Disasters Events

Flight 214 was in a holding pattern awaiting an insturment approach to the Philadelphia International Airport when it was struck by lightning. Immediately thereafter, the aircraft was obs...

Eastern Air Lines Flight 304 was a Douglas DC-8 flying from New Orleans International Airport to Washington-National Airport that crashed on February 25, 1964. All 51 passengers and 7 cre...

This great earthquake and ensuing tsunami took 128 lives (tsunami 113, earthquake 15), and caused about $311 million in property loss. Earthquake effects were heavy in many towns, includi...

After arriving at the San Francisco Airport, Gonzales took out two insurance policies totaling a $105,000. Then, shortly before boarding the flight to Reno, he displayed his gun to numero...

A United Air Lines Viscount turbo-prop with 39 aboard crashed and burned at 6:15 p.m. Thursday in the East Tennessee foothills of the Smokies near here. There apparently were no survivors...

Bonanza Air Lines Flight 114 was a Fairchild F-27 turboprop airliner flying out of Phoenix, Arizona to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the evening of November 15, ...

Linjeflyg Flight 277 (actually LF267V), a Convair CV-340 Metropolitan (SE-CCK), crashed during the approach to Ängelholm-Helsingborg Airport, Sweden, at the time an air force base. The cr...

A wide outbreak of 37 tornadoes killed 256 people, mostly in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana on Palm Sunday 1965. This was deadliest tornado outbreak in 33 years in the United States and has ...

On August 9, 1965, 53 contract workers were killed in a fire in the Titan missile silo outside of Searcy, in one the largest industrial accidents in US history.

On August 27th, reconnaissance aircraft found a tropical depression east of the Leeward Islands. By late in the day the system strengthened into a tropical storm, as it moved west-northwe...

At 13:42 hours the crew contacted ATC requesting permission to start the engines and clearance for a VMC climb via Fuji-Rebel-Kushimoto. The aircraft left the ramp at 13:50. It was instru...

On 21 October, 1966 Tip No 7 which forms part of the main complex of tips at Aberfan slipped and descended upon part of the village killing 116 children and 29 adults. The tragedy occurre...

The 1966 Flood of the River Arno in Florence killed many people and damaged or destroyed millions of masterpieces of art and rare books in Florence. It is considered the worst flood in th...

The 1967 USS Forrestal fire was a devastating fire and series of chain-reaction explosions on 29 July 1967 that killed 134 sailors and injured 161 on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal (C...

September 17th, 1967: A crowd occurred after the fight caused because of the goal scored in 20th minute of the match between Kayserispor and Sivasspor played at Kayseri. 40 people died an...

At least 40 rail passengers have died and 80 more have been wounded after a commuter train derailed in south-east London. The 19:43 express train was travelling from Hastings to Charin...

On December 15,1967 at approximately 5 p.m., the U.S. Highway 35 bridge connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Kanauga, Ohio suddenly collapsed into the Ohio River. At the time of f...

The Richmond, Indiana explosion was a double explosion which occurred at 1:47 PM EST on Saturday, April 6, 1968 in downtown Richmond, Indiana. The explosions killed 41 people and injured ...

On 1 February 1967, SCORPION entered the Norfolk Naval Shipyard for another extended overhaul. In late October, she commenced refresher training and weapons system acceptance tests. Follo...

For countless years the rivalry between both sets of fans has been very, very intense, and there have been several cases of deaths and injuries as a result of fan violence. However, th...

The most recent influenza pandemic occurred in 1968 with the Hong Kong Flu (H3N2) outbreak, which resulted in nearly 34,000 deaths in the United States. The 1968/69 pandemic, which was mi...

Hurricane Camille, the USA's second strongest 20th century hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast in 1969. Camille became a hurricane on Aug. 15, 1969 south of Cuba and began quickly growing th...

The 1970 Tonghai earthquake occurred on 4 January 1970 in Tonghai, China. The rupture originated on the local Yunnan Province’s Red River fault, which had not experienced an earthquake ab...

The earthquake, which lasted for about 45 seconds, occurred at 15:23:31 local time. The epicenter of this quake was located 35 km off Peru coast in the Pacific Ocean. The quake having a m...

What Gerit Hardenberg could not hear was the eerie pinging noise that came from the flakes of rust peeling off weathered steel or the jarring screech of metal moving slowly across metal. ...

