World Trade Centre Hit – September 11, 2001

The deadliest of all crashes ever, this conscious crashing of two planes into the World Trade Centre killed 2988 people, the majority of them being occupants of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. This was an act of terrorism, and has no parallels in the annals of airplane crashes.

 On the morning of September 11th, terrorists hijacked four commercial jet planes and attempted to fly them into numerous U.S. targets. One of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11, crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center at 8:50 AM.

The people of America hooped together in the weeks following the September 11th attacks like few other times in American history. People responded with donations of blood, effort and money.

President George W Bush immediately called for all civilized nations to band together and fight violence. The military of the United States mobilized for war in an operation code named Enduring Freedom.

The Worst Yellow River Flood in China

The 1887 Yellow River flood was an overwhelming flood on the Yellow River in China. This river is prone to flooding due to the elevated nature of the river, running between dykes above the broad plains surrounding it. The flood that began in September 1887 stated the area, killing some 900,000 people. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.

For centuries, the farmers living near the Yellow River had built dikes to contain the rising waters, caused by silt accumulation on the riverbed. In 1887, this rising riverbed, coupled with days of heavy rain, overcame the dikes on around 28th September, causing a massive flood. After the flood, two million were left homeless. The resulting pandemic and lack of basic essentials claimed as many lives as those lost directly by the flood itself. It was one of the worst floods in history, though the later 1931 Yellow River flood may have killed as many as four million.

The Deadliest Earthquake in the Twentieth Century: Tangshan

On July 28, 1976, a scale 7.8 earthquake hit the sleeping city of Tangshan, in northeastern China. The very large quake, striking an area where it was totally astonishing, obliterated the city of Tangshan and killed over 240,000 people - making it the deadliest earthquake of the twentieth century.

Though systematic earthquake prediction is in its promising stages, nature often gives some advance warning of an imminent earthquake.

In a village outer of Tangshan, well water apparently rose and fell three times the day before the earthquake. 

Animals also gave a caution that something was about to occur. One thousand chickens in Baiguantuan refused to eat and ran around excitedly cheeping. Mice and yellow weasels were seen running around looking for a lay to hide. In one home in the city of Tangshan, a goldfish began jumping violently in its bowl.

When the 7.8 scale earthquake struck Tangshan at 3:42 a.m. on July 28, more than a million people lay sleeping, unconscious of the disaster that was to happen them.

When the earth began to shake, a few people who were awake had the foresight to dive under a table or other heavy piece of furniture, but most were sleeping and did not have time. The whole earthquake lasted around 14 to 16 seconds.

The Most Horrible Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was one of the worst ecological disasters in the world for ever. The scene was set when irresponsible farming practices across the Great Plains in the early 20th Century stripped away the grasses and plants that held the topsoil and the moisture in place.

After there was a big draught season and came high winds that whipped all that dry soil into the air, literally entire homes, choking humans and other animals.

Few people back east took much notice … until the billowing clouds of dust from thousands of miles away blew into New York and Washington DC. A congressional hearing had to be stopped when a dust storm blew into the House of Representatives.

By the end of the 1930s, two million people had evacuated the Great Plains states, multiplying the effects of the Great Depression. The dust didn’t settle for 10 years.

The Worst Chernobyl Disaster-1986

The Chernobyl accident in 1986 was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated with poorly trained workers. The resulting condensation explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and downwind.

Two Chernobyl plant workers died on the night of the accident, and a further 28 people died in a few weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning. UNSCEAR says that apart from increased thyroid cancers, there are no facts of a major public health impact attributable to radiation revelation 20 years after the accident.

The Chernobyl disaster is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the worldwide Nuclear Event Scale.

Threatening Disaster: Tsunamis

A tsunami is a sequence of ocean waves that sends surges of water, sometimes reaching heights of over 100 feet onto land. These walls of water can cause extensive destruction when they crash aground. Tsunamis may also be caused by underwater landslides or volcanic eruptions. They may even be launched, as they frequently were in Earth’s ancient past, by the impact of a large meteorite plunging into an ocean.

Tsunamis race across the sea at up to 500 miles an hour about as fast as a jet airplane. A tsunami’s trough, the low point beneath the wave’s crest, often reaches shore first. When it does, it produces a vacuum effect that sucks coastal water seaward and exposes harbor and sea floors. In Deep Ocean, tsunami waves may appear only a foot or so high. But as they approach shoreline and enter shallower water they slow down and begin to grow in energy and height.

The best resistance against any tsunami is early warning that allows people to look for higher ground. The Pacific Tsunami caution System, a union of 26 nations headquartered in Hawaii, maintains a web of seismic equipment and water level gauges to recognize tsunamis at sea. Similar systems are proposed to protect coastal areas worldwide.

Unparalleled Onslaught of Disasters Due to Global Warming

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and warm waves that countries should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international board of weather scientists says in a report issued Wednesday. The greatest danger from extreme climate is in highly populated, poor regions of the world, the statement warns, but no corner of the globe from Mumbai to Miami - is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.
 

According to the scientists, some places, particularly parts of Mumbai in India, could become uninhabitable from floods, storms and rising seas. In 2005, over 24 hours nearly 900 millimetres of rain fell on the city, killing more than 1,000 people and causing massive damage. Roughly 2.7 million people live in areas at risk of flooding. Other cities at lesser risk include Miami, Shanghai, Bangkok, China's Guangzhou, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, Myanmar's Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon) and India's Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta). The people of small island nations, such as the Maldives, may also need to abandon their homes because of rising seas and fierce storms.

 IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri told The Associated Press that while all countries are getting hurt by increased climate extremes, the overwhelming majority of deaths are happening in poorer less developed places. That, combined with the fact that richer countries are generating more greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels, makes the issue of weather extremes one of fairness.