Portal:Disasters/Selected anniversary
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- March 2008
The Three Mile Island accident was the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry. It resulted in the release of a significant amount of radioactivity, an estimated maximum of 13 million curies of noble gases (480 petabecquerels), but under 20 curies (740 gigabecquerels) of the particularly hazardous iodine-131, to the environment. It resulted, however, in no immediate deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community which can be attributed to the accident. Public reaction to the event was probably influenced by at least three factors: first; the release – a few weeks before the accident – of a popular movie called "The China Syndrome", concerning an accident at a nuclear reactor; secondly, what was felt to be a lack of official information in the initial phases of the accident; and lastly, many of the statements made by political and social activists long opposed to nuclear power. Whatever the sources of the local fear and outrage, public reaction to the event is judged by some epidemiologists to have induced stresses in the local population that could have caused adverse health effects.
The accident began on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, and ultimately resulted in a partial core meltdown in Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant (a pressurized water reactor manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg.
Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's then Vice President for Power Generation initially and erroneously called the accident "a normal aberration." The scope and complexity of this reactor accident became clear over the course of five days, as a number of agencies at the local, state and federal levels tried to solve the problem and decide whether the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the local community, if not the entire area to the west/southwest. In the end, the reactor was brought under control, although full details of the accident were not discovered until much later.
Although 25,000 people lived within five miles (8 km) of the site at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "There will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects."
The accident, however, led to serious economic and public relations consequences for the US nuclear industry, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also initiated a protracted decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology. Later, under less emotional circumstances, this was all put in a more factual perspective for the public – both when it became clear that no one was killed or injured in this particular reactor accident, and by the relative comparison of TMI to the extremely severe meltdown and substantial loss of life resulting from the Chernobyl disaster.
- February 2008
The Daegu subway fire of February 18, 2003 killed at least 198 people and injured at least 147. An arsonist set fire to a train stopped at the Jungangno Station of the Daegu Metropolitan Subway in Daegu, South Korea. The fire then spread to a second train which had entered the station from the opposite direction.
The arsonist was Kim Dae-han, a 56 year-old unemployed former taxi driver who had suffered a stroke in November 2001 that left him partly paralyzed. Kim was dissatisfied with his medical treatment and had expressed sentiments of violence and depression; he later told police he wanted to kill himself, but to do so in a crowded place rather than alone. By most accounts, on the morning of February 18, he boarded train 1079 on Line 1 in the direction of Daegok, carrying a duffel bag which contained two green milk cartons filled with a flammable liquid, possibly paint thinner or gasoline.
As the train left Daegu Station around 9:53 a.m., Kim began fumbling with the cartons and a cigarette lighter, alarming other passengers who tried to stop him. In the struggle, one of the cartons spilled and its liquid contents caught fire as the train pulled into Jungangno Station in downtown Daegu. Kim, his back and legs on fire, managed to escape along with many passengers on train 1079, but within two minutes the fire had spread to all six cars. The seats and flooring were composed of flammable carbonated vinyl, and polyethylene, and non-flammable fiberglass, and produced a thick, chemical smoke as it burned.
The operator of the train, Choi Jeong-hwan, failed to notify subway officials immediately of the fire.
- January 2008
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred in the United States, over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC) on January 28, 1986. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The seal failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it filled, allowing a flare to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent attachment hardware and external fuel tank. The SRB breach flare led to the separation of the right-hand SRB and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter. The shuttle was destroyed and all seven crew members were killed. The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation.
The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but they failed to address it properly. They also ignored warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching on such a cold day and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The Rogers Commission offered NASA nine recommendations that were to be implemented before shuttle flights resumed.
Many schoolchildren viewed the launch live due to the presence on the crew of Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project. Media coverage of the accident was extensive: one study reported that 85 percent of Americans surveyed had heard the news within an hour of the accident. The Challenger disaster has been used as a case study in many discussions of engineering safety and workplace ethics and inspired the 1990 television movie, Challenger.
