Let's consider some disasters.

It has been quite a week in quite a month in quite a year in quite a decade, has it not? A lot of things have gone sideways, often driven into ditches by distracted drivers. Happily for us, some interesting data visualizations have emerged as a result.

Chapter 1
The disaster in Washington

The evisceration of The Washington Post is not the most important thing in the world, certainly. It has gotten a great deal of attention in part because it is A Bad Thing That Happened To The Media™, which is the sort of thing that the media spends a lot of time talking about and the media consumes a big chunk of the national conversation by definition.

But I would argue that it is more important than other ABTTHTTM™ because of the circumstances: one of the world's richest men gutting an institution as he cozies up to a wannabe autocrat. That's particularly problematic, even if it is more common than it used to be in the U.S.

For me, of course, The Post's collapse holds personal importance. I spent 11 years there. Nearly every Post employee with whom I remained close lost their jobs this week.

There have been myriad eulogies written for the paper as it was since the culling. I didn't contribute one, having rebutted Jeff Bezos's arguments about media objectivity when he first raised them in 2024, concluded my tenure at The Post with a rumination about the collapse of institutions and published an essay the day before the layoffs about how power is shifting in America. I'd said my piece.

Except there is still one aspect of all of this that deserves highlighting.

It has been mentioned, repeatedly, that The Post lost $100 million in 2024 — a loss driven in part by the shifts Bezos was already implementing. If you stacked $100 bills in a pile until you had $10 million, it would reach about 36 feet in the air. Here's what $100 million would look like, in ten stacks of $10 million, positioned next to a powerful 5'7" gentleman.

It's worse than that, though: The Post lost $277 million from 2022 to 2024, according to news reports.

That's a lot of money to lose, admittedly. At least for you or me. It is, relatively speaking, a lot less to lose for Jeff Bezos. After seeing his net worth plunge dramatically over the past few days, Bloomberg's Billionaires index still has him at a worth of nearly $240 billion.

Here's what that would look like in $10 million stacks.

Not too shabby.

Of course, his net worth isn't all liquid; Bezos doesn't have a big vault he swims around in like Scrooge McDuck (I assume). But this is still the equivalent of someone with a net worth of $500,000 finding themselves with a $240 credit-card charge.

There's another useful way to look at how much Bezos's net worth has grown. Since he bought The Washington Post in August 2013, he has become one of the wealthiest people in the world. In fact, from the day he bought the paper until yesterday, his net worth has increased an average of more than $45 million a day.

Based on that average, Bezos's net worth increased enough over any five-day work-week to offset The Post's $277 million in losses.

He's certainly not obligated to take a laissez-faire approach to a money-losing business. But he has been willing in the past to stick with a business's core proposition despite massive losses: Amazon lost almost $3 billion from 1998 to 2002, but he stuck with it. Because he believed in it.

Somehow, somewhere, he lost faith in what The Post was doing and how it was doing it. As a result, the paper will never again be what it was; we will see if it ever again is anything at all.

Chapter 2
Preventing disasters across America

I live close enough to our local volunteer fire department that its noon-time siren always gets my dog howling. But I'd never really considered it as a member of set, a bespoke organization serving a discrete area — like any number of other such organizations nationally.

Then I read a thread of posts about the number of fire departments in Pittsburgh and on Long Island.

The thread claimed that there are 200 different departments in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County and another 180 in Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York. That last figure is a bit high, according to data compiled by FEMA, but the Pittsburgh one is on the mark.

My first thought was that Pittsburgh's number was driven by its terrain; you need lots of stations to ensure you can get to different neighborhoods quickly. But this is independent departments, not stations, each of which may have several (or dozens) of fire houses.

So I pulled county-level data on population and departments and mapped the relationship. Bigger circles below indicate more departments per county resident.

What you'll notice is that this appears to be an inverse map of population density. Places with lots of people tend to be cities with unified departments, so they have one department for a lot of people. This doesn't hold universally; even rural California doesn't have a lot of different departments, probably in part because the counties there are so large and often served by county-level departments.

But there is a correlation. (Notice that the vertical axis below uses a logarithmic scale.) Less populous counties tend to have more departments per resident.

Allegheny County (hilly) has more departments per person than about-equally-populated Nassau County (flat). As you can see below, there is a modest effect from terrain — probably in part because terrain correlates to smaller towns and townships, each of which might have its own department.

I don't have a grand conclusion from any of this? Just an interesting artifact of America's evolution.

Chapter 3
Tracking a disaster's effects

You may recall two weeks ago when a massive storm dumped huge amounts of snow across the country. I remember it; looking out my window we still have a foot-plus of snow on the ground. As the storm was unfolding, someone I follow on Bluesky shared this map, showing how power outages tracked the path of the storm.

It was from the aptly named site PowerOutage.com. The site does what you would think, tracking the existence and severity of shutdowns as they occur.

They also have information about historic outages, letting them compile visualizations like this look at the effects of Hurricane Helene.