Dead Serious: China's 2005 natural disaster and accident stats
While blizzards continue to threaten some 200,000 people in Xinjiang, China released the official death toll for natural disasters in 2005:
Last year, 2,475 Chinese were killed in floods, earthquakes, blizzards, typhoons, droughts, hales, freezing weather, landslides and mudslides and 2.26 million houses were damaged. The direct losses added up to 204 billion yuan (US$25.3 billion).Both the death toll and the number of collapsed houses last year were the second largest in five year ...
Meanwhile, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs is launching a natural disaster alert system that uses mobile phone text messages and is expected to expedite relief efforts.
If you are part of the Faces of Death set, however, and crave really big piles of dead bodies, look no further than China's 2005 industrial accidents statistics, compiled by the ever-informative Stephen Frost of Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia. In 2005, 727,945 workplace accidents accounted for 126,760 deaths -- and that is a significant decrease from last year.
While much has been made of 12 dead in a recent mining tragedy in West Virginia, nearly 6,000 people died in China's coal mines last year. There were 58 "very serious" (10 to 29 deaths) mining accidents in China in 2005, and 11 that qualified as "especially serious" (30 deaths or more). In total, there were 3,341 coal mining accidents, or more than nine per day.
Other numbers that jumped out at us: 456,162 traffic accidents causing 99,080 deaths, and 11,254 train accidents resulting in 7,433 deaths. Again, both of those stats are improvements on 2004.
Visit csr-asia.com for a complete breakdown.
Image from China Daily.
