Disaster Area

What do you do when your home is no longer safe enough to be a home anymore? You try to find a new home, even it means hurrying things along for your own protection. The Jewish refugees on board the MS St Louis in May of 1939 were looking for just such a place. All they found were doors slammed in their faces.

You're driving along on a road trip and your engine starts to smoke. You give it another half mile or so, then pull over. By the time you pop the hood, the smoke has turned into actual flames spewing out of your car somehow. So you back away as far as you can for your own safety. It's terrifying enough if this happens to you while driving down an everyday country road or rural highway. But what if...

It was a little slice of Vegas transplanted to a Kentucky hillside just outside of Cincinnati, an elegant showcase for the likes of the Rat Pack, Marilyn Monroe, Liberace, and Frankie Valli. The Beverly Hills Supper Club went from a mafia-run illegal gambling den to the sort of place you could hold your kid's bar mitzvah or the Elk Club awards ceremony. But on Memorial Day weekend in 1977, all of...

In late January of 1959, ten hikers left the city of Sverdlovsk heading for an adventure in the wilderness. Only one of them returned alive. So what happened to Igor Dyatlov and the other eight hikers who died at what would later come to be known as Dyatlov Pass? 

N'Dolo Airport could not have been any worse of an airport to take off from in 1996 if it tried. Whether it be the pitted runway or the handwaving of appropriate documentation and procedures, flying out of N'Dolo was a nightmare, one which anyone with bad intentions could use to their advantage. This is why so many different factors came together at once to cause a horrific tragedy in the city of...

It was almost like a terribly kept secret. The Top Storey Club sat hidden away on the topmost story of an old warehouse you needed to wander through furniture workshops and storerooms on lower floors to reach, like a princess in a tower. But on May 1, 1961, the combination of a popular nightclub and workrooms cluttered with flammable materials below it would prove a deadly equation.

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...