Impact
The coast of the Bay of Bengal is particularly vulnerable to the effects of tropical cyclones, and there have been at least six cyclones to hit the region that killed over 100,000 people in total. The 1970 Bhola cyclone was not the most powerful of these, however; the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone was significantly stronger when it made landfall in the same general area with 250 km/h (160 mph) winds, a high-end Category 4.
The 1970 cyclone is nonetheless the deadliest tropical cyclone on record and is one of the deadliest natural disasters in recent history. The exact death toll will never be known, but it is estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 people lost their lives. A comparable number of people died as a result of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, but because of uncertainty in the number of deaths in all three disasters, it may never be known which one was the deadliest.
Read more about this topic: 1970 Bhola Cyclone
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)