[staggeringman]

this is what you call disasters some people have short memories!



How do you rate "worst" when it comes to natural disasters? By the sheer size of the events themselves, the spread of impact, economic cost or the loss of human life?

By any of the above counts, the earthquake off Sumatra rates as a human tragedy, but is far short of the worst events of the past 100 years or so as humanity stretched and squeezed into an increasingly vulnerable planet.

If the measurement is loss of life then the 14,000-plus casualties of Sumatra pale in comparison to the earthquake that struck Tianjin in China on July 27, 1976. The official casualty figure issued by the Chinese government was 255,000, but unofficial estimates of the death toll were as high as 655,000.

A list published by the US Geological Survey includes a string of earthquakes where the death toll is measured in the tens of thousands. These include 200,000 deaths in Ningxia-Kansu, China in 1920; 143,000 in Kanto, Japan in 1923; 70,000 in Messina, Italy in 1908; and 66,000 in Peru in 1970. More recently, 50,000 died in western Iran on June 20, 1990; 41,000 in Bam, Iran in December last year; 25,000 in Armenia in December 1988, and 20,000 in Gujarat, India in January 2001.


Volcanic eruptions have also killed tens of thousands. The worst in recent times was at Mont Pelee in Martinique, Lesser Antilles in 1902, when 30,000 inhabitants of the capital St Pierre were killed. On November 13, 1985, an eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia caused a mudflow that engulfed the city of Armero and killed more than 23,000 people.

Floods cause more deaths each year than any other natural disaster, on average. China and Bangladesh, in particular, have been devastated repeatedly. More than 300,000 died in Bangladesh in November 1970 and a further 130,000 in April 1991, from cyclone-induced flooding. The flooding of the Yangtze River in China in 1931 caused an estimated 3 million deaths from flooding and starvation.

In terms of its spread of impact, the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that struck Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Thailand - at 9.0 on the Richter scale, revised from 8.9 yesterday, the fifth largest ever recorded - compares with the biggest events of the past century, including its biggest quake at a magnitude of 9.5 which hit Chile on May 22, 1960. The tsunami which it created struck not only Chile, but Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines.

Perhaps the most famous disaster was the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in August 1883, when an explosion that could be heard more than 4000 kilometres away caused a series of tsunamis, some as high as 40 metres, which killed more than 36,000 people in the coastal towns and villages along the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

Its impact was also recorded or observed throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans, the west coast of the US, South America and even as far away as the English Channel.

this is not the first or last!