The world's worst dam disaster

Yesterday I blogged about Britain’s worst dam disaster. The world’s worst happened in China in 1975.

As part of his ‘Great Leap Forward’ designed to enable China to become a major industrial power, Chairman Mao encouraged peasants to go off and build dams, which they did with great enthusiasm, but also with a Brexiter-like disdain for experts. So the structures were jerry-built, and within a couple of years, they were collapsing. A hydrologist who tried to sound a warning was purged for being a ‘right-wing opportunist’.

In August 1975, storms dumped heavy rain on Henan province. On 9 August, the Shimantan dam collapsed and half an hour later, the Banqiao dam gave way, unleashing a wall of water 20 feet high. In all 60 dams burst, flooding an area of 4,000 square miles.

China tried to hide the disaster from the world’s gaze, and it was 30 years before the truth began to emerge. The authorities admitted that at least 26,000 had been killed, but other estimates put the figure as high as 85,000 killed by the floods, with another 145,000 from the famine and disease that followed.

For the full story, see my book A Disastrous History of the World.

Brexitwatch: a lesson from history - the Great Chinese Famine

From 1959 to 1961, tens of millions died in a terrible famine in Chairman Mao’s China. There was bad weather, but foolish government policies, such as ordering peasants to abandon their fields and concentrate on making steel instead, were also to blame.

Anyone watching the mainstream media or listening to politicians would have had no idea that millions were starving to death. The State Statistical Bureau had been shut down and replaced by ‘good news reporting stations’, and there was fierce competition between local activists to be the most Maoist by announcing the best news.

So the smaller the real harvests became, the bigger the phantom ones reported. The New China News Agency said peasants were growing pumpkins weighing 10 stones, cows were supposed to have been successfully crossed with pigs. There seemed to be more than enough food to go round, so Mao cut imports and increased exports.

He refused to hand out food from the official granaries, and party activists tortured peasants they believed were hoarding non-existent grain. This was perhaps the first famine in history that devastated the whole of China, but the areas that suffered most were those run by the most fanatical Maoists.

*For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

The worst floods in history

The worst natural disaster ever happened in 1931 when the Yellow River and the Yangtze burst their banks in China, flooding an area nearly as big as England. Up to 3.75 million people lost their lives in the flood itself, then in the famine and disease that swept through the country in its wake. The second deadliest natural disaster ever was another flood of the Yellow River in 1887, which cost up to 2.5 million lives.

In fact, the Yellow River burst its banks an estimated 1,500 times over three millennia, to be given the name ‘China’s Sorrow’.  Another of its floods in 1938 (pictured) cost the lives of up to 800,000 people, but this was a man-made flood, as the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, ordered dykes to be blown up to slow the advance of the invading Japanese army.

Floods come in many shapes and sizes, and China was also the scene of the world’s deadliest dam burst, with the collapse in 1975 of a number of Gerry-built structures erected as part of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward, at the cost of up to 230,000 lives.

We usually think of rain causing floods, but the culprit in Peru in 1941 was a heat wave. It caused a huge lump of ice to fall off a mountain into Lake Palcacocha, making it overflow and sending a torrent racing through towns and villages, drowning 7,000 people.

*For the full story, see my new book, Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books) ISBN 978 1 78023 196 9. It also includes chapters on how so many religions have stories of apocalyptic floods, how floods have been portrayed in literature, art and films, how some of the most ambitious structures ever built by humans have been erected to protect against flooding, and how climate change may now be making humanity more vulnerable than ever to the waters.

** Here's a review of the book. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-35616955.html

Mao's great famine

A new book on the great Chinese famine of 1958-62 confirms the figure I use in A Disastrous History of the World – that chairman Mao was responsible for at least 50 million deaths. In Mao’s Great Famine, Prof Frank Dikotter concludes that the famine itself killed at least 45 million, and on top of that, of course, there was the Cultural Revolution, the reign of terror that established Communist rule in the first place etc.

Prof Dikotter battled tenaciously for access to Chinese archives, and exposes how the party ruthlessly used food as a weapon, punishing with starvation anyone who stood in its way. He says that the state terror was imposed so efficiently that no photographs are known to exist of the famine.

The disaster had its origins in two of Mao’s doctrines – the forced collectivisation of agriculture, even though this had been clearly shown to reduce food production, and the ‘Great Leap Forward’ – designed to catapult China into the big league of industrial nations.

It involved getting peasants to abandon the land to construct gerry-built dams (which often collapsed with catastrophic results) or make useless steel by melting down agricultural implements in backyard furnaces. While his people starved, Mao cut food imports and doubled exports – handing out free gain to North Korea, Vietnam and Albania. (See also my blogs of 6 Jan and 27 March 2009.)

China - land of disasters

At least 400 people have been killed in an earthquake that has struck the remote area of Yushu in China’s western Qinghai province. The quake measured 6.9, compared with 7.0 in Haiti and 8.8 in Chile in February.

Nearly every building in the town of Jiegu is said to have been destroyed. Many Tibetans live in the area, and the relief effort is being hampered by landslides that have blocked roads.

China’s worst earthquake in recent years was the one that struck Sichuan in 2008 killing 87,000, but it is truly a country of disasters. Probably the deadliest earthquake the world has ever seen killed 830,000 people in Shaanxi province in 1556, while China also suffered the worst floods in history, with the Yellow River killing up to 2.5 million when it burst its banks in 1889, and the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers accounting for perhaps 3 million in 1931.

