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[edit] 2007
- February
The Tangshan earthquake of July 28, 1976 is one of the largest earthquakes to hit the modern world, in terms of the loss of life. The epicentre of the earthquake was near Tangshan in Hebei, China, an industrial city with approximately one million inhabitants. The earthquake left 242,419 people dead, according to official figures, though some sources offer much higher estimates. A further 164,581 people were recorded as being severely injured.
The earthquake hit in the early morning, at 03:42:53.8 local time (1976-Jul-27 19:42:53.8 UTC), and lasted for around 15 seconds. Many sources list it as 8.2 on the Richter scale, but Chinese Government's official sources state 7.8. It was followed by a major 7.1 magnitude aftershock some 15 hours later, increasing the death toll. It was the first earthquake in recent memory to score a direct hit on a major city. The large loss of life caused by the earthquake can be attributed to the time it struck and how suddenly it struck. The earthquake lacked foreshocks that usually come with earthquakes of this magnitude. It also struck at just before 4 AM leaving many people unprepared as they lay asleep. Tangshan was thought to be in a region with a relatively low risk of earthquakes. Very few buildings had been built to withstand an earthquake, and the city lies on unstable alluvial soil.
The earthquake devastated the city over an area roughly 4 miles by 5 miles. Many of the people who survived the initial earthquake were trapped under collapsed buildings and killed by a 7.1 magnitude aftershock 15 hours after the initial tremor; several aftershocks measuring 5.0 to 5.5 on the Richter scale followed later. 78% of the industrial buildings, 93% of the residential buildings, 80% of the water pumping stations, and 14% of the sewage pipes in Tangshan were destroyed or severely damaged. The seismic waves spread far, with damage in cities such as Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, and a few buildings as far away as Beijing, 140 km from the epicenter, were damaged. Even people in cities as far away as Xi'an felt the tremors of the earthquake.
- January
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:40 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in history, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near-total destruction of Lisbon. The earthquake accentuated political tensions in Portugal and profoundly disrupted the country's eighteenth-century colonial ambitions.
The event was widely discussed by European Enlightenment philosophers, and inspired major developments in theodicy and in the philosophy of the sublime. As the first earthquake studied scientifically for its effects over a large area, it signaled the birth of modern seismology. Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 km (120 mi) west-southwest of Cape St. Vincent.
Of a Lisbon population of 275,000, up to 90,000 were killed. Another 10,000 were killed in Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including famous palaces and libraries, as well as most examples of Portugal's distinctive 16th-century Manueline architecture. Several buildings that had suffered little earthquake damage were destroyed by the subsequent fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before (under the ill-fated name Phoenix Opera), was burned to the ground. The Royal Ribeira Palace, which stood just beside the Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Paço, was destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume royal library as well as hundreds of works of art, including paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Correggio, were lost. The precious royal archives disappeared together with detailed historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and other early navigators. The earthquake also damaged major churches in Lisbon, namely the Lisbon Cathedral, the Basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de Fora, and the Misericordia Church. The Royal Hospital of All Saints (the biggest public hospital at the time) in the Rossio square was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. The tomb of national hero Nuno Álvares Pereira was also lost.
[edit] 2006
- December
The Chernobyl disaster was an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986 at 01:23 a.m., consisting of an explosion at the plant and subsequent radioactive contamination of the surrounding geographic area. The power plant is located at , near Pripyat, Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union. It is regarded as the worst accident ever in the history of nuclear power. A plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland and eastern North America. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus, according to official post-Soviet data.
The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for a number of years, while forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive. The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. It is difficult to tally accurately the number of deaths caused by the events at Chernobyl, as the Soviet-era cover-up made it difficult to track down victims. Lists were incomplete, and Soviet authorities later forbade doctors to cite "radiation" on death certificates. Most of the expected long-term fatalities, especially those from cancer, have not yet actually occurred, and will be difficult or even impossible to attribute specifically to the accident. Nearly 20 years after the disaster, according to the Chernobyl Forum, no evidence of increases in the solid cancers and, possibly more significantly, none of the widely expected increases in leukemia have been found in the population.
- November
The Bath School disaster was a series of bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. The bombings constituted the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history, claiming more than three times as many victims as the Columbine High School massacre.
The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.
On the morning of May 18, Kehoe first killed his wife and then set his farm buildings on fire. As fire fighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, killing many of the people inside. Kehoe used a detonator to ignite dynamite and hundreds of pounds of pyrotol which he had secretly planted inside the school over the course of many months. As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent and killing and injuring several others. During the rescue efforts, searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds (230 kg) of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school's south wing.
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- October
The Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred at , near the Podkamennaya (Under Rock) Tunguska River in what is now Evenk Autonomous Okrug, at 7:17 AM on June 30, 1908. The event is sometimes referred to as the great Siberian explosion.
The explosion was probably caused by the airburst of a meteorite or comet 6 to 10 kilometers (4–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. The energy of the blast was later estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, which would be equivalent to Castle Bravo, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated by the US. It felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi).
At around 7:15 a.m., Tungus natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About 10 minutes later, there was a flash and a loud "knocking" sound similar to artillery fire that went in short bursts spaced increasingly wider apart. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported the sound source moving during each barrage, east to north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away. The majority of eyewitnesses reported only the sounds and the tremors, and not the sighting of the explosion; to different eyewitnesses the sequence of events and their overall duration is also different.
The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia, and produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected by the recently invented barographs in Britain. Over the next few weeks, night skies were aglow such that one could read in their light. In the United States, several observatories noted a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months.
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