The Insane Story Of The Deadliest Storm In Human History

earlier this month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their summary of weather disasters for the United States in 2022 what they found was that there were 18 weather or climate related events that caused more than a billion dollars in damage including everything from droughts to floods to wildfires to severe storms hurricanes and winter storms this is more than double the average of 7.9 since 1980 and led to the deaths of 474 people each death is a tragedy of course but 474 is practically nothing compared to a cyclone that struck South Asia in 1970. this one storm killed 600 000 people in one night Millions more died in the aftermath of the storm including a famine a genocide and a war that believe it or not came this close to nuclear Armageddon this was by any conceivable measure the deadliest storm of all time a storm that literally almost ended the world chances are you've never heard about it [Music] okay yeah I know everything I just said sounded super hyperbolic and way over the top but uh you're just gonna have to get used to that because everything about those stories over the top it also just happens to be true the storm in question made landfall on November 12 1970 in Bangladesh and it came to be known as the Bola Cyclone named after one of the many islands that pretty much just wiped off the face of the Earth and the thing is it wasn't even that bad of a storm I mean don't get me wrong it was it was a bad storm but it was more just a Confluence of unlucky factors that made it so deadly a perfect storm if you will that perfect storm is what should have been the name of the book but Sebastian younger already yeah that's Scott Carney an anthropologist an author who wrote a book called The Vortex about the Bola Cyclone I recently interviewed him for my podcast links down in the description now it was I think it was like a category 4 hurricane so it wasn't even the the highest level category but we still were having sustained winds of at least 140 miles an hour so pretty big but it's it's really the timing when it hit right so it comes in during a full moon so you already have high and at high tide and that's when it makes landfill so when you're dealing with islands that are only like three feet off of sea level when you have a 20-foot storm surge the only people who survive were the people who climb trees and stay there overnight in 1970 Bangladesh had a population of 64.2 million people spread across 144 000 square kilometers that's about the same size as the state of Iowa with 2.9 Million residents today why do so many people live there well for the same reason that the Egyptians were able to survive as an Empire Egypt and Bangladesh are both situated on river deltas just as the Nile enriches the soil of Egypt the Ganges enriches the soil of Bangladesh both Rivers dragged nutrients from Upstream into the ocean and Bangladesh the nutrient support bumper crops of rice tea and jute a kind of fiber that's used in coffee bags and when the Bola Cyclone Struck it depopulated we're using the word depopulated here entire islands in the Ganges Delta early reports focused on the largest island bolo which is how the Cyclone got its name but there are harrowing stories of survival and and loss from all over the area including the island of manpura where as Scott details in his book there lived a young man named Muhammad high so Muhammad Hayes is like a teenager 18 years old loves football you know fishes during the day and like dreams of bigger things in his life and he's in this tiny little like clay Village uh clay house and uh the the storm surge car is coming in so all of his family members like okay we've been through a lot of cyclones before we'll just gather up all the animals we'll all just sit in our like in our two-story house and and wait out the storm the storm starts coming up and he said the water starts filling up his house and like you know his family is reading the Quran trying to pray the storm away it's not working and they climb up to the second story of their house and the water keeps on going up and my high actually breaks through the roof through the tin roof and is telling his family to come up as their sort of you know their chins are just above the water level and uh you know he decides that he has to jump to a tree and he'll get all of his family to go to the palm tree that's right next to the house he jumps on it and the call is calling back to his family for hours as these you know 140 mile an hour winds are all around him and his entire family drowns that and and then the eye goes over him and there's this dead silence you know raging winds and then in a second it all turns to nothing it's like it's just Dead Calm you're like whoa is it over and then and then and then he looks around he talks to an uncle a neighboring house and and there's only one Survivor over there and then the storm all kept back up again and he has to hold on for another six or seven hours finally in the early hours of the morning the weather had passed and he was able to climb down from the tree but sadly this was just the beginning of the disaster for him all told over 40 000 of manpura's 50 000 inhabitants were dead he next week helping to bury corpses and mass Graves all over the island and later became an aid worker later still it became a freedom fighter and there are thousands of similar stories from this Cyclone one grandmother survived because her servants tied her to a tree and then all the servants drowned we also interviewed one guy and we didn't use him in the book but he spent the whole night in a tree with a nest of king cobras because they all kind of us Dave too and the cobras weren't going to go biting because they were you know also traumatized by this yeah now you might wonder why nobody tried to warn the people of Bola and manpura and all these other Islands to evacuate well the irony is if you want to use the word irony is that the science of