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20th Century’s Deadliest Disasters

Khalid Elhassan October 26, 2020 32 min

1976 Tangshan earthquake - Tangshan — A bridge destroyed by the Tangshan Earthquake. China Underground

32. The People of Tangshan Experienced Strange Phenomena and Omens Before a Tragic Disaster

The Tangshan Earthquake. Encyclopedia Britannica

Tangshan, a coal mining and industrial city, is about 70 miles east of Beijing. In late July, 1976, people in and around the city began noticing that there was some weird stuff going on. Chicken refused to eat. Rats were spotted running in panicked packs in daylight. The water level in wells rose and fell. On the evening of July 27^th, and through the early morning hours of the 28^th, fireballs and flashes of colored lights were seen.

While such phenomena were strange, people still had lives to live and work to do. So in the wee morning hours of July 28^th, 1976, most of Tangshan’s residents were sound asleep, resting from the toil of the day that had gone by, and recharging for the toil of the day to come. Then at 3:42 AM, disaster struck.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.