Their lives weren't worth any less than the victims of Harvey.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...s-a7919006.html

How horrible! I expect that India is even less prepared for above-average flooding than the US due to their lower GDP. Unfortunately I expect that we'll see worse and worse disasters every season, driven by climate change.

Thanks Bingley. You are absolutely right.
Every life is precious - no matter where the disaster happens.
There is not much coverage in the USA on these floods in India.

Pete

Mumbai (population 18.4 million) ... 24 hour period ... 16.4 inches of rain.

Santa Cruz (India) ... 24 hour period ... 49.6 inches of rain.

These are enormous downpours of rain in a 24-hour period. Data from the Met Office in India. Santa Cruz got as much rain in one day as the worst parts of Texas received in one week.

Pete

Treacherous ground, the discussion of the value of human life. It is easy to say, after the fact, that all lives are equally valuable, and highly valued. Before the fact, in making preparations to cope with life-threatening emergencies, we see politicians and administrators allocating limited resources in ways that place a higher value on some lives than others, or a lower value on all. Car manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies use cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it will be less expensive to recall/redesign a product or to pay off the victims.

Hospitals and EMS systems make decisions daily about staffing, acquisition of backup supplies and new technology that limit the systems ability to respond to mass casualty incidents. Resources will always be limited, and the folks who frequent this forum are also the ones who fight the battles to get allocations for preparedness and rescue. WE know the difficulties.

Maybe there is a mathematical solution. Divide the dollars expended on preparation, rescue and relief efforts by the total number of rescued (or should it be number of fatalities?) in each of the floods, and determine empirically the value of human life.

This has been a slow moving emergency, and I'm surprised it hasn't had more coverage. Local dramas get more clicks, I guess.

It appears to be particularly bad in Bangladesh, with one-third of the country underwater at one point. Hard to imagine.

Most of us are accustomed to an engineered and risk-assessed landscape, to some degree, and we have expectations that someone is responsible and answerable for lapses.

This is nothing like the developing world, where the most vulnerable live in unregulated shantytowns/slums and are exposed to the full fury of natural disasters. Or, live as subsistence farmers and live always on the brink of hunger or tragedy.

Solutions? I don't know if there are any, realistically. It is appropriate to be mindful, though, of ongoing tragedies in the human family, and to help a little as best as one can. A few dollars toward helping organizations (MSF in my case) probably does more than all the internet ink in the world.

My 2c.