Real Life/Tear Jerker/Natural Disasters

• The tornadoes that have been striking the Midwest have everyone scared. It was especially bad for Joplin, MO. One story from the tornado brought tears to everyone; A mother and child were in the bathtub when the tornado hit and the child was swept out of the mother's arms.
  • Weather Channel meteorologist Mike Bettes broke down on camera because of this.
• The Floods of 2011. The Troper won't just focus on Queensland, where 3/4 of the state was submerged. It was a shock to everyone, and when this Troper read the devastating news about the floods in Brazil where over 400 are dead, the floods in Sri Lanka, Tasmania and Victoria of Australia, she actually broke down.
  • The headlines of one of the Queensland newspapers after the flood: "Mate, you've lost my son." He was four.
• This write-up about the last moments of the Australian town Marysville before it was hit by the bushfire.
  • This Troper was a member of a forum for a while, with a rather enthusiastic Australian contingent. One of the most entertaining members was a fireman... This forum had a "How was your Day?" thread of which aforementioned member daily posted. For a week during the fires he posted nothing. His first post after that was simply a photo of his sooty sweat streaked hands and the frayed cuffs of his coat. No one could post about their days, their sniffles and boring workmates, for several days afterwards. I live in a rain drenched Welsh valley but that photo drove everything bush fires entail home.
  • This troper visited Marysville with his family about a month before bushfire season started. I remember it so well; it was very cool, for a summer day, and very quiet. There was an old-fashioned sweet shop with wooden statues in the garden, and a strange toy shop, and a waterfall that my friends and I went to the top of. I bought strawberry bonbons and a gigantic gobstopper at the sweet shop and gave it to my little sister because I thought it too intimidating to eat, and I remember remarking to my mother, "I wouldn't mind living here". Some time after the bushfires, we were passing through on the way to somewhere else, and everything was horribly altered. My sister and I demanded that we stop the car and look around, and seeing the charred sweet shop with nothing left of it but the gate was... difficult.
• The Victoria bushfires in Australia hit this troper particularly hard - since the Black Tuesday fires on Eyre Peninsula had come so close to my house, leaving the sky black while my parents told me to get ready to run with a backpack full of anything I wanted to keep... and over the next few days, the estimated casualties jumped from 20, to 100, to 140, to over 300...
• This comic transcript of an event from the 2008 earthquake in China. To fight so hard and for so long for everyone you love, to state over and over again that he HAS to survive, only to fail after being pulled out of the rubble? I simply tear up every time.
• This troper recently saw an exhibition on ancient Pompeii. Most of it was examples of graffiti, relics of everyday life, information on what the culture was like. Then they showed a video about the town's destruction -- it was gloomy, but not overly upsetting. The next room contained casts of bodies that had been preserved when the place was buried. I couldn't stand for several minutes from weeping.
  • This troper went to Pompeii with her family a few years ago. There's an entire section with casts - real casts - of people who died there. But what's touching is that all the casts show that people were trying to protect each other, holding onto each other even in death. There was a mother trying to shield her child, and two people assumed to be in love that desperately tried to stay together. It may seem cheesy, saying this, but it's incredible and heartbreaking at the same time, the fact that people from thousands of years ago loved each other as much as we do - that we're exactly the same, in that respect.
  • Especially jarring and tragic are the skeletons of two people who are hugging each other... for eternity.
  • They were excavating at Herculaneum, near Pompeii (both, along with Stabiae, were destroyed by Vesuvius) and found a bunch of skeletons of people who'd tried to shelter from the volcano in some buildings near the beach. One of the skeletons was of a young (early teens) girl, whose bones showed evidence of hard work and not enough food---clutching the skeleton of a baby wearing ornaments showing that he was of a higher class. Apparently that nameless slave girl loved her master's baby enough to try to save him, even though it was unsuccessful.
