Forgotten US airship crash recalled 80 years later

 

(AP) History buffs will gather this week near the New Jersey coast to commemorate a major airship disaster.
No, not that one.
Newsreel footage and radio announcer Herbert Morrison's plaintive cry, "Oh, the humanity!" made the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station probably the best-known crash of an airship.
But just four years earlier, a U.S. Navy airship seemingly jinxed from the start and later celebrated in song crashed only about 40 miles away, claiming more than twice as many lives.
The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it plunging tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933. Continued

Three Mile Island

 

(Wikipedia) - The Three Mile Island accident was the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry.... 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. Continued 

Fatal Cruise of the USS Princeton

 

(Navy History) On a late February day in 1844, a long line of black carriages drew up to the wharf at the Washington Navy Yard and dropped off the city's social elite, nearly 400 ladies and gentlemen in elegant attire and ready to celebrate. Captain Robert F. Stockton of Princeton, New Jersey, had assembled the very cream of the capital, including President John Tyler, for a demonstration cruise on board the pride of the United States Navy, the steam frigate USS Princeton . The festive voyage, however, did not go as planned. Continued

Buffalo Creek Flood

(Wikipedia) The Buffalo Creek Flood was an incident that occurred on February 26, 1972, when the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located on a hillside in Logan County, West Virginia, USA, burst four days after having been declared 'satisfactory' by a federal mine inspector.
The resulting flood unleashed approximately 132 million gallons (500,000,000 L) of black waste water, cresting over 30ft high, upon the residents of 16 coal mining hamlets in Buffalo Creek Hollow. Out of a population of 5,000 people, 125 were killed, 1,121 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless. 507 houses were destroyed, in addition to forty-four mobile homes and 30 businesses. The disaster also destroyed or damaged homes in Lundale, Saunders, Amherstdale, Crites, Latrobe and Larado. In its legal filings, Pittston Coal referred to the accident as "an Act of God." Continued

The Great Baltimore Fire

"Sunday morning, February 7th, about half-past 10 o'clock, while half of Baltimore was on its way to church, fire broke out in the large wholesale dry goods house of John E. Hurst & Co., at the corner of Liberty and German streets. From this point it raged until 5:45 o'clock Monday afternoon, when the exhausted firemen finally succeeded in bringing its destructive course to a halt among the lumber yards on Union dock, at the foot of Falls avenue, more than a mile from where it had started.
Its path, which today resembles nothing so much as a huge crescent, embraces eighty blocks in the heart of the business section; more than 2,500 buildings are in ashes, including the Chamber of Commerce, Merchants and Manufacturers' Association's headquarters; the Stock Exchange; more than half the banks and financial houses in the city, and practically the whole of the dry goods district, and the retail clothing district along Baltimore street, from Liberty street to the Baltimore street bridge over Jones' Falls, over a mile in length." Continued

Photos and text: Library of Congress

The Knickerbocker Blizzard

 

(Wikipedia) The Knickerbocker Storm was a blizzard that occurred on January 27–28, 1922 in the upper South and middle Atlantic United States. The storm took its name from the resulting collapse of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, D.C. shortly after 9 p.m. on January 28 which killed 98 people and injured 133. Continued

Tragedy at Chase

(Wikipedia) The Maryland train collision occurred at 1:04 pm on January 4, 1987, on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor main line in the Chase community of Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, at Gunpow Interlocking, about 18 miles northeast of Baltimore. Amtrak Train 94, the Colonial, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, crashed into a set of Conrail locomotives running light which had fouled the mainline. Train 94's speed at the time of the collision was estimated at about 108 miles per hour. Fourteen passengers on the Amtrak train were killed, as well as the Amtrak engineer and lounge car attendant. Continued

Photo: Freight Train, Chase, Maryland (MDRails)

The Dust Bowl: Tonight on PBS

Watch The Dust Bowl Intro on PBS. See more from The Dust Bowl.

The Wreck of the Faithful Steward

(discoversea.com) The Faithful Steward, bound from Londonderry, Ireland to Philadelphia with 249 passengers, ran aground near Indian River Inlet, Delaware on the night of September 1, 1785. When a sounding was taken, it was found the ship was only in 4 fathoms of water, though there was not the slightest appearance of land. Every exertion was used to run the vessel off shore but all failed.
On the morning of September 2, the ship was near Indian River, about four leagues to the southward of Cape Henlopen. Every effort was made to save the unhappy sufferers, who had remained on the deck during the night. The ship was only 100 yards from the shore. On the evening of Sept. 2, the ship broke to pieces. Continued

The Great Train Wreck of 1856

(Wikipedia) The Great Train Wreck of 1856 occurred between Camp Hill and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, on July 17, 1856. Two trains, traveling on the same track in opposite directions, collided, killing between 59 and 67, and injuring over 100.The incident was referred to as "The Camp Hill Disaster" in Montgomery County, and "The Picnic Train Tragedy" in the city of Philadelphia. It was the worst railroad catastrophe in the world up to that time and became one of the signature events of its era. Continued

Titanic sinks

(LoC) On this day, at about 11:40 PM, April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank to the bottom of the sea at about 2:20 a.m. the next morning, taking the lives of more than 1,500 people. Continued

