lisagrant87

I am fascinated by natural and not so natural disasters. The how and why of things like hurricanes, tsunamis, ship wrecks, plane crashes, pandemics, etc. are the type of things I'm talking about. I have studied and worked in medical and science fields and learning how and why things happen, if there was humor error, equipment failure, lack of warning or any other things that made a disaster worse is how we learn to make disasters less catastrophic. By the way, here's an interesting factoid. New Orleans had a natural barrier of wetlands for hundreds of years that lessened the intensity of hurricanes before they hit the city. Due to people building and polluting, these wetlands are nearly gone now, allowing hurricanes like Katrina to hit the city with full impact.

Anyway, I want to start a stock book of stamps commemorating natural disasters and the other things I mentioned. Are there enough stamps in this genre that it's worth starting on this endeavor? Are stamps depicting this topic difficult to find?

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roy

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

A few things come to mind. There are numerous stamps overprinted for hurricane relief, typically Caribbean islands and Central America - most of them will be found in the semi-postal section (B #'s) i.e British Honduras B1-5

Tristan da Cunha was evacuated for a number of years: See "Resettlement" set Scott #55-67 and St. Helena Tristan Relief set B1-4

Tin Can Canoe Mail (Tonga: Niuafo'ou) was discontinued when the island was evacuated due to earthquakes in 1946 (continued again later). This will all be covers. In fact, I think I was just handling one with a "discontinued operations" letter from Quesnell just the other day.

There are numerous flood relief semi-postals (See South Africa, Netherlands).

Austria issued a semi-postal for avalanche victims, Scott B287

Earthquakes would be represented by Mexico, Nicaragua (many of them).

I've run out of steam for now, but I think the answer to your question is "yes", you could easily build a 4 frame (64 page) exhibit around this theme.

Roy

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re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

Canada just issued a souvenir sheet, a booklet International Rate single and two domestic rate single stamps in 2012 commemorating the Titanic.

Japan issued a set of five semi-postal issues on June 21, 2011 Scott #B58 to B662 Earthquake & Tsunami Relief.

There are many others I'm sure.

Liz

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Les

01 Jun 2012
12:40:00pm

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

Lisa,
I did see a quote from USPS official in Linn's that the USPS would ignore the Titanic because it was a disaster.

Regards
Les

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re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

Those events changed history and society. They should be commemorated. They are much more important and powerful events to who we are as people than the Simpsons are.

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re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

The US issued an Amelia Earhardt stamp. Did she not die in a tragedy? She was a pioneer. The astronauts and others were too. These people deserve our respect and deserve to be remembered.

Logisitcal =

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musicman

APS #213005
01 Jun 2012
08:51:26pm

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

Michael,

Regarding Amelia Earhardt - tragedy, yes; disaster, no.

USPS says "no" to disasters, not tragedy.

...just clarifying!




Randy

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joshtanski

02 Jun 2012
08:45:51am

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

catastrophe - "an event causing great and usually sudden damage or suffering; a disaster:"

That makes all three terms equivalent, if a=b and a=c then b=c, if I can remember my mathematical rules correctly.

Also, in my own brain I do not see much difference in commemorating a disaster versus commemorating a war...

Then again, I'm in the minority of stamp collectors, as don't mind seeing Simpsons stamps or living people on stamps.

Josh

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musicman

APS #213005
02 Jun 2012
09:53:46am

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

I agree with all of your conclusions!

The USPS must have their rules, so they decided to pick and choose a few contradictory ones along the way, I guess!



Randy

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re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

NJW7 - I don't agree with you. We have had plenty of stamps issued worldwide since 1840 that memorialize "heroes". In the US, and probably other countries, there is a Stamp Advisory Committee that reviews requests for stamp subjects and makes recommendations to the Postal Board of Governors. Yes, there have been controversial issues (Freda Kalo is one and sorry if I spelled her name wrong), but by and large, they do a good job.

