2004 Sri Lanka tsunami train wreck
An initial tsunami wave halted the overcrowded train, prompting local residents and fleeing beachgoers to climb onto and inside the carriages for safety. A towering second wave—estimated between 7 to 12 meters high—slammed into the area, lifting the heavily loaded carriages and hurling them violently into nearby houses and trees. With doors jammed shut in […]
2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake And Tsunami
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a catastrophic natural disaster triggered by a magnitude 9.1 undersea earthquake on December 26, 2004, off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.
Deep Water Horizon
[Sample] Piper Alpha
Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil and gas production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum, about 190 km north-east of Aberdeen. On the evening of 6 July 1988, a condensate pump that had been taken out of service for maintenance was restarted; a temporary flange on the pump leaked gas, which ignited and exploded. Fires […]
[Sample] Tenerife airport disaster
On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Both aircraft had been diverted there after a bomb incident closed Gran Canaria airport, and the small regional field was congested and shrouded in fog when a KLM 747 began its take-off roll while […]
Chernobyl disaster
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Pripyat, in what was then the Ukrainian SSR, was destroyed during a safety test that had been run with several protection systems disabled. A sudden power surge led to a steam explosion, a second explosion and a […]
The Bhopal Gas Disaster Explained | The Night a City Couldn’t Breathe
On the night of 2–3 December 1984, a leak of methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, spread over the densely populated neighbourhoods surrounding the factory. Water entering a storage tank triggered a runaway reaction, and safety systems that should have contained or neutralised the release were […]
