Part #212: Acts of God
“It is thanks to the appalling safety record of the last Democratic Unionist government and Terry Blake/Daniella Laughton’s lack of investment in infrastructure
(Mary, double check if most plausible smoking gun happened under Blake or Laughton) that Croham Hall suffered such damage in the recent floods. A New Doradist government would ensure proper investment to ensure that all public buildings are fully compliant with the National Building Safety Code and equipped with
(Mary, put smoking gun component here—foundations, drainage, whatever) that will last for 10/15/20 years
(Mary, put in a quick quist to Professor Douglas at New College, or Mick Davis from Greele and Solomon’s if you can’t get the Prof – find out what a plausible timescale is) For now we will work together to rebuild from this tragedy but I ask you, do not entirely allow this memory to fade when it comes time once again to choose those who represent you at the highest level of government...”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
Forty-five minutes have now passed and Lieutenant Tindale and I still have yet to hear from Captain MacCauley’s team. I will keep you updated but there is little we can do but evacuate if anything has gone wrong. With a heavy heart I would ask the Institute to begin considering alternative rescue plans—and possibly with more of our people to rescue. And furthermore, I find myself running short of proper history books, for Bes. Batten-Hale’s collection is proving thinner than I had hoped...
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From: “The Breakspear Compendium of World Records” (2014 Edition)—
WORLD’S BIGGEST DOG. Digby, an Irish Wolfhound who resides with Mr and Mrs W. Vandusen of Ticonderoga, New England, ENA, is a staggering 41.3 English inches tall. However, if we are talking about mass rather than height—
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(Dr. David Wostyn)
Er, sorry about that, fed the wrong page into the digitiser. Here we are...
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From: “The Breakspear Compendium of World Records” (2014 Edition)—
SECTION 8: NATURAL DISASTERS
There are some records we don’t like to see broken, and many of them fall under this category: the number of people killed, the number of houses destroyed, the number of fields poisoned. But as the world’s population grows, sadly the death toll of such disasters tends to grow with it—even as we improve our technology and practices to try to prevent or mitigate such events. Often, despite our best efforts, they are beyond our control...
HISTORY’S DEADLIEST EARTHQUAKE. Although many of us may think of the Cometa earthquake of 1906 or the Zone14Urb2 earthquake of 1960, in fact the quake which led to the single largest loss of life occurred in China’s Shaanxi Province in the year 1556—exacerbated by the fact that many of those who died were living in artificial dwellings called
yaodongs excavated from caves. This quake, known as the Jiajing Great Earthquake, killed an estimated minimum of 800,000 people, around 60% of the province’s population as well as many from neighbouring provinces and effectively destroyed an entire region of China. It is estimated to have measured approximately J2 on the Benevento scale, very high but still less than the K1 of the aforementioned Combine earthquake of 1960. This ignores examples of earthquakes triggering marémotos [1] in oceanic regions, which can often be more devastating that the original quake—as the world learned to its horror ten years ago when the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre killed over 250,000 people in countries bordering the Indian Ocean and set back the Global Reconstruction Programme by years. This was the deadliest marémoto in history. Prior to this point, the holder of the dubious crown is disputed between the explosion of Thera/Santorini circa 1600 BC and its devastation of the Minoan culture (a possible inspiration for the legend of Atlantis) and, more recently, the marémoto stemming from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed not only people in Portugal but as far away as the British Isles. Both of these are estimated to have killed approximately 100,000, so sadly this is one record smashed in recent years we did not want to see.
VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS. A definitive answer cannot be given for the largest volcanic eruption in history, as many of them have taken place out of direct sight of human eye and early records are often spotty and reconstructed based on secondary evidence. For example, the eruption of Zone13Mont19 (Huaynaputina) in the year 1600 is estimated to be the largest volcanic explosion in South American history but its impact was mostly noted by the secondary impact that the volcanic ash and dust it spewed in the atmosphere caused crop failures and a devastating famine in Russia. Two centuries later in 1815, Zone7Mont1 (Mount Tambora) on the island then called Sumbawa erupted in an explosion heard as far away as Zone7Urb1 (Batavia), almost 800 miles away. This eruption is not only believed to have destroyed an indigenous culture on the island, but once again injected such high levels of ash and dust into the atmosphere that it let to the so-called ‘Year Without A Summer’ of 1816, when crops failed across much of the world and famine and starvation ensued. The devastation was particularly acute in Europe and in China, both recovering from recent major wars, and the global death toll is estimated to be approximately 100,000. The largest human death toll
directly attributable to a volcanic eruption is generally believed to be that of Krakatoa in 1883, which killed at least 30,000 people. The Laki eruption in Iceland in 1783 also deserves mention, as (as well as indirectly leading to many deaths through its effects on the atmosphere) it killed over 9,000 people in Iceland itself, which was a quarter of the island’s small population and led to a new settlement drive by its new British overlords, in many ways leading to the Icelandic culture we know today.[2] But probably the most famous of all volcanic eruptions in the West remains Vesuvius in AD 79, which of course destroyed the town of Pompeii and killed approximately 18,000 people. Despite several overly dramatic films which might make one think otherwise, the 1980 eruption of Mount North/Loowit in Drakesland, ENA led to ‘only’ 63 deaths.[3]
DELUGES AND OTHER FLOODS. The rivers are China for notorious for changing course erratically and causing floods as their beds are subject to elevation (in part due to man-made effects). The Yellow (Huanghe) River in particular is poetically known as ‘the Scourge of the Sons of Han’ due to its impact on the country. It is only because of some of the most ambitious canal and irrigation water control systems attempted from the ancient world onwards that China has not faced more devastation than it has, but it nonetheless seizes most of the top spots on the unenviable list of deadliest floods. The most devastating Chinese flood recorded is that of 1939, when the Yangtze and Huai Rivers both burst their banks after heavy rainfall. The city of Jiangning on its floodplain was particularly badly hit and water flooding down the Grand Canal (one of the aforementioned ancient waterworks of China) broke flood defences on the lake between Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The exact death toll remains disputed but may be as high as 3 million. Though less deadly, the Chinese floods of the 1850s are also worth noting here as they came together with the Yellow River changing its course so radically that it severed the Grand Canal connection at Shandong and the region’s economy was changed forever; furthermore the floods also altered the course of history by forcing both the Chinese factions at the time to focus on recovering from their devastation, leading to a period of piece between the two appropriately named ‘Riverine Wars’. At the end of the second, though it was over a decade after the Yellow River had shifted, the lack of detailed surveys due to the intermittent civil war meant that postwar borders were drawn based on the known former course of the river, leading to some disputes later on. By contrast, the deadliest flood outside China remains the St Felix’s Flood of 1530 in Belgium (another country which has by necessity produced brilliant works of water control) and the death toll is estimated at approximately 100,000.[4]
BIGGEST HYPERSTORMS. Since records began, hyperstorms (also known as Typhoons in the Pacific and Huracáns in the Atlantic) have caused devastation in countries bordering those oceans with both numbing inevitability and yet erratic irregularity. The death toll is much higher for most Pacific Typhoons than Atlantic Huracáns, partly because of the generally higher and denser population in the countries bordering the former. The only Huracán even to get into the top 30 is the Great Huracán of 1790, which killed over 20,000 people in the British West Indies—leading to assistance from Carolina and probably a major cause in some of the islands later becoming part of it.[5] This figure nonetheless pales into insignificance beside the Typhoon death tolls, such as the Hooghly Cyclone of 1737 (approx. 300,000) the Annam Typhoon of 1877 (est. 250,000) and the Hainan Disaster of 1860 (50,000) which ultimately led to European colonial withdrawal from the island and it becoming Chinese again. Many other hyperstorms have also had political impact, such as the Great Gujarat Storm of 1979 causing the food shortages which were a major cause in the popular overthrow of the Ram Kumar regime in Panchala in 1982. Unfortunately, the deadliest such hyperstorms are not restricted to past centuries, and the Calcutta Typhoon of 2009 remains the biggest single loss of life to a natural disaster since the Fiesta de San Esteban Massacre in 2004. It is worth noting that while the Huracáns of the Atlantic have not inflicted such devastating losses of life, they have continued to wreak devastation on buildings, agriculture and other wealth along the east coast of the Americas. Indeed, this devastation was so visible that for years many assumed that the reports of few deaths from the Combine Zones bordering the ocean were nothing but VoxHumana propaganda—despite occasional instances such as the Boston Storm of 1970 demonstrating the same effects to the Free World. Huracán deaths are as often due to people ignoring timely warnings from the authorities, or being unable to flee due to other crises such as wars and fuel shortages, as they are unavoidable losses of life. Unfortunately, in the case of the Pacific Typhoons, many of their deaths remain in the categoty of unavoidable—until technology advances to the point that the countries in question are able to construct better defences and warning systems.