meteorology had recently just taken a huge step forward a prototype weather satellite called idos one had just launched in January of 1970. it was meant to provide infrared and visual photographs from meteorologists to analyze and it did it worked perfectly the problem was a turnaround time for example there was a meteorologist named Neil Frank he's kind of a legendary meteorologist at this point he later went on to become the director of the National Hurricane Center in Florida but he received a picture of the Bola Cyclone from shortly before landfall he immediately saw the danger in this storm and would have sent warnings worldwide the only problem is it was a week old by the time it came across his desk he gets the the film role late to develop it and um and you know the New York Times reports in the storm before he knows what's going on now this wasn't idos one's fault it was working perfectly it snapped the picture on November 12th and transmitted it to Noah that day the problem was there was no internet back then that picture today could just be emailed to Neil Frank he would have had it in nanoseconds but back then they had to actually put it in an envelope and physically mail it to him and it was this disaster and others like it that led to the building of the infrastructure that made it possible to get that information around the world in a timely manner of the internet and all that stuff we completely take for granted today of course there were also local meteorologists that saw it coming with radar and whatnot and they knew what they were looking at and they knew how dangerous it was the problem was idos one wasn't the only new thing in the meteorological World they had also just updated their warning system and then meanwhile there's all these like weird warnings coming in off the radio system that they'd never heard before because Pakistan has just instituted a new Cyclone warning system and no one knew what it meant yeah it's like you switched the red lights and the green lights on all of your and you did and all of your traffic signs in your in your in your building in your city and then you just don't tell anyone you did it for example when the local meteorologist saw the storm coming and sent out warnings over the radio they called out red four red four the red meaning red alert and the four meaning a category 4 storm specifically red format Red Alert catastrophic destruction imminent seek High Ground immediately but this was new and had never actually been used in Bangladesh before so the people there didn't really know what the hell red 4 even meant in fact they were used to a one to ten scale so when they heard four that didn't sound like that bad of a storm at all to them so because of this many who could have evacuated didn't and those who could have gone to Higher Ground stayed put and as a storm approached it high tide under a full moon it just happened to turn just the right way to form a giant storm surge of the Ganges Delta and a quarter of an area the size of Iowa with 21 times the population of Iowa was engulfed by several meters of water literally washing half a million people out to sea all in one night and when you know later we have these accounts of people going down the river to the most affected areas and you know they'll they'll be in the boat and you know there'll be the smell that's coming in like that's not a very nice smell and they'll see like a body floating in the water and then more and more bodies until the boat can't even navigate because there's so many corpses and they're worried that their propellers gonna get full of human hair I mean this is a true nightmare the scale of this destruction is something most of us can hardly even imagine but um unfortunately this was just the beginning as we've seen in many other cases it wasn't the disaster itself that caused the most suffering it was the way people responded to it okay so here's the deal throughout this whole video I've been talking about how this storm hit and devastated Bangladesh and technically that's not true because in 1970 Bangladesh didn't exist back then Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan which was way over here this was West Pakistan and this it was East Pakistan now if you see that map and it doesn't make any sense to you well you're not British you probably know that the British ones controlled India part of that whole Asian land grab for spices thing all the European countries are into remember how everything is all about spices well this was known as the British Raj it was made up of land that is now India Pakistan Bangladesh Myanmar and Sri Lanka and in 1947 when the British ended their occupation they chose to partition this land Out Among religious lines Hindu Ares became India Muslim became Pakistan now if it sounds like I'm oversimplifying all this I am but in my defense so did they because there were multiple different groups of Muslims in the British Raj the bengalis in the East and the punjabes in the west among them and these were entirely separate ethnic groups with different languages and histories and economies and everything but the British in their Infinite Wisdom decided that instead of making them two separate countries it would be simpler to just make them one country separated and like most countries that experience a power vacuum Pakistan went through Decades of wars and coups and power struggles but by 1970 when the Cyclone hit this was the basic state of things in Pakistan the seat of power was in West Pakistan East Pakistan was more populous and resource rich but it was divided amongst many different political parties they kind of had less Sway and were treated more like a colony of the West than an equal at the head of government in West Pakistan was President Yahya Khan he was a famed General and war hero from World War II and he had big plans for the country Yaya Khan had two main goals first he wanted to oversee the first free and fair election since partition he really kind of saw