Flood, waterspout (water tornado), hurricanes, storms, thunderstorms, water damage such as causing roof supports to rot and collapse, pit holes like quick sand (another one) where it causes soil beneath houses and structures to sink when water makes it soggy and makes buildings collapse, acid rain which damages stuff. Avalanches (sorta water), dam breakage (sorta flood), water shortages (sorta caused by water, not really). Probably more.
Human life on Earth still again, har-har
What kind of disastrous things could happen because of water? Well, I know it can be a troublemaker and splashes people who have every right to bathe in it. Cursed substance! Di-hydrogen oxide. It sounds like a drug-addict/suicide-balmer. Why, you know I've heard it has the potential to rise up as two gases and blaze hydrogenously across the arc of sky above us and put our civilization back to using the ox again. I suppose this is a lamb excuse for saying such a thing.
Excess water can cause floods. An underwater earthquake (of a very high magnitude) can cause a Tsunami.
Water also can cause hurricanes.
Natural disasters include tsunamis and floods. Manmade disasters could be if a reservoir was to burst or if a levee broke.
? FLOODS
Perhaps the most obvious consequence. Floods can be caused by intense rainfall (short and heavy), prolonged rainfall (long and steady), rapid snow melt, dam or levee failure etc. The effects can be made worse by people living or working in flood risk areas. This is especially so in poorer parts of the world such as Bangladesh where millions of people live on flood plains in the Ganges Delta.
? LANDSLIDES
Landslides, landslips, rockfalls etc are usually caused by too much water in the ground. There are two main problems, the first being that the water softens (destabilises) the ground and the second being that the water makes the land heavier. The weakened ground collapses under gravity, usually on a small scale but sometimes on a massive scale that can wipe out whole communities.
? AVALANCHES
Avalanches don’t have to be snow but that’s what we tend to think of, so that’s what I’ll focus on. Snow is just frozen water, as snow falls it accumulates on hillsides and mountainsides until such time as an avalanche is triggered. The trigger could simply be the addition of more snow than the snowpack can support, it could be the addition of rainwater or something cutting through the snow such as skis, a snowmobile or footsteps (the idea of a loud sound such as a gunshot, is highly unlikely to trigger an avalanche, that’s more of a Hollywood myth). Avalanches can move at 200km/h (120mph) and the biggest ones have a mass of up to a million tonnes, they flatten anything in their path. A particularly bad avalanche can kill many thousands of people if it reaches towns and villages in the valley below.
? DISEASES
Water is an ideal medium for carrying and spreading diseases. It’s a breeding ground for many disease vectors such as malaria. Every year millions of people die because of waterborne infections, often because they have no choice but to drink contaminated water. The situation becomes worse at times of drought when people are forced to drink water they would otherwise ignore.
? TIDAL SURGES
A tidal surge is an unusually high tide. These conditions occur when the right factors combine – a high tide caused by the lunar and solar cycles, an area of low pressure and/or driving winds. These conditions cause sea-levels much higher than normal, in the recent case of Hurricane Sandy the storm surge was 10 metres (32 feet) higher than normal. If a tidal or storm surge hits an unprepared and populated area of low-lying land the effects can be devastating. Such was the case of the Bhola Cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1970, the winds killed very few people but the storm surge claimed up to 1.1 million lives.
? SALINATION / CONTAMINATION
Around the world many people rely on ground-water for their water supplies. Rising sea-levels now mean that sea-water is inundating low-lying areas and contaminating fresh-water supplies. With no drinking water available people are forced to migrate.
? LIMNIC ERUPTIONS
Here’s an unusual one. A limnic eruption (or lake overturning) occurs when gases accumulate but can’t escape because they’re underwater. The gases form a bubble that gets bigger and bigger until eventually it is large enough to overcome the pressure of the water holding it down. When this happens it erupts from the surface of the lake and releases the gases. In 1986 at Lake Nyos in Cameroon, more than a billion cubic metres of carbon dioxide burst out from under the lake. Because the gas is heavier than air it flowed into the surrounding valleys and suffocated people and animals as they slept. Within a few hours it had dispersed leaving no trace behind and authorities baffled as to how thousands of people and animals had peacefully died (the lake, and other similar ones, now have measures in place to release trapped gases in a controlled manner).
? RISING SEA-LEVELS
In many places around the world the sea-levels are slowly rising. This is causing a loss of land and leading to enhanced erosion of beaches. So far probably less than a million people have had to evacuate due to rising sea-levels but it’s a problem that is likely to get much worse in the future. In the long term (100 + years) even major cities such as Miami and London are at serious risk.
? TSUNAMI
As we’ve seen with the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the Tohoku tsunami of 2011, these waves can cause devastation on a huge scale. They’re often triggered by an underwater earthquake or volcano that displaces immense amounts of water and creates a wave that moves outward from the point of displacement. At sea these waves have little height and a ship could pass over one with little effect but because they’re long (from front to back), when they reach land they just keep on coming. Instead of a conventional wave that breaks and rolls back out to sea, a tsunami wave doesn’t break as such and just pushes more and more water in front of it.
Tsunami or hurricane
I have a project at school to do a presentation on disasters cause by water
