1980 United States heat wave | |
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Total costs | N/A |
Deaths | 5000 |
The 1980 United States heat wave was a period of intense heat and drought that wreaked havoc on much of the Midwestern United States and Southern Plains throughout the summer of 1980. It is among the most devastating natural disasters in terms of deaths and destruction in U.S. history, claiming at least 1,700 lives. Because of the massive drought, agricultural damage reached US$20.0 billion (equivalent to $63 billion in 2020 dollars). It is among the billion-dollar weather disasters listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Source: Wikipedia Soviet famine 1932-1933 | |
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Total costs | N/A |
Deaths | 8000000 |
The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. About 5.7 to 8.7 million people are estimated to have lost their lives. Joseph Stalin and other party members had ordered that kulaks were 'to be liquidated as a class', and became a target for the state. The richer, land-owning peasants were labeled kulaks and were portrayed by the Bolsheviks as class enemies, which culminated in a Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of large numbers of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929–1932.Major contributing factors to the famine include the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union of agriculture as a part of the first five-year plan, forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialisation, a decreasing agricultural workforce, and several severe droughts. Some scholars have classified the famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as genocides which were committed by Stalin's government, targeting ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs, while others dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation, as is frequently implied by that term, instead, they focus on the class dynamics which existed between the land-owning peasants (kulaks) with strong political interest in private property, and the ruling Soviet Communist party's fundamental tenets which were diametrically opposed to those interests. Gareth Jones was the first Western journalist to report the devastation.
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