World's long dance with death

January 8, 2005

Jonathan King puts the Indian Ocean killer wave into perspective, globally and historically.

Some world leaders attending this week's Jakarta tsunami summit described the disaster as the worst calamity faced by the human race, and the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has warned that Australian deaths could exceed those in the Bali bombing in 2002. So it could be a good time to put the rising death toll into historical perspective, for the world and for Australia.

A US statistician, Don McBride, who publishes an online disaster information exchange service, says: "It could help people traumatised by this tsunami to discover it was not the worst disaster in history. If they understand the limited extent of this disaster compared to earlier catastrophes, it should put the Boxing Day tragedy into perspective."

Mr McBride says he was surprised the death toll was not higher.

With the exponential increase in populations, especially in cities, he believes the world is more vulnerable.

"Compared to other disasters across the board, this is nowhere near as bad as those inflicted on the planet in years gone by. After all, more than 3 million died in China's 1931 Yangtze River floods and 655,000 died in the 1976 Tang-shan earthquake - although both figures were hushed up."

Yet the death toll from the tsunami, now approaching 150,000 from 12 nations, clearly makes it history's worst tsunami, with unprecedented multinational impact. A tsunami in 1755 killed 60,000 in Portugal; the 1883 tsunami that followed a volcano that destroyed the island of Krakatoa killed 36,000; and an 1896 killer wave claimed 27,000 lives in Japan (after which the Oxford Dictionary says the word tsunami was first used internationally - tsu meaning harbour and nami meaning waves).

The Boxing Day tsunami toll is also much worse than the 1998 killer wave in Papua New Guinea, which claimed 2000 lives.

The damage from the latest tsunami is compounded by large numbers of refugees; the United Nations estimates there will be more than 2 million.

But the tsunami has also inspired unprecedented levels of aid and volunteer help from around the world, as well as history's most high-powered disaster summit, attended by 25 world leaders on Thursday. This summit could be one of the most influential since the 1945 Yalta postwar reconstruction conference attended by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, which helped establish the UN.

But a review of other disasters over the past 500 years confirms McBride's claim that it was not as deadly as many disasters of the past.

Mind you, there is a great difference between natural and man-made disasters, and it is important to distinguish between immediate death tolls and those that grow in the days, weeks and months afterwards.

Disasters can also be interlinked, because although earthquakes, volcanoes and floods can occur separately, some earthquakes cause tsunamis.

It is extremely difficult to publish accurate figures because of conflicting sources and censorship by some regimes. In the end, figures can only be approximate. Even so, the estimated death toll from the 1931 Yangtze River floods varies from 3.7 million - quoted recently by The New York Times, along with the prominent US Infoplease website - to 400,000 quoted by the World Bank and 145,000 quoted by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation.

Natural: disasters claiming more

than 50,000 lives

1556: earthquake, Shansi, China - 830,000

1737: earthquake and typhoon, Kolkata, India - 330,000

1755: tsunami, Portugal and Morocco - 60,000 to 100,000

1850: earthquake, Sichuan, China - 300,000

1877: floods, Hwang-ho River, China - 900,000

1883: earthquake, Krakatoa, Indonesia - 36,000

1896: tsunami, Japan - 27,000

1908: earthquake, Messina, Italy - 75,000

1920: earthquake, The Great Quake (8.6 on the Richter scale), Ningxia-Kansu, China - 200,000

1923: earthquake and the Great Tokyo Fire, Japan - 143,000

1927: earthquake, Xining, China - 200,000

1931: floods, Yangtze River - 3.7 million

1932: earthquake, Kansu, China - 70,000

1948: earthquake, Turkmenistan - 110,000 to 176,000

1970: cyclone and floods, Ganges Delta, Bangladesh - 300,000

1970: earthquake, Peru - 66,794

1976: earthquake, Tang-shan, China - 252,000 officially (655,000 unofficially)

1990: earthquake, north-western Iran - 36,000 to 50,000

1991: floods, Bangladesh - 130,000 to 138,000

2004: tsunami, Indian Ocean - about 155,000

Major international disasters inflicted by humans upon each other, wittingly or unwittingly

1656: Plague, Italy - 300,000

1663-66: Great Plague of London - 70,000

1914-18: World War I, in Europe, Middle East - 15 million

1919: influenza (Spanish flu) - 21 million to 30 million

1939-45: World War II, in Europe, North Africa, Middle East and Pacific - 56 million (includes Holocaust in Germany - 6 million)

since 1978: AIDS worldwide, but mainly in Africa - an estimated 25 million, with death rate estimates varying from 80,000 a day to 3 million a year

2001: terrorist attacks, US - 3000

2002: terrorist attack, Bali - 202

2003: terrorist attack, Madrid - 191

Older international disasters with

less reliable figures

540-590: Justinian Plague, Europe - 100 million

1201: earthquake, Middle East (Egypt to Syria) - 1 million

1347-51: Black Death (plague), Europe - 25 million (estimated one-third of population)

1353-54: Black Death (plague), China - 60 million (estimated one-half of population)

Australian natural disasters claiming

more than 40 lives

1852: floods, Gundagai, NSW - 89

1916: cyclone, Clermont, Queensland - 62

1935: cyclone, Broome - 141

1939: Black Friday bushfires, Victoria - 71

1967: bushfires, Hobart - 62

1974: Cyclone Tracy, Darwin - 66

1983: Ash Wednesday bushfires, South Australia, Victoria, NSW - 75

Australian disasters inflicted by humans upon each other, wittingly or unwittingly, that have claimed more than 40 lives

1902: Mine explosion, Mount Kembla - 96

1909: Waratah shipwreck off Durban, South Africa - 92

1911: Yongala shipwreck off Queensland - 142

1912: Koombana shipwreck off WA - 150

1914-18: WWI - 61,000 killed from Australia

1919: flu epidemic - 11,989

1939-45: WWII - 39,000 killed from Australia

1962-72: Vietnam War - 520

2002: Bali terrorist bombing - 88

Sources: Australian War Memorial; Don McBride, Information Exchange Service, New Jersey; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Fairfax Publications; Food and Agricultural Organisation; National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration; The New York Times; Oxford Reference; United Nations; US Geological Survey; World Agency of Planetary Monitoring; World Bank; World Book; Oxford Dictionary (second edition).