Haiti's Earthquake, Largest Disaster In Human History?

Factual Questions
21

bonitahi

I am not surprised that you keep getting people replying whilst using the wrong criteria that you set out.

Check out your thread title, and compare it with your OP, I think you’ll soon see why.

As for the OP, how are you determining which is the largest natural disaster? The Cascadia Earthquake/tsunami of 1700 would qualify on any scale, and if such an event were repeated there would certainly be more fatalities than Haiti.

You could also take a look at the 1960 Valdiva earthquake, which also led to tsunamis, landslides and a volcanic eruption.

Again, if this took place today, the Haiti event would be overshadowed.

IF you want to broaden out your perspective, to include disease, then Haiti is very small, the import of various diseases from European settlers devastated many indiginous populations, and killed many millions.
Perhaps the best knwo fo these would be Spanish flu, in the US alone this is estimated to be over 500k, and of course if you take the whole of the Western Hemisphere then that number rises.

There have een several waves of flu throughout the 20thC in the Western Hemisphere - though to be honest these outbreaks also affected the rest of the world too.

It does depend upon where you decide is the Western Hemisphere, do we mean the Americas? - That is rather less than a hemispere, given what that word actually means.

Anyway, I’ll see your Lisbon Earthquake Jimm and raise you a Santorini

http://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/002034.html

I find it interesting that the date of the eruption is at some dispute because it would put the chronology of many ancient civilisations out, its an archeology vs science argument.

22

Natural Disasters are like Shopping Malls in the South and Cellular Networks. All are the biggest in some scale.

Question: When do you cut off the death toll of a natural disaster? Some people die during the event itself. Some others later from injuries. Others later trapped in rubble for days without rescue. Other from disease product of the lack of sanitation following the disaster, Many will have shortened lives for all kinds of issues directly traceable to the disaster (incapacity, lung disease from breathing dust, famine, etc). Others will also have shortened lives from reasons less direct (economic hardship, etc). Who are counted as victims of the disaster?

:eek:

23

Thank you all. By looking up your references I am learning a lot.

Yeah, the thread title should have said western hemisphere, thanks.

I am going to redefine for thread purposes “most devastating natural disaster” to specifically mean human deaths. In Haiti we are still estimating such, and I am looking for historic comparisons.

24

Lisbon is definitely west of the Prime Meridian…It’s just unclear where the numbers are for the Lisbon earthquake compared to the Haiti Earthquake.

For North and South America - no natural disaster in the human era comes close.

25

Ahem. Post #5. 1970 Peru quake.

26

To be fair your post title is “Haiti’s Earthquake, Largest Disaster In Human History?”, and the answer to that is no. If you wanted clearer answers you should’ve made it clearer what you were asking.

27

Yup, this will come as a surprise, but the chronology of ancient archeology is based upon comparisons of artifacts along with writings where available, and these are cross referanced to include other societies and civilisations. The idea has been to build up a ‘universal’ timeline.

However this can only work if you have a good reference point to start with, and there is some evidence that in the Egyptian chronology there are some discrepancies, such as socities seeming to dissappear for a time only to re-emerge some time later with almost identical artefacts - clearly something is wrong as we do not often get this form of step change from one situation and then back again.

These discrepancies are often related to radio carbon dating, dendochronology etc, whereas the classicist archeologists have a large body of work that relates to itself which makes changes to true chronology something they seem not to wish to countenance.
The implications would be that a huge number of archeological research papers would have to be at the least, revised, but it could also mean that civilisations that were thought of as contemporary, are not - and this would be a significant readjustment.

The scientific approach always has an amount of uncertainty, radio carbon dating can have errors due to all sorts of factors, and these are often cited as reasons that the science is wrong, and the conventional chronlogy is correct.

Over time more and more evidence is tending to work against some pparts of conventional chronology, some suggest that the error is in the order of 150 years or so, and some go much further- things such as climatic evidence in ice cores, through to vulcanism trace that is also in the ice cores.

Its not conclusive by any means, but the argument seems to centre around those who use primary sources, and those who point out certain flaws in primary sources and use science as evidence to back it up.

There are a lot of vested academic interests here, from the Egyptologists, through to Biblical scholars, and any number of alternates with their own way of looking at things - all things being equal, it seems that the date of the Thera explosion is earlier than previously thought and since this is quite a significant marker, it makes for changes elsewhere - but so far there is a huge amount of intertia in some quarters to quantify this.

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/Classics/Faculty/SManning_files/testoftime.pdf

The massive volcanic event at Santorini/Thera is one point in history where the effects can be examined across a region and so event can be referenced between differant civilistaions - and this would form a very powerful fixed point in chronologym but it would also be a test for current thinking. As a result of this, the scientific archeoligists vs scholarly archeologists have had a ceertain amount of disagreement over the actual date of this event and each side finds ways of explaining away the evidence that the other presents.

28

Besides being in the wrong hemisphere, estimates are that only 70,000-100,000 people were alive before the eruption. And the eruption itself killed 0 people. The deaths were due to famine resulting from climate change, and we’ve already ruled that out. (It should also be noted that Toba seems a reasonable extrapolation of what we know, but it isn’t known for certain).

29

The Haitian government today declared, probably, 140,000 are dead.

Sadly, very sadly, that seems to be a western hemispherical historic record. No?

30

Estimates for the death toll seem to be creeping higher again. The Haitian government says it has recovered about 72,000 bodies, which doesn’t count any people who died and were immediately buried by their families. The final number could be double that, or more.

31

They said on the news today that they buried 10,000 people (just today) in mass graves. Definitely a record disaster in the hemisphere.

32

Yes, no matter where it “ranks in the top 10 list” of natural disasters in the western hemisphere it’s undoubtedly large. With increasing casualty counts I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go towards the top of that list.