The Bhola cyclone

The surge came up the delta at night, six metres of water across islands a metre or two above sea level. There was no warning system that reached the villages.

Estimates run from three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dead. Whole islands lost most of their people. Manpura lost about three quarters.

The government in West Pakistan was slow to respond and was seen not to care, and the anger at that fed directly into the election that December and the war of independence that followed. It is one of the few natural disasters that helped make a country.