Disaster! audiobook out now

The audiobook of my book Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes (A Disastrous History of the World in the UK edition) is now out, read by Roger Clark.

It tells the story of the worst disasters to hit mankind from the volcanic eruption that nearly wiped out the human race 74,000 years ago to the catastrophes of the 21st century, like the Boxing Day tsunami. 

The first part of the book chronicles all the major natural calamities – floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms, disease, famine, etc. The second half describes the greatest man-made disasters – like invasions, air raids, massacres, riots, terrorism, mass poisonings, stampedes, fires, explosions, shipwrecks, and air and train crashes.

This is what the Independent said about the book: 'The publisher seems to be pushing its luck by describing this haul of the "nastiest things to have afflicted humanity" as "compulsively readable and entertaining". Weirdly enough, this is spot on.'

https://www.scribd.com/audiobook/382306276/Disaster-A-History-of-Earthquakes-Floods-Plagues-and-Other-Catastrophes?host=www.scribd.com&protocol=https

Tristan da Cunha - the volcano that emptied an island

On holiday, I read Hervé Bazin’s Les bienheureux de la desolation (which appeared in English as Tristan) – his novel about the volcanic eruption on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, in 1961 and its aftermath.

It tells of how a violent eruption of Queen Mary’s Peak at the centre of the island forced the entire population of 264 to flee to the UK.

There was a strong collective spirit on Tristan, with a belief that no one should raise himself up above anyone else, but life was hard, and the British authorities thought that once the islanders experienced the greater comforts of life in England, they would want to stay.

In fact, many rejected what they saw as the materialism and emptiness of modern British life, and when the government held a ballot a couple of years later, the islanders voted 148 to 5 to return. Most of them did.

They adopted some of the new things they had seen in England, but live television did not arrive until 2001, and there is still no mobile phone coverage. Tristan’s population has barely grown, now standing at 266.

Bazin’s book appeared in 1970, and is seen by some as a comment on the misgivings about ‘progress’ which had helped to foment the French riots of 1968.

Lanzarote's volcanoes

Just back from the delightful island of Lanzarote (I am the tiny speck at the top of the volcanic crater.) This caldera is quite green, but much of the island is covered in jagged, barren solidified lava.

It was produced by six years of volcanic eruptions from 1730 to 1736. Nowadays the volcanoes are classified as dormant, but at Timanfaya National Park enough heat rises from the ground to start a fire, boil water, or cook chicken.

A priest who saw the eruptions begin in 1730 described the scene: ‘an enormous mountain emerged from the ground with flames coming from its summit. It continued burning for 19 days.’ Fortunately no one was killed, but a number of villages were buried as much of the most fertile part of the island was covered in lava, while dead fish were washed up on the beaches.

The eruptions created over 100 new volcanoes, and there were further but smaller eruptions in 1824.  

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

200 years ago today - the biggest volcanic eruption of modern history

200 years ago today, the Indonesian volcano of Tambora was spewing molten rock nearly 30 miles up into the atmosphere. It is a less famous disaster than Krakatoa, also in modern-day Indonesia 68 years later, but this was the most powerful eruption of at least the last 500 years.

The immediate death toll on the island of Sumbawa, where the volcano is located, was perhaps 12,000, but across the world, hundreds of thousands may have perished in the volcanic winter that came after the eruption, as ash blotted out the sun.

It brought starvation to China's Yunnan province, hunger and disease to India, while the great chill killed many across Europe as global temperatures fell by perhaps three degrees, with the effect persisting into the following summer. There were food riots in Britain and France, while soup kitchens had to be opened in Manhattan.

The ash meant many countries experienced strange, dramatic sunsets, some of which inspired the great painter, J.M.W. Turner, while the 'wet, ungenial summer' in Switzerland confined Mary Shelley and her friends indoors. For entertainment, they had a story competition. Mary's entry was Frankenstein. The rotten weather was even thought to have contributed to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.

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

The disaster that nearly wiped out humanity

A Spanish-language blog has picked up the story of the earliest disaster featured in my book A Disastrous History of the World (Historia Mundial de los desastres).  A disaster that may have come close to wiping out the human race.   http://www.taringa.net/posts/info/15902116/La-erupcion-que-estuvo-a-punto-de-aniquilar-a-la-Humanidad.html

It was a huge volcanic eruption more than 70,000 years ago at what is now Lake Toba (pictured above) on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.   It is thought to have been one of the most powerful ever, at about 28 times the strength of the Tambora eruption of 1815, the biggest of modern times.