himself as the George Washington of Pakistan he wanted to be known as the the man who finally brought stability to this country and set it on a course for success to that end was his second goal he wanted to make Pakistan a major player in the world stage and his plan to do that was to engineer a meeting between the United States and China he had a connection with Mao Zedong and he knew that Nixon wanted to open diplomatic relations with China of course at time this was the Cold War and everything Nixon couldn't just you know openly approach them so Yaya Khan tried to serve as a sort of a back Channel between the two Nixon and Mao did famously have a summit in 1972 and Yaya Khan played a major part in that he spent years cultivating a relationship with Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger to make it happen now all of this paints a picture of Yaya Khan as a noble Statesman which he definitely had that side to him but he also had another side he was a drunken genocide a lunatic when the Bola Cyclone made landfall his all-important election was only 25 days away just less than a month out now one option would have been for him to shower the bengalis with help to to secure their votes but he chose a different direction in the spirit of never let a good disaster go to waste he withheld aid from East Pakistan he suppressed news reports and ordered the Army to hoard any relief supplies which led to hangars and airports just being loaded up with food and fuel and clothes and supplies while bengalis starved in the streets in his mind the bengalis were less likely to vote for him anyway so why not just let this disaster take out as many of them as possible in fact our hurricane specialist I was talking about earlier Neil Frank he actually visited Pakistan on behalf of the World Bank and he had an uh interesting exchange with the Punjabi General one General he goes to sort of sits him down you know sort of off the Record let's turn off the microphone he says you know that Cyclone solved half a million of our problems but this plan backfired when the election came because the bengalis who normally you know were split up among many different party lines uh instead they unified they came out in droves and they voted for a man named Sheikh mujibir Rahman who was the head of a pro-independence party called The awami League Rahman who went by mujib to his followers he had spent the last month Distributing supplies as far and wide as he could winning over the hearts and minds of the people now you could say that he did it as a you know campaign tactic or whatever maybe he did out of kindness but either way it worked so now Yaya Khan who had made this election his life's work not only lost the election but he lost it to a Bengali a Bengali who wanted Independence for East Pakistan so now he had a choice he could accept the results of the election that he oversaw handing over the government to what he considered to be an outsider watch his country possibly split apart and lose any chance of ever making that Nixon China connection he'd been working on or he could do some dictatorship he chose to do dictatorship he delayed the transfer of power over and over again for months and eventually had mujib arrested and put in jail and when the inevitable protest broke out in East Pakistan he set into action a plan that he called operation Searchlight the name operation Searchlight was specifically chosen to be as vague and innocuous sounding as possible but uh it was nothing of the sort in March 1971 just four months after surviving the deadliest storm of all time East Pakistan suffered through one of the worst genocides of the 20th century between March and Maya that year up to 3 million bengalis were slaughtered by Pakistani forces and millions more fled into neighboring India the details of this are horrifying I couldn't possibly cover it here on YouTube without getting to monetize this video is already flirting with demonetization so I made a whole separate video of it over on nebula as part of my forgotten atrocities series and this definitely fits the description of an atrocity basically Yaya Khan's instructions were kill three million people and the rest will eat out of our hands that was an actual quote from him so yeah just three million people some of the other topics I've covered on that series include the Irish famine and the halamador which was basically the Ukrainian Holocaust both of which are examples of natural disasters made a million times worse by human negligence or outright malice it's a bit of a pattern by the way if you haven't checked out nebula it's a create our own streaming service we're able to post content and videos not because it caters to some algorithm but because we feel like it matters and if the subject of this video is interesting to you you should check out the modern conflict series from real life lore where he's covered topics like the Libyan Civil War the Afghanistan war and the Chinese genocide of the uyghurs turns out there's a lot of bad stuff going on we also post videos early and AD free so if you're watching this on nebula you wouldn't be hearing this part in fact you get extra content in its place you'd also get to look down your nose at all the pleaves that have to wait longer to see it so that's nice so if you haven't checked it out yet just go to nebula.tv Joe Scott that's where you can find everything that I do plus my podcast also you find them early and AD free and like 150 other great educational creators and original series you can't find anywhere else I know I'm in it but it's also quickly becoming my go-to streaming service because pretty much everybody I follow is there with extra stuff that you can't see anywhere else it's just it's just better anyway that's my pitch nebula is awesome it's worth it and it really does help support the channel and like hundreds of other channels so nebula.tv Joe Scott go check it out I think you'll like it now where was I all right unspeakable human tragedy so