Biggest earthquake in 40 years hits Southeast Asia - Part 2

[Chemical Ollie]

Some dude had fun with Photoshop



The official death toll now exceeds 175 000.

The number of Swedish missing has decreased to about 900, far from the 2-3000 possible deaths previously reported.

[Dis]

there's a band called 50 foot wave

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Music/01/17/music.badtiming.ap/index.html

reminds me of that rap album that came out after 9/11 that showed the rappers destorying the world trade center.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Btw, Indonesia is now upping its death toll to 210,000. That brings the total up to around 270,000, the 5th worst disaster in thel ast 3 centuries.

Just out of morbid curiosity, what are the others?

I can't think of any natural disasters in that magnitude over the last three centuries. The Lisbon earthquake killed on 50,000, but it is memorable because so many people were killed when their churches collapsed. Karatoa, maybe?

Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. The firebombing of Toyko is in that range too. The Battle of the Somme was something like 50,000-60,000.

[Dis]

spanish flu maybe. that's not a natural disaster though, but a disease.

[Ned]

My sister assures me that this is a real photo.

[Buck Birdseed]

That's laughably clearly photoshopped. The scale of the wave is all wrong, for one.

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Ned
My sister assures me that this is a real photo.

Uhh, tell your sister she needs to be a bit more critical.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/tsunami2.asp

[Dis]

from what I understand it wasn't a tidal wave that high as in that photo. If it were that high there would be no survivors.

Most areas it did not exceed 1 story (10 feet). It was only those who couldn't reach higher ground that were killed. Which sadly were most of them because higher ground could not quickly be attained.

and taking scientific fact from sisters.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Zkribbler


Just out of morbid curiosity, what are the others?

I can't think of any natural disasters in that magnitude over the last three centuries. The Lisbon earthquake killed on 50,000, but it is memorable because so many people were killed when their churches collapsed. Karatoa, maybe?

Tangshan Earthquake in China, 1976- over 250 000 officially dead.

The Kanto Tokyo-Yokohama Earthquake in 1923, in which nearly 150 000 died.

Can't remember how many were reported dead in the Tashkent Earthquake.

[Boris Godunov]

IIRC, there was an earthquake in China that killed ~800,000 people, but that may have been more than 3 centuries ago...I'm thinking 16th or 17th century.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Zkribbler




Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

Wrong place for this really, but what you seem to be relying on are David Irving's fictitious accounts. The figures given by civil authorities in Dresden at the time do not go over 40 000.

Considerably less than Irving's grotesquely inflated account which relied on forged documents, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry and misattributions.

To give you an idea of what his aim was, he estimated that only 25 000 people, 'perhaps', were deliberately killed by the Nazis over a period of four years in Auschwitz.

He also claimed that the Allies (on no evidence whatsoever as far as anyone can tell) were responsible for the deaths of Jews and camp victims taken on the death marches, because supposedly, these victims were conveniently taken into Dresden(!) and other cities and towns to be killed in the bombing raids.

[JohnT]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a endowment of $27 billion:

Statistics*

Number of employees: 198
Endowment: $27 billion
Total grant commitments since inception: $7,486,247,357
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The Network of Public Libraries for the New Millennium Project, Chile – $9.28 million

* As of December 2004

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/FactSheet/

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Man-made catatrophies don't match up. The Dresden bombing killed IIRC 135,000 -- more than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. The firebombing of Toyko is in that range too. The Battle of the Somme was something like 50,000-60,000.

The Battle of Verdun in WWI killed a million people, IIRC. Man-made or easily preventable famines kill millions, such as in the USSR, China, and most of the Third World.

[JohnT]

The Battle of Verdun in WWI killed a million people, IIRC.

That figure is a little exaggerated.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/battles.htm#Verdun

The above link gives casualty figures for the 51 most deadly battles of the 20th century... Verdun ranks 12th.

#1? Leningrad, with up to 2 million soldiers and civilians perishing.

[molly bloom]

' Drought

Of all natural disasters, drought is by far the most feared. When the rains do not come, crops are not planted and food supplies dwindle. The effects of this can be devastating. Between 1899-1901, about 15% of the population of Gujarat in western India died from famine. Estimates of 10 million in Bengal in a famine in 1770, 800,00 in Uttar Pradesh in 1836, and one million in Orissa in 1865-66 are just a few examples of the damage drought can have.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/understanding/monsoon_impacts.shtml

'A hundred years later, the same class of people were largely responsible for the great Bengal Famine in 1943, in which an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million people perished. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explains in his now well-known theory of entitlements, the Bengal famine was not the result of a drastic slump in food production but because the colonial masters had diverted food for other commercial purposes. '

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GM-freefoodaid.php