Disaster Area

Working on an oil rig in the North Sea has its frustrations, its problems, and its dangers. In July of 1988, employees on the Piper Alpha platform were looking forward to having to work around construction as problem areas in the rig were updated - paint to be applied, sprinkler heads to be unclogged, and a broken safety valve to be fixed and replaced. In the end, a series of lapses and mistakes would lead to the deadliest oil rig disaster in history.

In most cases, we can trust the ground beneath our feet. We expect it to be solid, to hold firm, and to not move when we stand on it. Some places we can expect earthquakes, but most of the time we don't expect to look out the window and see the very land we've gotten used to outside every day slamming down toward our homes.

When someone says a mass shooter was "going postal," the term goes back to a series of workplace shootings in the United States postal service going back to the mid-1980s. The deadliest of those took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, when an unsettling middle-aged man walked into work on August 20, 1986, with three guns in his mailbag.

Until September 11, 2001, one aviation accident between two 747s was the deadliest aircraft crash by far, and only one of the planes just barely managed to make it off the ground. On March 27, 1977, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, one after another, leading to a deadly crash which left one group of prospective vacationers scrambling to escape a burning wreck.

Imagine you went to work every day terrified today would be the day the building would fall down around your ears. That was what it was like working in the CTV Building in Christchurch, New Zealand. Then in September of 2010, the earthquakes began. As each aftershock rocked the building, it grew closer and closer to the day when its weakened shell would finally crumble.

Yaroslav Kudrinsky was just taking his two kids on their first international vacation. But there was one notable aspect to their trip - Kudrinsky would be flying the plane. Captain Kudrinsky was part of the flight crew flying one of the company's new Airbus A310s to Hong Kong. What harm could it do to let his kids come into the cockpit and see the new plane their dad would be in charge of flying?

We all know what it's like when there's a bug going around. More than a few people call in sick from work. Every time you cough someone says, "Oh, my sister just had that." When you go to the pharmacy, all of the medicines you need are sold out. In Milwaukee in 1993, it wasn't a bug that was making the rounds, it was a parasite, once which wrecked havoc to the intestinal tracts of those who caught it.

It was just supposed to be a fun night of dancing to a jazz orchestra just like every other Friday in West Plains, Missouri. But on a rainy Friday the 13th in April of 1928, a dangerous secret lurked in the garage on the first floor, one which threatened the lives of every happy dancer on the second floor on the building.

In 2014, one South Korean high school sent its students off on a trip to the resort island of Jeju. The kids could have fun with one another and take a little break. But on the morning they were to arrive in Jeju, one wrong move by the helmsman shoved them into a steadily worsening nightmare.

Who doesn't enjoy a good haunted house? Six Flags Great Adventure had one such haunted house in 1984. The Haunted Castle contained a winding corridor of spooky sights, flashing lights, and costumed actors ready to give you a fright. On May 11, 1984, it added eight more ghosts to its cast.

Most of us have jobs, and whether they be our dream jobs or just something to pay the bills we just hope that when we go to work, we stay safe. But on April 24, 2013, garment workers at factories located in an eight-story building in Bangladesh started their workday nervous. The electricity went out, then the generators kicked in. Not long after that, the building collapsed, trapping thousands inside the debris.

You don't expect a lake to just explode. But in 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon did exactly that on a hot August night, sending a jet of water skyward. The water wasn't the problem, however. The real problem was a mysterious something which killed over 1700 people and thousands of head of livestock.

On a hot summer night in 2015, a water park near Taipei hosted a party which drew thousands looking for a good time. But the party included an added ingredient which threatened the lives of hundreds of attendees.

On September 1, 2004, hundreds of students of all ages arrived with their families at School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia for the start of the school year. The first day of school was a celebration punctuated with music, poems, and videos. But this year would be different. This year's Day of Knowledge festivities, however, wouldn't end in the first ringing of the school bell, but with gunshots.

When the woman cried out, what she said was, "Fight!" But what the congregation of Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, heard that Friday night in 1902 was, "Fire!" The panicked crowd rushed for the front door, and within ten minutes dozens would die - all because of a misheard word.

Imagine what you could do when you were seventeen. Would you have been able to handle surviving a plane crash in the middle of nowhere? Or would you have been able to get up after the crash and start walking toward where help will hopefully be, even if it meant walking for ten straight days? One teenage girl did just that, and became the sole survivor of a plane crash over the Peruvian jungle.

Fifteen years ago this week, one of the deadliest shipwrecks ever happened just off the coast of western Africa. The MV Le Joola was an integral part of life in Senegal. The ferry regularly traveled along the coastline between the capital of Dakar and the city of Ziguinchor in the southern Casamance region, an area nearly cut off from the rest of Senegal by an ongoing civil war, a lack of riches, and the obstruction that was the long thin strip of the Gambia. When it sank, it took over eighteen hundred people down with it.

It started with an argument, the kind of argument you might see at any nightclub or bar on any given night. A man tried to get his ex-girlfriend to give him another chance. She told him no. Angry, he made a grab for her. One of the bouncers saw, and the man ended up kicked out on the street. But within a half an hour he'd return -- this time with a gallon jug of gasoline and a pair of matches.

Something was burning down by the Texas City waterfront on April 16, 1947. Everyone in the growing town built on the petrochemical industry could see the plumes of smoke billowing upward from whatever was on fire. There was just one strange thing -- the smoke was bright orange. The curious sight drew many people down to the north slip at the docks to what was going on, a site which would soon turn into the most dangerous spot they could be.

In part two of our AIDS epidemic series, we look at the misinformation and bigotry which negatively impacted the struggle to identify and fight the virus. This includes the misleading story of "Patient Zero," and the Reagan administration's highly problematic view of the disease from the very start.