Browse Disasters
9 results
Australian Bushfires 2019-20
2019-2020
Before the flames became a continent-scale emergency, Australia had already entered a season of broken heat, parched forests, and exhausted warning systems — and then Black Summer arrived, proving how quickly a familiar landscape can become a firestorm.
Black Saturday Bushfires
2009
On one summer Saturday, Victoria’s fire weather stopped being a forecast and became a furnace: the day the air, the wind, and the landscape aligned against whole towns, and Australia had to learn what preparedness means when fire behaves like a storm.
Christchurch Earthquake
2011
A modern city thought itself seismic-savvy until an aftershock struck at lunchtime, collapsing the heart of Christchurch and revealing how thin the margin was between routine and ruin.
Cyclone Tracy
1974
On Christmas Eve, a compact tropical cyclone found the one Australian city that had grown just fast enough to believe itself safe. By dawn, Darwin would be gone, and the work of emptying it would begin.
Hunga Tonga Eruption
2022
A submarine volcano in the South Pacific tore itself open with the force of a giant impact, hurling ash to the stratosphere, shaking the atmosphere around the globe, and driving a tsunami across the Pacific in a disaster that began far below the sea.
Mount Lamington Eruption
1951
A mountain the local people knew by its shape but not by its nature suddenly tore itself open, and in minutes a landscape of gardens, villages, and mission stations became a field of ash, fire, and silence.
Papua New Guinea Tsunami
1998
Off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a sea-floor collapse turned a calm evening into a wall of water — and revealed that a tsunami does not need a distant megaquake to become a mass grave.
Queensland Floods
2010-2011
For weeks the rain did not simply fall on Queensland; it accumulated, basin by basin, until roads became levees, suburbs became islands, and an inland sea spread across a continent-sized state. The question was no longer whether the water would come, but how much of the map would still be recognizable when it left.
Samoa Tsunami
2009
A quake on the floor of the Pacific gave the Samoan coast only minutes to choose between the sea and the hills — and that thin margin became the difference between life and loss.