Americans Great Disasters

by Candace Floyd

Book Overview

Photo coffee table book of disasters in America. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0792453816
• ISBN13: 9780792453819
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A quick, easy, and very interesting read**

Almost everyone knows something about America's GREAT disasters, but few people know much, if anything, about how they happened or what took place there, and almost no one knows anything about America's many lesser known calamities. This book fills that void in words and pictures, and does it remarkably well. The book addresses a wide variety of disasters: floods, dam failures, droughts, storms, fires, building collapses, earthquakes, volcanoes, industrial and mining accidents, and transportation calamities. Included, of course, are all the better known catastrophes: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871; the Blizzard of `88; the Johnstown Flood of 1889; the Galveston Hurricane of 1900; the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906; the sinking of the Titanic in 1912; the Hindenburg Explosion at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937; the Texas City Explosion in 1947; the Eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1981; and the Challenger accident in 1986. Also included, however, are many lesser known, and in many ways more poignant, tragedies such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City in 1911; the capsizing of the Eastland Steamer in Chicago in 1915; the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942; the Centralia Pennsylvania Mine Fire of 1981; and the deaths of the Apollo I Astronauts on Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy in 1967. Some of these tragedies rival the sinking of the Titanic for stupidity, archaic laws, and negligence. At the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, for example, the laws in New York City required that any building taller than eleven stories had to have stone floors and metal window frames. Buildings of ten stories, however, could have wooden floors and wooden window frames. The building in which this fire took place was (you guessed it) ten stories high. When the fire broke out on the eighth floor, the female garment workers crammed into the top three floors attempted to flee down the stairs, but the doors had been locked for security purposes. Some women tried to go down the fire escape on the side of the building, but it pealed away and plunged to the street below. Those left behind on the eighth floor tried to use the fire extinguisher, but its hose was rotted and crumbled away. When the fire department finally arrived, they discovered that their ladders would only reach to the sixth floor. Some young women made it to the freight elevators, others didn't, and many jumped down the shafts landing on top of elevators, causing their roofs to collapse. Desperate firemen stretched nets to catch jumpers from a ledge on the ninth floor, but the women jumped in pairs or threes, ripping right through their nets. All-in-all 146 young women jumped, or fell, to their deaths that day, died of smoke inhalation or were burned to death. As small consolation, some laws were later changed and other improvements made. In reading this book, it might occur to the reader that things have improved markedly over the years, for the