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Floods, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes: History’s Most Consequential Natural Catastrophes

Khalid Elhassan December 22, 2024 15 min

Catastrophe - The Thera Eruption — The Thera Eruption. Sci Tech Daily

5. From Fertile Agricultural Land to Desert

The area impacted by the 1887 Yellow River Flood. Global Energy

Just an hour after the Yellow River broke through its dikes, a lake as big as Lake Ontario had formed. People from drier areas tried to save as many as they could by rowing around in small boats. Some survivors reached and clung to terraces slightly higher than the water level, and waited for rescue. Others desperately clung to anything that could float. One family, aware that it had no chance of survival, placed a baby on top of a wooden chest, along with some food and a note bearing its name. The baby was saved. The family was never found. When the waters finally receded, survivors were left with a floodplain heaped with loess mud up to eight feet deep. As it dried out, the region looked more like the Sahara Desert, rather than the green and fertile agricultural plain it had been just a few days earlier.

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.