Our 10 Greatest Natural Disasters

Our 10 Greatest Natural Disasters

THERE IS SOMETHING UNIQUELY CHILLING ABOUT A NATURAL disaster, the uncontrolled, unpreventable fury of normally benign elements: a blue sky now black exploding in water and electricity; the air around us suddenly quick, weaponized; a resort lake bewitched into a ferocious wall of water; the solidity of the very ground belied. In these moments nature proves its dominance, as if to remind us that there are some things in its arsenal before which we will always be powerless.

But if the year of recrimination over Hurricane Katrina has shown us anything, it's the potency of human intervention in the hours and days before and after those moments. A nation that might have grown blasé was reminded late last summer how vital protective engineering and prompt relief can be — even if the lesson came in their failure. To mark the first anniversary of Katrina, here is an assessment of the 10 deadliest natural disasters to strike the United States. As a whole, they paint a sobering picture of the impermanence of human enterprise, but they also reveal some fascinating — and familiar — patterns.

Eight of these disasters occurred within a 50-year period, a fatal nexus in U.S. history when the population had grown dense enough to be wiped out in large numbers by one localized event, but before modern meteorological tools, warning systems, and telecommunications could forecast storms and allow people ample time to flee or take cover. The one disaster that doesn't fall in that period, of course, is Katrina.

Despite the years between them, Katrina and the other calamities share several unfortunate refrains. In the inattention paid to the New Orleans levees we hear echoes of both the poor maintenance of the dam that unleashed the Johnstown flood and the refusal of Galveston officials to build a seawall; the government's lax response after Katrina plays like a reprise of Florida's in 1928. In fact, recurring themes run through all these disasters. First, as horrifying as earthquakes and tornadoes are, history tells us that when disaster strikes America, it does its worst mixing wind and water. Six of the 10 deadliest American natural disasters were hurricanes, joined by one tornado, one flood, one earthquake, and one forest fire. And all 10 left behind common images: victims clinging to debris for survival, cities and towns transformed into piles of rubble, the ground littered with so many dead that there was not enough room for graves. Many of the casualty figures probably underestimate the actual losses, since in most cases entire families were wiped out, with no one left to report them gone.

Taken together, these events also show that disaster, be it Katrina or the earthquake in San Francisco, almost always hits hardest below the poverty line. Farthest from the reach of telegraph, phone, or radio, the poor have also had the flimsiest housing and most limited access to transportation. So with no warning of impending doom and no way to escape, indigents have often been trapped in shacks that offered little protection. In the Southeast, where hurricanes are most common, the poor have been disproportionately black and, as we saw with Katrina — and as our forebears saw in Charleston, Savannah, the Sea Islands, Lake Okeechobee, and Cheniere Carminada — disproportionately affected when nature turns ugly.

10 Instate Tornado, 1925, 695 dead

The cyclone that touched down at 1:01 P.M. on March 18, 1925, just outside Ellington, Missouri, was so massive many of its victims didn't even recognize it as a tornado. As the mile-wide storm barreled over town after town in its 219-mile path across three states, residents alarmed by what sounded like an oncoming freight train checked the sky for the telltale funnel, only to find a huge black cloud hugging the ground. With no tornado warning system in place -forecasting was in its infancy, and radio had yet to become a household item in the rural Midwest — people had only moments to find shelter from what was fast shaping up to be history's deadliest twister.

Even those who made it inside weren't necessarily safe. As the storm traveled across Missouri and into southern Illinois, its winds overpowered the prairie's wood-frame houses, many of which did not have basements. In the two and a half hours it spent in Illinois, the storm killed 600 people and consumed five towns nearly whole. Murphysboro lost 234 residents and 150 of its 200 blocks. The tornado was now advancing at 73 miles per hour, a shrieking spiral of debris, chaos, and death. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported two days later, "the air was filled with 10,000 things. Boards, poles, cans, garments, stoves, whole sides of the little frame houses, in some cases the houses themselves, were picked up and smashed to earth. And living beings too. A baby was blown from its mother's arms. A cow, picked up by the wind, was hurled into the village restaurant." Farm families emerged from their cellars to discover trees uprooted, houses and cars gone, and new objects on the lawn transplanted from 50 miles away. In Gorham, Illinois, where the storm killed or injured half the population, the town's children found themselves trapped in their collapsing schoolhouse. As one young girl told the Post-Dispatch: "The walls seemed to fall in, all around us. Then the floor at one end of the building gave way. We all slipped or slid in that direction. If it hadn't been for the seats it would have been like sliding down a cellar door…. Children all around me were cut and bleeding. They cried and screamed. It was something awful. I had to close my eyes." Thirty-three students died before the storm moved on.

