A headline on the meteorologist’s column in a weekly paper distributed in Greater Warrenton-Fauquier caught our eye: “Flash floods are the nation’s leading killer.”
Michael Eckert says that flash floods kill more people on an annual basis than slow floods, hurricanes, tornados and all other “disasters” we see on the evening news. That would also include the indirect weather related disasters like forest fires, etc. See “Fire and Flood” 3 November 2003 and “Down Memory Lane with Katrina,” 5 September 2005″ at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com
What is even more startling is how most people die in flash floods. They drive their cars into flooded roadways going from where they are to where the need or want to be.
In “Dying Young in Traffic,” 1 November 2004 at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ we profiled the fact that human settlement patterns have put large numbers of citizens into cars who have demonstrated that they are too young to drive safely. Everything we have seen since 2004 suggests the problem is getting worse.
Data suggests that the vast majority of the pedestrians who die in the act of walking do so because they are hit by an automobile. The last person killed by a bicycle, stroller or a Segway was … (research in ongoing on this question, we are sure it is possible, but you get the idea…).
Then there is Bill Lucy’s data on death at the hands of a stranger in the Countryside. It is automobiles that makes one living in the Countryside more likely to die at the hand of a stranger that those living in the Urbanside.
The other day we noted that in the United States 20 times as many citizens are killed in auto accidents every year as the total of US and British military and military contractors who have been killed in the Iraq War since the invasion.
In the United States we kill more of our own citizens each year than the total number of Iraq citizens that have been killed since the current war started. Those auto accidents totals do not include flash floods, pedestrians and many other indirect results of using and abusing automobiles.
Is it not ironic that in order to achieve a sustainable trajectory for civilization citizens will need to evolve settlement patterns where most of these “accidents” would not happen?
In spite of this fact, citizens and their governance practitioners embrace automobile advertising, video games and movies that glorify dangerous and illegal driving.
Legislators give mainly lip service to ways to reduce auto related deaths. They even prevent rational approaches to traffic safety like red light cameras. And none of what they do relates to the core cause of automobile deaths – dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
There are some who suggest that this is just post-industrial Darwinism. We know enough model citizens killed by the irrational acts of others to know auto deaths are not helping to evolve a higher order of human.
There is no question we need to do something about reversing current population trends regionally, nationally and globally in order to achieve a sustainable human burden on the planet.
What citizens do, however, needs to be something other than subsidizing settlement patterns that causes tens of thousands to kill themselves every year.
EMR
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