Natural disasters have a habit of inflicting their worst upon peoples who seem least able to cope with the consequences. Hurricanes regularly rip through the southern states of the richest country on earth but even there, it is the weakest, the least well-off who suffer the most. The inhabitants of poor villages and peasant communities almost invariably seem to lie in the path of lava issuing from an erupting volcano, or a mudslide or find themselves in the grip of grinding drought, season upon season so that at times, the rest of the world wearies of their plight and forgets it.
There are similarities, but important differences also, with the picture emerging from the Indonesian island of Java, which suffered an earthquake last weekend. By yesterday evening, it appeared as though the death toll would number something over 5,000 - a dreadful tragedy for all concerned but on a scale altogether different to the horrific toll of almost 300,000 victims of the 2004 tsunami, 220,000 of whom came from another part of Indonesia, Java's neighbouring island of Sumatra.
Indonesia's fate is to straddle the so-called Pacific ring of fire - a mosaic of moving pieces of the earth's crust that, variously colliding, ripping apart or rubbing sideways off each other generate a necklace of volcanoes and earthquake regions stretching from south-east Asia north and east into Japan, across the northern Pacific Ocean into Alaska and south along the San Andreas fault in California and into the Andes mountain range of South America.
Java was expecting a volcano, not an earthquake. Nearby Mount Merapi has been rumbling for weeks and sporadically emitting hot lava and highly toxic gas. As a result of the earthquake (which may help make the volcano even more unstable), some 35,000 poorly constructed homes collapsed. Indonesian government figures put the number of injured at 2,155, but the UN children's fund (Unicef) says there are 20,000 people injured, many with crushed limbs, and more than 130,000 homeless, of whom 40 per cent are children. If the death toll is not to rise sharply, the challenge for aid agencies in the coming days will be to ensure that medical assistance gets speedily to all those who need it and shelter, necessary especially due to heavy rain, is provided to survivors. To this end, 5,000 tents are needed urgently.
Thanks to the already heightened alert over Mount Merapi, the delivery of emergency assistance may prove slightly less difficult than otherwise. Yesterday, international agencies and foreign governments were pledging aid. The Red Cross appealed for €7.6 million, Japan promised €7.8 million in grant aid, the EU said it would give €3 million, the US €4 million, Australia and China €1.5 million each. But once again events have shown the need for a UN disaster relief standing fund - a fund ready for use in times such as this rather than front-line relief agencies having to host meetings to pass around the begging bowl when events require their skills elsewhere.