p. 24 | A Year of Disasters

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 10, 1902

A Year of Disasters

THE following quotation from the Chicago Tribune of recent date shows how the minds of observing men are being impressed with the extraordinary and ominous nature of the times we have now reached:—

“One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, so fast they follow.” Public interest in the recent disasters among the West Indian Islands has hardly begun to abate before reports come of others, which, but for the exceptional magnitude of the former, would be regarded as unusual in their fatality. The cyclone which struck the little town of Goliad, Tex., on Sunday, not only nearly destroyed the place, but left in its wake ninety dead and over one hundred injured—an unusual cyclone record for a single locality. The mine explosion at Coalcreek, Tenn., is the worst of the year, not one of the one hundred and fifty men employed in the mine escaping. Simultaneously with these events comes the news of a terrible hurricane which swept over the Province of Scinde, in British India, carrying away houses, bridges, and embankments, and washing away miles of railroad tracks. The few words “many lives were lost,” are significant.

The prophets who predicted that 1902 would be a year of disasters were correct. . . . Nature has not been so busy with her forces of devastation for many years past as she has been during the first five months of the present year. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have destroyed 48,450 lives, storms 704, tornadoes 416, cyclones 220, floods 333, avalanches 228, tidal waves 103, snowslides 39, and waterspouts 12, a total of 50,505 lives destroyed by nature’s elemental disturbances. If to this were added the lives lost by agencies over which man has more or less control, such as fires, mine disasters, explosions, railroad accidents, and vessel wrecks, it would be increased to over 60,000, and this takes no account of individual lives lost in this country, which would bring the grand total up to about 100,000 lives lost in the short period of five months.

In the presence of these great natural convulsions man is powerless, and probably always will be.