- December 2007
The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, occurred on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people, killing fourteen (all of them women) and injuring the other fourteen before killing himself. He began his attack by entering a classroom at the university, where he separated the male and female students. After claiming that he was "fighting feminism", he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. He then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. He killed fourteen women and injured four men and ten women in just under twenty minutes before turning the gun on himself.
Lépine was the child of a French-Canadian mother and an Algerian father, and had been physically abused by his father during his childhood. His suicide note claimed political motives and blamed feminists for ruining his life. The note included a list of nineteen Quebec women whom Lépine considered to be feminists and apparently wished to kill.
Since the attack, Canadians have debated various interpretations of the events, their significance, and Lépine's motives. Most feminist and many official perspectives regard the massacre as an anti-feminist attack and as representative of wider societal violence against women, and the anniversary of the massacre has since been commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Some interpretations emphasize Lépine's abuse as a child or suggest that the massacre was simply the isolated act of a madman, unrelated to larger social issues. However, some commentators have blamed violence in the media and increasing poverty, isolation, and alienation in society, particularly in immigrant communities.
The incident led to more stringent gun control laws in Canada, and changes in the tactical response of police to shootings, which were later credited with minimizing casualties at the Dawson College shootings.
- November 2007
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, also known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake, took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:40 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in history, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 people . The earthquake was followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near-total destruction of Lisbon. The earthquake accentuated political tensions in Portugal and profoundly disrupted the country's eighteenth-century colonial ambitions.
The event was widely discussed by European Enlightenment philosophers, and inspired major developments in theodicy and in the philosophy of the sublime. As the first earthquake studied scientifically for its effects over a large area, it signaled the birth of modern seismology. Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 km (120 mi) west-southwest of Cape St. Vincent.
The earthquake struck on the morning of 1 November, the Catholic holiday of All Saints' Day. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half and six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five-metres (16 ft) wide to appear in the city centre. Survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing a sea floor littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Approximately forty minutes after the earthquake, an enormous tsunami engulfed the harbour and downtown, rushing up the Tagus river. It was followed by two more waves. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days. Lisbon was not the only Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. Throughout the south of the country, in particular the Algarve, destruction was rampant. The shock waves of the earthquake were felt throughout Europe as far as Finland and North Africa. Tsunamis as tall as 20 metres (66 ft) swept the coast of North Africa, and struck Martinique and Barbados across the Atlantic. A three-metre (ten-foot) tsunami hit the southern English coast. Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, was also hit, resulting in the partial destruction of the "Spanish Arch".
- October 2007
The Kashmir earthquake (also known as the South Asia earthquake or the Great Pakistan earthquake) of 2005, was a major earthquake, of which the epicentre was the Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The earthquake occurred at 08:50:38 Pakistan Standard Time (03:50:38 UTC) on 8 October 2005. It registered 7.6 on the richter scale making it a major earthquake similar in intensity to the 1935 Quetta earthquake, the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. As of 8 November, the Pakistani government's official death toll was 73,276, while officials say nearly 1,400 people died in Jammu and Kashmir and fourteen people in Afghanistan.
The epicenter at , about 19 km (11.8 miles) northeast of Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, and 100 km (65 miles) north-northeast of the national capital Islamabad. The earthquake is classified as "major" by the USGS. The hypocenter was located at a depth of 26 km (16.2 miles) below the surface. The Japan Meteorological Agency estimated its magnitude at a minimum of 7.8. By comparison, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake had a magnitude of 9.15. The earthquake caused widespread destruction in northern Pakistan, as well as damage in Afghanistan and northern India. The worst hit areas were Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), western and southern parts of the Kashmir valley in the Indian Kashmir. It also affected some parts of the Pakistani province of Punjab, the capital city of Islamabad, and the city of Karachi experienced a minor aftershock of magnitude 4.6. There have been many secondary earthquakes in the region, mainly to the northwest of the original epicenter. A total of 147 aftershocks were registered in the first day after the initial quake, of which one had a magnitude of 6.2. Twenty-eight of these aftershocks occurred with magnitudes greater. On October 19, a series of strong aftershocks, one with a magnitude of 5.8, occurred about 65 km (40.5 miles) north-northwest of Muzaffarabad. There have been more than 978 aftershocks with a magnitude of 4.0 and above, as of 27 October 2005 that continue to occur daily.
