Days Since Incident – tracker of natural disasters on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Days Since Incident – tracker of natural disasters on Earth

neal.fun

156 pointsChrisArchitect38 comments

As someone who just went through Ian using the date it became a tropical depression seems wrong. It was a Cat 4 yesterday when it made landfall and it was a Cat 1, 2, and 3 storm before and after that.

I hope you, your family, and the community are doing well.

Were you in Western Cuba when it made landfall? That was well before yesterday. Any particular landfall in general will be arbitrary and becoming Cat 4 is more or less objective.

We're doing okay we fortunately weren't too close to Ft Myers.

My point wasn't about the landfall. It was that if you're saying it's X days since the last category 4 hurricane then using the date it was designated as a tropical depression doesn't seem correct, because it wasn't a category 4 storm at that time. You should use the last day that it was a category 4 which is also objective, and is actually the most recent time we had a category 4 storm.

Ah, sorry, I misinterpreted your comment. Yes, if the line on a website is “day since category 4” it totally makes sense to use the latest day when hurricane was assessed category 4.

a tsunami of 0.09m tall hardly qualifies as a "disaster" surely?

https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazel/view/hazards/tsunami/event-m...

I've searched but the only reference to this list being of 'disasters' is in this HackerNews subject.

Many of the other items would not be considered disasters too.

but it still ended up killing 2 people. I have a hard time imagining how that works.

According to the "quick bulletin" on the bottom, this seems to be a downstream effect of a magnitude 6.9 earthquake that occurred. I suppose that will generally be the case for a tsunami, something usually drives it. In this case, it appears they're assigning 0 deaths (or stats) to the tsunami, but 2 deaths for the "total effects."

Even if the wave isn't very tall, if it is fast-moving it can knock you off balance. Once you're down, wave doesn't have to be very tall to drown you. There's also the fact that rip currents are commonplace phenomena on beaches all over the world, so you combine that with a single unexpectedly fast wave and it's easy to believe a few people would die.

but, is a rip current a natural disaster? Natural, sure, but to me it's a regular phenomenon, similar to a small tsunami

yeah what the hell, that is like 4 inches

Sorry, where do you see this called a “disaster”?

The site linked in the post list these as natural disasters

It also lists Fukushima as a “natural” disaster so the usage is a bit liberal

Unless they changed it, I don't see the words "natural" or "disaster" on the page. It just says "days since incident".

Hasn't it just been 1 day since a Cat 4 hurricane? it says 6.

6 days since it _started_.

But it wasn't a Cat 4 six days ago.

Shouldn't its existence be measured since it was named, rather than categorized?

Yeah. I posted this on another such thread, but the date it is using is apparently the date the storm was declared a tropical depression. This isn't a reasonable interpretation, if you ask me. If you ask a human who was just hunkered down in a closet in FL trying to ride out Ian "how many days since the last Cat 4?" their answer is going to be "One."

Was a bit confused that "Category n Hurricane" means exactly cat n, whereas "Magnitude m Earthquake" seems to mean at least magnitude m.

Not even that, really? It claims "6 days since last Cat 4 Hurricane", yet yesterday a Cat 4 was bearing down on Florida. The date used on that one seems to be the day Ian became an official tropical depression … not the last day it was a Cat 4.

Note: The site claims to track "incidents", not "disasters". The word "disaster" is only here in the HN title.

Speaking of incidents that are not disasters... there was a 633ft high tsunami in Alaska in 2015 that I never heard of!? Wow..... Some of these incidents are really interesting to read up on, despite them having gotten little or no news coverage at the time.

It also lists nuclear incidents, so it’s also not limited to natural events as per the HN title.

"Well it's between 600 and 750 days since the event..." https://youtu.be/22mt0cVyW5c

“In probability theory and statistics, the exponential distribution is the probability distribution of the time between events in a Poisson point process, i.e., a process in which events occur continuously and independently at a constant average rate." [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution

The fact that the "1" symbol is not aligned with the 7 segment display is bothering me more than it should but otherwise this is pretty cool.

Mudslides (from wildfires) caused by the hurricane that 'hit' Southern California a few weeks back presumably killed at least one person - that person is still missing in Forest Falls.

Maybe a mudslides/landslides category?

Cool idea. Looks like there’s a problem with the data though. The last cat 2 hurricane was Fiona, which has just petered out in the North Atlantic after ripping through my city five days ago.

Fiona hit category 4?

> Days since Gravitational Wave Detected

"One of these is not like the others..."

More stuff to worry about. My favourite!

For me it had a calming effect. Natural disasters appear to be relatively common

My brain can't even conceive of a teraton asteroid impact. Wouldn't that be world-ending?

Merely species-ending. It's hard to end planetary bodies.

dashboard for the end of days

Interesting. But it would depress me…

neal.unfun

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