Talk:1975 Banqiao Dam failure

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This article was nominated for merging with Typhoon Nina (1975) on 13 October 2020. The result of the discussion was No Merge.

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Death toll of 240,000

The only mention of the high figure of 240,000 people as far as i could see comes from the (now seemingly deleted) people's daily article that reads (per google translate):

“

Official data has long been questioned. For example, the "10 top technological catastrophe in the world" feature film produced by the Discovery Channel in the United States believes that the direct deaths caused by the dam failure, plus subsequent deaths caused by food shortage, infection, and contagion, totaled More than 240,000 people. Whether it is 26,000, 32,000, or 240,000, in fact, the official has never had accurate casualty data. ... On August 20, the Provincial Party Committee made preliminary statistics, saying that more than 85,600 people died in the province, and including those who died in the disaster area, the maximum number did not exceed 100,000. At that time, the provincial party committee said that this number was relatively accurate. Therefore, the Central Condolence Mission used this number in its report on the disaster in Henan and Anhui to Chairman Mao and the Party Central Committee.

”

The figure of 240,000 sounds more like speculiation in this qutoe than anything else. Should we really take this quote as a high estimate on the number of deaths included everywhere from the lede to the various lists of man made disasters by death toll here on wikipedia? Daikido (talk) 09:20, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think the section "Casualties" in this article already discusses the number of deaths in detail. For example, another source [1] listed a number of death estimates, ranging from 26,000 to 230,000. And the source from U.S. government [2] estimates fatalities to be 171,000 - 230,000 (on page 118). Overall, I'm not sure if Discovery was just making a speculation about "240,000" in its documentary, but I think either 230,000 or 240,000 can be the upper limit mentioned in the lede. (We can use the former if we want to be stricter.) SCreditC (talk) 00:41, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]