- September 2007
The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of London, England, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster (the modern West End), Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums. It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated that it destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's ca. 80,000 inhabitants.The death toll from the fire is unknown and is traditionally thought to have been small, as only a few verified deaths were recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the grounds that the deaths of poor and middle-class people were not recorded anywhere, and that the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims, leaving no recognisable remains.
The fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) in Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly. The use of the major firefighting technique of the time, the creation of firebreaks by means of demolition, was critically delayed due to the indecisiveness of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a firestorm which defeated such measures. The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City. Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and street violence. On Tuesday, the fire spread over most of the City, destroying St. Paul's Cathedral and leaping the River Fleet to threaten Charles II's court at Whitehall, while coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously mobilising. The battle to quench the fire is considered to have been won by two factors: the strong east winds died down, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks to halt further spread eastward.
The social and economic problems created by the disaster were overwhelming. Evacuation from London and settlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Despite numerous radical proposals, London was reconstructed on essentially the same street plan used before the fire.
- August 2007
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks during World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States of America under US President Harry S. Truman. On August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima (広島市 Hiroshima-shi?), followed on August 9, 1945 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki (長崎市 Nagasaki-shi?). They are the only instances of the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.
In estimating the number of deaths caused by the attacks, there are several factors that make it difficult to arrive at reliable figures: inadequacies in the records given the confusion of the times, the small number who died months or years after the bombing as a result of radiation exposure, and the pressure to either exaggerate or minimize the numbers, depending upon political agenda. That said, it is estimated that as many as 140,000 had died in Hiroshima by the bomb and its associated effects, with the estimate for Nagasaki roughly 74,000. Almost all of the casualties were a direct result of the bomb itself, with very few people dying from radiation induced illnesses. In both cities, the overwhelming majority of the deaths were those of civilians. The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender, as well as the effects and justification of them, has been subject to much debate.
Hiroshima was the primary target of the first nuclear bombing mission on August 6, with Kokura and Nagasaki being alternative targets. August 6 was chosen because there had previously been cloud over the target. The B-29 Enola Gay, piloted and commanded by 509th Composite Group commander Colonel Paul Tibbets, was launched from North Field airbase on Tinian in the West Pacific, about six hours flight time from Japan. The Enola Gay (named after Colonel Tibbets' mother) was accompanied by two other B29s, The Great Artiste which carried instrumentation, commanded by Major Charles W. Sweeney, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil (the photography aircraft) commanded by Captain George Marquardt.
After leaving Tinian the aircraft made their own individual way to Iwo Jima where they rendezvoused at 2440 m (8000 ft) and set course for Japan. The aircraft arrived over the target in clear visibility at 9855 m (32,000 ft). On the journey, Navy Captain William Parsons had armed the bomb, which had been left unarmed to minimize the risks during takeoff. His assistant, 2nd Lt. Morris Jeppson, removed the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area.
The release at 08:15 (Hiroshima time) was uneventful, and the gravity bomb known as "Little Boy", a gun-type fission weapon with 60 kg (130 pounds) of uranium-235, took 57 seconds to fall from the aircraft to the predetermined detonation height about 600 meters (2,000 ft) above the city. The radius of total destruction was about 1.6 km (1 mile), with resulting fires across 11.4 km² (4.4 square miles). Infrastructure damage was estimated at 90 percent of Hiroshima's buildings being either damaged or completely destroyed.
About an hour before the bombing, Japanese early warning radar detected the approach of some American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. An alert was given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. At nearly 08:00, the radar operator in Hiroshima determined that the number of planes coming in was very small—probably not more than three—and the air raid alert was lifted. To conserve fuel and aircraft, the Japanese had decided not to intercept small formations. The normal radio broadcast warning was given to the people that it might be advisable to go to air-raid shelters if B-29s were actually sighted, but no raid was expected beyond some sort of reconnaissance.
