Disaster Area

In two weeks, it will have been three years since a man walked into Pulse in Orlando, FL, bearing a rifle and intent on turning the last day of that city's Pride week into the last night many in the popular gay nightclub would ever see.

It was something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. On June 5, 2009, a spark caught on the other side of the wall of the ABC daycare center in Hermosillo, Mexico. On that side of the wall, a growing fire. On the other side, over a hundred and forty children between the ages of six months and five years old and only six adults to watch them - and save them when the fire broke through.

There's only a half an hour before the end of the school day, and your teacher is working through her final lesson - geography, geometry, Shakespeare. Then you think you smell something - a whiff of smoke. The room starts to warm up. In only a few short minutes, you and the rest of your classmates find yourself with a horrific choice - burn to death, or leap down to the pavement below? The young students of Our Lady of the Angels Catholic elementary school in Chicago, IL, faced that very decision on the first day of December in 1958.

All it would take was one spark. The southeastern Australian state of Victoria was dried out and temperatures were tipping into the high forties Celsius. In early February of 2009, the region could burn so very easily. Everyone knew February 7th was likely to be the day that summer Victoria burned.

There are certain things you don't want to see out the window when you're sitting on a plane that's taking off. Seeing pieces of the plane fall off - like, say, the engine - are pretty high up on the list. Passengers sitting on American Airlines Flight 191 as it took off from O'Hare International Airport on May 25, 1979, were horrified to look out their windows and see exactly that happen to the engine on the left wing. They would only be horrifed for another thirty-one seconds.

What do you do when your home is no longer safe enough to be a home anymore? You try to find a new home, even it means hurrying things along for your own protection. The Jewish refugees on board the MS St Louis in May of 1939 were looking for just such a place. All they found were doors slammed in their faces.

You're driving along on a road trip and your engine starts to smoke. You give it another half mile or so, then pull over. By the time you pop the hood, the smoke has turned into actual flames spewing out of your car somehow. So you back away as far as you can for your own safety. It's terrifying enough if this happens to you while driving down an everyday country road or rural highway. But what if it happens when you're in the middle of one of the longest highway tunnels in the world?

It was a little slice of Vegas transplanted to a Kentucky hillside just outside of Cincinnati, an elegant showcase for the likes of the Rat Pack, Marilyn Monroe, Liberace, and Frankie Valli. The Beverly Hills Supper Club went from a mafia-run illegal gambling den to the sort of place you could hold your kid's bar mitzvah or the Elk Club awards ceremony. But on Memorial Day weekend in 1977, all of that would end in a terrible fire those in the area would remember for years.

In late January of 1959, ten hikers left the city of Sverdlovsk heading for an adventure in the wilderness. Only one of them returned alive. So what happened to Igor Dyatlov and the other eight hikers who died at what would later come to be known as Dyatlov Pass?

N'Dolo Airport could not have been any worse of an airport to take off from in 1996 if it tried. Whether it be the pitted runway or the handwaving of appropriate documentation and procedures, flying out of N'Dolo was a nightmare, one which anyone with bad intentions could use to their advantage. This is why so many different factors came together at once to cause a horrific tragedy in the city of Kinshasa in January of 1996, a catastrophe which left hundreds of innocent people dead in its wake.