Oil tanker crashes + poverty = disaster

When oil tankers crash in poor countries, people often rush to the scene to gather the spilt fuel, often with lethal results. That happened again this week after a tanker crashed on the outskirts of the city of Bahawalpur in Pakistan on Sunday.

It is reported that the vehicle overturned on a sharp bend after the driver lost control when a tyre blew. A crowd of 500 had gathered to try to collect fuel in bottles, cans and household containers when, about 45 minutes after the crash, the tanker exploded.

It took firefighters two hours to put out the blaze. Twenty children were among the 146 dead, and another 80 people were injured. One local man said he had lost 12 relatives.

Probably the deadliest tanker crash ever happened on 2 July 2010 at Sange village in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The vehicle overturned as it was overtaking a bus on a dirt road. Again local people rushed to collect the spilt fuel, and a lighted cigarette caused an explosion, killing at least 230.

For the story, see my post of 7 July 2010. See also my posts of 1 February and 12 October, 2009, and 13 July 2012.

The world's deadliest tram accident

Investigators are still trying to establish the causes of this week’s tram derailment in Croydon to the south of London, which killed 7 people and injured more than 50 others. Trams are generally a very safe form of transport but this accident has led to calls for improved safety measures such as automatic braking systems of the kind used on trains.

Probably the deadliest tram accident in history happened on the foggy morning of 12 July 1930 in Buenos Aires. Service 105 was on its way from the city of Lanus, south of Buenos Aires, to the Constitución station in the Argentinian capital. The driver had been with the tram company for only about two months.

On its journey the vehicle had to cross a bridge over the Riachuelo river. As it approached, the bridge had been lifted to allow a vessel to pass beneath, but the driver did not see the red light warning him not to proceed.

By the time the driver realised the bridge was up, it was too late. He tried to apply the brake, but the tram plunged into the water. The driver was one of the 56 people who lost their lives. Only 7 survived.

How to avoid an economic disaster - Grexit

In 2010, I wrote about financial disasters – the South Sea Bubble, the bear market of 1972-4, the Great Crash of 1987, and the banking crisis that began in 2007 – for my book, London’s Disasters. Now I’m watching another – the attempt to keep Greece in the Eurozone.

Greece only got into the euro thanks to some heroic book cooking, but as long as the world economy kept growing, no one worried. A bit like the South Sea Company. It was worthless, but as long as the share price kept going up, everything was fine. But bad times reveal the truth, and the house of cards comes crashing down.

Over the last five years, more than €200 billion has been spent trying to keep Greece in the Eurozone. But you cannot make water flow uphill. Greece cannot pay its existing debts. Loading it with more debt would be crazy. Grexit will not be easy, but the alternative is worse. The sooner Greece leaves the euro, the better it will be for Greece and for the rest of Europe.

Greece cannot live with the euro rate of exchange. It desperately needs a devaluation. That cannot happen inside the euro. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad.

Simon Jenkins argues the case well - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/08/greece-catastrophe-eurozone-grexit-default

Indonesian air crash - lightning strikes twice

Students of lightning will tell you that far from it never striking the same place twice, it has favourite places it is always hitting. A structure such as New York’s Empire State Building, for example, might be struck 40 times in a single day.

Even so, the citizens of Medan on the Indonesian island of Sumatra must have felt themselves particularly unfortunate when a 51 year old Hercules military aircraft crashed this week, killing 9 people on the ground, as well as the 12 crew members and perhaps 109 passengers on board. There still seems to be confusion about the exact number of passengers.

It came down just two kilometres from where a Mandala Airlines Boeing 737 crashed shortly after take off in 2005, killing 100 people in the aircraft and 49 on the ground. An official investigation concluded the airliner had taken off with its flaps and slats retracted, meaning it failed to lift off properly.

The first indications from the Hercules crash are that one of its four engines failed shortly after take off. It is the latest in a series of accidents involving Indonesian military aircraft. Relatives of some of the passengers told reporters the victims had paid to be carried on the aircraft, which would be an illicit use of a military craft.

Air crashes in the Alps

It has been clear from the start that there would be no survivors from the Germanwings Airbus A320 that came down in a remote area of the French Alps. We know that it lost altitude for eight minutes before hitting the ground. One flight recorder has been found, but it is damaged.

