The world's deadliest tower block fires

A retired judge, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, has been appointed to head the official inquiry into London’s Grenfell Tower fire in which at least 79 people died, while the police say they are investigating any criminal offences that may have been committed.

The deadliest ever fire in a tower block (or blocks) was the result of the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, which cost more than 2,300 lives, but the worst accidental fire was probably the one that raged through the 25-storey Joelma office building in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 1 February 1974. (Grenfell Tower had 24 storeys.)

The blaze happened just a few weeks after the disaster movie, The Towering Inferno, was released, and it became known as ‘the real Towering Inferno’. It was started by an electrical fault on the 11^th floor, and spread rapidly thanks to the ready availability of combustible materials such as paper, plastics and wooden walls and furniture.

When the blaze began, there were more than 750 people in the building. More than 170 fled to the roof, but the heat and smoke foiled a helicopter rescue, and about 40 were killed jumping down or trying to get to firemen’s ladders out of reach below them. Altogether up to 189 people died. 

Mystery of another civil airliner shot down over Ukraine

We are still no nearer to knowing exactly who shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine (see my blog of July 20), and perhaps we never will be, but it was not the first civil airliner to be shot down over the country.

On October 4, 2001, a Siberia Airlines Tupelov Tu-154 (similar pictured) was hit by what was believed to be a Ukrainian missile while en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk in Russia, and crashed into the Black Sea. None of the 78 people on board survived.

With the crash coming so soon after 9/11, the favourite explanation at first was terrorism, but Ukraine eventually admitted the aircraft had been hit by one of its missiles that had gone astray during a military exercise, and paid compensation to victims’ families.

Subsequently, though, the Ukrainian government denied responsibility for the disaster, and a claim against it by Siberia Airlines remains unresolved. 

The Yazidis - a history of persecution

The Iraqi government says ‘Islamic State’ militants have murdered at least 500 Yazidis, some women and children they buried alive. They are also accused of forcing 300 women into slavery.

Tens of thousands of other Yazidis are taking shelter on the hot, desolate summit of Mount Sinjar, with the Americans trying to drop aid from the air, and strike at the Islamists who are threatening the refugees.

The Yazidis’ religion is much older than Islam. They believe God created the world, but then left if to be ruled by seven angels and that after death, our souls are transferred to other human beings. They do not believe in hell or the devil.

Over the centuries, they have been persecuted by many groups including the Ottoman Turks, Muslim Kurdish princes, and Saddam Hussein’s government. Then after his fall, nearly 800 Yazidis were killed in 2007 in the deadliest terrorist act in history apart from 9/11. No one has admitted responsibility for the co-ordinated four-bomb attack, but it is generally blamed on al-Qaeda or other Sunni militants.

Bloomsday disaster

‘Heart-rending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing.’ Thus did James Joyce’s great novel, Ulysses, describe the wreck of the General Slocum which happened on this day 110 years ago.

The steamer happened to meet disaster the day before ‘Bloomsday’ – June 16, 1904, on which all the action of the novel takes place, so the characters read about it in the newspaper. The ship had chugged up New York’s East River carrying parents and children on an outing organised by a German Lutheran church.

A bale of straw on board caught fire, and the crew of 22 were unable to put it out, partly because their rotten fire hoses burst. As the flames were fanned by the ship’s motion, the crew attempted to launch lifeboats, but these were tied down and the life jackets were no good either.

By the time the ship beached at North Brother Island she was burning from end to end, and many of her passengers had drowned as they had tried to escape by jumping into the waters. Altogether, 1,021 people perished, making it the city’s worst disaster apart from 9/11. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Deadly forest fires

An inquiry has begun into the deaths of 19 crack American firefighters in a forest fire at Yarnell Hill, Arizona. It was the worst death toll among US firemen since 9/11.

Altogether about 450 firefighters took on the blaze which destroyed 50 buildings and forced hundreds of people to flee their homes. It came during a heat wave which took temperatures close to all time record levels.

The victims belonged to a 20-man unit known as the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew, which had been trying to clear brush and trees that the flames were feeding on.  Only one member survived.

Perhaps the deadliest forest fire ever happened in Wisconsin in 1871. It began in the woods, but was carried on the wind to the lumber town of Peshtigo, where the sawdust that always clogged the streets provided ready fuel for the flames.  The whole town was burned to the ground and more than 1,150 people lost their lives. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

The long arm of 9/11

More than 10 years after the attack on the World Trade Centre, New Yorkers are still developing illnesses that may be related to the disaster.   In 2004, the original fund for the injured and bereaved was closed after paying out $7 billion.

The collapse of the buildings had  released a toxic cloud of glass fibres, asbestos, lead, pulverised cement and assorted carcinogens, but just days after, the Environmental Protection Agency said the air in lower Manhattan was safe.

As people continued to fall ill, in 2010, the fund was reopened, but it did not cover cancer.    Firemen, police officers and former pupils at a school near the site are among those who have been diagnosed, but it is hard to prove their illnesses are directly related to the disaster.  

In March, an advisory committee suggested cancer should be covered, but it is not clear for how long this would extend.  As with Hiroshima and Chernobyl, for some, it might be years more before tumours appear.     There are also complaints that victims of other American disasters, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and Hurricane Katrina, were not nearly so generously compensated.

BP - Of spills and compensation

Before BP, America’s worst offshore oil accident was the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. That was much smaller than BP (11 million gallons against 184 million so far). However, many experts believe the BP spill is likely to cause less damage because the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico will break up the oil much quicker.

