Disaster Area

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 th...

15 Mar 201844min

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 hea...

1 Mar 20181h 2min

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.

23 Feb 20181h 5min

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 t...

19 Feb 201858min

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 F...

23 Jan 201840min

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 constru...

31 Des 20171h 19min

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...

12 Des 201751min

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 ...

30 Nov 201741min