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ysabetwordsmithThese notes compare the Omaha incident from "In Untried Emergencies" and "The Native Metal of a Man" against previous examples.
Comparisons with Other Events
(Some of these descriptions are distressing, and some of the links are heinous.)
How does the disintegration incident compare with other events?
Well, it's a lot more violent than average for cape fights, most of which are really dominance fights that are not meant to kill anyone. Conversely, it's a lot smaller than some of the incidents where some nutjob tried to destroy a city, or the whole world.
Some of the biggest cape incidents have occurred not as purposeful battles but rather as reactions to an attack. Pretty much every bottom-ten country has a handful of examples why assaulting soups is a bad idea. These are just a few cases.
Somalia
In July 2007, raiders hit a small village near Mogadishu, provoking a young soup into releasing a devastating drought that wracked East Africa for two years, unfortunately heterodyning with a similar event in South Sudan which together spilled into Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. Well over 300,000 people died and another 10 million required emergency aid.
Ethiopian troops have committed atrocities including mass murder, gang rape, and gouging out people's eyes. The latter fell out of fashion as of December 31, 2011, after it removed the controlling organs of a little boy with Nuclear Energy Beams in Beledweyne. The resulting emission killed most of Beledweyne's population of around 67,200 inhabitants, and required the evacuation of the broader Beledweyne District population of 144,350 residents.
Haiti
On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, a young boy was raped in a refugee camp outside of Léogâne and manifested Earth Powers which caused a magnitude 8 earthquake. By January 24, over 50 aftershocks measuring 5+ were recorded, due to additional attacks and the boy's continuing trauma. SPOON finally managed to find him and take him to safety on January 25. This event affected well over 3 million people and killed almost 400,000. Nearly 300,000 homes and over 35,000 other buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.
Colombia
On April 12, 2001, a death squad of 100 Frente Calima ("Calima Front") paramilitaries led by a supervillain with Severance butchered an estimated 170 people in Alto Naya, displacing several thousand more. The first victim, Guadalupe Ipia, had her head and hands cut off with a chainsaw. An indigenous leader, Cayetano Días, was cut in half with a chainsaw. Many more people were shot and/or dismembered to disguise the body count. However, Guadalupe had Regeneration, Cayetano had Self-Duplication, and someone else evidently had Amalgamation because at least a dozen victims regenerated -- anywhere from 2 to 12 copies of each person with body and memories fully intact, all of them now with the same conflation of superpowers. By mutual agreement, they hunted down and destroyed not only the relevant death squad but most of the rest of Frente Calima as well. When the carnage was over, there were 144 soups in the Frente Alto.
In May 2003, the AUC perpetrated a masscre in Betoyes, supported by the Colombian army's 18th Brigade's "Navos Pardo Battalion." They murdered five Guahibo natives and raped three girls aged 11, 12, and 15. They also raped a 16-year-old pregnant mother, Omaira Fernández, then they cut her womb open and ripped out the fetus which they hacked up with a machete. This caused the fetus to explode (without regenerating) in a blast that killed over 400 people in the area and left a three-acre crater. (Most but not all infant superpowers are suppressed by the mother's lifeforce until birth, although recently a few cases of prebirth superpowers have been recorded.) The 11-year-old rape survivor Camila Zapata turned out to be Immortal, and she reported the incident to Amnesty International.
Historic Acts of Genocide
The largest fire in Nebraska history was a genocidal act of arson in 1865, organized by a military commander. No fatalities were mentioned, but the size of the incident was massive.
Historic massacres frequently involved death tolls in the dozens or hundreds. They were perpetrated by legal authorities, not people widely acknowledged as criminals. Many of these far exceed the numbers claimed by modern events to be the "biggest shooting spree."
Sand Creek Massacre
The Sand Creek Massacre, occurring on November 29, 1864, was one of the most infamous incidents of the Indian Wars. [...] When the attack was over, as many as 150 natives lay dead, most of which were old men, women, and children.
Fort Robinson Massacre, Nebraska
After the Northern Cheyenne were forced to a reservation in Indian Territory, Chief Dull Knife’s band, dissatisfied with the terrible conditions and rations furnished by the government, decided to return to their former home in the Black Hills of South Dakota in September 1878. [...]During the escape and following battles, the Cheyenne suffered between 32 and 64 people killed, about 23 wounded, and 78 others captured. The U.S. Army lost 11 soldiers and one scout killed and nine wounded.
Wounded Knee Massacre
Of the 230 Indian women and children and 120 men at the camp, 153 were counted dead and 44 wounded; but, many of the wounded probably escaped and relatives quickly removed a large number of the dead. Army casualties were 25 dead and 39 wounded. The total casualties were probably the highest in Plains Indian warfare except for the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Who needs supervillains when the authorities are committing atrocities?
