Disasters

In the early hours of December 16, 1811, the residents of New Madrid, a Mississippi River town once part of the Louisiana Territory, rushed from their homes as the ground rolled beneath their feet. Trees were uprooted and thrown to the ground. Huge chasms opened in the earth, ...read more

When the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded in the early hours of April 26, 1986—precipitating the worst nuclear disaster in history—it resulted almost entirely from human factors. As the real history of that fateful event continues to be revealed, those ...read more

Fires were nothing out of the ordinary on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in the 1960s. The city was still a manufacturing hub and the river, which empties into Lake Erie, had long been a dumping place for sewage and industrial waste. But on June 22, 1969, a spark flared from the ...read more

Overturned trains. Timber found miles away from where it had been stored. Trees felled. Fires and close calls. A letter that flew almost 100 miles. On a normal day in the Midwest in 1925, any one of these stories would have been worthy of front-page coverage. But March 18, 1925 ...read more

As the stage coach drove up to Camp Supply, its passengers must have felt relieved. They’d been caught in a storm, and the coach’s horses had lost their path in the Kansas snow. Finally, the coach arrived at Camp Supply, a military outpost in Indian Territory in what is now ...read more

The avalanche raced down a steep hill in Aberfan, Wales, sucking everything in its path into the chaos: landscape, buildings, an entire schoolhouse. When David Evans, the owner of a local pub, heard about it from a neighbor, he ran into the street. “Everything was so quiet, so ...read more

The ninth plague of Egypt was complete darkness that lasted for three days. But in 536 A.D., much of the world went dark for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures ...read more

It was 2004, the day after Christmas, and thousands of European and American tourists had flocked to the beaches of Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to escape the winter chill in a tropical paradise. At 7:59 AM, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake—one of the largest ...read more

While Allied troops were fighting World War II in the Pacific, the U.S. homefront was defending Washington, D.C. from the worst flood it’d ever seen. “Spare no effort or expense to protect the Capital,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told officials during the flood of October ...read more

I heard whooshing sounds… One of the most vivid pictures I have of the day is this waterfall of fire falling down. It was raining fire inside the elevator bank… I yelled ‘Stairs! Follow me!’ I turned right and just started running. —Neil Lucente, then-employee of Network Plus, ...read more

It took 18 days and the efforts of dozens of divers and rescue personnel, but 12 boys and their soccer coach were finallyrescued from the cave complex where they were trapped by floods during Thailand’s monsoon season. Here are five other dramatic rescues that were just as ...read more

Mother Nature can be merciless. From the churning hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, to the trailer-tossing storms of Tornado Alley, to the ground-pounding quakes of California, the United States is no stranger to deadly natural disasters. Here are five of the worst natural disasters ...read more