Counting Japan's Quake Dead

A huge tragedy has struck Japan. Yet, there are still reasons to be optimistic that the final death toll will not hit the projected 10,000 count.

A huge tragedy has happened in Japan; the economic and cultural damages to the nation are immense. All that said, there’s a very good reason to be skeptical of death tolls of 10, 000 or more that many are attributing to the quake and tsunami. Families still waiting to hear from loved ones have plenty of reason to remain hopeful. Historically, the disorganization and shock of a disaster combined with communications breakdowns results in public officials releasing wildly pessimistic numbers about death tolls that get revised down as time passes. Some examples:

• About 15,000 people were unaccounted for on the night of September 11^th, 2001. Even six months after the event, President Bush, administration officials, and writers still talked about a World Trade Center death toll of 5,000 or 6,000. In fact, about 2,800 died.
• Touring his flooded city by helicopter, then New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin estimated that over 10,000 had died in New Orleans. The final death toll was a still-grisly 1,836 (roughly 1,100 in New Orleans)…which included “indirect” deaths such as hospital patients afflicted with other maladies.
• Just a few weeks ago, major media outlets put the death toll for the Christchurch, New Zealand quake at about 240. It now appears that only about 160 died.
• Although nobody really appears to have done a systemic count (and the Haitian government still sticks with higher numbers) it appears that initial estimates of 230,000 or more dead in the 2010 Haitian earthquake were more than twice the number of bodies recovered.  (The collapse of Haiti’s already poor infrastructure, however, certainly resulted in more indirect quake-related deaths.)

None of this is to trivialize the enormous suffering and loss of life all of these events caused. But it’s unlikely that, in the end, the Japanese quake will be shown to have claimed 10,000 lives. Those still waiting to hear from friends and loved ones have good reason to remain hopeful.

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