There have been a number of other serious air crashes in the Alps. On 3 November 1950, an Air India Lockheed Constellation flew into Mont Blanc, killing all 48 people on board. Storms delayed the rescue operation, and it was not until four days after the accident that search parties were able to reach the aircraft.

Less than 3 years later, on 1 September, 1953, another Constellation, this time operated by Air France, crashed into the Pelat Massif in the French Alps near Barcelonnette, killing the 42 people on board. Shortly before the crash, the pilot had reported violent storms.

On 24 January, 1966, another Air India aircraft, a Boeing 707, crashed close to the site of the 1950 accident, while en route from Beirut to Geneva, killing all 117 passengers and crew. An investigation concluded that the pilot had miscalculated his position, and had also misunderstood an instruction from air traffic control. There is still debris in the area, and only last year, a passenger’s camera was found by a mountaineer.

Road accidents becoming no 1 killer

Fascinating piece in the Economist of Jan 25 on road accidents. At present, they kill about 1.3 million people a year – not far short of the number who lose their lives to tuberculosis, but the World Health Organisation expects the total to reach nearly 2 million by 2030, well outstripping tb deaths and catching up with AIDS as a killer.

The biggest increase is expected in the poorest countries, with deaths almost tripling. One of the main reasons being that when money is invested in new roads, little is spent on safety.

Already, road crashes are the main cause of death worldwide for people aged 15 to 29, with most victims men and boys. In poor countries, most of the people killed are pedestrians, while in developing countries such as Thailand, it tends to be motorcyclists.

In the developed world, better safety measures have seen road deaths actually being reduced. New York now has fewer than it did 1910, while Sweden has halved the number since 2000, cutting them by 80% since 1970.

*My updated website - http://www.disasterhistorian.com/index.html

Exploding trains

Canadian police now believe that about 50 people were killed in Saturday’s train disaster in Quebec. So far, 20 bodies have been found after a runaway train carrying 72 tankers of oil was derailed and then exploded at Lac-Megantic.

At least 30 buildings were flattened, and about 2,000 people had to flee from their homes.  The chief executive of the train operating company says they believed the driver had failed to apply a set of hand brakes.

The operating company also suggested that firefighters bore part of the blame after they were called to put out a fire on the train late on Friday night as it was parked about 7 miles from the scene of the accident.  

One of the most disastrous train explosions of all time came on the Trans-Siberian Railway on June 4, 1989, when leaking gas from an oil pipeline ignited as two trains were passing near the town of Ufa. One train was blown into the path of the other, and over 3 miles, the landscape was turned into a wasteland, while up to 800 people died.

Deadliest ever balloon accident?

A couple of years ago, I took a flight at dawn in a hot air balloon over Cappadocia in Turkey.  It was an unforgettably beautiful and thrilling experience, but you were always conscious that you were being kept in the air only by a roaring flame just above your head.

Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong on a flight 1,000 feet over Luxor in Egypt this morning, when a balloon caught fire, exploded and fell to the ground, killing up to 19 tourists.   Two people are thought to have survived what may have been the deadliest balloon accident ever.

An eyewitness in another balloon reported seeing people jump out of the stricken craft.  There are suggestions that it may have hit an overhead power line. 

In 2009, another balloon came down over Luxor after hitting a communications tower, but accidents are mercifully rare.  Until today, the deadliest ever was probably the mid-air collision over Alice Springs in Australia in 1989 which brought one balloon to earth with the loss of 13 lives.

It's the poor that gets the disaster

We are used to the idea that it is usually the poor who suffer most from natural disasters.   They tend to live in less sturdy dwellings in more dangerous places, have poorer access to telecommunications for warnings etc

But we have had a reminder this week that they are also more likely to be victims of man-made disasters.   At least 53 people are known to have been killed in a crash between a bus and a lorry about 60 miles north of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.

The accident happened on a busy road as the bus was reportedly swerving to avoid an oncoming vehicle.    Roads in Zambia are often poorly maintained and vehicles overloaded, but this is believed to have been one of the worst accidents in the country’s history.

Meanwhile in Bangladesh, a ferry capsized on the Meghna River, near the capital, Dhaka, plunging scores of passengers into the water.    Only two bodies have so far been recovered, but up to 40 are still missing.  Ferry accidents are common on the country’s vast river network.    In March last year, more than 112 people drowned when a ferry collided with an oil tanker and sank also in the Meghna.