The tornado shrank as it blew into Indiana, hut it still had enough power to destroy one town and several farms. After ripping up half of Princeton, the winds finally dissipated at 4:30 P.M. In three and a half hours the storm had killed 695 people in 19 communities, injured 2,027 more, and caused $16.5 million in property damage, including 15,000 demolished homes. In the aftermath, devastated survivors found an uncanny preview of the sort of images that would dominate news from Europe in 15 years. "Scenes of suffering and horror marked the storm," reported the Post-Dispatch. "Throughout the night relief workers and ambulances endeavored to make their way through the streets strewn with wreckage, fallen telegraph poles and wires and burning embers. The only light afforded was that of the burning area."

9 San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, estimated 700 dead Californians live with a mixture of nebulous anxiety and denial about the next Big One, and the template for their nightmares was cut in 1906. The earthquake along the San Andreas fault a century ago — which registered on seismographs in Germany — still reverberates in the American consciousness as the benchmark against which all other tremors are measured. And though the quake jarred residents from Oregon to Los Angeles and from the coast to Nevada, it was near the epicenter in San Francisco that it did the most damage and took the most lives.

At 5:13 A.M. on April 18, 1906, a foreshock startled the sleeping West Coast, followed 25 seconds later by violent shaking that lasted from 45 to 60 seconds and split the earth for 290 miles. In some spots the ground was offset as much as 20 feet, and fences that were straight the night before suddenly zigzagged. "The noise [was] deafening; the crash of dishes, falling pictures, the rattle of the flat tin roof, bookcases being overturned, the piano hurled across the parlor, the groaning and straining of the building itself, broken glass and falling plaster; made such a roar that no one noise could be distinguished," remembered one San Franciscan. "I never expected to come out alive…. Stand in front of your clock and count off forty-eight seconds, and imagine this scene to have continued for that length of time, and you can get some idea of what one could suffer during that period."

The devastation — which San Franciscans had not begun to see the worst of in those 48 seconds — went on for a full four days. The quake ruptured gas lines, igniting 52 fires around the city. The water mains burst too, so the fire department had nothing to fight the blazes with. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tenement dwellers, trapped when their buildings collapsed, were killed by the flames before they could be rescued. (Although the official death toll was well under a thousand, recent studies have suggested it ran as high as 3,000.) After the mayor called in the military, the Army dynamited buildings to prevent the spread of fire, but to little avail. By April 22, 4.7 square miles of the city had burned, leaving 250,000 people stranded in camps around the ruins. In the fall the city built shacks in the park for employed families, but it would be months before everyone had a home again.

Among the homeless were the residents of Chinatown, which, to a building, bad burned to the ground. Nativist businessmen celebrated the opportunity to develop the coveted real estate into a shopping district. But, with the Chinese segregated in their own refugee camp on Van Ness Avenue, others began to worry that they would put down roots in their new, fashionable neighborhood. So officials shuttled the Chinese around from location to location — as far away as Oakland — until San Francisco realized it needed to keep their tax dollars and they were finally allowed to rebuild on the original Chinatown.

8 Great New England Hurricane, 1938, 720 dead. The first signs came from 5,000 miles away in the Sahara desert. On September 4 a French meteorologist at Blima Oasis noticed strong winds blowing toward the Atlantic. Two weeks later ships at sea were radioing the mainland about a fierce tropical storm headed its way. But when the eye bypassed Florida to are north, forecasters at the National Weather Bureau assumed it would follow the usual course away from the coast.

Instead it headed straight for America's industrial center at 60 mph. When the eye made landfall on Long Island, New York, at 2:30 P.M. on September 21, 1938, with a force detected by seismographs in Alaska, it was 50 miles wide and circled by 100-mph winds. It conspired with seasonal high tides and ground already drenched with rain to cause $300 million of damage in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and Vermont. With the highest wind speeds ever recorded at the time — 186 mph in Milton, Massachusetts — the hurricane knocked over trees, houses, church steeples, and train trestles. Even so, water killed most of the storm's victims. A huge windhorne wave dumped almost 14 feet onto the Providence business district in minutes.

