Disaster Dominoes / Real Life

"Disasters don't just happen. They're a chain of critical events."

— Seconds from Disaster

You'd be surprised by the sheer number of accidents, disasters, and incidents that have occurred in Real Life are the result of a chain of Disaster Dominoes. As the Seconds From Disaster quote above states, disasters are typically not the result of a single large event; but rather they are a result of a series of several smaller events that form a perfect (so to speak) combination to make such a disaster happen in the first place. In fact, there several real-life disasters that would have been avoided entirely, or at least not have been as severe, if just one of those smaller events had not occurred as it did.

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Engineering

• The Swedish regalskeppet Vasa disaster:
  • King Gustavus II Adolphus realized Sweden needed a decent navy, and decided he would build it by the Dutch model. He invited the best shipwright he could get, Hendrik Hybertsson, and told him to build the most magnificent ship Sweden had ever seen.
  • Hybertsson protested he had never built anything so big, so the King told him just to scale up his previous works. As you may expect, this is not how shipbuilding works.
  • When construction was underway, the King ordered the ship to have three cannon decks instead of two, exacerbating the already dire size issue.
  • Hybertsson got sick and died. The new chief of construction, Jacobsson, saw the ship was too narrow and insisted on widening the hull by one and a half feet. It needed more, but the construction had advanced too far for even this to be feasible.
  • The construction of the port side was made by Swedish carpenters and that of the starboard by Dutch. The Swedes used the Swedish foot (296.9 mm) divided into 12 inches (24.74 mm) as the base unit, while the Dutch used the Amsterdam foot (283.1 mm) divided into 11 inches (25.73 mm). Unit Confusion ensued — the hull has been found to be crooked and asymmetric. In short, one man's four inches wasn't another man's four inches.
  • While Swedish and Dutch are both Germanic languages, they are only partially mutually comprehensible, meaning neither side could clearly talk to one another.
  • When the ship was launched, ship master Söfring Hansson ordered a stability test of the hull. To his horror, the ship proved horribly tender (apt to heel over). He reported this to the King but was ignored.
  • On her maiden voyage from Skeppsholmen to Vaxholm, some thirty nautical miles, Vasa passed the grandstand of the King and the top brass of the navy. The custom was to sail with gunports open to salute the King, and under full sail. Suddenly a gust of wind caught the ship, which heeled dangerously.
  • The open gun ports then went under the waterline and the sea rushed in. The vessel capsized and sank.
  • Fortunately the voyage so far had been less than a mile and deck work was still underway, so most of the crew were on the deck instead of below decks. The rescue work could be begun almost immediately, and only 50 sailors of the crew of 433 drowned. Hansson was among the rescued. He was court-martialled for the loss but acquitted. Nobody could be found to be guilty and no cause found, so the accident was called "an act of God".
  • Modern research has revealed that due to the aforementioned design issues, the ship had too narrow of a beam and too shallow draught. This led to too low a centre of buoyancy and too high centre of gravity. Her metacentric height was too low, and she had almost no righting arm — even 5 knots' wind could have capsized her under full sail. The only way to make her seaworthy would have been to add more ballast, remove the lower deck guns, seal the gun ports shut and give her a larger rudder. Her hull being asymmetric certainly didn't improve these qualities and may have exacerbated the situation.
  • Had she sailed with gunports shut and topgallants reefed, she could have made to Vaxholm that day. But her orders were to take 400 soldiers onboard and head to battle. Had she been lost in the middle of Baltic, nobody would have been saved. Had she avoided that and partaken in a sea battle, merely opening her lower deck gunports would have ended the same way. Vasa was simply a disaster waiting to happen.
  • Fortunately, the lessons were learned. The sister ship of Vasa, the regalskeppet (royal ship) Äpplet, was built wider, and deeper on draught, than Vasa. She was launched in 1629 and had a long career, being finally scuttled as a blockship at Vaxholm in 1658. Her wreck was discovered in 2022.

Environmental

• In real-life engineering, this is called an "error chain", "failure chain", or "disaster chain". One of the key considerations in design of high-importance safety systems (such as those in nuclear reactors) is breaking the chain.
  • The Chernobyl disaster is the sort of thing that happens when you don't break the chain.
  • Seemingly the Bhopal disaster was the result of this, too. So was Apollo 13. It could even be said that the Love Canal disaster was a long-winded version of this.
  • This happens even in their studies. Sure, it can happen in regular mathematics as well, but when you take up engineering and move to modelling actual events and objects, that's when you can clearly see how a tiny mistake near the start will chain into others and create something 100% detached from reality by the time you've finished. What's technically just one small mistake can completely wreck your entire answer, which does a good job of making the lesson stick.
• The 2010 saga of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. To hit the highlights:
  • The blowout causes an explosion and fire on the rig which cannot be put out before the rig sinks;
  • The blowout preventer, specifically meant to stop this sort of thing from causing the well to release oil uncontrollably, fails because of a dead battery and a miswired coil;
  • Everyone suddenly realizes they have no freaking idea how to deal with a blowout in over a mile of water, nor do they know what the released oil will do at that depth;
  • The plan for dealing with a spill is ridiculously out of date, to the point where one of the experts supposed to be called in to assist was dead for 4 years... before the plan was filed;
  • To make matters worse, the plan turns out to have originally been written to deal with Arctic oil spills, and never adjusted for the different conditions in the Gulf of Mexico. It has more to say about how to protect walruses from the leakage than sea turtles.
  • And just to put the icing on the cake, it appears that the well suffering the blowout would have been one of the most productive in the Gulf of Mexico, meaning that the volume of oil escaping is freaking huge.
  • Last, oil is a very valuable resource. All that oil is completely wasted and the reservoir is unlikely to be tapped again in the near future.
  • A more recent revelation is that Halliburton supplied concrete to BP, as well as some simulations regarding the effectiveness of each design choice, and subsequently deleted both for fear of litigation in the wake of the explosion. They're currently slated to plead guilty to one count of "Computer Fraud" for having employees delete the aforementioned computer models, for which they'll pay a fine... to the tune of $200,000, the maximum fine available for that particular crime. Unsurprisingly, there's been some backlash.
• The Chernobyl disaster:
  • When the plant was built, the process was a bit rushed, and proper materials weren't all available. (For example, using bitumen^note Which is only typically used in road surfacing anymore, probably as a result of what follows in the roof.)
  • There were other problems with the RBMK design, including several positive feedback loops (a "positive void coefficient", meaning water turning to steam due to increasing reactivity would further increase reactivity, causing more water to turn to steam, further increasing reactivity...) as well as a transient power spike that had been observed during previous shutdowns. While the feedback loops were widely known, the power spike issue was not - in fact, information on the issue was suppressed by the government.
  • The RBMK design was chosen by the Soviet Union despite the known flaws because its reactors needed to be able to run on low quality fuel and require no large prefabricated components or specially trained construction crews.
  • A safety test was scheduled to coincide with a routine maintenance shutdown of the reactor. The test involved cutting off the steam pressure to the turbine, and seeing if the turbine's inertia would provide sufficient power during the rundown phase to keep the coolant pumps running for sixty seconds, long enough for the backup diesel generators to start up and come up to speed. Several previous tests had failed, and a success was deemed important^note How important? It was meant to have been succesfully completed before the reactor was even put into use, but the documents were forged to ensure the plant management got a bonus for completing the reactor schedule, even though the scenario of a complete power failure was unlikely.
  • As the experienced day crew were preparing the shutdown and reducing the power output, another power plant in Kyiv went offline. The grid controller in Kyiv requested that any further power reduction at Chernobyl be postponed. The Chernobyl plant director agreed and postponed the test and the shutdown. The reactor was kept at half of its normal power for far longer than originally intended.
  • It wasn't until 9 hours later that the Kyiv grid controller allowed the reactor shutdown to resume. However, operating the reactor at that power for so long resulted in a "xenon poisoning" situation: reaction byproducts that have a slowing effect on the reaction were not being burned away and slowly accumulated, dragging the power further down. However, the director decided to proceed with the test anyway^note Despite several critical safety systems being disabled, the whole exercise was thought of as an electrical test. Neither the reactor design institute nor the nuclear energy department was even informed that the test was taking place and what it would entail.
  • Instead of letting the xenon poisoning solve itself and waiting for the more experienced next day-shift, it was decided to assign the test to the (less experienced and prepared) night shift, thinking "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?".
  • The test required a minimum power output, but due to the xenon poisoning, it was nowhere near that. Then the reactor's power began dropping sharply without any input from the crew; the xenon poisoning was so strong that the reactor "stalled", dropping to less than one percent of normal power. The proper response would have been to shut all the way down and then very slowly raise the power back to normal over twenty-four hours, but the supervisor insisted on proceeding, even though the results of the test would be completely useless because of the abnormal starting conditions. Trying to raise the power back up to something useable, the operators began removing far too many control rods to counteract the issue, to the point of removing all but six of the 211 rods - leaving only one fifth of the recommended minimum reserve of 30 fully inserted rods. The reactor was only being held down by the massive amount of xenon at this point.
  • Various limiters and alarms had been disabled to get the reactor into this state. The reactor control computer system, based on the readings it had, recommended a complete shutdown - and was ignored.
  • As the coolant pumps were disconnected, the coolant flow to the reactor slowed, resulting in more steam, starting a positive feedback loop that caused the reaction to accelerate. The xenon poisoning, which, again, was the only thing holding the otherwise wide open reactor in check, began burning off, and the power level began rising... and rising... and rising...
  • At this point, the crew's reaction went from anxiety to full-blown panic, and their reaction was to hit the emergency shutdown (SCRAM) button at which point the politically-suppressed power spike flaw was revealed in the most disastrous way possible: Because liquid water in an RBMK reactor slows the reaction, the lower half of the control rods was made out of graphite^note Which is a neutron moderator, as opposed to the neutron absorber that water is; in layman's terms, instead of absorbing the neutrons, the graphite absorbs a little of their energy, slowing them and making them more likely to successfully split another U-238 atom and thus release more neutrons - and radiating that energy back out as heat, like the heating coils in an oven. But with no new coolant to draw this heat away, there is only so much energy it can store before getting compromised. Within nuclear engineering fields, moderators are often used to help propagate nuclear chain reactions to assist with reactor efficiency, but there is still the issue of dissipating the heat, as will become apparent below. which displaces the reaction-slowing water when the rods are in their pulled out state and thus increases reactivity. The upper part of each rod, being made of Boron, is a very efficient neutron absorber, so when the rods are dropped, the graphite moves down towards the bottom of the reactor while the boron part is also moving down - but still outside of the core. This initial movement had been discovered to cause sudden power spikes during normal operations, because the lowest part of the reactor would increase in reactivity before the upper part saw any reactivity-reducing Boron. Hitting the SCRAM moved all the rods down, all at once, displacing the (already hot, due to no new water flowing in) water at the bottom and causing an unchecked power excursion at the bottom of the reactor. This issue was only discovered in operation and was held back from the crews by the government - because the risks from the power spikes was considered low, since surely no one would pull out almost all the rods and then put them all back in at once!^note Despite the fact that, you know, dropping all the rods, no matter how many were already out, back into the reactor was exactly what the emergency shutdown button was designed to do.
  • At this point, pulling out any of the rods would cause the chain reaction to accelerate further, but the graphite and positive void coefficient meant the SCRAM sequence would do exactly the same thing. Very rapidly, things hit their breaking point: The astronomical amount of heat caused the control rod channels in the reactor to shatter, jamming and locking the mechanisms in place. Now, there was no way to prevent the events which would happen next.
  • Interestingly enough, what exactly happened at the moment of explosion is unknown, since anyone in the reactor hall itself did not survive to give their observations, and the control room's measurement gear had failed due to the extreme amount of heat and energy coming from the soon-to-explode reactor^note the final reading for the reactor's power, which is only the lower limit of how hot it could have got, was 33,000 MW - more than ten times the Reactor's designed full power of 3,200 MW, so the following possible chain of events is only theorized in line with simulations: The fuel cladding protecting the coolant lines from the heat failed, and the partially-molten fuel elements released directly into the coolant. As a result, the coolant immediately flash-vaporized, resulting in the initial steam explosion which compromised the reactor casing.
  • The resulting pressure spike literally blew the lid off the reactor and through the roof of the facility, exposing the core. No RBMK reactor has a full containment structure, because the size of the core would have made full containment ruinously expensive; and while it is highly doubtful that any containment structure could have successfully held up against the blast, not having one certainly didn't help matters. The second explosion, which was the more powerful one, is hypothesized to have been caused by hydrogen, which had been formed as a result of chemical reactions between the steam and the red-hot graphite. While the two explosions did have the (somewhat) positive effect of scattering the nuclear fuel and temporarily terminating the runaway nuclear reaction, suffice to say there were... multiple other problems to be dealt with now.
  • The graphite moderators, now exposed to the air rushing into the core, immediately caught fire, creating a massive updraft that hurled radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The bitumen-treated roof caught fire as well.
  • Several members of senior management chose to invest more effort in deflecting the blame and/or reassuring the general public that everything was fine (which it really, really wasn't) than in trying to actually clean up the mess, delaying the evacuation of the area around the plant for several days.
  • On a more individually disastrous level, the chief engineer point-blank refused to believe what he was being told - that the reactor had exploded and the core was wide-open - and sent a man, Anatoly Sitnikov, to look at it. Quite aside from all of the contaminants in the air, and the radioactive debris on the roof, looking into the exposed core meant being exposed to the ionising radiation being emitted by it - at least twice that given off by the Hiroshima bomb. He died of radiation poisoning just over a month later.
• The March 2011 disaster in Japan could be disaster dominoes within disaster dominoes. First you have the most powerful earthquake in the country's history, which triggers a huge tsunami, which damages the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and then things at the plant get progressively worse and worse and worse. And the number of deaths directly due to the Fukushima disaster? Zero. Pretty good engineering there. The amount of radiation that was released will likely spike the cancer and other illness rates for years to come, with no direct link to the disaster provable. It's nowhere near the scope of Chernobyl, but, like all nuclear accidents, it's proper to say that not only can we not yet say that the dominoes have stopped, but indeed we may never even know if they'll ever stop or even how many were knocked down.
• This trope is what led to the Flint, Michigan water crisis. In 2013, in an attempt to save money in water treatment fees, Flint water treatment responsibilities would be handed from Detroit to Flint itself, and while a new system was built that would take water from Lake Michigan, in 2014 an interim system was made to take water from the Flint River. Although a system of lead pipes serviced Flint, lead contamination was kept in check by adding a chemical that prevented corrosion and to prevent microbial contamination, chlorine compounds would also be added to help kill harmful bacteria. Likely as a cost-cutting measure, the anti-corrosion chemical was not added to the interim system, the pipes corroded and dangerous amounts of lead was unleashed onto the water supply. The chlorine that was added to the Flint water reacted with the unprotected pipes, further speeding up the corrosion and release of lead into the water. Without the anti-corrosion chemicals, the chlorine compounds reacted with the metal pipes, rendering them useless for killing bacteria, which led to an increase of waterborne disease. By then time the authorities finally took action in 2015, 12 people died and dozens more were sickened by waterborne illness, thousands of homes were contaminated with water that could legally qualify as toxic waste, and what was supposed to be a cost-cutting infrastructure measure became an expensive cleanup operation.
• Love Canal was a case where stubbornness and outright idiocy overrode repeated attempts to stop a chain of disaster. The canal was used as a chemical waste dump by the Hooker Chemical Company; the waste was stored in containers that were better than was required by then-current law and buried in the canal, which was lined with clay, and then sealed under a thick cap of clay into the bargain... Then the local school district decided to site a new school there.
  • The company balked at the idea of selling and wanted, if the land was sold, to impose conditions on its usage to reduce the risk. But, they had to cave when seizure of the property under eminent domain was threatened, and eventually sold the land for $1 with a deed that warned against the risk of the materials stored there and attempted to limit the company's liability.
  • Development began and quickly breached some of the containment measures. Workers found 55-gallon drums of waste while digging and warned people about them. The architect, on discovering this, told the board that it would be “Poor policy" to build there not knowing what chemicals had leaked into the ground and that the concrete foundations could be damaged. The board's reaction was to relocate the school... to eighty-five feet away.
  • Then the school board sold the remaining land for homes, despite Hooker's attorney warning that the land was not suitable due to being, as previously mentioned a few times by now, a toxic waste dump. The clay cap was partially removed and used as fill dirt for the 93rd Street school. City construction work punched holes in the clay walls of the canal. Despite all of the warnings, and despite the chemical drums being seen by many people, there was no monitoring or evaluation of the soil and water for contamination. Residents complained of puddles of oil or coloured liquid in their yards and basements. Black fluid was reported leaking from the canal. Nearly twenty years after the housing construction began, the City finally paid a consulting firm to take a look at the situation. That spring, when the State Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation began testing the soil and water, it was already far, far too late. The area was heavily contaminated with, among other things, benzene, chloroform, toluene, dioxin, and various types of PCBs, and had been for years. In August of 1978, the dumpsite was declared "an unprecedented state of emergency".
  • 800 families had to be evacutated from the area, and the government spent a further $15 million purchasing the homes at and around the canal, demolishing them, and fencing out the area. As it stands, most of the former community now sits abandoned, with only some empty streets and a few buidlings left standing to mark where it once was.

