Posts, Podcasts, Mini-Docs & Novels – PAUL ANDREWS
General Andrew Jackson won the nasty election of 1828 and was elected President of the United States. At this time, over 125,000 Native Americans still occupied millions of acres in the American southeast – land they had lived on for generations. In a little over a decade, thanks the Indian Removal Act, there would be few left alive anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Many would have died along the Trail of Tears.
Drawing the Middle East’s modern borders on a map with a ruler certainly seemed simple. Perhaps that’s why the lines, set in 1916 by Englishman Sir Mark Sykes and Frenchman Francois Georges-Picot were straight ones. The infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was a pact between Great Britain and France, in the middle of World War I (with the Russia Empire’s blessing). With it, they planned to completely dismember the centuries-old Ottoman Empire. It led to the division of the Turkish-held Middle East into 5 French and British-administered countries – today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel (then called Palestine), Jordan and Iraq. During World War I, the Turks had allied themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary and basically faced a war on three fronts.
Sykes & Picot were both colonial aristocrats who believed in the quaint notion that Second & Third World counties were incapable of self-rule, and far better living under their European masters. They had carved up African colonies in a similar fashion. Plus the warring sides of World War I were still oblivious to the fact that the Middle East sat upon the largest hidden oil reserves in the world. At the time, all the two allied nations desired was open shipping routes to Russia (via Istanbul), and a secure Suez Canal connection through the deserts of Egypt to India.
So the two men literally drew straight lines on a map, dividing up territory ruled by the Ottoman Empire for over 400 years into brand new countries. Syria and Lebanon, which would be under French control in the north. Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine which would be under British control in the south. Beneath them all sat all of Arab controlled Saudi Arabia. Following the end of World War I in 1918, the deed was done and signed into the 1919 Versailles Treaty between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire.
For you see, the Sykes-Picot Agreement had MANY problems. The first lay in those damn straight lines, which failed to take into account any sectarian, tribal, or ethnic divisions. Sykes & Picot envisioned Lebanon as a Christian haven, Palestine with a Jewish community, and Syria, Jordan & Iraq with the region’s Muslims. That of course never happened. Old racism and hatreds, suppressed for decades under strict Ottoman rule, came boiling to the surface without Turkish control.
Second, the agreement was made with NO Arab input of any kind … NONE. AND it ignored a promise Britain made to the Arabs that if they sided with them, and rebelled against the Turks in World War I, they would finally gain their independence. When independence did not materialize after the war, Arab politics gradually shifted from constitutional parliaments to militant kingdoms. This led to the rise of dictatorial regimes that dominated many Arab countries for decades, to this very day.
During World War I, Britain was willing to recognize and support Arab independence. The Arabs fulfilled their part of the agreement and revolted against the Turks, fueled in part by the contribution of famous British archaeologist Lieutenant TE Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia.” Britain, however, did not live up to its side of the deal. Lawrence later wrote that the Arab Revolt was useful, as it marched in line with Britain’s aims, i.e. the break-up of the vast Ottoman Empire. But, he also warned the Arab tribes were even less stable than the Turks, a ‘tissue of small, jealous principalities, incapable of long term cohesion.’
During the 1800’s, the Ottoman Sultan had taken a hands-off approach to governing the Middle East, and did little to promote progress. At the first sign of any tribal identity, the Turks beheaded the movement’s insolent leaders. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a blatantly imperialistic solution. It took no account of the wishes of the people, ignored Arab and Kurdish boundaries, and provoked conflicts which continue to plague the region to this day. No other region on earth has seen so many border wars, civil wars and deadly coups in recent decades.
The Ottoman Empire was finally defeated by the Allies, carved up like a tired bull, and split among the victors in the1920 Treaty of Sevres. Instead of the nation-states Britain & France had promised the Arabs, the victors divided the Middle East into countries which, because of those damn straight lines, are still among the most difficult to govern on earth. The strains unleashed on the Arab World after World War I remain as acute as ever, 100 years later.
The Middle East still finds itself living with a 1916 map that ignored the region’s Islamic and ethnic realities – there were Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Jews. The nations and borders are still seen today as illegitimate by many of their own governments and citizens. World War I spilled over in World War II with little change to the Middle East. This was followed by: the founding of Israel in 1948, the race for Arab oil in Iraq, 3 Egypt-Israeli wars, countless Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish conflicts, 2 Iraq-Iran wars, 2 Persian Gulf Wars, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise and fall of Al-qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas.
With the exception of the 1978 Camp David Egypt-Israeli Peace Accords, negotiated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, no lasting peace in the Middle East has stuck. The result has been seemingly unending conflicts amongst Arab nations, Arab factions, and with Arab neighbor Israel, that have yet to come to an end, a century later. Plus they show no signs of ceasing any time soon. All due to a few straight lines drawn on a paper map by two European men, over a hundred years ago.
It is true the infamous Chicago Fire started in the barn of Catherine and Patrick O’Leary on Sunday night, October 8th, 1871. They lived at 137 DeKoven Street on Chicago’s West Side. But poor scapegoated Kate O’Leary was not milking a cow at the time, as was later popularized by the relentless press. They were looking for a scapegoat, someone to blame. She and her husband were instead fast asleep in their bedroom after a long day of work. They were morning laborers you see, up at the crack of dawn to milk their 5 cows and make deliveries to their neighbors. By 8:30 pm, after feeding both their barn animals and their children, they were legitimately exhausted.
