A severe heat wave leaves nothing to photograph. No structure falls, no road washes out, and the damage assessment forms sitting in your emergency manager's drawer have no line item that fits, which is part of why an event that kills several hundred people in a week can pass without [...]

At about 9:15 on the morning of 21 October 1966, a saturated colliery spoil tip on the mountainside above Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley moved, ran down the slope, and buried Pantglas Junior School and a row of houses in Moy Road. One hundred and forty-four people died, 116 of [...]

Late on the evening of 2 December 1984, water entered a storage tank holding roughly 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, and in the early hours of 3 December that tank vented to the atmosphere over dense neighborhoods that... [...]

At about eight o'clock on the morning of 16 April 1947, longshoremen found smoke coming out of the number four hold of the French freighter Grandcamp at Pier O in Texas City, Texas, where she was loading bagged ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Roughly seventy minutes later she detonated with the... [...]

At about five minutes past nine on the morning of 6 December 1917, a French freighter carrying high explosive burned for roughly twenty minutes at a pier in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then detonated in what remained the largest accidental explosion in the world until the nuclear age. The response... [...]

A city is a machine that has to be fed every day, and most of the emergency services inside it are built on the assumption that the feeding continues. When resupply stops, the failures do not arrive in the order the plans expect: firefighting water goes before drinking water, hospital [...]

Dominique Jean Larrey put light sprung wagons into the fighting line in the 1790s so that wounded French soldiers could be collected during an engagement instead of after it, and he treated them in the order of how badly they were hurt rather than by what rank they held. Most [...]

Between 14 and 16 December 1999 the mountain front above Venezuela's central coast shed thousands of shallow landslides that gathered into debris flows and ran out onto the alluvial fans where most of Vargas state lived. Neighborhoods were buried under meters of boulders and sand, the coastal... [...]

At about three in the morning on 4 February 1976, a long stretch of the Motagua fault broke under Guatemala and the shaking reached highland towns where most people were asleep under heavy tile roofs carried on unreinforced adobe walls. The death toll ran to roughly twenty-three thousand, and it... [...]

Every few months an emergency manager gets asked about a transportation accident, either by a reporter, a county commissioner or a firefighter who wants to know what really happened. The National Transportation Safety Board publishes an enormous amount of material on closed cases, and almost... [...]