On August 15, 1945 Japan announced its surrender to the Allied Powers, signing the Instrument of Surrender on September 2 which officially ended World War II. Furthermore, the experience of bombing led post-war Japan to adopt Three Non-Nuclear Principles, which forbids Japan from nuclear armament.
- July 2007
The Plan de Sánchez massacre took place in the Guatemalan village of Plan de Sánchez, Baja Verapaz department (map pictured), on 18 July 1982. Over 250 people (mostly women and children, and almost exclusively ethnic Achi Maya) were abused and murdered by members of the armed forces and their paramilitary allies.
The killings took place during one of the most violent phases of Guatemala's Civil War, which pitted various groups of left-wing insurgents against the government and the armed forces. After assuming power in March 1982, President Efraín Ríos Montt embarked on a military campaign that largely succeeded in breaking the insurgency, but at a terrible cost in human lives and human rights violations. The massacre in Plan de Sánchez was an element in the government's scorched earth strategy, and the village was targeted because of the authorities' suspicions that the inhabitants were harbouring or otherwise supporting guerrilla groups.
After the massacre, the village was practically abandoned for a number of years and the survivors were told that reprisals would follow if they spoke about the incident or revealed the location of the numerous mass graves they had helped to dig. With the gradual return to democracy that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of the survivors felt they could begin to talk about the killings without fearing for their lives. Accusations were filed with the authorities in 1992 and, in 1993, a criminal investigation was launched. However, faced with delays and other irregularities in the proceedings, and stonewalled by a National Reconciliation Law that granted amnesties to the suspected perpetrators, the survivors saw that Guatemala's domestic legal remedies were ineffective in this case and consequently decided to lodge a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the supranational human rights arm of the Organisation of American States, in 1996.
The IACHR began processing the complaint, received a partial recognition of the state's institutional responsibility from democratically elected president Alfonso Portillo in the first year of his term, and finally referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for judgement and settlement. In 2004, the Inter-American Court issued two judgements, in which it established Guatemala's liability in the case and ordered an extensive package of monetary, non-monetary and symbolic forms of compensation for the survivors and the next-of-kin of the deceased.
- June 2007
The Eschede train disaster was the world's worst high-speed train disaster. It happened on 3 June 1998, near the village of Eschede in the district of Celle, Lower Saxony. The toll of 101 dead and 88 injured surpassed the 1971 Dahlerau train disaster as the deadliest accident in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Car number 4 derailed by the violent deviation of car number 3 and still travelling at 200 km/h (125 mph), passed intact under the bridge and rolled onto the embankment immediately behind it. Three DB railway workers who had been working near the bridge were killed instantly when the derailed car crushed them. The tearing of the wagon hitches caused automatic brakes to engage and the mostly undamaged cars 1 to 3 (as well as the front locomotive) came to a halt at the Eschede train station, some three kilometers (two miles) down the track. As the second half of car number 5 passed under the bridge, the bridge collapsed and fell on the car, flattening it completely. The remaining cars jackknifed into the rubble in a zig-zag pattern as the collapsed bridge had completely obstructed the track: Cars 6 and 7, the service car, the restaurant car, the three first class cars numbered 10 to 12, and the rear locomotive all derailed and slammed into the pile. The resulting mess was likened to a partially collapsed folding ruler. An automobile was also found in the wreckage. It belonged to the three railway technicians and was probably standing on the bridge before the accident.
The train driver did not notice the trailer loss itself; instead he was interpreting the automatic brakes and missing control lamps as an electric error. While checking on standard procedures for this case in the power head, the station manager informed him of the situation ("You passed through alone! You're derailed!") The driver fell into a seat in shock and was unable to leave the power head for hours.
The crash made a sound that witnesses later described as "startling", "horribly loud", and "like a plane crash". Nearby residents, alerted by the sound, were the first to arrive at the scene. At 11:02, the local police declared an emergency; at 11:07, as the magnitude of the disaster quickly became apparent, this was elevated to "major emergency" and at 12:30 the Celle district government declared "catastrophe emergency" (civil state of emergency). More than 1000 rescue workers from the regional emergency services, fire departments, rescue services, police and army were dispatched. Some 37 emergency physicians, who happened to be attending a professional conference in nearby Hanover, also gave their assistance in the early hours of the rescue effort.
