Note: The following is an excerpt from the article. Read the full version here or on page 322 of The American Philatelist.
Many philatelists collect material for which they have a connection, such as the country and communities where they lived, the places where they traveled, or the career paths they followed. In my case, after spending 30 years studying ways to reduce deaths and damage from natural hazards, I set about assembling a collection of everything philatelic I could find on hazards and disasters. From floods and tsunamis to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, natural disasters have resulted in many dramatic and interesting postage stamps as well as a rich, and not well explored, postal history.
I will show here what I’ve learned about how such a collection can be organized. For those with no interest in natural disasters, hopefully you will see how a variety of philatelic items can be used to illustrate and enhance any collection.
I include natural disasters, their victims and damage, the various activities involved in disaster response and recovery, and the options available to reduce the likelihood of future disasters in the collection. The disasters explored include those caused by hazards that are geophysical (volcanic eruptions and earthquakes), hydrological (floods and tsunamis), meteorological (hurricanes and droughts), and famines associated with crop failures from droughts or other causes.
To set limits on a subject that is inherently broad, the framework and disasters I’ve included omit those of limited scope, such as plane crashes and shipwrecks; those that are entirely of human origin, such as urban fires and nuclear accidents; those that are extremely rare, such as meteor strikes; and those that are associated with public health catastrophes, such as pandemics.
In looking for philatelic items, I chose to be inclusive rather than exclusive in the belief that any item that helps in understanding disasters and their consequences is inherently interesting and relevant. A natural disaster collection is likely to include not only various types of postage stamps but also labels of various sorts, covers with relevant auxiliary markings, cachets, cancellations, corner cards, postal and postcards, souvenir cards, and even correspondence.
I have put together a checklist of relevant material that includes more than 4,000 items. It has been accepted for publication by the American Topical Association and will be distributed in three parts: disaster events; disaster response; and disaster mitigation. At this writing, it is in the ATA checklist pipeline, with the date of its availability to stamp collectors yet unknown.
Contemporaneous disasters
Images of victims and damage can be found on postage stamps issued shortly after disasters to raise funds for relief efforts. Postal agencies have done their part by issuing postal tax stamps and semi-postals. Money paid for a semi-postal stamp is divided; the postal service takes its share as postage and the rest goes to a designated charity. The extra funds are often shown on the stamp with a plus sign.
Figure 7. The Russian Volga Famine Relief issue of 1921 includes this semi-postal (Scott B17), which depicts aid being administered to a victim of the famine.
Postal authorities in Russia were the first to depict disaster victims on semi-postals. To raise funds for victims of the famine of 1921-22 (as many as 5 million people perished), the Volga Famine Relief Issue (Figure 7) included stamps that picture famine victims and relief efforts. The stamps were issued imperforate with values that reflect the hyperinflation that existed in early Soviet Russia up until 1924.
In 1928, Liechtenstein became the second country to picture disaster scenes on semi-postals. After catastrophic flooding of the Rhine Valley displaced thousands in September 1927, postal authorities created four semi-postals to aid victims. The stamps depict emergency response activities, damage to a railroad bridge and flooding in the village of Ruggel (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Flooding of the village of Ruggel is shown on a Liechtenstein semi-postal (Scott B8) issued on February 6, 1928, four months after the flood disaster in September 1927.
After an earthquake on March 31, 1931, postal authorities in Nicaragua devised a scheme to issue 13 definitive and five airmail stamps to raise funds to rebuild the central post office in Managua and improve postal services (Figure 9). The new stamps depicted the post office as it existed both before and after the earthquake. To create a philatelic market for the stamps, they were available for sale on only one day, January 1, 1932. Possibly because the funds raised did not meet expectations, postal authorities also had semi-postal stamps with a similar design printed, but they were never put on sale.
Figure 9. Examples of stamps issued in 1932 to raise funds to rebuild the central post office in Managua, Nicaragua include a 50-cent green (Scott 567), from a set of 13 definitives and the high value 1-cordoba (Scott C24) from a set of five airmail stamps. Both picture the post office before and after it was destroyed by the March 31, 1931, earthquake. Also shown is an imperf pair of the high value from a set of 12 semi-postal stamps that was never issued.
