Bombay Cyclone of 1882 (hoax)

The so-called Bombay Cyclone of 1882 or Great Bombay Cyclone is a hoax (or otherwise fictitious) historical event. Supposedly, the cyclone struck Bombay on 6 June 1882. Though it is widely reported, even in scientific literature, historical research shows that it did not in fact happen.

Example accounts of the supposed event

The supposed cyclone is mentioned in academic literature from at least 1976.[1] Its entry in the 2008 edition of the Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones reads:

The Great Bombay Cyclone of June 6, 1882: One of few truly great Indian cyclones to have formed over the Arabian Sea, the Great Bombay Cyclone--engorged with 110-MPH (177-km/h) winds and an 18-foot (6-m) surge--reportedly claimed more than 100,000 lives when it came ashore at Bombay right before daybreak.[2]

A 2014 academic article claims that: 'the deadliest storm surge of Arabian sea was Great Bombay Cyclone, took place in 1882 causing 100,000 causalities [sic]. It is one of ten deadliest tropical cyclones of the known history of the world'.[3] Another account, published in 2017, says that

the city of Bombay was all but destroyed by a monster cyclone that slammed into the Maharashtra region on June 6th 1882. This was one of the few great storms to emerge from the Arabian Sea. The super storm covered an enormous area as it came ashore at dawn bringing with it 110 mile per hour winds and an 18 foot tidal surge that inundated much of the region around Bombay ... The resultant winds, flooding and damage to buildings killed more the 100,000 people.[4]

It appears in other academic literature besides: some further examples are referenced here.[5][6][7]

Exposure of hoax

Amitav Ghosh reports that research by Adam Sobel, along with a consultation by Murali Ranganathan of the contemporary Bombay newspaper Kaiser-i-Hind for the relevant period, shows no contemporary record of the event. If a storm of anything like the reported magnitude had happened, it would have killed about an eighth of Bombay's population, and would have been widely reported. There does appear to have been a storm with heavy rain and strong winds on 4 June 1882, but it does not answer to descriptions of the supposed cyclone of 6 June. Bombay's biggest cyclone event of the nineteenth century in fact appears to have been 'in 1854, when "property valued at half-a-million pounds sterling" was destroyed in four hours and a thousand people were killed'.[8][9]

References

  1. ↑ C. L. Mantell and A. M. Mantell, Our Fragile Water Planet: An Introduction to the Earth Sciences (New York: Springer, 1976), p. 94 (no source cited).
  2. ↑ David Longshore, Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones, new edn (New York: Facts on File, 2008), p. 258 (no source cited).
  3. ↑ A. S. Rana, Q. Zaman, M. Afzal, M . A. Haroon, 'Characteristics of Sea Surface Temperature of the Arabian Sea Coast of Pakistan and Impact of Tropical Cyclones on SST', Pakistan Journal of Meteorology 11.21 (July 2014), 61-70 (p. 62), citing H. K. Yusuf, S. Dasgupta, and M. H. Khan, 'August Climate Change: An Emerging Threat To Agriculture and Food Security in Bangladesh', in International Symposium on Climate Change and Food Security in South Asia, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2008), pp. 25-30. If this is substantially the same paper as the almost identically-titled slides at https://web.archive.org/web/20121002172713/http://www.wamis.org/agm/meetings/rsama08/Bari101-Yusuf-Climate-Change.pdf (slide 20), then Yusuf et al.'s source was https://metocph.nmci.navy.mil/jtwc.php (link now dead), but the March 2008 version of the page at archive.org does not contain the relevant data.
  4. ↑ Paul W Simpson, Star of Greece (Adelaide: Clippership Press, 2017), p. 91.
  5. ↑ Richard Anthes, Tropical Cyclones: Their Evolution, Structure and Effects (Boston, MA: American Meteorological Society, 1982) , p. 4 (table 1.2), citing R. L. Southern, 'The Global Socio-Economic Impact of Tropical Cyclones', Australian Meteorological Magazine, 27 (1979), 175–95 (no page reference cited, but the relevant page is Table 3, p. 178; Southern's citation for his table simply says 'from various sources').
  6. ↑ Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 264 (no source cited).
  7. ↑ Shubhendu S. Shukla, 'Disaster Management: “Managing the Risk of Environmental Calamity”', International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Research (IJSER), 1.1 (September 2013), 1-18 (p. 14; no source cited).
  8. ↑ Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (London: Penguin, 2016), chapter 10, citing [Stephen Meredith Edwardes], The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, 3 vols (Bombay: The Times Press, 1909), I 99.
  9. ↑ Adam Sobel, 'All at Sea: What Mumbai Needs to Learn from Superstorm Sandy', The Times of India (Delhi) (2 December 2015).
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