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A September morning in 1989 changed Alton's history forever. At 7:34 a.m., a Dr Pepper truck collided with Mission School Bus no. 6. After the bus and its occupants plunged into a water-filled caliche pit, twenty-one students lost their lives. The resulting investigation flooded the small South Texas community with reporters and lawyers. The heavily scrutinized legal battle divided the city, but it did ultimately produce changes in school bus safety...
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On September 15, 1896, Crush boasted the highest population in Texas. Built near Waco, the town provided the staging ground for a publicity stunt ramming two trains together at top speed. Showrunner and Katy Railroad official William Crush thought he had planned for every contingency. But when elephant-sized chunks of steam locomotive began raining down into the packed stands, the extravaganza quickly unraveled into one of the Lone Star State's most...
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Coastal Delaware, Maryland and Virginia have always been vulnerable to the power of storms. In the early nineteenth century, storm-driven shipwrecks led to the construction of the Delaware breakwater. In 1933, a storm created an inlet on the south edge of Ocean City and changed the character of the Maryland resort. The Ash Wednesday nor'easter of 1962 devastated oceanfront communities, led to the creation of beach replenishment projects that pushed...
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Beneath the churning surface of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary rest the bones of shipwrecks and sailors alike. Massachusetts' ports connected its citizens to the world, and the number of merchant and fishing vessels grew alongside the nation's development. Hundreds of ships sank on the trade routes and fishing grounds between Cape Cod and Cape Ann. Their stories are waiting to be uncovered--from the ill-fated steamship Portland to collided...
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In 1893, Fargo was simply trying to thrive amid an impending national depression. One Wednesday afternoon in June, a ferocious fire quickly devoured hundreds of businesses and more than thirty blocks in the heart of the fledgling city. Residents were stunned, but they weren't defeated. Through perseverance, grit and some helpful insurance money, owners immediately began rebuilding. The arduous reconstruction ended up protecting the city against unemployment...
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June 28, 1924, dawned hot and sunny, with fluffy white clouds hovering over a blue and inviting Lake Erie. For two Ohio communities, Lorain and Sandusky, the day ended in unimaginable disaster. In the late afternoon, the blue sky turned dark, and the wispy white puffs morphed into a mass of black thunderclouds as a monster formed on the lake. An F4 tornado, unexpected and not understood, was born from a thunderstorm on the now turbulent waters of...
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Richmond has had its share of man-made and natural calamities throughout its illustrious history. In 1811, fire destroyed the Richmond Theatre on Broad Street, tragically claiming seventy-two lives in one of the worst urban disasters in American history. As Union forces approached Richmond in the final months of the Civil War, Confederate troops ignited the city in flames, leaving scars still visible today. The international Spanish flu epidemic did...
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A fire of frightening magnitude was not a question of "if" but "when" in young Prescott, and on July 14, 1900, the feared conflagration found its spark. After several years of drought, a candle slipping from its holder was all it took to utterly destroy Prescott's business district, red-light district and famous Whiskey Row. People grabbed what they could to rescue it from the flames, but the party didn't stop. Even the piano from one saloon was moved...
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Heralding the coming spring, the weather forecast promised a warm and sunny Easter in 1913. Little did the citizens of Tippecanoe County realize that a furious deluge would cause the Wabash River to swell to an ungovernable and lethal height. Bridges collapsed, whole buildings came unmoored from their foundations and washed away and heroic rescue attempts saved lives and cost others. Using previously untold stories and images never before seen in...
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Author Janis Thornton reveals the stories of a day in Indiana like no other.
Palm Sunday 1965 started as the nicest day of the year, the kind of weather that encouraged Hoosiers to get out in the sun, fire up the grill, hit the golf course, or roll down their car windows and take a leisurely drive. That evening, however, throughout northern and central Indiana, the sky turned an ominous black, and storms moved in, quickly manifesting as Indiana's...
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In the fall of 1870, a massive flood engulfed parts of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. What began near Charlottesville as welcome rain at the end of a drought-plagued summer quickly turned into a downpour as it moved west and then north through the Shenandoah Valley. The James, Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers rose, and flooding washed out fields, farms and entire towns. The impact was immense in terms of destruction, casualties and depth of water....
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Since 1821, when Jean Lafitte sailed away from a burning Campeche, the history of Galveston has often been wreathed in smoke. Over the next century, one inferno breached the walls of Moro Castle, while another reduced forty-two blocks of the residential district to ash. Recognizing the importance of protecting the city, concerted efforts were made to establish the first paid fire department, create a city waterworks and regulate construction standards....
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For more than 150 years, East Tennesseans have experienced disasters of historic proportions. The 1902 Fraterville Mine explosion took the lives of 216 men and boys. A 1904 head-on passenger train wreck in New Market claimed the lives of 64. In 1906, Jellico was practically destroyed by the explosion of a train car loaded with dynamite. Floodwaters near Rockwood in 1929 took the lives of 7 Boy Scouts and their Scoutmaster. An explosion in 1960 at...
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Indiana suffered enormous losses in the Great Flood of 1913, yet this disaster is largely forgotten. The combined tornado and flood barreled through Terre Haute, killing more than twenty. In Peru, 114 miles away, the circus lost most of its animals in the storm. At the southwestern corner of the state, a "sea of water," as local papers put it, washed over Evansville, turning streets into canals. In the capital, levee failures left hundreds homeless...
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On November 28, 1942, fire roared through Boston's famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub during what was supposed to be a high-spirited Saturday night. By midnight, more than five hundred people were dead, dying, or maimed for life.
Local author Stephanie Schorow probes the club's history, the circumstances leading to the fire, and the tragedy's lingering impact. The inferno reached deep into the city's social structure-its politics, medical care, law enforcement,...
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The Wallingford tornado of 1878 took less than two minutes, but it killed at the rate of one person per second. Twisters in Connecticut are incredibly rare, but they're often disastrous and sometimes deadly. The Windsor tornado of 1979 destroyed a field of aircraft that had survived World War II. The 1787 Wethersfield tornado ripped off a barn roof in New Britain, traveled on to Newington and finally subsided in Wethersfield after destroying a family...
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With more than one thousand books on Hurricane Katrina, somehow not one work examines a collection of Crescent City calamity-until now. Here seven tragedies and their fallout are explored through gripping firsthand interviews, planting readers amid the chaos. Revisit the agony of the Luling ferry disaster, the horror of Pan Am Flight 759 slamming into a Kenner neighborhood and the Mother's Day bus crash on 610 that claimed twenty-two lives. Sift for...
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In the beginning of the twentieth-century, the Connecticut River Valley was a thriving manufacturing hub for fabric, arms and brass. But early in the spring of 1936, nearly two feet of rain created havoc on a massive scale, killing more than one hundred people and leaving tens of thousands homeless, unemployed and without power for weeks. Patrols were conducted in rowboats on city streets. Typhoid and other public health issues complicated recovery...
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Ranked among the top ten states for both disasters and dry climate, Colorado has a long history of extreme weather. On May 19, 1864, residents of the fledgling gold rush town of Denver awoke to a wall of water slamming into the city with enough force to flatten buildings and rip clothing from its victims. The infamous Big Thompson Canyon flood of 1976 killed 144 residents, tourists and campers. Per the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Coloradoans...
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A detailed look at the state's most terrifying and destructive disasters-photos included. Home to hundreds of faults, California leads the nation in frequency of earthquakes every year. And despite enduring their share of the natural disasters, residents still speculate over the inevitable "big one." More than three thousand people lost their lives during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Long Beach's 1933 earthquake caused nearly $50 million in...
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