Disasters happen, but sometimes there are warning signs, if we're paying attention. From industrial accidents to shipwrecks to volcanic eruptions, these tragedies could have been avoided if only the warning signs hadn't been ignored.
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00:00Look, disasters happen, but sometimes there are warning signs, if we're paying attention
00:05at it. From industrial accidents to shipwrecks to volcanic eruptions, these tragedies could
00:10have been avoided if only the warning signs hadn't been ignored.
00:14So this is the ship they say is unsinkable.
00:17It is unsinkable. God himself could not sink this ship.
00:21It sank. On April 10, 1912, the much-hyped RMS Titanic left Southampton, England, on its
00:27maiden voyage to New York. While crossing the North Atlantic, the ship sailed into a
00:31field of floating ice, hit an iceberg, and broke apart.
00:35Icebergs are huge, white, and usually extremely visible. It would take some doing to miss
00:40one right in front of your ship. The Titanic did. But why?
00:45The whole world stood still that night. Once the lights had gone, the ship had gone, the
00:50sound had gone. That was it.
00:54Two days after the Titanic sank, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew along with
00:58it, the Chicago Examiner reported that a previous ship, La Bretagne, had received warnings from
01:03a Newfoundland lighthouse about dangerous levels of ice in the water. The La Bretagne's
01:08captain assumed the Titanic received the warnings, since several other ships had. He also reported
01:13that, even without the warnings, the skies were clear enough for him to see the icebergs
01:17and steer the ship through them.
01:19It gets worse. Another nearby ship, the Californian, radioed the Titanic to warn them that they
01:25were surrounded by dangerous amounts of ice. But Titanic telegraph operator Jack Phillips
01:29told them not to interrupt him while he was forwarding messages from the passengers.
01:33It's that idiot on the Californian's. Keep out! Shut up! I'm working!
01:42If all or any of these warnings had been heeded, it's entirely possible the Titanic would have
01:47made it safely to New York Harbor.
01:51On September 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy whipped ashore at the southeastern tip of Louisiana,
01:56destroying the beach town of Grand Isle and flooding parts of New Orleans. There, the
02:01waterline reached the roofs of some houses in the eastern part of the city. Billion-dollar
02:05Betsy was the most expensive U.S. storm to date. She claimed 81 lives, and drew attention
02:10to the fact that New Orleans, which lies below sea level at the bottom of a geographical
02:14bowl surrounded by wetlands, lakes, and a large meander of the Mississippi River, was
02:19extremely vulnerable to a major hurricane.
02:22This cultural powerhouse, shipping linchpin, and petroleum hub clearly needed protection.
02:27But slow, inadequate, and incomplete action doomed many of the city's residents, along
02:31with its infrastructure and irreplaceable architecture and cultural treasures.
02:36This is what's left. You know, your whole history is just somewhere under a pile of rubble."
02:43In 2003, a report in Civil Engineering magazine noted that refurbished levees along the city's
02:48northern edge would be finished in the next decade, while levees along the curved southern
02:53border would need a few more years. That would be too late. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina
02:59made landfall along a path eerily similar to Betsy's, pushing a storm surge into the city that
03:04overwhelmed many of its existing defenses. The flooding and subsequent governmental failure to
03:09manage the humanitarian crisis left a toll of over 1,800 dead and much of the city in ruins.
03:15On February 20, 2003, a fire broke out at a West Work, Rhode Island nightclub called The Station.
03:21It was among the worst nightclub fires on record, leaving 100 dead and many more injured.
03:26The blaze began when the hair metal band Great White made their entrance to the stage.
03:30The accompanying pyrotechnics ignited polyurethane foam being used as soundproofing.
03:35The flames spread quickly, filling the air with deadly hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide fumes
03:40from the burning polyurethane. In under five minutes, the nightclub was a death trap.
03:46And before you knew it, the lights went out, and it was all over."
03:50The Station had recently passed a fire inspection. On November 20, 2002,
03:55fire inspector Dennis LaRock cited the club for nine minor violations.
03:59These were addressed, and LaRock approved the upgrades during a follow-up visit on December
04:032. However, when questioned later by the Providence Journal, LaRock said that he
04:07hadn't noticed the dangerous foam because he was,
04:09"...blinded by anger about a badly installed door that swung inwards, creating a safety hazard."
