Over a decade ago I was talking w/the great disaster scholar Russell Dynes (RIP) and he clued me in to the importance of the tremendous compound disaster that struck Lisbon in 1755: earthquake, tsunami, conflagration. He had written a working paper about it.

2. Dynes was interested in Lisbon as a turning point towards what we would recognize as a more modern, scientific, state-oriented disaster ontology and recovery. http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/294

3. He was interested in the combined nature of the disasters. Looking back I see this fascination as totally in line w/his whole corpus of works conducted during the cold war, when researchers were constantly imagining nuclear attack as an amalgamation of many different disasters

4. At the time I thought "why is Dynes diving back in history?" But he was looking for something.

5. I've been reading Daniel Defoe, too, telling me about the disaster that struck London in 1665, a plague that killed 10-20% of the population of London. It's grim reading, and I cannot recommend it enough. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm

6. The Defoe stands on its own, but it also offers clues to the devastation of the great fire that swept the city in 1666. http://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/browse-the-collection/minutes-26-september-1666-common-council-meeting/

7. Of course we've heard a lot lately about the so-called Spanish Flu in the midst of WWI. War and pandemic disease ride together. Consider as well the 1968 H3N2 outbreak that took place in concert with the height of the Vietnam War. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html

8. On and on, case after case, disasters treated separately, nodes in time--types we differentiate from types--but I'm really not seeing such segregation as being very useful anymore.

9. I thought I was being specific and analytical and it blinded me to the intense connections among disaster types--sometimes linked tightly in time, but sometimes much more loosely linked, and yet still connected. After Fukushima this should have snapped into focus for me.

10. I don't think anyone will be much interested in books or studies that treat single disasters as separate events anymore. How will we moor COVID-19 to the past, what other disasters made it, and which disasters to come will multiply it? /end