Selective memories

As he was getting his brains kicked in by members of the Los Angeles Police Department, Rodney King famously asked “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Sorry Rodney. We never have and if the past is a sign, we never will. Oh we’ll have periods of relative calm but the dam eventually bursts and washes away a swath of humanity. The history of humanity is a struggle, either with or against nature or with each other.

Leave it to others to explain why. But take a look back and a look around. If you’re like most of us, you don’t know a whole lot about the past.

We are blissfully ignorant of many of the past calamities, man-made or nature-made. We’re largely empty-headed about our own history, let alone calamities away from our shores. And we all have the collective attention and memory of a door knob. Most don’t remember events of last year, let alone 10 years ago.

Here, let’s look at some of the deadliest acts by nature and others aided by man. We’ll leave the man against man conflicts for another time.

First are five of the worst natural disasters that you probably know very little about.

• The Great Galveston Storm of 1900 took the lives of 6,000 to 8,000 people, more than those killed in the Revolutionary War. Galveston was Texas’s biggest port city and home to millionaire mansions. Much of Galveston was destroyed and many of its residents were killed when the hurricane struck on Sept. 8 with 140-mile per hour winds.
• The San Francisco earthquake raged struck with a fury on April 18, 1906. For nearly a minute, the 7.9 magnitude quake assaulted the city of 450,000 and ripped a 296-mile fissure along the San Andreas fault. More than 3,000 people were killed, more than 28,000 buildings were destroyed and more than 200,000 San Franciscans were left homeless.
• Johnstown, Pa., was destroyed by flood in 1889 when a 40-foot high, half-mile wide wall of water and debris exploded through the town. In moments, 1,600 homes were washed away, and 2,209 people were dead. The source of the flood was the failure of dam that was holding back 20 million tons of water in the man-made reservoir, Lake Conemaugh. The tsnumani-like water shoved 170,000-pound locomotives off their tracks and bodies were recovered as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio.
• The Peshtigo Fire started on Oct.8, 1871, the same day as the more famous, Great Chicago Fire. The Peshtigo Fire consumed 1.5 million acres of tinder-dry land in Wisconsin and Michigan, causing the deaths of 2,500 people. Drought conditions triggered the Peshitgo fires along with a string of wildfires. High winds fanned the flames into tornado-like firestorms, with the sounds of a freight train. One group took refuge in a water tower and were boiled to death. The firestorm was so hot that it turned sand on the Peshtigo streets to glass.
• Hurricane Maria, a category 4 storm, tore its murderous path through Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. The official death toll was 64 people but the actual number was believed to be around 4,645 people. The higher number was deduced when researchers found that the death rate in Puerto in months following the hurricane was 62 percent higher than the same period a year earlier.

And now for the man-made catastrophes:

• The Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced millions of people to flea and killed many from dust pneumonia, also called “brown plague.” The tragedy could have been avoided were it not for ignorant farming practices.

Before World War I, the land on the American Great Plains was largely used to raise cattle and other animals. But millions of acres were plowed under so farmers could grow wheat. After a decade of plowing, a drought struck and eroded top soil turned to mountains of killer dust that grew into monstrous storms. The Dust Bowl left as many as 500,000 people homeless and caused an 2.5 million to move.

• On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev, Ukraine, exploded, sending high levels of radiation in the air. Within three months, 30 people died of radiation sickness but thousands more were affected. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated from nearby cities.
• Hundreds of thousands may have died from radiation poisoning caused by the 200 atomic bomb tests conducted by the U.S. government in the south and west, from 1945–62. Exposure from radiation from the tests was linked to thyroid cancer and leukemia. One study determined that 340,000 to 690,000 people died of exposure.
• The Exxon Valdez oil tanker was grounded on March 24, 1989, in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million of gallons of oil and devastating the environment. The spill was spread across 1,300 miles of the coast and wrecked habitats of herring and pink salmon, and killed thousands of seals, otters and birds.
• The Deepwater Horizon was drilling a deep well in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, when it exploded, killing 11 crew members and injuring 7 others. The rig sank on April 22 and for the next 87 days, spewed 134 million to 206 million gallons of oil into the gulf. Five years later, the contamination had killed an estimated 800,000 birds, 65,000 turtles along with brown pelicans and dolphins.
• The water in Flint, Mich., was contaminated with lead in 2014 after officials switched the source of Flint’s drinking water. A few months later, the water tested positive for coliform bacteria. Doctors later found the levels of lead in the blood of children in Flint had doubled. Researchers determined the new water source from the Flint River likely corroded the lead in the pipes. The contaminated water also has been blamed for an increase in a severe type of pneumonia, killing as many as 119 people. Fetal death rates rose and fertility rates dropped after the water source switch.
• The Union Carbide insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, exploded on Dec. 2, 1984, causing 45 tons of methyl isocyanate gas to leak out and reach the nearby populated areas. The poison killed more than 3,000 instantly while later estimates put the death toll at 15,000 to 20,000, with about 500,000 affected by the gas exposure. More than 300 metric tons of waste remained at the site and chemical runoff contaminated drinking water may have chronic health problems and birth defects.