Disaster Area

Dragging yourself into work on a Monday can always feel grim. But on June 18th, 1990, the employees at the GMAC office in Jacksonville, Florida, had something far more terrifying than boring meetings to look forward to that day.

And now for Jennifer's hometown disaster - when one small hurricane turned southern New York and Pensylvania into one big muddy lake.

On March 18th, 1937, the students in the junior-senior high school of New London, TX, sat waiting in eager antipation of the end of the school day, looking forward to a three-day weekend. But the school, and many of the students and teachers inside the building, wouldn't make it to 3:30.

The Trolley Squre Mall in Salt Lake City was a popular and historical landmark with a quaint and quirky design. On February 12th, 2007, a young man would arrive at the mall to do something no one, not even his family, saw coming.

The first maneuver the Frecce Tricolori display team would perform at the Ramstein air show on August 28th, 1988, was called the pierced-heart maneuver. But when three of the planes collided, what followed woud instead pierce through the heart of the crowd, killing dozens.

The man on the train would not be quiet, and what he was saying was horrifying. Three men would stand up to him. Only one of those men would survive.

We will never know the entirety of what happened on the Taconic State Parkway on July 26th, 2009, but we know enough - that a drunk and high mom driving a van loaded with five children drove the wrong way and struck another vehicle, leaving eight people dead. It's in the details where the mystery grows.

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.

It's late at night, and you're sleeping soundly until you're awakened by a stench that makes your stomach roll. You hack and cough as your eyes burn. You can barely breathe. So you grab your spouse and your kids, and you run. You run, not just by yourself, but with everyone in your neighborhood, all of you trying to escape a silent killer.

At 9:02 AM on April 19th, 1995, an explosion rocked the downtown area of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. When people saw the devastated Alfred P. Murrah federal building, many thought at first it was a natural gas explosion. But it turned out to be something much more sinister.

Being the only survivor of a plane crash is difficult enough. Being the only survivor when you were the one in the cockpit is another level of tragic.