This list of mass evacuations includes emergency evacuations of a large number of people in a short period of time. An emergency evacuation is the movement of persons from a dangerous place due to the threat or occurrence of a disastrous event whether from natural or man made causes, or as the result of war.
Ancient times 480 BC – During The Second Persian invasion of Greece, Greek officer of the state and navy commander Themistocles ordered the evacuation of Athens as a strategic countermeasure to the approaching Persian army, leading to 100,000 inhabitants being displaced in the late summer.
1st century 60–61 – Boudica's uprising resulted in the mass evacuation of numerous Roman settlements in Britain. 79 – Eruption of Mount Vesuvius caused evacuation of Pompeii and surrounding areas.
5th century 410 – Sack of Rome by Visigoths under Alaric I. Many Romans were either taken captive and sold into slavery or later fled the devastated city.
13th century 1237–1293 – Mongol invasion of Europe: Many thousands in Eastern Europe were displaced or fled before each of several Mongol expeditions.
14th century 1351 – Peak of the Black Death, which led to mass evacuations in numerous cities, ports, and villages in Asia, Europe, and North Africa.
19th century 1836 – The Fall of the Alamo resulted in a mass evacuation of American, Mexican, Tejano, and Texian persons in what is known as the Runaway Scrape. 1845–1855 – The Great Famine resulted in no less than 2.1 million people fleeing Ireland. As well, roughly 1 million people died. The population of Ireland fell from 8.18 million in 1841 to 6.55 million in 1851, though the population continued to fall until 1946. The population of Ireland remains lower than recorded in 1841 in the present day.
20th century
April 20, 1906 – The resultant fire of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake led to evacuation by sea of 20,000 refugees. Between March 1937 and October 1938, as the Nationalists began to gain more ground in the Spanish Civil War, nearly 3,000 children were evacuated from the Second Spanish Republic to the Soviet Union. Most of the children were from the Basque Country, Asturias, and Cantabria. On June 12, 1937, over 1,500 children and 75 tutors (teachers, doctors, and nurses) left the Port of Santurtzi in the Basque province of Bizkaia on board the ship "Habana." Similarly, nearly 4,000 children were evacuated to the United Kingdom, also on the "Habana", with HMS Hood as an escort. They became, and are still known as, "los niños de la guerra" ("the war children") or the "Gernika Generation" (as regards Basques). September 1939 – The evacuations of civilians in Britain during World War II; at the outset of World War II, London and major British cities were evacuated in preparation of the Blitz, with 1.5 million displaced in the first three days of the official evacuation. The final number of evacuees reached 3.75 million. 1939–1940 and June 1944 – The entire population of Finnish Karelia, 522,000 people, was evacuated during the Winter War. Some 260,000 of these returned home during the Continuation War but were evacuated again in June 1944. May–June 1940 – Operation Dynamo was implemented during the Battle of France, with around 339,000 British and French troops evacuated from Dunkirk, France to the United Kingdom. 20–23 June 1940 – 24,600 people, a third of the population, were evacuated from the Channel Islands to Great Britain ahead of the German invasion. October 1940 – 1945 – Evacuations of children in Germany during World War II: Millions of children in Nazi Germany were evacuated into the countryside from major cities to escape air raids by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Eighth Air Force. October 1941 – A mass evacuation of Moscow was ordered during the Battle of Moscow estimated 1.5 million to 3 million German Wehrmacht. Two million inhabitants were displaced within two weeks. 1942–1945 – Evacuation and deportation of Ingrian Finns from Ingria during and after World War II. About the entire population of Ingrian Finns (estimating 70,000 people) was evacuated from Leningrad Oblast, Russia to Estonia and Finland. Those who returned after the war faced deportations to other parts of Russia. Autumn 1944 – Spring 1945 – Evacuation of East Prussia (1.8 million people) and Pomerania (various estimates range between 3 and 7 million; see Flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War II) June 1944 – August 1945 – Evacuations of civilians in Japan during World War II: 8.5 million Japanese civilians evacuated major cities when the U.S. Army Air Forces began routine air raids on the Japanese Home Islands during the Pacific War. 1945–1951 – Istrian–Dalmatian exodus: From the end of World War II through 1953, according to various data, between 250,000 and 350,000 people emigrated from Istria, Zadar, and Rijeka after these regions were ceded to Yugoslavia under the 1947 Treaty of Peace with Italy. The migrants included mostly ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) but also Croats and Slovenes who opposed Josip Broz Tito's Communist regime. May 1950 – 100,000 people were evacuated from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada during the devastating Red River flood of 1950. Between December 10 and 24, 1950, over 100,000 UN Command troops who were cut off by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in Northern Korea, along with an even larger number of civilian refugees, were evacuated from the North Korean port of Hungnam during the Korean War. July–August 1971 – 18 million people migrated from Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan) to India to escape the military forces of Pakistan (then known as West Pakistan). This was the largest and bloodiest exodus in human history, with 4 million dead. 26–31 December 1974 – As a result of Cyclone Tracy destroying over 85 percent of the city, more than 60,000 people from Darwin, Australia, were evacuated from the area, leaving just 10,000 people (mainly adult males) to begin the massive cleanup. July 1974 – The complete, spontaneous evacuation in a few hours of Varosha before the advancing Turkish army; the population feared a massacre. 