04:15In a particularly bitter irony, the afternoon before the fire,
04:18the state fire marshal had publicly praised Rhode Island's fire safety codes,
04:22boasting that they made mass tragedies like deadly fires and crowd stampedes unlikely in his state.
04:28A bridge should not be exciting. A bridge should be solid and remain relatively still.
04:34Bridges shouldn't have nicknames focusing on their wobble. Unfortunately for Tacoma
04:38Area commuters and a singularly unfortunate pup, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge was
04:43a magnificently bad example of bridge construction. Spanning the waters of the Puget Sound,
04:48it opened on July 1, 1940, and quickly received the nickname Galloping Gertie because of its
04:53dramatic rocking when exposed to wind. On November 7, 1940, winds of about 42 miles an
04:58hour rocked Galloping Gertie so hard that the bridge flew apart in one of the worst structural
05:03engineering failures in American history. Authorities managed to close the bridge in
05:08time, so the only death was a cocker spaniel who was abandoned in a car, though you might
05:13credibly ask why a galloping bridge was ever open in the first place. Or why anyone would
05:18abandon their dog on a collapsing bridge. The collapse was captured on tape, in part because
05:23engineers were filming the installation of supports intended to fix the swaying.
05:28In 1973, Israel's Arab neighbors were still smarting from the 1967 Six-Day War in which
05:34Israel seized territory from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, including the much-contested Old
05:39City of Jerusalem. Egypt and Israel continued a low-intensity air war until 1970, and as soon
05:45as it ended, the Egyptians moved Soviet-made anti-aircraft weapons to the Suez Canal,
05:50which at that time was then the line of control between the countries. Israel didn't respond
05:54immediately, apparently due to a baseless assumption that the 1967 victory had convinced
05:59Egypt, Syria, and their allies that they would lose any further confrontations.
06:04About the only thing Pentagon officials are confident of is that the ultimate victor will
06:08be Israel. That assumption prevailed even after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's threatened war
06:13in 1971, 1972, and third-time unlucky 1973. A false alarm strategy worked.
06:22The Israelis were surprised, even though they had seen Sadat move boldly
06:26in the first three years of office.
06:28When the Egyptian preparations of the summer and autumn of 1973 turned out to be actual
06:33preparations for war, Israel was caught off guard. The war began on October 6, 1973,
06:39the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. The Yom Kippur War lasted three bloody weeks and
06:44ended in an effective stalemate, with little territory changing hands.
06:49The prospect of indefinite conflict led Israel and Egypt to negotiate a peace agreement in 1979.
06:54But as even casual observers of the news will know, peace in the region has yet to be realized.
07:00In 1960, Canadian scientist Frances Kelsey was working for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
07:06and found something she didn't like. She had been given a file for a drug called thalidomide
07:10that was widely used in Europe, particularly Britain, to help pregnant women with insomnia
07:15and morning sickness.
07:16A hypnotic, as the doctors call it, that was the answer to a prayer.
07:21Kelsey, who'd only been at the USDA a month but had previous experience testing drugs that
07:25could cross the placenta from mother to fetus, didn't think the application for approval was
07:29complete. It offered insufficient data about safety or efficacy.
07:34Is there no international clearinghouse for reports on new drugs?
07:38No, there's no such system in use at present.
07:42William S. Merrill Company of Cincinnati, the drug manufacturer, pressured her,
07:46but Kelsey stuck to her guns. By 1961, the first reports of side effects had come out.
07:51Children born to mothers taking thalidomide were born with serious limb deformities — either
07:56flipper-like appendages or none at all. Thanks to Kelsey, U.S. mothers were protected.
08:01Canada, which had received essentially the same application at about the same time as the one
08:06to which Kelsey objected, did not.
08:08Even after Britain and Germany pulled the drug from the market in late 1961,
08:12Canada dawdled for three more months before yanking thalidomide from its markets.
08:17Over 100 Canadians were ultimately born with thalidomide-related birth defects.
08:21An advocacy group now protects their interests.
08:24Thalidomide was ultimately approved for use in the United States for leprosy.
