Technology Disasters

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2. Seven people died with the Space Shutter Challenger flew apart in flight on January 28, 1986, including Christa McAuliffe the "first teacher in space." Like the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which also resulted in the deaths of seven crew members, Challenger's end shook the American psyche and marked the beginning of the decline of American's manned space program. The accident is blamed on the failure of an O-ring that sealed the shuttle's rocket booster. The failure of China's Intelsat 708 resulted in more deaths but information about the accident remains sketchy and the public impact was more limited.
4. The sinking of the Titanic serves as a reminder of human hubris. Deemed to be virtually unsinkable, she sank nonetheless, despite engineering designed to keep the ship afloat. The presence of enough lifeboats to carry only about 1/3 of the people on board made ship's technical shortcomings deadly.
6. In August 1975, the Banqiao dam on China's Ru River collapsed in under the heavy rain from Typhoon Nina, a failure foreseen by project critics and in part attributable to inadequate engineering. The death toll has been estimated to be 26,000 from flooding and 145,000 from subsequent hardships, though official statistics of such events in China are difficult to verify.
7. In 1976 the catastrophe in Seveso, an Italian town contaminated by leaking of dioxine from a chemical plant, caused the evacuation on 600 people and 2,000 had to be treated for sickness due to the contamination. This accident led to a new European directive to be put into place on industrial sites at risk; it is called the Seveso directive.
9. Less than 60 deaths have been directly attributed to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Though various groups have made unverified claims that anywhere from 4,000 to more than 200,000 people have died as a result of radiation exposure in the years that followed, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), following decades of study, has concluded that apart from increased thyroid cancers, "there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident." However, the effects of the accident continue to be felt on a personal and environmental level, inside and outside of Ukraine. Though the extent to which human error versus design flaws contributed to the accident remains open to debate, there's a strong case for bad design.
11. Death estimates range from about 4,000 to 30,000 for the 1984 release of poison gas at a Union Carbide Facility in Bhopal, India. But like Chernobyl, the health effects have lasted decades and continue to this day. A variety of equipment failures and design flaws are believed to have contributed to the accident. Eight Indian plant employees were convicted of negligence in June 2010, in Bhopal. An arrest warrant for former CEO Warren Anderson, now 90, was issued by Indian authorities last year but the U.S. will not extradite him.
12. Before the Texas City disaster, there was the Port Chicago disaster in which 320 Navy sailors and civilians died from a munitions explosion. The explosion occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California. Most of the dead were African-Americans and the incident sparked a mutiny over the dangerous conditions. As World War II was underway, disciplinary action was harsh and the incident continues to be a racial sore point. Inadequate attention to safe munitions handling, in terms of tools and training, led to the disaster.
14. The deadliest single-aircraft accident to date occurred in 1985 with the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The cause of the accident has been attributed to improper repairs following damage to the tail of the 747SR-46 in 1978. A single metal plate with the a few more rivets could have saved 520 lives.
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