Some also blamed Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan for starting the blaze. He was the first person to shout “FIRE! FIRE!” in the streets that fateful night. But no, Daniel was simple strolling by the O’Leary place, listening to fiddle music drifting from a neighbor’s house, who were hosting a party. He noticed the first lick of flames shooting out of the O’Leary barn roof. The loft was packed with 3 Tons of Hay for the winter and went up like a bone-dry tinder box. Peg Leg Sullivan in fact risked his life to free the O’Leary’s terrified animals. A shed next door unfortunately held 2 tons of coal, also stockpiled by a neighbor for winter. That quickly ignited next.
Across Chicago, a fierce, gusting prairie wind blew from the southwest all night long. In between the tightly packed wooden houses were lines of wooden fences and wooden sidewalks. By the time Patrick and Kate O’Leary emerged sleepily from their home, two of their neighbors’ houses were already ablaze. Chicago had been experiencing a terribly hot drought that autumn. The winds would eagerly thrust the fire from house to house … and then street to street, throughout the long night. Neighbors would first try a bucket brigade, but it would be all for naught.
Due to fire signal confusion by the fire department, the first Firehouse Steamers would not arrive for OVER AN HOUR! Even when a dozen more arrived, entire city blocks were now on fire. It was too late to contain it just to the rural West Side. You see back in the 1800’s, nearly every structure, including the sidewalks, was made of wood, not brick or stone.
The winds freely tossed huge firebrands the size of livestock clear across the dark Chicago River to the South Side, where warehouses and the business district waited. There the wind-fed inferno charged along, consuming dozens of factories and lumber yards. Then it swept into city center, burning luxury hotels, banks, department stores, and even the Opera House and the cupola’d City Hall. Tall grain silos on the edge of Lake Michigan burnt like monstrous Roman candles. Panicked residents crowded onto bridges across the Chicago River. City officials made a feeble attempt at a fire break by dynamiting a few South Side buildings. It had little effect. Only the waters of Lake Michigan halted its ravenous eastward march.
Within hours, the fire jumped the river again to the heavily populated North Side residential area. The Fire Brigades, with their tiny steamer engines, were not equipped to handle such a massive conflagration. Dozens of city blocks, filled with mansions, homes, schools and churches all went up in flames. All Chicagoans could do was watch in horror and dash away in panic, ahead of the advancing front of flames. Even ships docked in the river and the wooden bridges that crossed it eventually caught fire and were consumed. In the middle of the night, dazed refugees huddled in Lincoln Park, or waded into the shore of Lake Michigan, praying to God for deliverance.
What was left of the city resembled Hiroshima after the atomic blast. Over 300 souls perished in the mighty blaze. Thousands of survivors were left homeless. The entire nation was shocked that one of their largest cities could literally go up in smoke. In the week to come, Kate O’Leary and her famous cow, were merely made unfortunate scapegoats. The papers went so far as to publish a now infamous sketch of her milking a cow that kicks a lantern into the straw. They drew her as an old, witch-like hag when in fact she was only thirty-five, with several young children to take care of. She and her family eventually had to flee the city due to numerous death threats.
So who Really started the famous fire that consumed a bustling American city? Having spent 2 years researching the Great Chicago Fire for my historical novel, FIREBRANDS, my theory is that it was not Catherine O’Leary or Peg Leg Sullivan. The most likely, though never proven culprit, was one of the O’Leary’s neighbors, from that rowdy party next door. If you had no cow, it was common to steal free milk from your neighbor’s barn under the cover of night. The drunken thief from the party likely had a candle that tipped over and fell into the hay. It starting the barn’s brittle, dry straw to blaze, and the shocked robber fled. After that, the rest is history. It would indeed be a “Hot Time in the Ole Town Tonight!“
Source: https://greatchicagofire.org/
A decade before the Apollo Moon Missions, two aquanauts, traveled to the last unexplored place on Earth, the deepest point under all the Earth’s oceans. On 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, in the bathyscaphe Trieste, descended down to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 7 miles, (11 km) beneath the water surface.
The lowest point on our planet is deep underwater, in the western Pacific Ocean near the island of Guam. It’s here where converging geological plates crash together, forcing one plate down beneath the other, forming the formidable Mariana Trench. The deepest portion, at nearly 11,000 meters was discovered in 1951 by the British survey ship Challenger, hence the name “Challenger Deep.”
The Trieste bathyscaphe was named after the Italian city of its birth. A bathyscaphe (deep boat) is a type of mini-sub with a bathysphere attached to the bottom for piloting and observation. Auguste Piccard, a visionary Swiss inventor and aeronaut designed the Trieste, a precursor to today’s modern submersibles. Piccard was already famous for setting the record for the highest altitude balloon flight ever in 1932.
Trieste’s two-man crew would be working inside a 6.5 foot (2 meter) wide pressure sphere on the underside of the submersible. To withstand the intense pressure at the bottom of Challenger Deep [8 tons per square inch!], the bathysphere’s walls were 5 inches (8 cm) thick. To see outside, the crew would rely on a single window made of a solid cone of Plexiglas.
The rest of the nearly 60-foot (18-meter) long Trieste was primarily a 50 ft. tank. It was filled with 33,350 gallons (126,240 liters) of gasoline for buoyancy, along with nine tons of iron pellets as ballast to weigh it down. (Gasoline is more buoyant than water and resistant to compression.) The Trieste also had the advantage of being controlled by the pilot and didn’t need to be tethered to any surface ship. Piccard developed an ingenious method to control the buoyancy, using both the gasoline and pellets.
During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy realized the ocean depths could be exploited for military advantages against the Soviets. The Office of Naval Research purchased the Trieste in 1958 and hired Auguste’s son, Jacques, as consultant. The dive was not just about setting a new record, the Navy wanted to prove the feasibility of human exploration at such extreme depths.