While many passengers and the driver survived in the front part of the train, there was almost no chance of survival in the rear carriages, which crashed into the concrete bridge pile at 200 km/h. Including the three railway workers who had been standing under the bridge, 101 people died. ICE 787 was passing the bridge in the opposite direction (on route from Hamburg to Hannover) only two minutes earlier.
- May 2007
The RMS Lusitania was a Cunard Line ocean liner, that was built by the John Brown & Co. Ltd ship yard near Clydebank, Scotland. Lusitania then sailed on her maiden voyage on September 7, 1907 and reached New York City on September 13, 1907.
During World War I, when Britain and Germany were at war, on May 7, 1915 the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, the U-20. It sank within 18 minutes, eight miles off of the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard. The sinking turned sentiments in neutral nations against Germany and helped provoke the United States into entering the war two years later.
Lusitania was making for the port of Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, 70 kilometers from the Old Head of Kinsale when the liner crossed in front of U-20 at 2:10 p.m. It was sheer chance that the liner became such a convenient target, since U-20 could hardly have caught the fast vessel otherwise. Schwieger gave the order to fire, but his quartermaster, Charles Voegele, would not take part in an attack on women and children, and refused to pass on the order to the torpedo room — a decision for which he was court-martialed and served three years in prison at Kiel. Another crewman took over, and a single torpedo was launched towards Lusitania. It hit cleanly under the bridge, blowing a hole in the side of the ship, and was then followed by a much larger secondary explosion that blew out the starboard bow.
As was typical for this period of time, the hull plates of the Lusitania were fastened with large rivets. As the lifeboats were lowered, they dragged on these rivets, which threatened to rip the boats apart. Many lifeboats overturned while loading or lowering, spilling their passengers into the sea below; those that were lowered tended to be overturned by the ship's motion when they hit the water. Some, by the negligence of some officers, crashed down onto the deck, crushing other passengers, and sliding down towards the bridge. Lusitania had 48 lifeboats, more than enough for all the crew and passengers, but only six managed to get to the water and stay afloat. Lusitania sank in 18 minutes at 2:28 pm, 8 miles off of the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. 1,198 people died with her, including almost a hundred children. The bodies of many of the victims were buried at either the Lusitania port in Cobh or the Church of St. Multose in Kinsale. However, the bodies of many other victims were never recovered and remain entombed inside the wreck of the ship.
- April 2007
The Storm of the Century, also known as the ’93 Superstorm or the (Great) Blizzard of 1993, was a large cyclonic storm that occurred on March 12–March 15, 1993, on the East Coast of North America. It is unique both because of its intensity as well as its massive size and wide-reaching effect. At its height the storm stretched from Canada to Central America, but its main impact was on the Eastern United States and Cuba. Areas as far south as central Alabama and Georgia received 4 to 6 inches of snow and areas as far as Birmingham, AL, received up to 12 inches with isolated reports of 16 inches, even up to 2 inches was reported on the Florida Panhandle, accompanied by hurricane-force wind gusts and record low barometric pressures. Farther south from Florida down to Cuba, hurricane-force winds produced extreme storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, which along with scattered tornadoes killed dozens of people.
This storm complex was massive, affecting at least 26 U.S. states and much of eastern Canada. Bringing cold air along with heavy precipitation and hurricane force winds, it caused a blizzard over much of the area it affected. The storm brought snow as far south as northern Florida, thundersnow from Texas to Pennsylvania, and whiteout conditions. Some affected areas saw more than 3.5 feet (1.0 m) of snow, and snowdrifts were as high as 35 feet (10.0 m). Central and Southern Florida saw no snow, but tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, resultant from the storm, occurred there and in Cuba. Responsible for 300 deaths and the loss of electric power to over 10 million, it is purported to have been directly experienced by over 130 million people in the United States, about half the country's population at that time. Every airport from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Atlanta, Georgia was closed for some time because of the storm. The volume of the storm's total snowfall was later computed to be 12.91 mi³ (53.96 km³), an amount which would weigh (depending on the variable density of snow) between 5.4 and 27 billion tonnes.