Transportation

• Similar to the Arab Spring, in 2013 Brazil had protests on abusive public transportation prices. The first went somewhat calm, then things got real once the one in São Paulo ends up receiving police brutality to get suppressed, even hitting some reporters trying to cover the chaos. It even got its catchy name, "Vinegar revolts"◊ (as some of the protesters were carrying vinegar, supposedly because it helps contain tear gas bombs).
• The Donner Party. A huckster touts an alternate route to California before he ever had a chance to actually travel it. An 1846 migrant party decides to take it, even after being warned by people who'd actually been on the route that it was treacherous and unproven. The huckster finally travels the route in the opposite direction but only gives the party some vague advice and basically leaves them on their own to negotiate the forbidding mountain and desert terrain. Instead of saving time, the cutoff actually adds about a month to their journey, putting them at the foot of the Sierra Nevada just as the winter snows hit, with dwindling supplies and major internal dissension. By spring only half the party made it out of the mountains alive, bringing with them tales of murder and cannibalism.
• Where the U.S. has the Donner Party, Britain and Canada have Franklin's lost expedition of 1845 (which Dan Simmons's The Terror and its TV adaptation are based on). While the ultimate fate of the individuals on the expedition remain a mystery (with the remains of crewmembers still being identified in 2021), a mix of hindsight, forensic evidence, and oral testimony have given us a clearer picture of why the expedition — which was using (for the Victorian period) cutting-edge technology to chart the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage — ended in disaster, enough to help us surmise the how.
  • For starters, despite past accomplishments, the overall commander of the expedition, Captain Sir John Franklin, had a spotty record. Franklin had previously led an 1819 expedition to the Arctic through the Canadian wilderness which, thanks to poor planning, ended in many of his men dying of starvation and in Franklin himself eating his own boots to survive.^note In fairness, Franklin led two better-planned expeditions between 1819 and 1845. His second-in-command, Captain Francis Crozier, was arguably more qualified to lead the expedition,^note He had previously served in Sir James Clark Ross's successful expedition of Antarctica; Cape Crozier on Ross Island is named after him. but was passed over for being Irish and lower-class.
    • Franklin was also known for keeping lax discipline in his command, which meant that while he was popular with his men they wouldn't be well-prepared for the desperate survival situation to come. Crozier, the more authoritarian captain of the two, complained in his personal correspondence about Franklin's all too chummy approach to his crew.
  • Despite extensive modifications, the repurposed warships used by the expedition, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were woefully inadequate for sailing through the icy maze of the Arctic. Instead of maritime engines, the Admiralty had both ships fitted with steam engines originally used for trains which only produced up to 25 horsepower, or four knots.^note Fitting the ships with these engines was pointless anyway, since sailing through the Arctic was a slow, painstaking process, making the purpose of the engines moot.
  • It wasn't just the engines where the Admiralty cut corners. While Erebus and Terror were stocked with canned food which should have given the crewmen provisions lasting three years (five with rationing) when the time came to hire someone to handle those provisions, the Admiralty went with the lowest bidder. It later turned out that the provisioner, Stephen Goldner, not only soldered the cans with lead but had done so improperly, leading much of the food to spoil. What's more, not all of the cans were even filled with food to begin with; the provisioner had struggled to produce the required number of cans (8,000) in the allotted timeframe and had filled some of the cans with rocks rather than lose the contract.
  • The issues with the canned food not only left the crewmen malnourished but also led them to develop lead poisoning, which in turn left them susceptible to diseases such as tuberculosis or scurvy. When Erebus and Terror became ice-locked at Beechey Island (in modern-day Nunavut, Canada), three crewmen were buried there; the bodies were exhumed for forensic examination in the 1980s and were discovered to contain abnormally high concentrations of lead, either from the solder or the ships' central heating systems.
  • After Beechey Island, the expedition sailed further inland only to once again become ice-locked at the mouth of Victoria Strait, off the coast of King William Island. Unfortunately for them, the Arctic was entering an unusually intense cold period, and Erebus and Terror remained frozen in place, unable to move, for two years. During this period, Franklin and 22 of his crewmen died. Eventually the decision was made to abandon the ships and trek south across King William Island towards Back's Fish River on the Canadian mainland.
  • It is here where the ultimate fate of the expedition remains murky. However, testimonies by the local Inuit people suggested that discipline among the surviving crewmen broke down by this point, that the expedition split up into smaller groups, and that at least some of these groups engaged in murder and cannibalism to survive. Despite the outcry from Victorian society when this was initially reported, the cannibalism was eventually confirmed upon examination of human bones found on King William Island.^note Other testimonies indicate that some of the crewmen gave up on the trek south and returned to Erebus and Terror to await rescue, while still others suggest that a very small group of survivors reached the mainland and wandered among the Inuit for several years before leaving for parts unknown.
• The Titanic: The infamous ship had a plethora of factors that ultimately led to her sinking and the loss of over 1,500 lives:
  • The pre-voyage hype contributed to a sense of hubris: it was the largest ship in the world, the pinnacle of technology and luxury, & White Star Line's crown jewel. It was designed where any four compartments can be completely filled with water and it wouldn't sink. On top of that, the ship has a double-bottom hull. But this second layer of hull didn't extend up the sides.
  • The ship set out into the Atlantic with enough lifeboats for about half the people on the ship at the time, due to an obsolete law that has not been updated,^*The gist of the law being that a ship's lifeboats were not meant to evacuate a vessel entirely, but to ferry passengers and crew from the ship in distress to a waiting ship; thus, one only needed enough lifeboats to evacuate the vessel in an orderly fashion, rather than in its entirety and all at once. Of course, the idea here was that even if the Titanic were to somehow sink, it would stay afloat long enough for this evacuation to another waiting ship to take place.^* As to why the law was obsolete, the theory is that it goes back to the era of Wooden Ships and Iron Men; since ships were, in that era, made of wood & other material that tended to float when they broke free off the ship, the idea was that, in the event of a sinking, the ship could stay afloat enough for an orderly evacuation, or would have enough floating debris that the passengers could safely stay afloat until the lifeboats could retrieve and rescue them. As one can imagine, this policy became moot once ships started being built with heavier components such as iron boilers and hulls, and thus couldn’t stay afloat long enough, yet the policy was not updated; several disasters were also making it apparent that even wooden ships may not offer this assumed safety-net to its passengers, but the policy remained and while the Titanic technically had more than required, it still was not enough. The designers intentionally meant for the ship to carry forty-six boats, but the it was reduced to twenty, and they still felt that it was more than necessary because it was more than the legally required number of sixteen boats. And two of those boats, the collapsibles, were stowed on the roof of the officer's quarters, an impractical place to stow them, as getting them to the davits from there was incredibly difficult. ^note  However, while more people might have survived due to boats floating off the deck, it's likely that they wouldn't have been able to launch all or even most of 46 boats before the ship went down; due to other errors in the chain, the Titanic barely had time to launch the boats they had (minus two collapsibles that ended up going overboard), let alone what it would have taken to load more than twice that number.
  • The ship's Captain Smith was a seasoned veteran who never blundered due to indecisiveness, but also he had little experience when caution is needed and thought he could handle any situation.
  • Four days into the maiden voyage, a few ice reports came in. Smith decided to change the course ever so slightly southward, but continued sailing at full speed without having to see if the correction was enough. He also decided not to slow down during night hours, otherwise the ship would fall behind schedule.^note However, it should be said that this was standard practice at the time. Using an analogy, it would be as if the military procedure of trying to get out of a minefield by running as fast as possible.
  • It turns out that the correction was not enough; the Titanic got several more warnings that it was headed right into an ice field. The radio operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, had just finished fixing the primary wireless transmitter, and Phillips, in the middle of clearing the message backlog, failed to pass the warnings on — including telling the wireless operator on the infamous Californian to stop sending transmissions. (In Phillips' defense, the Californian had nearly blown out his eardrums; Titanic had much more sensitive radio equipment.) Because these warnings weren't passed on, the officers were unaware of the true extent of the ice field they were entering.
  • The day of the disaster, there was a scheduled lifeboat drill. But it was canceled on the excuse that it was too cold.
  • Titanic was triple-screwed in the hull — one centerline propeller connected to a steam turbine and the two wing propellers connected to reciprocating engines. Triple screwing is widely considered a poor arrangement for propulsion — its only advantage is making the stern more streamlined. Triple shafts would combine all the biggest problems of a single propeller layout and a twin-shaft system. The only advantage of the triple shaft layout is that it eliminates the vulnerability of the single shaft layout to mechanical damage or accident. The design hydrodynamics is such that the effects of the centerline screw actually degrade the efficiency of the wing propellers.
  • Finally, at 11:40pm on April 14th, the lookouts saw that the ship was headed right toward an iceberg. At the speed it was going, along with its 46,000 ton weight, it would have been impossible to turn on time. The churning water actually disrupted the proportionally small rudder's ability to turn even more than the speed. Furthermore, while the two wing props were run by reciprocating engines, the middle propeller in front of the rudder was connected to a turbine, and when that propeller stopped spinning, the ship was slowed and lost its inertia and turning ability. Their chances of missing the iceberg actually might have been increased if they had just focused on steering around it; the inertia probably would not have made much difference in the severity of the impact, but if the turn with engines stopped was enough that the iceberg just scraped the side of the hull, a turn with the engines still set to "ahead" might just have been enough to clear it, or at least shorten the contact, minimizing the amount of surface area damaged and thus potentially flooding fewer compartments.
  • Remember the ship’s double-bottom hull? It only would help the ship if it runs aground. The sides of the ship were still only an inch of steel, made of plates essentially riveted together- and those rivets were weaker in this part of the ship. This was not because of budget cuts, but because there was a machine used to drive these rivets in, but it couldn't work properly in areas with a lot of curved metal to navigate: such as the extreme forward and aft ends of the ship. Therefore, they had to use rivets with more slag (a glass-like substance that in trace amounts strengthens steel, but in higher ones weakens it) to make it easier to be hammered in by hand.
  • Scraping along the iceberg caused five compartments to flood. The ship can be salvaged with four; but not five. The flooding water will go over the top of each bulkhead of the compartment as it goes down, like in an ice tray.
  • There was one ship close enough to lend assistance (the Californian), but her radio operator had already gone to bed. (Thereafter, radios were required to be manned around the clock). The Titanic fired off flares, but there was no reaction from the Californian. Other radio operators were within range, but most had also gone to bed. The reason one of the aforementioned radio operators had gone to bed is that he was annoyed with having to relay so many messages from the Titanic passengers. And many of the Titanic's First-Class Passengers would send messages that would backlog the other ships' systems. At least one radio operator had enough of these messages & called it a day and wasn't awake to receive the one important message of the bunch.
  • And if the whole situation wasn't bad enough, despite the ship having enough lifeboats to save the lives of about half of the people on board, they did not even save that many, as numerous lifeboats were launched at well below capacity. This was partly due to confusion among the crew, but also because many people didn't realize how dire the situation was and refused to get in the lifeboats, thinking they'd be safer staying on the ship to await rescue; by the time it became clear how serious of a situation they were in, many of the lifeboats had already been launched partially empty.
  • Due to general delays in boarding and launching lifeboats, as well as a certain measure of bad luck, the last two collapsible boats were not successfully launched and ended up being washed off the deck before they could be boarded (the ship was still a few minutes from sinking, but it was incredibly low in the water and a wave washed over the deck just as the collapsibles were being moved into position). Some survivors were able to make use of the drifting boats after the ship sank, but it's unquestionably less than the number those boats could have carried if they had been properly loaded to capacity, and not all of those who initially grabbed onto these boats survived: one of the two was found floating fully upside-down (and the survivors had no way to rectify it), reducing how many people it could carry and putting those who did get on in a more precarious position, such that several people fell off from sheer exhaustion, while the other, though upright, was partially filled with freezing water, and many of those who had climbed into it consequently died of hypothermia before they could be rescued.
  • Additionally, many of the underfilled lifeboats were still close by when the ship sank, but the crew members aboard them were reluctant to go back, fearing they might be capsized by the suction from the sinking or swamped by too many survivors trying to climb on at once ^note what makes this particularly tragic is that the swamping-the-lifeboat scenario is unlikely, as according to survivors on the drifting collapsible boats, the would-be survivors were fully willing to sacrifice themselves rather than bring others down in the attempt to save their own lives; when told that the boats could not accommodate them and would sink if they tried to climb on, every single one of them accepted this and many even wished the other survivors luck. It's estimated that between them all, they could have taken on nearly 500 additional passengers, but only about 40 were actually rescued, and at least 30 of those were the ones on/in the two lifeboats that had been swept off the deck being transferred into proper lifeboats; very few survivors were pulled from the water itself.
  • Remember that cancelled Lifeboat Drill? None of the crew were familiar with the new davits put on the ship because of it, causing a few close calls in the unloading process. Thus they had to learn on the fly, costing time and potentially lives.
  • A few more people died due to a smaller, lesser-known boatyard hearing about the disaster that was the Titanic. One of their ships sank because it was carrying too many lifeboats.
  • None of these factors would have mattered if the iceberg hadn't been in that exact spot, at that exact time. Even a difference of a few minutes in the movement of either ship or iceberg — movement, which thousands of fine shifts in current, wind, and surface chop dictated, never mind human intervention — and they would have missed each other completely. Thankfully, if the disaster hadn't happened, then regulations for ship safety wouldn't have been updated and there would probably still be ships with too few lifeboats and radio transmissions wouldn't be manned around the clock. So because of this disaster, we have updated rules and regulations for ship travel and safety.
  • However, even if it wasn't that particular iceberg, the Titanic would've likely just run into another. A survivor's account mentions that, prior to the collision, when he looked out the porthole of his cabin (which was down on one of the lower decks), he would sometimes see stars in the night sky being blocked out by something, then reappearing. This phenomenon has been occasionally witnessed with icebergs at night (the ice temporarily blocks out light from stars, at least until they've passed/been passed). The conclusion here is that, even before the collision, the Titanic was already deep in the ice field, and without proper precautions being taken, there would be a strong chance that she'd have a head-on/glancing encounter with an iceberg.
• Defied with the sinking of the sister ship to the Titanic, the Britannic. That incident was not the result of hitting an iceberg, but instead from hitting a sea mine. Thanks to safety improvements done to the Britannic in construction as a result of lessons learned from the Titanic, no Disaster Dominoes happened to cause this sinking, but they did help to increase the number of survivors for three reasons: one, the weather was about 70 degrees, there were more lifeboats available, and help got there quicker, especially so since the sinking only took an hour. Most of the 30 fatalities in the Britannic tragedy were the result of the first two lifeboats being lowered while the propellers were still turning, causing the boats to be sucked into the propeller blades, ripping them and their occupants to pieces.
• The 1956 sinking of the Italian passenger ship SS ''Andrea Doria'':
  • On the evening of July 25, Andrea Doria was sailing on her normal route past Nantucket Lightship towards New York City. The ship encountered heavy fog and her captain, Piero Calamai, only slightly reduced the ship's speed from 23 knots to 21 knots. This decision would come to haunt Calamai for the rest of his life.
  • Traveling in the opposite direction was the Swedish passenger ship MS Stockholm, helmed at the time of the accident by Third Officer Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johanssen. Although Carstens-Johanssen would insist the opposite was true for decades afterward, evidence suggests that he had misread his radar and assumed Doria was at his ship's port side, when in reality it was at his starboard. Thus when he steered Stockholm to starboard, Carstens-Johanssen was turning his ship towards Doria rather than away from it.
  • Because of the thick fog, Doria and Stockholm did not make visual contact until a collision between the ships was unavoidable. Once the two ships realized they were on a collision course, Doria steered to its left to attempt a starboard-to-starboard passing. This only narrowed, rather than widened, the passing distance. Despite a last-ditch attempt by Doria to correct her course to port, Stockholm (which had a steel-reinforced bow designed to break up pack ice) sliced into the ship like a scalpel and tore a 90-degree gash that sealed Doria 's fate.
  • Doria might have still remained afloat had the crew properly ballasted the ship. Due to nearing the end of a transatlantic voyage, her fuel tanks were mostly empty, accentuating an already-known topweight problem the ship had. To counter this, the fuel tanks were designed to be filled with sea water after being emptied. This was not done, and the empty, air-filled tanks on the opposite side from the impact site contributed to the immediate fatal list she developed, a list that rendered her watertight compartments useless because the side with the gash tipped over hard enough to let water in above the compartments.
  • Another design flaw was the access tunnel between her pump controls and the generator room, which despite passing through a watertight bulkhead lacked a watertight door. Naturally, the tunnel flooded, the generator room flooded, and the ship lost all power.
  • But one domino did tip away from disaster: due to being near New York Harbor on one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet, Doria 's distress call immediately drew several ships to the scene to rescue the passengers, most dramatically the French liner Ile de France, which charged onto the scene out of the fog all lights blazing. The only casualties of the disaster would end up being the people killed in the initial collision.
• The 2001 Selby Railway Disaster, the deadliest railway disaster in the United Kingdom in the 21st century, is due to a particularly unlucky sequence of these.
  • A sleep-deprived driver makes an early-morning cross-country commute from Louth to Wigan, around a two-and-a-half hour drive. The reason he was sleep-deprived is because he had spent all night talking on the phone to a woman, and had lost track of time doing so. Investigators found that he would have to be speeding in order to keep up the pace he was travelling that morning.
  • On a rightward bend on the M62, he lost concentration and drove off the road next to a bridge^note investigators later speculated he outright fell asleep at the wheel, but he has staunchly denied this, and there's no way to be certain. Rather than simply run into something and stop as would be expected, his car managed to continue far enough to become stuck on the southbound track of the East Coast Main Line.