Piccard’s radical design would be put to the test in January 1960 at the deepest place on Earth, with none other than his 38-year-old son Jacques as one of the 2 crew. So the U.S. Navy carried the small sub to the Pacific for its historic dive into the Mariana Trench. 31-year-old oceanographer Don Walsh, a U.S. Navy Lieutenant, would be the other “aquanaut.”
Floating over the trench, the 2 men waved one last time to the crew of the mother ship. They then climbed down through the Trieste, into the bathysphere underneath. It took 4 hours and 48 minutes to drop to the very bottom of the Challenger Deep at a rate of about a yard (0.9 m) a second. One can only imagine the creeping fear and tension the 2 men experienced. They descended slowly and silently into the pitch-black darkness, the bathysphere getting progressively colder and colder.
As if to highlight the peril, after passing 27,000 feet (9,000 meters) the outer window pane cracked, violently shaking the entire sphere! Should they abort? But since no leaks or pressure drop occurred, the brave men decided to continue their decent. Throughout much of the trip, they lost contact with their mother ship on the surface. Nevertheless, Piccard and Walsh successfully reached the bottom of the trench at a depth of 7 miles.
The floor of Challenger Deep was a fine, snuff-colored, oozy silt made of microscopic algae known as diatoms. The explorers were shocked to see jellyfish, shrimp-like creatures, and a couple of small white flatfish, proving that some life could withstand the extreme depths. Unfortunately, they carried no external camera and one of the external lights had imploded from the extreme pressures. Skeptics at the time criticized Piccard’s observations, claiming life was impossible at such depths and they were hallucinating.
Eating chocolate bars for energy, they shivered in the cold. The bathysphere temperature was only 45 F (7 Celsius). They finally managed to speak with their mother ship using a sonar-hydrophone. Travelling at a speed of nearly a mile per second, it still took 14 seconds for a message to travel from the Trieste to the surface and back.
Piccard slowly unloaded the iron pellet ballast and the Trieste began to float back to the surface. The ascent was much quicker than the dive, taking only three hours and fifteen minutes. If you consider that faster, when you are freezing inside a cracked, cramped, and cold dark sphere.
At the surface came cheers and champagne. Both men were celebrated as two of the world’s great explorers. For a time, the Piccard family, father and son, held the record for both the highest altitude balloon and the deepest ocean dive. The historic dive ushered in a golden age of underwater exploration. Men like Jacques Cousteau lead the way, in which submersibles would make amazing discoveries in oceanography and marine biology.
The Trieste was retired by the Navy in 1963. You can view the original today on exhibit at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington DC. So costly and risky was the descent into the Mariana Trench it was not attempted it again for another 52 years. It’s been repeated only once, in 2012. This time solo done by Canadian explorer and filmmaker James Cameron (of Titanic and Avatar movie fame) in the torpedo-shaped, DeepSea Challenger. And this time, Cameron was sure to take copious videos, enough for an award winning documentary of the same name.
Most know of the Jewish Holocaust, committed by Nazi Germany during World War II. But many are oblivious to Armenian Genocide, the 1st modern atrocity of the 20th century. It occurred 30 years earlier during World War I. In 1915, leaders of the Ottoman Empire began the systemic expulsion and extermination of Armenian Christians living in what is today eastern Turkey. Somewhere near 2 million Armenians (10% of the Empire) were forcibly deported from their homeland, resulting in 1.5 MILLION Deaths.
Armenians have been in the Caucasus mountains of the northern Middle East for millennia. Armenia was an independent kingdom in the 4th century and became the first nation to make Christianity its national religion. Ruled at various times by Persians, Romans, Arabs and Mongols, it was eventually absorbed into the mammoth Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. At its peak, the vast Ottoman Empire included much of southeastern Europe, ALL of the Middle East, and North Africa.
While the Sultans permitted Armenian Christians to maintain autonomy, they also treated them as infidels, with few rights. In spite of this, Armenians tended to be wealthier & better educated than Turks: businessmen, lawyers, and doctors, educated in Europe. The Ottoman Sultans, however, resented their success.
By contrast, the majority of Muslim Turks were poor and illiterate. The Sultans had placed little worth on education, valuing blind obedience instead. Layered on this were long held suspicions that Armenians were more loyal to Christian nations, like their nearby enemy Russia. They shared a disputed border with the Russian Empire, including Crimea on the Black Sea.
By the beginning of the 20th century, nationalist reformers called “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Hamid and established a modern constitutional government. Unfortunately, 3 Pashas within the Young Turks soon assumed dictatorial control, just like the Sultans had. They promised a pure Muslim state, and again viewed Armenian Christians as a threat. Anti-Armenian demonstrations were staged in Istanbul, often leading to violence.
The Eastern Front eventually included the disputed border with Russia. Since Christian Russia was now the enemy, the 3 Pashas argued that Armenians were traitors who could not to be trusted and would if fact fight for the Allies. This led the dictators to push for the complete removal of Armenians from the Empire. About 40,000 Armenian men were serving in the Ottoman Army in the war. However they were quickly disarmed and switched to labor battalions, building roads or carrying supplies.
In April 1915, the government executed 300 Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul. Next came mass arrests of Armenian men for treason throughout the country. The 3 Pashas created a ‘Special Organization’ which organized ‘Killing Squads’ to deal with deported Armenians. Men were taken to the outskirts of their towns and shot. Armenian women, children, and the elderly were ordered to leave their homes and villages for ‘relocation’ to non-military zones for their own safety. Ottoman families quickly moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.
