Jack Goldstein - 101 Amazing Facts about Natural Disasters

Title Page

101 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT NATURAL DISASTERS

Jack Goldstein

&

Frankie Taylor

Publisher Information

Published in 2015 by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

The rights of Jack Goldstein and Frankie Taylor to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

Copyright 2015 Jack Goldstein & Frankie Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All facts contained within this book have been researched from reputable sources. If any information is found to be false, please contact the publishers, who will be happy to make corrections for future editions.

Photograph of 2011 Mount Etna eruption courtesy of gnuckx

Photograph of Krakatoa in 2008 courtesy of flydime

Introduction

What exactly is an avalanche? Why do tropical cyclones spin in different directions? What is the deadliest heat wave ever to have been recorded? And what are the three different types of lightning? All of this and more is revealed in this fantastic book containing over one hundred facts about the worlds most deadly natural disasters. Covering floods, cyclones, landslides, avalanches, tsunamis, fires, earthquakes, blizzards, heatwaves, volcanoes and lightning, this is a fascinating addition to any fact-lovers collection.

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Floods

1. In the simplest possible terms, a flood is when water covers land that is not normally submerged. A flood can happen due to the overflow of water from a river or lake, or because there is too much rainwater for a given area of ground to drain away. Whereas some floods happen slowly, with the build-up taking place over an extended period of time, others happen very quickly; we refer to these as flash floods.
2. The word flood that we use today comes from the Old English word flot , itself deriving from Latin words such as fluctus (translating as both flood and disorder ) and flumen (a river or stream ).
3. Many cultures across the world feature stories of a flood sent by an angry deity, often with one sole good man surviving the deluge. The Epic of Gilgamesh written in 700 BC tells of Utnapishtim, an immortal man who was instructed by the God Ea to build a huge boat in which he could save his family and the animals of the world from a huge flood which was about to destroy the world. Platos Timaeus tells us that the God Zeus became angry at the Bronze race of humans who were constantly waging war, and decided to punish them with a flood. The Hebrew Bible speaks of Noah, the one righteous man saved from the flood along with his family and the animals of the earth when he builds an ark.
4. There are five key categories of flood. An areal flood is caused by rainfall, where ground is saturated and the falling water cannot run off quickly enough. A riverine flood is one where a river breaks its banks due to an increased amount of water finding its way into the river upstream. A combination of winds and low pressure can cause a sea tidal surge - an estuarine flood, and urban flooding is that caused by rainfall overwhelming the capacity of human-made drainage systems. The last type is the catastrophic flood, which is caused by a major event such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or even the bursting of a dam.
5. Floods can be both negative and positive events. Many countries carefully manage their flood defences, as it can be hugely costly to repair the damage when a river bursts its banks near to a built-up area, and it is devastating to farms that are within the flood plain. However, some communities - especially the ancient civilizations along rivers such as the Nile, Ganges and Indus rivers - relied on periodic flooding for their livelihoods. A flood will make soil more fertile, increasing its nutrients, and can even kill pests in arid farmland.
6. The 1931 China floods are considered to be among the deadliest natural disasters ever to have affected the human race. The two previous years had seen extreme droughts, until the winter of 1930 and the heavy snowstorms that it brought. Rains in the spring saw river levels rise significantly, and these continued - along with cyclone activity - through the summer. In July and August of 1931 there were nine cyclones that affected the region, and both the Yangtze and Huai Rivers overflowed with catastrophic effects, especially when the waters reached Nanjing, Chinas capital at the time. Around four million people died either of drowning or of the severe cholera and typhus epidemics that followed.
7. Both in 1887 and 1938, Chinas Yellow River flooded with great loss of life. The river runs within elevated dykes surrounded with broad plains, and on both of these occasions the rivers flow increased so heavily that it burst its banks swamping agricultural and commercial areas. In 1887 an estimated one million people drowned, with a further million killed by starvation and disease; exactly the same problems resulted in a death toll of 700,000 just over fifty years later.
8. In 1975, a flood classified as once in 2000 years occurred as a result of Typhoon Nina. The Banqiao Dam had been engineered to withstand extreme water levels - but no-one had foreseen the terrible conditions that this particular typhoon would bring. The weather had caused communication lines to the dam to fail, and when the message to open the dam was sent, it was not heeded. As more and more water piled in from upstream, the sluice gates could not handle the overflow, and the wave protection wall failed. Seven hundred million cubic metres of water rushed over the dam in just six hours, resulting in a wave more than six miles wide and seven metres high, travelling at more than thirty miles per hour. More than 85,000 people died in the flood, and almost 150,000 lost their lives to disease soon afterwards.
9. A flood that occurred on St Felixs day - Saturday the 6 th of November - in 1530 caused that particular day to be renamed Evil Saturday in the Netherlands. The country is famous for its low-lying land, and many lessons were learned about the power of the weather when large parts of Flanders and Zeeland were completely washed away, resulting in the loss of some 100,000 lives. Today, flood defence technology there is some of the most advanced in the world; the countrys people never want to see a repeat of Evil Saturday again.
10. Throughout this section we have spoken about floods of water. But this final fact is about a rather unusual - but still devastating flood. On January the 15 th 1919, a storage tank burst, and its contents of molasses (also called black treacle) rushed through the streets of Boston, Massachusetts at thirty-five miles per hour. Twenty-one people died in the flood, and around one hundred and fifty people were injured. Legend has it that on a hot summer day, you can still smell the sickly sweet aroma of treacle in the city!

Tropical Cyclones