  • The train that inevitably crashed into it shortly afterwards was a high-speed InterCity 225, travelling at the line's top speed of 125mph. This didn't derail the train by itself and the emergency brakes were applied, but just slightly beyond the crash site was a freight siding. As the train was unstable in this state, travelling over the switches at such a high-speed caused it to derail and shift onto the oncoming track. Tragically, at that precise moment a freight train also happened to be travelling along that track, and effectively took a head-on collision from the high-speed train.
  • In total, 10 people died: Both drivers, two of the train staff on board the InterCity 225, and six passengers. The fact that there wasn't more fatalities was due to the passenger train being relatively empty at around 1/5th occupancy, as well as the structural integrity of the "Mark 4" passenger coaches. It was noted that had the crash involved an InterCity 125 with its older Mark 3 coaches, the results could've been much worse.
• The 2012 wreck of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia. The whole mess could be considered a masterpiece of Disaster Dominoes:
  • First off, it should be noted that Captain Francesco Schettino's background consisted of being a security guard that rose to the position of Chief Security Officer, then was somehow horizontally promoted to Captain in a few years despite his position having nothing to do with sailing ships. Schettino had been involved in two separate crashes of other Costa ships he captained before he assumed command of Costa Concordia.
  • It all started when the ship's head waiter, who was a native of Isola del Giglio, asked Schettino to do a "sail-by salute" near the island and salute the residents via the horns. Schettino deviated from the ship's computer-programmed route, claiming that he was familiar with the local reef and could navigate through it. In fairness, this was considered a tradition by Costa ships and in theory should have been an easy thing to pull off. Costa Concordia had in fact performed this maneuver before with success.
  • Schettino was apparently so confident in his abilities that he decided to take them closer to the island than was normal for the maneuver (just 1,500 feet off the shore) and switched off the alarm on the ship's navigational computer. According to his first officer, Schettino had left his reading glasses in his cabin and repeatedly asked the first officer to check the radar for him. Schettino eyeballed the distance (again, not necessarily uncommon if highly unprofessional, but his questionable eyesight left that a noticeable danger).
  • As the ship closed the distance, Schettino called up former captain Mario Palombo and had a casual chat about the sail-by salute and the proper safe distance from shore, but Schettino was still confident in his ability to pull the close run by. He ordered a new heading of 310 and then 315, then pushed up the ship's speed to 16 knots.
  • The helmsman, Indonesian national Jacob Rusli Bin, was a relatively new hire on the job, with his previous experience being as a painter and a cleaner. But most importantly, Rusli Bin was non-fluent in either English or Italian. As they closed the distance, when Schettino relayed "325", Rusli Bin heard it as "315" before the first officer corrected to "335" and Schettino repeated "325" to clear the misunderstanding. An innocuous mistake that was corrected, but one that foreshadowed what was to come, especially as it caused them to move in a wider arc than they expected and thus closer to the shoreline.
  • This wider arc would be noticeable and could be corrected faster, but the third officer (who was supposed to be relaying the exact current coordinates each time Schettino gave the new directional heading per procedure) wasn't doing so out of negligence.
  • At this point, the ship reached 16 knots and Schettino ordered the second officer to head to the left wing to get a better view of the ship. Schettino started to realize the looming danger when he noticed white foam crashing on rocks directly in front of him in the distance. Costa Concordia was now 700 meters closer than it should have been and at risk for direct collision if not stopped.
  • Schettino ordered the ship to turn away, first at 335, then 340, and then 350. However, the ship's speed at 16 knots worked against them as it couldn't hope to complete such a drastic turn at its speed, as well as undersea (in other words, the bow of ship is still pointed at 327, not nearly enough to miss the rocks). The escalating situation was not helped by the language barrier causing Rusli Bin to hesitate at "340" for several crucial seconds before correcting to 350.
  • Schettino ordered the rudder to be moved starboard to 10, then 20, and finally "hard to starboard", but at this point even if they cleared the rocks they needed to get the rest of the ship to swing around and not crash. He ordered "midship" to center the rudder, and finally called "port 10" and then "port 20". If all went well at this point, they just might have avoided the rocks, or at worst caused a scrape bad enough to cause flooding in one compartment. However, a panicking Rusli Bin, again confused by Schettino's orders, turned to starboard instead of port, undoing the swing. In the eight seconds before he realized his mistake and corrected, it was too late: the bow of the ship barely cleared the rock before the stern was practically gutted on impact, flooding three compartments. Despite attempting to close the watertight doors, the flooding is severe enough to short out the ship's six engines in twenty-nine seconds due to the fact they were located in the initially-hit compartments, triggering a ship-wide blackout twenty-two seconds later.
  • Schettino's final order was to turn the rudder "hard to starboard" before propulsion was also lost, resulting in the ship drifting starboard. Had he not done so, the ship wouldn't have drifted back and run aground in the shallows of the islands and the capsizing would have claimed many more lives. Even so, thirty-two passengers and crew lost their lives in the end, Schettino not among them as he abandoned ship in a lifeboat (after switching into civilian attire and refusing orders from the Coast Guard to return to the ship and assist evacuation).
  • The emergency generator lost cooling due to short-circuiting, preventing the crew from using it despite desperate attempts by their engineers to keep it on long enough to be useful without causing it to catch fire using a screwdriver. Among other things, this trapped people in elevators, resulting in twelve of the fatalities.
  • The Concordia crew lied about the situation to passengers and rescuers in a futile attempt to prevent a panic and allow Schettino to delude himself into thinking the situation wasn't as dire as it actually was. This made the evacuation far more chaotic than it needed to be and prevented an adequate external response, and the order to Abandon Ship came long after passengers had called bullshit on the "temporary electrical fault" and taken the initiative to evacuate.
• The events that led up to the February 3, 2015, collision of a Metro North Railroad commuter train on the Harlem Line with a stopped SUV in Valhalla, New York, that killed the driver of the SUV and five passengers on the train:
  • The crossing that the accident happened on was on a section of the Harlem Line running parallel to the Taconic State Parkway. One hour before the incident, a pretty serious car accident closed both lanes on the parkway going southbound, and one lane going northbound, causing many drivers to seek alternate routes.
  • The driver of the SUV took this detour and somehow ended up stopped on the tracks at a grade crossing while waiting to rejoin the parkway.
  • The gates came down and got stuck on the driver's car.
  • Instead of trying to back up and possibly avoid being hit by the oncoming train, or even just abandoning the car to at least save her own life, the driver tried to pull forward (and this is after getting out of the car and trying to free it from the crossing gate by hand), and thus was in the center of the tracks when the train hit it.
• The Fox River Grove grade crossing collision, where a Metra train hit a school bus stopped at a red light on Algonquin Road and Northwest Highway and killed seven students, was the result of a sequence of events that could have been prevented:
  • At the crossing where the accident happened, the tracks of the UP Northwest Line run parallel to the Northwest Highway. Prior to the 1990s, the highway was a two-lane road and there was about 60 feet of space between the tracks and the highway. When the highway was widened to four lanes, the distance between the tracks and highway was reduced to 30 feet so as not to impede business development north of the highway. The Illinois Department of Transportation also erected a modernized traffic signal to ensure traffic cleared the crossing in front of an approaching train.
  • The gates at the crossing on Algonquin Road only activated 20 seconds before the train arrived. However, the traffic light clearing the rail intersection only allowed cars to clear 18 seconds after the crossing signals activated, giving vehicles only 2 to 6 seconds to clear the tracks.
  • The accident happened in the early morning when the sun wasn't yet fully up.
  • Planners didn't want to disrupt traffic on the busy Northwest Highway unnecessarily, so instead of setting the traffic light on an automated cycle, the light was controlled by a sensor that would turn the light green only when a vehicle was actually present on the Algonquin Road part of the intersection. However, the way this was set up, it could only be triggered by a vehicle that was right at the intersection, and as such there was no option for long vehicles like buses or trucks to play it safe and wait short of the tracks until they had a green light; unless there happened to be a vehicle already at the intersection ahead of them (which, particularly at the hour the accident took place, was not a common occurance), they had to go over the crossing in order to pull up to the intersection and trip the sensor, otherwise the light would never change.
  • There was a substitute bus driver driving the bus. She wasn't familiar with the route and failed to judge the distance between the light and the crossing, such that the last three feet of the bus were still within the railroad crossing area.
  • When the students on the bus saw the crossing gate come down and realized the danger that was about to unfold, they began screaming for the driver to move forward. However, the driver only heard screaming coming from the back of the bus but couldn't make out specifics. As such, she was trying to attend to what she presumed was some crisis within the bus and consequently was no longer watching the light (which the NTSB determined turned green six seconds before the train hit).
  • The NTSB later established that there had been previous cases of near-misses at the same crossing (specifically other long vehicles that had had crossing gates come down on the vehicle, but all of those had managed, if only barely, to get clear of the crossing before the train arrived), which should have alerted authorities that the intersection was an accident waiting to happen, but no action had been taken.
• The Kursk sinking.
  • The welds of the torpedo weren't checked because it was a "dummy" torpedo, with no warhead. It is theorized that, while loading one of the dummy torpedoes for a training exercise, a faulty weld caused the torpedo's volatile high-test peroxide (HTP) fuel to interact with its kerosene catalyst, causing the torpedo to explode and cause a fire.
  • The torpedo tube door, which would have contained the blast, hadn't been sealed properly, a common issue at the time.
  • The bulkhead, which would also have contained the blast, didn't because it had been pierced by a ventilation shaft. The same blast also forced open the aforementioned unsealed torpedo tube, causing a deluge of flooding as well as the still-raging inferno.
  • Said ventilation shaft led almost directly to the control room in section 2, thus the first blast immediately incapacitated the only people on the ship who could do anything.
  • Despite only on a training exercise, Kursk was carrying a full combat load, including cruise missiles and anti-submarine torpedoes, which were kept on standby in their ready positions. Without anyone fighting the blaze, the fire raged hotter and hotter until several of those torpedoes detonated, destroying the entire bow and sealing the submarine's fate.
  • The emergency buoy which would have given the submarine's exact location and told everyone the issue was big had been disabled, due to fears that it would trigger accidentally and give the submarine's position away to non-Russians.
  • The only escape vessel which could have evacuated the survivors in the aft sections was located in front of the conning tower in the area taking in water.
  • The automatic shutdown on the nuclear reactor worked flawlessly, immediately shutting off power to the still-inhabitable areas of the submarine.
  • The air filters providing breathable air to the survivors trapped in the aft section used Potassium Hydroxide, which is highly volatile when it comes in contact with water and also very difficult to handle with no light or heat on board.
  • No one was willing to risk being disciplined to investigate until five hours after the disaster (after the Kursk failed to make a routine check-in), despite the explosion being audible to practically all ships in the area (this meant NATO was aware there had been an explosion on board before the Russian government did).
  • The Russian government refused all offers of help for five days.
  • The external locking mechanism for the emergency hatch was extremely complex and the Norwegian divers who first made it down to the ship were told explicitly it had to be turned counter-clockwise to open. After a day of trying this, the Norwegians finally tried turning it clockwise, which opened the hatch.
• Ablation cascade / Kessler effect is a theoretical space disaster. It is speculated that if the mass of objects wandering in low Earth orbit reaches a high enough density, a collision would eventually trigger a chain reaction creating debris that would itself hit and destroy other objects, producing even more debris. It would eventually make space exploration and satellite use impossible for several generations, as the debris would be very slow to reenter Earth's atmosphere, meanwhile shredding anything that tried to get past it.
  • See the Gravity entry (in Films) for a realistic portrayal of such an event in fiction.
• Apollo 13. It started with the ship's oxygen tanks being dropped during transfer from another service module. The vent tube used to drain the oxygen after testing was damaged. Normally, it wasn't a big deal, since they could just burn off the oxygen and it wouldn't be needed after the tanks were refilled and in space. But, someone failed to realize that an upgraded electrical system had been installed, and did not change the thermostat that normally shut down the tanks if they overheated. As a result, the increased charge going through the thermostat fused it shut and it could not shut off the tanks as they heated. This resulted in the insulation of the wires melting and leaving them exposed. Only the supercooled oxygen in the tanks kept the whole thing from blowing up on the pad. The problem was that by the time the explosion occurred, enough oxygen had been used to expose the wires and allow a spark. Fortunately, no lives were lost that time.
• The Challenger disaster:
  • NASA's publicity stunt of recruiting Christa McAuliffe, a public school teacher who would have been the first private citizen to travel in space, created much incentive for NASA to ensure that the upcoming mission proceed with as few issues as possible, which would later be determined to have caused the space agency to downplay or ignore major warnings about the faulty O-rings in Challenger 's solid rocket boosters.
  • The shuttle launch was supposed to occur on January 22, 1986. However, a series of delays caused them to push it back until January 28th. These included delays from a previous mission, bad weather at a Transoceanic Abort Landing site at Dakar, numerous bad weather moments, and problems with its exterior access hatch.
  • On January 27th, engineers for Morton-Thiokol, the company who made the O-rings, realized that the launch date would be unsuitable as the O-rings were not rated for a launch temperature so low (they were rated at 40 degrees F, while launch day would only have it at 30) and desperately called NASA for a conference call to beg the group to delay the launch until it got warmer. NASA refused. Morton-Thiokol tried again, but only with the management of the Kennedy and Marshall Space Centers. They were again refused. Amazingly, Morton-Thiokol management then gave the thumbs up for the launch to proceed, with one shocked engineer admitting to his wife that Challenger would be destroyed.
  • The day of the launch, Rockwell International, the main contractors for NASA's shuttles, was aghast at the amount of ice on Challenger and feared that build up could damage the shuttle upon ascent. As well, the temperature that day was colder than most launches, at about 28 degrees F. Rockwell tried to warn NASA to scuttle the mission, but they ended up only delaying until around 11:38 AM.
  • Everything went swell until, over a minute after launch, everything fell apart, one after another in rapid, cascading succession: hot gases escaped from a hole created from the damaged O-rings, creating a blowtorch effect into the fuel tank. The fuel tank then detonated, causing the solid rocket boosters on either side of the shuttle to twist before seperating and breaking apart, their fuel adding to the explosion. At this point, the shuttle was still intact, and would have remained intact if these events were the only thing that happened, since, after all, this is a vehicle designed to survive the extremes not only space, but also launch and re-entry. However, another event did happen: A combination of the explosion, and the SRB's twisting, caused the shuttle to suddenly pitch up, subjecting it to extreme wind sheer, like tossing a balsawood glider into a tornado. While the shuttle was designed to withstand forces at shallow-to-moderate angles of attack during descent, the sudden, deep pitching, combined with the fact that the shuttle was moving at almost Mach 2, was far beyond the Challenger's design tolerances and leading the shuttle's sad disintegration on live television.
• The San Bernardino train disaster was a fine example of this. If one of several things had gone differently, it's possible that six people would not have died:
  • First, the superintendent at Lake Minerals Corporation^note  A mining and shipping company based off from Owens Lake, California didn't write the weight of the cargo that the train was hauling down on the BOL form, and since the cargo, trona, which is heavier than coal, was loaded to a point well below where coal would be loaded visually (but to the maximum weight capacity of the hopper cars), SP station clerk Thomas Blare went with a visual inspection and estimated that the cargo was 40% lighter than it actually was.
  • As a result, engineer Frank Holland, working off the wrong figures, underestimated the number of engines he would need, meaning he would not have sufficient braking power for going down the Cajon Pass.
  • Complicating matters was the fact that 4 of the 6 engines had faulty or did not have operational dynamic braking at all. The original leader, SP 7551 at the front and the consist that was named after, was dead to begin with, only having air brakes operational. The third unit, SP 7549 showed traction current but no action in it's dynamics. SP 9340's dynamics operated sporadically and were of limited use. To make matters worse, one more unit at the back (SP 8317) also had no dynamics. This drastically further reduce the braking power the train actually needed. Thus, only SP 8278 as the new leader and SP 7443 in the rear-end had fully operational dynamics.
  • On the way down the pass, when they realized the train was now a runaway, helper engineer Lawrence Hill pulled the emergency brakes, which turned on all the mechanical brakes on the train, but turned off the dynamic brakes,^note Due to the fact that at the time, it was a mandate that dynamic braking would be automatically disabled when the train's brakes are placed in emergency; this was supposed to be as a safety feature to keep the wheels from locking and sliding down the tracks, but in this case, it accelerated the train to dangerous speeds. Since this accident and other accidents involving runaways, today's mandate is that all dynamic brakes must remain functional, even when the train's brakes are in emergency. which kept the train from slowing much.
  • The train rapidly increase speed until it hit a four-degree curve at the bottom of the pass just north of the Highland Avenue overpass, which had a speed limit of 30-40 mph, at a full 110 mph, causing it to fly off the tracks and plunge down the embankment, hitting several houses and killing four as a result.^note  Among the dead were two SP crew members fatally crushed in their units: identified were 35-year-old conductor Everett Crown (found in the nose of the lead unit) and 43-year-old brakeman Allan Riess (found in the cab of the third unit), and two children identified as 10-year-old Jason Thomas and 7-year-old Tyson White, both found buried or crushed in one of their houses under the wrecked cars and spilled potash. In fact, this curve was the major reason the engineers knew they would have to slow down while going down the Cajon Pass, thus their growing panic when they realized their train was a runaway and that a derailment was inevitable.
