Disaster Area

It was the worst manmade explosion in human history prior to the bombing of Hiroshima. On December 6, 1917, Halifax, Nova Scotia, was one of the busiest ports in the world, with wartime traffic passing through on a daily basis. The French ship, the Mont Blanc, was just another ship in the harbor, but its cargo hold carried a deadly secret which would wipe out thousands of lives in an instant.

Hear ye, hear ye! Come one, come all, on the evening of May 2, 1845, to see a fantastic sight! Nelson the clown of the Cooke Royal Circus will be performing for you all on the river Bure in Great Yarmouth - floating along on the tide in a wooden washtub pulled by four of the finest geese in the land! Simply head to the suspension bridge over the river with all of your other young friends and wait...

The river was a sewer - almost literally. In 1858 London, the Thames wound through the city carrying everything from fecal matter to slaughterhouse offal. Even worse, that was the city's drinking source. If three separate cholera outbreaks weren't enough to change people's minds about how to handle the problem, adding a heat wave to the mix might do the trick.

For the 100th episode of the podcast, we examine a genuine Christmas miracle, in which the bad guys lose, one man wins, and Twinkies survive an entirely different kind of disaster than we thought they would.

If you're afraid of flying, it's usually a more understandable fear - bad weather may bring your plane down, your pilot might screw something up, something on the plane might break. But a much more unlikely fear might be that someone on board might decide that in order to milk out a little insurance money, they're going to blow up the plane you're flying in, either to take themselves out or to get...

Every year, three million Muslims arrive in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to complete the hajj, an important series of rituals which must be undertaken by all physically and financially capable Muslims at least once during their lifetime. But three million people crammed into any place is a magnet for disaster, and over the years Mecca has seen multiple tragedies which left thousands of innocent pilgrims d...

The MGM Grand hotel and casino sat in a plum spot right along South Las Vegas Boulevard in the glittering city of - surprise - Las Vegas, Nevada. Hosting Dean Martin roasts and a long-running performance of Jubilee!, the MGM Grand featured the height of 1970s Las Vegas-caliber entertainment in a luxurious hotel anyone would die to stay in. But in the early morning hours of November 21, 1980, a dea...

The Gente Inocente nursery in Janauba, Brasil, was small and poor but filled daily with happy children. Then, on October 5, 2017, a familiar face came to the front gate. It was the night watchman, and he wanted to come inside. But what seemed innocent enough would turn out to be anything but, and would end with a bottle of alcohol and a burst of flames.

The Sunshine Skyway bridge was a well-known piece of Florida architecture, carrying vehicles back and forth across Tampa Bay and allowing ships to pass underneath in the bay's busy shipping channel. But on May 9, 1980, a sudden and ferocious storm brought all three - the ships, the bridge, and the cars - to a tragic shared end.

On April 10, 1968, Cyclone Giselle hit New Zealand at the worst possible - when the ferry TEV Wahine was returning to Wellington with over seven hundred passengers. The Wahine entered Wellington Harbor as the storm raged around it, and for a moment everything seemed no worse than any other stormy day in the city. But then the wind speed doubled, and over the course of the morning the Wahine strugg...

The women were - to say the very least - incredibly pissed. In recent years, their rights had been whittled away, leaving their status a husk of what it had once been. Their complaints were either ignored by men in power, or not worth sharing with them knowing what the reaction would be. All it took was one confrontation between a man in a position of privilege and a woman who'd had enough, and th...

All they wanted was a ride to JFK International Airport. But on May 16, 1977, the passengers waiting on the rooftop of the Pan Am Building in midtown Manhattan to get onto a helicopter shuttle to the airport would miss their flight, all due to a single snapped landing gear strut.

It was quiet in the rural Australian ski village of Thredbo, New South Wales, at 11:30 PM on the night of July 30th, 1997. Then the ground near Bobuck Lane began to tremble. A moment later, the hillside slid downward, taking two ski lodges containing nineteen people with it and crushing them in the chaos. It would be more than two days before rescuers who'd come to believe no one survived the trag...

Let's go back almost four hundred years to a time when sailing ships steered their way across the oceans of the world, whether it be for travel, exploration, or war. In Sweden, King Gustav II Adolph wanted four new ships be added to the country's navy, including an impressive ship featuring two gun decks - the Vasa. Then she sank twenty minutes into her maiden voyage. Three hundred and thirty year...

In 1921, a ship dropped four white men, one Alaska Native woman, and one cat off on the desolate shore of Wrangel Island, a strip of land just north of easternmost Siberia. Two years later when a relief ship finally broke through the ice and returned, only two of those beings were still alive.

Moore, Oklahoma, had the worst luck. Over the course of fifteen years, the Oklahoma City suburb would have five major tornados blow through the area, causing billions of dollars in damage. One in particular which struck on May 20, 2013, caused another tragic kind of damage, heading straight for two of the town's elementary schools.

On this International Cat Day, we look back at the story of a leopard whose feeding habits veered away from its normal prey into the human world, and a hunter determined to stop its deadly eight-year spree in northeastern India. 

It was the deadliest building fire in United States history, twice as deadly as the fire which tore through the city three decades earlier. Chicago thought it had seen the worst that fire could do, but then came the afternoon of December 30, 1903. The Iroquois Theater was filled and then some - with children on Christmas break and their parents, with teachers enjoying their own time off, with coll...

Four years ago this week, a plane full of innocent people just going about their lives - returning home, heading for vacation in Malaysia, flying to an international AIDS conference in Melbourne - unwillingly became a pawn in a war they played no part in before that day. On July 17, 2014, someone in an Ukrainian war zone looked up and thought they saw enemy military aircraft overhead. So they posi...

During the sweltering Easter holidays in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1992, the Reforma district reeked for days. Everything smelled of gas, but no one could figure out precisely where the source was. Tap water stank. Manhole covers rattled where they sat in the street. On Wednesday, April 22nd, one explosion after another tore through the working-class neighborhood and left the streets a ragged canyon...

Neerja Bhanot was uniquely successful in two fields - as a model, and as a senior purser for international airline Pan Am. But on September 5, 1986, the bravery of Neerja and her cabin staff was tested when a group of armed militants stormed the plane, demanding to be flown to Cyprus. What would happen over the next seventeen hours would be terrifying, chaotic, and in the end a display of the hero...

It would take the worst terrorist attack in modern times to steal the Joelma Building fire's title as the deadliest high-rise fire. On February 1, 1974, the office building in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, was slowly filling with hundreds of employees starting their work day. Then an air conditioner on the twelfth floor sparked. Within hours, at least 179 people would be dead from the sudden and all...

It was only supposed to last a few hours. All they would have to do was keep quiet, keep their heads down, and wait it out until they reached Houston. But at two AM on the morning of May 14, 2003, the driver of a truck would pull over near a truck stop and open the trailer at the back to a horrifying scene.

Graniteville, South Carolina, is like a lot of small towns - quiet and filled with hard-working people. It was the quiet that was broken when a moving train struck another train parked on a spur in the early morning hours of January 6, 2005, and it was the hard-working people who suffered when a damaged tanker began leaking deadly chlorine gas into the air. (TW: Discussion of suicide.)

It was hot that day in August of 1966, so hot you probably could have cracked an egg and cooked it on the sidewalk. Students walking the campus of the University of Texas at Austin did so under the watchful eye of the main building's tower. As noon neared, everyone was looking forward to heading off to lunch. That's when the shooting began. It wouldn't end for another ninety-six minutes.