Disasters

1688

-600

1906

1989

2004

2010

2011

Tacloban's own evacuation shelter was drowned by the storm surge it was supposed to protect people from, because Typhoon Haiyan's warnings focused on wind speed while the water, not the wind, did almost all the killing.

2015

Australia's Black Summer burned an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom and killed an estimated three billion animals, and it happened after fire chiefs had already spent months publicly warning that the country was not ready.

Queensland's premier called the water that hit Toowoomba and Grantham in January 2011 an inland tsunami, a strange thing to say of a town seven hundred metres above sea level, and a court case running to 2022 settled how far the dam upstream was to blame.

2010

79

2003

2011

1888

Official records counted eight deaths; one historian argues the real number, once you count the poor nobody bothered to record, could run into the thousands.

Food kept leaving Ireland by ship while roughly a million people starved, a fact that turns the argument over this famine less into what happened and more into what to call it.

1958

1999

1995

1755

Hooker Chemical sold the land above its own toxic waste for one dollar, attached a legal waiver, and still ended up found negligent decades later, a sequence that shaped how American law now treats a seller's warning as something less than a shield.

1883

Myanmar's military government let an American aircraft carrier group sit offshore for weeks with aid it refused to accept, while the storm it was refusing help for had already killed as many people as some entire wars.

1988

2002

1976