List of environmental disasters

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See also: List of environmental issues

This article is a list of environmental disasters. In this context it is an annotated list of specific events caused by human activity that results in a negative effect on the environment.

Main article: Environmental disaster

Environmental disasters by category[]

Agricultural[]

Main article: Environmental impact of agriculture
  • Mismanagement and shrinking of the Aral Sea
  • Salinity in Australia
  • Salinization of the Fertile Crescent
  • The Dust Bowl in Canada and the United States (1934–1939)
  • The Great sparrow campaign; sparrows were eliminated from Chinese farms, which caused locusts to swarm the farms and contributed to a famine which killed 38 million people.
  • Africanized bees, known colloquially as "killer bees"
  • "Dirty dairying" in New Zealand
  • Salton Sea California, U.S.

Biodiversity[]

Human health[]

  • Introduction of the bubonic plague (the Plague of Justinian) in Europe from Africa in the 7th century resulting in the death of up to 60% (100 million) of the population.
  • Introduction of the bubonic plague (the Black Death) in Europe from Central Asia in the 14th century resulting in the death of up to 60% (200 million) of the population and recurring until the 18th century.
  • Introduction of infectious diseases by Europeans causing the death of indigenous people during European colonization of the Americas
  • Health effects arising from the September 11 attacks
  • Goiânia accident, human deaths resulting from dismantling a scrapped medical machine containing a source of radioactivity
  • Agent Orange use by the United States during the Vietnam War, resulting in lasting serious health effects on the Vietnamese population, such as cancer, nervous system disorders, and countless related fatalities.

Industrial[]

See also: List of industrial disasters

Mining[]

Main article: Environmental impact of mining
See also: List of tailings dam failures
  • Summitville mine in Colorado, from 1870 to 1992
  • Iron Mountain Mine in California, from 1879 to 1963
  • Argonaut Mine in California, from 1893 to 1942
  • Phosphate mining in Nauru, from 1906 to the 1990s
  • Phosphate mining in St. Pierre Island from 1906 to 1972
  • 1947 Centralia mine disaster, a coal mine in Illinois
  • Centralia mine fire, Pennsylvania, burning since 1962
  • Mountaintop removal mining in the US since the 1960s
  • Aberfan disaster, collapse of a coal mining waste pile in Wales, 1966
  • Tui mine, tailings dam from the now abandoned in New Zealand, 1966 to 2013
  • Darvaza gas crater in Derweze, Turkmenistan, burning since 1971
  • Uranium mining controversy in Kakadu National Park in Australia, 1981 to 2009
  • Ok Tedi environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea beginning in 1984
  • Omai gold mine tailing dam breach in Guyana, 1995
  • Marcopper mining disaster in the Philippines, March 1996
  • Doñana disaster, tailings dam breach of the Los Frailes zinc/silver mine in Spain, April 1998
  • Aitik mine, tailings dam failure in Sweden, September 2000
  • Martin County sludge spill in Kentucky, October 2000
  • Magellan Metals mine, lead dust in Australia, 2006
  • Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, April 2010
  • Padcal tailings spills of August-September 2012
  • Talvivaara gypsum pond leak, Finland, 2012
  • Obed Mountain coal mine spill in Alberta, Canada, October 2013
  • 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill in Colorado, August 2015
  • Mariana dam disaster, Samarco iron ore mine tailings dam failure, Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo to the Atlantic sea. Brazil, November 2015
  • Brumadinho dam disaster of an iron ore mine in Brazil, January 2019
  • Hpakant jade mine disaster landslide of tailings into waterway in Myanmar, July 2020

Oil industry[]

Main article: environmental impact of the oil shale industry
See also: List of oil spills

Nuclear[]