*My account of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840’s from A Disastrous History of the World has been reproduced on this website.    http://stravaganzastravaganza.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-irish-potato-famine_9376.html#!/2013/01/the-irish-potato-famine_9376.html

Nigeria - another deadly tanker crash

More than 100 people are believed to have been killed after a petrol tanker crashed near the village of Okogbe in southern Nigeria.    Many of the victims are thought to have rushed to the scene to try to collect fuel that had spilled onto the road.

The tanker is reported to have collided with three other vehicles, but it did not burst into flames immediately.    By the time it exploded, it was surrounded by people.  The authorities say that 95 bodies have been recovered so far, but it is believed that many more have died.

Nigeria has been the scene of a number of disastrous tanker crashes.   Back in 2000, a tanker that had been poorly maintained careered into a traffic jam on the motorway from Ife to Ibadan. It exploded in a huge fireball, destroying more than 100 vehicles and killing up to 200 people.   

Then in 2009, at least 70 people were killed when a tanker overturned and exploded as the driver tried to negotiate deep potholes on the Enugu-Onitsha highway.  Perhaps the deadliest tanker fire of all came at Sange in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010 when a tanker overturned as it overtook a bus, and 230 people were killed.  

*A new reivew of my book Historia Mundial de los Desastres -
http://libros-san-francisco.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/libro-historia-mundial-de-los-desastres.html

Financial disasters 2 - stock market crashes

The worst two Stock Market crashes in the UK both happened within the last 40 years. From 1972 to 1974, the market lost 70% of its value. Investor confidence was undermined by a spate of bad news, particularly the oil embargo and four-fold price increase that followed Israel’s Yom Kippur War with Egypt.

The market did not recover the ground it had lost in real terms until May 1987. Then five months later, it crashed again. On Friday, 16 October, 1987 hardly anyone was at work in London’s City financial district because of the disruption caused by the Great Storm, the worst in Britain for more than 280 years.

While they were away, prices in New York had been falling steeply. The reasons are not altogether clear - a drop in the price of the dollar, poor trade figures, just that headless chicken panic that seems to grip markets every so often? Anyway, by the time London opened on Monday, 19 October, there was huge pent-up demand to sell. £50 billion was wiped off share prices, and the date went down in history as ‘Black Monday’.

The next day’s collapse was even more precipitous, and by November 9, the index had fallen 34%. The main blame was put on ‘programme trading’ which meant that computers automatically sold shares when they dropped to a certain level, though others thought Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ deregulation had also played its part.

The worst ever tanker accident?

Apologies for my silence. I’ve been away for a few weeks, and during my absence, that unhappy country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, fell victim to one of the deadliest road accidents the world has ever seen - on Friday, 2 July.

An oil tanker overturned as it was overtaking a bus on a dirt road in the village of Sange, close to the border with Burundi. The authorities say that as local people rushed to try to gather the leaking fuel, a lighted cigarette caused it to explode.

At least 230 people were killed, including some watching a World Cup match in a nearby cinema. Roads in the area are notoriously bad after years of war and chaos, while Sange’s population has been swelled by people fleeing the fearsome Lord’s Resistance Army militia.

This may have been the worst ever accident involving a tanker. In 1978, 217 people perished when one carrying liquid propylene overturned near a campsite at Los Alfaques near Taragona in Spain, while in 2000, up to 200 died after a petrol tanker ploughed into stationery vehicles caught in a traffic jam near Ibadan in Nigeria.

Road accidents - Bangladesh

Another country with dangerous roads is Bangladesh. On New Year’s Day, at least 18 people were killed when a bus skidded off the road and plunged into a ditch in dense fog at Kanaipur in the south-west of the country.

Early last month, near the same town, at least 20 people died when two buses collided head-on, and in December 2008, 24 perished when the lorry in which they were travelling veered off the road, again in thick fog. The accident happened at Tangail, about 40 miles north of the capital Dhaka.

Altogether, up to 5,000 people are killed every year in road accidents in Bangladesh. Poor roads and old, badly maintained vehicles are blamed for most crashes.

The Inter-American Development Bank once named the North Yungas Road, a 40 mile highway in Bolivia that leads from La Paz to Coroico, “the world’s most dangerous”. Also known as the “Road of Death”, it is said to see up to 300 travellers killed every year. (See also my blogs of Dec 20 and 29)