The 5 Worst Man-Made Disasters

When do we speak of a catastrophe? Oxford Languages ​​defines the term as a ‘serious accident’, a ‘natural event with devastating consequences’ and a ‘terrible, unforeseen, economic catastrophe’.

While ‘serious accident’ includes almost all events with serious consequences, the final definition ‘terrible, unforeseen, economic catastrophe’ excludes considerably more events. Including wars. Because these are not unexpected, but consciously created.

But even with this narrower definition, qualifying and quantifying disasters becomes a macabre and subjective matter. The list therefore makes no claim to completeness.

In Bhopal, the capital of the Indian province of Madhya Pradesh in the heart of India, the chemical factory is located in the middle of a slum. Within a radius of one kilometer, 100,000 people live in poor conditions. Some of them work at UCIL (Union Carbide India Limited). Carbaryl is produced there. Some call it a pesticide, others a pesticide. It is sold in the US under the brand name Sevin. Carbaryl is not approved in Switzerland and the EU. It kills non-selectively, including beneficial animals such as bees. And on the night of December 2 to 3, 1984, thousands of people died.

The factory in Bhopal is dilapidated and Sevin’s sales are declining. And so savings are made. In terms of materials, in terms of personnel. When the accident occurs, production is at a standstill, but the warehouses are full. Only maintenance work is underway – and this results in transferring water to a tank containing methyl isocyanate (MIC). The pressure increases so much that the pressure relief valves fail and a cloud weighing tons of highly toxic gases is released into the environment. The alarm goes off at the factory – and is immediately switched off again. Otherwise the sirens remain silent. The system installed to protect the population had previously been deactivated. While the employees of the chemical plant move against the wind away from the disaster, the surrounding residents are left to their fate.

The cloud is now slowly spreading in the immediate area. 500,000 people are exposed to the toxic gases. MIC is heavier than air and the concentration of the poison increases as it gets closer to the ground. That’s why it hits children particularly hard. The poison causes chemical burns, blinds the eyes, causes skin irritation, burning sensation in the lungs, shortness of breath and abdominal pain. The next morning, thousands of people lie dead in their huts, asphyxiated or suffering from circulatory collapse. It is not known exactly how many there are. Estimates range from 3,000 to 25,000 direct victims of the gas cloud. Half a million people are still feeling the consequences years later. The Bhopal disaster is still considered the worst chemical disaster in human history.

Of the originally demanded 3 billion in damages, the responsible American company Union Carbide has so far paid only 470 million.

Personal career ambitions, a strong hierarchy gap and a lack of knowledge about the weaknesses of one’s own technology led to an unprecedented nuclear catastrophe in 1986 in what is now Ukraine.

Under the leadership of the ambitious Anatoly Dyatlov, a test of the emergency power supply was carried out in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986. Dyatlov complied with the tests despite several warnings. During this time, several operator errors, safety violations and unforeseen chemical reactions occurred, leading to two major explosions. These destroyed the Unit 4 reactor roof, which weighed more than 1,000 tons, shortly after midnight on Saturday, April 26, 1986, releasing huge amounts of radioactive material and dust into the atmosphere.

The catastrophe initially remained hidden. Hours after the destruction, shift manager Akimov reported that the power plant was intact. Not only the state government in Moscow, but also the residents of the nearby city of Pripyat were left in the dark.

Only on Monday evening, about two days after the explosions, after a nuclear power plant in Sweden reported too high radioactive values, did the Soviet news agency TASS report an incident in Chernobyl.

The clean-up work proved to be an enormous challenge due to the enormous radioactive radiation and a graphite fire. So-called “liquidators” were used. The majority of these were conscripted soldiers sent to extremely polluted areas for 100 rubles (about $100 at the time). For example, on the roof of reactor block 3. There were highly radioactive chunks of graphite that had been thrown there by the explosion. The radiation on the roof was so high that cleaning robots from Germany and Japan gave up after a few seconds. So people had to participate.

According to Greenpeace nuclear physicist Heinz Smital, exposure to radiation of one sievert is only 10 to 20 percent fatal. Four sieverts are 50 percent lethal and seven sieverts are approximately 100 percent lethal. There is hardly any chance of survival. The radiation exposure to which the curators were exposed on the roof of block No. 3 is estimated at a maximum of 15 Sieverts. That’s why an operation there only took 40 seconds. During this time, the liquidators had to shovel as many pieces of graphite into the abyss as possible. Some firefighters who were the first to arrive at the scene of the accident were reported to have been exposed to 16 sieverts.

