[Rodney King]

The worst disaster of our time.

I beleive in the last 20 years there have been worse events. Flooding in Bangledash, and a few earthquakes/mud slides.

[Bon mots]

Looks like the toll is over 50,000 according to this Asian resource.

[pepsionice]

I think if you check media reports from China floods of the 1930s and 1940s...there various occassions that 100k people died. Nobody activately talked about it...but most foreigners in the country during this period readily agreed on extremely high numbers.

[ican'tbelieveit]

I don't think we have seen the beginning of this. When everyone is saying this will be the biggest aid operation in history; there is more to this than we are seeing, yet.

[KC_Conspirator]

I am also pretty sure that some earthquakes (I recall one in China) have killed over 100k people in the last half century.

[Bon mots]

Floods are the worst natural disaster in terms of numbers of casualties.
China and Bangladesh have been devastated repeatedly by floods - Bangladesh lost 300,000 people in November 1970 and more than 130,000 in April 1991, from cyclone-induced flooding, and the massive flooding of the Yangtze River in China in 1931 caused more than 3 million deaths from flooding and starvation.

The planet's deadliest earthquake of the century, by far, was a magnitude 8.0 that struck Tianjin , China, on July 27, 1976. The official casualty figure issued by the Chinese government was 255,000, but unofficial estimates of the death toll were as high as 655,000. The most destructive U.S. earthquake was the Great San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. Though its magnitude was 7.7, and the energy less than 1/30th the energy released by the 1964 Alaska event, the San Francisco earthquake and resulting fires caused an estimated 3,000 deaths and $524 million in property loss.

An earthquake was responsible for the deadliest landslide this century, which caused 40,000-50,000 deaths in western Iran on June 20, 1990. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake at Mount Huascaran, Peru, on May 21, 1970, triggered a rock and snow avalanche that buried the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca, killing perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

So let's just say that the 2004 Tsunami is the worst disaster this century...