  • It gets better though: when either during the process of removing the destroyed houses and train or cleaning up the trona that had spilled, some heavy equipment accidentally damaged a fuel pipeline running nearby, and that burst. Calnev, the company who operates the pipeline, did not react to the sudden drop in pressure, and the emergency valves meant to stop flow in cases like this did not trigger. This resulted in a massive fire that burned for seven hours, killing two more people and caused more property damage of $14.3 million.
• The 1988 Gare de Lyon rail accident was another case of this.
  • It all began with a passenger who was unaware that train schedules had recently been changed and that this train no longer stopped at the stop she usually used. When she realized they were passing the stop, she panicked and pulled the emergency brake so she could exit. (Due to the number of intervening factors, she was not held responsible for the accident, although she was fined for misuse of the emergency system.)
  • While trying to reset the emergency brake, the driver and the engineer inadvertently closed a critical valve between the first and second cars, which disconnected the second car and every car behind it from the braking system.
  • As a safety precaution, the brakes were designed to lock if disconnected, preventing the train from moving. However, the driver and engineer failed to recognize the significance of this and believed that the brakes lines were overloaded as a result of the emergency brake activation, a common malfunction. In order to correct the suspected malfunction, the driver and engineer manually released air from the braking system, disabling the safety mechanism and allowing the train to move despite the problem in the brake system.
  • Adding to the confusion, the driver's gauges showed the brake pressure as normal. He was unaware that, with the valve closed, he was only getting brake pressure readings for the first car, not the whole train. There were also no additional indicators to warn him of a problem in the braking system.
  • By the time the train got moving again, they were severely delayed. The train was supposed to make two more stops, but in order to make up some of the lost time, dispatchers instructed the driver to skip the penultimate station, which was on level ground and would have allowed the driver to recognize the failure in enough time to bring the train safely to a stop even with the greatly diminished braking power. Instead, the train proceeded directly to Gare de Lyon, which sat at the bottom of a shallow hill. By the time the driver realized the brake system was malfunctioning, he was already on the graded part of the track, which greatly increased his stopping distance.
  • When he realized the problem, the driver activated an emergency alarm and then called the station and attempted to warn them of the problem, but in his panic, he failed to identify himself or his train, so station controllers were uncertain which train was having the problem. In his panic, he also forgot that he had a backup mechanical brake for exactly this situation; admittedly that type of brake was known to be unreliable (which may be why the driver didn't think of it), so whether activating said brake could have prevented the accident is an open question, but he should have at least tried.
  • Furthermore, after calling in the warning, the driver left the cab in order to help direct passengers to move to the rear. This likely prevented fatalities aboard the inbound train, but it also made it impossible for controllers to reestablish contact with him.
  • The controllers quickly determined it had to be one of four trains, and attempted to call each of the four to determine which one was in difficulty, which could have allowed them to identify the train by process of elimination even with the train's driver not responding. However, the activation of the emergency system had gone out to all the trains, and a flood of calls inquiring as to the nature of the problem prevented them from making the outgoing calls in a timely manner.
  • According to the original programming, the inbound train was (as any train would be) supposed to be routed to an empty platform. Crashing into the empty platform would have probably wrecked the train, but with all the passengers moved to the rearmost car, there would likely have been no serious injuries (as there weren't aboard that train in the wreck that ultimately ensued). However, the emergency system overrode that programming, sending the inbound train to the platform directly ahead, where a fully-loaded outbound train had been waiting to depart.
  • At this point, the disaster is mitigated slightly by the driver of the outbound train, André Tanguy, who sees the train coming at them and frantically orders his passengers to evacuate. But while some lives are unquestionably saved by his actions, there are just too many people onboard and not enough time for all of them to get off safely. With the evacuation still in progress, the inbound train slams into the outbound train, killing 56 people aboard the outbound train (including Tanguy, who refused to leave his post so he could continue to call out the evacuation warning over the PA; he was most likely the first to die when the train careened into his cab, killing him instantly).
• In 1998, a single wheel failure led to a horrific single-train accident in Eschede, Germany. This accident is currently the worst high-speed train disaster worldwide.
  • The train had a two-piece wheel design, known as a resilient wheel, which was typically only used on trams/streetcars, and had been added to the trains in question because solid wheels typically used on heavy-rail trains caused excessive vibrations, which customers weren't fond of. The resilient wheel had not been tested for reliability at high speeds, all necessary data were just theoretically calculated.
  • Some reports from tram operator companies went in, stating that the new wheels weren't able to safely drive as much as determined and needed to be replaced sooner. This is because fractures could also form on the inside of the outer rim and the wheel, but the Deutsche Bahn lacked fitting equipment to detect such cracks due to some previous false positives, and thus didn't care.
  • The outer rim of one of said wheels fractures and unwinds from the wheel, puncturing the front passenger car and leaving the other end sticking out the bottom. A passenger, who had been riding with his family in the compartment of the front car where the wheel rim penetrated, goes to find the train manager, but Deutsche Bahn policy at the time requires staff to make a judgement on whether the emergency brake should be pulled. However, the manager doesn't have any authority on pulling the brake lever either, as he is not a driver nor an engineer and simply a service employee.
  • Just as the train manager and passenger arrive to investigate the damage, the train passes over a switch in the track. The hanging piece of metal catches on a check rail that operates as part of the switch mechanism, pulling that car, and by extension the one behind it, off the track.
  • As the first two cars derail and coast partially off the rails, the straying wheels bump the switch rails into the open position. This causes a torquing force to be applied to the third car that swings it out sideways. By terrible coincidence, this switch operates in close proximity to a concrete highway overpass, and the swinging motion of the third car sends it right into the support pillars for the overpass, knocking them out and critically compromising the bridge's structure.
  • The violent motion of the third car also pulls the fourth car from the tracks. It rolls up onto an embankment where two highway workers are unluckily working at the time; both are killed instantly.
  • While the first four cars and the front power car clear the overpass, the rest of the train is not so lucky. The overpass collapses, crushing part of the fifth car and the entirety of the sixth car so severely that the resultant wreckage was later determined to be about six inches high; anyone in those sections would have been killed instantly. The front half of the fifth car is spared from a direct impact with the concrete, but the force of having the rear part of the car crushed and torn off is enough to cause serious injury and death even in the part that was left intact.
  • The remaining six passenger cars and the rear power car are still moving at high speed and have nowhere to go but into the massive pile of concrete. The cars jackknife and plow into the pile one by one with crushing force. Including the two highway workers, 101 people are killed, most of them in the fifth through twelfth cars.
  • Rescuers were hampered in their attempts to get into the derailed train because of the design of both the framework and the pressure-proof windows, the latter of which were replaced with windows with predetermined breaking seams in the aftermath of the accident.
• The Big Bayou Canot rail accident qualifies:
  • The railroad in charge of maintaining of the bridge, CSX, had the swing span acting as a fixed span. To their detriment, it had been built as a swing during the 1940s, but they maintained it as a fixed span due to the waterways being difficult to navigate.
  • The railroad failed to light the bridge in any way.
  • The railroad failed to secure the swing span against unintended movement.
  • The railroad also had the rails contiously welded. Had the rails severed, the signals would have indicated a problem ahead, giving the engineer time to either stop the train or slow down the train to minimize the damage done.
  • The Sunset Limited was delayed by half an hour due to an unscheduled repair on a malfunctioning air conditioner unit and a toilet in New Orleans, LA. Had they not had to repair the toilet and AC, the train would've missed the accident by almost 20 minutes.
  • The weather was foggy at the time of the accident, which caused the tugboat pilot to become disoriented and veer into a waterway never intended for use by craft as big as a tugboat with barges.
  • The tug boat pilot was not trained to read any radar, and the tug boat did not have maps, a compass or charts of the local waterways.
• The Dutchman's Curve Train Wreck of 1918, the worst disaster on US rails, was a "long, thin chain of events" as described by Trains Magazine. Here's what happened leading up to it.
  • Two trains of the Nashville Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad, the #1 and #4, were scheduled along the same route. The #4 was ordered to hold in the station until #1 arrived, as the stretch of track leading out of Nashville was an unsignaled, single-track main with no room to pass.
  • 7 minutes had passed past departure time, and #4 was still holding position. Then the conductor noticed another train passing, thinking it to be #1. He informed the engineer, who proceeded with the train. The problem was that train wasn't #1—it was a switcher passing with an empty train from the yards—but the conductor was too busy checking passengers in during a crowded day to notice.
  • The disaster might have been prevented when the yardmaster at Shops, the last junction before switching to signal track, noticed #4 leaving without verifying #1 had passed. Engineers were required to make such confirmations before leaving the yards, but they had been disregarding it without consequence. The yardmaster tried to get them to stop, but the train had passed without hearing the warning whistle. Only a few minutes later, both #4 and #1 had collided at a combined speed of 100 mph, killing 101 people.
• The infamous wreck of Casey Jones might have been a simple run that night, had Murphy's law not reared its ugly head.
  • Casey wasn't even supposed to work that night. He had just gotten off his shift and was heading home, but the #1 train to Canton had arrived several hours late, and Sam Tate, the regular man, was out sick. That meant Casey and his fireman, Simm Webb, had to fill in for him aboard #382, the train's locomotive.
  • It was a rainy night on an unsignaled stretch of signal track, with six other trains scheduled for that evening. The #25 was running ahead of #1, and he would have to take siding at Goodman to let the higher-priority #2 pass. Otherwise, most of his meets would be at Vaughn, Mississippi, where two freights and a double-section train would hold siding to let him pass. The problem was that the freights—#73 and #82—were too big to fight into the siding at Vaughn, so they had to couple end to end and snake around each train that passed them, with just a few cars hanging out of the end of the siding.
  • But perhaps the biggest detriment was Casey himself. He had already built himself a reputation as a fine engineer, but he was also known as a risk taker, often pushing his train to dangerous speeds to make up time whenever they were running late. On this night, Casey was hellbent on making sure #1 made it to Canton on time, and he had already made up several minutes by the time the disaster occurred. But he was pushing himself so hard, he never considered fate might have other ideas. Just before he got to Vaughn, the freights had snaked outward onto the main track where Casey was barreling towards in order to let the two sections of #26 back into the station to make room for #1. They were planning moving to block the north switch to let Casey by, then maneuver back to the south, but before they could, an air hose broke and sent the train into emergency. They set a torpedo warning Casey, who was moving too fast to stop in time. His fireman jumped, (and indeed, Casey's last known words were to him, shouting, "Jump, Sim, jump!") while Casey valiantly stayed aboard to stop his train, only to smash into the rear of the stalled freights; to his credit, he managed to slow his passenger train down from a blistering 75 mph to a relatively slower 35 mph before the collision occurred. Casey was the only fatality that night, but his efforts saved his passengers, and he was rewarded for his service by being hailed an American folk legend.
• In January 2022, a powerful snow storm in Virginia left motorists stranded on a fifty mile stretch of Interstate 95 for over a day and a half, including US Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va). How did this happen? Despite having over a day's warning at how bad the storm could be, the Virginia Department of Transporation (VDOT) had decided to not pretreat the roads for the snow and ice as there would be rain before the changeover to snow, running the risk of the treatment being washed away by the rain and passing cars. With the roads untreated, snow and ice began to build, leading to six tractor trailers blocking the road. Even more, the snow falling at a rate of 2 inches/hour meant that traversing the hill-filled area was impossible. Making matters worse, power outages around those areas knocked out VDOT's webcams around those areas, meaning they had no idea such problems. The only inklings that things were terrible were Twitter posts asking for where any one was, that they were stuck there with low food, water and gas. This lead to at least one lawmaker vowing to make a law to make sure nothing like that never happened again.
• One notable rail disaster that's still buried under Richmond, Virginia, is Chesapeake and Ohio #231, a 4-4-0 locomotive that remains trapped in the abandoned Church Hill Tunnel after almost a century. How it got there was a long, thin chain of events that started at the end of the Civil War—a disaster of which plagues Richmond to this very day.
  • During the Reconstruction Era, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) elected to dig a rail tunnel under Church Hill Street to increase coal traffic out of the area. Where the railroad faltered was that the tunnel was dug out under a marl deposit, which was more prone to absorbing and discharging water. Numerous cave-ins occurred during construction, and the area was frequently prone to flooding.
  • Eventually, C&O gave up on the tunnel, constructing a new line out of the area to reach the Alleghenies, and bypassed Church Hill in 1901. That might have been the end of things, but someone in management decided to reopen the troublesome area in 1925 so they could get a few extra trains through. Plans called for widening the tunnel to accommodate larger rail cars and locomotives. Alas, it seemed nature was not pleased about being disturbed.
  • On October 2, 1925, a larger area near the western end of the tunnel collapsed while #231 was passing through, pulling ten flat cars. Several men died, the boiler ruptured, the engineer was immediately killed, and the fireman was severely burned and died the next day. Workers attempted to recover a few of the bodies, but the area was so unstable that C&O gave up completely and sealed off the west end of the tunnel and a portion between the collapsed area and the east end. It was used a wye for a few years at the unsealed end, but that was eventually abandoned, and the tunnel was left to rot. A local legend reemerged after the disaster, claiming the burnt fireman was really "The Richmond Vampire," who caused the collapse as punishment for being disturbed.
  • Today, the tunnel still sits as a threat to Richmond. Sinkholes have formed, a few buildings on Church Hill have collapsed due to the water damage wreaked by the tunnel, and even a few buildings farther from it have been victims. Numerous attempts have been made to extract the train and the bodies (if there's much left after nearly a century of rot), but the increased danger of extraction has made that an almost impossible task. While there are still those hoping to see if #231 will finally escape the prison of Church Hill Tunnel, its threat will loom over Richmond for a long time.
• Torre del Bierzo, the worst rail disaster in Spain's history, might have been avoided had wiser heads prevailed on a mail-and-express train that was running several hours late.
  • The train in question was being doubleheaded by 4-8-0s, but they were well behind schedule due to braking issues. One of the engines had to be left behind when a hotbox broke out, delaying the train further. And yet, despite the brakes clearly not working, they decided to continue on their journey anyway. What happened next is this trope in full force.
  • After the train's brakes stopped working, the line ahead tried putting sleepers on the tracks to slow it down. Unfortunately, it was going so fast, it failed to do anything.
  • At Tunnel 20, a shunting engine was traveling backwards when it heard about the runaway barreling toward it. While it made a valiant effort to get out of the way, the mail-and-express smashed into it head on. And if that wasn't enough, the wreck severed the cables for the signals, meaning an oncoming coal train was given a false clear to enter the tunnel and smashed into the wreck at full force. And then it caught on fire, burning the survivors inside the tunnel alive. It got so bad, the crews couldn't get inside for several days, and when they did, most of the bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
• Quintinshill is to Great Britain what Dutchman's Curve is to Americans—the deadliest train wreck on home soil. Occurring as World War I was well underway, the network had a lot of problems brewing that wound up costing a lot of lives thanks to a very bad habit its crewman had gotten into.
  • The signalmen at Quintinshill had two men on duty—a night shifter and a day shifter—who would come in to relieve the other when it came time to punch out at 6:00 AM. However, in order to let the morning shifter get an extra half-hour of sleep and come to work on the local passing that way, it was practiced where the night shifter would write all scheduled train movements through the area on a piece of paper, pass it to his replacement, and said replacement would copy them into the logbook so no one would find out. This practice was not only highly illegal, but very dangerous due to the risk of misplacing trains. George Meakin, that day's night shifter, was engaging in this practice so his replacement, James Tinsley, could take over without anyone noticing.
  • The junction at Quintinshill consisted of an Up Line, a Down Line, and two passing sidings on both lines. Unfortunately, the network was experiencing a huge uptick in traffic due to the war, so it wasn't uncommon for the siding on the Down Line to be occupied, forcing trains that needed to let higher priority ones traveling in the same direction move onto the Up Line, and into the path of oncoming trains heading that way, until the lower line was clear. The day the accident occurred, the Down Line's siding was occupied by a goods train from Carlisle, and both northbound expresses were running late. On top of that, the Up Line had an empty coal wagon train and a special troop train heading towards Carlisle.
  • Meakin had the goods train parked in the Down Line siding and cleared the empty coal train to head into the Up Line siding, while also clearing the first express train (which Tinsley was riding on) to maneuver onto the Up Line to make room for the train behind it. However, though he alerted the signalmen at Kirkpatrick that the coal train had cleared the main line, he neglected to alert of the first express train's presence on the Up Line. He also neglected to put a lever box on the signals to make sure the Up Line wasn't cleared, with both men forgetting of the train's presence.
  • Worst yet, the fireman on the express had neglected to ensure Tinsley was properly alerted of the train's presence on the Up Line, as, though he reminded him of the train's presence, was doing so at a moment where Tinsley was writing the logbook information his coworker had written down elsewhere, and failed to take notice of a lack of a lever box. Other staffers on both the express and goods train were also violating company policy by hanging out in the signal box longer than necessary, and thus neither train was properly protected.
  • With the express train completely forgotten about, the Southbound troop train was given clearance to proceed. At 6:49, it smashed into the stopped express head on. Only a few minutes later, the other express on the down line smashed into the wreckage blocking its path, and thanks to older rolling stock being used that day, a fire broke out that made rescue efforts that much more difficult. By the end of it, 226 died, and 246 were injured.