operation Searchlight was terrible it was horrible you see all the details in that other video but it led to an all-out War as bengali's retaliated and fought back in India who already had Decades of tension with Pakistan began training and equipping the bengalis this led to a series of skirmishes that are formerly known as the indo-pakistan war and this is where things get really messy because India at the time had a Cooperative agreement with the Soviet Union and remember I said a second ago how Yaya Khan had been cultivating a relationship with Nixon yeah so you have India on one side using Soviet weapons and Pakistan on the other side using American weapons where could this go wrong it also turned out that Nixon wasn't really a fan of mujib in the wami league because their politics were a little too socialist for his taste so now we're right in the middle of Vietnam which was basically a proxy war between the U.S and the Soviet Union here comes another one but because Vietnam was raging at the time and it was so expensive and so divisive Nixon didn't really want to get completely involved in another War so he attempted a bit of a half measure he sent one ship to the Bay of Bengal as a show of force but it wasn't just any ship it was the USS Enterprise the aircraft carrier not the Starship although it did have the power to go where no one had gone before that place being total nuclear annihilation on its own the Enterprise carried more Firepower than 2 000 hiroshima's so that's one hell of a half measure the Soviets of course couldn't just sit idly by and let that happen so they sent a trio of nuclear subs as a countermeasure and the commander was given a simple order don't let the Americans come within range of Targets in India and the Americans were given orders to not let the Soviets show a force deter them because it was worth ending the human race rather than look weak so yeah once again the fate of all of humanity came down to just a few ship captains playing chicken with each other God the Cold War was stupid so you have this literal line in the water that the Soviets will not let the Enterprise go past the Enterprises just inching forward and the Soviet Subs came to the surface each communicate with each other and said that their orders were to basically set the world on fire if the other didn't back down but luckily for us all within literal hours before an escalation were to take place the Bengali Independence forces took the capital of DACA and Pakistan conceded defeat on December 16 1971. the only reason you were born the only reason anyone who's listening to this is still alive is because these dudes these former fishermen with some mines and grenades defeated the genocidal regime of Yaya Khan Bangladesh was finally a free country mujib was released after nearly a year in jail and became the country's first president later as first prime minister and I would love to say that things were happily ever after from that point but that's not the truth the truth is Bangladesh had been completely devastated first by the worst storm of all time then by a genocide in a civil war that killed up to 3 million people plus as part of operation Searchlight Yaya Khan specifically targeted political figures in the country's academics and Elites and they emptied out the banks of their reserves with the sole purpose of setting them back as far as possible Bangladesh had to rebuild itself from the ground up which is never easy but as often happens after revolutions and Civil Wars years of struggles by various groups for power led to even more waves of violence in fact mujib only served as prime minister for eight months before he was assassinated in 1975. it really wasn't until the 90s that Bangladesh was able to find stability and finally recover from the series of tragedies they had endured now since the bolus Cyclone our ability to track and predict storms has taken giant leaps so while we can expect more and bigger storms as our climate changes hopefully we won't ever see a disaster on this scale ever again by the way it's not it's not the last bad Bangladesh in fact they beso home to the deadliest deadliest tornado in history the dalipur sadaria tornado and it hit in 1989 and it killed more people than any other tornado in history probably again because it's just such a highly populous place by the way if you're wondering Yaya Khan was ousted as president soon after the war and he was put in house arrest for the next eight years he died one year after being released and is now remembered basically it's just a dark stain on the history of Pakistan it is quite possible that no country has suffered as much in the last 50 years as Bangladesh their story is one of perseverance and grit and one that we just don't hear about very much here in the United States but we should because it's important anyway my interview with Scott Carney is up on the conversations with Joe Channel you can find that link down below go check it out there's a lot more details there you can also find that in the bonus video about operation Searchlight over on nebula which I deeply encourage you to do operation Searchlight was insane all right thanks for watching and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the channel members that are keeping the channel going and giving me good ideas giving me feedback I actually had some people that went through one of my most recent scripts and did fact checking for me which is always super appreciated but there's some new members that need to shout out real quick we've got MJS Kenneth White Michael McBride Daniel grow Jeff Miller Nick Polly the wicked Andrew Brown Gregory J Silva APC Adam Highland and Brian Jorgensen thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get a little thing next to your name in the comments it makes you stand 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,737,265

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: xdFGSkh5X24

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023