1975 – Operation Eagle Pull: 444 Cambodians and 146 Americans were evacuated from Phnom Penh, then in the Khmer Republic, before the city's fall to the Khmer Rouge. 1975 – Operation Frequent Wind: thousands of South Vietnamese and the last remaining Americans evacuate Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, before the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army entered the city. July to October 1975 – After the end of the Portuguese colonial war, one million Portuguese civilians were flown from former Portuguese colonies in Africa, mainly Angola and Mozambique, back to Portugal. Thousands of flights were organized by the Portuguese government, using hundreds of commercial airplanes. 1975–1979 – Cambodia: After the Khmer Rouge took over the capital of Phnom Penh, all civilians were forced to evacuate the cities for the countryside, in order to create a new agrarian communist society; 2–3 million displaced. 1976 – Seismic activity on the island of Basse-Terre (one of Guadeloupe's six islands) led to a mass evacuation of the island's 72,000 residents. The volcano – La Grande Soufrière – erupted on August 30, but less severely than anticipated. There were no fatalities and no damage of consequence. November 1979 – As a result of the 1979 Mississauga train derailment, the city of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada was evacuated following a chlorine leak after a freight train derailed. 218,000 were displaced. April 1986 – The Chernobyl disaster involved an evacuation of an estimated 335,000 people following a nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). June 1988 – The Poole explosion caused 3,500 people to be evacuated out of the town centre in the biggest peacetime evacuation the country had seen since the World War II. 13 August to 11 October 1990 – During the 1990 airlift of Indians from Kuwait Air India entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people evacuated by a civil airliner. Over 170,000 people were evacuated from Amman to Mumbai– a distance of 4,117 km- via 488 flights operated by Indian Airlines. The operation was carried out during the Persian Gulf War to evacuate Indian expatriates from Kuwait and Iraq. 24–25 May 1991 – Operation Solomon; covert Israeli military operation to take 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel using Israeli Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and El Al Boeing 747 airliners. June 1991 – Operation Fiery Vigil was the evacuation of roughly 20,000 non-essential military and United States Department of Defense civilian personnel and their dependents from Clark Air Base and U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay back to CONUS during the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. February 1995 – At least 200,000 people were evacuated in the Netherlands due to flooding. April 5, 1995 – Nearly 10,000 inhabitants of Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Argentina were evacuated for several days because of flooding. August 1995 - The complete, spontaneous evacuation of almost 200 000 Serbs in a few hours of unrecognized self-proclaimed proto-state Republic of Serbian Krajina (today Croatia) before the advancing Croatian army during Operation Storm; the population feared a massacre. April 1997 – Nearly 50,000 residents of Grand Forks, North Dakota were evacuated due to flooding from the Red River of the North, which overtopped levees.Shelby, A. Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press/Borealis Books, 2003. July–August 1998 – Nearly 14 million people were evacuated because of massive flooding and landslides in north and central China, and 5.6 million houses were destroyed. An additional 300,000 people were evacuated on August 7 in anticipation of a possible breach of dikes along the Yangtze River. 1999 – The Kosovo War led to 800,000 refugees, not all of them urban residents, leaving Kosovo and being accommodated for up to three months in other parts of Europe. September 1999 – The size of Hurricane Floyd, its intensity, and its track prompted public officials to launch the largest evacuation in U.S. history, with an estimated 3 million people fleeing the storm.
21st century
April 29, 2001 – 77,000 inhabitants (around 2/3 of the population of Vicenza, Italy) were evacuated for several hours so that an unexploded bomb, originally dropped in World War II, could be safely disarmed. September 11, 2001 – Evacuations from high-rise buildings across the United States. This included 3200+ survivors of the World Trade Center disaster and inhabitants of downtown Manhattan, New York City. Numerous other evacuations of high-rises in Chicago, Illinois included the Sears Tower and the James R. Thompson Center. The evacuation of New York included the largest sea evacuation in recorded history, with over 500,000 being evacuated in 9 hours by hundreds of boats. January 2002 – 300,000 residents of the city of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo were evacuated in three days due to the eruption of the Mount Nyiragongo. August 2002 – The 2002 European floods led to the evacuation of 50,000 residents of Prague, Czech Republic, on 13 August, with a total of 200,000 Czechs during the second week of August. Elsewhere in Europe, more than 120,000 people were evacuated in the German city of Dresden, 36,000 in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and 1,500 in Hungary. September 2004 – Evacuation orders were issued for over 2.8 million residents in advance of Hurricane Frances, potentially the largest in Florida's history. FEMA later granted assistance to 229,500 applicants largely associated with relocation expenses. July 2005 – 20,000 people were evacuated from the city of Birmingham in the United Kingdom after a security alert due to a bomb scare.