The Storm of the Century

 The Storm of the Century

CenturyFrom March 12 to 13, 1993, a cyclonic storm formed off the east coats of the United States, so vast in size that it caused a unique hodgepodge of severe weather.Rarely does a single storm system cause blizzards from the Canada/U. S. border all the way down to Birmingham, Alabama, but this one did, and Birmingham received 12 to 16 inches of snowfall in one day and night. This was accompanied everywhere with hurricane-force wind gusts of 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The Florida panhandle received up to 4 inches, and the strange thing is that 5 people were killed by tornadoes, in the middle of this blizzard.The Appalachians of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia received as much as 3.5 feet of snow, with drifts up to 35 feet. 300 people froze to death throughout the eastern half of the country when the electrical power was knocked out by falling trees. 100 mph wind gusts reached all the way to Havana, Cuba.

Great Flood of 1931

The deadliest natural disaster ever recorded occurred through the winter, spring, and summer of 1931 in central China. There are three major rivers draining this area, the Yangtze, the Yellow, and the Huai. All three flooded catastrophically, because the winter snowstorms were particularly heavy in the mountains around the river basins, and when spring began, all this snow melted and flowed into the rivers.Then the spring brought particularly heavy rains. Then the cyclone season, which usually brings only 2 storms per year, brought 10, 7 of them in July. All this water swelled the three major rivers, especially the Yellow River, and because they drain a very large, very flat area of China, somewhere between 3.7 and 4 million people were drowned or starved.Nanjing City, China’s capital at the time, became an island surrounded by over 100,000 square kilometers of water, more area than the state of Indiana, or all of Portugal.