TOP 10 DEADLIEST

NATURAL
DISASTERS IN
HISTORY
1138 Aleppo earthquake
• On Oct. 11, 1138, the ground under the Syrian city began to shake.
The city sits on the confluence of the Arabian and African plates,
making it prone to temblors, but this one was particularly nasty. The
magnitude of the quake is lost to time, but contemporary chroniclers
reported that the city's citadel collapsed and houses crumbled across
Aleppo. The death toll of this quake is typically put at about 230,000,
but that estimate comes from the 15th century, and the historian may
have been conflating the Aleppo quake with another one in Georgia,
according to a 2004 paper in the Annals of Geophysics.
2010 Haiti quake
• If Aleppo's death toll is mistaken, the earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan.
12, 2010, may be a contender for the top 10 deadliest disasters. Even
in a modern mass disaster, though, estimating the death toll is a tricky
business.
• In the year after the quake, the government of Haiti estimated that
the magnitude-7.0 quake and its aftermath killed 230,000 people; in
January 2011, officials revised the figure to 316,000. Those figures are
highly disputed, however. A 2010 study published in the journal
Medicine, Conflict and Survival put the number at around 160,000
deaths. A 2011 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
draft report from 2011 claimed even lower numbers — between
46,000 and 85,000.
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
and tsunami
• A magnitude-9.3 temblor struck undersea off the west coast of
Sumatra on Dec. 26, 2004, creating a massive tsunami that killed
people in 14 separate countries. The overall death toll is estimated at
between 230,000 and 280,000 people. In some places, especially
hardest-hit Indonesia, the tsunami wave reached 98 feet (30 meters)
in height. Indonesia had the highest death toll of any country, with
126,473 confirmed dead and 93,943 missing, according to official
government figures. Sri Lanka followed, with a total of 36,594 dead or
missing.
1920 Haiyuan earthquake
• On Dec. 16, 1920, a strong earthquake hit Haiyuan Country in central
China. According to a 2010 study presented at a conference in honor
of the quake's 90th anniversary, 273,400 people died in the quake,
most buried in landslides caused by the ground shaking.
• According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the quake was
probably a magnitude 7.8 and was felt all the way from the Yellow Sea
to Qinghai Province on the Tibetan plateau. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records show that the quake
destroyed four cities and buried multiple towns and villages.
1976 Tangshan earthquake
• At 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976, the Chinese city of Tangshan and its
surroundings were rocked by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake. Tangshan,
an industrial city, had a population of about a million people, and the
official death toll was a staggering 255,000. Another 700,000 people
were injured, according to "The Great Tangshan Earthquake of 1976:
An Anatomy of Disaster" (Pergamon Press, 1988). Many of Tangshan's
buildings were completely destroyed, according to that history, and
150,000 people got new residences in the six years following the
quake.
526 Antioch earthquake
• As with all historical quakes, precise death tolls for the Antioch
earthquake of A.D. 526 are hard to come by. But contemporary
chronicler John Malalas wrote at the time that about 250,000 people
died when the temblor hit the Byzantine city in May of that year.
Malalas attributed the disaster to the wrath of God and reported that
fires destroyed everything in Antioch that the earthquake itself did
not.
1839 India cyclone/1881
Haiphong typhoon
• The Coringa cyclone of 1839 hit the port city of Coringa on Nov. 25,
whipping up a storm surge of 40 feet (12 meters), according to
the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory
Hurricane Research Division. About 20,000 ships and vessels were
destroyed, along with the lives of an estimated 300,000 people.
• Also vying for the No. 5 spot on the list by death toll is an 1881
typhoon that hit Haiphong, Vietnam, on Oct. 8. That storm is also
estimated to have killed about 300,00 people.
The 1970 Bhola cyclone
• Another storm that wiped out tens of thousands of lives was the
Bhola cyclone of Nov. 12, 1970. This storm struck what is now
Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), pushing up a 20-foot storm surge
that funneled right over the low terrain bordering the Bay of Bengal,
causing widespread flooding. A 1971 report from the National
Hurricane Center and the Pakistan Meteorological Department
acknowledged the challenge of accurately estimating the death toll,
especially due to the influx of seasonal workers who were in the area
for the rice harvest. However, most estimates place the loss of life
from the Bhola cyclone at 300,000 at the low end, ranging up to
500,000.
The 1887 Yellow River Flood
• The Yellow River (Huang He) in China was precariously situated far
above most of the land around it in the late 1880s, thanks to a series
of dikes built to contain the river as it flowed through the farmland of
central China. Over time, these dikes had silted up, gradually lifting
the river in elevation. When heavy rains swelled the river in
September 1887, it spilled over these dikes into the surrounding low-
lying land, inundating 5,000 square miles (12,949 square kilometers),
according to "Encyclopedia of Disasters: Environmental Catastrophes
and Human Tragedies" (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008).
• The estimated death toll of the flood is 900,000.
The Central China Floods of
1931
• The deadliest natural disaster in history is likely the Central China
floods of 1931. In July and August of that year, the Yangtze River
overtopped its banks as the spring melt mingled with heavy rains.
(The Yellow River and other large waterways also reached high levels.)
According to "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River
Flood" (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the flood inundated
almost 70,000 square miles (180,000 square km) and turned the
Yangzi into what looked like a giant lake or ocean.
• Estimates of the overall death toll vary. Contemporary government
numbers put the number of dead at around 2 million, but others,
including NOAA, say it may have been as many as 3.7 million people.