Planetary Disasters

[Spinward Scout]

We talked about this a couple of times a while back. What happens if there is a planetary disaster? Who would show up to help? How long would it take to notify anyone that could help? And so on...

Well, here's a couple of list of the current risks to planet Earth that you could throw into your Traveller game. Be aware that some of these scenarios might make you run and hide under your stairs after reading them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risks_to_civilization,_humans_and_planet_Earth

http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/12/an_eschatological_taxonomy.html

The second page gives an expectation of recovery for each scenario.

 

[fiat_knox]

We talked about this a couple of times a while back. What happens if there is a planetary disaster?

There have been one or two such scenarios in CT in the past. One unpublished disaster was A Plague of Perruques, all the population suddenly getting that fungus that gave them all an ugly grey wig and robbed them of their eyesight.

And then there was The Night of The Glow in JTAS, and Chamax Plague / Horde, of course.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

Personal experience in Somalia during the early 1990s and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina indicates that the first to show up are the looters, then the clueless-yet-earnest who just get in the way and/or cause more problems than not, then the professional relief organizations, then the donors looking for a tax break, then the politicians trying to appear concerned for the voters back home.

Meanwhile, the victims are the only ones dealing directly with conditions. That is, until someone finally decides to ship them out of the area (if possible) or provide them with enough half-hearted promises to tide them over until the real help shows up ... or until they learn to help themselves.

 

[Commander Truestar]

Personal experience in Somalia during the early 1990s and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina indicates that the first to show up are the looters, then the clueless-yet-earnest who just get in the way and/or cause more problems than not, then the professional relief organizations, then the donors looking for a tax break, then the politicians trying to appear concerned for the voters back home.

Meanwhile, the victims are the only ones dealing directly with conditions. That is, until someone finally decides to ship them out of the area (if possible) or provide them with enough half-hearted promises to tide them over until the real help shows up ... or until they learn to help themselves.

That is an interesting point of view considering the many examples that did not follow that path. Both events you describe are disasters where local authority either disintegrated or was never in control to start.
But when you look specifically at events like major earthquakes, they fall into two categories. The first are situations like the major US earthquakes, where there is a firm and functioning local government presence after the event. Larger organizations like the FEMA system ni the US have a local partner. FEMA is designed to hand shake with that local partner and deliver aid while reinforcing them. This could not happen after Katrina because the center of attention(New Orleans) had lost all authoritative local organizations leaving FEMA to hang in the breeze saying,"whell what do we do now". Other major crisis points were lost in the immediate media coverage to the point that much of the world still says, "there were other communities effect than New Orleans??". As a result, those towns and Parishes that had surviving local authoritative organizations never got a response from a government running rag tag to please a media led audience. Add to that the massive effort to get into the effected zones by ground vehicle and you have the post-Katrina debacle.
Next look at the event that flattened Banda Aceh(the 2002 Indoneisian earthquake/tsunami) In this event the effected were so devastatingly smashed and shocked that there was little they could do but huddle together and keep alive until real and meaningful aid from outside the zone of devastation arrived.

One thing to consider is that such disasters as we are talking about will make events like Katrina look like a joke and will leave those in Banda Aceh thinking they had it easy. One event that has had a mild effect on MTU was the Canon 1079 comet strike on the mainworld of the Paya System(Spinward Marches). My players were dealing with the children(or older grand children) of refugees I had decided settled in the Inthe System 33 yrs later(1112) in the slums they still could not get out of as second class citizens. IMTU Paya is still an ash shrouded tectonically and vocanologically active world except for the one remaining stable plate on which the population remains(and where the small naval downport is).