Natural disasters have existed as long as humanity, and in fact a lot longer.
This means that pretty much every century in recorded history has been forced to endure
one or more incredibly destructive attacks of nature’s strongest powers.
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest natural disasters in history, and how they
affected the people of that era.
10.
Peshtigo Fire
Most people are familiar with the Great Chicago Fire, with its “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow tipped
over a lantern” backstory and hundreds of dead.
However, it’s far from the most destructive fire in American history.
It’s not even the most destructive one that started on October 8, 1871.
That dubious honor goes to the Peshtigo Fire of Wisconsin — the most destructive forest
fire in America’s history, which caused around 1,200 deaths, burned an incredible
1.2 million acres and burned through 16 different towns, in 11 counties.
At one point, it even “skipped over” Green Bay to burn sections of two counties on the
other side.
It even made the same amount of damage as the much more urban Chicago fire — roughly
$169 million.
Where the Great Chicago Fire was a disaster, the Peshtigo fire was hell, plain and simple.
The fire was likely started by careless railroad workers who caused a brush fire which the
dry summer and unfortunate winds soon whipped up into a superfast wall of flame that some
say moved almost like a tornado.
The flames “convulsed” and moved in strange ways, eating up all the oxygen and bursting
fleeing people ablaze.
It looked like the end of the world, and for many, it was.
There were heroics, and tragic losses, and desperate survival stories.
One heroic man reportedly carried a woman all the way to safety, thinking it was his
wife, and when he found it was a stranger he immediately went insane.
A young girl spent all night in the river to escape the inferno, holding on to a cow’s
horn to stay moored.
The worst damage was done to the fire’s namesake, the town of Peshtigo.
800 of the fire’s 1,200 victims were from there, and the entire place was “gone in
an hour.”
9.
Ch’ing-yang event
There have been many times when meteors and meteorites have graced our planet with their
presence, but arguably the one with the biggest death toll is the Ch’ing-yang event in 1490.
Seeing as this meteor shower event in China happened well over five centuries ago, actual
details about the event are unfortunately somewhat fuzzy.
Accounts of the era report that “stones falling like rain” killed up to 10,000 people
on the Ch’ing-Yang area of the Shaanxi Province.
Modern experts have expressed doubt over that exact figure — after all, it is the only
meteor shower case with such a giant death toll.
However, pretty much everyone agrees that a “dramatic event” happened at the reported
time and place, and it’s speculated that a breakup of an asteroid may indeed have resulted
in a deadly rain of celestial hail.
8.
Calcutta cyclone
The Ganges River delta area is no stranger to tropical storms, but the Calcutta cyclone
of 1737, also known as the Hoogly River cyclone, ranks among the absolute worst.
It struck on an early autumn morning just south of the city of Calcutta, tearing 200
miles inlands before finally calling it a day.
The cyclone brought with it a 30 to 40-foot storm surge (a sudden rise of water level
in Ganges), along with 15 inches of rain over just six hours.
The combination of these elemental attacks was catastrophic.
Most of the city of Calcutta, built largely of mud huts and brick buildings, was utterly
demolished.
The city suffered 3,000 casualties, but the cyclone’s overall damage was over a hundred
times worse; The disaster is estimated to have killed up to 350,000 people and destroyed
around 20,000 boats, ships and canoes of all shapes and sizes.
7.
Dadu river landslide dam
On June 1, 1976, a huge earthquake shook the Kangding-Luding area of southwest China, causing
all the problems that a major 7.75 magnitude quake can cause.
What happened next was worse.
A landslide dam (debris from the landslide blocking the water flow of the river), and
as is so often the case in impromptu dams, it unfortunately wasn’t built to last.
After building a nice reservoir behind it for 10 days, the landslide dam eventually
breached.
The water cascaded downstream as a catastrophic wall of death, flooding the areas it encountered
to the tune of 100,000 deaths.
Experts think that this was likely the most destructive event of this particular nature
in history.
6.
Coringa cyclones
Coringa was a large and prosperous Indian port city at the mouth of river Godavari.
These days, it’s still there, but only as a mere small village.
This is because the former busy city went through some of the worst cyclones in history.
In 1789, Coringa received a massive blow when a nasty cyclone tore through the area, leaving
around 20,000 people dead.
The shaken city was nevertheless able to resume its functions, but unbeknownst to its residents,
their terrors had only begun.
On November 25, 1839, another, much worse cyclone came, bringing a 40-foot storm surge
and punishing winds with it.
Once the roar of the storm died down, Coringa’s entire port was destroyed.
The death count of the cyclone was an estimated 300,000 people, which along with the 20,000
boats that were also destroyed by the storm marked the end of Coringa’s glory days.
5.
Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883
What the Krakatoa volcano’s eruption in August 1883 lacked in death toll (it killed
“only” 36,000 people), it delivered in pure, deadly spectacle.
The volcano, which was on a 3-by-5.5 mile island between Sumatra and Java, started giving
signs of upcoming trouble months before the incident, starting with massive ash clouds,
“thundering” noises and strange “natural fireworks” that lit the sky.
Unaware of the impeding doom, the people living on nearby islands took to celebrating the
show — only to be rudely interrupted when Krakatoa started a very different, deadly
party.
On August 26, the first blast threw debris and a gas cloud a good 15 miles in the air.
