History"s A Disaster

22:29

Sinking of the Aurora del Titicaca

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/10/04

Send us Fan Mail A shipwreck nearly three miles above sea level sounds like a punchline until you realize it’s a real record held by a real lake. We’re heading to Lake Titicaca, the icy, oxygen thin giant of the Andes, where the Aurora del Titicaca went down near Amantani in the 1870s and then somehow took most of its documentation with it. No clean inquiry. No reliable death toll. Not even a single version of the story that everyone agrees on. We trace how colonial era trade pressure ...

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25:12

PSA Flight 182

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/09/27

Send us Fan Mail A cloudless sky can be its own kind of trap. We’re telling the story of PSA Flight 182, the 1978 Boeing 727 crash that tore through San Diego’s North Park neighborhood after a midair collision with a Cessna 172. No storm. No sabotage. Just two aircraft in busy airspace and a system that trusted “visual separation” to do a job human attention cannot reliably do, even with experienced professionals in the cockpit and controllers on the radio. We start with what made Pacific So...

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20:30

Thorpe Rail Diaster

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/09/20

Send us Fan Mail One rushed decision. One contradictory telegraph message. One single-track stretch of rail where only one train can be allowed to exist at a time. On a cold, rainy night in September 1874, that fragile setup collapses and Britain’s worst railway accident of the century detonates outside Norwich. We tell the story of the Thorpe Railway Disaster with a hard look at how Victorian railways actually worked: booming passenger demand, higher speeds, competing private companie...

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19:33

French Pass Drift Dive Disaster

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/09/13

Send us Fan Mail The most dangerous water often looks the calmest from the surface. French Pass sits like a postcard at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, but it hides the fastest tidal current in the country, a chaotic mix of eddies and standing waves, and a feature divers still whisper about: Jacob’s Hole. We’re telling the story of the French Pass diving tragedy, a routine advanced drift dive training run that ends with seven divers pulled into a situation no recreational certification...

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21:44

Collision of the Andrea Doria and The Stockholm

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/09/06

Send us Fan Mail A luxury Italian ocean liner glides toward New York with art on the walls, pools on deck, and new radar that’s supposed to make fog irrelevant. Then, off Nantucket, the SS Andrea Doria and the MS Stockholm do the unthinkable: they read each other on radar, make opposite assumptions about how to pass, and commit to turns that line them up perfectly for impact. The collision becomes one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in American waters, and it’s a brutal reminder...

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28:11

SwissAir Flight 111 Fire

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/08/30

Send us Fan Mail A modern airliner. A premium cabin upgrade. A faint smell that doesn’t seem urgent until it’s far too late. We’re diving into Swissair Flight 111, the 1998 MD-11 crash off Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, and the chain of hidden risks that turned a routine transatlantic flight into one of the most defining aviation safety case studies of the last 25 years. We walk through Swissair’s rise from a fiercely private, precision-focused carrier to the “Flying Bank,” then into the financi...

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23:17

The Malbone Street Wreck

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/08/23

Send us Fan Mail A packed train, a brand-new tunnel, and a curve that demanded six miles per hour. Now add a labor strike, a rushed staffing decision, and an operator who never should have been put in that seat. That mix created the 1918 Malbone Street Wreck, still the deadliest subway crash in New York City history, and we walk through exactly how it happened. We start with how Brooklyn’s transit system grew from a messy web of private lines into the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, then spr...

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25:35

Union Oil 1984 Explosion Romeoville

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/08/16

Send us Fan Mail A hairline crack doesn’t sound like much until it’s hissing flammable vapor at the base of a pressurized refinery tower. We’re telling the story of the 1984 Union Oil Refinery explosion in Romeoville, Illinois, a disaster that escalates in minutes from a routine walkthrough to a massive blast, a second fireball fueled by liquefied petroleum gas, and a night that leaves 17 workers dead. We start with the nuts and bolts of refinery operations, including how an MEA absorber tow...

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21:56

The White Ship Disaster

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/08/09

Send us Fan Mail A royal party boat packed with nobles, wine, and bad decisions sets off from Barfleur and hits rock within minutes, and England never really recovers the same way. We’re telling the story of the White Ship disaster of 1120, the night William Adelin, the only legitimate son of King Henry I, drowns in the Channel and takes a generation of Anglo-Norman leadership down with him. We start with the brittle logic of medieval succession: William the Conqueror’s cross-Channel empire,...

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17:38

Air Midwest Flight 5481

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/08/02

Send us Fan Mail A plane can be perfectly flyable and still be doomed by paperwork and a wrench turn. On Air Midwest Flight 5481, a Beechcraft 1900D lifts off from Charlotte Douglas and, within moments, pitches up so steeply the crew can’t muscle it back down. The stall warning blares, the aircraft rolls, and it crashes into a maintenance hangar, leaving no survivors. We break down what the NTSB uncovered and why this accident remains a defining case study in regional airline safety, w...