  • An inquiry into the accident found both signalman guilty of culpable homicide and breach of duty, and the two were sentenced to prison. In later years, however, the BBC charged that the railway itself was the guilty party, running wartime traffic to the point it was putting such a strain on the network and its men, and that the signalmen were overworked as a result.
• In a similar vein, there was Harrow & Wealdstone in 1952.
  • On a very foggy morning, a commuter service from Tring to Euston arrived at Harrow & Wealdstone station, taking the fast line as it was due to run non-stop to Euston after making its booked stop. The train was delayed by 7 minutes due to fog, and was busier than usual as the previous service had been cancelled.
  • Fast coming up behind was an overnight sleeper train from Perth to Euston. Normally, it would have been long gone by the time the commuter service stopped at Harrow, but it too had been delayed by the fog and was running 80 minutes late.
  • As the fast line was occupied, all signals were at danger. However, the driver of the express missed the signals (there was no advance warning system outside of the former Great Western Railway) and the express smashed into the commuter train.
  • To make things worse, the wreckage spilled onto the adjacent line right into the path of an express to Liverpool, which had already passed clear signals at speed. Ultimately, 112 people died and 340 were injured.
• The most notable plane crash caused by Disaster Dominoes and gross miscommunication is also the deadliest in aviation history - the March 27, 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, when KLM Flight 4805, a diverted Boeing 747-200, tried to take off on a foggy runway at Los Rodeos Airport while Pan Am Flight 1736, a Boeing 747-100 named "Clipper Victor" (and the aircraft that flew the 747's inaugural commercial flight) was taxiing on it. The two planes collided, resulting in the deaths of all 234 passengers and 14 crew on the KLM, as well as 9 of the 16 crew and 326 of the 380 passengers on the Pan Am. The total number of fatalities was 583, the worst non-terrorism related plane crash of all time. But the kicker regarding this incident is that if just one of the stages leading to the disaster had been avoided, it would not have happened. To elaborate:
  • These two planes were among several that had been diverted to Tenerife when a bomb planted by the separatist Canary Islands Independence Movement exploded at Las Palmas Airport on the island of Gran Canaria. The threat of a second bomb shut down that airport, causing incoming flights to be diverted to the much smaller Los Rodeos airport, which was not designed to handle nearly that many flights and was packed to the brim. The airport had only one runway and one major taxiway running parallel to it, with four short taxiways connecting the two, and was just barely big enough to accommodate the massive Boeing 747's having to divert to them. The diverted airplanes took up so much space that they were having to park on the long taxiway, making it unavailable for the purpose of taxiing. Instead, departing aircraft needed to taxi along the runway to position themselves for takeoff, a procedure known as a back-taxi or backtrack.
  • The Los Rodeos field is located in a caldera, and is susceptible to deep fogs. A thick fog descended on the field that day.
  • Eventually, Las Palmas reopened and planes began to clear out for the KLM and Pan Am to be able to take off. The Pan Am plane was ready to depart from Tenerife, but access to the runway was being obstructed by the KLM plane and a refueling vehicle; the KLM captain had decided to fully refuel at Los Rodeos instead of Las Palmas, apparently to save time. The Pan Am aircraft was unable to maneuver around the refueling KLM, in order to reach the runway for takeoff, due to a lack of safe clearance between the two planes, which was just 12 feet. The refueling took about 35 minutes, after which the passengers were brought back to the aircraft.
  • The search for a missing Dutch family of four, who had not returned to the waiting KLM plane, delayed the flight even further. The delays caused by the KLM refueling meant that by the time the KLM was ready to leave, the entire airport was blanketed in fog so thick that the Pam Am crew described looking out the front windscreen and not being able to see the tarmac, making verbal communication that much more critical.
  • The Los Rodeos field did not have a ground radar. The fog meant the tower had no idea where the aircraft were as they did not have visual contact to them.
  • Los Rodeos airport is at 633 meters (2,077 ft) above sea level, which gives rise to weather conditions that differ from those at many other airports. Clouds at 600 m (2,000 ft) above ground level at the nearby coast are at ground level at Los Rodeos. Drifting clouds of different densities cause wildly varying visibilities, from unhindered at one moment to below the minimums the next. The collision took place in a high-density cloud. The Pan Am crew found themselves in poor and rapidly deteriorating visibility almost as soon as they entered the runway. According to the ALPA report, as the Pan Am aircraft taxied to the runway, the visibility was about 500 m (1,600 ft). Shortly after they turned onto the runway it decreased to less than 100 m (330 ft).
  • The KLM Boeing 747 was directed by the tower to taxi all the way down the runway, then do a 180-degree turn (called a "back-taxi" turn) to line up for takeoff. While it was doing its turn, the Pan Am Boeing 747 was directed to taxi behind the KLM, then turn off at an exit partway down the runway. It is here that several miscommunications caused the disaster:
    • The first was an unclear direction about which exit the Pan Am plane was to take. Its pilot, Victor Grubbs, was instructed to take the third exit to the taxiway. This could have referred to exit C3 or may have meant for the Pan Am to turn upon reaching the third exit from where it was when the instruction was issued, that would have meant C4 (the controller even counted off "one...two...three, third exit", when asked for a clarification, which clarified absolutely nothing). There is still debate over which exit the controller even meant, but seeing as how exit C3 would have required the pilots to take the plane through a pair of impractically tight 135 degree turns (one left, then right), they continued on to C4 (a much simpler pair of 55 degree turns).
    • Additionally, it is unclear whether the Pan Am flight crew ever positively identified exit C3 as such; it is quite possible that, due to the fog, they either never saw C3 at all, or did not recognize it as an exit, or that they overlooked one of the earlier exits and that threw their count off. If any of these was the case, then exit C4 would have appeared to in fact be C3 - especially for a flight crew unfamiliar with the airport and its layout.
    • When the KLM completed its turnaround, the Pan Am was still on the runway, but the KLM crew could not see them due to the fog. In the conversation that followed, accents, language barriers, and a lack of standardized terminology prevented either side from being clearly understood. As a result, two different meanings were drawn from the conversation; the controller believed the KLM was standing by for clearance, while the KLM pilot believed the clearance had already been given.
    • Due to a problem with the communication system, the KLM crew missed two critical messages: the controller telling them to stand by for takeoff and the Pan Am crew trying to warn them that they were still on the runway. Either message by itself would have gotten the KLM pilots to stop, but the radio system was not designed to handle multiple inputs at the same time, and because the transmissions were simultaneous, neither one of them was able to go through, with the KLM only getting the first part of the controller's message ("Okay..." from "Okay...stand by for takeoff. I will call you.") followed by a heterodyne (a loud "screech!" sound which overcomes all signals). It was shortly thereafter that the KLM pilot decided to begin his takeoff roll, with horrific results.
    • The cause of the crash was noted by investigative agencies as the KLM's pilot decided to take off without clearance. Analysis of the black box showed that the KLM crew was not entirely sure they had clearance. The tower had instructed the plane to hold for takeoff clearance, then began giving post-takeoff flight instructions, but never actually cleared the plane to take off as the Pan Am plane had still not yet cleared the runway. Post-crash investigations suggested that the junior officers were aware to some degree that something wasn't quite right, but they were reluctant to contradict Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten (who was a highly regarded pilot and instructor, and was in fact recommended by KLM for the crash investigation until they found out he was the pilot involved in the crash); when they did speak up at all, their statements were not direct or forceful enough for the captain to recognize what they were trying to tell him. This has led to the development of Crew Resource Management, a management system that encourages consensus thinking over top-down responsibility, and teaches junior officers how to speak up and make themselves understood in these situations.
    • It is also suggested that the captain of the KLM flight was also distracted by a Dutch law that limited how much time one was allowed to work. While initially easy to figure out, a change in December 1976 threw their measuring scale off kilter, thus the captain was trying to err on the side of caution lest he and his company would get into trouble.
  • The 45 tonnes of fuel (and thus additional weight), which captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten took in the aircraft, increased the takeoff distance and made it impossible to rise over the Pan Am when taking off; it also increased severity of the fire, which led ultimately to the deaths of all those on board the KLM jumbo. Without the extra fuel, the KLM jumbo could have completed the takeoff run and climbed over the Pan Am (albeit with a clearance of one or two metres).
  • At this point, one of the dominos tips away from disaster. Seeing the KLM approaching, Grubbs attempted to steer his plane onto the median and out of the way of the KLM. While there was not enough time for him to pull it off, it did save several lives aboard his plane.
  • Upon realizing that the Pan Am was on the runway, Veldhuyzen van Zanten panicked and tried to lift off early despite having insufficient speed, which only caused the plane's tail to drag across the runway, slowing the plane and increasing the distance of the takeoff run. As counterintuitive as it seems, Veldhuyzen van Zanten would have been better served to continue with a normal takeoff roll despite the situation, as this might have allowed him to get the plane in the air in time to avoid the accident.
  • To add an insult to injury, the Spanish crew in the tower was listening to a football game on the radio. The Dutch side of the investigation suggested this may have played a part since some of it could be heard on the cockpit voice recorders, suggesting that ATC inadvertently played part of the radio broadcast to the planes, distracting their crews.
  • The crash investigation highlighted communication errors to the point where the entire industry was reformed. Now when controllers give instructions, pilots are required to reply by repeating the instructions given (i.e. "Taxi to runway 123 and hold", "Roger, taxiing to runway 123 and holding"). Additionally, the word take-off is only used when giving explicit clearance to take-off or taking away said clearance; prior to that, the word "departure" is used. Additionally, an ATC clearance given to an aircraft already lined-up on the runway must be prefixed with the instruction "hold position".
• The 1951 wreck of "The Broker" in Woodbridge, NJ remains the deadliest railroad accident in the state of New Jersey, and the deadliest rail disaster in the United States during peacetime, all caused by the tragic combination of a railroad strike, a distracted engineer, bad visibility, poor rolling stock maintenance, and a disturbing lack of railroad safety protocols.
  • In 1951, Pennsylvania Railroad operated two express trains along the New Jersey Coast Line: the Broker and the Banker, named after the route's most common commuters heading to and from their long days of work on Wall Street and the financial districts of Jersey City. The Coast Line was also utilized by the Jersey Central Railroad, which followed a similar route as the express.
  • At the time, the JCR was in the midst of a strike, which meant, of course, it wasn't conducting its services for passengers. PRR pounced on the opportunity by adding extra cars to the Broker (to a total of eleven cars, including a club car at the very end of the train for exclusive membership holders, totaling over twice its usual length) to allow for more passengers. On the night of February 6, the Broker was carrying over 1,000 passengers, and the cars were crowded to the point of standing room only. As one can imagine, the night was already becoming a recipe for disaster.
  • In the town of Woodbridge, New Jersey, construction was ongoing on the New Jersey Turnpike, which the Coast Line intersected. While normally the Coast Line ran along a raised embankment through the city, a "shoofly" (essentially a temporary stretch of track meant to divert trains around construction sites) redirected trains over a temporary trestle spanning the Turnpike and another spanning the abutment for Legion Place which intersected the embankment, so that the construction workers could work on the Turnpike and the main railroad line unhindered. The trestle itself did not have the rails physically attached to it, instead having them laid in shallow grooves on top of the structure, to better facilitate building and adjusting it as needed for the ongoing construction project.
  • While the Broker was still in the railroad yard, one of the yard workers noticed an alarming amount of movement between the frame of the train's tender and the main bunker which held the water and coal. Closer inspection showed that the bolts securing the tender's water tank to its frame were very loose, and the pieces of wood which were meant to reinforce and cushion the water tank's movement were almost completely rotted away, which severely compromised the structure of the entire tender. This, along with the report that the tender's water tank was missing the baffles meant to stop water from sloshing against the sides in a turn, was reported to the railyard, but nothing was done to replace or repair the tender. That being said, the tender was technically still in a decent enough condition that it could run with an express train with no major issues, as long as, you know, something like a derailment didn't happen to it.
  • Naturally, the shoofly was not made for trains travelling at express speeds, and included several sharp turns as the track swerved onto the temporary trestle near Fulton Street, so the PRR put out a verbal notification that trains travelling through Woodbridge were to go no faster than 25 miles per hour. This notice was given to any and all engineers that were travelling the route, but, according to PRR's policies at the time, they felt that this was sufficient...so no effort was made to put up even a single warning light on the approach to the shoofly.
  • The engineer that night was Joseph Fitzsimmons, a veteran of many years for PRR. He, as with all other engineers for the area, was notified of the restriction in late January, and reminded again by his conductor John Bishop, but that night he had a lot on his mind; on top of the restriction, he was also dealing with a packed train due to the JCR strike and personal issues — namely his wife whom had just gotten released from the hospital for a heart attack, which possibly gave him motivation to get home as soon as he could.
  • At approximately 5:43 PM, the Broker steamed into a Woodbridge shrouded in an early-dusk mist, severely reducing visibility. The tracks into the city had a slight upwards incline, so Fitzsimmons put on the throttle so the train wouldn't ground to a stop, but, as he recounts it, he was looking out for a yellow signal light to indicate when he was supposed to slow down for the shoofly....which was never there in the first place, because, again, PRR felt that a visual warning signal was not necessary because the speed restriction was passed along verbally.
  • Instead, what he saw rushing out of the fog towards him was the sharp right, then left turn of the diversion onto the temporary trestle. Fitzsimmons slammed on the brakes, but by then the train was estimated to be travelling around fifty miles per hour, and there was no slowing down before the big K4 locomotive hit the shoofly.
  • In the passenger compartment, Conductor Bishop also noticed the excessive speed, but due to the car being packed with passengers, he could not reach the emergency brake in time. By this point the disaster was past the point of no return.
  • The Broker hit the first sharp right, then almost immediately went into the sharp left, which resulted in several things happening at once:
    • Firstly, the passengers were thrown against the left wall, then the right as the Broker slammed through the shoofly at more than twice the recommended speed. In the tender, the same thing happened to the remaining water in the water tank, due to the lack of baffles, and the tender twisted and tipped on its side. Interestingly, the Broker's K4 locomotive actually made it around the turn, with the tender itself being the first car to derail.
    • The first car pushed into the derailing tender, further forcing it off the tracks....and then the tender's frame snapped, essentially tearing it in half and twisting to the point that it actually dragged the locomotive itself off the rails with it.
    • Underneath the Broker, the rails on the temporary trestle over Legion Place shifted, due to not being secured to the tracks, which resulted in the following cars of the train leaving the tracks as well, smashing into the abutment and each other as they toppled off the embankment onto the street below. Eight of the eleven cars came off the tracks, but it was in cars 3 and 4 where the bulk of the deaths occurred; the two cars had smashed into each other, and into the Legion Place abutment and were all but torn apart in the crash, to the point that Car 4 was taken away in pieces because of the damage it sustained.
  • Eighty five people, including Fitzsimmons' fireman, died as a result of the incident. Fitzsimmons himself was severely injured, but survived, and was questioned extensively afterwards, both by investigators and the press; he initially claimed he'd been maintaining the 25 mph limit, but eyewitness accounts refuted that; it was only later that he admitted to maintaining speed as he looked for the yellow warning light which, as mentioned, did not exist due to, once more, PRR's policy stating one was not needed for the track diversion when the warning was passed verbally.
  • Fitzsimmons was later exonerated of wrongdoing, but he was a broken man, both physically and emotionally, from the accident, and never operated another locomotive again. To add a cap to the tragedy, the stress of the incident, and the resulting public attention, gave his wife another heart attack, one which she sadly didn't recover from, dying six years to the day from the disaster in 1957. Fitzsimmons himself maintained his story, and his innocence, to his death in 1976. For their part, PRR tried to defend their policy that track warnings issued verbally did not need physical signaling, but changed their tune after the NTSB released a report of the crash, which also cleared them of wrongdoing but did more or less call their signals policy moronic (in more polite terms). Not long after, the policy changed so that any potential track hazards were indicated with visual signals, regardless of whether the engineers had been verbally informed.
  • As it is, the question of just who carries the blame for the accident is debated even to today — both official investigations put it on Fitzsimmons due to his "excessive speed" upon approaching Woodbridge, though, as mentioned by the NTSB report above, many questions were raised regarding PRR's policy of not requiring visual warning signals if the warning was passed verbally, especially in light of the weather at the time causing poor visibility, meaning that even if Fitzsimmons did have the warning on his mind at the time, he may not have been able to act on it if there was no way for him to tell where he, and by extension the potential railway hazard, actually was. There was also concerned raised about the poor condition of the tender, namely the loose fittings and lack of baffles that possibly could have prevented it from fully derailing as the Broker slammed through the curve, compounded by the report that the locomotive itself actually successfully navigated the curve before the tender's derailment dragged it off the tracks. Ultimately, any one of the factors that night could have caused a major incident by themselves, but when they add up in the way that they did, it creates a massive and tragic catastrophe which cost the lives of more than eighty people and injured hundreds more.
• Various modern postmortems of the fatal Hindenburg explosion in 1937 have attributed the disaster to a combination of poor engineering, shoddy construction, and bad weather.
  1. The decision to use hydrogen as the lift gas instead of helium was motivated by economics: it was much easier to get hydrogen in 1930s Germany than helium, and it can lift a greater mass, meaning a smaller dirigible envelope for the same capacity. Also, pure hydrogen cannot burn unless it is mixed with oxygen. Except...
  2. Difficulties in construction led to the envelope's fabric skin not being stretched as tightly over the skeleton as designed, meaning it vibrated in the wind more readily. Knowing this would cause excessive drag, the builders attempted to remedy this with extra coats of metallic paint, but didn't realize until before the 1937 flying season that the vibration was causing a gas cell to rub against the structure, which they attempted to repair lest it spring a leak.