Natural Disasters
Explore 12 of the deadliest disasters in Nebraska history. Death tolls generally trend downward over time, reflecting improvements in safety precautions and emergency services. Compared to these, the Omaha incident makes the top 5 but not the top 3.
1930s Dust Bowl, deaths estimated in the thousands
The Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888, 235 deaths
Easter tornado of 1913, 103 deaths
Republican River Flood of 1935, 94 deaths
Floods of 1950, 25 deaths
Blizzard of 1949, 20+ deaths
1976 Fremont hotel explosion, 20 deaths
1913 Yutan tornado, 20 deaths
Dewey hotel fire of 1913, 20 deaths
1947 Republican River flood, 13 deaths
1913 Berlin (now Otoe) tornado, 12 deaths
Millard hotel fire of 1933, 7 deaths
Nebraska City Fire, 1860
What was probably the most disastrous fire in Nebraska during territorial days occurred on the afternoon of Saturday, May 12, 1860, in Nebraska City. At about two o'clock in the afternoon the alarm was given that Coleman's butcher shop was on fire. It had been a dry spring, and the wind from the south was blowing a gale. [...] About thirty-eight buildings were destroyed, some containing several offices.
Car Crashes
Multivehicular pileups are messy and dramatic, but the death tolls tend to be on the low side. Looking at just the vehicular victims from the Omaha incident, there were only 5 fatalities, which is nowhere near the worst, although certainly bad enough to merit listing it among the "worst car crashes in Nebraska." The reason is that, in downtown Omaha, none of the cars were going very fast. Most of the deaths came from debris crushing the cars, or injuries that couldn't be treated because victims were out of reach.
The Worst Traffic Accidents in U.S. History
A 1988 Kentucky school bus accident, where a bus full of children were struck by a pick-up truck driven by an intoxicated driver, resulting in 27 deaths and 34 injuries, most of them severe. It remains the deadliest bus crash in U.S. history.
NOVEMBER 29, 1991
Motorists returning home after the Thanksgiving holiday along Interstate 5 in California were engulfed in winds exceeding 40 miles per hour. [...] The high winds whipped up the dry topsoil and created a dust storm that severely reduced visibility, leading to a series of crashes that became a 104-car pileup stretching over a mile of highway. Rescue efforts continued for many hours, and 17 people died while 150 were seriously injured.
NOVEMBER 3, 2002
The largest multi-car accident in U.S. history occurred on this day, around 25 miles south of Los Angeles, California, on Interstate 10. Despite it involving an astounding 216 vehicles, there were no deaths reported. However, 41 people were injured.
Resilience and Recovery
The disintegration beam incident was messy and unpleasant, but it didn't shatter the city. Despite the chaos, it only affected a few blocks -- much less than some city fires or bad storms in the past. A bunch of people died, but more people have died in some other events.
Dire experiences can leave people with traumatic stress. This can cause a variety of conditions. Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder is similar to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but involves a long span of torment instead of a single brief incident. Developmental Trauma Disorder from Adverse Childhood Experiences describes the effects on a developing psyche. Traumatic stress tends to have a profound negative impact on relationships and socializing. This encourages isolation, which can cause further problems. Understand how to cope with traumatic stress, recover after trauma, or help a friend with it. Trauma-informed care offers compassionate, effective ways to help survivors.
Read an article about measuring trauma, and see the sliding scales.
Feeling helpless is a major contributing factor in trauma and PTSD. There are ways to deal with feeling powerless.
Unless personally pinned down, most folks in Terramagne-America don't tend to feel helpless in a crisis, because they can do something about it. They have plenty of resilience factors both socially and individually. These include, but are not limited to:
* Early training in how to handle emergencies, e.g. Bom Bom Bunny and Activity Scouts.
* Civilians generally know to get out of the way instead of gawking, and citizen responders (about 10% of most crowds in T-America) respond promptly.
* Publicly accessible supplies for emergencies.
* Plentiful first aid training.
* Widely taught coping skills and Emotional First Aid.
* Presence of quiet rooms and other facilities for emotional equilibrium.
* Availability of immediate treatment for psychological injuries, including Emotional Trauma Care at a hospital for severe cases, reduces the chance of them getting worse over time.
* A robust health care system, fire department, police, etc. capable of handling big incidents competently.
* Community cohesion with a high level of civic engagement.
* Putting a current event into context by comparing it to other events and realizing that it could've been worse.
* Justice, since the culprit was quickly brought down and taken into custody.
When you have skills, supplies, and other resources to handle a disaster then it just isn't as scary or overwhelming as if you don't. It might still make you sad, angry, or injured but it is much less likely to shatter an individual or a community. People can cope with what happened in Omaha because they were well equipped to respond to emergencies, not caught off-guard. Also, when you have good support, that makes it much easier to heal from physical or emotional injuries than if you don't. So while there are casualties, those are far fewer than they would've been in a less-competent community. People take pride in rising to a challenge.
