Top 40, now top 66 - World's Worst Natural Disasters
Across Pacific Magazine News Humour God at Work ... Rancho de la Paz
Compiled by David B. Hall The world has seen many disasters over the years. Many were caused by people - wars, terrorists... Others are sometimes referred to as "acts of God". It's very difficult to rank them because there are different ways of defining "worst" (some would just count the dead, others would include the injured, still others would measure in terms of the amount of dollars required to repair the damages, or somehow calculate the damage to the environment...) and there are different ways of defining "natural". Nevertheless the following is a substantial list of some of the world's worst natural disasters. All of these disasters took more than 25,000 lives. 43 of these disasters took over 100,000 lives (see second disaster list near the end for death toll rank).
Note: These 66 are listed sequentially, not by amount of lives lost or damage done. Some may have other situations which COULD be included in preference to some of these. Note also, we're only going back less than 900 years here, because there's little record to document natural disasters prior to that.
Also note that many figures are only rough estimates. As we have seen recently, after so many thousands, many people assisting with the disaster relief stop keeping accurate records - they're just too overwhelmed, too tired, too busy doing what has to be done and still survive themselves, that keeping detailed records ceases to be a priority for them. In some cases government authorities for various reasons have tried to hide the true figures (see 1976, China below); other situations involve more deaths from the "aftermath", so there are different reports given by different sources. | |
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