  3. The extra paint led to a problem discovered in Nova's "Hindenburg: The New Evidence": aircraft as a general rule tend to collect a static charge in flight, and there was no direct electrical connection between the superstructure and the metal-painted envelope skin, which caused the entire envelope to effectively become a gigantic air-gapped capacitor.
  4. During the trip across the Atlantic, the Hindenburg caught a headwind that delayed its arrival, causing it to arrive during a light rain shower, and the damaged gas cell began leaking. The rain dampened the landing ropes, which caused them to become conductive and ground the collected electrical charge, generating sparks between the skin and the structure that ignited the leaking hydrogen gas once it mixed with air. And did we mention that the metallic paint was also highly flammable?

War

• In 2010, a Tunisian set himself on fire as a protest. This led to the fall of the Tunisian dictatorship... which led to the fall of three other Arab dictatorships as well as three civil wars, which led to increasing religious fundamentalism, which led to wars, which led to refugees who fled to Europe, which led to the rise of the far-right nationalism around the world, which led to increased security and a generally repressive global environment. It's a wonder how many impacts the suicide of a single person could do.
• The Campaign of 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War resulted in a resounding defeat for the Russian Empire's Baltic Fleet and significantly undermined Tsar Nicholas' hold over Russia, contributing to the revolutionary fervor that would eventually lead to his ouster a decade later. The sequence of events that led to that defeat were numerous and sometimes ridiculous, as detailed here.
  • After losing Russia's Eastern Fleet during the initial Japanese attack on Port Arthur (in present-day Liaoning, China), Nicholas approved a plan that called for the Baltic Fleet to be deployed to fight Japan. The thing is, much of the Baltic Fleet was extremely inexperienced in naval combat due to the sailors not coming from Russia's coastal regions and being too iced in to receive proper training.
  • The combat losses in Asia meant that all the trained artillerymen of the Baltic Fleet were transferred to the Army and sent to the front line. They had been replaced with fresh conscripts, many of them being illiterate. As one officer put it: "One half of this lot needed to be taught everything, because they know nothing. And the other half also needed to learn everything, because they had forgotten everything."
  • The officers themselves were not the brightest lot either. Being assigned to the Baltic Fleet was seen as some kind of a punishment (compared to warm climate of the Black Sea) and many of them would often sneak off to literally get drunk on shore.
  • When the fleet initially left its docks at Saint Petersburg, one of the ships lost its anchor. While the anchor was being retrieved, a destroyer ran into another ship, necessitating its return to port for repairs.
  • More generally, the Russians had no time to give their ships a shakedown cruise (a preliminary test run to find and repair any maintenance problems), leading to constant maintenance problems. The ships also became heavily fouled with marine life like plants and algae, which reduced their overall speed.
  • On their way out of European waters, the Russian sailors (convinced that they were being confronted by Japanese torpedo boats) got the fleet involved in a series of friendly fire incidents with civilian fishing vessels, damaging two of their own cruisers in one attack. This eventually resulted in the British closing the Suez Canal to the fleet, forcing the Russians to sail around Africa, while twenty-eight British battleships shadowed the Russians until they passed Portugal. And even then, one Russian ship strayed from the fleet and ended up firing 300 shells at European merchant ships.
  • Eventually the Second Pacific squadron left European waters and docked in the port of Tangier, Morocco. There one of the ships managed to cut the telegraph cable that ran under the harbor, effectively cutting off all communication with Europe for a few days.
  • The next port of call was Dakar, Senegal, on 12 November 1904. Eleven German colliers were waiting as the fleet arrived. Vice Admiral Zinovy Rozhdestvensky ordered each ship to load additional coal. In the case of the Oryol and her sister ships, their coal bunkers would hold 1100 tons but were ordered to load an extra 600. As this began the French authorities in Dakar informed Rozhdestvensky to stop resupply until they got permission from their government. The Admiral ignored them and continued the task at hand. Even at night the temperature was 25 deg C, and loading coal during the day saw many sailors drop from heat stress. By the time the French government sent word that the fleet was not to load supplies it was too late. Coal was stacked in every spare space in the fleet and the ships' crews had tried to clean up the mess. By 15 November the fleet was underway again but the strain of the voyage, the tenuous supply situation and the tropical heat were taking their toll. Many of the crew were falling ill from the coal dust. The stokers especially were haggard from the heat and noise of the engine rooms.
  • Near the coast of Angola, the fleet was caught by a tropical storm lasting for two days. The storm washed the coal dust away but made the sailors seasick. Once emerging off the storm, the supply ship Kamchatka sent the fleet a message: "Any Japanese torpedo boats observed?"
  • As the Squadon approached Cape Town, Rozhdestvensky got word that Captain Nicolas Klado (whom Rozhdestvensky had earlier sacked for insubordination) was organizing reinforcements in the form of the "Third Pacific Squadron" to meet up with the Second—which was the last thing Rozhdestvensky wanted to hear. This Third Squadron was made up of vessels that really had no business sailing around the world: they were old, antiquated, in state of disrepair and manned with fresh crews straight from boot camp. In other words, more a liability than an asset on fighting the Japanese. Seeing that many of those ships, if not all, were the exact definition of "obsolete", Rozhdestvensky would refuse to give any updates to his location or progress to Klado as long as he could.
  • Upon arrival in Madagascar, the sailors, suffering from low morale, tried to raise their own spirits by purchasing exotic pets during shore visits. This led to the animals often roaming free on deck, including a venomous snake which bit a commanding officer. The cruiser Aurora probably had it worst, as the vessel was so overrun with predatory creatures (including a crocodile) that the crew was too afraid to sleep, as they knew many of the animals wandered the ship looking for a snack and the healthy supply of rats on board were not enough. It was not long before the Second Pacific Squadron soon became the world’s largest floating zoo. Which all things considered was a huge upgrade since just week before it was the world's largest floating coal dust air bomb.
  • Rozhdestvensky fell ill in Madagascar and left no one to take command. This allowed the sailors to take a prolonged shore leave, which led to many of them also contracting tropical illnesses like dengue fever and malaria and some of them dying. At one of the funerals for the deceased crewmen, a gun salute was arranged with live shells which led to yet another friendly fire incident. One of the officers purchased over 2,000 cigarettes while on a shore visit, not realizing until too late that the cigarettes were filled with opium.
  • But it wasn't just physical illnesses which began to affect the sailors at this time. The crews got stir crazy from being out at sea for so long and began to exhibit religious fanaticism, which led to mutiny on at least one ship; the sailors involved were sent back home.
  • News that Port Arthur had fallen wasn't exactly a morale-raising event. As they heard they were now heading to Vladivostok (which meant sailing though the Sea of Japan), everyone was now convinced they had been sent on a suicide mission.
  • When Rozhdestvensky ordered a gunnery practice, none of his destroyers could land a hit on their target. One of them did, however, manage to hit the Russian ship that was towing the target. Furthermore, one jammed torpedo swung off-target and caused other Russian ships to scatter in panic.
  • Meanwhile, the aforementioned "Third Pacific Squadron", under the command of Rear Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov, managed to cause a massive traffic jam when they arrived at the Suez Canal and proceeded to stop and scan the area for possible enemy activity. Ironically, the Suez Canal was the only area where the Japanese could realistically attack the Russian Fleet. Eventually the fleet made it through the canal and, despite the best efforts of Rozhdestvensky to avoid his own reinforcements, was eventually able to link up with the Second Pacific Squadron off the coast of French Indochina (Vietnam). This was the straw that finally broke Rozhdestvensky, who tendered his resignation from the Russian Navy. Which the Tsar refused.
  • Rozhdestvensky's second-in-command, Rear Admiral Dimitri Fölkersahm, had been diagnosed cancer in Madagascar, and he died at sea. To avoid panic, Rozhdestvensky did not inform the fleet of his death, and his corpse was put to the food freezer of his flagship Oslyabya. It meant also that Nebogatov, of which Rozhestvensky did not have a high impression, rose to his second-in-command.
  • Despite all this, by some miracle of God Rozhestvensky somehow managed to get the Baltic Fleet all the way to the Tsushima Straits, where the Imperial Japanese Navy was waiting. Now that you know the Fleet's track record until this point, how do you think their engagement with the Japanese turned out? Well, they suffered a Curb-Stomp Battle, leaving all but two of their ships either destroyed or captured.^note Despite the one-sided result, the Russian fleet put up a surprisingly good fight in the opening minutes of the engagement, and even briefly seemed to be in advantageous position before the tide turned decisively against them. The situation wasn't helped as Rozhdestvensky was incapacitated by Japanese shrapnel very early in the battle and Nebogatov had to take command. Both this defeat and the loss of Port Arthur turned Russian public opinion against the war in general and against Tsar Nicholas in particular, forcing him back to the negotiating table and concede to the Japanese.
  • Rozhestvensky was captured by the Japanese, who treated him for his injuries. He was visited by Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who saluted him as a Worthy Opponent and said he had nothing to be ashamed of. He was eventually returned to Russia and insisted that he was solely to blame for the disaster at Tsushima. Despite being convicted and sentenced to death, he was pardoned by Tsar Nicholas.
  • As for why it had been the Baltic Fleet that was used to form the Second Pacific Squadron instead of the Black Sea Fleet that was seen as the elite of the Imperial Russian Navy (due to the warmer waters making it possible for them to actually train at sea at any time of year), or even send both fleets to overwhelm the Japanese with sheer numbers? Mostly because Russia had good reason to suspect that the Ottoman Empire (who controlled the only access point to the Black Sea) wouldn't let them back in if they left the confines of the Black Sea.
• The "Battle" of May Island during World War I, as detailed here by Fredrik Knudsen. This increasingly catastrophic chain reaction of blunders, mistakes, and sheer bad luck so embarrassed the Royal Navy that they tried to bury the incident for the better part of a century. Let's dive in (no pun intended), shall we?
  • The person who set the disaster to come in motion was John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910. As part of his efforts to reform the Royal Navy, Fisher replaced its aging wooden fleet with iron-hulled warships that he felt would be more capable of fighting Imperial Germany. Fisher mandated that these new ships be heavily gunned and have high speed capability, which came at the cost of the ships being only lightly armored.
  • The Admiralty followed these design principles when war in Europe broke out and a new vessel was needed to address the threat posed by Germany's U-boats. What they produced was the K-class submarine, a monster vessel that dwarfed other submarines of the time (103m to the typical 42m). But the K-class, thanks in large part to its impractical size, was unwieldly, poorly-built and prone to mechanical failures, which led to frequent (and sometimes deadly) accidents and to the K-class earning a negative reputation with British submariners.
  • On the evening of January 31, 1918, a fleet of British ships left the port of Rosyth in Scotland for a naval exercise with the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. The Rosyth fleet was composed of nine K-class submarines (K3, K4, K6, K7, K11, K12, K14, K17, and K22^note originally christened K13), divided into two flotillas. The 13th Submarine Flotilla^note composed of, in order, K11, K17, K14, K12, and K22 was led by HMS Ithuriel, followed by the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron composed of the cruisers HMS Australia, HMS New Zealand, HMS Indomitable, and HMS Inflexible, which were flanked on both sides by smaller screening destroyers. Following the cruisers were the 12th Submarine Flotilla,^note composed of, in order, K4, K3, K6, and K7 led by the tender HMS Fearless, and the 5th Battle Squadron composed of the battleships HMS Barham, HMS Warspite, HMS Valiant, and their own escort of screening destroyers.
  • Given that the fleet had sailed out at dusk, each of the ships activated blue stern lights so they they could spot each other in the dark. However, these lights were semi-luminescent and could only be seen within a narrow 11-degree angle behind the ships, meaning it was easy to lose sight of them.^note An entirely reasonable system given that the exercise was being carried out in wartime, and those semi-luminescent lights significantly reduced the chances of the enemy spotting the fleet. This problem was compounded by a mist which settled around the Isle of May, an island at the mouth of the Forth of Firth where the fleet was supposed to take a slightly starboard turn on its way to the North Sea. The fleet was ordered to increase their speed to 21 knots once they reached open ocean due to a U-boat sighting earlier that day.
  • As the 13th Submarine Flotilla passed the Isle of May, K11 noticed two small unidentified vessels ahead of her in the mist. Both K11 and K17 managed wide turns to port to avoid the vessels, but the wheel of K14 jammed during her turn and caused the submarine to continue to coast leftward after clearing the vessels before coming to a stop.
  • K12 passed the adrift K14 with no issue, but K22 drifted far to port while trying to find K12 's stern light, putting it on a collision course with K14. K22 spotted the red navigation light of K14 and attempted a hard turn to port, but her bow pierced the nose of K14, breaching the crew compartment and killing two submariners. Both K22 and K14 managed to seal their stricken compartments and avoid sinking, but the rest of the 13th Submarine Flotilla continued sailing ahead of them, unaware of the collision.
  • Immediately, K22 and K14 sent out distress signals. However, in her message to Ithuriel, K22 mistakenly stated that she had hit K12 (the submarine that was originally ahead of her) instead of K14. Because the message was sent in Morse code, it took time for the inaccurate information to be decoded.
  • Shortly after K22 managed to extricate herself from K14, the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron sailed past the wreck site. While the courses of the first three cruisers safely took them past the stricken submarines, Inflexible had gone off course and found herself on a collision course with the motionless K22 at increased speed. Inflexible ended up scraping K22 's starboard side, shearing off her external ballast and oil tank, before steaming past.
  • Thirty minutes after the initial collision, Ithuriel managed to decode K22 's distress signal and decided to turn around to the wreck site, making her starboard turn at an extremely wide angle in order the avoid the other vessels coming behind them. To reduce confusion, Ithuriel ordered her submarines to turn off their navigation lights and sent out a message informing the other groups of this maneuver. However, the order neglected to specify the location past the Isle of May where they were to make their turn. As a result, each group went on slightly different courses. The 13th Submarine Flotilla now sailed head-on towards the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron, with the cruisers completely unaware of the approach.
  • The coding officer aboard Ithuriel tasked with relaying the order to turn was saddled with having to code an addendum to the message, delaying its dispatch. Then the cypher officer approached him, told him that the order was supposed to be given in cypher instead of code, and took both messages away with him to the bridge. In the thirty minutes that the message was amended, recoded, and recyphered, the submarines and the cruisers continued on their collision course.
  • Ithuriel, K11, K17, and K12 barely had time to take evasive maneuvers and turn hard to starboard to avoid impact with Australia. Ithuriel steered herself through a swarm of screening destroyers and managed to clear them unscathed, but the 13th Submarine Flotilla and the 12th Submarine Flotilla (which had turned around earlier than the other groups) were now sailing at a shallow angle towards each other. The message aboard Ithuriel still had not been delivered, meaning that Fearless did not know to look for Ithuriel or her submarines.
  • Fortunately, the mist in this area was lighter and the flotillas could see that there was enough distance to make proper maneuvers. Unfortunately, rather than follow the rules of the sea and give the right-of-way to the larger vessel Fearless, the submarines following Ithuriel refused to change course. K11 narrowly cleared Fearless, but the larger ship was unable to avoid K17 and became lodged into her, devastating the lower portion of her bow and dragging the submarine forward with massive momentum. Pulled by the water, K17 rolled to the port side of Fearless and became dislodged, damaged beyond repair. Submariners began climbing to the stricken sub's deck while Fearless began sending lifeboats to rescue them.
  • Attempting to remove itself from the tangle of ships, K4 took a ninety-degree turn starboard, unaware that K6 was rapidly approaching in an attempt to catch up with Fearless. In the mist, K6 mistook K4 's starboard light for K3 's stern light and tried to follow it at full speed, not realizing her mistake until it was too late. K6 struck and nearly bisected K4. K7, the submarine following K6, managed to avoid colliding with her while scraping the top of the sinking K4, which was lost with all hands.
  • Meanwhile, most of the surviving submariners of K17 were struggling to survive in freezing water, inadvertently gulping down spilled oil. What they didn't know was that the 5th Battle Squadron, unaware that the 13th Submarine Flotilla had even reversed course, was now bearing down on them. While the large battleships avoided colliding with the damaged or sinking vessels, the screening destroyers charged into the mass of survivors floating around K17, either battering them or sucking them into their propellers.
  • Of the fifty-six crewmembers who abandoned K17, only nine survived. The fatalities from K14, K4, and K17 totalled 104. The death toll, plus the damage or destruction of half of the K-class submarines involved in the incident, gave the Royal Navy such a humiliating black eye that they decided to handle the matter discreetly and buried the disaster for 76 years, only reluctantly disclosing what happened in the 1990s. Within the fleet, the K-class became known as the Kalamity-class.
• The Battle of Midway in World War II could have been a potentially decisive victory for the Japanese, taking over one of the most if not the most vital island base in the Pacific, and hamstringing U.S. naval operations in the region, but they managed to snatch a glorious defeat in the threatening jaws of victory and lose four aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser in the process.
  • First, the Japanese attempted a far too complicated and complex operation, assuming the Americans would react by the schoolbook. Evidently they had forgotten to remember that the Moltke maxim states that "no battle plan has ever survived five minutes of enemy contact."
  • The Japanese were unaware that the American codebreakers had cracked the supposedly "unbreakable" IJN cryptographic code.
