Disaster Area

On September 21st, 1921, the day dawned just like any other workday at the BASF fertilizer plant in Oppau, Germany. But just a few minutes after 7:30 that morning, an explosion rocked the town and left hundreds dead underneath the remains of Oppau.

On the night of December 2nd, 2016, an Oakland warehouse burned to the ground. There was just one small problem - it wasn't empty at the time.

Jennifer went on a five-day-long pilgrimage to as many disaster sites as she could manage and now she's going to talk about it for two whole hours.

On December 14th, 2012, a young man carrying a Bushmaster rifle walked over the shattered glass from the front doors of Sandy Hook Elementary School and into the building. He was already a murderer. In another five minutes, he would be dead.

September 11th was still fresh in everyone's minds when, two months later, an Airbus 300 crashed in a Queens neighborhood after takeoff from JFK International Airport. Was it terrorism, or something else?

It has been twenty years this month since the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, but they weren't the first time the trade center found itself the target of a deadly terrorist attack.

We are so used to receiving all sorts of warning on our phones - Amber alerts, COVID exposures, weather watches. One weather app on our phone is all it takes to be warned of flood conditions or upcoming storms. But in 1990, people in northeastern Illinois received absolutely no warning that a powerful late-summer tornado was about to tear their lives apart.

Waiting is just a part of flying anywhere, whether it's hanging out waiting to board the plane, twiddling your thumbs while your plane waits for permission to take off, sighing in frustration as the captain announces you'll need to hold over your destination and won't be landing on time. But it could be worse ... far, far worse.

After six months of striking against the copper companies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the families of the striking miners -especially their children - looked forward to a union Christmas party at the Italian Hall in Calumet. Everyone was having a wonderful time, right up the moment a strange man appeared and yelled, "Fire!"

A month after the death of President John F. Kennedy, plenty of Americans could use whatever pick-me-up they could get. The Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, FL, was just such an event. But after a night of celerating came the tragedy that unfolded when exhausted football fans awoke in hotel rooms slowly filling with smoke.