CHERNOBYL MELTDOWN

The explosion at Chernobyl is one of the world’s most infamous man-made disasters — and with
good reason. It started innocently enough, with engineers performing a routine experiment that
was supposed to find out if the plant’s emergency water cooling would work during a power outage.

The test had been carried out previously, but on this occasion, there was a power surge and
engineers couldn’t shut down Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors. Steam built up in one reactor, the roof
was blown off, the nuclear core was exposed, and radioactive material was released into the
atmosphere.

Workers and firefighters were hospitalised and 28 people quickly passed away from acute radiation
exposure. It took nearly two weeks, and military intervention, to extinguish the fires.

Crucially, it took more than a day for the 50,000 residents of nearby Pripyat to be evacuated.
Following this, the government established a 19-mile (30km) "exclusion zone" and built a
containment dome over the top of the site.

In the years following the incident, studies estimate that thousands of people have succumbed to
cancer because of the radiation. It’s one of the most expensive disasters in history, too, and it’s
estimated that containment and clean-up efforts will continue until 2065.

THE BHOPAL DISASTER

That’s a huge amount of toxic material, and the plant was surrounded by densely-packed housing –
so more than 600,000 people were exposed to the deadly cloud.

The people living around the plant were not informed quickly, and hospital staff were given
conflicting information about the situation. Innocent people suffered from coughing, eye irritation,
burns, breathlessness and vomiting, and thousands of people died within hours, as Live Science has
previously reported. Thousands of animals passed away, too.

Longer-term studies since the accident have confirmed that many thousands of people are still
affected by eye, lung, and psychological damage – and, even today, it’s hard to say exactly how many
people have suffered.
CALIFORNIAN WILDFIRES

Climate change has seen wildfires become a far more common threat around the world, and 2018
saw huge areas of California affected by some of the worst fires in recent memory,. More than 100
people died in more than 8,500 fires across California, and the fires destroyed more than 24,000
buildings and burned two million acres of land.

Most of the fires in California took place in July and August, and the government declared a national
disaster.

There’s no doubt that the fires were a man-made disaster. The years that preceded the fires saw an
increase in temperatures due to climate change, and that killed plenty of trees in California — and
those dead, dry trees provide ample fuel for fires to spread.

Scientists predict that this kind of disaster is only going to become more common because of
climate change, so California’s extreme weather may soon feel normal. Sadly, it has significant
health effects on people too
BHOLA CYCLONE 1970