Everyone knows about the Titanic, the Astroworld crowd crush, and 9/11. But there are plenty of other deadly disasters that deserve to be remembered, too. Let’s take a look at a handful of these historical horrors.
10. The Victoria Hall Disaster
Sunderland, England, June 16, 1883. What should’ve been a festive good time turned into a horrifying tragedy. The Victoria Hall, typically a place of joy and celebration, witnessed a horrifying incident during a children’s variety show, when a rush for prizes led to a deadly stampede.
Organizers distributed toys and treats to the children in attendance without considering the need for crowd control – especially for excitable kids who would rather do anything than wait patiently in line or allow the staff to bring the goodies to them. In an unfortunate turn of events, panic ensued as children rushed to claim their prizes, and the surge towards the staircase led to a fatal crush. The narrow stairway became a bottleneck, and the situation spun rapidly out of control. The Victoria Hall disaster claimed the lives of 183 children out of nearly 2,000 in attendance, devastating the community.
9. The Balvano Train Disaster
As if Italy wasn’t going through enough in March 1944, a tragic incident unfolded on the 2nd of that month near Salerno, Italy, that’s been shrouded in obscurity until recent revelations. Train Number 8017, originally a freight train, departed Salerno with a clandestine load of approximately 650 passengers, a mix of soldiers and civilians seeking transit through the Apennine Mountains. Battling wartime constraints, the train, laden with low-grade coal substitutes, faced an unexpected halt in the Galleria delle Armi tunnel near Balvano.
Whether stalled due to the strain of ascending the slope or awaiting a descending train, the 8017 idled in the tunnel for over 30 minutes. Unbeknownst to the occupants, the burning low-grade coal substitutes pumped carbon monoxide into the carriages, leading to a silent catastrophe. Tragically, more than 500 passengers asphyxiated in the confined space, marking one of the century’s most unusual and underreported rail disasters. The wartime government, immersed in intense military efforts, kept the details veiled, contributing to the incident’s historical obscurity despite its devastating toll. Sadly, it’s not like mass civilian deaths was out of the ordinary in the thick of the Second World War.
8. The Great Smog of 1952
You might be familiar with this one if you’ve seen The Crown. In December 1952, London found itself enveloped in a deadly, strange phenomenon that later became known as the Great Smog: a catastrophic air pollution event. A combination of cold weather, which led residents to burn more coal for heating, and an anticyclone that settled over the city, trapped pollutants in the dense fog, created the perfect conditions for an environmental disaster.
The thick, yellowish smog that blanketed London for five days resulted in reduced visibility, chaos in transportation, and a dramatic increase in respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. The toxic air, packed with sulfur dioxide and particulate matter from coal combustion, led to an estimated 12,000 premature deaths over the next few years. The calamity prompted significant changes in environmental policy, with the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1956, marking a pivotal moment in recognizing the importance of air quality regulation and the severe consequences of unchecked industrial pollution.
7. The 1905 Grover Shoe Factory Disaster
In 1905, a catastrophic explosion occurred at Brockton, Massachussett’s Grover Shoe Factory, leading to one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.
The blast was caused by a small but untreated crack in the metal of a boiler, that was hidden from inspectors by overlapping steel plates held together with rivets. It took time for the crack to get to a catastrophic point. But when it did, things fell apart quickly. The boiler blew to pieces, which caused a water tower to fall onto the roof, causing the top floor to collapse onto the one below, and that to smash onto the one below that, and on and on until the entire facility was smoke and debris. Fires engulfed what was left. Fortunately, many of the 300-400 workers who were inside at the time of the explosion made it out alive (although certainly rattled), but 58 died and more than 150 sustained injuries. Extensive measures were taken to recover the bodies, but given the limited technology of the day and the fact that they were dealing with mountains of smoldering rubble, they couldn’t get everyone – 18 victims were never found.
6. The Haunted Castle Fire
In May 1984, a fun day at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, turned into a horror scene when a fire broke out in the Haunted Castle attraction, killing eight teenagers. The structure, composed of interconnected commercial trailers and plywood frames, became engulfed in flames, fueled by a foam pad inside the attraction.
The Haunted Castle fire led to a lawsuit (although it eventually ended in a not guilty verdict), new ownership, an entirely revamped management team, and substantial investments in safety measures. The park, now operating as one of the safest family-entertainment facilities in the country, clearly underwent significant updates, including the installation of sprinkler systems, smoke and heat detectors, and emergency generators. The tragedy spurred a commitment to safety, with routine checks by the in-house fire brigade and collaboration with certified local fire inspectors to ensure compliance with state and national fire codes.
5. The 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse
For more than six decades, the collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge is one of the most perplexing construction failures that ever dumbfounded engineers. Despite extensive studies, a unanimous agreement on the exact cause of the bridge’s failure has remained elusive.
