5 Disasters That Could Have Been Avoided
By Wesley on July 18th, 2009
Some disasters are unavoidable. Hurricanes, earthquakes, meteor strikes: only mad scientists are blamed for these mishaps. Sometimes fate decides to go ahead and give people a good spanking just for shits and giggles. Other times, its our own damn fault.
1. The Great Smog of 1952
The Disaster:
On December 5, 1952, London’s fog, tired of being the butt of many a British joke, got serious. On that particularly cold morning, London’s fog teamed up with vehicle exhaust, factory and power plant emissions, and smoke from coal-fired furnaces to sink London in a noxious haze for the next four days. The smog was so intense that it brought traffic to a standstill, closed schools, ruined an opera and several sporting events, and acted as cover for numerous intrepid robbers and thieves. Oh, it also killed an estimated 12,000 people.
What happened?
One of the instigators for the smog was the sooty diesel fumes from London’s brand new buses. Earlier that year that the city had brilliantly replaced their system of electric, pollution-free streetcars with smoke-belching, people-killing buses. Fortunately, when visibility fell to a foot in parts of London, the smog put a stop to the antics of these bright, shiny death-wagons. The largest contributors to the smog, however, were probably coal-fired furnaces. In a stroke of genius, the people of London hunkered down and kept the home fires burning brighter than ever. If they had put on coats and threw a few extra blankets on the bed, they probably could have kept from killing their neighbors.
2. The Draining of Lake Peigneur
The Disaster:
Lake Peigneur (pronounced pen-your) was a shallow, unassuming lake in southern Louisiana until November 21, 1980. It was on this day that the 11-foot-deep lake became vain and swallowed two enormous oil derricks, 11 barges, a tugboat, 70 acres of an island, and an impressive portion of the Gulf of Mexico. All of this was sucked down a whirlpool that reached a quarter mile in diameter, forcing water that normally flowed towards the Gulf down a 12 mile canal to flow backwards. In what would have been an engineering masterpiece, had it been intentional, Lake Peigneur was permanently transformed from a shallow fresh water lake into a 1,300-foot-deep inland sea in only three days.
What happened?
The disaster began when a Texaco oil rig accidentally drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake. Texaco was fully aware of the mines location and had intended to drill in a different part of the lake. Unfortunately, none of their employees could read a map and proceeded to rip a hole right through the top of the mine. When water began to pour in, it (unsurprisingly) began dissolving all the salt in the mine causing it to collapse rapidly. The collapse of the mine created a feedback loop of destruction: water entered the mine causing the salt to dissolve, causing the mine to collapse, causing the hole to grow wider, allowing more water in… By some miracle of fate, none of the oil riggers, salt miners, or tugboat crewmen died in this moment of glaring idiocy.
3. The Manila Garbage Slide
The Disaster:
The 15,000 residents of Promised Land had it bad. Despite their settlement’s cheery name, they lived in a disease-ridden shantytown wedged between Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and a gigantic garbage dump that really would have looked like the Promised Land to Oscar the Grouch. Their luck finally changed on July 10, 2000, for the worse, when the world decided to take a dump on them. After being buffeted for several days with heavy rain, the 50-foot high mountain of garbage that towered above Promised Land engulfed the shantytown, killing at least 234 people, and displacing many more.
What happened?
The way Manila approaches garbage disposal leads one to believe that its sanitation duties were in the hands of Captain Planet’s nemesis Sly Sludge. The government was aware that the landfill was already overfull by 1993. It was ordered closed in 1998, but it remained in use, even after a smaller garbage slide destroyed 32 homes in 1999. In November, 2000, only a few months after the dump’s deadly collapse, the city reopened the dump without even bothering to finish recovering the dead from the garbage.
4. The Bradford Sweets Poisoning
The Disaster:
On October 23, 1858, William “Humbug Billy” Hardaker, sold peppermint lozenges to the good people of Bradford, England, as he usually did. This particular Saturday he had the good luck to buy his batch of mints at discount because of their substandard appearance. By the time he fell sick that afternoon, he had sold enough lozenges to satisfy some 200 peoples’ sweet tooth. The next day, still ill, Hardaker had to explain to the police why everyone who ate his candy was either getting sick or dying.
What happened?
Joseph Neal, who sold Humbug Billy his peppermints, regularly replaced expensive sugar with the much cheaper and less tasty “daft” which could consist of just about any white powder from plaster of Paris to gypsum or limestone. Neal had sent one of his assistants to a druggist’s to buy some daft. The druggist’s assistant got the daft, or more correctly, he got arsenic which he thought was daft. Despite the fact that the lozenges made with arsenic looked notably odd and the fact that one of his employees fell sick while making the candies, Neal saw no reason not to sell them. Neither did William Hardaker, who also fell ill after tasting the not-so-sweet sweets. The carefree use of non-food ingredients and selling of obviously questionable candies lead to the death of 20 people and the non-lethal poisoning of another 200 or so.
5. The Boston Molasses Flood
The Disaster:
January 15, 1919, was an unusually warm day in Boston. It was also the day a 2 million gallon tank of molasses on top of a rum distillery exploded, pouring a 10-foot-high wave of molasses through the city’s streets at a whopping 35 mph. This wave of syrupy death managed to shove a building from its foundation, demolished a section of elevated train track, all the while killing 10 horses, 21 people, and, for the hell of it, injuring another 150. Problems didn’t stop there. It took 4 days to recover all the victims of the spill as the thick molasses made it almost impossible to move through the affected areas. Then came the cleaning effort, which involved massive amounts of salt water from the Atlantic Ocean and a lot of pumps to get the molasses out of people’s basements.
What happened?
Although the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, which owned the offending molasses tank, tried to pin the flood on crazy anarchist bombers, the likely culprit in the disaster was simple negligence. Coincidentally, the day after the disaster, the 18th Amendment, which initiated Prohibition, was ratified. On January 16th, 1920, it went into effect, a year too late to save the people of Boston. Had Prohibition begun earlier the distillery, no longer being able to legally make rum, would have had little reason to keep such a deadly amount of molasses sitting idly on its roof.
Bonus: Hurricane Andrew
Few would argue that Hurricane Andrew, which ravaged the Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana in 1992 was avoidable. Few, that is, except for Imelda Marcos, the wife of former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. After her husband’s death, the Philippine government refused to allow his body to reenter the country for burial. Imelda, a woman most famous for her massive collection of shoes, claimed that in response his restless spirit caused Hurricane Andrew and numerous other natural disasters.
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