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21:26

2017 Washington Amtrak Cascades Derailment

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/07/26

Send us Fan Mail A passenger train on a brand-new route should not end up scattered across a highway, but that’s exactly what happened when Amtrak Cascades Train 501 hit a tight curve at more than double the posted limit and derailed onto I-5. We walk through how the Point Defiance Bypass was designed to improve service, why key infrastructure fixes were cut, and how a “permanent speed reduction” became the main defense at the most dangerous spot on the line. We also dig into the safet...

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24:05

Split Rock Explosion

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/07/19

Send us Fan Mail A played-out limestone quarry in the hills of New York should have faded into silence, but World War I turned Split Rock into something far more dangerous: a round-the-clock TNT factory built to feed an exploding demand for high explosives. We walk through how an isolated site with rail access and existing infrastructure became the ideal place to make munitions, and why “ideal” can also mean “easy to look away from” when the goal is maximum output. We follow the pressure coo...

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21:53

The Sinking Of The Larchmont

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/07/12

Send us Fan Mail A warm saloon, a clear night sky, and a cheap ticket from Providence to New York sounds like an easy win until the ocean decides otherwise. We’re telling the story of the 1907 sinking of the Larchmont, the deadliest maritime disaster in Rhode Island history, and the kind of shipwreck where the danger is not just the water, but the cold, the darkness, and the steam. We start with the Larchmont’s past life as the Cumberland, its rushed rebuild, and the string of groundin...

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22:15

Pan Am Flight 214

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/07/05

Send us Fan Mail A thunderstorm can feel peaceful right up until you’re trapped inside the worst part of it. We start with that uneasy contrast, then head straight into the night Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707 called the Clipper Trade Wind, enters a holding pattern near Philadelphia and never makes it to the runway. We walk through the flight’s path from San Juan to Baltimore and onward, meet the crew, and replay the moment air traffic control warns about heavy thunderstorms, strong winds, ...

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17:43

The Wreck Of The Old 97

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/06/28

Send us Fan Mail One minute you’re chasing a schedule. The next, you’re flying off the rails. We dig into the true story behind the Wreck of the Old 97, the notorious 1903 Southern Railway Fast Mail crash outside Danville, Virginia, and why a single downhill run turned a proud on time reputation into national headlines. We break down what the Old 97 was actually hauling, why a high-stakes mail contract created brutal incentives, and how engineer Steve Brody and the crew were pushed to make u...

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19:19

Castaway: Daniel Foss

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/06/21

Send us Fan Mail Five years alone on a rock island with no trees, no soil, and no certainty of rescue is the kind of survival scenario people argue about online, until you hear what Daniel Foss reportedly lived through after an 1809 shipwreck in the Pacific. We follow Foss from the moment the brig Negotiator strikes an iceberg to the desperate days in an open lifeboat where cold, thirst, and starvation wipe out the crew one by one. Along the way, we zoom out to the sealing industry of the 17...

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26:43

Sinking of the SS Central America

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/06/14

Send us Fan Mail Nine tons of gold. Nearly five hundred passengers. A hurricane powerful enough to turn a luxury-leaning paddle steamer into driftwood. We’re telling the story of the SS Central America, the 1857 shipwreck that wasn’t just a tragedy at sea, but a shockwave that hit the American economy when the country could least afford it. We start with the strange reality of Gold Rush wealth: if you struck it rich in California, your “bank account” might be literal metal you had to move yo...

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22:20

The Gimli Glider

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/06/07

Send us Fan Mail A wide-body jet goes quiet at 41,000 feet, the cockpit starts losing systems, and the crew has to fly a Boeing 767 like a glider with no engines. That sounds impossible until you trace the real-world chain behind Air Canada Flight 143, the incident aviation history now calls the Gimli Glider. We walk through how a routine day turns into a high-stakes emergency when a faulty Fuel Quantity Indicating System (FQIS) forces manual checks, and a simple units problem quietly sets th...

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20:03

West Gate Bridge Disaster

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/05/31

Send us Fan Mail A bridge is supposed to be the safest part of your commute, not the reason a city hears alarms for miles. The West Gate Bridge collapse in Melbourne is a brutal reminder that “close enough” and “we’ve got this” don’t belong anywhere near steel, bolts, and gravity. We walk through how a booming 1960s port city pushed for a high-span crossing over the Yarra River, and how a cutting-edge steel box girder design set the stage for disaster when real-world stress met rushed decisio...

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18:27

Byford Dolphin Disaster

History"s A Disaster ·

2026/05/24

Send us Fan Mail One wrong move in a pressurized diving system can turn routine maintenance into an instant mass casualty event. We’re telling the story of the 1983 Byford Dolphin saturation diving accident, a North Sea offshore drilling rig disaster that shows how razor-thin the margin is when humans work hundreds of feet underwater under extreme pressure. We walk through what saturation diving actually is, why divers live sealed inside a hyperbaric chamber for weeks, and how a diving...

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