Natural disaster

“ An explosion, a railroad wreck, even a fire—these are bad enough in their pictorial effect of shattered ruins and confusion. But for giving one an oppressive sense of death-like misery, there is nothing equal to a flood.
I do not speak now of the loss of life, which is unspeakably dreadful, but of the scenic effect of the disaster. It just grips and benumbs you with its awfulness.
In the flat country of the Middle West there is less likelihood of swift, complete destruction than in narrow valleys, like those of Johnstown and Austin in Pennsylvania. ”

“ Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster. ”

“ Suddenly an ominous oppressiveness weighted the atmosphere, and, nature aghast, was as silent as death. Then from toward the south came a seismic wave, the ground trembled, heaved and burst asunder into yawning fissures, towering temples crashed to the ground in fragments, and public buildings and private dwellings were shaken from their foundations in ruinous masses. Fire added to the horror of the catastrophe and no one attempted to stay the conflagration. Terror-stricken, all who survived the sudden disaster strove to escape from the deadly peril to a place of safety. ”

“ Cities have been shaken down by earthquakes, and the ocean has swept in over the land, drowning thousands of people. Even the mountains, which stand upon broad and firm foundations, sometimes bring disaster, by means of avalanches and land-slides, to the people who live at their bases. ”

“ But the great hidden teaching of disaster is that the laws of nature are eternal and inexorable; that they move with unerring precision and resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature. ”

“ The system may have had its source, in part at least, in exaggerated accounts of those dreadful catastrophes which are occasioned by particular combinations of natural causes. Floods and volcanic eruptions, the agency of water and fire, are the chief instruments of devastation on our globe. ”

“ The flood disaster that has befallen our state is of such magnitude in loss of life and human suffering that I respectfully urge upon your honorable body the importance and propriety of making an appropriation for the succor of those in distress. ”

“ They clung to the ropes and glued their gaze upon the sight so far beneath them. The storm had magically cleared away. The sunlight now pierced the whole landscape for the first time since the disaster. The lost city, in black, shapeless ruins, lay directly beneath them.
"We will go down." The professor opened the safety-valve cautiously. "The devil has been chased away by the storm," he said emphatically. ”

“ Numbers of the inhabitants, who had carried the fear of this disaster in their minds for years, had become so alarmed by the long-continued rains, and the floods that were already upon them, took their families and fled to the high grounds on the hillsides. ”

“ Ingenious and masterful as the human intellect is in guiding and controlling the ordinary forces of nature, how impotent and insignificant it appears in the presence of such a transcendent disaster! It is well nigh inconceivable that a great section throbbing with populous towns, and resonant with the hum of industry, [Pg 112] should be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye by a mighty, raging torrent, more consuming than fire and more violent than the earthquake. ”

“ We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle and almost every animal.
“The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death. ”

“ Good God! what horror and destruction—it's impossible for me to describe—or you to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of the falling houses—and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels. ”

“ And strangely enough, if there are but few references to the problem in all our rapidly-growing literature, it is not because catastrophies are few. Indeed it would seem that with the advent of the industrial age, disasters grow more frequent every year. [1] Many are small, no doubt, touching but the life of a village or a borough—a broken dyke, a bridge swept out by ice, a caved-in mine. Others again write themselves on the pages of History—an Ohio flood, an Omaha tornado, a Chicago fire, a San Francisco earthquake, a Halifax explosion. ”

“ Loud thunder peals in the sky, the roaring hurricane enters into fearful conflict with the warring trees, and the rain descends, not in tiny drizzles, but in torrents; and its voice, as it buries itself in square miles of standing forest, is like the roar of many waters. Cascades, starting into life, leap gladly from the hill-side. ”

“ Just for one moment think—we in our warm, comfortable houses, comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy—of the half million of our fellow creatures out yonder shivering and trembling and dying, in the grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by "the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless, hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair. ”

“ As we gaze at the revolutions and wars that form the storm-centres of the past century, we can now see some of the causes that brought about those storms. If we survey them with discerning eye, we soon begin to see that, in the main, the cyclonic disturbances had their origins in two great natural impulses of the civilised races of mankind. ”

“ The idea is that on a wet and slippery day mere exercise of human caution would be sufficient to avert the disaster, but happening in bright, dry weather, it becomes indubitably a manifestation of the will of Heaven. ”

“ On the fourth day of the first month of the thirty-fourth year, a great and terrible tempest arose, the horrors of which exceeded all others since the deluge. Huge tidal waves swept the coasts, swift cyclones and irresistible hurricanes mowed down forest, wilderness, city and tower, leaving blank desolation in their train; the earth trembled to its foundations, belched forth fire, uprose in giant peaks or sank in deep abysses. ”

“ The hurricane runs in front, heaving out the rocks with force. At once with a battle shout, and armed with the courage of despair, valiantly move the new bodies of waves. They will fall, or they will destroy this dam, or the sea will be their tomb! ”

“ Each felt the crisis of their fate had arrived. Nature, when her mightiest agencies are about to go forth in the hurricane, the earthquake, or the volcanic eruption, is for the moment breathless. So the human soul anticipates its most direful trials by utter stillness. ”

