Disaster Area
253 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★ - 723 ratingsA podcast about disasters throughout history - what caused them, how people survived, and how we've responded to keep those disasters from happening again.
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Episodes
Episode 97: The MGM Grand hotel fire
November 01, 2018 04:08 - 52 minutes - 57.1 MBThe MGM Grand hotel and casino sat in a plum spot right along South Las Vegas Boulevard in the glittering city of - surprise - Las Vegas, Nevada. Hosting Dean Martin roasts and a long-running performance of Jubilee!, the MGM Grand featured the height of 1970s Las Vegas-caliber entertainment in a luxurious hotel anyone would die to stay in. But in the early morning hours of November 21, 1980, a deadly secret smoldered inside one of the hotel's five restaurants.
Episode 96: The Janauba massacre
October 31, 2018 01:37 - 34 minutes - 38.1 MBThe Gente Inocente nursery in Janauba, Brasil, was small and poor but filled daily with happy children. Then, on October 5, 2017, a familiar face came to the front gate. It was the night watchman, and he wanted to come inside. But what seemed innocent enough would turn out to be anything but, and would end with a bottle of alcohol and a burst of flames.
Episode 95: The Sunshine Skyway bridge collapse
October 30, 2018 05:46 - 1 hour - 83.4 MBThe Sunshine Skyway bridge was a well-known piece of Florida architecture, carrying vehicles back and forth across Tampa Bay and allowing ships to pass underneath in the bay's busy shipping channel. But on May 9, 1980, a sudden and ferocious storm brought all three - the ships, the bridge, and the cars - to a tragic shared end.
Episode 94: The sinking of the Wahine
October 19, 2018 04:08 - 1 hour - 66.3 MBOn April 10, 1968, Cyclone Giselle hit New Zealand at the worst possible - when the ferry TEV Wahine was returning to Wellington with over seven hundred passengers. The Wahine entered Wellington Harbor as the storm raged around it, and for a moment everything seemed no worse than any other stormy day in the city. But then the wind speed doubled, and over the course of the morning the Wahine struggled to remain afloat with the safety of dry land so close, yet so far away.
Episode 93: The Women's War
October 10, 2018 03:49 - 57 minutes - 62.6 MBThe women were - to say the very least - incredibly pissed. In recent years, their rights had been whittled away, leaving their status a husk of what it had once been. Their complaints were either ignored by men in power, or not worth sharing with them knowing what the reaction would be. All it took was one confrontation between a man in a position of privilege and a woman who'd had enough, and the straw broke the camel's back. At the end of 1929, the women of southern and eastern Nigeria wo...
Episode 92: The Pan Am Building helicopter crash
September 29, 2018 20:31 - 31 minutes - 33.6 MBAll they wanted was a ride to JFK International Airport. But on May 16, 1977, the passengers waiting on the rooftop of the Pan Am Building in midtown Manhattan to get onto a helicopter shuttle to the airport would miss their flight, all due to a single snapped landing gear strut.
Episode 91: The Thredbo disaster
September 27, 2018 07:11 - 50 minutes - 54.5 MBIt was quiet in the rural Australian ski village of Thredbo, New South Wales, at 11:30 PM on the night of July 30th, 1997. Then the ground near Bobuck Lane began to tremble. A moment later, the hillside slid downward, taking two ski lodges containing nineteen people with it and crushing them in the chaos. It would be more than two days before rescuers who'd come to believe no one survived the tragedy heard a voice calling for help underneath the rubble. Ski instructor Stuart Diver was still ...
Episode 90: The sinking of the Vasa
September 18, 2018 06:09 - 58 minutes - 60 MBLet's go back almost four hundred years to a time when sailing ships steered their way across the oceans of the world, whether it be for travel, exploration, or war. In Sweden, King Gustav II Adolph wanted four new ships be added to the country's navy, including an impressive ship featuring two gun decks - the Vasa. Then she sank twenty minutes into her maiden voyage. Three hundred and thirty years later, however, the Vasa would rise out of the sea once again.