The eruption itself must have been deadly enough, but much worse was the volcanic winter that followed.   The ancient volcano spewed out an estimated 670 cubic miles of debris that dimmed the sun’s rays for six years.

As catastrophic global cooling resulted, the world’s estimated human population at that time of a million was reduced to perhaps just 10,000.   The eruption gouged out a vast crater which filled with water to produce picturesque Lake Toba, now a noted tourist destination.

Pompeii - disaster history in danger

A week ago I was looking at paintings of the destruction of Pompeii. Today I’m reading bad news about the bits Vesuvius spared in AD79.

It seems that yesterday morning the Schola Armaturarum, the building that was used for training gladiators, was found in ruins. Italy’s president said it was an occasion for national shame, while the president of the country’s National Association of Archaeologists called the collapse "an irreparable wound to the world's most important archaeological site".

More than two years ago, the Italian government declared a state of emergency over the condition of the site. In many ways, it had been an archaeologist’s dream as the pumice and ash from the volcano preserved much of the town in miraculous detail.

*Want to know what are the worst disasters ever to overtake humanity and the worst things ever to happen to London? See me on youtube:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKcOCn5Qauk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzoB_il4PpM

Volcanoes, eruptions and art

Visited a fascinating exhibition at Compton Verney Museum, near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, examining the way in which artists have portrayed volcanic eruptions. Vesuvius figures prominently, with a number of imaginative recreations of its devastation of Pompeii in AD79.

The 19^th century British artist John Martin, some of whose wonderfully demented pictures of the Last Judgment are exhibited in the Tate Britain, has a suitably fiery painting included. While Andy Warhol has a typically Warholesque picture of Vesuvius going up in smoke in lurid primary colours.

Also featured are a series of paintings by another 19^th century British artist, William Ascroft, who painted sketches of the psychedelic sunsets that we experienced in our skies after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, across the world in Indonesia. Volcanic eruptions made perfect subjects for perhaps the greatest of all British painters, J M W Turner, but like a number of artists represented in the show, he never saw one, and relied instead on written accounts and other people’s pictures.

Unfortunately, the exhibition is now over. I caught it on its last day.

*Latest about me on the internet:-

http://plymouth.myvillage.com/article/plymouths-disastrous-history

http://newcastle.myvillage.com/article/newcastles-disastrous-history

Indonesia - land of tsunamis and volcanoes

Indonesia has been living up to its reputation as the most seismically active country on earth. At least 300 people have been killed on the Mentawai Islands off Sumatra by a tsunami, which has washed away at least 13 villages.

After the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, that killed 94,000 people on Sumatra, a new early warning system was installed, but Indonesian officials say two buoys off the Mentawai Islands that formed part of it had been vandalised and were out of service. Even if the system had been functioning properly, though, warnings may still have reached local people too late.

Meanwhile, in central Java, 32 people have been killed by the eruption of the volcano, Mount Merapi. It is regarded as Indonesia’s most active, but the area around is heavily populated, and tens of thousands of people are now in temporary shelters.

Indonesia has seen many major eruptions – the most famous being Krakatoa in 1883, which killed around 36,000 people, though much more powerful was Tambora in 1815, which was responsible for perhaps 80,000 deaths in Indonesia, and thousands more around the world because of the volcanic winter the eruption caused. For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

*Latest about my books on the internet:- http://hexham.myvillage.com/article/hexhams-disastrous-history

Guatemala storms

At least 150 people have been killed – most of them in Guatemala - because of heavy rain brought by Tropical Storm Agatha. More than 3 feet fell on parts of the country causing rivers to burst their banks, and unleashing landslides. In the capital, Guatemala City, a giant sinkhole opened up and swallowed buildings.

The rescue effort has been hampered by the destruction of roads and bridges, and further rain is forecast. The disaster comes just days after more than 1,500 Guatemalans had to flee their homes because of the eruption of Mount Pacaya.

In 2005, Hurricane Stan killed more than 1,500 people in the country. Again, it was not the winds, but the floods and mudslides brought by torrential rain that did the damage.

Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest on the Atlantic in two centuries, caused more than 380 deaths in Guatemala in 1998, though the storm did its deadliest work in Honduras, where perhaps 14,000 were killed, and Nicaragua where the death toll was approaching 4,000.

