disasters

DashCon 2014 was Tumblr’s infamous failed convention: a ball pit, guest cancellations, and a frantic $17,000 cash appeal that turned fandom excitement into internet legend. We trace how a dream of bringing online community into real life collapsed in...

A luxury music festival collapses spectacularly into chaos, exposing lies, financial fraud, and social media delusion. We revisit how Fyre Festival became the internet’s most infamous modern cautionary tale.

A wrong turn inside Utah’s Nutty Putty Cave left John Edward Jones trapped head-first, beginning one of America’s most haunting cave rescues.

At 01:23:40 on 26 April 1986, Reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded during a late-night safety test. What followed exposed a dangerous reactor, a culture of silence and a human cost still argued over today.

A fuel leak, an engine-room fire and one catastrophic power failure turned Carnival Triumph into the infamous ‘Poop Cruise’, leaving more than 4,200 passengers and crew without normal plumbing, air conditioning or hot food.

Two hippo attacks unfolded days and roughly 100 miles apart on the Zambezi River. One guide lost a leg; another group faced rising water, crocodiles and a night on a sandbar, armed with the blue paddle carried downstream from the first disaster.

OceanGate sold Titan as a daring shortcut to the Titanic, but its experimental carbon-fibre hull, weak oversight and culture of dismissing warnings created a preventable disaster. On 18 June 2023, five people entered the submersible and never returne...

Stella Liebeck did not drive away with coffee between her legs and chase an easy payday. She was a 79-year-old passenger in a parked car who suffered devastating third-degree burns, asked McDonald’s to cover her medical costs and became the face of a...

A pizza delivery driver walks into a bank with a bomb locked around his neck and a homemade gun disguised as a cane. What follows is a fatal scavenger hunt, a freezer full of secrets and one of the strangest conspiracies the FBI has ever tried to unt...

Ninety metres beneath the North Sea, saturation diver Chris Lemons lost the umbilical supplying his breathing gas, heat, light and communication. His teammates could see where he was, but getting back to him was another matter.

A routine yacht delivery became a fight to survive in the Atlantic. When the Trashman went down, Deborah Scaling Kiley and four crewmates were left with a tiny dinghy, no proper supplies, brutal weather and a horizon that offered no obvious way home.

Roar was supposed to prove that humans and big cats could live in harmony. Instead, Tippi Hedren, Noel Marshall, Melanie Griffith and their crew spent years being bitten, clawed and chased through a film whose real danger is visible in almost every f...