Cold Case - Famous Disasters

Famous Disasters

Many disasters and accidents remain obscure, especially involving major fires, wherein any evidence of how they started is destroyed by the fire itself. They include the King's Cross fire of 1987 and the Bradford City stadium fire of 1985 in Britain.

The causes of many early railway accidents are often obscure, although they can sometimes be inferred from later research, such as the Versailles train crash of 1842 and the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. The French disaster was one of the first major rail accidents and caused the deaths of at least 55 passengers, when two locomotives derailed and the carriages piled into them and one another. They were then set on fire by coals from the engine, and passengers could not escape because the carriage doors were locked.

The first Tay rail bridge collapsed in a storm on the evening of December 28, 1879, and an entire express train fell into the river below the bridge. It is still one of the worst structural failures in Britain. It is likely that metal fatigue in critical components contributed and the parts broke suddenly, precipitating disaster. Many key joints were also loosened by the vibrations of trains passing overhead. The public inquiry in 1880 concluded that the bridge was "badly designed, badly built and badly maintained".

The wheel axles were the weak link on the Versailles locomotive and the lugs holding the tie bars on the Tay bridge. The same fatigue theory may explain the Boston Molasses disaster of 1919, when a large storage tank suddenly failed, releasing a wave of molasses onto the dockside in Boston, Massachusetts. It killed 21 people, including a firefighter from an adjacent firehouse.

The loss of the RMS Titanic has also been revisited following the discovery of the remains of the ship at the bottom of the Atlantic. Modern analysis of the steel appears to show that the wrought iron rivets used to fasten the steel sheet of the hull were weaker than expected. When the ship received a glancing blow from the iceberg, the rivets failed sequentially and allowed seawater to pour through the gaps between the plates of the hull.