In July of 1915 on the Chicago River, the SS Eastland, carrying over 2,500 passengers and crew headed for a Western Electric company picnic, suddenly listed to port and rolled over into the muddy river. 844 souls perished, more than on the Titanic or Lusitania; yet the SS Eastland is lost in history to most.
Tag Archives: disaster
The Legacy of Russia’s Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
The greatest nuclear disaster the Earth has ever known, was sworse Three Mile Island, worse than Japan’s Fukushima.
Podcast: Who Drained Russia’s Vast Aral Sea?
To answer the question, it was the Soviet Union, that’s who. The Aral Sea is actually situated in Central Asia, between Northern Uzbekistan and Southern Kazakhstan. Once the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world, the vanishing Aral Sea is now nearly empty, thanks to a flawed, decades-old, Soviet-engineered desert irrigation program. To read theContinue reading “Podcast: Who Drained Russia’s Vast Aral Sea?”
The 1917 Great Halifax Explosion Eclipsed only by Hiroshima
At 9:05 am on December 6th, 1917, the most devastating man-made explosion, short of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb, occurred in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada.
Podcast: Five Reasons the Johnstown Flood Disaster should never have happened
The terrible Johnstown Flood of 1889 was more of a man-made Tsunami. Yes, there was flooding at first. The ‘Storm of the Century‘ rains arrived in the deep Pennsylvania valley on Memorial Day, 1889. The two rivers that flanked the steel mill town began to swell. But it wasn’t until the aging South Fork DamContinue reading “Podcast: Five Reasons the Johnstown Flood Disaster should never have happened”
Welcome to Centralia – the Town that Burned from Beneath
If you drive north on Route 61 in northeastern Pennsylvania, you will come across an innocent looking detour at the top of a low mountain.
Bhopal India was the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster
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,Continue reading “Bhopal India was the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster”
Japan’s Horrific Minamata Disease was a Man-made Disaster
Minamata Disease is a sobering reminder of the dangers of unregulated industries in modern times, a purely human-created disease.