“ Thunder and lightning came and shook the world with terror: mighty trees were riven and shattered, and fires swept through forest and plain, leaving blackness and desolation behind. Then came floods, that covered the low-lying parts of the earth, and made of the rivers roaring torrents, that ran madly to the sea. The world trembled in the terror of the wrath of Pund-jel.
And yet, men had grown so wise and cunning that not very many died. When the whirlwinds and hurricanes came, they crept into holes in the hill-sides, or sheltered themselves in deep gullies. ”

“ But it is a notorious fact that inhabitants of countries subject to earthquakes and volcanoes get inured to all idea of danger, and walk on the very brink of disaster with a light and merry heart, indifferent to the lessons of experience or the fate of their predecessors, and on that New Year’s Day the orgies of the Buccaneers were equalled, if not excelled, by many of the inhabitants. ”

“ Moreover, the one we inhabit is the home of the earthquake and the volcano; hurricanes and tornadoes are born and bred on every continent and island; plague and pestilence ride on every breeze; death and destruction waste at noonday. ”

“ The flood, and swallowed up the fallow waves,
The struggling sea—the abyss devoured it all. 1590
Yet not the waves alone it swallowed up;
But fourteen men, worst caitiffs of the throng,
Went headlong to destruction with the flood
Under the yawning earth. Then sore afraid
Was many a heart at that calamity;
They feared the slaughter both of men and wives,
A yet more wretched season of distress,
When once those sin-stained cruel murderers,
Those warriors fierce, plunged headlong down the abyss. ”

“ Then fearfully a quake Pervades the lands, and 'long the lofty skies Run the far rumblings. For at such a time Nigh the whole tempest quakes, shook through and through, And roused are the roarings,—from which shock Comes such resounding and abounding rain, That all the murky ether seems to turn Now into rain, and, as it tumbles down, To summon the fields back to primeval floods: So big the rains that be sent down on men By burst of cloud and by the hurricane, What time the thunder-clap, from burning bolt That cracks the cloud, flies forth along. ”

“ Sometimes the level plain is broken up into savage ridges and awful canons, along whose arid bottoms no water streams. As you stagger through their chaotic bottoms, you see vast boulders poised overhead, tottering to a fall; a shiver of earthquake, a breath of hurricane, and they come crashing and splintering in destruction down. Along the sides of these acclivities extend long, level lines and furrows, marks of where the ocean flowed ages ago. ”

“ Disease consequent upon the reaction after the excitement and hardships of the past week threatens to make sad inroads into the portion of the population that still remains alive. The condition of the ruins, filled with dead bodies, menaces a still more serious situation, which is being delayed, providentially, by the continued cool weather. Danger hangs over the unhappy town from another source. ”

“ MYRIAD LIVES LOST IN GREAT DISASTERS. “If you will refer to the statistical sources of information you will find that in one hundred and fifty years, a mere moment in the life of this world and its races, and add up the round thousands only and leave out the hundreds of lives which are charged to lesser lists the sum will reach 1,563,000 souls in the thirty-seven most important earthquake, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and inundations that have visited the earth. ”

“ The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, and other enormous accumulations of sound. ”

“ A romantic valley, filled with busy factories, flourishing places of business, multitudes of happy homes and families, has been suddenly transformed into a scene of awful desolation. Frightful ravages of Flood and Fire have produced in one short hour a destruction which surpasses the records of all modern disasters. No calamity in recent times has so appalled the civilized world. What was a peaceful, prosperous valley a little time ago is to-day a huge sepulchre, filled with the shattered ruins of houses, factories, banks, churches, and the ghastly corpses of the dead. ”

“ Though it is only at comparatively rare intervals that the winds attain the development of a hurricane, the destruction of life and property which they occasion, both by sea and land, is in the aggregate of no small moment. ”

“ Everywhere building was going on, indicating hopeful fortunes, or, more likely, recent disaster, for it is the prevailing dampness alone that saves the whole mountainside from being swept by fires, and they are all too frequent as it is. ”

“ Every man who, within thirty years, had put up a wooden house in a city whose familiar breezes were gales, and whose gales were hurricanes, solicited that rain of fire. They who, hasting to be rich, fell into the snare of cheap and dangerous building, digged, every man, a pit for his neighbor's feet as well as for his own. The scrutable aspect of the calamity was that it had not come years before. ”

“ The crash of the thunderbolt, the bellowing of the volcano, the awful groaning of the earthquake, the roar of the hurricane, the reverberating peals of loudest thunder, any of these, or all combined, are as nothing compared with the tumult raging over every square mile, every square yard, of the surface of each one among the stars. ”

“ And naught can present so sombre and terrifying an aspect as those phantoms of the air, when mailed with the lightning and flying with the storm.
Yet, upon the cloud the welfare of the human race is dependent, as much as upon any other force in nature: for rain or drouth, famine or plenty, snow or flood, all follow in its path. More than once has rain or storm decided the destiny of nations. ”

“ The scenes were full of human pathos. Torn bodies, disfigured almost beyond recognition, were being dug from debris. Whole families, marooned for four long days and nights in the upper stories of houses that had escaped as if by miracle, many of them without food or water and in fear of constant death by flood or flame, were being reached by rescuers.
Many of those rescued were in a critical condition from the long hours they had spent in the bitter cold—their clothing soaked by the incessant rainfall of three days and nights and no fuel or bedding with which to combat their fearful condition. ”

“ The wildest cries of agony and fear arose from below, where row beyond row of the thickly crowded streets swayed backwards and forwards, like the agitated waves of the ocean, when the first blast of the hurricane is felt ”