Jim Nash Edits, Writes and Shoots

Determining the most destructive weather-related disasters in history is deceptively hard.

What constitutes destruction?

You can count lives lost, but that skews heavily toward the late 19th and early 20th centuries when urban populations grew much faster than the ability for populations to be warned or evacuated. You can count property damage, but that skews to the last 50 years when expensive, extensive and aging infrastructure has collapsed like sand castles.

Do you include events like famines, which by definition involve short-sighted, grotesque or just plain murderous government decisions? Whole civilizations have again and again obliterated themselves this way.

But determine we must, so here’s my list of 10, with caveats. I’m not counting famines, given the bloody thumbs resting on the scale of horror. And I’m counting the only factors that will always matter — lives lost. In all cases, death tolls are estimates.

10.  1991 Bangladesh Cyclone; 138,000 dead

Many shelters built after the 1970 Bhola cyclone (see No. 5) sat all but empty as this particularly fast storm ran ashore.

Residents either forgot where the shelters were, forgot how powerful major cyclones can be or both. The result was massive drownings.

 

 

9. China’s 1935 Yangtze river flood; 145,000 dead

The Yangtze is one of China’s storied rivers (the other being the Yellow, which we’ll hear about in a minute). The 1930s were a particularly deadly period for the Yangtze, with catastrophic floods in 1931 and 1935. The latter disaster was akin to removing the population of a major U.S. suburb from the planet.

8. Super Typhoon Nina, 1975, China; 231,000 dead

Nina was one of the first modern monsters to attack Asia.

It would have killed tens of thousands all by itself, but it was able to destroy the Banqiao Dam thereby setting in motion a regional game of death-dominoes. Dam after dam fell, each loosing another wall of racing water.

 

 

7.   1881 Haiphong Cyclone, Vietnam; 300,000 dead

Just as the U.S. has its Tornado Alley, Southeast Asia has a cyclone corridor, which runs right over Haiphong.

 

 

 

 

6. India Cyclone, 1839; at least 300,000 dead

The harbor city of Coringa was so devastated by this cyclone’s 40-foot storm surge that it was never completely rebuilt.

Fully 20,000 boats were destroyed, and with them, the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands.

It’s not like this tragedy was unheralded. Just 50 years earlier, another cyclone took 20,000 lives in the same region.

5.  1970 Bhola Cyclone, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); 500,000-1 million dead

Some areas of East Pakistan saw mortality rates of almost 50% in the wake of this storm. The mean death rate throughout the impacted region neared one in five.

Out at sea, a 5,500-ton freighter was sunk by the storm, now estimated to have been the equivalent of a category-3 hurricane.

 

4. China’s 1887 Yellow River flood; 900,000-2 million dead

The Yellow, or Hwang He, River could only be a disaster waiting to happen.

One of the world’s longest rivers, it empties a vast portion of China’s watershed area. And it carries a particular sediment, which is yellow, that can make up to 60% of the river’s entire volume.

As the river slows crossing vast plains, the silt settles, broadening the river. When ice dams in Mongolia break loose in the spring, the stage is set for massive flooding. The 1887 flood was one of China’s worst, and that’s saying a lot for a flood-prone nation.

 

3.  The 1931 Yellow River flood; 1,000,000-3,700,000 dead

This wasn’t really one flood. There wasn’t even one cause.

A two- or three-year drought ended in 1930 with mountainous snows which, of course, melted. Then seven cyclones raked the region.

The Yellow became less of a river than an aorta, pulsing with flood water for a year.

 

2.  1941 China Drought; 3 million dead

Droughts often are lumped in with famines, but not this one. The nationalist Chinese government was apparently too busy ousting the brutal, invading Japanese army to tinker with agriculture.

A severe drought brought much of the nation’s interior to its knees before wiping out a population greater than modern-day Chicago.

 

1. 1918-1919 El Nino; complicit in 20 million-100 million deaths

This is a shocker. New research indicates that along with troop movements during World War I, the peculiar Pacific weather pattern known as El Nino could have played a significant role in the Great Flu Pandemic.

Scientists say that El Nino was abnormally strong as the pandemic grew, and they don’t think it was a coincidence. El Nino altered weather patterns over the U.S., now believed to have been that flu’s incubator, creating good conditions for transmission. It also caused a historically severe drought in India, weakening that population’s collective immunity to disease.