The next morning, the area was shaken by four explosions that equaled the strength of 200
megatons of TNT (the Hiroshima bomb was around 0,01% of that) and could be heard from 2,800
miles away.
Superheated steam, hot gases and volcanic matter scorched the surrounding 25 miles at
speeds over 62 miles-per-hour.
The eruption claimed its first victims via thermal injuries from its mighty blasts, and
the rest fell victim to the 120-foot tsunami that came when the volcano collapsed into
an undersea caldera.
Even after its initial terrors were over, Krakatoa wouldn’t stop wrecking humanity’s
day.
The eruption was so strong that it actually changed the climate and dropped temperatures
all over the world.
4.
Shaanxi earthquake
In 1556, the Shaanxi province of China had the extreme misfortune of hosting what is
thought to be the deadliest earthquake in recorded history.
The quake was around 8 on the Richter scale, meaning it was a “great” earthquake that
is totally capable of leveling communities near the epicenter.
The Shaanxi quake wasn’t content with just communities, either; Chinese annals report
that it lasted mere seconds, but was so incredibly strong that it destroyed buildings, remodeled
rivers, caused floods, ignited massive fires and even “leveled mountains.”
As you can probably expect, such a massive disaster was bad news for any and all humans
who happened on its way.
The Shaanxi earthquake had an estimated 830,000 casualties, and it actually cut the population
of the area by a ridiculous 60 percent.
Oddly, it also managed to affect the architectural trends of the area: Because many people had
been killed by falling stone buildings, the rebuilding process saw the adaptation of wood,
bamboo and other more earthquake-resistant materials.
3.
Yellow River floods of China
Between 1887 and 1938, China’s famed Huang He (Yellow River) went through the top three
most destructive floods in recorded history.
The 3,395-mile river is extremely silted, which makes especially the North China Plain’s
flatlands to be in constant risk of flooding: Since the 2nd century BCE, it has flooded
an estimated 1,500 times, and no one can even begin to calculate the death and destruction
these floods have brought in total.
We do, however, know unpleasantly well the havoc these three ultra-destructive floods
brought on the ill-prepared China.
In the flood that happened over September and October of 1887 (and the famine and diseases
it brought to the survivors) the death toll is estimated somewhere between 900,000 and
two million people.
An even more destructive one in August 1931 covered 34,000 square miles of land in water,
and “partially” flooded a further 8,000.
Up to 4 million people were killed by the flood and its aftermath, and a devastating
80 million people were left homeless.
This particular flood is often considered the most deadly natural disaster in recorded
history.
The last of the three mega-floods came in June 1938, and it was actually completely
manmade.
Thanks to the military’s destruction of dikes near Kaifeng in an effort to stop the
approaching Japanese forces in the Sino-Japanese war, up to 900,000 people died.
2.
The great European famine
If even honest men can do terrible things when they’re desperate, and the best way
to make a person desperate is to make them terribly hungry, imagine what would happen
if you’d make a whole continent starve.
Actually, you don’t need to, because that exact thing happened in 14th century Europe.
The Great European Famine happened when bad weather conditions caused crops to fail all
over Europe from 1315 to the summer harvest of 1317.
The results were nothing short of cataclysmic.
The few years of hunger single-handedly stopped a centuries-long time of wealth and growth,
and plunged the continent into a pandemonium of disease, death, crime, and even the indescribable
horrors of infanticide and cannibalism.
Millions of people died, and it took until 1922 for Europe to recover from the terror.
In fact, the effects of the disaster can still be felt today: Reportedly, certain parts of
France are still more sparsely populated than they were just before the Great Famine hit.
1.
Plague of Justitian
Disclaimer: this one has a death toll that goes right through the roof, though technically
it’s not a natural disaster in the “earth rises to devour us all” sense, but rather
an outbreak of disease.
A massive, massive outbreak of disease.
Imagine being an all-powerful emperor trying to cement your legacy, only to find that the
main thing history books remember about you is that a bunch of rodents managed to kill
countless thousands of people during your reign … and then giving the ensuing epidemic
your name.
Such was the fate of Byzantine’s emperor Justitian I, who became the namesake of the
Plague of Justitian (or Justitian’s plague, because why bother giving it just one version
of the guy’s name?) just because he happened to be in charge when it struck.
Justitian’s plague, which was basically a nasty cellar band version of the Black Plague
before it went mainstream, had formed in China and/or India, and its tours eventually took
it to Egypt and assorted trade routes.
Iit got its big break in the year 542, when the rodents bearing the disease finally reached
the mighty city of Constantinople.
Reports indicate that the city was struck with pretty much all forms of plague at once:
Apart from the Black Death classic bubonic plague, pneumonic and septicemic types were
also present.
As such, citizens started keeling over by the thousand.
Tens of thousands of people died in an extremely short span of time, and matters weren’t
helped by the fact that authorities were unable to dispose of the masses of dead, diseased
bodies in a timely manner.
After the plague was done with Justitian’s Constantinople, it turned its attention to
the Mediterranian and later Persia.
Its active career lasted for an estimated half a century, though some indicate that
the plague continued its Mediterranean tour for a good 225 years.
Ultimately, it’s estimated that the Plague of Justitian killed up to 40% of Constantinople’s
residents, and the entire Byzantine empire lost somewhere between 25 and 50 million people.
Nice legacy, Justitian.