“The 7 Worst Natural Disasters in American History”

I think the list is missing the event that was #1 by far: the Volcanic Eruptions of Mount Tambora. That volcano was far away from our shores, so no Americans were killed by lava or ash, but the effects of that series of eruptions caused the infamous “year without a summer,” and the death toll was staggering.

The sun was blocked by what people at the time called the “dry fog” (now called a “stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil”), a condition that was never dispersed by wind or rain. Ice clogged the rivers of the Northeast well into early August, and the next winter’s frost began only two weeks after the thaw. The agricultural output of some crops was basically reduced to zero, making some foods available only to the most prosperous people in New England.

Google’s AI overview:

The exact number of American deaths during the “Year Without a Summer” (1816) is not known, but estimates suggest the effects of crop failures, famine, disease, and violence led to the deaths of over 100,000 people in the United States. The widespread hardship was caused by the climatic effects of the 1815 Mount Tambora volcanic eruption.

No natural event in American history ever came close to that level of fatality, not even the pandemics. Those 100,000 deaths occurred in a nation of eight million people, roughly one of every 80 Americans. In proportion, that is more than three times the death toll wreaked by the COVID epidemic, which claimed one of every 275 Americans, and about double the impact of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, which killed about one of every 160 Americans.

The only event that killed a greater percentage of Americans than Tambora was the entire Civil War, which claimed about 360,000 Union soldiers and a few thousand Union civilians in a population of 22 million – about one of every 60 Americans. The effect was even more brutal in the Confederacy, where about 275,000 soldiers and some 30,000-40,000 civilians died in a population of only nine million. That’s a rate greater than one out of 30. And the numbers for the Confederacy are probably underestimated, since there is no good record of slave deaths.

Anyway, think about how catastrophic the Civil War was during those four dark years. Well, the volcano that created the year without a summer was almost as calamitous in a much shorter time.

TRIVIA:

The year without a summer affected far more of the world than just the USA. In fact, it was responsible for Frankenstein. The extreme weather in Europe forced Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, their friend Lord Byron, and others to remain indoors for weeks while vacationing near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They had no idea when, or even if, the gloom would end, and in that morbid and paranoid mood, they challenged one another to write horror stories. The spirit of competition and the bleak atmosphere combined to create Ms. Shelley’s iconic novel.

People have speculated about some other historical trends created or affected by the year without a summer. Vermont perhaps suffered the most of any state from the lack of sunshine, which caused Joseph Smith’s family to migrate to Palmyra, New York, which is where he encountered the angel Moroni. Thus was born The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons).

Palmyra is more or less an exurb of Rochester, NY. For me, a native of Rochester, it’s hard to imagine anyone going there to see the sun. I told my daughter during her first visit there that the local Native Americans had no word for “sun” because the subject never came up. Given the conditions when we visited, I had no trouble convincing her. I ultimately had to assure her that I was kidding, and that it is occasionally possible to see the sun in Rochester.

Some historians have argued that the migration from New England to Western New York caused by the year without a summer brought together the people that created not only the religious fervor of that era, but eventually the abolitionist and women’s rights movements as well. That is, of course, highly speculative, and the impact is indirect, but it does begin to explain how historically important people like Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony ended up in a seemingly unimportant place like Rochester.