Wish you were here (A letter from America)

(Click on it to get old timah super high res. ^^)

1906. Natural disasters never cease to scare the crappo out of me.

Officially there was 350ish casualties. Actual death-counts goes to 3000, but that's nothing. Listen to this:

Ten deadliest natural disasters

1. 1931 Yellow River flood,
Yellow River, China.
Summer 1931,
1,000,000-4,000,000 dead

2. 1887 Yellow River flood
Yellow River, China
September-October 1887
900,000-2,000,000 dead

3. 1970 Bhola cyclone
Ganges Delta, East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh)
November 13
500,000-1,000,000 dead

4. 1938 Yellow River flood
Yellow River, China
500,000-900,000 dead

5. 1556 Shaanxi earthquake
Shaanxi Province, China
January 23
830,000 dead

6. 1839 India Cyclone
Coringa, India
November 25
300,000+ dead

7. 1642 Kaifeng Flood
Kaifeng, Henan Province, China
300,000 dead

8. 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami
Indian Ocean
December 26
280,000 dead

9. 1976 Tangshan earthquake
Tangshan, China
July 28
242,000 dead

10. 1138 Aleppo earthquake
Syria
230,000 dead

After the first time, you would think peeps would stop living by the yellow river

yea.. why dont they move with all the money they have in a nice house in the hills?....................

I guess there were no-one left to tell except the rumors from outside the area. If you look at the death-tolls for the years, I bet it went something like this,

pre - 1887
Area starting to get populated, most dense area around the flood has somewhere between 900,000 to at least 2,000,000, probably more, persons living in the danger-zone from the flood.
1887 - 900,000-2,000,000 dead

1887 - 1931

44 years pass. Now all of this is of course my wild speculations, but I guess the fear for another flood would keep the citizens away from the central area for at least a decade, perhaps two. Then some exterior pressure made the area re-populate, perhaps by government orders, the need for a more stable source of food or what not. I couldn't find any relevant sites with city growth information (I'm too lazy to have a proper search), so if anyone have any knowledge of the subject...


1931 - 1,000,000-4,000,000 dead

1931 - 1938

7 years. Compared to the 44 years where theres a much higher deathtoll, one can imagine that again there was an external force making the area repopulate again, but this time the disaster struck sooner than they'd expected (or hoped, whatever).

1938 - 500,000- 900,000 dead

Since there haven't been any giant disasters on this scale since '38 I assume they either made the river so it didn't flood, dug another path for it or simply didn't want to move back there. It only shows that if they'd left the place alone after the first time, at least 1,500,000 casualties would have been avoided.

_Q