Episode 89: The story of Ada Blackjack
August 31, 2018 08:28 - 1 hour - 78.7 MBIn 1921, a ship dropped four white men, one Alaska Native woman, and one cat off on the desolate shore of Wrangel Island, a strip of land just north of easternmost Siberia. Two years later when a relief ship finally broke through the ice and returned, only two of those beings were still alive.
Episode 88: The 2013 Moore tornado
August 20, 2018 03:18 - 1 hour - 70.1 MBMoore, Oklahoma, had the worst luck. Over the course of fifteen years, the Oklahoma City suburb would have five major tornados blow through the area, causing billions of dollars in damage. One in particular which struck on May 20, 2013, caused another tragic kind of damage, heading straight for two of the town's elementary schools.
Episode 87: The Leopard of Rudraprayag
August 09, 2018 05:56 - 1 hour - 68 MBOn this International Cat Day, we look back at the story of a leopard whose feeding habits veered away from its normal prey into the human world, and a hunter determined to stop its deadly eight-year spree in northeastern India.
Episode 86: The Iroquois Theater fire
July 31, 2018 22:01 - 1 hour - 89.3 MBIt was the deadliest building fire in United States history, twice as deadly as the fire which tore through the city three decades earlier. Chicago thought it had seen the worst that fire could do, but then came the afternoon of December 30, 1903. The Iroquois Theater was filled and then some - with children on Christmas break and their parents, with teachers enjoying their own time off, with college students wishing to enjoy a show with their friends. "Mr. Bluebeard" was supposed to be a sp...
Episode 85: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
July 20, 2018 02:47 - 1 hour - 69.3 MBFour years ago this week, a plane full of innocent people just going about their lives - returning home, heading for vacation in Malaysia, flying to an international AIDS conference in Melbourne - unwillingly became a pawn in a war they played no part in before that day. On July 17, 2014, someone in an Ukrainian war zone looked up and thought they saw enemy military aircraft overhead. So they positioned their Russian-made missile and fired. What happened afterward would be a subject of debat...
Episode 84: The Guadalajara explosions
July 12, 2018 05:01 - 1 hour - 64.7 MBDuring the sweltering Easter holidays in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1992, the Reforma district reeked for days. Everything smelled of gas, but no one could figure out precisely where the source was. Tap water stank. Manhole covers rattled where they sat in the street. On Wednesday, April 22nd, one explosion after another tore through the working-class neighborhood and left the streets a ragged canyon winding through Guadalajara.
Episode 83: Pan Am Flight 73
June 30, 2018 15:21 - 59 minutes - 61.8 MBNeerja Bhanot was uniquely successful in two fields - as a model, and as a senior purser for international airline Pan Am. But on September 5, 1986, the bravery of Neerja and her cabin staff was tested when a group of armed militants stormed the plane, demanding to be flown to Cyprus. What would happen over the next seventeen hours would be terrifying, chaotic, and in the end a display of the heroism on one incredible cabin crew.
Episode 82: The Joelma Building fire
June 23, 2018 04:55 - 57 minutes - 60.5 MBIt would take the worst terrorist attack in modern times to steal the Joelma Building fire's title as the deadliest high-rise fire. On February 1, 1974, the office building in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, was slowly filling with hundreds of employees starting their work day. Then an air conditioner on the twelfth floor sparked. Within hours, at least 179 people would be dead from the sudden and all-encompassing conflagration.
Episode 81: The People Hiding in the Truck
June 19, 2018 00:43 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBIt was only supposed to last a few hours. All they would have to do was keep quiet, keep their heads down, and wait it out until they reached Houston. But at two AM on the morning of May 14, 2003, the driver of a truck would pull over near a truck stop and open the trailer at the back to a horrifying scene.
Episode 80: The Graniteville train crash
June 10, 2018 03:37 - 1 hour - 74.2 MBGraniteville, South Carolina, is like a lot of small towns - quiet and filled with hard-working people. It was the quiet that was broken when a moving train struck another train parked on a spur in the early morning hours of January 6, 2005, and it was the hard-working people who suffered when a damaged tanker began leaking deadly chlorine gas into the air. (TW: Discussion of suicide.)