When the firemen arrived, they were struck by an unusual silence. Only a few flames could be seen flickering through the roof of the fortress-like, cinder-block building, and the men assu...

On November 12, 1970, a cyclone devastated an area of almost 8,000 square kilometers of East Pakistan's mid-coastal lowlands and its outlying islands in the Bay of Bengal. It was perhaps ...

Southern Airlines Flight 932 departed Kinston, NC at 18:38 to return members of the Marshall University football team, coaching staff and other passengers to Huntington. After an uneventf...

Sixty-six football supporters have been killed following a match between Old Firm rivals Celtic and Rangers at the Ibrox Park stadium in Glasgow. The disaster occurred when crush barri...

The earthquake created a zone of discontinuous surface faulting, named the San Fernando fault zone, which partly follows the boundary between the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Fernand...

The February 1971 Mississippi Valley tornado outbreak was a deadly tornado outbreak that struck portions of the Lower Mississippi River Valley and the Southeastern United States on Februa...

There was a festive air about the 155 passengers as they boarded All Nippon Airways' Flight 58 at Chitose Airport. Most were from the sleepy town of Fuji in central Japan, members of a so...

A severe flood of the Red River in North Vietnam kills an estimated 100,000 people on this day in 1971. This remarkable flood was one of the century’s most serious weather events, but bec...

Alaska Airlines Flight 1866 was the first fatal jet airliner crash of Alaska Airlines (sometimes incorrectly cited as the first fatal crash involving the airline), an airline registered i...

On Christmas Eve 1971, a Peruvian airliner was struck by lightning in an area of heavy turbulence at 21,000 feet and crashed into a the Amazon. Miraculously, a German teenager survived th...

The plane crashed after the detonation of a bomb in the forward cargo hold. A flight attendant, 22 year old Vesna Vulovic, fell 33,330 feet in the tail section and although she broke both...

The disaster killed 125 people, injured 1,000, and left 4,000 homeless. Five hundred and seven houses were lost or demolished 44 mobile homes were destroyed another 273 houses were severe...

A fire of as yet undetermined origin was detected by Sunshine employees at approximately 11:35 a.m. on May 2, 1972. At that time, smoke and gas was coming from the 910 raise on the 3700 ...

On June 9-10, 1972, extremely heavy rains over the eastern Black Hills of South Dakota produced record floods on Rapid Creek and other streams in the area. Nearly 15 inches of rain fell i...

"In fact, our survival had become a matter of national pride. Our ordeal was being celebrated as a glorious adventure… I didn't know how to explain to them that there was no glory in those..." —Nando Parrado

Thirty-nine people were killed and more than 200 injured Monday when an electric commuter train that was trying to back up after apparently overshooting a station was rammed from behind b...

At 23:41:40 Miami approach contacted the flight and granted the crew's request to turn around by clearing him for a left turn heading 180 degrees. At 23:42:05 the first officer suddenly r...

In one of the worst tornado tragedies to hit Bangladesh, 681 people were killed in the Manikganj subdivision of Dhaka district on 17 April 1973. The details of this tornado were provided ...

More than 30 people have died in a fire which has gutted a £2m leisure resort in the Isle of Man. Initial reports suggest the blaze, which destroyed the seven-storey Summerland complex...

Joelma Building is the famous 25 storied skyscraper located in Sao Paolo Brazil, exactly based in “225 Avenida 9 de Julho”. It is one of the most memorable tragedies that ever took place ...

Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, registered TC-JAV and nicknamed the Ankara, that crashed just outside Senlis, France, on 3 March 1974 killing all on board. Know...

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the April 3-4, 1974, super tornado outbreak. It was the worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history with 148 twisters touching down in 13 states. Before...

The Zagreb train disaster occurred on August 30, 1974, when an express train traveling from Belgrade to Dortmund derailed before entering Zagreb Main Station (then in Socialist Federal Re...

The aircraft departed Surabaya at 12:03 UTC for a hadj flight to Jeddah with a planned intermediate stop at Colombo. Around 16:30 UTC Colombo Control cleared the flight down from FL350 to...

By world standards, Tracy was a small but intense tropical cyclone at landfall, the radius of gale force winds being only about 50 km. The central pressure of 950 hPa was close to the ave...