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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

35. History’s Worst Natural Disaster

As tragic as the 1887 Yellow River Flood was, at an estimated 900,000 fatalities, that horrific figure qualified it as “only” history’s second-worst natural disaster. The fatalities were eclipsed by yet another Chinese riverine calamity: the 1931 Central China Flood.

That year, the Yangtze and Huai rivers experienced disastrous flooding that submerged about 70,000 square miles – an area as big as England, plus half of Scotland tossed in. 53 million people were impacted, and up to 4 million lives were claimed in the catastrophe.

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.