Comparisons with Other Events
(Some of these descriptions are distressing, and some of the links are heinous.)
How does the disintegration incident compare with other events?
Well, it's a lot more violent than average for cape fights, most of which are really dominance fights that are not meant to kill anyone. Conversely, it's a lot smaller than some of the incidents where some nutjob tried to destroy a city, or the whole world.
Some of the biggest cape incidents have occurred not as purposeful battles but rather as reactions to an attack. Pretty much every bottom-ten country has a handful of examples why assaulting soups is a bad idea. These are just a few cases.
Somalia
In July 2007, raiders hit a small village near Mogadishu, provoking a young soup into releasing a devastating drought that wracked East Africa for two years, unfortunately heterodyning with a similar event in South Sudan which together spilled into Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. Well over 300,000 people died and another 10 million required emergency aid.
Ethiopian troops have committed atrocities including mass murder, gang rape, and gouging out people's eyes. The latter fell out of fashion as of December 31, 2011, after it removed the controlling organs of a little boy with Nuclear Energy Beams in Beledweyne. The resulting emission killed most of Beledweyne's population of around 67,200 inhabitants, and required the evacuation of the broader Beledweyne District population of 144,350 residents.
Haiti
On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, a young boy was raped in a refugee camp outside of Léogâne and manifested Earth Powers which caused a magnitude 8 earthquake. By January 24, over 50 aftershocks measuring 5+ were recorded, due to additional attacks and the boy's continuing trauma. SPOON finally managed to find him and take him to safety on January 25. This event affected well over 3 million people and killed almost 400,000. Nearly 300,000 homes and over 35,000 other buildings were either destroyed or severely damaged.
Colombia
On April 12, 2001, a death squad of 100 Frente Calima ("Calima Front") paramilitaries led by a supervillain with Severance butchered an estimated 170 people in Alto Naya, displacing several thousand more. The first victim, Guadalupe Ipia, had her head and hands cut off with a chainsaw. An indigenous leader, Cayetano Días, was cut in half with a chainsaw. Many more people were shot and/or dismembered to disguise the body count. However, Guadalupe had Regeneration, Cayetano had Self-Duplication, and someone else evidently had Amalgamation because at least a dozen victims regenerated -- anywhere from 2 to 12 copies of each person with body and memories fully intact, all of them now with the same conflation of superpowers. By mutual agreement, they hunted down and destroyed not only the relevant death squad but most of the rest of Frente Calima as well. When the carnage was over, there were 144 soups in the Frente Alto.
In May 2003, the AUC perpetrated a masscre in Betoyes, supported by the Colombian army's 18th Brigade's "Navos Pardo Battalion." They murdered five Guahibo natives and raped three girls aged 11, 12, and 15. They also raped a 16-year-old pregnant mother, Omaira Fernández, then they cut her womb open and ripped out the fetus which they hacked up with a machete. This caused the fetus to explode (without regenerating) in a blast that killed over 400 people in the area and left a three-acre crater. (Most but not all infant superpowers are suppressed by the mother's lifeforce until birth, although recently a few cases of prebirth superpowers have been recorded.) The 11-year-old rape survivor Camila Zapata turned out to be Immortal, and she reported the incident to Amnesty International.
Historic Acts of Genocide
The largest fire in Nebraska history was a genocidal act of arson in 1865, organized by a military commander. No fatalities were mentioned, but the size of the incident was massive.
Historic massacres frequently involved death tolls in the dozens or hundreds. They were perpetrated by legal authorities, not people widely acknowledged as criminals. Many of these far exceed the numbers claimed by modern events to be the "biggest shooting spree."
Sand Creek Massacre
The Sand Creek Massacre, occurring on November 29, 1864, was one of the most infamous incidents of the Indian Wars. [...] When the attack was over, as many as 150 natives lay dead, most of which were old men, women, and children.
Fort Robinson Massacre, Nebraska
After the Northern Cheyenne were forced to a reservation in Indian Territory, Chief Dull Knife’s band, dissatisfied with the terrible conditions and rations furnished by the government, decided to return to their former home in the Black Hills of South Dakota in September 1878. [...]During the escape and following battles, the Cheyenne suffered between 32 and 64 people killed, about 23 wounded, and 78 others captured. The U.S. Army lost 11 soldiers and one scout killed and nine wounded.
Wounded Knee Massacre
Of the 230 Indian women and children and 120 men at the camp, 153 were counted dead and 44 wounded; but, many of the wounded probably escaped and relatives quickly removed a large number of the dead. Army casualties were 25 dead and 39 wounded. The total casualties were probably the highest in Plains Indian warfare except for the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Who needs supervillains when the authorities are committing atrocities?
