Some disasters much worse than Trump
I have been told Trump is the worst disaster in the history of the world. Not really true. There are far worse. In no real order:
1. BASF Oppau's Ammonium Nitrate Pile
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/03/03/how-not-to-do-it-breaking-up-ammonium-nitrate
In the early 1900s, BASF - who normally knows better - was producing ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate fertilizers at their Oppau, Germany, chemical plant. They put the mixed salts in a big pile on the edge of their site...where it turned into a rocklike lump, too hard for pickaxes to penetrate. So...they did some tests, found out the mixed salt was insensitive to detonation, and commenced breaking up the pile, when needed, with dynamite.
On September 21, 1921, the inevitable happened.
The huge crater at the bottom of the picture is where the ammonium nitrate pile used to be. An estimated 450 tons of ammonium nitrate was in this pile; its detonation killed 561 people.
2. The Texas City Disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster
In April 1947, longshoremen at the Port of Texas City reported the bags of ammonium nitrate they were about to load onto the SS Grandcamp (approximately 2200 tons of AN) and onto the SS High Flyer (951 tons of it) were "warm to the touch." They were ordered to load them anyway. The inevitable blast killed at least 581 people and leveled the entire town.
This anchor is the centerpiece of a park, located over two miles from the harbor, that was built to memorialize the disaster. The anchor is displayed exactly where it landed after being blown off the side of the ship.
3. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
A shirtwaist was a women's blouse popular around the turn of the 20th Century. They were made in a New York City sweatshop that caught fire March 25, 1911. 146 workers, 123 of whom were women, were killed in this disaster. Strangely enough, the building in Greenwich Village where the Triangle Waist Company was located was very proud of its "fireproof" rooms.
4. Imperial Sugar Refinery Explosion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Georgia_sugar_refinery_explosion
On February 7, 2008, Imperial Sugar's Port Wentworth, GA, sugar refinery suffered a dust explosion in its packaging area. 13 people died and 40 were injured in the blast.
5. The PEPCON Disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster
The Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada (PEPCON) made the chemical Ammonium Perchlorate, which is an oxidizer for solid rocket fuel. On May 4, 1988, it blew up for reasons never discovered. Two people were killed and 372 injured. Both the PEPCON plant and a nearby marshmallow factory were leveled by the explosion. Windows were broken ten miles away by the shock wave.
6. The Bhopal Catastrophe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
On the night of December 2-3, 1984, water was pumped into a tank at Union Carbide India Limited's Sevin insecticide plant. The tank contained 42 tons of methyl isocyanate - a chemical you do not, under any circumstances, mix with water. The 2259 people who died the first night were, as it turned out, the lucky ones. The final death toll is disputed, but it's somewhere between less than 4000 and over 16,000.
7. The Teton Dam Collapse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teton_Dam
In 1963, the geniuses at the US Bureau of Reclamation decided what South Idaho needed was a dam across the Snake River. Which was true. They decided the best way to build this thing was to make it out of compacted dirt with no concrete in its construction. This was NOT true. It collapsed while they were performing the initial fill of the reservoir. 11 people and 13,000 cattle were never seen again.
8. The Exxon Valdez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
On March 24, 1989, a comedy of errors led to the decidedly humorless dumping of 1.25 million barrels of Alaskan crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, Alaska.
9. The Chinese Melamine Scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_adulteration_in_China
In the libertarian paradise we call Communist China, an enterprising entrepreneur discovered you could fool the protein test being used in China at the time by adding the industrial chemical Melamine to the food you were testing. A lot of it wound up in food for people and animals, and many deaths occurred.
10. The Great Boston Molasses Flood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Boston's Purity Distilling Company built a 2.3-million-gallon tank to hold molasses which they distilled into ethanol. They built it so cheaply no one in Boston bought sugar; why would you when you could just stick a bucket under the leaky tank and get all you wanted for free? On January 15, 1919, the tank finally got around to collapsing. A wave of fermenting molasses 25 feet high roared down what is now Commercial Street. Twenty-one named people are known to have died but the true death count is far higher; many were so thoroughly coated in this crap they were either unable to be identified, or they were swept away in the molasses tsunami never to be seen again.
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