Obscure disasters (formerly "Ever hear of Texas City Disaster...?)

[tuq]

Hay guise has anyone mentioned the Boston Molasses thing yet?

Anyway, some interesting finds in this thread. I wonder how concerned we should be about these huge masses of inland water drying up.

I used to go to Lake Powell every Labor Day (the large body of water upriver from the Grand Canyon that was created by the Glen Canyon Dam, much to the chagrin of Edward Abbey). I think their level is back up a bit but we went five straight years and every year the water level was noticeably lower until the last year we had to take a huge detour through some other canyons because the main channel had dried up in a spot. It was weird looking up at our campsite from a few years earlier and noticing it was now about 30-40 feet above water.

[LeapFrog]

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Compared to the new body, it was a pond [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


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touche [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Tuckmaster Flash, the molasses incident was mentioned in the 2nd post. Talk about a bad way to go...

edit: hmm perhaps you were joking there -- I have been moving for the past few days and my detectors are offline due to lack of sleep. The 'hay guise' made me reconsider...

[tuq]

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edit: hmm perhaps you were joking there -- I have been moving for the past few days and my detectors are offline due to lack of sleep. The 'hay guise' made me reconsider...

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I was being a smartass because YTF posted about it and then dcasper came along and posted about the exact same thing. I like (gently) calling people out when it looks like they didn't read the thread and make a duplicate post. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[KotOD]

Does the Great London Beer Flood count?

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/beer.asp
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1355155

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On October 16, 1814 the metal hoops that held the big vat together snapped and beer exploded in every direction, causing all the other vats in the building to rupture. A total of 8,500 barrels (1,224,000 liters) of beer smashed through the brick wall of the building and out into the crowded slum area of St. Giles. The sea of beer ran through the streets, flooded basements, and demolished two homes. The wave collapsed a wall in the nearby Tavistock Arms pub and buried a barmaid for three hours. In one home, the beer busted in and drowned a mother and her three-year-old son. A total of eight people were killed, seven due to drowning and one due to alcohol poisoning.

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People really buck up in times of tragedy
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People quickly waded into the flooded areas and tried to save all the free beer they could. Some scooped it up in pots while others lapped it up in their hands.

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[KotOD]

I know that there was a killer fog in London, but this one is local to me:

The Donora Fog

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The smog, the researchers pointed out, was a poisonous mix of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and heavy metal dusts that came from the smokestacks of the local zinc smelter where most of the town worked.

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http://www.eltoroairport.org/issues/fog.html

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One eye witness related that the fog piled up all the 26 October while the weather was raw, cloudy and dead calm and stayed that way as the fog piled up that day and the following days. It was just possible to see across the street.

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http://www.actionpa.org/fluoride/donora-fog.html

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By the time fresh winds finally swept through the valley and blew away the smog on Monday, 7,000 people had become ill – nearly half the town's population. In all, twenty would die from acute fluoride poisoning and asphyxiation.

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[daveT]

people always tells me that my hometown did nothing good.

Fires plagued the Cuyahoga beginning in 1936 when a spark from a blow torch ignited floating debris and oils. Fires erupted on the river several more times before June 22, 1969, when a river fire captured the attention of Time magazine, which described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays."[3]

This event helped spur an avalanche of pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and the creation of the federal and state Environmental Protection Agency. As a result, large point sources of pollution on the Cuyahoga have received significant attention from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in recent decades. These events are referred to in Randy Newman's 1972 song "Burn On" and R.E.M.'s 1986 song "Cuyahoga".

[ChipWrecked]

Tupelo-Gainesville Outbreak

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Approximately 436 people were killed by these tornadoes.

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The worst tornado-caused death toll in a single building in U.S. history was at the Cooper Pants Factory. The multiple story building, filled with young workers, collapsed and caught fire, killing 70 people.

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Letters from Gainesville, Georgia were blown 67 miles away to Anderson, South Carolina.

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[ChipWrecked]

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Dust clogged the atmosphere worlwide to the point that 1816 was called The Year Without a Summer and the Norther Hemisphere suffered the biggest famine of the 19th century.

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There are studies that suggest this was the cause of a wave of migration from New England to (what is now) the Midwest.

[SmokeyRidesAgain]

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A boat carrying
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* 223,188 kilograms benzol
* 56,301 kilograms of nitrocellulose (guncotton)
* 1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid
* 544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (highly explosive, and extremely sensitive to shock, heat and friction)
* 226,797 kilograms of TNT


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Runs into another and catches fire. The resulting explosion

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cubic mile of air was consumed by the terrific explosion, whose force was sufficient to annihilate the Mont-Blanc and push the sea away, exposing the harbor floor for an instant.

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From 13 miles away:


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Two and a half square kilometers of Halifax was completely flattened by the blast.

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Ho-leeee [censored]!

[bonds]

I'm kinda obsessed with the Centralia Mine Fire for no valid reason.