  • Thanks to having broken the "unbreakable" cryptographic code, the Americans learned that the Aleutian Islands Campaign being conducted in the northern Pacific was a ruse to get the United States to divert resources to defend them; so instead, they feinted to make it seem like they were sending reinforcements northward, while instead they began preparations for whatever the Japanese were planning.
  • The Japanese reacted to the American bait (message of Midway water distillation plant failure) by sending the message "The target has shortage of water". So now the Americans had intelligence that confirmed where the Japanese attack was going to happen,^note While the IJN code had already been broken, even when the messages were decoded, targets were referred to only by a two-letter Code Name rather than their actual name or coordinates. While Midway was already suspected as a likely target, this message confirmed it. and the U.S. Navy decided to ambush the Japanese there.
  • Admiral Yamamoto assumed that the USS Yorktown had been either sunk at Coral Sea or been too seriously damaged to go to sea for a long time. Instead she was repaired at Pearl Harbor in just a span of 48 hours.
    • That's a whole saga all by itself; the hasty repairs and a solid dive bombing led the Japanese to assume they'd sunk this carrier at Midway due to the visible extent of the damage (gutting the interior of the only recently repaired Yorktown) only to have to sink her again during salvage operations after the battle. Because the Japanese thought they had sunk two carriers, they assumed (incorrectly) that the other victim had been her sister ship, Enterprise. The Enterprise ended up surviving until the end of the war, with Japan mistakenly believing they'd sunk her multiple times.
  • The Japanese failed to neutralize the Midway air detachment on their first strike, requiring another.
  • They also completely neglected to bring any sort of landing forces in the initial waves, and the transports that were arriving were not equipped for a landing operation on that type of atoll, meaning that even if they were able to neutralize the island's defenses, it's debatable whether they could have done anything before the United States sent reinforcements.
  • The reconnaissance plane of heavy cruiser Tone was half an hour late on take-off, leaving its sector unsearched for half an hour. Unfortunately, the Americans were just in that sector.
  • Half of the Japanese bombers had been armed with torpedoes and armour piercing bombs in case of American shipping being sighted. When the carrier pilots reported that another strike on Midway was needed, Admiral Nagumo decided to change their bomb loads to fragmentation bombs to be used against ground targets. That change operation took 45 minutes.
  • When the reconnaissance report of that particular plane reached Admiral Nagumo, he decided to change the armament back to anti-shipping. Which meant the Japanese carriers were full of unstacked, loose ordnance for another 45 minutes.
    • Just after the Akagi's aircraft returned from bombing Midway, a B-26 squadron carrying torpedoes attacked the fleet. While unsuccessful, one of the bombers, either losing control or in a last bid to hit the carrier, began flying directly at the Akagi's bridge after it was critically damaged, narrowly missing and cartwheeling into the sea beside the ship. This was followed up immediately by another B-26, Suzie-Q piloted by Lieutenant James Muri, which after dropping its torpedoes, flew straight up the Akagi's flight deck, killing two crewman in the strafing run. This incident was arguably what motivated Nagumo to initially gear his planes up for another attack on Midway, either making him believe Midway was still too combat-effective to ignore, or possibly out of being royally pissed at the Americans' audacity. Either way, his decision, against Yamamoto's orders to remain in reserve for anti-carrier strikes, was what initially caused the 45 minute delay.
  • The fighters and dive bombers found the Japanese ships by accident. They arrived at the direction where the anti-aircraft gunners thought they would not come.
    • Early in the battle, the American submarine Nautilus had attempted a torpedo attack on the Japanese carriers. Due to the sorry state that American torpedoes were in during the early part of the war, it failed, but the Japanese destroyer Arashi stayed behind to drop depth charges to try and sink the sub. It did this for about an hour before giving up and rejoining the fleet. It was at this time that a squadron of Enterprise's dive bombers located the destroyer and followed her back to the main fleet.
    • The American torpedo bombers had maintained the bearing while the dive bombers and fighters had diverted off the course, meaning the torpedo bombers were unprotected. They drew the Japanese combat air patrol off to slaughter them at will, forcing the carriers to rely only on the defence of their anti-aircraft gunnery.
    • By sheer chance, the slower TBD Devastator torpedo bombers arrived at the Japanese carrier group before the faster Dauntless dive bombers; While the slow, outdated Devastators were slaughtered wholesale, their attack run had diverted the concentration of the anti-aircraft gunners from watching above to watching the one-sided air battle at low altitude. Some Japanese survivors recount that they didn't even know the Dauntlesses were upon them until they heard the banshee wail of the bombers' dive brakes engaging as they rolled into their attack runs.
    • The dive bombers were able to attack the Japanese carriers almost undefended, with their enclosed hangar decks full of planes in the process of refuelling alongside unstacked ordnance. They attacked at exactly the moment when the Japanese carriers were at their most vulnerable.
  • The next night, Japanese Cruiser Division 7, which included the heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma, were alerted an American submarine (the USS Tambor, to be precise) stalking them, and conducted evasive manuvers. Said manuvers resulted in the Mogami colliding with the Mikuma, badly damaging the bow of the Mogami and the oil tanks of the Mikuma. As a result, the two damaged ships lagged behind and, thanks to the massive oil slick pouring from Mikuma, were quickly spotted by American reconnaissance, and the Mikuma ended up sunk and the Mogami being put out of action for the remainder of the battle. At that point, Admiral Yamamoto decided to terminate the Midway operation, instead of committing his battleships into action.
    • Yamamoto was not aware that USS Hornet had lost her whole air wing (it had landed on Midway because of navigation error and fuel shortage) and USS Yorktown had been sunk. He assumed that the USN had all its carriers still intact. In reality, only USS Enterprise was at that moment functional.
    • A battle is lost when either of the commanders sees it is lost. Yamamoto lost his nerve and called it quits at the point where the battle could still have been won.^SemanticsThough by what margin he could have won is a bit debatable; as mentioned above, the IJN showed up to the party woefully unprepared for landing operations, with absolutely zero amphibious forces that were capable of landing on an atoll like Midway, and the element of surprise had already been ruined due to the Allies breaking the IJN's codes. At best, Yamamoto could have dealt a heavy blow to America's carrier forces had he managed to sink them all, but whether this was possible, let alone whether this would have changed the tide of the war, is dubious at best. In a bit of cruel irony (or perhaps excellent foresight on the part of Yamamoto), he himself had predicted that Japan's victory streak would have lasted only about six months after the declaration of war before things went south, and, wouldn't you know it, the Battle of Midway was exactly that many months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
  • Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, one of the most talented officers in the IJN, committed suicide by going down with Hiryu, refusing to be rescued. Stubbornness deprived the IJN one of its most able junior flag officers.
  • Despite (or possibly due to) the audacity of the plan and the sheer importance of the battle, Yamamoto was actually reluctant to commit to the operation. He knew that, despite the momentum he'd built earlier in the war, it was only a matter of time before the United States caught up with him and outclassed the IJN in practically every aspect, and warned the Japanese high command about the sheer riskiness of the operation. He also noted that the idea to lure the American carrier force away from Midway was a mistake, since one of the objectives of the Midway operation was to destroy the Americans' carriers in the same battle, an endeavour which would be somewhat difficult if the carriers had been lured away to defend the Aleutians. Unfortunately, his reservations fell on deaf ears in the Japanese brass, and he was forced to commit to the operation anyways. Thus, the Aleutians "diversion" operation only managed to divert some of Japan's own aircraft carriers. While these were smaller and less capable than those in the main fleet sent Midway, all those extra planes probably would've been quite useful, allowing Japan a nearly 2 to 1 numbers advantage.
• The Operation Valkyrie fiasco: a series of mistakes were made, their combination turned the plot into a failure, and it has been speculated that the plot to kill Hitler would have succeeded if a single one of those errors didn't happen:
  • The assassination was supposed to use two bombs. Stauffenberg only had enough time to activate a single one (he suffered from severe disabilities, including a missing hand), then get rid of the unactivated bomb instead of leaving it inside its briefcase with the live one (postwar testing using the same type of explosive has shown that the explosion of the first bomb would have detonated the second one);
  • The meeting was unexpectedly moved to a wooden cabin instead of the usual concrete building where it was supposed to happen (the concrete walls would have reflected the explosion, making it much more destructive);
  • And then, when the briefcase with the bomb was left near Hitler, someone moved it, putting an obstacle (the table's leg) between Hitler and the bomb. Had both bombs been in the briefcase, this wouldn't have mattered, but for the single bomb that thick table leg deflected enough of the blast for Hitler to be only wounded.
  • The plan didn't include anybody entering the room after the blast to Make Sure He's Dead, instead proceeding under the assumption that the blast had killed him and trying to start the coup...which promptly collapsed when Hitler turned out to still be alive.
• Operation Wikinger is a textbook example of how Poor Communication Kills in a Right Hand Versus Left Hand situation. This Friend or Foe? incident requires so many poor decisions to occur unquestioned that the involved participants do not appear to be merely unlucky but downright incompetent.
  • In theory, the mission was a combined Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe raid on British shipping. In practice, neither arm fully cooperated with their counterparts due to a combination of Interservice Rivalry and the Fascist, but Inefficient ideology encouraging this infighting, with the idea that the 'most deserving' military arm would produce the best results and thereby receive the most resources.
  • The Luftwaffe were normally to identify ships before striking, but in certain areas they had an 'attack on sight' order. An advance warning that the Kriegsmarine was launching their part of the raid went unheeded not once but twice—once after an admiral neglected to pass on the information to the air wing and again when the flight corps were contacted to request aerial overwatch. At this stage they could have called off the raid, but both the fleet admiralty and air arm suggested to the other to contact their forces by wireless to provide warning. As it so happened, neither did, presuming the other would obey the suggestion they had made.
  • The six destroyers in the raid set out unsupported at first, but a Luftwaffe air patrol Henkel spotted the destroyers and closed in to check. The problem here was that the ships did not flash the appropriate countersign, leading the Luftwaffe to assume this was a British raid, as no one had informed the air wing that the Kriegsmarine had launched. On the ships, a pair of destroyers opened fire on the Henkel. One sharp eyed sailor saw Luftwaffe markings on the wings and went to tell his comrades, but they ignored him. Another of the ships radioed that there might be German markings on the plane. They ignored her too. As a result, they kept shooting, and the Henkel was convinced that this was in fact a sneaky British raid.
  • Things escalated quickly as the Henkel performed a textbook air strike... on the German destroyer Leberecht Maass, blowing up her bridge and funnel and crippling her instantly. Just to add insult to injury, the Henkel turned around and hit her again in the same spot, splitting the Maass in two and causing her to sink rapidly.
  • A second destroyer, Theodor Riedel, charged out to attack what it thought was a British submarine. Deploying a series of depth charges in the area, she was successful at hitting a ship with the blast: herself, blowing up her rudder and jamming her steering, causing the wounded ship to sail in circles until repairs could be made. In the process, another ship, Erich Koellner, also spotted an offender and rammed what she assumed was the submarine, but turned out to be the wreckage of the Maass.
  • In the chaos, no one realized that a third ship, Max Schultz, had gone eeriely quiet. Her absence was only noted when the surviving ships compared notes and realized there had been an explosion no one could account for (not the Maass sinking nor the Riedel damaging herself). It turned out that this had been the Schultz hitting a Sea Mine and blowing up. ^note Historians argue if this was a German or British mine. The location suggests the British re-mined a previously cleared zone, but this clusterfuck occured so close to German controlled waters that a collision with a stray German mine is not out of the question. If the latter, this further compounds the Germans' list of errors.
  • Still beliving this to be a submarine attack, the three intact ships staged a confused and disorganized search... inadvertently leaving many of the surviving German sailors in the water. As a result, many drowned or froze to death, increasing the death toll even further. In a farcial turn of events, a Luftwaffe searchplane looking for the lost sailors was later shot down by Kriegsmarine anti-aircraft gunners, very likely due to nerves caused by the loss of two ships.
  • The after-action report proved to be both shocking and embarrassing. Two destroyers, the Maass and the Schultz, were total losses. A third, Riedel, was damaged and needed a fair amount of repair due to her own depth charge barrage. A search and rescue plane had been shot down, and as a result, six hundred sailors had perished in the sea before they could be rescued. The end result was a complete and humiliating failure on the part of the Kriegsmarine, who had not even been able to get their destroyers out of their own waters before losing two of them.
  • As for the targets of the operation? The British fishing trawlers were never once bothered by so much as a stray bullet from the Germans and were generally unaware of the display of fratricidal incompetence occurring some distance away. The fishing boats completed their catches and left the area, resulting in a decisive British victory despite not being present for any of the action.
• The series of events leading to the outbreak of World War I is this trope combined with a few hefty doses of War for Fun and Profit and Home by Christmas. It all boils down to two countries wanting to go to war with each other and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the trigger. Then, as treaties are suddenly called into account, a two-country war engulfs two continents.
  • Bizarrely, the actual assassination itself was almost a reverse disaster-dominoes situation — just about everything that could go wrong for the would-be assassins did, until the very last moment.
    • The first two conspirators to be passed by the Archduke's car failed to act; When the third one threw his bomb, it bounced off the folded-down convertible cover (or, according to some retellings, was knocked away by the driver with an umbrella) and detonated under the following car, injuring spectators but doing no harm to the Archduke; the failed assassin took a cyanide pill and jumped off a bridge — but the pill just made him sick, and the river was only a few inches deep because of the preceding hot dry summer, so he was arrested very quickly (but not before he got a severe beating at the hands of angry onlookers); the Archduke and his wife were hurried to safety and it all looked like a farcical comedy of errors (albeit with up to 20 people injured by the bomb).
    • Then, because the Archduke wanted to visit the wounded in hospital, and because the Governor-General vetoed the idea of troops being brought in to secure the city because they wouldn't be in the appropriate dress uniforms, and because Gavrilo Princip had picked a nearby delicatessen as a possible place to wait for a second chance at the motorcade, and because the Archduke's driver wasn't properly told that the itinerary had changed to now include the hospital visit, and because the driver stalled the engine while trying to get it into reverse to get back on the correct route just by that delicatessen, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were both fatally shot, and two World Wars and the ensuing Cold War were all triggered by "some damn fool thing in the Balkans", as Otto von Bismarck had predicted some thirty years earlier.
  • Additionally, Franz Ferdinand would not have been the heir to the Austrian throne (and in a position to be assassinated) if his more liberal-minded cousin Rudolf (son of the ultra-conservative Emperor Franz Joseph) hadn't shot himself in a murder-suicide, and several other candidates hadn't been out of the way.
  • To compound it all, it could have ended for Christmas had Italy not decided to stay neutral instead of invading France as it was supposed to (as the French didn't have enough reserves, that invasion from the south would have either found itself unopposed or distracted enough troops for the Germans to take Paris). Problem was, the alliance had always been unpopular in Italy due to the Wars of Italian Independence (which were widely felt to be incomplete until the Italian-majority portions of Austria-Hungary were "liberated" into Italy) and the Italian government was in a decent relationship with both Britain (that had given diplomatic support and helped to cover Garibaldi's legendary Expedition of the Thousand during the unification of Italy) and France (that had actually fought on Italy's side during the Second War for Italian Independence), and the chief of staff Alberto Pollio, the one important guy who sympathized with Austria-Hungary and would have had the ability and the will to raise a stink and have Italy respect the treaty and do that invasion, had a heart attack and died four days after the Archduke. Thus when Germany called upon Italy to do their part the government and the new chief of staff Luigi Cadorna (a well-known Austria-Hungary hater) replied to sod-off because the Triple Alliance was a defensive alliance and Austria-Hungary had declared war first, and the rest is history.
  • That said, it can easily be extrapolated how effective the Italians would have been fighting through the French Alps: Italian offensives into the decidedly-easier (but still disastrously difficult) Trentino region against an Austrian army that had been crippled by the 1914-15 Russian offensive into Galicia and was still struggling against Serbia still foundered. Moreover, French forces on the Italian border played absolutely no role in stopping the German onslaught at the Marne. It verges on insanity to postulate that an Italian involvement with the Central Powers (one the Germans themselves did not plan on, knowing the extreme unpopularity of the Italian-Austrian alliance and the complete reliance of Italy on British imports) would have been enough to turn the tide in the West "by Christmas."
  • The war also could've ended more quickly in a Triple Entente victory, had everything not lined up perfectly to bring the Ottoman Empire in on the Central Powers' side. This was not inevitable, as the government officials who had signed a secret alliance with Germany before the war didn't actually have the authority to enact the treaty, and the Ottoman government and military were initially split between pro-German and pro-British factions. However the war nearly immediately created a confluence of events that not only sidelined the pro-British faction but also resulted in Britain missing their only opportunity to defeat the Ottomans quickly.
    • First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill immediately ordered that a pair of nearly-compete battleships being built in British yards for the Ottoman Navy be seized with only token compensation offered.^note So long they remained neutral, the Ottoman Empire would be paid £1,000 per day for the duration of the war...which would require the war to last over 16 years to match the over £6 million that the Ottomans had bought the ships for. This was in stark contrast to the ships being built for Chile, for which an immediate full refund of the purchase price was given to their South American ally, with the option for Chile to buy their ships back at cut-rate prices if they survived the war. Not only had these ships been bought by public fund-raising and thus turned popular opinion against Britain, this also alienated the naval officers who were the bulk of the Ottoman Empire's pro-British faction.
