What disaster natural/man-made occurred in your city?

[Dariusb]

What disaster or disasters natural or man made occurred in your city? Could be a city you live in now or your hometown.

[bilbao58]

Hurricanes Harvey, Ike, Alicia, Carla, Tropical Storm Allison, floods too numerous to list, a couple of very small tornadoes, an ammonia truck explosion on a major freeway, exploding chemical plants...

[Steely Dan]

For Chicago:

- A really big fire back in 1871.

- And the most intractable gang violence problem in the developed world for going on sixty years now.

[pdxtex]

Portland has 4 events I can think of off the top of my head during the last century, the vanport flood, the columbus day storm, eruption of mt saint Helen's and the 1996 flooding. Of all those, I gather the vanport floods did the most damage. Now were just waiting for the big earthquake or mt hood to erupt

[JManc]

Just two years ago most of my neighborhood was under 8' of water during Harvey.

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by Dariusb

What disaster or disasters natural or man made occurred in your city?

I remember the man-made disaster that occurred in yours.

[Dariusb]

Originally Posted by Gresto

I remember the man-made disaster that occurred in yours.

Are you speaking of the mass shooting that occurred on October 16, 1991 that killed 23 and wounded 27 at the Luby's Cafeteria? Just sad. I just moved here earlier this year but I remember when it happened. In my hometown (Texarkana) there was a small tornado. I lived in Dallas for a bit and besides JFK's assassination a Delta Airlines plane crashed at the airport in 1985 killing 131 people including a guy who was killed when the plane flattened his car. Also a couple of tornadoes over the years.

[HurricaneHugo]

The wildfires of 2007

The Witch Fire alone caused 1.4 billion in losses, destroyed 1,300 structures, killed 2 civilians

500,000 were evacuated

[Centropolis]

1849 was a bad year for st. louis...a massive fire of the central city brought it to rubble even though it was already brick, and a massive cholera epidemic killed 5,000 people, so many that they had to quarantine people on an island in the mississippi.

stltoday.com

[Centropolis]

during the 1811-12 new madrid earthquake the city was still a sleepy creole frontier outpost made primarily of Poteaux-en-terre and cabin construction with only brick chimneys that toppled

[Centropolis]

nationalgeographic.com

cahokia was the largest man-made settlement in the present-day u.s. until philadelphia. local environmental collapse and invasion theorized for its fall around 1350.

[MidTenn1]

There were two major events that personally affected me in Nashville...

Nashville tornado of 1998

Nashville became the first major city in nearly 20 years to have an F2 or larger tornado make a direct hit in the downtown area.

This tornado, rated F3, touched down near the intersection of Charlotte Pike and Forty-Sixth Avenue and traveled directly through downtown Nashville. The tornado manifested itself as a large area of rapidly rotating rain curtains and dark clouds, rather than a traditional funnel. After crossing the Cumberland River, it passed through East Nashville, Donelson, and Hermitage before finally lifting northwest of Lebanon in extreme northern Wilson County. An ROTC student from Vanderbilt University was trapped under a fallen tree in Centennial Park and later died from his injuries. The tornado blew many windows out of office buildings. Many large buildings, including skyscrapers, were damaged. The TPAC building had over 100 windows blown out.

I was in the TPAC Tower when it hit. It was an eerie feeling to have gusts of wind blow through the normally still air of an office building.

And the floods of 2010 in which I was stuck on an 'island' (in my suburban home) surrounded by flood waters for 3 days.

Twenty-one deaths were recorded in Tennessee, including ten in Davidson County, which includes Nashville. Of the ten dead in Davidson County, "four victims were found in their homes, two were in cars and four were outdoors."

[Centropolis]

wild stuff re: nashville.

[Centropolis]

stltoday.com



stltoday.com


pinterest.com


gfycat.com

direct hit on the airport in 2011
speaking of tornados, st louis has taken the most direct-hits of a tornado of any larger us city, since its the oldest (or largest, longest) city near tornado alley.

interestingly, being at the junction of two longest rivers in the u.s. st. louis is fairly hardened against flooding, with a large amount of infrastructure designed to shunt water out and away from the city, and massive concrete/steel floodwalls to protect areas not on the high saddle of land st louis proper sits upon.

[Centropolis]

disastrous urban policy did the most, longest lasting damage.


gfycat.com

[muppet]

Tokyo, Moscow, London, Belgrade, Baghdad have been destroyed waaay to many times.

The former city even has a term for it, the 'Flowers of Edo' as on average every 25 years over the past 5 centuries the city was visited by a vast catastrophe, often a conflagration lighting up the horizons from afar.
Even to this day it's infiltrated the cultural mindset - society, design and laws now encourage buildings to be seen as temporary (and the birth of functionalism, which the early modernists visited to study).


www.rekihaku.ac.jp

http://1.bp.blogspot.com

www.oldtokyo.com

The last time Tokyo was destoyed was in the 1945 air raids, the world's worst ever that killed over 200,000. It became the most destroyed ever piece of urbanity, where one could see across
8 straight miles of levelled cityscape.


https://c8.alamy.com/comp/KWB8RY/aer...945-KWB8RY.jpg



[
http://japanfocus.org


The city of Kaifeng (pop 5 million), once the world's largest, has been flooded and destroyed by the Yangtze River no less than 300 times. There's so much history in the clay of the former capital that it's the only major city in China which doesn't have highrises and skyscrapers, as every building would involve major, expensive, delaying architectural finds.


https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/ka...-province.html

[harryc]

April 13 1992

We had just set up a DR site the week before - I was very very busy that day - we were the only system trading from Chicago.

The next morning .... pumping out the basements




Setting up cooling for the server room - EVERYONE had their servers in the server room in the old building. Except I.S.I. pushing these new Sun servers which can run just about anywhere ;-)


Ironically this was greatly aggravated by the holes drilled into all the basements from the underground tunnels to handle this new fangled EtherNet thing ( Metro Fiber ) and we were some of the first adopters since Sun (UNIX) has always spoken TCP/IP.


[ IIRC these are the last shots from my Mimiya Sekor DTL-1000 - did not handle being dropped from a bike into a puddle. Got my FE-2 after this, still have it. ]

[dave8721]

-Riots in 1980 and 1989 decimated Overtown

-The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The Category 5 storm is strongest hurricane to hit Miami proper. Andrew went well south.
(barges washed up ahore downtown)


(Downtown Miami damage):



-Hurricane Andrew 1992. Category 5 storm that hit the southern suburbs, coming ashore near Homestead. One of the strongest storms at landfall in history.
Caused tornado-like damage over about 50 square miles of suburbs:

[IluvATX]

Anchorage, Alaska
9.2 earthquake 1964
7.1 earthquake November 2018. Many businesses still closed and roads still damaged. Everything in my house broke or fell that was on a wall or upright. Luckily no one was killed and only minor injuries reported.

[Buckeye Native 001]

Cincinnati:

The flood of January 1937 where the Ohio River crested at 80 feet.