Beginning in 1940, postal services began using semi-postal souvenir and mini sheets to raise funds for disaster relief. These larger formats allow postal services to create stamp designs with dramatic images of disaster victims. The first of these was issued on March 1940 by Hungary to raise funds for victims of severe floods along the Danube River (Figure 10).
Figure 10. The first souvenir sheet issued to raise money for natural disaster victims (Hungary, Scott B113) depicts a soldier rescuing a family from swift-moving floodwater.
More recent examples include the mini sheets issued by Pakistan Post and the Bangladesh Post Office, both of which make direct appeals to aid disaster victims (Figure 11).
Figure 11. Mini sheets issued by postal authorities in Pakistan in 2005 (Michel Pakistan BL17) and Bangladesh in 2007 (Scott 726) make direct appeals for aid to disaster victims. The Bangladesh sheet is missing a stamp because the prime minister had the stamp showing his image removed.
The Pakistan Post example was issued on October 27, 2005, just three weeks after Kashmir was devastated by an earthquake that killed more than 87,000. Children are a central element of the mini sheet design reflecting the fact that 19,000 children died in schools that collapsed. At the bottom of the sheet is the statement, “All proceeds of this issue will be contributed to the President’s Relief Fund for Earthquake Victims 2005.” The mini sheet of eight 4-rupee stamps sold for 100 rupees.
The south Asian floods of 2007 led Bangladesh to issue a mini sheet labeled “In Charity to Flood Victims.” The sheet originally consisted of six stamps, five showing flood scenes and the sixth containing an image of Prime Minister Fakhruddin Ahmed. The prime minister had the stamp bearing his image physically removed from each mini sheet before the stamps were released to the public, apparently because he had not been consulted about use of his image and did not want to be associated with the catastrophe.
Picturing disaster victims and damage on stamps can be a double-edged sword. While this can create sympathy for victims and foster sales of the stamps, it also has the potential to stifle tourism in the affected areas. To counter this, at least two postal services used stamps to say that while the disaster was catastrophic, the affected area is now open for business.
Figure 12. Three stamps were issued in 1963 by Morocco to commemorate recovery from the 1960 Agadir earthquake (Scott 94-96). Respectively, they show an image of the city before the earthquake, an X over that image and date of the earthquake in red, and an image of the rebuilt city.
The first stamps of this nature were issued following the Agadir, Morocco, earthquake and fire on February 29, 1960, which led to the death of a third of the city’s population and left 70 percent of its buildings in ruins. To signal its recovery from the earthquake and rejuvenate its tourist economy, on October 10, 1963, Morocco issued three stamps, one showing Agadir before the earthquake, a second showing a large X over the image of the city and date of the earthquake, and a third showing Agadir rebuilt (Figure 12).
Figure 13. Examples of the three themes Guatemala used in stamps issued after the February 4, 1976, earthquake are: damage from the earthquake (Scott C577; with red band); the vigorous response to the event aided by international donors (Scott C584; in green); and rebuilding (Scott C586; pink). Each stamp thanks international donors (“Gracias Amigos del Mundo”).
The second example is Guatemala’s postal response to the earthquake of February 4, 1976, that killed about 23,000 people and left thousands homeless. Exactly four months later, Guatemala issued a set of 12 stamps with four of them devoted to each of three themes (Figure 13): earthquake damage; with the help of friends from around the world Guatemala mounted a vigorous response to rebuild; and Guatemala is back on its feet. Designs for each theme thanked international donors with the words “Gracias Amigos del Mundo.”
The Author
Raymond Burby is an emeritus professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His career included articles published in several scholarly journals dealing with natural disasters, service on several national research council committees that examined U.S. disaster policy, and invited talks on disaster policy in Australia, England, Italy and South Africa. A member of the APS since 1984, Ray’s other philatelic affiliations include the American Topical Association, Wreck & Crash Mail Society and Triangle Stamp Club. This article is his first in The American Philatelist, but in previous years his wife, Nan, has authored several articles for the journal based on her pursuit of interesting stories told by postcards.