INFOBOX: FASCINATING FACT: Though hyperstorms can be devastating, they can also bring people together.
(Painting of three men in military uniforms of green, tan and grey, all with impressive sideburns, shaking hands in front of suspiciously artificial-looking display of three crossed flags, all tattered and torn by a stylised storm in the background). The Santa Eufemia Huracán of 1872 made landfall on September 16th (St Euphemia’s Day) not far from the city of Nouvelle-Orléans. French rule in what was left of Louisiana had been increasingly shaky since the Great American War and enforced only by excessive numbers of troops that effectively meant the colony was always run at a steep loss from the point of view of the Comptroller-General’s treasury. Even worse, Governor Laurent Lequiller was slain in the early hours of the Huracán’s impact when his boat was overturned: his supporters claimed that he was crossing Lake Pontchartrain to bring orders to those on the southern peninsula closer to the storm, but popular belief was that he had been trying to escape and abandon the people of the city to the storm’s ravages. Many people in the city rose up against those who were often now seen as ‘occupiers’, metropolitan Frenchmen selected so as to have no ties to the city. There was fighting even as the high-velocty winds tore the city apart. Floods drowned some while a possibly apocryphal story said two men held a long swordfight atop the towers of St Louis Cathedral, only for both to be struck by lighting as the storm swept over them and toppled the towers. Such tales of ‘fighting in a burning house’ would be used by Raúl Caraíbas as parables in his books. In the devastating aftermath of the storm (which is believed to have killed perhaps 2,000 people, though the fighting makes it hard to differentiate the numbers) no help came from France, at the time obsessed with a phantom German invasion. Meridian, Carolinian and American troops gathered at the border, eyeing each other while the Orléanais drowned and starved. Then the Carolinian General Roderick Peters (also sometimes known as Rodrigo Pérez; he had married a Meridian wife) took the first move, approaching his American counterpart Henry Day with a flag of truce and threw down his weapons as a token of honesty. Day, the son of a Great American War general who had bitterly fought the Carolinians, hesitated but in the end accepted Peters’ mission. Together with Alonso Fernández, a Mexican officer with Meridian connections of his own, the three agreed not to quarrel over the city (regardless of what their government Lectels told them) but to cooperate in a humanitarian mission to save its people. An attempted court-martial of General Day by fire-breathing Supremacists in Parliament led to a public outcry and then-obscure future President Michael Chamberlain rising to prominence as Day’s biggest defender in Parliament. As well as saving thousands of lives and establishing the Free City of Nouvelle-Orléans—relegating a humiliated France’s final American possessions to its islands in the Lesser Antilles—the Santa Eufemia Intervention led to a warming of relations between the ENA and Carolina, and ultimately the UPSA—the so-called Seventies Thaw. For the first time in years Novamundine politicians began to focus on promoting peaceful trade and prosperity rather than banging the drum of brinksmanship, and the Long Peace became the Gilded Age. Later generations would so name it as they would look back in nostalgia on such a time of peaceful cooperation. For years afterwards descendants of the principals involved in the rescue effort have met every year in Nouvelle-Orléans on the anniversary of the disaster to honour their ancestors. Though this custom was held in abeyance during the worst Black Scare periods of the twentieth century, it has recently been revived...
[1] A Spanish term for tsunami, literally ‘the sea moves’ (by analogy to terramoto for earthquake). Tsunami, being a Japanese name, is not widely known in TTL and ‘tidal wave’ has been discouraged for the same reasons as OTL (i.e. it’s a misleading term stemming from the fact that a tsunami has a high
tidal bore, but it has nothing to do with tides themselves).
[3] “New” is a bit misleading considering the island had been British for decades at this point.
[3] This is of course OTL’s Mount St Helens; it was named for Captain North of the
Enterprize mission in TTL and there remains some political argument over whether to use this name or the native one (rather, one of the native ones) Loowit—named along with two neighbouring mountains for members of a mythical love triangle of gods transformed into mountains by their chief.
[4] Like similar works in OTL, this just uses the name of the current nation state in which the flood happened—at the time of the flood it was part of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ of Charles V’s Holy Roman Empire.
[5] This is another weasel-words comment, as such books don’t go into detail on the possesion of islands coming and going over time.