Natural Disasters
Explore 12 of the deadliest disasters in Nebraska history. Death tolls generally trend downward over time, reflecting improvements in safety precautions and emergency services. Compared to these, the Omaha incident makes the top 5 but not the top 3.
1930s Dust Bowl, deaths estimated in the thousands
The Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888, 235 deaths
Easter tornado of 1913, 103 deaths
Republican River Flood of 1935, 94 deaths
Floods of 1950, 25 deaths
Blizzard of 1949, 20+ deaths
1976 Fremont hotel explosion, 20 deaths
1913 Yutan tornado, 20 deaths
Dewey hotel fire of 1913, 20 deaths
1947 Republican River flood, 13 deaths
1913 Berlin (now Otoe) tornado, 12 deaths
Millard hotel fire of 1933, 7 deaths
Nebraska City Fire, 1860
What was probably the most disastrous fire in Nebraska during territorial days occurred on the afternoon of Saturday, May 12, 1860, in Nebraska City. At about two o'clock in the afternoon the alarm was given that Coleman's butcher shop was on fire. It had been a dry spring, and the wind from the south was blowing a gale. [...] About thirty-eight buildings were destroyed, some containing several offices.
Car Crashes
Multivehicular pileups are messy and dramatic, but the death tolls tend to be on the low side. Looking at just the vehicular victims from the Omaha incident, there were only 5 fatalities, which is nowhere near the worst, although certainly bad enough to merit listing it among the "worst car crashes in Nebraska." The reason is that, in downtown Omaha, none of the cars were going very fast. Most of the deaths came from debris crushing the cars, or injuries that couldn't be treated because victims were out of reach.
The Worst Traffic Accidents in U.S. History
A 1988 Kentucky school bus accident, where a bus full of children were struck by a pick-up truck driven by an intoxicated driver, resulting in 27 deaths and 34 injuries, most of them severe. It remains the deadliest bus crash in U.S. history.
NOVEMBER 29, 1991
Motorists returning home after the Thanksgiving holiday along Interstate 5 in California were engulfed in winds exceeding 40 miles per hour. [...] The high winds whipped up the dry topsoil and created a dust storm that severely reduced visibility, leading to a series of crashes that became a 104-car pileup stretching over a mile of highway. Rescue efforts continued for many hours, and 17 people died while 150 were seriously injured.
NOVEMBER 3, 2002
The largest multi-car accident in U.S. history occurred on this day, around 25 miles south of Los Angeles, California, on Interstate 10. Despite it involving an astounding 216 vehicles, there were no deaths reported. However, 41 people were injured.
Resilience and Recovery
The disintegration beam incident was messy and unpleasant, but it didn't shatter the city. Despite the chaos, it only affected a few blocks -- much less than some city fires or bad storms in the past. A bunch of people died, but more people have died in some other events.
Dire experiences can leave people with traumatic stress. This can cause a variety of conditions. Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder is similar to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but involves a long span of torment instead of a single brief incident. Developmental Trauma Disorder from Adverse Childhood Experiences describes the effects on a developing psyche. Traumatic stress tends to have a profound negative impact on relationships and socializing. This encourages isolation, which can cause further problems. Understand how to cope with traumatic stress, recover after trauma, or help a friend with it. Trauma-informed care offers compassionate, effective ways to help survivors.
Read an article about measuring trauma, and see the sliding scales.
Feeling helpless is a major contributing factor in trauma and PTSD. There are ways to deal with feeling powerless.
Unless personally pinned down, most folks in Terramagne-America don't tend to feel helpless in a crisis, because they can do something about it. They have plenty of resilience factors both socially and individually. These include, but are not limited to:
* Early training in how to handle emergencies, e.g. Bom Bom Bunny and Activity Scouts.
* Civilians generally know to get out of the way instead of gawking, and citizen responders (about 10% of most crowds in T-America) respond promptly.
* Publicly accessible supplies for emergencies.
* Plentiful first aid training.
* Widely taught coping skills and Emotional First Aid.
* Presence of quiet rooms and other facilities for emotional equilibrium.
* Availability of immediate treatment for psychological injuries, including Emotional Trauma Care at a hospital for severe cases, reduces the chance of them getting worse over time.
* A robust health care system, fire department, police, etc. capable of handling big incidents competently.
* Community cohesion with a high level of civic engagement.
* Putting a current event into context by comparing it to other events and realizing that it could've been worse.
* Justice, since the culprit was quickly brought down and taken into custody.
When you have skills, supplies, and other resources to handle a disaster then it just isn't as scary or overwhelming as if you don't. It might still make you sad, angry, or injured but it is much less likely to shatter an individual or a community. People can cope with what happened in Omaha because they were well equipped to respond to emergencies, not caught off-guard. Also, when you have good support, that makes it much easier to heal from physical or emotional injuries than if you don't. So while there are casualties, those are far fewer than they would've been in a less-competent community. People take pride in rising to a challenge.