The Armenians were actually being taken on what became Death Marches, walking hundreds of miles into the scorching Syrian desert. When food or water ran out, they were given nothing more by their guards. Some were stripped naked and forced to walk under the desert sun until they dropped from dehydration. Any who stumbled from exhaustion were beaten or shot. Gendarmes pushed them off cliffs, or burned them alive. Soon, the Empire’s roadsides to the south were littered with unburied corpses, shocking foreign diplomats at the time. Young girls were raped, killed or forced to become sex slaves in harems. Children were made to denounce Christianity and forcibly converted to Islam.
By the end of WWI, there were only 390,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire, 75% of them had been killed. Newspapers like the New York Times published reports with shocking headlines like: “Armenians Are Sent to Perish in the Desert – Turks Accused of Plan to Exterminate Whole Population” (18 August 1915). The Ottoman government in Istanbul denied there was an Armenian Genocide, but rather the killing of an enemy force within their borders during wartime.
The 3 Pashas fled to Germany where they were offered asylum. Turkey’s new, post-war government asked Berlin to extradite the Pashas. But all requests were turned down. A separate Armenian nation was briefly created after the war. Then Turkey’s new nationalist leader refused to accept the post WWI treaty. He instead re-occupied Armenian lands in 1920. Sadly, no Allied powers came to aid the fledgling republic.
Two years later, Armenia was absorbed into the Soviet Union. Armenian activists took matters into their own hands, located 2 of the Pashas responsible for the Armenian genocide living lavishly in Germany and assassinated them both with a bullet to the head. The third was killed by the Russian military in 1922.
The half-hearted reaction of the world’s major powers, including Britain and the U.S., to the Armenian Genocide was duly noted by none other than a young Adolf Hitler as he dreamt up the Jewish Holocaust. After becoming Germany’s Fuhrer in 1934, Hitler told his Nazi generals:
You may know the name Mother Jones from the progressive news magazine & website. But its namesake, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a fearless fighter for the working class and a tireless labor activist. Her opponents in industry and congress labeled her “The most dangerous woman in America!” Jones combined radical organizing methods and energetic speeches to mobilize thousands of lower-class workers into unions between 1872 and 1924. She literally shaped the way civil disobedience could be used to fight for economic justice.
The fiery Mary Harris Jones actually started her life quite humbly. She was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1837. Her family was one of the starving thousands that fled the Irish Potato Famine and emigrated across the Atlantic. They landed first in Canada, where her father worked laying railroad tracks, and eventually settled in the United States. She went to school in Toronto, then moved to the US to begin a career as a simple dressmaker in Tennessee.
Young Mary Harris experienced far too many tragedies in her early life. In Memphis, she married George Jones in 1861, an iron worker and active member of the Iron Molders’ Union. He fought for workers’ rights at a time when unions were still in their infancy. In rapid succession, they had four young children together. But a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1867 killed her husband and ALL FOUR children. She was only 30.
In shock and heart-broken, Mary moved to Chicago and opened a seamstress shop, sewing clothes for the wealthy residents of the North Side. It has here, watching workers slave away in factories, that Mary’s resentment for economic inequality began to bubble. But then suddenly, tragedy struck again. She lost both her home and shop in The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (see related blog post).
With all her possessions in ashes, Mary sought shelter with the Knights of Labor. There, she slowly began to see the labor movement as her new family, and started working as an activist. She would commit the rest of her life to the struggle for humane wages and working conditions.
Mary found her voice and began giving inspirational speeches to encourage workers to unionize. She traveled to numerous strikes, helping coal miners in Pennsylvania in 1873 and railroad workers in 1877. From 1880 onward, Jones participated in hundreds of strikes across the country. The way in which she genuinely cared for any and all workers earned her the well-deserved nickname “Mother” Jones.
They also called her the “Miner’s Angel,” but rejected that label, saying bluntly, “I’m no angel.” Mother Jones became an active campaigner for the United Mine Workers Union in West Virginia. In the 1890s, she mobilized miners’ wives to march with brooms and mops in order to block company strikebreakers from entering the mines.
Her movement assisted both the United Mine Workers and the American Railway Unions, which launched major strikes for living wages in 1894. For Jones, it was about more than just a fair union contract. She argued that miners should be able to direct their own economic destinies, a radical idea at the time.
Mother Jones even encouraged militant action when warranted. While the militias and the strikes were often brutally crushed, they helped perfect Jones’ methods for mobilizing struggling communities. She emerged from these skirmishes undeterred, inspired by the new labor and socialist movement.
She was considered by the authorities (both corporate and political) to be a dangerous radical. Five-feet tall, now with snow-white hair, and in an all-black dress, Jones was indeed a confrontational presence. When she was mocked as the “grandmother of all agitators,”
She believed in organizing at the community level to demonstrate to workers their capacity to manage their own destiny. Wherever she went, she entered into the lives of the toilers and truly became a part of them. She put women and children at the center of struggles, making it a family-based movement.
One of Jones’ key contributions was building unions that bridged racial and ethnic divides. She believed that unskilled immigrants and blacks should be included as well. She condemned white supremacy and argued that black and immigrant workers were some of the best union members.
Oddly, Mother Jones opposed Women’s Suffrage. She feared that focusing on the vote was diverting working-class women from more important economic justice. She saw the suffrage movement as only a rich women’s distraction. “You don’t need a Vote to raise Hell!” she proclaimed.
A political progressive, she was a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. Jones also helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, and published numerous articles in the International Socialist Review.
Jones insisted that the government address social injustice as well. Demanding child labor laws, she organized children textile workers to march on President Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay home in 1903. In 1914, the Colorado militia massacred 20 women and children in a miners’ tent colony. Jones persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to intervene and negotiate a truce.
