Forest fires

This month’s forest fires in Portugal, which killed 64 people, were the worst in the country’s history. Most of the deaths happened in Pedrógão Grande in the centre of the country when flames swept across a road filled with people trying to escape in their cars.

More than 1,700 Portuguese firefighters fought the blaze along with others from Spain, Morocco, Italy and Canada. Although most reports point to a thunderstorm as the cause, there have been some claims that it was arson.

Probably the deadliest forest fire ever happened in the USA, in Wisconsin on 8 October 1871. It began in the woods after a long dry spell, but was carried on the wind to Peshtigo and other nearby lumber towns on the banks of Lake Michigan, where the sawdust that always clogged the streets provided convenient fuel for the flames.

Peshtigo was burned to the ground, and more than 1,150 people were killed, but because it happened on the very same night as the Great Chicago Fire, it has tended to be rather forgotten.

For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World. See also my posts of 7 February 2009, 3 July 2013, and 7 May 2016. 

The War on Drugs continued

A staggering 28,000 people have been killed in the last four years in Mexico's "war on drugs." In one of the most bizarre episodes, last month a group of prisoners in Durango was apparently released from gaol for a night so they could murder 18 guests at a party.

Now President Calderon has called for a debate on whether drugs should be legalised. Meanwhile, in California, people will vote in a referendum in November on whether to legalise and tax marijuana.

In the UK, Sir Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, has also called for drugs to be decriminalised, on the grounds that it would improve health and reduce crime. Depressingly, the government reflected for about three seconds, before dismissing the idea on the grounds that "we want to reduce drug use, crack down on drug-related crime and disorder and help addicts come off drugs for good."

It would be lovely if nobody took drugs, just as it would be lovely if nobody smoked, but millions of people do, and intelligent policy making has to start from that point. There is absolutely no evidence that the government's present policy is achieving its objectives and it is certainly generating a huge violent criminal industry. It's claimed that use of drugs in Portugal has actually fallen since they were decriminalised in 2001.

(See also my blogs of June 10 and 12.)

Quakes in capital cities

The Haiti earthquake may be the deadliest ever to hit a capital city if the estimate of up to 200,000 killed is accurate. The Tokyo quake of 1923 killed about 150,000 in the Japanese capital and its port Yokohama, and about 1.9 million were made homeless, as up to 360,000 buildings were destroyed.

Within days, though, businesses and shops left standing had begun trading again, and seven years later, it was said that Tokyo had been restored with scarcely a single visible scar from the disaster. A plan to rebuild the capital at a new site, less vulnerable to earthquakes, was rejected.

The Lisbon earthquake of All Saints' Day 1755 struck a city that was then not just the capital of Portugal, but the hub of a great empire. As many as 90,000 people were killed, while thousands of buildings were flattened - much of the damage being done by the fires that broke out after the quake. The king put his prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, in charge of reconstruction, and Pombal turned his coach into an improvised office among the ruins, living on soup brought in by his wife as he got to grips with the crisis.

He posted guards at exits from the city to stop any able-bodied men from leaving, then pressed them into work on the clean-up, while he sent ships to all corners of the empire with the message that the capital was still open for business. Some, like the Jesuits, argued that the city should not be rebuilt as the quake was a punishment from God, but within a year the Marquis was constructing a new Lisbon with the big squares and long avenues that form the elegant heart of the city we see today, and which his statue surveys from the top of a tall column.