Talk:List of deadliest natural disasters

Article needs updating and correcting
This article needs updating and correcting. Suggest using these linkss and. For now, I have changed the date of the 1976 hurricane at number 4, because I can find no references to that hurricane and the date is identical to the earthquake, so looks to be wrong. I think the author meant this hurricane, 1970 Bhola cyclone. Carcharoth 13:55, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikilinks to articles
Many of the disasters mentioned here have their own articles in Wikipedia. But none of them are linked from this article. I have placed some of them in Category:Deadliest natural disasters, but they should also be linked from this list, which should be kept along with the category. 194.200.237.219 16:18, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Drought left out!
In a strange case of possible US-centrism, droughts have been left off this list. According to my textbook on natural disasters, droughts rate #1 on duration, number of people killed, and economic after-effects. Hurricanes/Cyclones are #2.

If true, then the analysis at the end is going to need a rewrite once the 5 worst droughts come into the picture. Steve Rapaport 21:16, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Reason why Droughts Left Out
The reason why droughts were left out had nothing to do with US centrism. If you'll notice, *none* of the natural disasters listed occured in the US, with the exception of the tornados. The reason why droughts aren't listed is because the seed list I used to focus my research did not include droughts.

Also, I don't think your text book is rating things the same way I was... clearly, if this list is even slightly accurate, then floods are more deadly than hurricanes/cyclones. It is likely that hurricanes that cause loss of life occur more often than major floods, meaning that *overall* they are more deadly, but the worst hurricanes are less deadly than the worst floods. It might be the same for droughts. In addition, you mention economic after-effects and duration, which were not taken into account on my list.

Hurricanes to Tropical Cyclones
All the references to hurricanes are vastly incorrect since hurricanes only occur in the Eastern Pacific and Atlantic Basins. In the Western Pacific they are typhoons and in the Indian Ocean they are commonly called cyclones. However the all-encompassing term is tropical cyclone and hence I have changed all references to hurricanes to tropical cyclones. Since I am new I do not know how to link tropical cyclone to its page. If someone could do that I would appreciate it.

A bias in the list
I think we need to mention specific biases in this list. For one, it seems to bias towards earlier in history, i.e. before major disaster preparedness and mitigation came about. It also seems that the flood bias may also be due to population density -- I think the largest cities in China are on the Yellow River (historically as well?).

Additionally, floods would seem to have a heavy bias because most cities are built on or very close to a river or other body of water, whereas, for example, tornadoes appear in the less dense U.S. Midwest. IMacWin95 21:14, 18 July 2006 (UTC)


 * This is not a bias so much as a consequence of varying initial conditions. If more people live where disasters occur, or if there are more people living in the world now, then more people will die in natural disasters. By all means mention this, and give reasons why the impact varies from place to place and from the past to the present, but don't call it a bias. That implies someone is selecting some events from the list and omitting others, and that is not what is happening. Carcharoth 13:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)