My BBC radio interview: Devon's worst disasters

Really interesting to be interviewed (again) by Pippa Quelch on BBC Radio Devon on the subject of Devon's worst disasters. 

Here are the shipwrecks of the Coronation and the Ramillies, how pilfering of gunpowder led to the Amphion blowing up. The great fires of Tiverton and the blaze that destroyed Exeter's Theatre Royal, the Blitz in Plymouth and the Lynmouth floods. More about all of them in my book A Disastrous History of Britain.

You can hear the interview here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0bmmdxj

A historic object returns to Iraq. What does this have to do with Noah's Ark?

 

A 3,600 year old clay tablet telling part of the Epic of Gilgamesh is being returned to Iraq after being looted from a museum during the Gulf War in 1991.

The epic is a fascinating tale, written perhaps a millennium before the Book of Genesis. It recounts how human beings had become so numerous the noise they made was unbearable, and the gods could no longer sleep.  So they decided to ‘exterminate mankind.’ 

To achieve this, they ‘turned daylight to darkness’, and summoned up a storm and a half. ‘For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world.’ Then on the seventh day, the storm subsided, and the sea ‘stretched as flat as a roof-top.’ And mankind was ‘turned to clay’.

But not quite. One of the gods had a soft spot for a man named Utnapishtim and had tipped him off about the impending catastrophe. So he and his family had commissioned a boat and escaped. With them they took samples of ‘the beast of the field, both wild and tame’, as well as the ‘craftsmen’ who had built their vessel.

For anyone who knows the story of Noah’s Ark from the Bible, much of this will sound rather familiar. For the full story, see my book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books).

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.

Britain's worst dam disaster

The people of the Peak District town of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire are still unable to return to their homes as fears continue that the dam holding back the Toddbrook Reservoir (pictured) above the town may burst, unleashing a devastating flood.

The reservoir was built in 1831. About 20 miles away, the collapse of another dam in 1864 brought Britain’s worst ever dam disaster. As Sheffield became a major centre for steel-making, the Sheffield Waterworks Company decided to build new reservoirs in the surrounding hills to provide the water the booming area demanded.

By 11 March 1864, the first of them, above the village of Bradfield, was almost finished when a local man noticed a crack in the structure. It was a wet, stormy night and water was also coming over the top of the dam. Within hours, the structure had burst, and a mountain of water careered down the valley below.

Bradfield was the first place to be hit, though mercifully most of the inhabitants had been evacuated, but no warning reached Malin Bridge, where more than 100 people were killed, and altogether in the valley, 270 died. For the full story, see my book A Disastrous History of Britain.

Deadly mudslides

At least 400 people have been killed by the mudslide that swept through Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, on Monday morning. Another 600 are still missing, as rescue workers desperately hunt for survivors.

Freetown is an overcrowded city of more than a million, many living in makeshift settlements which are easily washed away in frequent heavy rains and floods. A key objective at the moment is to avoid the disaster being made worse by water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea.

Probably the deadliest mudslide ever was the one that hit Venezuela in the dying days of the last millennium in December 1999. It effortlessly swept away the shanty towns precariously perched on ridges around the capital Caracas.

But smart apartment blocks also found themselves buried under the mud. Most estimates put the number killed at around 30,000, with 140,000 left homeless, and more than 20,000 homes destroyed. For the story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

See also my post of 21 February 2010.

Storms and floods: Met Office says they'll get worse

New analysis from the Met Office says there is an increased risk of ‘unprecedented’ winter downpours in the UK, perhaps even worse than those that caused the major floods of 2014. Its supercomputers have calculated that for each year over the next decade, there is a one in three chance of record rainfall in an English or Welsh region.

In my book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2016), I noted that four of Britain’s five wettest years since records began have happened since 2000. Globally, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seeks a consensus from the views of thousands of eminent scientists all over the world, predicts fiercer rainstorms ‘over many areas’.

In my previous book Flood (Reaktion 2013) I quoted a United Nations report from 2011 which said the number of natural disasters had quintupled over the previous four decades, and that most of the increase could be attributed to what it called ‘hydro-meteorological’  events, including storms and floods.

I also wrote about a UK government report in 2012 which concluded that climate change would greatly increase the danger of flooding, saying the number of people at risk could more than double to 3.6 million by 2050.    

