Relative Disasters

Come join us in the friendly skies, where danger is a constant co-pilot and daredevils risked their lives to entertain the onlookers below. We're going to talk about the 13 Black Cats flying troupe, Gladys Ingle's amazing "mid-air wheel replacement" stunt, and the incredible life of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman to get a pilot's license, along with barnstor...

On a rainy May evening in 1937, thousands of spectators gathered at the Lakehurst, New Jersey, airfield to watch the German luxury zeppelin 'Hindenburg' land. Instead of the landing, however, they were shocked to see the massive airship catch fire and burn to the ground in a minute and a half. On this episode, we're discussing airships and airship travel; hydrogen vs. helium; how the c...

On its surface, it's a complicated legal case that took an appeal all the way to the House of Lords to settle. In reality, it's what happens when you attempt to swindle the relative of Lt. Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC - a man who lived an utterly remarkable life and wasn't about to lose this last battle. Come join us for a discussion about a complicated military career, a case that...

On the busiest travel day in 1971, a hijacker commandeered Northwest Airlines' Flight 305, as it was en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. Upon landing in Seattle, he got what he'd asked for - four parachutes and $200,000 cash - and when the passengers had disembarked, he ordered the plane on to Mexico. But they'd only been in the air for a few minutes when the hijacke...

Content Warning: In this episode, we talk about the deliberate murder of infants for profit. Please skip this episode if you'd like to avoid hearing about that subject. When there's money to be made, there will always be people who will go too far to make it. The practice of "baby farming" - on paper - looks almost like a direct ancestor to adoption agencies or foster care. In re...

On Christmas Eve, 1953, the North Island of New Zealand was settling in for the holiday when the crater lake on top of Mount Ruapehu abruptly gave way. Within minutes, a six-meter-high wall of mud and rocks was barreling down the Wongaehu River valley, where it knocked out half of a railway bridge...just as the evening Wellington-to-Auckland express train was approaching. On this episode, we'r...

Come join us for the day the ocean caught fire. A simple, tiny mistake meant death for over a hundred and sixty people when the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea of Scotland became engulfed in flames. We'll talk about the events of the day, how the safety protocols failed, and how the chain of events likely unfolded. Love the show? Support us on Patreon, at ⁠www.patreon.com/RelativeDisaster...

In March of 1979, the worst accident of the American nuclear power industry occurred inside the reactor of TMI 2, a brand-new power plant just outside Middletown, Pennsylvania. The operators knew immediately that the plant had to be shut down, due to leaking radiation, but it wasn't until years later that they - and the public - realized just how close they'd come to a full-scale disaster....

In 1898, an ambitious railway project intended to connect Kenya and Uganda  to the coast ran into trouble when construction hit the Tsavo River valley in Kenya. There, two of the local lions - both oversized, fearless, and very smart - spent nine months terrorizing the labor camps with nighttime attacks, killing between 35 and 135 laborers and injuring dozens more.  On this episode, we're disc...

On St. Patrick's Day weekend in 1990, two thieves disguised as police officers broke into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole 13 works of art, ranging from a Vermeer masterpiece to a decorative eagle. By dawn the next morning, the thieves and the art had vanished, and clues were few and far between. In the thirty-odd years since the theft, not one piece has been recovered, d...

In the late 1760s, rural France was terrorized by a beast. Appearing suddenly out of the rocky, forested hills of Gévaudan province, it would seize a victim and disappear, leaving only blood and mangled bodies behind. With an estimated victim count of at least 60, mostly small children, the Beast of Gévaudan was certainly real; but what exactly was it?   On this episode, we're talking wolves,...

In the summer of 1883, the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra were rocked by a volcanic eruption more destructive than any other in recorded human history. When the tiny, uninhabited island of Krakatoa erupted, it sent a plume of ash and gas 17 miles into the sky, created a 2,500-foot-tall pyroclastic cloud, and wiped out settlements thirty miles away with a series of deadly tsunamis. The erup...

