5 Real Disasters That Sound Like Preachy Hollywood Movies
When you watch a disaster movie, you know the ice storm/fire storm/exploding protons won’t be the only villain. The movie will also be sure to insert some greedy businessman or reckless military dude, making it clear that much of the blame for all this rests on their shoulders. The story then becomes a lesson in morality, which might leave you rolling your eyes. And how about real life? Can we blame every tragedy on a sin committed by one evil man? Not always. But some of the time, we really can. 5 The Selfish Grocer
We’ve had a couple different major fires burn down dance clubs overseas in recent months, killing hundreds of people. Whenever this happens, you could always point your finger at someone for violating fire codes because if the place took every precaution, the death toll would never have been quite so bad. But with the 2004 Ycuá Bolaños supermarket fire, the fault went a little bit further than that. Don't Miss A fire started at this two-story Paraguayan supermarket, possibly because a cylinder of gas exploded. Some people were bound to die in the blaze, including those closest to the initial explosion. Then while the fire was spreading, owner Juan Pío Paiva radioed a security guard. Lock the place’s doors, said Paiva. If they didn’t, people would surely freely move in and out and loot the whole store. Tony1940/Wiki CommonsWould not be the stupidest way people responded to high grocery prices.The fire killed 424 people. Paiva and the guard denied locking those doors, but a court found them guilty of doing so and convicted them of involuntarily manslaughter. That’s something, but it fell short of the consequences people demanded, and the public responded by rioting — and setting fires. This worked, and the courts upped the conviction to negligent homicide.
4 The Gambling Officers
Over at the U.S. naval storage facility in Port Chicago during World War II, the commissioned officers placed bets among one another over whose team of sailors could load a ship the fastest. If you’re in charge of, say, a supermarket in Paraguay, rushing teams like this might result in a few broken eggs. These sailors weren’t loading food but loading munitions, and on July 17, 1944, 2,000 tons of them exploded.Debris blew two miles straight up into the air. The tremor clocked in at 3.4 on the Richter scale. At the dock, 320 sailors died immediately, while flying metal shredded some 400 more people close by. U.S. Naval Historical CenterA clear case of sabotage by the Japanese, assumed many.A court found no officers responsible. A little bit after the disaster, however, the navy convicted hundreds of sailors at the port. The charge here was refusing to load more explosives, in anticipation of them exploding. These sailors were eventually exonerated — last year, 80 years after their courts-martial. The navy have a lot more detailed information about the Port Chicago disaster. Maybe you should look to an archived version of the page, though, because a new message now appears there. U.S. NavyThe instruction referenced above tells personnel “to remove all DoD news and feature articles, photos and videos that promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).” The majority of sailors convicted or killed in the Port Chicago disaster were Black.
3 The Rigid Priest
The fire that spread through New Orleans in 1788, starting in a home and expanding from there, was another one of those fires bound to do a lot of damage. But it could have done less if St. Louis Cathedral rang its bells to sound the alarm, as it often did for fires, rousing a response from firefighters. On this day, Pere Antoine forbade the anti-fire protocol. It was Good Friday, and he said this meant the bells must not ring. via Wiki CommonsGood Friday is not a time for saving everyone.The fire went on to destroy 850 buildings. Among them were multiple churches, including St. Louis Cathedral itself. The famous St. Louis Cathedral that faces Jackson Square today is a replacement following the old one burning down.
2 The Forgetful Boatswain
We’ve all heard the reasons behind the Titanic sinking. We talk about how fast the ship was going, how they launched lifeboats without filling them to capacity, how a fire broke out on the ship and weakened the hull, how someone left behind the key to the iceberg binoculars cabinet and you could probably dig up even more factors and even more people to blame. With some other sinkings, the cause is simpler. Consider the MS Herald of Free Enterprise, which sank in the English Channel in 1987.Someone neglected to shut the doors before the ferry set off. With the bow doors open, the boat quickly took on water and capsized in 90 seconds. via Wiki CommonsThe band bravely played till the end. Probably some really short song like “Old Town Road.”The guy in charge of closing the doors was assistant boatswain Mark Stanley. He missed that task because he was asleep in his cabin. He and his supervisors faced manslaughter charges over this, but a judge ultimately dismissed these. The charges said there was an “obvious” risk the ferry would sink with its doors open, but according to the judge, “It was not obvious to any of these people until it happened to them. That is my intellectual difficulty.” We imagine the defendants now chuckled and exchanged handshakes before remembering 192 people died in that boat and then realizing this might look bad.
1 The Irresponsible Pilot
A plane flew from Moscow toward Hong Kong in 1994, and when it crashed, all 75 people aboard died. Plane crashes lead to detailed post-mortems that usually uncover detailed mechanical explanations for what went wrong. With Aeroflot Flight 593, the cockpit voice recorder presented something else. It was the voice of a 12-year-old girl. “Daddy, can I turn this?” she says. It’s the captain’s daughter, and she’s sitting at the controls. “Have you turned on the autopilot?” she asks, and her dad says yes. “What is that little star?” she asks, and the pilot starts naming not stars but cities below them.Thankfully, he lifts her off the chair before anything can go wrong. Not so thankfully, the pilot’s son replaces her, and though he’s three years older, he similarly lacks flying credentials. “Can I turn this?” he asks, much like his sister. Michel GilliandYour children were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, you didn't stop to think if they should.This seems to go fine for a bit, but then the boy asks, “Why is it turning?” Is it turning by itself, asks the dad now. “Yes!” says the boy. “Hold on, hold the wheel, hold it,” says dad. Then: “To the left! To the left! To the right!” Alarms ring. “Get out!” he says at last. Then: “Crawl out to the back!” Then: “Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!”The captain and the copilot yell to each other, trading commands like, “Full throttle! Full throttle!” Then we have the captain saying, “Giving you more speed. Easy, we'll get out of it now. Everything's fine.” A pause. “Pull backwards a little. Take it easy. Take it easy, I tell you.”And then silence. Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.
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