These things seem to be happening awfully frequent now in days.
Sad to see. Why is it that tsunamis seem so damn frequent of late. I don't remember them in the 80's. 90's?!
Urbanization is a significant factor into an up tick in the frequency of major disasters, especially the propensity for people to move to disaster prone areas. The last major New Madrid earthquake resulted in farmers saying their animals ran off and everyone basically putting themselves back together. A repeat, which many expect is coming, would result in many urban centers becoming dependent on outside aid. If it does occur, it will be a major disaster. Then you have places like Dakar, where we see regular disasters of flooding because migration toward the urban center resulted in poor communities populating the region's floodplains. It used to flood and nobody cared, now it is a regular place for a disaster.
Awareness and better technology are another factor many people ignore. Faster and better sharing of information across the globe also helps make us more aware of events like this. News is no longer hand picked for people based on what paper they read or what tv station they watch. Technology also allows the relevant communities to now have more complete records for global data. Not too long ago if a human didn't witness and pass it outside their area, it didn't happen.
The big question is whether or not events that cause disasters really are occurring at a higher rate. There are popular, and valid, charts out there that show dramatic increases over the last 100 years, and especially the last 20 years. Both of the above factors have influenced the increases in those charts, which is expressed by those that created the charts. The thing to note is that floods and hurricanes have risen dramatically while earthquakes have risen a little but stabilized, quite possibly just a capturing of better reporting in the data. This suggests that possibility that weather related events have outpaced the influence of reporting and are starting to occur more frequently. It really doesn't prove it, though, since it's still hard to quantify the affects of migration.
If nothing else we'll definitely know more in a few decades now that we are paying attention to this topic, but for now the jury is out. Over the last five years we've had some up and some down in frequency, so at least it isn't an every year gets worse scenario.