Second biggest earthquake in history

This day 48 years ago saw the second biggest earthquake ever recorded.   For four minutes at about half past five in the evening of Good Friday, March 27, 1964, it rocked the Gulf of Alaska with a magnitude of 9.2.

Fissures appeared in the ground, buildings collapsed, and tsunamis were generated, but fortunately because the area was sparsely populated, only about 130 people died.

It was stronger than the underwater earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra that generated the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, resulting in perhaps 230,000 deaths.   This was the third most powerful ever recorded.

The strongest of all was the Chilean quake of 1960, which cost perhaps 4,500 lives and made 2 million people homeless.    Once again because of the relative sparseness of population in the area, it was much less devastating than less powerful earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti in 2010 and probably killed more than 200,000.

BP - Of spills and compensation

Before BP, America’s worst offshore oil accident was the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. That was much smaller than BP (11 million gallons against 184 million so far). However, many experts believe the BP spill is likely to cause less damage because the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico will break up the oil much quicker.

The Exxon Valdez spill is reckoned to have killed more than 20 whales and a quarter of a million sea birds. Fishermen in the affected area say that herring were wiped out permanently, destroying their livelihood. So far the BP spill is known to have killed just less than 1,400 birds. But while BP is having to pay $20 billion in compensation, Exxon had to shell out just half a billion.

Here’s another interesting fact. President Obama has appointed Kenneth Feinberg to administer BP's $20 billion BP fund. Mr Feinberg also administered the compensation fund for 9/11, when nearly 3,000 people were killed. That paid out just $7 billion.

America’s, and the world’s, worst oil spill, incidentally, was probably the Lakeview Gusher in California, which released more than 370 million barrels over 18 months in 1910-11, flooding an entire valley.