Man Made Disasters – Have we learned anything?
Try as we might to keep ourselves from damaging the Earth, there are times when it’s been unavoidable and humans have created some of the worst man made disasters history has ever seen. Here are the few top man made disasters over the last few years that have really left an impact on our environment and how history and the world views them.
Man Made Disasters: Gulf of Mexico: The Dead Zone
Farmers in America love to use fertilizers and many pesticides to their crops to help them grow abundantly and keep those pesky plant ruining pests off of them. However, unfortunately these types of chemicals as well as livestock wastes that are full with nitrogen seeped from the farmlands located along the Mississippi River into the River, which then made it’s way gradually down into the Gulf of Mexico. This created what we refer to as a “Dead Zone”. A dead zone is oxygen deprived and cannot support any type of sea life at all.
This Dead Zone located in the Gulf of Mexico has gradually grown over the past few decades and is now around the size of the state of New Jersey. Scientists around the world have been studying the Dead Zone to find out how this could have been avoided all together.
Some say to decrease the usage of pesticides and fertilizers, but farmers argue that crops will begin to fail and decrease as a result. So at what cost are we to figure out what to do? Either way in this man made disaster we are losing valuable crops to support and feed the country, or valuable sea life.
Man Made Disasters: Exxon Oil Spill
One of the worst ever man made disasters in the history of the world was the Exxon Valdez Oil spill. The Oil spill happened when more than 10.8 gallons of crude oil was released into the Prince William Sound, which ended up covering over 11,000 miles of ocean in the process.
Thanks to a couple of pilots who were sleep deprived they put the oil taker on auto pilot and this caused 1/5th of the total load of oil to be released into the ocean. After over 20 years the disaster still has not been fully cleaned up, with 58% of the 91 sites still found to have oil in 2001′s survey.
It’s a shame that with the mistake of only a few the imThe worst one of any man made disasters in history could have been avoided with a little more careful attention of the oil tankers pilots.
Unfortunately everyone is human and as humans we all make mistakes. But man made disasters such as the two described above could have been avoided with careful preparation and planning beforehand by everyone involved.
Mankind has learned a valuable lesson from these two tragic man made disasters, that lesson is to plan out and prepare for the worst, and by doing so you may avoid it all together.