Disasters from 1948 to 2015 in Korea and Power-Law Distribution

The Korean peninsula is no stranger to disaster, experiencing natural disasters such as severe downpours, floods, and typhoons and human-caused disasters such as industrial accidents, building collapses, and infernos. Fortunately, for the purposes of learning from each event, it has well documented many aspects of each disaster, policy and law changes, institutional reforms, and future risk management alternatives. However, to take the almost 2000-year documented history of Korea in a more manageable period, we focus on the major disaster events, those that are quantifiable and that took place between 1948 and 2015 to see if the disaster trend in Korea is producing power-law distributed disasters. We specifically analyzed the statistical characteristics of these major disaster events and their functional relationship between frequency and magnitude to see if a change in one produces a proportional relative change in the other.