Ansamed

(ANSAmed) - BRUSSELS, 03 NOV - A study by the EU-funded civil protection project PPRD South, on the disasters recorded in the international disaster database (EM-DAT) for the first six months of 2011, indicates that 73% of disasters in the Mediterranean in this period were due to major transport accidents, causing 479 deaths - 93% of the total deaths recorded in the period - and involving more than 700 persons.

According to the Enpi website (www.enpi-info.eu), more than half of these transport accidents involved sea transport and caused nearly 84% of all transport accident deaths. Most of these sea transport accidents involved migrants trying to reach Italian coasts from Libya and Tunisia. The study was carried out by the EU-funded PPRD South programme to compare global and regional disaster statistics prepared by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the University of Louvain on the basis of the EM-DAT international disaster database. Of the fifteen disastrous events recorded in the EM-DAT database for the first semester 2011 in the Mediterranean,eleven are transport accidents, two are earthquakes - Spain and Turkey - and the other two are a building collapse in Egypt and an industrial explosion in Turkey. While globally EM-DAT figures show the occurrence of 108 natural disasters, which killed over 23,000 people, affected nearly 44 million others and caused more than 253 billion dollars of economic damages, for the Mediterranean region only two natural disasters - earthquakes - are reported over the period, killing 10 and affecting over 15,000. (ANSAmed)