    • To be clear, unlike slavery in the United States in the 1800's, Roman slaves, although not having the same rights that natural born citizens did, were normally treated like members of the family (public slaves, however... not so much - and slaves sent to the mines were essentially given a death sentence) and it was not uncommon for them to be freed. So rather than a case of Stockholm Syndrome or obligation to protect the master's child, this could have been a case of a girl protecting who she saw as her younger brother.
• The 1984 Bhopal disaster is considered to be among the worst disasters in world history. Basically, Union Carbide, a chemical company based in the United States, built an unsafe chemical plant in the village of Bhopal in India. Due to India at the time having less-restrictive safety regulations than in the United States, the Bhopal plant was able to operate under poor conditions otherwise scrutinized in American plants. On December 2, 1984, toxic gas leaked from the plant and more than 3000 men, women, and children died immediately, with thousands more dying later from complications due to the disaster. Several lawsuits were filed in both India and the United States related to the tragedy, with several employees being charged and convicted in India years later for their failure to prevent disaster. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the tragedy, successfully fled India to escape prosecution.
• The death of 13-year old Omayra Sánchez, trapped in debris after a volcanic eruption. She was there, people could see her, touch her and talked to her. She was filmed by camera crews, but for 3 days no one was able to get her legs untrapped from the mud and concrete. She died of exhaustion, cold and her infected wounds, and nobody could do anything for her.
• It is....surprising, to say the least, that the tsunami of December 2004 has not been mentioned yet. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and while, if we were to list every disaster here, the page would never end, there were a few very telling moments that this troper will never, ever forget. The first happened during the wave itself, because we knew that not everyone who'd just been down on the beach had made it to safety. Then, after spending the night on that small island hill because all the boats were smashed, being picked up by boat the next day to pick up the survivors of Koh Phi Phi island, and seeing the stretch of beach that was once a holiday paradise..turned into a scene that looked like something straight out of a war documentary. Another was getting back to the shore, going to an internet cafe to let my brother know I was still alive, and finding out the cafe's owner had lost his brother just the day before. And then the airport on the flight back, with walls and walls covered in pictures of missing loved ones, or prayers for the dead, in almost every language imaginable, with people from almost every country. There is not a single winter where my family doesn't have at least a few minutes of remembering what we experienced then.
• Today this troper discovered that they are calling off the search for any more survivors in Haiti. The number of dead, over 200,000.
• As I opened this page in school, I happened to overhear my neighbour showing this story to her friend. To go through one earthquake is horrendous enough, but then to go where you think you're safe...Jesus.
  • That was somewhat surverted in the way they, after the Earthquake, went to outside and discover the Buildings were still standing. While still traumatizated, the people were a lot relieved to know, at least, the world didn't went down after what happened.
• The 2011 Canterbury earthquake in New Zealand. Over 120 people are reported dead and more than 200 are missing so far and in this earthquake. It's very sad to say the least.
  • the final death toll was 185, and more than 50% of the buildings in the CBD are being demolished. I didn't know anyone who died, and my neighbourhood wasn't too badly affected, but more than a year later, it still hasn't really sunk in that Christchurch will NEVER be the same. Oh, and we are still getting aftershocks to remind us all what has happened.
• And now the massive earthquake/tsunami in Japan, coming just after what happened in New Zealand.
  • Most recently (19/03/2011), the firefighters keeping the reactor from melting by continually dousing it with water have called their families to tell them they're not coming home. Instead they're going to be staying at the reactor for as long as they can to keep it cooled. It is effectively certain death. Godspeed.
• The Mumbai floods of 26th July 2005. We came to a standstill for days, and so many parts of the city was submerged. This Troper still remembers wading home through the flood from school. I didn't know how to swim, and my street was prone to flooding after 5 minutes of rain. And the only thing I could keep thinking about, while the water kept getting higher as I walked was that if our place flooded so high, that my grandmother - who is house bound, and my aunts stuck at work, would be okay. We made it, a lot of families, didn't.