"It hit an iceberg and it sank"

(NYTimes) What doomed the Titanic is well known, at least in outline. On a moonless night in the North Atlantic, the liner hit an iceberg and disaster ensued, with 1,500 lives lost.
Hundreds of books, studies and official inquires have addressed the deeper question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built — a ship declared to be unsinkable — could have ended so terribly. The theories vary widely, placing the blame on everything from inept sailors to flawed rivets.
Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe. Continued

July 1919: "Big Dirigible, C-8, Explodes, Injuring 80, After Landing at Camp Holabird, Baltimore"

(NYTimes) BALTIMORE, July 1 - The big navy dirigible [blimp] C-8, which made a landing here on the way from Cape May, N. J., to Washington, exploded with terrific force in an open field just outside Camp Holabird today. A great crowd ... Continued

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904

"Sunday morning, February 7th, about half-past 10 o'clock, while half of Baltimore was on its way to church, fire broke out in the large wholesale dry goods house of John E. Hurst & Co., at the corner of Liberty and German streets. From this point it raged until 5:45 o'clock Monday afternoon, when the exhausted firemen finally succeeded in bringing its destructive course to a halt among the lumber yards on Union dock, at the foot of Falls avenue, more than a mile from where it had started.
Its path, which today resembles nothing so much as a huge crescent, embraces eighty blocks in the heart of the business section; more than 2,500 buildings are in ashes, including the Chamber of Commerce, Merchants and Manufacturers' Association's headquarters; the Stock Exchange; more than half the banks and financial houses in the city, and practically the whole of the dry goods district, and the retail clothing district along Baltimore street, from Liberty street to the Baltimore street bridge over Jones' Falls, over a mile in length." Continued

Photos and text: Library of Congress

Great Bel Air Fire remembered 40 years later

(Aegis) Thursday is the 40th anniversary of an event that has reverberated up and down Main Street in Bel Air to this day.
What some in town still refer to as the Great Bel Air Fire raged for more than four hours on Wednesday morning, Feb. 2, 1972 – Groundhog Day.
The fire resulted in the loss of six businesses and more than $2 million in damage. Continued

The Knickerbocker Storm

(Wikipedia) - The Knickerbocker Storm was a blizzard that occurred on January 27–28, 1922 in the upper South and middle Atlantic United States. It was named this due to the resulting collapse of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, D.C. shortly after 9 p.m. on January 28 which killed 98 people and injured 133. An estimated 22,400 square miles (58,000 km) of the northeast United States were affected by 20 in (51 cm) of snow from this cyclone, which was over one-fifth of the total area that received over 4 in (10 cm) of snow. Snowfall was quite heavy in Maryland and Virginia. Richmond, Virginia recorded 19 inches. Baltimore, Maryland was paralyzed as it received the most snowfall within 24 hours since 1872. Continued

Photos: Library of Congress

Pan Am Flight 214

(Wikipedia) - Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707-121 registered as N709PA, was a domestic scheduled passenger flight from Baltimore to Philadelphia, which crashed on December 8, 1963 near Elkton, Maryland, after being hit by a lightning strike while in a holding pattern, killing all 81 persons on board. Continued

Photo: Historical Society of Cecil County (mislabeled as flight 714).

The Storm That Nearly Lost the War

(NYTimes) During the first week of November 1861 the worst storm in years struck the Atlantic Seaboard. Lacking modern meteorological equipment and techniques to predict its arrival, millions of people were caught unprepared. Floodwaters swamped Newark, Manhattan and Newport, R.I. Violent winds splintered fishing fleets off New England. On Nov. 3, 26 people on board the 990-ton square-rigger Maritana drowned when their ship capsized near Boston Harbor.
As bad as the damage was, though, most Northerners feared the worst news was still to come. Continued

Was the Union disaster at the Battle of Ball's Bluff caused by a simple lack of maps?

(NYTimes) The Battle of Ball’s Bluff does not loom large in our memory of the Civil War. Yet it was the second-largest battle in the eastern theater in 1861 and a complete rout of Union forces. James Morgan, an expert on the engagement, has described it as an “accidental battle” that resulted from erroneous intelligence. But it also reveals something about the wartime role of maps. Continued

Photo: Death of Col Edward D. Baker: At the Battle of Balls Bluff near Leesburg Va. Oct. 21st 1861, (Currier & Ives/Library of Congress)

The Doctors Who Killed a President

(NYTBR) ... Garfield’s medical “care” is one of the most fascinating, if appalling, parts of Millard’s narrative. Joseph Lister had been demonstrating for years how his theories on the prevention of infection could save lives and limbs, but American doctors largely ignored his advice, not wanting to “go to all the trouble” of washing hands and instruments, Millard writes, enamored of the macho trappings of their profession, the pus and blood and what they referred to fondly as the “good old surgical stink” of the operating room.
Further undermining the president’s recovery was his sickroom in the White House — then a rotting, vermin-ridden structure with broken sewage pipes. Outside, Washington was a pestilential stink hole; besides the first lady, four White House servants and Guiteau himself had contracted malaria. Continued

Photo: President James A. Garfield & daughter (Library of Congress).