- March 2007
The Storm of the Century, also known as the ’93 Superstorm or the (Great) Blizzard of 1993, was a large cyclonic storm that occurred on March 12–March 15, 1993, on the East Coast of North America. It is unique both because of its intensity as well as its massive size and wide-reaching effect. At its height the storm stretched from Canada to Central America, but its main impact was on the Eastern United States and Cuba. Areas as far south as central Alabama and Georgia received 4 to 6 inches of snow and areas as far as Birmingham, AL, received up to 12 inches with isolated reports of 16 inches, even up to 2 inches was reported on the Florida Panhandle, accompanied by hurricane-force wind gusts and record low barometric pressures. Farther south from Florida down to Cuba, hurricane-force winds produced extreme storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, which along with scattered tornadoes killed dozens of people.
This storm complex was massive, affecting at least 26 U.S. states and much of eastern Canada. Bringing cold air along with heavy precipitation and hurricane force winds, it caused a blizzard over much of the area it affected. The storm brought snow as far south as northern Florida, thundersnow from Texas to Pennsylvania, and whiteout conditions. Some affected areas saw more than 3.5 feet (1.0 m) of snow, and snowdrifts were as high as 35 feet (10.0 m). Central and Southern Florida saw no snow, but tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, resultant from the storm, occurred there and in Cuba. Responsible for 300 deaths and the loss of electric power to over 10 million, it is purported to have been directly experienced by over 130 million people in the United States, about half the country's population at that time. Every airport from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Atlanta, Georgia was closed for some time because of the storm. The volume of the storm's total snowfall was later computed to be 12.91 mi³ (53.96 km³), an amount which would weigh (depending on the variable density of snow) between 5.4 and 27 billion tonnes.
- February
The 228 Incident or 228 Massacre was an uprising in the Republic of China (Taiwan) that began on February 28, 1947 and was suppressed by the Kuomintang government, resulting in thirty thousand to sixty thousand civilians killed. The number "228" refers to the day of the incident, February 28 (28th day of the 2nd month, 2/28).
This event is now commemorated in Taiwan as Peace Memorial Day. Official government policy had repressed the education of the events until recently, for various reasons. Many of the details of the incident are still highly controversial and hotly debated in Taiwan today, as the largely conservative-controlled government often tries to stifle discussion on the topic. Some people point to Communist involvement as a "justification" for the KMT's action.
After 50 years of colonial rule by Japan, Taiwan was placed under the administrative control of the Republic of China in 1945 by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). After two years of administration by the Republic of China, nepotism, accusations of corruption and a failed economy increased tensions between the local Taiwanese and ROC administration. The flashpoint came on February 27, 1947 in Taipei when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an anti-smuggling officer triggered civil disorder and open rebellion that would last for days. The uprising was shortly put down by the military of the Republic of China.
- January
The Kegworth Air Disaster occurred on January 8, 1989, when British Midland Airlines Flight 92, a Boeing 737-400, crashed onto the embankment of the M1 motorway near Kegworth, Leicestershire, UK. The aircraft was preparing to land at the East Midlands Airport. During the final approach to the East Midlands Airport, more fuel was pumped into the damaged engine to maintain speed, which caused it to cease operating entirely and burst into flames. The captain attempted to restart the right engine by windmilling, using the air flowing through the engine to rotate the turbine blades and start the engine, but the aircraft was by now flying too slowly for this.
The captain managed to keep the now-gliding aircraft airborne long enough to avoid a crash landing in the village of Kegworth by pointing the nose up and stretching the glide, but just before crossing the M1 motorway, the tail hit the ground and the aircraft bounced back into the air and over the motorway, crashing on the opposite embankment and breaking up into three pieces. Forty-seven of the 118 passengers (126 people on board including flight staff) died (39 at the scene, 8 later). All eight of the flight crew survived the accident. Of the 79 survivors, 5 had minor injuries and 74 were seriously injured. No one on the motorway was hurt (and no vehicles were damaged), although one driver did subsequently receive damages for post-traumatic stress disorder.