Mass poisonings

Up to 90 people have been poisoned by illicit home-made banana gin in Uganda. The drink, much in demand among those who can’t afford commercial alcohol, had in this case been laced with methanol, which is used in anti-freeze. It causes blindness, coma and death.

Between 1990 and 1992, about 300 children died from kidney failure in Bangladesh, after being given paracetamol syrup laced with diethylene glycol, a solvent which is also used in brake fluid. In 2007, the same chemical was responsible for up to 365 deaths in Panama from contaminated cough medicine.

One of the worst mass poisonings took place in Iraq in the early 1970’s. After a series of poor harvests, stocks of grain had become dangerously low, and the authorities imported nearly 100,000 tons of foreign seed, which they insisted should be treated with a mercury fungicide – highly effective, but highly poisonous.

The seed was coloured bright pink, and carried warnings – in English or Spanish – not much use to most Iraqis. Unaware of the danger, many people used it to make bread, which was often reported as tasting delicious, but altogether about 100,000 people were poisoned, with 6,000 dying. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

* Thanks to the Daily Mirror for quoting me on the Icelandic volcano eruption even if they didn’t get the story exactly right – see my comment. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/04/16/volcanic-ash-cloud-almost-wiped-out-the-human-race-in-1973-115875-22190307/

Icelandic eruptions

An Icelandic volcano that had been dormant for two centuries has erupted, sending lava 300 feet into the air. About 500 people have been evacuated from the sparsely populated area about 75 miles east of Reykjavik.

Iceland is a mysterious country of volcanoes, geysers, bubbling, spitting mud and lunar landscapes, and there are fears that the eruption could cause flooding, or spark off the much more dangerous nearby Katla volcano.

Iceland’s deadliest ever eruption, and one of the deadliest in human history, came in 1783 when the Laki volcano threw the equivalent of Mont Blanc into the air. Burning lava overwhelmed 20 villages, blocked rivers burst their banks, and many also died from toxic fumes.

As with so many disasters, though, the real damage came in the aftermath (see my blog of March 17). In Iceland itself, crops failed, livestock starved, fish disappeared, and about 10,000 people – a quarter of the island’s population – died. Much of the Western hemisphere was enveloped in a volcanic winter, and some estimates say that this climate change caused more than 200,000 deaths. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Caribbean catastrophe

On this day....107 years ago, the volcano Montagne Pelée erupted above the town of St Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Apart from a minor eruption in 1851, there hadn’t been a peep out of the mountain for a long time, but in April 1902, it started to grumble, and on the bright sunny morning of May 8, 1902, it went berserk.

As people gathered in the churches of St Pierre - the “Paris of the West Indies” – for eight o’ clock mass, smoke blotted out the sun, and boiling lava poured down the hill into the town killing everyone in its wake. More than a dozen ships were destroyed in the harbour; one having its masts and funnel sheared off “as if they had been cut by a knife.”

Of St Pierre’s 26,000 inhabitants, only a handful survived. One was a convicted murderer awaiting execution who was saved thanks to the thick walls and tiny windows of his prison. He was reprieved, and began a new career with Barnum & Bailey’s circus – sitting in a replica of his cell as the “lone” survivor of the “Silent City of Death”.

St Pierre would be partially rebuilt, only to be hit by another eruption in 1929, and would never again recover its colourful and rather racy reputation. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

World's biggest volcanic eruptions

This week the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was rocked by an earthquake. No great surprise there – Indonesia is the most seismically active country on earth, and was close to the epicentre of the undersea quake that sparked the great Christmas tsunami of 2004. This time there were no reports of any casualties.

How different from the great volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa 194 years ago today. The Europeans who had started to settle in the islands in the sixteenth century believed the volcano was extinct. On April 5, 1815, it proved them wrong, generating the biggest eruption in recorded history – four times as powerful as the more famous Krakatoa.

The immediate death toll on the island was about 12,000, but as so often happens with volcanoes, the worst would come later, as the debris spat out into the atmosphere made the world dramatically colder. In the months that followed, up to 80,000 are thought to have died on Sumbawa and Lombok, while it is estimated that the chill weather and resulting poor harvests may have cost another 200,000 lives in Europe alone.

An even fiercer eruption rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra in about 72,000 BC, and the volcanic winter it generated may have killed 99 per cent of the earth’s human population at that time. The full story of all these eruptions is in A Disastrous History of the World.