Episode 79: The Austin tower shooting
June 01, 2018 02:27 - 1 hour - 80.8 MBIt was hot that day in August of 1966, so hot you probably could have cracked an egg and cooked it on the sidewalk. Students walking the campus of the University of Texas at Austin did so under the watchful eye of the main building's tower. As noon neared, everyone was looking forward to heading off to lunch. That's when the shooting began. It wouldn't end for another ninety-six minutes.
Episode 78: The Moorgate tube crash
May 28, 2018 15:31 - 51 minutes - 54.6 MBOn a busy Friday morning in 1975, the London Underground was packed with people heading off to work at insurance and banking companies. In one six-car train on the Northern Line, driver Leslie Newson was just having a normal workday, with plans to go buy his daughter a car after the day was done. He'd not leave the Underground alive, and neither would forty-two of his passengers.
Episode 77: The Pioneer Hotel Fire
May 18, 2018 06:55 - 1 hour - 66.4 MBForty-two years. That's how long one man spent in prison for setting the deadly fire at the Pioneer International Hotel in Tucson, Arizona, just after midnight on December 20, 1970, when the place was packed with holiday tourists and Christmas partygoers. There was just one problem - he may have been innocent the whole time.
Episode 76: The Baby In The Well
May 06, 2018 05:12 - 1 hour - 71.8 MBChildren of the 80s know their pop culture touchstones - when the Challenger exploded, when the Berlin Wall came down, that time everyone was wondering who shot J.R. One particular 80s moment was a story of survival by a Texas toddler, an incident which was not without precedent but had yet to produce a happy ending.
Episode 75: Care Teams
May 01, 2018 01:07 - 37 minutes - 38.1 MBIn the aftermath of a disaster, a company's care team may step up to do the things you're not physically, emotionally, or mentally ready to do for yourself.
Episode 74: Aloha Airlines Flight 243
April 24, 2018 05:12 - 52 minutes - 56.6 MBSome plane crashes may make you terrified any plane you get one will crash. Only one may scare you into worrying the roof of your airplane may rip right off in midflight.
Episode 73: The Lake Peigneur disaster
April 17, 2018 05:36 - 34 minutes - 36.2 MBWhat's the worst day at work you've ever had? It probably wasn't nearly as bad as what happened to one Louisiana oil rig's employees in November of 1980.
Episode 72: The Twilight Zone disaster
April 08, 2018 05:52 - 1 hour - 78.9 MBOne can only imagine how scary the scene might be for two small children. The village they hid in was being destroyed by explosions and gunfire. A strange man swore he would protect them and carry them to safety. As he attempted to take them away, the enemy's helicopter hovered overhead, men firing off guns from both sides. Luckily, it was all fake. The terrifying scene was a sequence being filmed for "Twilight Zone: The Movie." Everything was perfectly safe ... until it wasn't.
Episode 71: The Rwandan genocide
April 01, 2018 00:05 - 1 hour - 109 MBIn the early 1990s, the country of Rwanda struggled through growing tensions between the local ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Hutus led the government, while the Tutsis were targets of harrassment and discrimination. Over the course of a hundred days in 1994, those tensions would erupt in fear, violence, desperation, and genocide.
Episode 70: The 2010 Bandundu crash
March 15, 2018 05:00 - 44 minutes - 47.3 MBSome plane crashes have possible causes which are so out of the ordinary they stretch the limits of credulity. The accident which happened when a plane fell from the sky while attempting to land in the Democratic Republic on the Congo in 2010 is just such a crash.
Episode 69: The Port Chicago explosion
March 01, 2018 06:04 - 1 hour - 64.1 MBThe black servicemen who loaded munitions onto ships at Port Chicago Naval Magazine knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. They were hardly trained, rushed to load ships heading for the Pacific theater in World War II, and feared every day that this might be the day one dropped bomb blew them all to smithereens. On July 17, 1944, Port Chicago's number finally came up. But the tragedy which occurred there was not the end of the story.
