Disaster Area

On a busy Friday morning in 1975, the London Underground was packed with people heading off to work at insurance and banking companies. In one six-car train on the Northern Line, driver Leslie Newson was just having a normal workday, with plans to go buy his daughter a car after the day was done. He'd not leave the Underground alive, and neither would forty-two of his passengers.

Forty-two years. That's how long one man spent in prison for setting the deadly fire at the Pioneer International Hotel in Tucson, Arizona, just after midnight on December 20, 1970, when the place was packed with holiday tourists and Christmas partygoers. There was just one problem - he may have been innocent the whole time.

Children of the 80s know their pop culture touchstones - when the Challenger exploded, when the Berlin Wall came down, that time everyone was wondering who shot J.R. One particular 80s moment was a story of survival by a Texas toddler, an incident which was not without precedent but had yet to produce a happy ending.

In the aftermath of a disaster, a company's care team may step up to do the things you're not physically, emotionally, or mentally ready to do for yourself.

Some plane crashes may make you terrified any plane you get one will crash. Only one may scare you into worrying the roof of your airplane may rip right off in midflight.

What's the worst day at work you've ever had? It probably wasn't nearly as bad as what happened to one Louisiana oil rig's employees in November of 1980.

One can only imagine how scary the scene might be for two small children. The village they hid in was being destroyed by explosions and gunfire. A strange man swore he would protect them and carry them to safety. As he attempted to take them away, the enemy's helicopter hovered overhead, men firing off guns from both sides. Luckily, it was all fake. The terrifying scene was a sequence being filmed...

In the early 1990s, the country of Rwanda struggled through growing tensions between the local ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Hutus led the government, while the Tutsis were targets of harrassment and discrimination. Over the course of a hundred days in 1994, those tensions would erupt in fear, violence, desperation, and genocide.

Some plane crashes have possible causes which are so out of the ordinary they stretch the limits of credulity. The accident which happened when a plane fell from the sky while attempting to land in the Democratic Republic on the Congo in 2010 is just such a crash.

The black servicemen who loaded munitions onto ships at Port Chicago Naval Magazine knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. They were hardly trained, rushed to load ships heading for the Pacific theater in World War II, and feared every day that this might be the day one dropped bomb blew them all to smithereens. On July 17, 1944, Port Chicago's number finally came up. Bu...

He was a teacher and a veteran. On August 20, 1982, an argument over a badly repaired lawnmower motor from the previous day would result in a massacre which left eight dead.

Sometimes when planes crash, it's due to the tiniest hidden flaw which causes incredible amounts of destruction after a series of one mishap after another. One microscopic flaw led to the failure of the tail-mounted engine on a DC-10, and the damage it caused ended with an incredible fiery crash caught on camera.

In wartime, terrible loss of life is expected - but usually not due to a series of ridiculous screw-ups. On January 31, 1918, a fleet from the British Royal Navy left a Scottish port in the Firth of Forth with the intention of leaving for exercises in the North Sea. But among that fleet were multiple K-class submarines, a sub notorious for its flaws, its bad luck, and its short history of deadly a...

Working on an oil rig in the North Sea has its frustrations, its problems, and its dangers. In July of 1988, employees on the Piper Alpha platform were looking forward to having to work around construction as problem areas in the rig were updated - paint to be applied, sprinkler heads to be unclogged, and a broken safety valve to be fixed and replaced. In the end, a series of lapses and mistakes w...

In most cases, we can trust the ground beneath our feet. We expect it to be solid, to hold firm, and to not move when we stand on it. Some places we can expect earthquakes, but most of the time we don't expect to look out the window and see the very land we've gotten used to outside every day slamming down toward our homes.

When someone says a mass shooter was "going postal," the term goes back to a series of workplace shootings in the United States postal service going back to the mid-1980s. The deadliest of those took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, when an unsettling middle-aged man walked into work on August 20, 1986, with three guns in his mailbag.

Until September 11, 2001, one aviation accident between two 747s was the deadliest aircraft crash by far, and only one of the planes just barely managed to make it off the ground. On March 27, 1977, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, one after another, leading to a deadly crash which left one group of prospective vacationers scrambling to escape a burning wreck.

Imagine you went to work every day terrified today would be the day the building would fall down around your ears. That was what it was like working in the CTV Building in Christchurch, New Zealand. Then in September of 2010, the earthquakes began. As each aftershock rocked the building, it grew closer and closer to the day when its weakened shell would finally crumble.

Yaroslav Kudrinsky was just taking his two kids on their first international vacation. But there was one notable aspect to their trip - Kudrinsky would be flying the plane. Captain Kudrinsky was part of the flight crew flying one of the company's new Airbus A310s to Hong Kong. What harm could it do to let his kids come into the cockpit and see the new plane their dad would be in charge of flying?

We all know what it's like when there's a bug going around. More than a few people call in sick from work. Every time you cough someone says, "Oh, my sister just had that." When you go to the pharmacy, all of the medicines you need are sold out. In Milwaukee in 1993, it wasn't a bug that was making the rounds, it was a parasite, once which wrecked havoc to the intestinal tracts of those who caught...

It was just supposed to be a fun night of dancing to a jazz orchestra just like every other Friday in West Plains, Missouri. But on a rainy Friday the 13th in April of 1928, a dangerous secret lurked in the garage on the first floor, one which threatened the lives of every happy dancer on the second floor on the building.

In 2014, one South Korean high school sent its students off on a trip to the resort island of Jeju. The kids could have fun with one another and take a little break. But on the morning they were to arrive in Jeju, one wrong move by the helmsman shoved them into a steadily worsening nightmare.

Who doesn't enjoy a good haunted house? Six Flags Great Adventure had one such haunted house in 1984. The Haunted Castle contained a winding corridor of spooky sights, flashing lights, and costumed actors ready to give you a fright. On May 11, 1984, it added eight more ghosts to its cast.

Most of us have jobs, and whether they be our dream jobs or just something to pay the bills we just hope that when we go to work, we stay safe. But on April 24, 2013, garment workers at factories located in an eight-story building in Bangladesh started their workday nervous. The electricity went out, then the generators kicked in. Not long after that, the building collapsed, trapping thousands ins...

You don't expect a lake to just explode. But in 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon did exactly that on a hot August night, sending a jet of water skyward. The water wasn't the problem, however. The real problem was a mysterious something which killed over 1700 people and thousands of head of livestock.