Brexitwatch: Hinkley Point: 'take control' means lose control cont'd

I forecast a month ago (http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/brexitwatch-take-control-means-lose.html) that post-Brexit, Thresea May would find she had no option but to continue with Hinkley Point in spite of fears about national security and the colossal electricity price it will bring:

'Another foreign-owned enterprise is Hinkley Point nuclear power station. It looks as though Theresa May would dearly love to cancel it because of the eye-watering price for electricity it commits us to paying, but, the Chinese are major investors, and they have made it clear that if it does not go ahead, they will be severely displeased.

As the Brexiters’ ‘plan’ involves us cosying up to people like the Chinese to replace the trading partners in Europe we are turning our back on, it will be interesting to see how much ‘control’ they dare exercise over Hinkley Point.' 

And now that we have spat in the face of our European allies, Ms May did indeed decide we dare not upset the Chinese. Here's the story:

http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14746666.Tweaks_are_not_enough_to_convince_doubters_over_Hinkley_Point_C/

* A review of my book Flood: Nature and Culture that I have just found - http://geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/310-flood-nature-and-culture-by-john-withington

Storm: sightings of my new book!

The first hints about my new book Storm: Nature and Culture are beginning to appear on the internet. Published by Reaktion Books, it is due to be published in September.

Storms are one of the most awesome expressions of the power of nature that all of us will experience in some form - hurricanes, gales, thunderstorms, hail, monsoon rain, sand and dust storms, tornadoes. Storm will be the first book to examine all aspects of tempests - 

the stories of the fiercest we have experienced
how they have changed the course of history
how important storms and storm gods have been in religion
how they have influenced art, cinema, and literature
how humanity has tried to control them through religion, superstition and science
whether they are going to get fiercer in the future
etc, etc

Storm, like my last book Flood: Nature and Culture appears in Reaktion's Earth series.

Here is a selection of internet pieces about Storm:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/storm/john-withington/9781780236612
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Storm-Nature-Culture-John-Withington/dp/1780236611?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
http://www.bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9781780236612

East London Disasters

Thank you to the East London History Society for inviting me to talk to them last night on 'East London Disasters'.

There was a good turnout, with some fascinating stories from members of the audience: two men who had been working at King's Cross underground station on the night of the fire, and a woman whose mother had been caught up in the Bethnal Green tube station disaster of 1943.

That was one of the disasters I covered in the talk, along with the Barking flood of 1377, cholera, the Princess Alice, the Forest Gate school fire of 1890, the HMS Albion launch disaster of 1898, the Silvertown explosion of 1917, Ronan Point and the Dudgeon's Wharf explosion of 1969.

A great time was had by all!

http://www.mernick.org.uk/elhs/

Floods: chronicle of a disaster foretold

Late in 2013, my book Flood: Nature and Culture was published by Reaktion Books. It noted the devastating floods seen across the world the previous year, and ended with a question:-

'Are we witnessing nothing more than the normal ups and downs of the climate? Or are those calculations by so many scientists right: does mankind now face a struggle with floods the like of which we have never seen before?'

Many people in the north of the UK in particular must have been asking something similar as the rainfall records I wrote about in the book keep being broken, leading more and more politicians to concede that what they had been categorising as 'exceptional' might, in fact, be becoming normal. The Environment Agency has admitted that a 'complete rethink' may be needed on flood defences.

In Flood, I also noted that in the United States, of the 48 Republican candidates for the Senate mid-term elections of 2010, all but one either denied the existence of global warming or opposed any action to combat it. It will be interesting to note what shift in opinion, if any, we see on the American right as the next year's presidential election looms.

Flood on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flood-Nature-Culture-John-Withington/dp/1780231962/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451496198&sr=1-1&keywords=flood+nature+and+culture

After a disaster: return or move away?

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were plans to sweep away London's courts and alleys and replace them with something grander and neater, but many of them survived (and still do). A lot of Londoners wanted to rebuild the city much as it had been before the fire.

After the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, it was a similar story. Grand designs floundered because locals wanted to live in the same kind of homes in the same places as they had before. And when the Ugandan government tried to get people to settle away from an area devastated by floods in 1978, they too ran into opposition.

Now history seems to be re-repeating itself in Japan. After an earthquake and tsunami caused meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station in 2011, some argued that the 80,000 people evacuated should be persuaded not to return, but to go and live somewhere else. 