More than 1,540 miners perished in the world’s worst mining disaster at Honkeiko in 1942, while in the late 1870’s up to 13 million people died in one of the country's regular famines. The great hunger of 1959-61, hugely aggravated by Chairman Mao’s doctrinaire policies, brought a death toll of perhaps 40 million, while an estimated 36 million were killed in the An Lushan rebellion of the 8th century. For more details on all these stories, see A Disastrous History of the World.

(See also my blogs of Jan 10, Feb 22, March 27, May 11, July 28, Nov 19 and 23, 2009, Jan 15 and 22, Feb 9 and 15, 2010.)

Bursting dams

Two dam bursts in southern Kazakhstan have killed 35 people. They happened after heavy rains, and two villages in the Almaty region were swept away by the resulting floods. President Nazarbayev has suggested that the dams may have been poorly maintained, and is threatening to prosecute those responsible.

The world’s worst ever dam disaster happened in China’s Henan province in 1975 when 60, built shoddily as part of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, gave way after heavy rains. More than 4,000 square miles were flooded, and the death toll is disputed to this day. The official figure is 26,000, but others say it was really as many as 230,000 if you include those who died from starvation and disease in the aftermath. (see my blog of March 27, 2009)

One of India’s worst floods happened when the Machchu-2 dam burst in 1979, flooding the town of Morvi in Gujarat and killing up to 15,000 people. Once again there had been heavy rains.

While America’s worst flood followed the collapse of what was then the world’s biggest earth dam, 14 miles from Johnstown in Pennsylvania. The dam held back the USA’s biggest man-made lake. It burst on May 31, 1889 after weeks of rain, and the waters careered through four villages and then devastated Johnstown itself, killing at least 2,200 people. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Tanshan + 33

On this day….33 years ago, the Chinese industrial city of Tangshan was devastated by the country’s worth earthquake in four centuries. In just 20 seconds, 20 square miles was shaken into rubble.

Survivors said the ground moved around like the sea. Tangshan was the site of one of China’s biggest coalmining complexes, and about 15,000 miners were working underground when the quake struck.

Bizarrely, only 13 of them were killed, whereas above ground the total was at least 242,000. That was the number that the Communist authorities officially admitted to three years later, though by then there were already claims that secret documents had put the death toll at more than 655,000.

There is a belief in China that earthquakes go hand in hand with political upheaval. Six weeks after Tangshan, Chairman Mao died. For the full story see A Disastrous History of the World.

Terrorism

After the death of 15 British soldiers in 10 days in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown and his Labour colleagues have again been banging the “War on Terror” drum. How instructive last night, then, to watch the thought-provoking Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution on BBC-2.

It was the Reign of Terror of Robespierre and his henchmen that gave us the word “terrorism” – “the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective”. (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

However, governments of all colours have managed to obscure an important fact. The most dreadful acts of “terrorism” are almost invariably perpetrated by them, rather than the rebel groups to whom the term is normally applied. Hardly surprising as governments usually command far more powerful weapons.

So we are constantly told that 9/11 was the world’s worst terrorist outrage – killing nearly 3,000 people, but, of course, it does not compare with, say, the USAF’s bombing of Tokyo in 1945 that killed perhaps 140,000, nor with Hitler’s mass murder campaign that accounted for perhaps 20 million, or Stalin’s cruelties that killed up to 30m, or Mao’s – maybe 70 million. Robespierre’s terror, incidentally, saw off about 55,000.

As a few of those around him raised the odd timorous voice to express half-hearted misgivings about the ever-more intrusive and paranoid regime he had created, Robespierre retorted: “innocence never fears public scrutiny.” Or as Labour tends to put it when critics object to its National Identity Register or its project to snoop on all our emails etc, etc – “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Dam bursts

At least 58 people, and probably many more, have been drowned after a dam built of earth burst south-west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. The waters of the Situ Gintung lake rose because of heavy rain, then overwhelmed the dam, which gave way at two in the morning when most people were asleep. The waters swept away cars and brought down telephone lines. The dam was said to be up to 100 years old.

The world’s worst ever dam burst happened in China’s Henan province in 1975. As part of his “Great Leap Forward”, Chairman Mao had ordered villagers all over the country to build home-made, and home-designed, dams with whatever implements they could lay their hands on. After days of exceptionally heavy rain, more than sixty of them burst, and floods spread over 4,000 square miles.

Whole towns were washed away, and more than a million people were trapped by the waters, but the authorities tried to keep the disaster secret, and it was only in 1995 that the pressure group Human Rights Watch began to reveal its full magnitude. It was another decade before the Chinese authorities started to lift the veil of secrecy, saying that 26,000 people had been killed. Others believe the toll was much higher, with Human Rights Watch putting it at 85,000 in addition to the 145,000 who died from starvation and disease in the aftermath.

Mao's Great Famine 1959-61

2009 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Great Chinese Famine. Estimates of the number who died range as high as 40 million. There were floods, there was drought, but above all there was the chaos produced by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward.” Peasants were dragooned into huge inefficient centralised farms, or were diverted from the land to make steel by melting down pots and pans in backyard furnaces, or to build giant, shoddy dams – many of which soon collapsed.

Other madcap schemes included killing all the birds, and planting seeds more closely together so they choked each other. The trouble was that even as people starved, the government propaganda machine was claiming that harvests were at record levels and that there were dazzling agri-technological achievements like crossing cows with pigs.

The full story is in my book A Disastrous History of the World.