I vaguely remember that there was a river in some North American city that was so polluted, it actually caught fire.
Anyone have any details? Or is this an urban legend?
The Cuyahoga, in June 1969.
Armed with that info, I found a site: http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/60s/pages/richoux/
Thanks!
James Thurber wrote about the horrible “flood” that hit Columbus, Ohio, in … 1913, maybe? Memory fails me at the moment.
I once had an original copy of The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters, which I mistreated and subsequently nearly destroyed. There’s a softcover reprint now available, but it omits the sections on ‘other sea disasters’, and some interesting sections on proposals to prevent future sea disasters.
The Sinking of the Titanic… is an excellent example of the “instant” disaster book. It’s full of elegant, 1912-style prose which is almost entirely speculative except for a few excerpts from survivor accounts. Much (and I do mean much) is said of the gentlemanly and very Anglo-Saxon behavior of the gallant men who, “as has been said of a Greater One…died so that others may live”. Very little is said of the actual circumstances of the disaster – it’s almost all tales of heroism and sacrifice, sprinkled with more errors than another book which shall remain nameless.*
*: I mean the one with the insane conspiracy theories, like that the Titanic was switched with the Olympic as part of an insurance fraud scheme.
For example, early in the book, there’s a diagram of the lifeboats aboard the Titanic, which is very wrong. It shows two rows of lifeboats on each side of the Boat Deck, and also shows lifeboats in other places. The collapsibles are omitted.
There’s far more errors in the book than I could keep track of, but the narrative style is great. It’s probably just that the average writing style of a no-talent hack in 1912 seems elegant, sophisticated and poignant compared to the writing style of today’s no-talent hacks. =)
Eve: Thanks for mentioning the new Triangle fire book. I think Leon Stein’s book is out of print, so I’ll look for the new one. rocking chair, your list is great – I’ll try to look for some of those. Unfortunately, my college’s library has very few disaster books, despite being the second- or third- largest in North America. Bookstores don’t seem to have many either, though I did find the Hartford circus fire book once, and read it all in the store (and in a more comfortable chair than I have at home, too). =)
Sorry to say, I can’t highly recommend Dark Tide (I’m about 3/4 through it now). The writer commits too many no-nos for non-fiction: imagining “what he was thinking,” inventing dialogue—and falling prey to the urban legend that people’s hair turned “snow white” during a trauma!
Plus, he comes up with this wowser of a sentence: “Martin Clogherty walked home from the Pen and Pencil Club on this damp Wednesday morning with elation and wistfulness as his companions, both tugging at him like lovers competing for his affections.”
Yikes! If I ever write a sentence like that, promise to put a bullet through my head?
Still it is the only book on the Great Molasses Flood, so it is useful and interesting fact-wise . . .
Shall we fill that man’s house with… molasses?
See, If I were writing about The Great Boston Molasses Flood, I’d have used the tagline, “It’s Like The Johnstown Flood—Only Delicious!”
The historian David McCullough wrote a book The Johnstown Flood. Not an “instant” disaster book, but still absolutely riveting. He included part of a poem that was written shortly after the disaster, that put the “blame” for the flood on the poor maintenance of a dam that held back the waters of a lake belonging to a local resort.
Many thousand human lives–
Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives,
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,
(Worse than Herod’s awful crime)
Sent to heaven befor their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!
All the horrors that hell could wish,
Such was the price that was paid–for fish!
Try the “Living Almanac of Disasters” here:
Here’s a few:
RISING TIDE: THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI FLOOD OF 1927 AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA by John M. Barry
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle
The Titanic, End of a Dream by Wyn Craig Wade
Fire in Boston’s Coconut Grove by Paul Benzaquin
all at Amazon
Although Ron Hansen’s “Nebraska” is fiction, the first (title) story is based on an actual, historical blizzard that struck Nebraska in late 18XX, early 19XX (I don’t recall the date). People got lost between house and barn and froze to death kind of blizzard. Quite good fiction all-around, too (IMHO).
I grew up in the northern part of Door County which was unaffected by the fire. I think it’s something that all Wisconsin students study in their fourth grade social studies class (or whichever elementary year focuses on state history).
Theres a nice little memorial park in Southern Door set up to honor those who died in Williamsonville which had the most deaths of any individual community in Door County.
Here’s a link to an article written by a member of the community in which I grew up detailing the Peshtigo fire: http://www.doorbell.net/lukes/a020802.htm
Here’s a link to a website about Tornado Memorial Park, so called because of the vortex of fire that took out Williamsonville: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/geolwisc/weather/tornmpk.htm
I saw the title of this thread and immediately thought, “Just add water!”
I’m going now.
I love that story! It’s “The Day the Dam Broke” from “My Life and Hard Times,” all about the panic that took place when people thought the dam had broken, although in fact it hadn’t and even if it had it would not have affected the part of Columbus where Thurber was.
For years I thought it was just a panic out of the blue. It’s not at all clear from Thurber’s telling that there really were calamitous floods all around at the time (which was indeed 1913).
Nothing like a cheery thread like this one to turn a lurker into a poster.
Since I live in disaster central—New York City—the possibility of large-scale horror looms in my mind unceasingly. After all, what a rich history we have here! The Civil War draft riots, the 1876 fire in Conway’s Theater in Brooklyn that killed 285, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Wall Street bombing in 1920, and of course, unparalleled, the WTC. One that I think about when I get on the subway is the Malbone Street subway crash. In November 1918, a dispatcher, untrained and inexperienced, was hastily subbed in as a motorman due to a wildcat strike; he took a six-mph curve at 30, which smashed the rear cars into the wall as if he were playing crack-the-whip. The cars, which were wooden, were destroyed, and 90-plus people were killed and about 100 more injured. The city, embarrassed by the carelessness of Brooklyn Rapid Transit officials in allowing a guy with two days of ride-along “training” to operate a subway, hastily changed…their labor policies? No, they changed the name of Malbone Street, to Empire Boulevard.
But if you really want disaster, there’s nothing comparable to the 1904 immolation of the steamboat General Slocum, which took 1,021 lives. The ship burst into flames on a church trip up the Hudson River. As in so many tragedies, human carelessness, greed, and stupidity turned an accident into a catastrophe: the crew had no training, the fire hoses burst, the ship’s lifeboats were wired in place and couldn’t be moved, and the life jackets aboard were rotted. Most of the victims were children. Almost all of them were German immigrants from the Lower East Side, so the tragedy and its aftermath basically wiped out a neighborhood. (The book on this one is Ship Ablaze, by Edward O’Donnell; came out in June, haven’t read it. I suppose 99 years later doesn’t quite qualify as instant.)
Do look for it–it’s an excellent book, and I am a tough judge.
Nothing like a good disaster thread to get me back on the boards after months of relative anonymity. Can’t wait to add some of these books to my collection. Thanks, Eve!
My grandfather shipped out to WWI through Halifax just six days after the collision between the Mont Blanc and the Imo in December, 1917. He had never seen anything like it – houses turned to matchsticks, nothing recognizable as having been a structure. But they got the harbor open ASAP because so many doughboys needed to get to Europe.
It’s peculiar that there was a rash of hotel fires in the US in 1946. There were at least three that year with terrible death tolls; the Winecoff was the worst at 119. I guess the book about that one is available; I’d thought it long out of print.
wow,thanks, hoopy frood. great links.
So, Eve, did you ever read what I suggested?