26 December tsunami provokes high jump in disaster death figures

17 February 2005. More than 320,000 people perished last year in 366 natural disasters, according to figures announced today in Geneva by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) based in Brussels. The number of deaths is still provisional as the death toll for the December Tsunami in the Indian Ocean is not yet definitive. “2004 was a killer year because of the tsunami which took the lives of around 300,000 people out of the 320,000 total people killed by natural disasters. Without the tsunami, a dramatically exceptional event, the general trend which shows a decrease in the number of deaths would have been confirmed,” says Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir of CRED