I noticed Steve Aplin mentioned the Banqiao hydro dam event. I understood that 170,000 people perished from this hydro dam failure around 1975. He states that it’s more like 85,000. Either way, this is a lot of people.

I decided to make a quick graph to show this in comparison with events like Chernobyl. The difficulty is that it would take 1700 Chernobyl sized events to match the single Banqiao event. Or 56 Titanic Disasters. So I decided to use circles with the area representing the death tolls. We still have graph that’s fairly hard to grasp.

Event                        Count   Radius
Banquio Homeless          11000000  1871.21
Banquio Deaths               85000   164.49
Titanic Deaths                1517    21.97
Chernobyl                       50     3.99
Belo Monte Dam Construction  40000   112.84

Here is Banqiao, Titanic and Chernobyl:

Events such as Fukushima have not caused any deaths yet so it cannot be shown on this graph. Here’s another blog chart showing the displacement of people (loss of homes).

The loss of homes from the Banqiao hydro dam failure is so massive it even dwarfs the loss of homes for the Bele Monte Dam in Brazil. This one hasn’t been built yet. That’s just the loss of homes if the project goes well. I’m looking for some estimates on how many people will perish during it’s construction but haven’t found anything.

I had to add a magnifier because the Chernobyl became less than a pixel.

Chernobyl is the biggest nuclear related disaster. Here are a few more.