At other times, the authorities were not so tolerant of Mother Jones. When violence broke out during a 1912 miners strike in West Virginia, the court convicted her, at age 82, to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. Nationwide rallies and protests led the governor to quickly commute her sentence. Undeterred, she returned to organizing workers. Nothing it seemed could dissuade Mother Jones from her work.
Mary was also a global organizer who believed in a world-wide labor revolution. By 1910, she was fighting for Mexican labor rights against the country’s dictatorship and its US supporters. When she finally traveled to Mexico City in 1921, workers showered her with red carnations and blue violets, calling her “Madre Juanita.”
Mother Jones lived her last years with friends in Silver Spring, MD. In 1930, her life was celebrated with special labor events across the country. She even gave her last speech for an Edison moving picture camera. She died in November of that year at age 93. A friend of laborers to the end, she asked to be buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Illinois, next to victims of an 1898 mine riot. Her funeral was attended by thousands.
Mother Jones was truly an inspirational folk hero to generations of American laborers for over six decades. Many of her dreams were not realized in her lifetime, but they did in fact come to pass after World War II, when our grandfathers returned home as GIs. They took jobs in countless factories and mills scattered across the U.S. and, yes, joined countless labor unions. These unions ensured fare pay, benefits, and pensions to millions of American men and women of the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers.
The eruption of Krakatoa island in August 1883 was THE most deadly volcanic explosion in modern history. More than 36,000 people in over 300 coastal villages perished in the most ghastly ways imaginable. Many died of burns and suffocation from the super-heated pyroclastic blasts that blew the peaks off the island. Thousands more drowned from the 4 tsunamis that followed when the volcano collapsed into the sea.
The Indonesian island of Krakatau (Krakatoa) sits in the narrow Sunda Straits between Sumatra to the north and Java to the south. Before the 1883 eruption, the uninhabited tropical island had no less than 3 volcanic peaks: Perboewatan the most active, Danan in the middle, and Rakata the tallest. Krakatau and its two nearby islands were remnants of a previous eruption that left an undersea caldera simmering beneath the sea.
Our story however starts 3 months before. Early in the morning of 20 May 1883, an 11 kilometer high cloud of ash and pumice plumed above the normally silent Krakatau, the first eruption in over 2 centuries. Over the next 2 months, it would deliver similar spectacles, all of which brought churning clouds of incandescent ash high into the hot tropical skies. People living in the nearby Dutch colonies on Java & Sumatra actually held parties celebrating nature’s spectacular fireworks. These awe-inspiring displays however were a prelude of far worse things to come.
At 12:53 pm on Sunday 26 August, the eruption’s first major blast sent a cloud of hot gas, ash and pumice 24 km into the afternoon sky! Debris from the smaller summer eruptions had plugged the neck of the cone, allowing pressure to build in the magma chamber. This initial blast generated an eardrum-rupturing barrage accompanied by a black churning cloud that quickly turned daytime into night. Villagers and Dutch colonists covered their mouths and fled into houses and huts to escape the raining storm of hot ash and pumice. This was but the opening salvo to a climactic eruption the next day.
The first of 4 stupendous eruptions began at 5:30 am Monday morning, climaxing in a colossal blast at 10am that literally blew Krakatau Island apart. The noise was heard over 4600 km away, throughout the Indian Ocean – from Sri Lanka in the west, to Australia in the east. TWO-THIRDS of the island collapsed beneath the sea, into the now vacated magma chamber. 23 square kilometers of the island, including all of Perboewatan and Danan, fell into a caldera 6 kilometers across.
The explosive force was estimated at 200 megatons of TNT. By comparison, the 1945 atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima was a mere 20 kilotons. When the northern half of the island dropped beneath the ocean, it generating a series of devastating pyroclastic ash flows at sea level. Black clouds blasted across the waters of the Sundra Straits at speeds up 100 kph. Dazed villagers had barely enough time to take in the destruction of Krakatoa. Blistering pyroclastic flows struck southern Sumatra and western Java with a vengeance, hot enough to incinerate entire villages.
1000 alone died in the Sumatra town of Ketimbang, over 40 kilometers away. Dutch Controller Willem Beijerinck lived and worked in Ketimbang with his wife Johanna and their three children. He seriously contemplated killing his wife and children to spare them the hideous death of suffocation by hot ash. The family managed to survive by heading to high ground early in the eruption.
The collapse of the island into the sea generated immense tsunamis that ravaged the coastlines on both sides of the strait. Thousands that survived burns from the hot ash were now killed by a tidal wave 120 feet tall. Completely unprepared, survivors scrambled fanatically for higher ground. Most of the closest islands, after first being overwhelmed by the hot ash, were totally submerged, stripping away of all vegetation, washing helpless people out to sea, and removing all signs of human occupation.
The steamship Berouw was carried a mile inland on Sumatra and beached in a river bed; all 28 crew members died. The Loudon was anchored in Lampong Bay, near the village of Telok Betong when the first wave approached. The ship’s captain Lindemann raised anchor and turned its bow to face the tsunami. The ship somehow managed to ride over the steep crest. The wave continued past them and the shocked crew watched as the waters consumed the town until nothing remained but the open sea.
All told, the explosions hurled 45 cubic kilometers of debris into the atmosphere darkening skies 440 km away. The sun was not seen over Sumatra and Java for three days. The shock wave was recorded around the globe as far away as London, and circled the planet seven times. Within 13 days, a layer of volcanic gas had circled the Earth, making for spectacular sunsets over Europe and the Americas. Average GLOBAL temperatures were up to 1.2 degrees C COOLER for the next FIVE years! Mother Nature had indeed put on one of her better shows.