The Exxon Valdez spill is reckoned to have killed more than 20 whales and a quarter of a million sea birds. Fishermen in the affected area say that herring were wiped out permanently, destroying their livelihood. So far the BP spill is known to have killed just less than 1,400 birds. But while BP is having to pay $20 billion in compensation, Exxon had to shell out just half a billion.

Here’s another interesting fact. President Obama has appointed Kenneth Feinberg to administer BP's $20 billion BP fund. Mr Feinberg also administered the compensation fund for 9/11, when nearly 3,000 people were killed. That paid out just $7 billion.

America’s, and the world’s, worst oil spill, incidentally, was probably the Lakeview Gusher in California, which released more than 370 million barrels over 18 months in 1910-11, flooding an entire valley.

Lingering disasters

Disasters do not always claim all their victims at once. It has been revealed that perhaps 800 people have died, and up to 10,000 have become ill, as a result of poisons they were exposed to in the aftermath of 9/11. There is now an argument in the USA over who should pay for their medical care. Just under 3,000 died in the attack.

Sometimes the aftermath is far deadlier than the original event. In the world’s worst ever dam burst (see my blog of March 15), human rights campaigners estimate that 85,000 were drowned, but that another 145,000 died of starvation and disease after the event.

A similar pattern can be seen in other floods. When the Yellow and Yangtze rivers burst their banks in 1931, the immediate death toll was around 130,000, but up to 3 million more starved or died from illness later.

As with 9/11, poisons wreak their havoc over many years. The initial death toll from Bhopal was about 3,800, but it’s claimed that another 20,000 died from poisoning over the years that followed (see my blog of Aug 1). While at Chernobyl, only about 30 people died in the first few weeks after the explosion, but some believe it will eventually cause fatal cancers in up to 200,000 (see my blog of April 14).

Terrorism

After the death of 15 British soldiers in 10 days in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown and his Labour colleagues have again been banging the “War on Terror” drum. How instructive last night, then, to watch the thought-provoking Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution on BBC-2.

It was the Reign of Terror of Robespierre and his henchmen that gave us the word “terrorism” – “the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective”. (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

However, governments of all colours have managed to obscure an important fact. The most dreadful acts of “terrorism” are almost invariably perpetrated by them, rather than the rebel groups to whom the term is normally applied. Hardly surprising as governments usually command far more powerful weapons.

So we are constantly told that 9/11 was the world’s worst terrorist outrage – killing nearly 3,000 people, but, of course, it does not compare with, say, the USAF’s bombing of Tokyo in 1945 that killed perhaps 140,000, nor with Hitler’s mass murder campaign that accounted for perhaps 20 million, or Stalin’s cruelties that killed up to 30m, or Mao’s – maybe 70 million. Robespierre’s terror, incidentally, saw off about 55,000.

As a few of those around him raised the odd timorous voice to express half-hearted misgivings about the ever-more intrusive and paranoid regime he had created, Robespierre retorted: “innocence never fears public scrutiny.” Or as Labour tends to put it when critics object to its National Identity Register or its project to snoop on all our emails etc, etc – “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

Bloody connected anniversaries

This day, 16 years ago, saw the Waco siege end after 51 days. The stand-off at the Branch Davidian Church’s ranch in Texas had begun on February 28, 1993 when agents from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to search the property, resulting in a gun battle in which four agents were killed.

The cult’s leader, David Koresh, had taken a number of its female members as “wives”, some of whom were teenagers. This brought allegations of child abuse, while Koresh’s launch of a business selling guns added to the disquiet. On April 19, FBI agents tried to force their way in to the compound, and up to 80 members of the group including 20 children and Koresh himself, were killed as fire engulfed it.

Exactly two years after the siege ended, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a huge truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people – the United States’ biggest ever terrorist outrage before 9/11. McVeigh had spent a brief time in the army, and was decorated for bravery, but he began to fear the government was planning to abolish Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms. He went to Waco to watch the siege, and took the view that the FBI’s actions were illegal.

Soon after, he began planning the Oklahoma attack, which targeted a Federal building in the city. An hour after the explosion, McVeigh was stopped for a driving offence, and was found to be illegally carrying a concealed hand gun. He was executed in 2001, and an accomplice was sent to prison for life.

Suicide bombs

It is now feared that up to 70 people may have been killed by yesterday’s suicide bomb at a mosque in Pakistan’s Khyber region about 20 miles from the Afghan border. The blast went off just as Friday prayers were beginning and completely destroyed the building. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, and some believe it may be part of a power struggle between rival tribal militias. Similar enmities may have been behind another suicide bombing on Thursday that killed at least ten people in a restaurant in South Waziristan.

Last year Pakistan overtook Iraq as the world’s worst country for suicide bombings. In the first eight months of 2008, more than 471 people were killed in 28 suicide attacks, compared with 463 people in Iraq and 436 in Afghanistan.

We tend to think of suicide bombings as a new tactic, and certainly the US-British attack on Iraq gave them an enormous boost, but actually they go back at least as far as the 17th century when Dutch soldiers trying to conquer Taiwan would use gunpowder to blow up themselves and the enemy.

If you count fuel-filled aeroplanes as bombs, then the deadliest ever suicide attack remains 9/11, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Of attacks using more conventional explosives, the deadliest happened on August 14, 2007 when four suicide bombers killed up to 800 members of the obscure pre-Islamic Yazidi sect in Iraq.