The Mean Annual Loss of Life during Earthquakes

Abstract

IT is always difficult to make an accurate estimate of the number of lives lost during a great earthquake, and impossible in such disasters as those of Lisbon in 1755 and Messina in 1908. For Lisbon alone, the estimates vary between 30,000 and 70,000; but the bodies were removed from the city in masses without being counted. In the Messina earthquake, the first estimates gave 150,000 as the number of persons killed. A later report reduces the figure to 82,000, but, as it includes more than 32,000 “presumed killed”, the real number may be about 50,000. In the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, there is the same uncertainty. According to the official estimates, 99,331 persons are known to have lost their lives, but there were also 43,476 reported as missing. In all cases in which the figures differ widely, the mean of the greatest and least is taken in the estimate that follows.