08:28Over a two-year span from the fall of 1982 to the summer of 1984,
08:33journalist Rajkumar Kaswani wrote articles warning of unsafe conditions at a chemical
08:38plant in Bhopal, a lakeside city in central India. Kaswani's sources included employees
08:43of the plant and a report on safety conditions commissioned in 1982 by the plant's owner,
08:48the American company Union Carbide. The journalist warned that the report found
08:52a number of concerning issues, including defective or missing equipment, as well as
08:56high employee turnover.
08:58All our fail-saves are compromised.
09:00Pressure gauges were broken, tanks had no indicators of how full they were,
09:04and sprinklers were simply absent. As early as 1975, a bureaucrat had recommended the
09:10factory be moved away from the highly populated city. The chemical plant wasn't moved, and on
09:15the night of December 2, 1984, a huge cloud of methyl isocyanate, a chemical used in the
09:21manufacture of pesticides, polyurethane foam, and plastics, along with other chemicals,
09:26poured from the plant, instantly killing thousands.
09:29So much suffering from India's invisible killer. At one point, an official said one
09:34death was being recorded every minute from the poison gas leak in the city of Bhopal.
09:38Eventually, over 20,000 people are estimated to have died from the toxic gas leak,
09:43and over half a million people were injured and left disabled in the world's worst industrial
09:47disaster to date. Union Carbide settled out of court with the government of India,
09:52not with survivors, for a relatively paltry $470 million, later selling its India branch to
09:58Dow Chemical. For its part, Dow claims to have cleaned hands as it didn't operate the plant at
10:03the time. The plant that was the source of the Bhopal disaster is still not secure.
10:08Thirty years on, its chemical waste contamination pits still remain.
10:13Mining produces waste, which might be evident. Not everything you dig out of the ground will
10:18be what you want. Unfortunately for the mining town of Aberfan, Wales,
10:22one of the accepted means of disposing of such waste is to stack it in huge piles.
10:26By the fall of 1966, a tip or pile of mining waste containing 300,000 cubic yards of debris
10:33and rising 111 feet stood outside of Aberfan. Most residents didn't realize it had been placed
10:38over a spring of porous rock, but they did know that the rainy autumn had left the tip,
10:43and everything else, saturated, turning the waste into slurry.
10:47It's an incredible sight. The whole mountain is moving again.
10:51On the morning of October 21, the massive mound of slurry collapsed,
10:55sending a wave of watery debris into Aberfan and burying, among other buildings, an elementary
11:01school. Tragically, 144 people died, 116 of them schoolchildren.
11:07Had the slurry hit hours later, the school would have been empty. It was the last day of term.
11:13A tribunal found it all to have been avoidable. Their report noted that Aberfan regularly flooded,
11:18and those floodwaters were visibly contaminated by coal waste. Despite many complaints,
11:23the promised retaining wall never materialized. Full responsibility was
11:27assigned to the National Coal Board, but charges were never brought against any individuals.
11:32In October 1985, Colombian geologist Marta Lucia Cavache Velasco and her colleagues made
11:38what should have been a startling report to the Colombian government.
11:41The Nevado del Ruiz volcano, located in the north of the country, was about to erupt. While
11:46the threat wasn't imminent, with months or years giving us a likely timeline,
11:50precautions were strongly advised.
11:53Unfortunately for most of the population of the nearby town of Romero, the Colombian
11:57government was distracted. The country's long-simmering civil war had again reached
12:01the capital, Bogota. Additionally, no real system existed to transmit warnings to local
12:06governments or residents who could act upon them. Nor was the Colombian infrastructure
12:10able to consistently and effectively monitor the area for tremors that might indicate a
12:14large eruption. The volcano didn't wait for these matters to be resolved. On November 13,
12:191985, it awakened. Some ash had fallen on the town that evening, but local religious leaders
12:24in the fire department had urged calm. But the heat from the volcano was melting the
12:28glaciers that lay atop it, creating the conditions for an especially fast and dangerous form of
12:32landslide called a lahar. A massive lahar was funneled into a narrow riverbed, and the river
12:38burst its banks and buried Romero, killing some 25,000 of the 30,000 residents. This
12:44horror did at least lead to improvements in Colombia's disaster preparedness. A similar
12:48eruption less than four years later claimed no human lives thanks to improved detection
12:53and warning systems.