"It was your worst nightmare coming true," one survivor said. "I think many people have had through their years the nightmare of the ocean coming up, and they're trying to get away from it, and they can't get away from it. And this was something you're seeing right in front of your eyes."

Once the storm had swept into Canada and died out near the Arctic Circle that night, weary survivors, many of whom had stayed afloat by clutching debris, greeted dawn in a daze. A Mystic, Connecticut, resident recalled: "The next morning, everywhere I went, I saw faces full of misery and despair, as people who had barely been hanging on and trying to get along the best they could surveyed incalculable damage to their properties. I heard many stories of a miserable night spent in roofless and sometimes wall-less houses or how they had taken refuge with neighbors in the night. I saw parents who had spent the night worrying about children who had not returned from school. I saw people worrying about relatives and friends they could not communicate with and about whose safety they feared. I saw barns flattened to the ground. Hardly a barn was left standing in the whole village. Hen coops and other such light buildings were never found."

With telephone lines tangled and strewn across debris-ridden streets, some 376,000 phones went dead, about 25 percent of the total in New England. Apple orchards and maple farms were uprooted. Brine contaminated aquifers and reservoirs, so municipalities had to ration out potable water. For Depression-era New Englanders, it proved too much to bear alone. The Red Cross, which received pleas for aid from 19,608 families, doled out $22,000 within the next month. But as destructive as the hurricane of 1938 was, the gathering storm in Europe upstaged it, even at The New York Times, so close to the eye of the hurricane: Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich took the top headlines.

7 South Carolina-Georgia Hurricane, more than 2,000 dead Hurricane season got off to a bad start in 1893, and it would only get worse. The second of five great storms to hammer the East and kill a total of more than 4,000 at least came with some warning. The Weather Bureau tracked the storm for three days after it formed off Cape Verde. But when it made landfall south of Savannah on August 27, 1893, with 120-mph winds, warnings weren't enough. In Charleston a storm surge killed a thousand people; the Savannah River rose 14 feet to flush countless victims into the ocean.

But it was a little farther out to sea, in a place warnings couldn't reach, that the hurricane wrought its most tragic devastation. When the wind and rain descended that night, the people of the Sea Islands — mostly former slaves and their families — had to abandon their wooden shanties and lash themselves to high tree branches to escape the flooding. At least 2,000 residents of the islands were killed before morning, and another 30,000 were left homeless. Hundreds more would perish in the coming weeks from exposure and disease, which spread as the tide uncovered hastily dug graves. One doctor reported 2,542 cases of malaria on his rounds in just 8 of the more than 100 islands.

Yet, as the sun came up August 28, the survivors faced a more immediate problem. Their cash crops, cotton and sweet potatoes, were gone, their animals drowned, and their water supply contaminated. They had nothing to eat or drink and, with most of their boats dashed or strayed, no easy way to escape. Once bodies began to wash ashore on the mainland days later, followed by crowded boatloads of refugees, authorities realized that the harrier islands had suffered worse than the coast. But even then the federal and state governments declined to offer any assistance. The only relief came from the two-year-old Red Cross, and Gov. Benjamin Tillman waited nearly a month before contacting the organization. Until October 1 South Carolinians were on their own.

Once Clara Barton set up shop in a Beaufort warehouse, however, her headquarters served as a clearinghouse for African-Americans who wanted to help. Barton was quick to hire survivors as the Red Cross's first black disaster workers; in fact, the area's African-American residents contributed a significant chunk of both the materials and labor that put the region back on its feet. During the nine months she spent in South Carolina, Barton later wrote, "the submerged lands were drained, three hundred miles of ditches made, a million feet of lumber purchased and houses built, fields and gardens planted with the best seed in the United States, and the work all done by the people themselves."

6 Peshtigo Fire, 1871,1,200-2,400 dead

Every disaster on this list must have seemed like hell on earth. But the fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, on October 8, 1871, re-created with the crudest accuracy a scene of Miltonian terror. Buildings, trees, horses, people, and the ground itself all burned; even the sky burst into flame. It was the deadliest fire in American history, but it's famous only as an also-ran: It ignited in the same hour that 220 miles to the south, Mrs. O'Lcary's fabled cow kicked over a lantern to start the Chicago fire.