Sometimes the worst weather disasters aren’t spotted or tracked by satellites or radar. The International Red Cross doesn’t show up with blankets and coffee. The President doesn’t send billions in disaster aid.

But that doesn’t make the following catastrophes any less heartbreaking or worthy of round-the-clock cable news coverage. At least we can be grateful that no one was seriously hurt in these terrible incidents.

11. Jack Nicholson and the Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is it any less of a shame when the weather, in this case, a hot, windless day out in the ocean, forces you to create your own calamity? “Nick” seems unfazed, but then again, there are three men on that boat and four women. Looks like someone’s going to have to double up….

10. Humidity Victimizes Actress Eva Amurri

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You start your day in Hollywood glamour, content with being a TV and movie star. But then maybe your Fiesta dies on the way to the red carpet, and it’s L.A., so there’re no cabs, and no one slows down for you on the PCH much less offers you a ride, and the kid in the yard wants one-fiddy for his bike but you only got $100 and you have to run through Santa Monica in your $400 Stella McCartney knockoff. That’s a tragedy that would choke up Anderson Cooper.

9. Benicio Del Toro’s Cumulohimbus

In his movies, Del Toro survives almost everything except for a silver bullet in (and reviews for) “The Wolfman.”

Then this.

Initial reports indicated that the actor had driven through an errant pocket of helium, but it was later confirmed that a simple yet strong updraft caught his coiffure.

His hair had the consistency of meringue.

 

 

8. Courtney Love vs. the World

A strange attractor for all kinds of disasters, punk performer Courtney Love, shown here shortly after being kicked out of a New York club by the band that had actually been booked to play, stumbled straight into the first tornado to hit Brooklyn in recorded history.

 

 

7. Reservoir ‘Dogs’ Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino can be close to god-like in his ability to control forces of nature like Michael Madsen, Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro.

He’s less successful with the real thing. Here, humidity, rain and maybe a close call with lightning have the master director offering a brave (grandmotherly) face for the public.

 

6. Katie Holmes Blown Away

Pretty is as pretty does. Until pretty walks into the mini-cyclones that form at the entrance of Chicago skyscrapers.

Katie Holmes never had a chance as she exited a Michigan Ave. coffee shop. Between the gust and the photographers, she was lucky to find her way back to husband Tom Cruise’s suffocating isolating waiting arms.

 

 

5. You’re A-List, Steve. You Can Lose the Jacket

Steve Carell, one of the more unlikely comic leading men in movies today, is an ordinary Joe at heart. And under his arms.

In case you can’t tell, that’s a three-layer sweat stain, provoked by a Manhattan August, or as the month has been renamed there, Asthma.

(Jim Carrey was spotted moments later soaking his Armani jacket in a fountain to upstage Carell. To no avail.)

4. Mother Nature Deals Cruel Blow to Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston is the female Tom Hanks. They are the nicest person in Hollywood.

So when Aniston walked out of a category-5 hurricane and into a local laundromat with several loads of wash one recent Sunday morning, onlookers were shocked to see hair out of place and some odd highlights marring her otherwise flawless Grecian beauty.

Some patrons ran out into the storm, shaking their fists at an unrepentant sky.

3. Nolte’s Version of ‘How Dry I Am’ Is Judged ‘Unconvincing’

Record heat in California’s Inland Empire has wilted more than the nation’s salad bowl.

Clearly, the shirt worn here by grumbly actor Nick Nolte will never be the same.

 

 

 

 

2. Sweetheart Zellweger Caught Out of Her ‘Habitable Zone’

It’s well-known that elfin actress Renee Zellweger has a right-kind-of-light beauty, but who knew she required such a narrow range of climate, too?

Estimates vary, but experts figure Zellweger was experiencing humidity, heat, wind, rain, high UV rays and flying debris when this photo was taken.

 

1. Tropical Heat Boils in Hillary Clinton’s Blood

Colombia’s sultry weather will take the starch out of potatoes, so is it any wonder that when Former First Lady and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited this year she would … relax?

Sure, a few rum drinks might have her out there doing this thing that looks like dancing, but only the waterlogged atmosphere in Columbia could lay out her hair like that.

No, ’twas weather that unwound this clock. (And good for her.)