For months, the Sunda Straits were clogged with so much debris that it looked like solid ground, peppered with decaying corpses. Relief ships were unable to reach devastated coastal communities like Telok Betong for weeks. The official number of dead, calculated by the Dutch East India Company was 36,417, 90 percent of which were directly killed by the tsunamis. Truer estimates including native populations and the aftermath are over 100,000 dead.
In 1927, fishermen in the strait were shocked when a column of steam began spewing from the old collapsed caldera. Krakatau had awakened after 44 years of silent slumber. Within weeks, a small, new cone appeared above sea level. Within a year, it grew into a small island, named appropriately Anak Krakatau, Child of Krakatau. The new peak continues to grows on average 7 meters every year. Krakatoa Jr. is up to its old tricks yet again, and erupted as recently as 2020, spewing ash and lava into the air and causing a 5 meter tsunami. Let us hope that is the worst it has to offer the South Pacific.
For 13 nerve-wracking days in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the earth close to a nuclear WORLD WAR III. It was a direct confrontation between 2 major superpowers, United States and USSR (Soviet Union) during the so called Cold War. It was the worst clash since the construction of the Berlin Wall a year earlier in 1961.
The US Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 spectacularly failed to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. So in 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Castro. The Soviets would place nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island to deter any future invasion. The Soviet Union also disliked the number of nuclear weapons pointing at them from Western Europe’s NATO. They saw missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field.
In September, President John F. Kennedy issued a public warning against the introduction of any offensive Soviet weapons into Cuba. Despite this, in October, a U–2 spy plane took aerial photos. It clearly showing construction of a medium-range ballistic nuclear missile site in Cuba. The Pentagon rushed these images to the White House on October 16th, beginning what would be called the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba was a mere 90 miles from Key West, Florida and the range of these missiles included Washington DC!
Kennedy quickly summoned his security advisers to the West Wing, a group called the Ex Com (Executive Committee) to consider options and a course of action. The Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for an immediate air strike, followed by a U.S. invasion of Cuba! Non-military advisers recommended only stern warnings and sanctions to the Soviet Union. Kennedy and ExCom all agreed that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The challenge was to get them removed without triggering a nuclear world war.
In tense deliberations that stretched for nearly a week, they came up with a variety of options, including diplomacy, a bombing attack, and a full-scale invasion of Cuba. In the end, President Kennedy decided upon a middle of the road course. On Monday, October 22nd, he ordered a US Naval “quarantine” of Cuba. Calling it a “quarantine” technically meant this was not a “blockade,” which assumed a State of War existed.
In it he declared the U.S. would not permit offensive weapons of any kind in Cuba. He demanded the Soviets dismantle the missile bases under construction, AND return all offensive weapons to the Soviet Union. President Kennedy then went on national TV that night and informed America and the world of the threat to national security these Cuban missiles represented. He explained the naval quarantine he had ordered, and the global military consequences if the crisis escalated. His stern message was clear:
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba anywhere in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
President John F. Kennedy
The Joint Chiefs of Staff moved the USA to DEFCON 3 as naval ships began to surround Cuba, preparing for a military strike. People around the globe nervously worried and waited. WHAT WOULD THE SOVIET RESPONSE BE? Many feared the earth was finally at the brink of nuclear annihilation and looked for the nearest bomb shelter.
In schools around the country, teachers ran daily Duck and Cover drills in their classrooms. In duck and cover, students drop quickly to the floor and scramble under their desks. Then they lie curled up in a ball, face down, and cover their head with their hands. The goal being to protect against a nuclear blast where the force of the explosion could shatter glass windows and create an immense blast of heat.
On Wednesday, October 24th, Khrushchev responded with his own statement. He said the US “blockade” was an “Act of Aggression” and that Soviet ships would proceed. The crisis had reached a superpower stalemate. A crucial moment arrived later that day, when Soviet ships neared the line of US Navy vessels enforcing the quarantine outside Cuba. Any attempt to breach the blockade would spark a military confrontation that could escalate to a nuclear exchange. But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade!
Meanwhile, US spy planes showed the Soviet missile sites were nearly operational. The Pentagon placed military forces at DEFCON 2—meaning war was imminent. Kennedy and the ExCom prepared for an attack on Cuba. On October 26th, Kennedy told his advisers it appeared that only a US attack on Cuba would remove the Soviet missiles, but he insisted on giving diplomacy a one last chance.
“I thought it was the last day I would ever see.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
That afternoon, the crisis took a strange turn. ABC News told the White House they’d been approached by a Russian agent. He suggested the Soviet Union would remove their missiles from Cuba, IF the US would not to invade the island. While the Pentagon scrambled to validate this “back-channel” offer, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a communication in the middle of the night, October 26th. It was an emotional message raising the specter of nuclear holocaust, and proposed a resolution that matched what ABC had heard!
“If there is no intention to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”
Kremlin message to the White House
The next day, Saturday, October 27th, Khrushchev sent a second message, indicating that any proposed deal must include the removal of US missiles from Turkey. That same day, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba. 35-year-old pilot Major Rudy Anderson was killed. Kennedy decided to ignore the 2nd message and respond only to the 1st. That night, he sent a communication to Khrushchev proposing the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba under supervision of the United Nations, and a guarantee that the US would NOT invade Cuba.
It was a risky to ignore the 2nd Khrushchev message. So Attorney General Robert Kennedy (the president’s younger brother) met with Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, in Washington. He said the U.S. was planning to remove the missiles from Turkey anyway, and that it would do so soon, but this could not be part of any public statement. The next morning, October 28th, Nikita Khrushchev issued a statement that Soviet missiles would be dismantled and removed from Cuba!!
