Locating World Disasters Trivia Quiz

Also known as the Galveston Flood, the colloquial 'Great Storm' was an anomalous hurricane event that occurred on the Texas coast in 1900, becoming the deadliest natural disaster in American history when its surge destroyed the city. Swinging in from the Caribbean, making landfall in Galveston, and heading northeast through the U.S. and Canada, the hurricane led Texans, especially business owners, to move their settlement inland to Houston, subsequently making it one of the largest cities in the United States over the next century.

Across a period of approximately five months, the volcanic island of Krakatoa experienced an explosion that was felt the world over, wiping out adjacent islands in its tsunamis and shooting plumes of smoke and ash that would affect the planet's skies for years to follow.

The volcano at the island's former location continued to erupt, periodically, in the centuries after, but the 1883 event became one of the defining volcanic events of human history, being 13,000 times more powerful, by explosive magnitude, than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in WWII.

In December 1984, the most damaging industrial disaster in history occurred in Bhopal, India when the U.S./India-owned Union Carbide Pesticide plant experienced a critical leak that spilled a catastrophic amount of methyl isocyanate into the surrounding city.

The resulting poisoning killed thousands, but caused non-fatal injuries to more than half a million people and critically damaged water and soil for the region, the effects of which persisted into the 21st century. In the aftermath, the incident was blamed on a number of factors, but the primary reason was negligence at every level of oversight.

With an epicentre located only a short distance west of the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, the M7.0 earthquake that struck the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in January 2010 was devastating to the already poverty-stricken nation as more than 100,000 Haitians died in the event and much of their infrastructure was damaged. Humanitarian aid continued in Haiti throughout the decade, and proceeded further when an M5.7 earthquake hit the north of the country in 2017...and an M7.2 earthquake hit the Tiburon Peninsula in the south, becoming the deadliest natural disaster of 2021.

One of the most memorable earthquakes to hit the Indian Ocean in the early 2000s, the M9.3 quake that occurred one hundred and sixty kilometres off the coast of Sumatra was one of the most devastating of its kind, creating a massive tsunami reaching ten metres high by the time it made landfall on the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Maldives.

By the time the waters receded, more than two hundred thousand people had died in the disaster, leading to the development of an early warning system for the Indian Ocean coast.

The most famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius, rising up from the edge of the Bay of Naples, occurred in 79 AD and destroyed both the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, wiping out all of their inhabitants and reducing them to ruins in a catastrophic blast of pyroclastic surge.

The event was so influential that it has since become tied to the region's art, culture, and imagery. Vesuvius has erupted multiple times since, but it hasn't been a deterrent for locals; the cities of Naples, and the Amalfi Coast at the south end of the bay, are amongst Italy's most visited destinations.

Also known as the BP oil spill (considering that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was operated by British Petroleum), the events that occurred when the this rig, located in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi Coast, ruptured on April 20, 2010 resulted in the largest ecological disaster in world history, spilling 210,000,000 gallons of oil into the ocean, destroying ecosystems throughout the region.

It took four years before the region was declared clean of oil, though the effects on wildlife, marine quality, and local industry would be affected long-term.

In a case of extreme Australian weather, the bushfires that commenced in February 2009-- approximately four hundred of them in total-- broke out to become one of the more devastating natural disasters on the continent, displacing thousands of families in the State of Victoria and killing more than a hundred seventy citizens. Damage was severe and widespread, especially in the Kingslake Complex region, and the 2019-2020 bushfire season, since called 'Black Summer' would bring further investigations of causes, especially climate change, only a decade later.

Early on December 6, 1917, the SS Imo collided with the SS Mont-Blanc in Halifax Harbour, setting off a catastrophic explosion that levelled most of the city's structures within a kilometre of the blast, killing more than a thousand Haligonians and shipmen.

At the time, the explosion was the largest man-made blast in human history, and it would be the largest accidental one until World War II. Over time, Halifax would be rebuilt, remaining Nova Scotia's capital and one of Canada's largest port cities.

It was April 26 when the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down, causing the most expensive disaster in human history. In the weeks to follow, radioactive material spread across Europe in trace amounts while an exclusion zone of thirty kilometres radius was formed around the former city of Pripyat, Ukraine. Though the reactor onsite was sealed away in a massive sarcophagus, it was determined that clean-up of the region and resealing of the radioactive materials on the site wouldn't be able to commence until the 2060s.

After Chernobyl, the Fukushima incident was the only level-7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale, indicating the maximum level of severity for nuclear disaster. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan resulted in a tsunami which, when it struck the coast, damaged all backup power supplies that would have allowed the radioactive core of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant to continue cooling.

The earthquake, the tsunami, and the resulting nuclear event resulted in one of the costliest disasters on Earth. Though few, if any, resulting deaths were attributed to radiation, widespread stress from displacement was detrimental, especially to the region's aging population.

It was late March in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, had its hull punctured by rocks in the Prince William Sound on the Alaskan coast near Anchorage, spilling millions of tonnes of crude oil into the ocean until clean-up efforts could commence (in a complicated fashion, due to the remote location). Until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred more than two decades later, this event was the single largest ecological disaster in America.

Located in Southern Illinois, the town of Centralia befell disaster when one of its coal mines exploded in 1947, killing more than one hundred of its workers. After reopening, the mine suffered its second and final disaster in 1962 when unstoppable fire was sparked at a nearby dump, igniting across more than eight miles of labyrinthine tunnels.

The subsequent blaze, unable to be quelled, would force the town's citizens to evacuate over time; the area became virtually uninhabitable. Experts believed the fires would continue until the 23rd century.

London's reliance on coal for much of its time in the 19th and 20th centuries came to a head in 1952 when poor weather patterns cause coal pollution to rest over London and the surrounding area, leading to smog of a pea-soup consistency. Naturally, the health problems associated with this were wide ranging with thousands dying of breathing issues during that time.

In the coming years, British politicians instituted the Clean Air Act, a motion that would be reflected in other nations in an effort to stem industrial damage to society.

The dam in question, the Banqiao Dam, caused the greatest flood in history when it failed in August 1975, destroying more than five million Chinese houses and affecting more than ten million people in its watershed on the Hong River. Although the dam was never meant to withstand a quantity of rain that had fallen in that particular year, the nation of China was in the midst of its Cultural Revolution, which meant that no resources-- people or otherwise-- were able to respond to the events that preceded the collapse.

After the collapse of the Banqiao Dam, sixty-one other dams downriver also collapsed.