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drmicro68

03 Jun 2012
01:35:08pm

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

At the risk of unleashing a firestorm, why SHOULD USPS issue a Titanic stamp? It was a British vessel, it sank in international waters. Yes, there were US citizens on board, and US citizens have gone down with many other vessels. So? There has been a plethora of movies, books, etc about it. Why a US stamp? Just my curmudgeonly rant on the subject.

Roger

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cdj1122

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

" .... Are there enough stamps in this genre that it's worth starting on this endeavor? ..."
I have seen a stamp or two issued by India that memorialise the Tsunami that raced from Indonesia across the Bay of Bengal a few years ago and actually derailed and up ended a passenger train and I am fairly sure Sri Lanka also issued stamps showing the effect on its shores.

I never thought of that as a topic, Lisa, but I guarantee you that there is a fertile field of such stamps to explore.

And if you want to pass beyond stamps that directly refer to some particular disaster, you can seek covers that were in the mail stream during the days or weeks when the disaster was occuring, especially if their path from dispatch to delivery was impacted by the event.

Just thinking about it excites me.

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cdj1122

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

I am planning to dig through several shoeboxes of envelopes this weekend just to look for connections.

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Bobstamp

14 Jun 2012
10:10:31pm

re: Need help from the experts....is this a good Topical idea?

I haven't read all of the responses to Lisa's question (I don't think I'll live long enough to complete the reading!), but she and I are obviously intrigued by the similar topics, disaster-wise. My interest was piqued when a friend asked me to evaluate a cover that his father mailed from Netherlands to Java in 1934. It had obviously been "distressed" — the edges were charred, and it appeared to be water stained. My friend told me that it had been on a plane that crashed in North Africa. I soon learned that he was wrong, that the crash occurred in the Syrian Desert near Baghdad. The plane was a KLM Douglas DC-2 (immediate precursor of the famous DC-3), named Uiver (Old Dutch for Stork) on its first commercial flight. Everyone on board was killed, and no cause of the accident was ever discovered, or at least revealed: KLM scarcely acknowledged the accident. We do know that much of the Middle East was covered by a huge storm system the night of the crash. Heavy rain prevented a search for several hours after it was clear that the plane wasn't going to be landing in Baghdad. The plane was mostly destroyed by fire. Bags of mail burst open and were burned, and/or soaked by rain, and/or stained by oil, and/or covered with mud. Here's an image of the cover I eventually obtained from my friend:



I began a search for more Uiver crash covers, eventually developing an exhibit which included pre-crash Uiver post cards issued by KLM, an original photo of the Uiver landing in Melbourne (it had won the handicap portion of the MacRobertson International Air Race between London and Melbourne), and stamps showing DC-2s.

The Uiver crash got me to thinking about other interesting airline crashes, and I now have collections of material related to three crashes in 1954:

• The collision between an Trans-Canada Airlines Northstar and an RCAF Harvard trainer over Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan

• The hard landing of a BOAC Stratocruiser G-ALSA early on Christmas morning at Prestwick, Scotland

• The crash landing of a Linee Aeree Italiane DC-6B at Idlewild after three failed landing attempts

Learning about the multiple causes of these crashes, and the probable causes of the KLM crash, has been fascinating. I'm sure that these collections seem morbid to some people, but I think of the covers as evidence of both human and technological failures at a time when air travel was nowhere nearly as safe as it is now. In 1954, sixty airliners plunged from the sky, just one less than the average for that decade. Today, about the same number of airline crashes occur annually, but of course millions upon millions more passenger miles are flown now than in 1954.

There certainly are some "disaster stamps" around. Many semi-postals have been issued to raise disaster-relief funds. I recently obtained a stamp — sorry, can't put my hands on it at the moment — issued for flood relief and showing an airliner on the tarmac of a flooded airport. A search might turn up some other very interesting stamps and covers, and there are many other stamps which could be considered collateral to disasters, such as map stamps showing rivers which have flooded disastrously in times past. In my Uiver exhibit, I included stamps showing storm clouds similar to those which likely contributed to the plane's crash.

Bob

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