Deadliest Natural Disasters of the Past 50 Years

The 7.9-magnitude Great Sichuan Earthquake, also known as the Wenchuan Earthquake, struck the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan with tremors felt as far away as Shanghai, more than 1,000 miles distant from the epicenter near the provincial capital of Chengdu. The quake induced massive landslides that toppled buildings and left millions of people homeless.

The quake that struck northern Pakistan measured 7.6 on the magnitude scale, inflicting extensive damage in and around the regional capital of Muzaffarabad. Entire villages were leveled and an estimated 32,335 buildings collapsed across much of the country and into northern India, where thousands were killed or injured, and in parts of Afghanistan and Bangladesh. About four million people lost their homes in the quake.

The Vietnamese capital of Hanoi had for centuries been protected by dikes and reservoirs to control seasonal flooding of the Red River Delta, a convergence of three major tributaries that have both threatened and nourished locals. But an unusually strong rainy season in 1971 came during the Vietnam War, which hampered the city’s ability to respond to the overloading of its flood control system. Though overshadowed by the war, this flooding was one of the worst natural disasters in the history of Vietnam.

After forming into a massive category 4 storm over the Bay of Bengal, Cyclone Nargis plowed into Myanmar (Burma) with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. The storm path took it right over the country’s heavily populated city of Yangon (Rangoon), which had been the capital of the country until 2006. Nargis caused extensive flooding in the city and nearby coastal plains.

Cyclone Gorky, a massive category 5 storm, made landfall in Bangladesh on the evening of April 29, bringing with it tidal surges as high as 30 feet. The storm hovered over the coastal lowlands for three to four hours, dumping a massive amount of rainfall on impoverished communities living at sea level. Later it was determined that cyclone shelters prevented 20% of the deaths than would have occurred without them – however there weren’t enough of these shelters to meet the demand.

Of the ten deadliest natural catastrophes on this list, the 2010 Haiti earthquake is the only one outside Asia. The quake, magnitude 7.0, toppled hundreds of thousands of homes and tens of thousands of commercial buildings and was followed by dozens of aftershocks. One-story homes topped with sheet metal fared better than other structures with concrete rooftops, such as apartment warrens, churches, commercial centers, and government buildings lacking earthquake-resistant features.

A 900-mile segment of fault line off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where the Indian and Australian tectonic plates meet, slipped, causing an incredibly powerful undersea quake, magnitude 9.1, that lifted a portion of the seafloor to break upwards by as much as 131 feet in a matter of seconds. Within 20 minutes, 100-foot-tall waves from the ensuing tsunami drowned the shoreline of Banda Aceh at the northeastern tip of Sumatra. Successive large waves struck the coasts of Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka and caused deaths as far away as South Africa, thousands of miles to the southeast across open ocean.

Nina, a category 4 super typhoon, stalled over central China for three days, causing extreme rainfall and catastrophic flooding. This unusually high amount of precipitation was caused by the typhoon’s interaction with another tropical depression. Most of the deaths were caused by the catastrophic failure of a Banqiao Dam on the Yellow River in Henan province that caused a rush of water up to 33 feet high and seven miles wide, traveling at about 30 miles an hour. Dozens of other dams and reservoirs were also breached in the storm.

The magnitude-7.8 quake struck the densely populated industrial city of Tangshan, Hebei province, in the pre-dawn hours. Within minutes most buildings in the city toppled or were so severely damaged that they had to be demolished. The quake caused death and injuries in nearby Beijing and Tianjin. Though slightly less powerful than the Sichuan quake of 2008, the Tangshan earthquake remains the deadliest ever recorded in China.

Bangladesh has borne the brunt of two of the world’s ten deadliest natural catastrophes. Cyclone Bhola was a category 4 tropical cyclone, and though it was weaker than Cyclone Gorky in 1991, it inflicted more than double the death toll and remains the deadliest natural catastrophe ever recorded. Cyclone Bhola delivered 20-foot storm surges and sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. More than a third of Bangladesh is less than 20 feet above sea level.