Natural Disasters

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Lacey Olsen

Instructor Jill Lockard

GO125

28 Sept 2014

The Central China Floods of 1931

Unusual weather patterns from the years 1928-1930 came together to create the twentieth century’s worst natural disaster. Starting in 1928 and lasting through the winter of 1930 China suffered through a major drought, then the winter brought on severe blizzards and snowfall. Completely unexpected by the Chinese people, the summer of 1931 unleashed 24 in. of rainfall, this coupled with the melting snow and ice of the previous winter lead into massive flooding of major river systems. The rivers swelled to 53 feet above normal.

The Yangtze River and Yellow River overflow in early August killing and estimated 145,000 people (History of Disasters). Huai River floods the then Chinese capitol city of Najing, this kills million and does billions of dollars in todays standard of damage. The 25th of August brings another tragedy, when the dikes of the Gaoyou Lake break and kill an estimated 200,000 residents while they slept. While rainfall and the melting of ice and snow caused flooding the main cause of most of damage to banks and dikes was the record breaking 9 cyclones China experienced that year.

China’s average cyclone threat was 2 a year, in 1931 there were 7 in July alone (History of Disasters). Due to a series of extremely unusual weather patterns, the summer of 1931 witnessed the death of an estimated 3.7 million people. This

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disaster was estimated to cost 9 million dollars in 1931, this is equivalent to 14.1 billion dollars in today’s money (Simpson et al.). This number may seem low but this is due to the low cost and poor structures of the effected area. With the financial burden and major loss of life recovery was near impossible.

While many countries attempted to assist in the recovery process, lack of funding and the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War put rebuilding preventative measures on the back burner....