Or rather, who did Shari Villarosa speak to? Shari Villarosa is formally the USA Chargé d'Affaires for their Embassy in Rangoon since 2005. Some news outlets have called her in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis the "de facto USA ambassador to Myanmar". During my introduction to Managing News targeting the tracking of disasters I already knew she was one the names I wanted to tag in the system. But I didn't need to: Managing News picked her name up automatically and promoted it to the to the front of the tag cloud. I knew I had to track her because as soon as all media outlets were talking of 100,000 deaths there was no other source but her. Ms. Villarosa had thrown that figure, referring to an unnamed NGO working in Myanmar, and that was the single source of the figure: unconfirmed, unquestioned... Shari had just said it.

Immediately it felt fairly random. It could easily be much bigger, or smaller given the lack of transparent news from the field at the time. Often in disaster events one gets a range of figures from field reports, independent groups, and authorities. But here for a few good days all we had were Shari's figures, those of a US official, which seemed to have unquestioned authority, and/or access to privileged and unverifiable data.
The figure would fall short a few days later, but those were enough days for Shari's 100,000 to permeate all media and all shorts of demonstrations, Vigils against the junta used the number, NGOs organized fundraisers around it, and other nations began to organize their formal complaints for the negligence of the junta around the 100,000. It would only be eight days after, that the United Nations would report on such a figure, while already others were offering higher figures. In this context Shari's 100,000 highlights at least two critical aspects.

First, there is the apparent need to have very quickly, a round, and strong figure. A tangible number ready to mobilize, to manipulate, the reaction to the disaster. There were other figures, but under the original confusion and with an easily widespread critique of the ruling government, no smaller figure seemed to satisfy the news. We did have other numbers: 351 on May 4, 10,000 on May 5, or 22,500 on May 6. But after the 100,000 grabbed the media on May 7, and after the peak moment in disasters when victims stop from being counted (for instance Hurricane Katrina was no different) for political and/or logistical reasons, and rarely the damage is factored over time, the figure lingered on unmovable at least until May 15. On that date the UN still used the number, while the Myanmar authorities talked of 78,000 death and 56,000 missing (an aggregate often used to tally all casualties), and the Red Cross was quoted as talking about 128,000 deaths, being the first large NGO offering publicly a figure.

The second elements is unfortunately simpler. This dance of figures with hurricane Nargis was a result of the dictatorial regime and how media decided lazily to attack that aspect from the first emerging news, instead of facing the challenges of conducting the hard task of investigating and informing of the disaster under such conditions. What is striking is that the Chinese government (not precisely a beacon of democratic freedoms) did its own dance of figures during the Sichuan earthquake, which went unchallenged regardless a similar unreliability: from 5 deaths, to something between 3,000 to 5,000, to 7,600, to 8,500, to 10,000, to 21,500, etc. etc.

However, after all this Shari Villarosa has remained present in the news following the Cyclone, but her momentum faded around diplomatic interventions, guided tours for authorities somewhere between trying to figure out the conditions on the ground and doing a bit of disaster tourism. But nothing compares to the peak she reached when she was the only name behind the 100,000 deaths.

Image by Alan Chan