And some have, but older people in particular seem to be keen to go back to the places they still think of as home. The town of Naraha is the first to be declared safe by the government.

Floods in deserts

At the start of Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books), I wrote about how floods could happen almost anywhere – even in deserts, and included the picture above to prove it. It was taken in a desert in Arizona.

The latest proof has come in one of the driest places in the world, the Atacama Desert in Chile (a fascinating place to visit). Last week, torrential rains brought flash floods there that left two people dead and 24 missing. One was said to have been killed in a mudslide and the other electrocuted.

As the river Copiapo burst its banks, the government declared a state of emergency. 38,000 have been without electricity, nearly 50,000 without drinking water, and the government has been rescuing people by helicopter because roads have been blocked.

For the story of another deadly desert flood, in Antelope Canyon, Arizona, see my blog of 6 October 2012.

Picture by Anne Clements.  http://www.anneclements.com/

'Flood: Nature and Culture" - new reviews

Two new reviews of my latest book: Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books)

http://www.geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/310-flood-nature-and-culture-by-john-withington

http://sites.psu.edu/emslibrary/

Reminder - Flood talk TONIGHT

A reminder that I'm giving a talk entitled 'Are floods getting worse?' at Swiss Cottage Library, 88 Avenue Rd, London NW3 3HA tonight, October 9, at 1830, based on my book Flood: Nature and Culture. (Reaktion Books) Admission free.  All welcome.   

For full details, see my post of Sept 20.

Diary Date - flood talk October 9

I'm giving a talk entitled 'Are floods getting worse? at Swiss Cottage Library on October 9 at 1830, based on my book Flood: Nature and Culture.  Admission free.  All welcome.   

Last year, the UK’s Environment Agency issued a record number of flood warnings, while also in the last few years, Pakistan has had its worst monsoon floods in eight decades, Thailand suffered one of the costliest inundations in history, Colombia and Brazil experienced the severest in living memory, and Australia’s prime minister declared the Queensland floods perhaps the worst natural disaster ‘in the history of our nation’.

So are things actually getting worse? I will be revealing that floods are the natural disasters humans are most likely to experience, and that some of the most ambitious structures ever built have been put up to defend us against them.

I will also be telling how stories like that of Noah’s ark, about an apocalyptic flood which almost wipes out humanity, feature in dozens of religions all over the world. Floods caused by rain, melting snow, storms, tsunamis, tides, the failures of dykes or dams, or deliberate act of war all feature.

The talk will also look at the way floods have been portrayed in films, literature and art.

FREE FLOOD TALK TONIGHT!

Reminder. Tonight at 1915, I'll be giving a free talk on my book Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books) at Highgate Library Civic and Cultural Centre, Croftdown Road, London N19 5DJ.  All welcome.

Did a North Sea tsunami wipe out Doggerland?

Did a tsunami more than 8,000 years ago put paid to the last inhabitants of Doggerland, a submerged land mass which once connected north Germany to East Anglia?

Around 10,000 years ago, it was still one of the richest hunting grounds in Europe, but 2,000 years later, it had become a low-lying, marshy island about the size of Wales. That was around the time of the Storegga tsunami – generated by a massive landslide beneath the sea off the coast of Norway.

Fishing boats operating around Doggerland have turned up ancient human artefacts, but none date from later than the tsunami. The tsunami theory of Doggerland’s end is based on computer simulations of the effect of the Storegga slide, but some scientists argue the area had already been abandoned before the disaster.

Some, though not all, scientists also maintain that the deadliest flood ever suffered by mainland Britain, the Severn Flood of January 30, 1607, was also caused by a tsunami. It is estimated that 2,000 people, and thousands of livestock animals were killed.

My A Disastrous History of the World has now been translated into Romanian - http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/cele-mai-mari-dezastre-din-istoria-omenirii-5358/

Another talk on 'Flood'

All welcome! Talk on 'Flood', Highgate Library Civic and Cultural Centre, Croftdown Road, London N19, Thursday, 15 May, 1915.

Talk on 'Flood: Nature and Culture'

Roll up! Roll up! To the talk I'm giving at Shoe Lane, Library, London EC4A 3JR. Thursday, 8 May at 1230. 

Flood: Nature and Culture - Another review

Here's a review of my book from the Eastern Daily Press -