The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, after two explosions in its bow, and all 118 men aboard died. Some of them survived the sinking for a time in the stern compartment. The Northern Fleet took hours to recognize that the boat was [...]

Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was destroyed at 1:23 a.m. local time on April 26, 1986. The residents of Pripyat, a few kilometers away, were told to leave about a day and a half later. The first Soviet public statement came on the evening of April 28, [...]

On January 27, 1967, a fire inside the Apollo command module on Launch Complex 34 killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee during a ground test that nobody had classified as hazardous. The crew's calls went to the blockhouse and the pad crew over the same voice loops [...]

SKYWARN is the National Weather Service program that trains volunteers to watch severe storms and report what they see to the forecast office issuing the warnings. Its roots are in the tornado disasters of the 1960s, above all the Palm Sunday outbreak of 1965, and amateur radio operators became... [...]

On August 5, 1949, fifteen smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch above the Missouri River in Montana. Within about two hours of landing, thirteen men were dead: twelve of the jumpers and a Forest Service fire guard who had joined them on the ground. The crew's only radio was destroyed in [...]

The direct communications link between Washington and Moscow, agreed in June 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, appears in popular culture as a red telephone on the President's desk. It was never a telephone of any color. It was a pair of encrypted teleprinter circuits that carried typed text,... [...]

On the evening of December 11, 1995, an explosion and fire destroyed much of the Malden Mills textile complex on the line between Lawrence and Methuen, Massachusetts, and fire departments from well beyond both cities were called in on mutual aid. The fire is remembered mostly for what the owner... [...]

On the morning of December 7, 1941, two Army privates at a mobile radar set on the north shore of Oahu saw the largest return they had ever seen. They checked their equipment, tracked the contact and telephoned it in, roughly fifty minutes before the first bombs fell. The report [...]

The alert that lights up a phone in your county was not sent by a phone company, and in most cases it was not sent by FEMA either. It was composed by somebody at a desk in an emergency operations center or a weather forecast office, entered into software that [...]

Part one of this series set out the communications findings from the 1993 bombing that were already written down and accepted before 2001. This part takes up the narrower and harder question of what the published investigations actually establish about radio performance inside the World Trade... [...]