have to be long and painful. It took over four days for the first rescue ship to get there, but by the early morning hours of the first day sharks were already on the scene. The bloodbath started as soon as the sun rose up past the horizon on the 30th, and out of the 900 people floating there, only 317 were rescued alive.
The story is told most accurately by the account of Woody Eugene James, a sailor who survived that day; one of 317 survivors from the 1,196 crew members that were on board. According to Eugene's story, on the first day most people were in groups, hanging on to lifeboats, floating debris, and anything that they could find. They did head counts, and in his particular group, there were around 150 men. The waters were not too freezing, and the sea was calm, so at first there was no real panic. While there had been no message sent out, they were expected in the Philippines, so other ships would be bound to look for them at some point.
When the sharks were first spotted, it took a while before any attacked. The sharks clearly investigated their prey for a while. But by the time the attacks started, there were hundreds of them, all eager for human flesh. There were constant screams, and while the sharks started to attack during the day, they did not stop at night. People were hungry and thirsty, and fights broke out between the survivors.
On the fourth day when a plane noticed them, at first it flew by, but then it came back, and the men knew it had spotted them. It landed in the water and picked up some survivors, and later that night ships arrived to pick up the rest.
9 – Hurricane Katrina
Flooding in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
Date: August 23rd - September 3rd 2005.
Location: The Bahamas, Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Disaster Type: Destructive hurricane.
Fatalities: 1,833 deaths.
Resulting Damage: $108 billion dollars worth of mass destruction.
Hurricane Katrina will always be remembered as one of the strongest hurricanes in the history of the United States. It caused the deaths of almost two thousand people, making it the deadliest hurricane in nearly eighty years. In property damage, the total is estimated at around $108 billion, which is triple the amount of damage caused by another famous storm, Hurricane Andrew, in 1992.
The storm started over the Bahamas on August 23rd, 2005 as a tropical depression, at the time called ‘Tropical Depression Twelve’. It did not take long for meteorologists to realize that there was a major storm brewing in the Atlantic. The next morning, on August 24th, it was now bumped up to tropical storm status and given the name Katrina. By August 27th, the storm was already a Category 3 hurricane and evacuations were underway in the danger zones. The next morning it was a Category 5, the highest and deadliest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
At its peak, Hurricane Katrina had winds of 175 miles per hour and a central pressure of 902 mbar. The pressure measurement is what makes Katrina the fourth most intense Atlantic hurricane in recorded history.
Katrina made its first landfall after it had been classified as a hurricane for only two hours. It touched down between Hallandale Beach and Aventura in Florida on August 25th. It moved on to the Gulf of Mexico, where it gained most of its strength. Its second landfall was on August 29th, 2005 near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana. It had diminished to a Category 3 by then, with only 120 mph winds.
The storm continued to move inland, moving on to touch down near the Louisiana/Mississippi border, still a Category 3. It then continued strong as it moved into Mississippi, but finally weakened more than 150 miles inland. Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression, but its lingering effects were still distinguishable in the Great Lakes region on August 31st.
Katrina is most famous for the damage it caused to the city of New Orleans on the morning of August 29th, 2005. Although 80% of the city had been evacuated, there were still tens of thousands of people in their homes when the levees broke and most of the city was submerged in water. About 180,000 homes were underwater during the flood, and all the electrical and water systems ceased to function.
However, Hurricane Katrina affected more than just New Orleans. Its storm surges affected the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama as well. Almost 240 of the deaths caused by Katrina were in Mississippi, although the majority of deaths were in Louisiana, at around 1,500. It destroyed buildings and bridges and lives.
10 – The Killing Fields
Khmer Rouge victims' skulls.
Date: 1975-1979.
Location: Cambodia.
Disaster Type: Genocide.
Fatalities: 2.2 million deaths.
Resulting Damage: 95% of Buddhist temples destroyed, alongside the inhuman political crimes.
Many people have heard about the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian militia who once followed an extreme communist regime, but few know a lot of details involving what these people actually did. The killing fields are perhaps their most dreadful legacy, and refer to both a geographical place and a period in history. If you visit Cambodia, a large number of fields may be pointed out to you as the killing fields, the locations where massacres happened.
The Khmer Rouge was an extremist group who came from the Vietnamese army, mostly from North Vietnam, who established themselves in Cambodia to bring about a new communist future for the country. It was formed in 1968 and by 1975 it ruled the country, until the group was finally driven out by Vietnamese forces after they had attempted to invade back into Vietnam. However, most of their political actions pale when compared with all of the inhuman brutality they were involved in.
Most of what the Khmer Rouge did when they grabbed power was find and arrest anyone who did not swear loyalty to their new regime or were seen as a potential threat. This included everyone from ethnic Vietnamese people, Chinese people, Thai, Christians, Buddhists, to many more groups. In all, over 2 million people were arrested, with the vast majority being killed in what would become one of the biggest genocides of modern times. A recent survey showed that based on the arrangement of tombs, the killing fields alone saw 1.3 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot, the then leader of the group, was sometimes referred to as Cambodia's Hitler. Some believe that over 2.2 million people ended up being killed by this group.
The judicial process when they were in power was fairly simple. There was no court of law; instead the government would issue two warnings for small crimes, and then the person was arrested and killed. Any type of political association or opinion that the Khmer did not approve of meant instant death. The goal was to ‘purify’ the population and remove any element that had any connection to the old regime or to foreign countries. Most of the executions were done using machetes, bamboo sticks or poison, and the dead were buried in mass graves, with the killing fields being by far the most populous ones.
The Khmer Rouge funded themselves using slavery and diamond trafficking. It was not a stable economy, and in just a few years, they collapsed due to a lack of funds. In a last ditch effort, they tried to invade part of Vietnam in order to gather more people to kill or trade into slavery, but they were driven back and forced to disband. In 1997, Cambodia enlisted the UN's help to set up a genocide
