I thought everyone had heard about that! Then again, I thought everyone knew about The Great Boston Molasses Flood, too . . .
And that’s why you’re a Doper, Eve.
Oh, another one I remembered last night:
The Sinking Of The Eastland: America’s Forgotten Tragedy. Worst maritime disaster on the Great Lakes, and it happened on a ship in the Chicago River tied up next to Wacker Drive. 844 dead. This is another one that seems largely forgotten, though there has been renewed interest here in Chicago in the last couple of decades.
A big second to Peter Maas’ The Terrible Hours.
Another good one is about the Morro Castle, a cruise ship that burned (arson) off the Atlantic coast. I don’t remember the exact book title – read it 20+ years ago – but I think it was Fire at Sea: The Mysterious Tragedy of the Morro Castle by Thomas Gallagher.
You like shipwrecks, hmm? I haven’t read this one, but I know the story: Four Short Blasts, by Peter Dow Bachelder and Mason Philip Smith, tells of the loss of the steamer Portland off Boston in a fierce gale in 1898. The wreck was just located recently.
It’s a stretch from being a disaster, but any story of the sinking of the Bismarck should be fulfilling.
As for fires, I was fascinated by Joseph Wambaugh’s Fire Lover, about a recent rash of arson-caused brush fires in the LA area with a surprising culprit. Sebastian Junger’s Fire, an anthology of several articles, includes a detailed account of forest fire fighters fully as good as his The Perfect Storm.
And Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson is a highly readable account of the discovery of the wreck of U-869 off New Jersey.
Slight title correction from an earlier post: it’s The Custom of the Sea: The True Story That Changed British Law by Neil Hanson. It goes into fascinating detail about the agonies of protracted dying of thirst and hunger on a lifeboat, and offers an illuminating historical overview of the appalling extent of such maritime incidents in, especially, the 18th and 19th centuries.
There’s a nice book on the Kursk disaster, Cry from the Deep: The Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test by Ramsey Flynn. Flynn shows how the Kursk disaster originated with poor engineering and a military culture that prioritized everything over safety and was compounded by levels of faulty decision-making going up the ranks of the Russian Navy. Flynn’s treatment also frames the disaster as a personal one, as experienced by the victims and their families; in this he benefitted from the cooperation he had by a few of the Kursk widows and relatives.
I haven’t read this one, but it’s organized around the idea that many disasters are man-made, often originating in how engineers and architects are driven to push the envelope: To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski, a Professor of Civil Engineering (and prolific author of books on engineering with crossover appeal). The disasters covered include the collapse of the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge and the collapse of a catwalk in a Hyatt Hotel.
OK, howz aboutDisaster at the Pole: The Crash of the Airship Italia by Wilbur Cross.
Arctic disaster plus a Zeppelin!
I don’t have the title, but any book about the Burke and Wills expedition in Australia has tragedy to spare.
For now, I have on request at the local library:
Triangle : the fire that changed America
To sleep with the angels : the story of a fire
Ship ablaze : the tragedy of the steamboat General Slocum
The great influenza : the epic story of the deadliest plague in history
The San Francisco earthquake
Also, my local library has The Children’s Blizzard, Batavia’s Graveyard and Ordeal by Hunger. I’ll check out the other ones after I’m done with these.
Being Canadian, I must plug Michael J. Bird’s The Town That Died (1962) about the 1917 explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbour. The whole thing was like a dress rehearsal for Hiroshima.
I’ve just started Melissa Fay Greene’s Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Pretty good so far.
You’ve all beaten me to some choices, but here are few more:
Ghosts of the Fireground by Peter Leschak. This book, authored by a wildland firefighter compares/contrasts his own experiences with the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, and the writings of Father Pernin, a minister caught in the midst of the conflagration, one of the few who survived. If you’ve never heard of the Peshtigo Fire, that’s because it shares a date in history with the Great Chicago Fire, in whose shadow it has been left.
Abandon Ship! by Richard Newcomb. This story of the USS Indianapolis, and it’s last journey is a tale of Naval screwup and scapegoating. The skipper delivered an unknown cargo to Tinian Atoll-it was the uranium used to make the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Denied proper intelligence, his ill fated return trip resulted in the greatest sea disaster of the US Navy.
If your more into a scientific book but still an easy read try
Why Buildings Fall Down
It covers a lot of old structural disasters like Galloping Gertie, the Hyatt Regency walkway disaster, and other major engineering/architectural failures.
An interesting update:
David Cowan, author of To Sleep with the Angels : A Story of a Fire (about the 1958 Our Lady of the Angels school fire in Chicago that killed 92 children and 3 nuns – one of my recommendations) was himself arrested for arson last Friday. He set fire to a storage building at a Roman Catholic parish (with an associated school building)
Cowan is also a co-author of Great Chicago Fires.
According to the Sun Times article, Cowan was recently fired as a janitor at the parish. He had also been previously fired from the Bellwood Fire Department.
As the article points out, a strange twist is that Cowen’s book tried to clear the name of the Angels’ janitor, Jim Raymond, who was blamed for contributing to dangerous conditions at the school. Now Cowen as a janitor sets a fire. Something must have cracked. He was very involved with the survivors of the Angels fire, and would seem to be the last person you’d expect to set a fire.
Cooper’s Creek by Alan Moorehead is an excellent account. It’s amazing how close they repeatedly came to being rescued, sometimes missing by a matter of hours.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Donner Party yet. Blizzards, cannibalism, horror, and heroism. I can recommend Ordeal by Hunger, by George R. Stewart, but there are a half a dozen other accounts listed in the link.
A lesser-known story of cannibalism is Death Raft, by Alexander McKee, about the wreck of the Medusa off the African coast in 1816. 150 men set adrift on a raft for two weeks under the blazing sun were reduced to 15 by mutiny, murder, hunger and thirst. It was commemorated in Gericault’s famous Raft of the Medusa.