Episode 68: The Welding Shop Shooting
February 23, 2018 16:33 - 1 hour - 68.7 MBHe was a teacher and a veteran. On August 20, 1982, an argument over a badly repaired lawnmower motor from the previous day would result in a massacre which left eight dead.
Episode 67: United Airlines Flight 232
February 19, 2018 01:51 - 58 minutes - 59.9 MBSometimes when planes crash, it's due to the tiniest hidden flaw which causes incredible amounts of destruction after a series of one mishap after another. One microscopic flaw led to the failure of the tail-mounted engine on a DC-10, and the damage it caused ended with an incredible fiery crash caught on camera.
Episode 66: The Battle of May Island
January 23, 2018 00:50 - 40 minutes - 42.8 MBIn wartime, terrible loss of life is expected - but usually not due to a series of ridiculous screw-ups. On January 31, 1918, a fleet from the British Royal Navy left a Scottish port in the Firth of Forth with the intention of leaving for exercises in the North Sea. But among that fleet were multiple K-class submarines, a sub notorious for its flaws, its bad luck, and its short history of deadly accidents.
Episode 65: The Piper Alpha disaster
December 31, 2017 21:38 - 1 hour - 83.9 MBWorking on an oil rig in the North Sea has its frustrations, its problems, and its dangers. In July of 1988, employees on the Piper Alpha platform were looking forward to having to work around construction as problem areas in the rig were updated - paint to be applied, sprinkler heads to be unclogged, and a broken safety valve to be fixed and replaced. In the end, a series of lapses and mistakes would lead to the deadliest oil rig disaster in history.
Episode 64: The Oso mudslide
December 12, 2017 01:04 - 51 minutes - 55.4 MBIn most cases, we can trust the ground beneath our feet. We expect it to be solid, to hold firm, and to not move when we stand on it. Some places we can expect earthquakes, but most of the time we don't expect to look out the window and see the very land we've gotten used to outside every day slamming down toward our homes.
Episode 63: The Edmond post office shooting
November 30, 2017 00:51 - 41 minutes - 44 MBWhen someone says a mass shooter was "going postal," the term goes back to a series of workplace shootings in the United States postal service going back to the mid-1980s. The deadliest of those took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, when an unsettling middle-aged man walked into work on August 20, 1986, with three guns in his mailbag.
Episode 62: The Tenerife disaster
November 26, 2017 08:04 - 1 hour - 83.4 MBUntil September 11, 2001, one aviation accident between two 747s was the deadliest aircraft crash by far, and only one of the planes just barely managed to make it off the ground. On March 27, 1977, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, one after another, leading to a deadly crash which left one group of prospective vacationers scrambling to escape a burning wreck.
Episode 61: The CTV Building collapse
November 23, 2017 06:10 - 51 minutes - 53.9 MBImagine you went to work every day terrified today would be the day the building would fall down around your ears. That was what it was like working in the CTV Building in Christchurch, New Zealand. Then in September of 2010, the earthquakes began. As each aftershock rocked the building, it grew closer and closer to the day when its weakened shell would finally crumble.
Episode 60: Aeroflot Flight 593
November 17, 2017 08:14 - 41 minutes - 43.6 MBYaroslav Kudrinsky was just taking his two kids on their first international vacation. But there was one notable aspect to their trip - Kudrinsky would be flying the plane. Captain Kudrinsky was part of the flight crew flying one of the company's new Airbus A310s to Hong Kong. What harm could it do to let his kids come into the cockpit and see the new plane their dad would be in charge of flying?
Episode 59: The 1993 Milwaukee cryptosporidiosis outbreak
November 15, 2017 05:07 - 46 minutes - 49.3 MBWe all know what it's like when there's a bug going around. More than a few people call in sick from work. Every time you cough someone says, "Oh, my sister just had that." When you go to the pharmacy, all of the medicines you need are sold out. In Milwaukee in 1993, it wasn't a bug that was making the rounds, it was a parasite, once which wrecked havoc to the intestinal tracts of those who caught it.
Episode 58: The West Plains dance hall explosion
November 08, 2017 04:55 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBIt was just supposed to be a fun night of dancing to a jazz orchestra just like every other Friday in West Plains, Missouri. But on a rainy Friday the 13th in April of 1928, a dangerous secret lurked in the garage on the first floor, one which threatened the lives of every happy dancer on the second floor on the building.