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the city engineers of Ottowa, Ontario, designed a sewer line that was so full of combustible material and so poorly ventilated it blew up twice, causing injuries and property damage each time.  This week, we're talking 'dark waterfalls' (so much worse than it sounds), exploding streets, DIY water piping, service station waste, natural gas...

On a hot June night in 1969, the New York police raided a gay club called the Stonewall Inn. They planned to seize some under-the-counter liquor, arrest some 'loiterers', and and close down the club for a day or so. Instead, they became the catalyst for a riot that lasted for six days and sparked a massive movement towards equality for LGBTQ+ Americans. On this episode, we're talking J...

It's our most dramatic disaster ever this week, as we take a look back in time to explain what happens when an 10-kilometer-wide asteroid hits a planet with life on it. In short: the dinosaurs perish, an ice age follows global forest fires, and the air quality hit an all-time low for ten years straight. On the other hand, after the impact, mammals had the perfect conditions to become bigger an...

In 1903, a young Italian man emigrated to America in hopes of finding work, love, and money. Over the following thirty years, Charles Ponzi would work dozens of jobs, form several companies, marry a very nice stenographer, and become an important (and notorious) member of the immigrant Italian-American communities he landed in.  On this episode, we're taking a deep dive into Ponzi's backgr...

On May 10, 1849, wealthy New Yorkers set out for a night at the Astor Place Opera House to enjoy English actor William Macready's performance in "Macbeth". A few streets away, however, fans of rival American actor Edwin Forrest were preparing to 'express their opinion' at the urging of inflammatory press pieces and Tammany Hall. Before the night was out, Astor Place would be...

On a sunny June day in 1904, well over a thousand German-American residents of Manhattan set out for a picnic and river cruise aboard the stately P.S. General Slocum. Fourteen years old, freshly painted and polished, and enjoying a reputation as one of New York's largest and most comfortable excursion steamships, the General Slocum was also a master class in maritime safety violations, with li...

It's an Arctic Ghost Ship Double-Header! First up is the HMS Terror, which carried Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition all the way to King William Island in the very far north of Nunavut, Canada, before freezing into the pack ice and being abandoned; and in the second half, we've got the SS Baychimo, a cargo freighter lost in pack ice off the coast of Alaska in 1931. Although they were...

On a hot July evening in 1979, thousands of Chicagoans gathered in Comisky Park for a double-header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. After a lackluster season, White Sox owner Bill Veeck was hoping to fill seats with a promotion called "Disco Demolition Night", in which spectators could get a discount ticket if they brought a disco record to be blown up by local radi...

Who knew that a ball of plutonium could be dangerous? We were surprised too!  At the end of World War II, the United States' Manhattan Project was left with an extra plutonium core, intended for an atomic bomb that was never built. What does one do with a subcritical ball of plutonium? Experiment, of course. At Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, scientists and physicists performed a number o...

This week it's a public health special on a topic you probably don't need to worry too much about: leprosy. Today it's treated with a three-drug cocktail, but in 1892 Queensland, Australia, it was so feared that the government made Peel Island, off the cost of Brisbane, into a leper colony. Here, sufferers from across the state would be housed, treated, and kept isolated from the gener...

We just can't seem to stay away from the beautiful (and dangerous) state of Pennsylvania! Today we're visiting a town called Donora, where in October of 1848 the weather and the local zinc factory combined to create a blanket of yellow smog that lay over the town for five full days. Unfortunately for the citizens of Donora, this particular smog wasn't just smelly and impossible to driv...

In the summer of 1945, as World War II was drawing to a close, a number of unusual animal attacks occurred in and around the town of Erehwon, New Jersey, on the American east coast. Miles away from their nesting ground in the Pine Barrens wilderness, a pair of Jersey Devils were spotted circling a playground, 'befouling' a public library, burning down a barn, scaring campers, and, in the m...

In the spring of 1874, a plague of locusts descended on the American Midwest in a swarm so vast it blocked the sky for miles before it settled down and beginning to eat...everything. Farmers and homesteaders fought back with blankets, coal tar, and fire, with exactly zero success. By the first frost that autumn, an estimated 120 billion Rocky Mountain Locusts had destroyed hundreds of thousands of...