Flood by John Withington6/9/2023 Then 2012 saw the biggest storm ever in the Atlantic – ‘Superstorm Sandy’ – 900 miles across. The global insurance giant, Munich Re, said 2011 was the costliest year in history for natural disasters. Fierce rain storms caused 500 deaths from mudslides in Brazil, the US had its worst tornado season since 1925, and Hurricane Irene became the first natural disaster to shut down New York’s subway system. Pakistan was flooded out again in 2011, while Tropical Storm Nock-Ten brought Thailand’s worst floods in half a century. In 2010, up to 20 million people were caught up in floods in Pakistan caused by the most torrential monsoon rains in 80 years, and about 1,750 were killed. The following year, an American meteorologist reported that storms were 50 percent more powerful and were lasting 60 per cent longer than in 1949, and in August 2005, Hurricane Katarina became the costliest storm in history. Disaster historian John Withington’s new book, Storm: Nature and Culture, tells how a hurricane was seen developing off the coast of Brazil for the first time ever in 2004. And it was not just 2013-4, four of the five wettest years in UK history have happened since 2000. The UK winter of 2013-4 was unusually turbulent – from the St Jude’s storm of 27 October which killed four people, through a January when parts of the Somerset Levels had their worst floods in a century to a February that saw the main railway line to the West Country washed away.
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