By the end of November 1962, the U.S. was satisfied with the removal of Soviet missiles and ended its naval quarantine of Cuba. U.S. quietly removed their Jupiter missiles from Turkey the next year, in 1963. The Cuban Missile Crisis strengthened President Kennedy’s image both in the U.S. and internationally. It also helped turn the negative world opinion surrounding his failed Bay of Pigs Invasion a year earlier.
In an effort to prevent this from ever happening again, a direct telephone link between the White House and Moscow’s Kremlin was established in 1963, known as the famous red “HOTLINE” phone. So a direct verbal conversation could take place between the U.S. President and Soviet Premier when needed, and avert World War III.
The tense Cold War between the East and West was far from over though. It would last another 29 YEARS, until the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Of course the world’s nuclear arsenals, though greatly diminished by treaties, still contains thousands of warheads, and remains under the control of the U.S., Russia Federation, Britain, France, and many other countries, including China, Israel, India and Pakistan. Let us hope another such nuclear crisis does not evolve between any of them.
If you approached Galveston, Texas from the gulf in 1900, it looked like an American Venice. Barely 8 feet above sea level – hotels, mansions, and church steeples rose from the placid waters as if it were Atlantis itself. Its long harbor and numerous warehouses made it a more important port than its inland cousin, Houston. Over 1,000 steam ships docked at the harbor every year. Its busy business district was dubbed the ‘Wall Street of the West.’ Over 37,000 souls crowded into the picturesque barrier island, linked to the mainland by no less than 3 railroad bridges. The popular, flat beachfront boasted numerous hotels, restaurants and shops along its famous Midway. All that changed when the 1900 Storm, a Category 4 hurricane, arrived.
As far back as locals could remember, Galveston had been spared the arrival of any major hurricane, or ‘Cyclones’ as they called them back then. Only two tropical storms had hit Texas in recent memory, but much farther south. Galvestonians considered them freak incidents and that a major hurricane would NEVER breach the Florida Straits, let alone hit Texas. Why even the U.S. Weather Bureau agreed the shallow Gulf waters made it virtually immune to hurricanes.
Talks of building a sea wall were discussed by city leaders, then tossed aside as sheer folly. Why bother? In the meantime, the bustling city continued to fill up and grow. The protective dunes were destroyed and their sand used to fill in wetlands for new construction and even more souls on the island.
The U.S. Weather Bureau knew a tropical storm had passed Cuba two day earlier, but thought it turned to the north and was heading for Florida. In the days before satellites, eye witnesses and telegraphs had to suffice … and they were not enough. Isaac Cline, Galveston’s chief meteorologist, went to the beach that morning and reported partly cloudy skies with only “unusually high swells in the gulf.” There was not the brick-red dawn usually associated with foul weather. Other than the raising of a storm warning flag atop the weather bureau building downtown, there would be no call for evacuation. By that time, it was too late anyway.
By the lunch hour, dark clouds had brought heavy rains. They were fed by an unusually high tide, flooding all streets nearest the beach hip-deep in seawater. Fierce, crashing waves destroyed the beloved Midway and trolley tracks that ran parallel to the beach. Some families began to pack their wagons with valuables and head to the center of the island. Others, believing it was just a bad storm, stayed put and moved to the upper floor of their homes.
By four o’clock, winds were blowing at hurricane strength, flipping slate shingles off roof tops, sending them flying through the air like scimitars. Rising waters were already chest-deep in the streets. Store front windows downtown were shattered by the winds. Families realized they had but two options now, risk wading downtown to slightly higher ground (a mere 8 feet above sea level), or ride out the storm in the upper floors of their wooden homes. Isaac Cline had watched his barometer drop all day to a record low and waded home to his own family. Schools, convents and hospitals became emergency shelters.
A 15 FOOT STORM SURGE rose in a matter of minutes, flooding the island from beach to bay. All the bridges leaving the island were destroyed. Two hours later, the Eye itself plowed over the city, punching it with 140 mile per hour winds. In the dark of night, street after street of houses were crushed by the massive storm surge. Broken homes were lifted off their foundations. They crashed into the next street, only to repeat the cycle of destruction. Residents who were not killed instantly were quite literally thrown into the heart of the cyclone’s dark swirling waters, to either survive clinging to wreckage, or die.
St. Mary’s Orphanage sat on prime property, directly on the Gulf, just outside the city limits. The Sisters of Charity gathered the terrified children into the upper floors to escape the rising storm surge. They sang Mary, Queen of the Waves to pray and calm the orphans. The sisters even tied themselves to the children with ropes so they’d not be separated if blown out into the storm. Its two dormitories eventually collapsed with 90 young children and 10 nuns inside … only three teenage boys managed to survive.
By dawn, the killer storm has passed. The dazed and lucky survivors crawled from the wreckage to find half their city flattened to rubble and littered with corpses. Due to the large number of bodies washed out to sea, it will never be known exactly how many truly died in the Galveston Hurricane. 3,600 buildings were completely destroyed and up to 8,000 lives lost. Isaac Cline managed to save his 3 daughters when their home collapsed, but lost his wife. The bodies of the dead were first loaded onto barges and dumped in the Gulf of Mexico, but the Gulf dumped them back on the beach the next day. Funeral pyres became the only way to dispose of so many dead.
In the years folllowing, the Gulf of Mexico sand was dredged and the entire city raised up 17 FEET. Then a massive, curved concrete seawall was constructed. Galveston has since been hit many more times by tropical storms, most recently directs hits by Hurricane Alicia in 1983 and Hurricane Ike in September 2008. Though given ample days to evacuate from Ike, over 100,000 residents chose to stay on the skinny barrier island and ride out the storm … just like their ancestors a hundred years earlier. Given the uncertainty around global climate change, we can only assume Hurricane Ike will not be the last cyclone to attack the vulnerable Texas coast.