Episode 57: The sinking of the MV Sewol
November 04, 2017 06:10 - 1 hour - 70.6 MBIn 2014, one South Korean high school sent its students off on a trip to the resort island of Jeju. The kids could have fun with one another and take a little break. But on the morning they were to arrive in Jeju, one wrong move by the helmsman shoved them into a steadily worsening nightmare.
Episode 56: The Haunted Castle Fire
November 01, 2017 11:06 - 40 minutes - 43.6 MBWho doesn't enjoy a good haunted house? Six Flags Great Adventure had one such haunted house in 1984. The Haunted Castle contained a winding corridor of spooky sights, flashing lights, and costumed actors ready to give you a fright. On May 11, 1984, it added eight more ghosts to its cast.
Episode 55: The Rana Plaza disaster
October 31, 2017 19:28 - 49 minutes - 52.4 MBMost of us have jobs, and whether they be our dream jobs or just something to pay the bills we just hope that when we go to work, we stay safe. But on April 24, 2013, garment workers at factories located in an eight-story building in Bangladesh started their workday nervous. The electricity went out, then the generators kicked in. Not long after that, the building collapsed, trapping thousands inside the debris.
Episode 54: The Lake Nyos disaster
October 29, 2017 22:03 - 54 minutes - 57 MBYou don't expect a lake to just explode. But in 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon did exactly that on a hot August night, sending a jet of water skyward. The water wasn't the problem, however. The real problem was a mysterious something which killed over 1700 people and thousands of head of livestock.
Episode 53: The Formosa Fun Coast explosion
October 25, 2017 22:46 - 45 minutes - 48.5 MBOn a hot summer night in 2015, a water park near Taipei hosted a party which drew thousands looking for a good time. But the party included an added ingredient which threatened the lives of hundreds of attendees.
Episode 52: The Beslan school hostage crisis
October 21, 2017 07:38 - 1 hour - 90.5 MBOn September 1, 2004, hundreds of students of all ages arrived with their families at School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia for the start of the school year. The first day of school was a celebration punctuated with music, poems, and videos. But this year would be different. This year's Day of Knowledge festivities, however, wouldn't end in the first ringing of the school bell, but with gunshots.
Episode 51: The Shiloh Baptist Church stampede
October 06, 2017 15:53 - 44 minutes - 48.2 MBWhen the woman cried out, what she said was, "Fight!" But what the congregation of Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, heard that Friday night in 1902 was, "Fire!" The panicked crowd rushed for the front door, and within ten minutes dozens would die - all because of a misheard word.
Episode 50: LANSA Flight 508
September 30, 2017 04:14 - 44 minutes - 46.3 MBImagine what you could do when you were seventeen. Would you have been able to handle surviving a plane crash in the middle of nowhere? Or would you have been able to get up after the crash and start walking toward where help will hopefully be, even if it meant walking for ten straight days? One teenage girl did just that, and became the sole survivor of a plane crash over the Peruvian jungle.
Episode 49: The sinking of the MV Le Joola
September 28, 2017 05:09 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBFifteen years ago this week, one of the deadliest shipwrecks ever happened just off the coast of western Africa. The MV Le Joola was an integral part of life in Senegal. The ferry regularly traveled along the coastline between the capital of Dakar and the city of Ziguinchor in the southern Casamance region, an area nearly cut off from the rest of Senegal by an ongoing civil war, a lack of riches, and the obstruction that was the long thin strip of the Gambia. When it sank, it took over eighte...
Episode 48: The Happy Land Social Club fire
September 21, 2017 07:43 - 52 minutes - 57.9 MBIt started with an argument, the kind of argument you might see at any nightclub or bar on any given night. A man tried to get his ex-girlfriend to give him another chance. She told him no. Angry, he made a grab for her. One of the bouncers saw, and the man ended up kicked out on the street. But within a half an hour he'd return -- this time with a gallon jug of gasoline and a pair of matches.