Disasters R Us

[ffutures]

Gacked from sjgames

World disasters - a continuously updated disaster map for the world. Scary stuff.

http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert.php?lang=eng

Comments

[angusabranson.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing the link. That site is amazing.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's clashing with my browser or something, but I am not impressed with its choice of icons. Minor disease outbreaks are flagged with radiation trefoils, which is not helpful.

It's also... curiously selective. It thinks strong winds (barely gale force) are a disaster, it reports earthquakes of such small magnitude you'd hardly feel them, a collapsing water tank killing one person in India qualifies, yet it seems not to regard pollution incidents as disasters; I can't see any, and find it difficult to believe that that's the case. It reports a mine disaster with many survivors in Siberia, but not one with many deaths and no survivors in India. On the whole, if I used it as a news source right now I'd feel terribly complacent.

Could be a cool tool, but needs serious work...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I noticed the radiation / disease mixup, hadn't really checked how accurate it is otherwise - thanks for the heads-up.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

And thanks for pointing me at it. I think it's a really neat idea, but it would probably take more resources than they have to make it work well.