Source: https://www.1900storm.com/
How soon we forgot. Over 30 years ago, on the night of December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released 30 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas into the air. Primarily into the poor slums surrounding the factory, exposing more than half a million souls to the deadly cloud.
The thick, heavy gas stayed low to the ground, causing victims throats and eyes to burn, inducing vomiting, internal bleeding, and death. Estimates of the death toll vary from as few as 3,800 in the early days to as many as 16,000 over the years.
In the 1970s, the Indian government lured Union Carbide (UC) to build a pesticide plant in Bhopal in central India. The government itself would keep a 22% stake in the company’s Indian subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited. The plant would produce the pesticide carbaryl using methyl isocyanate (MIC). The densely populated Bhopal site was unfortunately not zoned for such a hazardous industry.
In 1984, the factory operated with safety equipment and procedures far below the standards found in its sister plant in the US’s West Virginia. The local government was aware of the safety issues. But they were unwilling to burden the owners with pollution regulations for fear of the economic impact and the loss of such a large regional employer.
At 11 pm on 2 December 1984, a million Bhopal resident slept in the nearby slums. An operator at Plant C noticed a leak of methyl isocyanate gas and growing pressure inside storage tank #610. A faulty valve allowed water meant for cleaning pipes to mix with 40 tons of MIC. The vent-gas scrubber, which neutralized toxic emissions, had been turned off 3 weeks earlier. A refrigeration unit that cooled the storage tank had been drained of coolant for use elsewhere. The gas flare tower was out of action for 3 months. Pressure and heat from the MIC + water exothermic reaction continued to build for 2 hours.
Finally, at 1 am, December 3, a loud explosion rumbled through the plant as a safety valve blew away, sending a plume of methyl isocyanate gas into the night air. Within minutes, a toxic gas cloud flooded the surrounding streets of Bhopal. Within hours, those same streets were littered with human corpses and the carcasses of cows, dogs and birds. An estimated 3,800 people died that night, mostly in the poor slums adjacent to the plant. As a cool morning breeze picked up, it carried the poisonous yellow gas to the rest of the city, killing even more.
The Union Carbide plant’s alarm system was not triggered for hours. The factory managers raised no alarm to the city. Suddenly, thousands of people awoke choking. Those that could, started running to Bhopal’s 2 local hospitals. They were soon overwhelmed, a crisis exacerbated since doctors didn’t know what gas was causing the odd symptoms they were seeing. Victims were coughing up blood, unable to breathe, fainting from dizziness, suffered blistering skin rashes, and sudden blindness. Bhopal’s doctors had no experience in dealing with an industrial disaster.
“I woke up suffocating! It felt like someone had thrown hot coals in my eyes.”
Quote from Bhopal victim
In the neighborhoods closest to the plant, the gas caused internal hemorrhaging, pneumonia and death, leaving bodies in the streets as they tried to flee their homes. The government later estimated over 3,000 people died within a few hours. The two hospitals treated over 50,000 patients in the first 2 days.
Methyl isocyanate is extremely toxic and, if its air concentration reaches 21ppm (parts per million), it causes death within minutes. Near the Bhopal plant, the level was several times higher! Bhopal had a population of about 8,500,000 souls that night. Approximately a half a million people were immediately exposed.
Officially, the government stated the gas leak was contained in 8 hours. It’s estimated that about 40 tons of methyl isocyanate leaked from the Union Carbide factory. Estimates of the dead in the first few days run as high as 10,000, with 20,000 premature deaths reported in the subsequent 20 years.
Immediately after the disaster, UC began to distance itself from responsibility, shifting blame to its Indian subsidiary. It also spread sabotage theories that it was perpetuated by Sikh extremists, but no evidence existed to substantiate that. At every turn, Union Carbide attempted to manipulate and withhold data. To this date, the company has never stated exactly what was in the deadly cloud that enveloped the city that December night.
The toxic plume had barely cleared when the first multi-billion dollar lawsuit was filed in a U.S. court. This was the beginning of years of litigation in which the affects of the tragedy on Bhopal’s poor were largely ignored.
In a 1989 settlement agreed by the Indian Supreme Court, UC finally agreed to pay $470 million to the Indian government, to be distributed to Bhopal victims as a final settlement. The figure was based on the disputed claim that only 3000 people died and 100,000 suffered permanent disabilities. The Indian government, notorious for its corruption, has yet to distribute all of the settlement. Had compensation in Bhopal been paid at the same rate that victims were awarded in US, the liability would have been greater than $10 billion!
By 2003, over 500,000 people were awarded compensation. The average amount to families of the victims was between only $550 to $2,200, which could not pay for the chronic lung ailments, life-long eye problems, and birth defects survivors developed.
As a final insult, Union Carbide closed its Bhopal plant and failed to completely clean up what was now a hazardous waste site. Today, the rusting, deserted complex continues to leak toxic chemicals and heavy metals into the soil and aquifers of Bhopal. Thousands of tons of hazardous waste remain buried underground. In 1999, Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide for $9 billion in stock. In 2009, the Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment monitoring lab reported that pesticide groundwater contamination was still detectable 3 km from the factory.
As its legacy, the Bhopal tragedy became the worst chemical catastrophe in global history to date. The name ‘Union Carbide‘ is today synonymous with industrial mismanagement, disaster, and death. In 2023, Netflix released a mini-series on the heroes of the Bhopal disaster entitled, “The Railway Men.“