The primary explanation for the collapse revolves around “torsional flutter,” a complex mechanism involving several stages. The 1940 Narrows Bridge’s susceptibility to torsional forces, due to its large depth-to-width ratio, made it exceptionally flexible. A critical event occurred when the cable band at mid-span on the north cable slipped, leading to the separation of the cable into unequal segments and a shift from vertical to torsional movement. Contributing to the torsional motion was “vortex shedding,” a phenomenon where wind separation, swirling forces, and the bridge deck’s elastic response created a self-induced harmonic vibration pattern known as “torsional flutter.” Whatever the cause, it’s worth noting that other that there were no human fatalities involved in the incident.
4. The Iroquois Theatre Fire
On a fateful winter day in Chicago on December 30, 1903, the Grand Iroquois Theater, only five weeks old, hosted a crowd of teachers, mothers, and kids as they watched a lavish musical comedy starring Eddie Foy. Little did the more than 1700 patrons know that the afternoon would turn into a catastrophic disaster. As the show hit its second act, a spark from a stage light ignited nearby drapery, setting off a fiery chain reaction. Efforts to contain the fire failed, and chaos ensued as terrified audience members, hindered by obscured exit doors and locked accordion gates, rushed towards the few available escape routes.
Amid the pandemonium, Eddie Foy, still in costume, tried to reassure the audience, while stagehands struggled with a malfunctioning fire-retardant curtain. The situation deteriorated as the fire spread uncontrollably. Cast members opened a rear stage door to flee, but the backdraft caused a fiery explosion, killing people in the balconies. Some lucky people found a makeshift escape via a precarious bridge, while hundreds were trapped inside, succumbing to the flames before firefighters could intervene. More than 275 people ultimately lost their lives.
3. The 1958 Springhill Mining Disaster
Is there a worse place to get trapped than a dark mining shaft? On the evening of October 23, 1958, tragedy struck No. 2 mine in Springhill as an underground earthquake, akin to a coal mine bump, reverberated through the depths. The mine, believed to be the world’s deepest at 14,300 feet, had a history of small bumps, claiming ten lives since 1952. A fatal mistake in mining strategy exacerbated the risk; a shift from a step-like mining approach to one long wall, designed to alleviate pressure, resulted in a cataclysmic event. Floors, ceilings, and walls collided, creating chasms, blocking levels with coal and debris, and cutting off communication below 7800 feet.
In the aftermath, 81 men made their way to the surface, but that sadly didn’t account for everyone. Rescuers employed draegermen to breach sealed spaces and barefaced workers to excavate every corner. After six days, the grim reality set in as bodies were discovered. Miraculously, twelve men were found alive at the 13,000-foot level, followed by seven more three days later. The trapped miners had sustained hope through singing, praying, and banging on pipes. Ultimately, however, 75 lives were still lost, and No. 2 mine never reopened.
2. The St. Francis Dam Failure
Nestled approximately forty miles northwest of Los Angeles, California, the curved concrete gravity St. Francis dam, erected between 1924 and 1926, played a pivotal role in the Los Angeles Aqueduct system. William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer celebrated for earlier triumphs, led the project, crafting a dam with a distinctive stepped downstream design and towering at 205 feet with a span of 700 feet.
The calamity struck in 1928 when the dam’s failure unfolded and caused one of the worst civil engineering disasters in US history. Over 400 lives were lost, and property damage soared to an estimated $7 million. Mulholland’s decisions, notably raising the dam’s height without adjusting its base width, exposed critical flaws in the structure’s design. Leaking cracks, disregarded in the lead-up to the disaster, further underscored the lack of due diligence. The tragedy’s root cause lay in a bunch of factors, including saturated conditions in the left abutment foundation rock, triggering a landslide, and destabilizing uplift forces. Mulholland, shouldering the blame, conceded, “If there was human error, I was the human,” resulting in the end of his esteemed career.
1. The Mina Stampede
On September 24, 2015, a tragic crowd crush unfolded during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, resulting in the deadliest Hajj disaster in history. Notably, the government of Saudi Arabia initially declared 769 deaths and 934 injuries, figures that remained official and unaltered despite subsequent revelations that bumped most estimates of the death toll to well north of 2,000.
It all went down near the Jamaraat Bridge, sparking ongoing disputes about its cause. Saudi Ministry of Interior spokesman Mansour Al-Turki, addressing the matter in a press conference on the day of the disaster, stated that an investigation was underway, and the precise cause of the overcrowding leading to the fatal crush had yet to be determined. The aftermath of the Mina disaster ended up inflaming tensions between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, already heightened by broader conflicts in the Middle East, including the Syrian Civil War and Yemeni Civil War.