Are the numbers growing in absolute terms, or is the reported disasters that are growing? Before satellites, 24-hour news, the internet and social-media + camera phones, a lot of natural disasters went unreported. Now you will find clips of a disaster with two dozen different viewpoints, before, during and after, all in high resolution[1]. So what decades ago would have been a short, nondescript page-3 article about tragedy at an exotic place halfway around the world, is now gripping TV (with very high ratings) in the present day.
Fair point - but that was a neat example of the kind of coverage modern-day disaster get. The Puebla earthquake also had countless videos, but none were curated in one package like the Beirut explosion.
1. Checkout Forensic Architecture's reconstructed timeline of the Beirut explosion. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...