Main article: Environmental impact of nuclear power
Mushroom-shaped cloud and water column from the underwater nuclear explosion of July 25, 1946, which was part of Operation Crossroads.
November 1951 nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site, from Operation Buster, with a yield of 21 kilotons. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are 6 mi (9.7 km) from the blast.
See also: Nuclear and radiation accidents, List of civilian nuclear accidents, List of military nuclear accidents, and List of civilian radiation accidents
  • Chernobyl disaster in 1986 in Chernobyl, Ukraine killed 49 people and was estimated to have damaged almost $7 billion of property".[2] Radioactive fallout from the accident concentrated near Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and at least 350,000 people were forcibly resettled away from these areas. After the accident, "traces of radioactive deposits unique to Chernobyl were found in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere".[2]
  • Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster: Following an earthquake, tsunami, and failure of cooling systems at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant and issues concerning other nuclear facilities in Japan on March 11, 2011, a nuclear emergency was declared. This was the first time a nuclear emergency had been declared in Japan, and 140,000 residents within 20 km of the plant were evacuated.[3] Explosions and a fire have resulted in dangerous levels of radiation, sparking a stock market collapse and panic-buying in supermarkets.[4]
  • Mayak nuclear waste storage tank explosion, (Chelyabinsk, Soviet Union, 29 September 1957), 200+ people died and 270,000 people were exposed to dangerous radiation levels. Over thirty small communities had been removed from Soviet maps between 1958 and 1991.[5]
  • Windscale fire, United Kingdom, October 8, 1957. Fire ignites plutonium piles and contaminates surrounding dairy farms.[6]
  • Soviet submarine K-431 accident, August 10, 1985 (10 people died and 49 suffered radiation injuries).[7]
  • Soviet submarine K-19 accident, July 4, 1961. (8 deaths and more than 30 people were over-exposed to radiation).[8]
  • Nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa in the Pacific Ocean
  • Fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands
  • The health of Downwinders
  • Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day.
  • Hanford Nuclear, 1986 – The U.S. government declassifies 19,000 pages of documents indicating that between 1946 and 1986, the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington, released thousands of US gallons of radioactive liquids. Radioactive waste was both released into the air and flowed into the Columbia River (which flows to the Pacific Ocean). In 2014, the Hanford legacy continues with billions of dollars spent annually in a seemingly endless cleanup of leaking underground

Air/land/water[]

Air[]

See also: Air pollution

Land[]

Water[]

  • Sandoz chemical spill, severely polluting the Rhine in 1986
  • Selenium poisoning of wildlife due to farm runoff used to create Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, and the artificial wetland
  • The Jiyeh Power Station oil spill in the Mediterranean region
  • Effects of polluted water in the Berkeley Pit in the United States
  • Ignition and conflagration (13 times from 1868 to 1969) of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, United States
  • Cheakamus River derailment which polluted a river with caustic soda
  • Draining and development of the Everglades
  • Loss of Louisiana Wetlands due to Mississippi River levees, saltwater intrusion through manmade channels, timber harvesting, subsidence, and hurricane damage.
  • Lake Okeechobee is heavily polluted and during extreme events releases large volumes of polluted water into the St. Lucie River estuary and the Caloosahatchee River estuary.
  • Amoco Cadiz oil spill off the coast of France in 1978
  • Draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes in the 1990s
Marine[]
See also: List of oil spills
  • Millions of metric tons of plastic entering the ocean each year for decades due to China's attempt to recycle the world's plastic waste.[9]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ Dunsmuir 10 years later. SF Chronicle. July 9, 2001.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Benjamin K. Sovacool. The costs of failure: A preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907–2007, Energy Policy 36 (2008), p. 1806.
  3. ^ Weisenthal, Joe (11 March 2011). "Japan Declares Nuclear Emergency, As Cooling System Fails At Power Plant". Business Insider. Retrieved 11 March 2011.
  4. ^ "Blasts escalate Japan's nuclear crisis". World News Australia. March 16, 2011. Archived from the original on April 7, 2011.
  5. ^ Samuel Upton Newtan. Nuclear War I and Other Major Nuclear Disasters of the 20th Century 2007, pp. 237–240.
  6. ^ Benjamin K. Sovacool and Christopher Cooper. Nuclear Nonsense: Why Nuclear Power is no Answer to Climate Change and the World's Post-Kyoto Energy Challenges, William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, Vol 33:1, 2008, p. 109.
  7. ^ The Worst Nuclear Disasters
  8. ^ Strengthening the Safety of Radiation Sources Archived 2009-03-26 at the Wayback Machine p. 14.
  9. ^ J. R. Jambeck, "Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean," Science, February, 2015.
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