Talk:1970 Bhola cyclone
The title of this article may be wrong. Can anyone confirm that this disaster is most generally known as the 'Bhola cyclone'. I'm not finding many Google references to it under that name, and the cyclone + tidal wave affected a much larger area. In the meantime, I've moved to page to '1970 Bhola cyclone' to conform to the style of other natural disaster articles and because cyclones in the area of the Bay of Bengal occur nearly every year. -- Solipsist 09:55, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Worst recorded disaster?
I cut this text:
- and possibly the worst recorded natural disaster in terms of the number of lives lost
because [1] refers to three earthquakes with higher numbers of dead (the source given there is Catalog of significant earthquakes 2000 BC–1979, including Quantative Casualties and Damage, NOAA World Data Center, 1981). If famines and epidemics count as natural disasters — which they do according to the Wikipedia article — then there have been many much more deadly than any earthquake or storm. Gdr 17:49, 2005 Jan 2 (UTC)
- Probably a good call. After writing this, I noticed Tangshan earthquake on Wikipedia:Collaboration_of_the_week, which claims similar official death toll, but a higher maximum estimate. One of the main reasons that unofficial death tolls can be a lot higher is that there is no recent census to know how many people (especially children) were previously living in the area. It would be impossible to know which one was actually worse, so the claim shouldn't be made - or if it is, it should be fully qualified.
- I removed a similar statement from a link to this page, but forgot that it was still in the article. -- Solipsist 19:28, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I removed the link again. The tsunami/earthquake has little to do with the Bhola cyclone. Yes, in one more lives were lost, and there was some misreporting, but that misreporting was not in this article (or no longer is).
- Think of it from the point of view of someone who reads the article. Out of the blue, there's a link to an earthquake with no explicit relevancy to the article. If the earthquake was misreported as the largest disaster, then a relevant comment debunking it should be placed in that article, not this one.Beetle B. 01:02, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
- I agree there shouldn't be an out-of-context link. Rather we should include a link in context, in the article. I did this by adding a "fully qualified" claim of deadliness. The wording I used is identical to what the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake article uses. Jdorje 03:04, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
- Side note: this "see also" is also in the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone article. I'm pretty sure I put it there when writing the article, mindlessly copying this article. Jdorje 05:08, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
The official figure for death toll is 500,000, according to Banglapedia (see [2]). I updated the figure in the article. I agree that the real number is not known and can be higher, the region being one of the most densely populated in the world. --Ragib 04:01, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
- This brings the question: official according to who? It should be either the government (except that government doesn't exist anymore) or some world organization (UN? WHO?), right? Banglapedia may be reliable (I don't know) but they are not an official source. Can you find an official source for the number? Jdorje 05:08, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
- Banglapedia is the "official encyclopedia of Bangladesh". So, I guess this should be an official source. I did a quick google search, and found several book references, here is an example: Natural Hazards: by Graham A Tobin, Guilford Press, 1997 ISBN1572300620. This states on page 11: "Certainly , many of the 300,000 to 500,000 who died in Bangladesh in 1970 were victims of seawater". Here is a news item in BBC, stating the death toll as 500,000. And here is another one from weather.com . The Straight Dope site puts the number to 300,000. I'm not sure if Bangladesh Govt websites has the figure... I'll have to check. --Ragib 05:46, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I presume the figure of 500,000 made it the deadliest, and not the "other estimates"? Beetle B. 23:26, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
- Any of the estimates would make it the deadliest cyclone. The next most deadly tropical cyclone is the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone which killed about 150,000. See List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_death_toll#Hurricane_and_cyclone (the #2 entry there is flat-out wrong). There is uncertainty about which of the natural disasters is deadliest. Also there's the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake which (if the numbers are to be believed) killed close to a million people - hence the "in modern times" qualifier (and this should probably also be qualified "as of 2005"). Jdorje 23:58, 15 September 2005 (UTC)