Over the years, up to 800,000 liquidators have been deployed from what is now Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Despite the enormous radiation exposure, only a few direct fatalities from Chernobyl are known. There is secrecy – and chaos in the registrations. So far, only Ukraine has published figures. In April 1998, then Health Minister Andrei Serdiuk reported that more than 12,500 Ukrainian liquidators had died as a result of the Chernobyl operation.

It is not a single event, but a series over the past 50 years that ensures that the Niger Delta appears in this sad list. In the fifteen years between 1976 and 1991 alone, 2,976 oil spills occurred there. In 1998, more than a thousand people died when a poorly maintained pipeline exploded due to a lit cigarette. Two years later, more than 200 people, including many schoolchildren, were injured in a similar accident. Leaks in two pipelines released hundreds of millions of liters of oil in 2008 and 2010. The operators Shell and ExxonMobile are trying to cover up the incidents, which cost tens of thousands of fishermen and farmers their livelihoods.

It is estimated that about two billion liters of crude oil has seeped into the Niger Delta in recent decades. As a result, life expectancy has fallen by ten years for 30 million residents. Restoring the delta will take at least thirty years and cost well over a billion dollars.

Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland had warned in 1974 that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could lower the ozone concentration around the Earth, but initially the scientists were not taken seriously. When in 1985 three British researchers showed that a huge hole in the ozone layer had actually opened above the South Pole, the panic was even greater.

The ozone in the ozone layer, in the stratosphere at an altitude of 25 to 30 kilometers, protects people, animals and plants against the sun’s harmful UV-C and UV-B radiation. UV-B radiation can destroy cells in living things and leads to an increased risk of skin cancer in humans. But that is not enough. Too much UV radiation increases the risk of developing cataracts or an immune deficiency. In addition, established natural cycles are broken.

Concrete figures on the consequences of the ozone hole only exist in the form of estimates. According to UN scientist JC van der Leun, the ozone hole was responsible for 270,000 cases of skin cancer per year in the 1990s. About five percent of cases are fatal. Accordingly, over a hundred thousand people have died in recent decades due to the ozone hole. This only includes cases of skin cancer.

Fortunately, the global community responded quickly and decisively. The CFCs responsible for this, found in aerosol cans, air conditioning systems, refrigerators and chests, insulation, pillows and upholstery, were banned under the Montreal Protocol in 1987, two years after the deadly hole was discovered. Today it is believed that the ozone hole will close again by 2066. Climate change could slow down this process.

If you throw a frog into hot water, it will jump out again. On the other hand, if the pot of water is heated slowly, it will remain in it until it is boiled alive. The cruel image fits with how people deal with climate change. Apart from a lot of croaking, there was little movement.

And so the average temperature on this planet continues to rise, increasing the chance of extreme weather. But there have always been floods in Florida. Just like deadly showers in China – or Europe. That is why climate change is so difficult to understand. That is why countermeasures that sometimes affect our quality of life are so difficult to implement.

As with the ozone hole, exact numbers of climate change victims are not possible. Would the floods in Greece have happened in September 2023 without warming? Or would they simply have been less strong? What about the flood of the century in Germany in July 2021, which killed more than 180 people? Although it is not possible to make a direct connection with climate change, one thing is clear: it increases the risk of these types of disasters.

What is possible is to calculate the statistical increase in weather extremes – and predict the number of victims. That’s exactly what a 2021 study macabrely titled “The Mortality Cost of Carbon” did.

The article, published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’, discusses various scenarios. Global warming of 4.1 degrees would cause 83 million heat-related deaths in the second half of the century. Deaths due to storms and floods are not included in this figure. If humanity manages to limit global warming to 2.4 degrees, this number will shrink by 74 million to 9 million.

The report ‘Consequences of climate change for global health’, recently presented in Davos, takes into account six consequences of climate change (floods, droughts, heat waves, tropical storms, forest fires and rising sea levels). With a warming of 2.4 degrees, the authors assume 14.5 million deaths in 2050.

Spin it any way you want: climate change is by far the deadliest man-made catastrophe. A glimmer of hope remains: the problems have largely been identified. And humanity already has the means to prevent the worst.