    • Around the same time, a series of blunders at sea allowed German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and its escorting cruiser SMS Breslau, which had been under repairs at the then-Austrian port of Pola when war broke out, to escape to Constantinople from a vastly superior force of British and French warships. Even with those mistakes of repeatedly failing to predict which escape route Goeben would take, the British battlecruisers were mere minutes away from catching up when the German ships reached Ottoman waters and were officially gifted to the Ottoman Navy (thus partially replacing the confiscated British ships), renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli.
    • The pro-German Minister of War Enver Pasha connived to not only have the entire German crew of the two ships inducted into the Ottoman Navy (ostensibly because they were already trained on those ships) but even appointed the German Admiral Souchon as commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Navy (leapfrogging all of the actual Turkish admirals). Souchon used this new authority to bring both his ships and a Turkish squadron to attack Russian ports, pulling the empire into the war regardless of whether the pro-neutrality Sultan or anybody outside of the pro-German faction wanted it.
    • Britain and France sent a small fleet (including the two battlecruisers that Goeben had barely escaped plus two obsolete French battleships to "test" Ottoman defenses of the Dardanelles...but didn't follow up on this attack by forcing the straits all the way to Constantinople and trying to force a quick Ottoman surrender. Thus, all this "test" did was reveal to the Ottomans how insufficient their defenses were. This gave the Ottomans plenty of time to beef up those defenses before the next attempt was made, including laying extensive minefields in the straits. The next British attempt brought a much more powerful force, including the brand-new HMS Queen Elizabeth (the most powerful warship in the world at the time), but inexplicably used civilian fishing trawlers instead of dedicated military minesweepers in their attempt to clear the minefields, which slowed the fleet to a craw and were easy pickings for shore-based artillery. This failure led to the catastrophic amphibious invasion of the Gallipoli campaign.
    • Germany's own General Ludendorf estimated post-war that Germany couldn't have lasted beyond 1916 at the latest if so many British troops hadn't been tied down fighting the Ottomans. Had the war ended that soon, such momentous events as the Bolshevik Revolution might never have happened. And since the Ottoman Empire entered the war, they got to share in the defeat, being stripped of all Arab lands and reduced to just Turkey (and then overthrown by Ataturk's rebellion to form the Republic of Turkey). And since Britain and France proceeded to divide up those ex-Ottoman lands on purely self-serving lines, with no regard whatsoever for the Arabs and Kurds actually living there, this laid the groundwork for the powder keg that is the modern Middle East.
  • Of course, World War I was the first of a long line of Disaster Dominos that shaped the modern world.
    • It and World War II allowed outsiders, including some notably racist Americans and Brits, to redraw national borders in the Middle East, often without bothering to pay lip service to the people who lived there, setting up generations of strife and civil war.
    • The United States Senate Nye Committee of the 1930s helped publicize how much banking and munitions industries set the stage for WWI rather than moral ideology. An idealistic anti-war isolationist movement grew from this, condemning those that had formerly cried that War Is Glorious. Unfortunately, totalitarianism rose in Germany so the infrastructure set in place by those in America who wanted to avoid a senseless waste of human life was shortly hijacked by Those Wacky Nazis and yet more people interested in War for Fun and Profit.
    • WWI helped arm and train the gangsters and the Ku Klux Klan of The Roaring '20s.
    • The treaties signed and organizations founded in the wake of WWI set off a new chain of increasingly unlikely dominoes that led to Those Wacky Nazis becoming the ruling — and then only — political party in Germany with only a third of the electoral vote. In particular, the disastrous physical and economic state that Germany was left in after the war was the primary reason why Adolf Hitler was able to garner so much support from the German public despite his extremist ideology.
• And then there was the time when, at the height of WWII, a US Navy Destroyer almost killed her own President through sheer incompetence (you can read more about it here):
  • In November of 1943, the USS William D. Porter is one of a number of ships escorting the battleship USS Iowa, carrying Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Cairo and Tehran Conferences, both of which would see the major leaders of the four Allied powers meeting for the first time in the war.^note  Well, not altogether — Chiang Kai-shek met with Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo. Stalin met them both at Tehran, while Chiang did not attend. The Willie Dee begins her escort mission in U-Boat-infested seas by severely damaging another Navy vessel with her anchor as she leaves her berth.
  • A number of mishaps and screw-ups occur during the journey. This includes having a depth charge roll off the deck and detonate, making the rest of the group believe that they are under submarine attack until the William D. Porter told them otherwise. They also lost a crew member when he fell overboard due to a rogue wave. These mistakes and mishaps see the Porter's captain, Wilfred Walter, draw the ire of the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King. Walter vowed to improve the ship and crew's performance.
  • On the 14th, the Iowa offers to show the President and his aides how the Iowa would defend herself against an air raid. The crew begins releasing weather balloons to fire at with the battleship's air defense guns. The William D. Porter was trailing behind some 6,000 yards behind. When some of the balloons begin to drift their way and into the range of their own air defense weaponry, Captain Walter — eager to show the capability of his crew in the eyes of the Chief of Naval Operations and the President in the face of all these screw-ups — orders the crew to engage the balloons with their own guns. In addition, Walter orders a drill to practice firing torpedoes at another ship.
  • During this drill, the Porter's torpedo crews decide to engage the largest ship in the fleet because it would be the easiest to target. In this case, the Iowa. The drill proceeds as normal until the order to fire the third torpedo tube fires an actual, live torpedo. A live torpedo which is now racing towards the POTUS. They have less than two minutes before it strikes the ship, and the Iowa has no idea of the danger.
  • Walter immediately orders the Porter to send out a message to the Iowa that there is a torpedo in the water and it is coming for them. However, the fleet is under a strict radio silence order to reduce the threat of a U-Boat attack. In light of this, Walter sent a signalman to the deck to alert the Iowa using a signal deck light. But the signalman was young and inexperienced. In a panic, he first signals to the Iowa that a torpedo is in the water, but that it is going away from the Iowa. He then sends a second message, mistakenly telling the Iowa that the Porter is going reverse at full speed. All the while, the torpedo is still racing towards the Iowa.
  • The Porter finally decides to break radio silence and informs the Iowa that a torpedo is racing for her, and that she needs to break right to avoid it. But by the time they send out the report to the Iowa, it's already in visual range of the Iowa's crew. The Iowa lists so hard to the right that the President, still on the deck, has to be held onto by one of his bodyguards to keep his wheelchair from rolling off the deck, and the torpedo gets so close that a second guard pulled out his pistol, ready to fire at it. Thankfully, the torpedo just misses the Iowa and explodes in the ship's wake.
  • In the aftermath, the Porter finds herself under the Iowa's guns, under suspicion of attempting a genuine attempt on the President's life for the rest of the trip, despite assurances from the Porter that it was all an accident. Sent to a naval base in Bermuda, the Porter was met by US Marines and the entire crew was put under arrest. Only one crew member was prosecuted and convicted of a crime, which was almost immediately pardoned by Roosevelt, but the stain of the incident would follow the Porter for the rest of her career. She was commonly met in port with the cry of "Don't shoot, we're Republicans!" She continued on to serve throughout the war, at one point seeing a drunken crew member fire a 5-inch gun at port and almost blow up a party at the base commander's home and finally sank during the Battle of Okinawa, when a Japanese kamikaze's crashed plane exploded underneath the Porter with enough force to literally blow her out of the water. (Miraculously, all of her crew escaped with their lives.)
• The loss of the Japanese carrier Taiho during World War II is a textbook lesson on why bad damage control can lead to this; while launching planes as part of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Taiho was struck by a single torpedo from the American submarine Albacore (of a salvo of 6, 4 of which missed and one was stopped by the sacrifice of Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu crashing his plane into it), which cracked an aviation fuel tank and jammed one of the forward elevators. With seawater and airplane fuel mixing in the center of the ship, Admiral Ozawa... ordered the jammed elevator covered up so he could continue launching planes. That task complete, the crew tried and failed to dispose of the now vaporizing fuel mixture, including failing to properly use suppressant foam in the hangar's fire control system. With the fuel still not dealt with and with Ozawa still launching planes, the captain eventually ordered all ventilation shafts opened to try and get the hangar cleared, but this only succeeded in spreading the fumes around the ship and raising the chance of a fire even more. Six and a half hours after the initial torpedo strike, a single spark triggered an explosion that popped Taiho like a balloon, costing Japan another carrier it couldn't afford to lose and taking over sixteen hundred men to their graves.
• On the American side, there is the ignominious loss of the carrier USS Wasp, which was doomed from the start by questionable design choices which would ultimately come back to seal her fate.
  • Thanks to the Washington Naval Treaty being active during her construction, the US Navy had a limited amount of tonnage that was allocated to making aircraft carriers—in this case, after the construction of the carriers Lexington and Enterprise, they only had about 15,000 long tons left in allocation. This may seem like a lot, but considering that the average Yorktown-class carrier averages at just under 20,000 tons when empty, this wasn't enough to make another. So, the solution was the Wasp, essentially a "mini-Yorktown", which came in at a relatively airy 14,700 long tons.
  • The problem is, this light weight came across by stripping the Yorktown-class design of almost all of its armor protection, including those that would have otherwise shielded her fuel and munitions stores against torpedoes, and by reducing her size to approximately three-fourths of her half-sisters, compacting her most vulnerable areas closer together. All of this was done in the name of keeping her under that 15,000 long tons mark, and the result was a Glass Cannon of a carrier, able to carry a large air group of comparable size to the Yorktown-class despite being 25% smaller, but at the cost of essentially being a floating powder keg; something which several experts claim "doomed her to a blazing demise", a prediction which would turn out to be most unfortunate.
  • Her first few years of service were in the Atlantic, initially on "neutrality patrols" and then, when America officially entered the war, supporting the Atlantic Fleet and later moving to operations in the Mediterranean. This was a bit of a double-edged sword for her — on one hand, she was mostly safe from attack, as German U-boats tended to focus more on logistics and cargo ships rather than warships, and the Luftwaffe and Italian air force didn't dare to send their roving patrol bombers against a heavily-defended carrier group. On the other, however, it meant her shipborne crew rarely if ever got experience with actual battle, leaving them woefully inexperienced on the topics of damage control and defense against submarine attacks, for when it came time to transfer to the more intense Pacific Naval Theatre.
  • In the Pacific Theatre, she served well, participating in the Invasion of Guadalcanal and the Solomons Island Campaign, but it all came to an end on the afternoon 15 September 1942, as she was turning out of the wind after recovering aircraft. Just as she had completed the turn, her lookout reported three torpedoes racing towards her, launched by the Japanese submarine I-19. Despite evasive maneuvers, all three torpedoes hit—right in the vicinity of the Wasp's ammunition and fuel storage.
  • Remember how the Wasp didn't have any armor protecting those specific areas? Yeah. A series of explosions ripped through the bow of the ship with such force that it tossed aircraft and equipment into the air in the hangar, which crashed down and started fires that joined those started by the initial explosions. The explosions also disabled the water lines, hampering efforts to quench the building flames, which were fed by further explosions from leaking aviation gasoline and ammunition. The inexperienced damage control teams were quickly overwhelmed (though, to be fair, even an experienced damage control team likely wouldn't have been able to do much better given the circumstances) and the fire soon rendered the ship's control station and communications systems unusable; with no other option, Captain Sherman gave the order to abandon ship, only 36 minutes after the torpedoes were initially sighted. The fires on the ship would continue to rage for another five hours, until the destroyer Lansdowne put her out of her misery with a spread of her own torpedoes. And so ended the Wasp.
  • Surprisingly, despite the horrifying damage inflicted upon the poor carrier in the attack, overall casualties were relatively low; Captain Sherman himself noted that the evacuation process, despite taking 40 minutes, was very orderly and without panic, with the only hold-ups being that many sailors were reluctant to leave wounded comrades behind and wanted them loaded first. Still, 193 men died and 366 men were wounded. On a strategic level, the loss of the Wasp was a serious matter to high command, as it meant that, for a while, the only operational aircraft carrier in the Pacific was the USS Hornet, which had only been in operation for a year at that time.
• Gather around, Tropers, Tropettes, and everyone in between. The setting was the summer of 1944, and the commander of the Western Allied forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was facing a conundrum: having endured this war for the good part of five years, civilian leaders in Europe were growing quite tired of it, and they wanted it ended, fast, and with as few people killed as possible. Unfortunately for Eisenhower, despite France being all but liberated, the Western Allies still had half a continent to go through before the war could even begin to be considered "over," and the only (and best) strategy he had been offered was that of General George S. Patton's, who favored pushing across The Dreaded Siegfried Line, a massive fortified network guarding Germany's border, and making a mad charge across the German countryside, tearing up anyone in their way and taking Berlin in a battle of massive attrition; Eisenhower's problem with such a strategy was the "attrition" part, since such an endeavour would likely commit the Allies to a mobile, entrenched offensive reminiscent of that seen in World War One, and which the Western Allies had already had a bitter taste of during the France offenses. With how tightly Germany, which, while severely diminished, still had a significant amount of industrial and logistical capacity to mount a respectable (if ultimately futile) defense, was holding onto its ground, it was not likely to be a bloodless offensive, with potentially massive casualties on both sides—at this point, you can see why Eisenhower and the civilian leaders pressuring him to end the war had a problem with this.
  • In walks Bernard Law Montgomery, Patton's British contemporary, and he has a plan. Said plan is called Operation Market Garden, a two-phase offensive consisting of the following:
    • Market: An absolutely massive aerial drop into Holland, in which paratroopers (consisting of an amalgamation of British, American, and Polish regiments) would seize nine bridges along Holland's A50 Motorway, which led directly across the Rhine and into Germany, namely terminating near Germany's Ruhr Valley, the main industrial and manufacturing hub for the entire country. Once the bridges were secured, the next phase would begin, consisting of...
    • Garden: In which the British XXX Corps, an armored mechanized force, would use the A50 and the secured bridges to ride straight into Germany, establishing the northern half of a massive pincer formation which would be co-opted by a southern pincer with a similar operation, surrounding Germany's Ruhr Valley and cutting it off from the rest of the country, essentially cutting Germany's still-beating industrial out of its proverbial chest and tapping the country of its capacity to mount any sort of organized offense.
  • Theoretically, this operation would have ended the war by Christmas, and, on the assumption that the German troops guarding Holland were tired, battle-beaten conscripts with little to no mechanized support whatsoever (as most leaders believed that Germany was sending its best forces to fight Russia on the Eastern Front), the operation would likely be relatively bloodless, with few projected casualties.
  • Unfortunately, this is not how things unfolded. During the Market phase, several regiments missed their drop and were scattered, most notably the British 1st Airborne who were dropped ten miles off their target at the city of Arnhem due to heavier-than expected flak defenses. There was also the unexpected presence of armored support for the German defenders, including the elite SS Panzer Divisions being held in reserve near the city, something which the Dutch Resistance had tried to warn Allied leaders about but were promptly ignored or distrusted. What's more, the 1st Airborne's supply drop zones were overrun by the German defenders before they could secure them, and coordination broke down as British soldiers had to brave enemy fire to run into the open fields, grab what they hoped was something useful, then dash back into cover before the German guns could shoot them down.^note Those familiar with the film A Bridge Too Far would remember the scene of a British soldier having to do just that, getting within spitting distance of his fellow soldiers with his pilfered bounty...only to be shot down by a German sniper; then, to add insult to injury, the supply case he was carrying breaks open to reveal it was stocked with nothing but berets.. And if this wasn't bad enough, a British glider, carrying several high-ranking officers, crashed on landing with no survivors, but what did survive was an officer's attaché case, carrying important documents covering pretty much the entire Arnhem front of the operation; said case was promptly discovered by a German soldier surveying the wreckage, who, recognizing its value, turned it over to General Kurt Student, commander of the First Paratroop Army, who used the documents to plan his troop movements to devastating effect. As a result, while a few bridges were taken without incident, others were fought over bitterly, including the bridgehead in Arnhem, which the entire operation depended upon to succeed.
  • And just when people thought Garden would go smoother... it didn't. While some bridges were taken intact, the Germans, having been expecting an offense of some sort in the area soon, wired several bridges to blow, which they detonated at the first sign of trouble, causing heavy delays to the XXX Corps as they tried to reach Arnhem to relieve the 1st Airborne. On top of this, the A50 became a death trap for the XXX Corps' convoys, being shelled and raided almost constantly by German forces still holding out, and earning it the ignominious name of "Hell's Highway". And, just to ad a topper to the shitstorm, a major part of the XXX got caught in a surprise German air raid in the city of Eindhoven, which devastated their logistics and, most horrifying to them, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, who had only the day before had welcomed the Allies with open arms and celebration in gratitude for their liberation. Combined with the hampering efforts and logistical nightmare that supplying them had become, the XXX bogged down just outside Nijmegen. Unfortunately, at this point, Eisenhower called it quits, and Market Garden was aborted. As for the 1st Airborne in Arnhem, who despite being hopelessly short on ammunition and supplies, were still doggedly holding out, waiting for the XXX Corps...their relief would not be arriving. Of the eight thousand souls left behind in the besieged city, barely a quarter of those would make it back to friendly lines. The operation went down as one of the biggest Allied SNAFU's of the war, and resulted in casualties and setbacks that dashed any hopes of ending the war early. For Montgomery, for whom the operation had been touted as one of his crowning achievements, it became a black mark on his record (though he was not solely at fault and continued to be a valuable commander to the Allies to the end of the war). One of the lesser known effects it had, though this was not as apparent until after the war, was that it tapped the British of the majority of their frontline ground forces; while Britain continued to support the war in the form of armored, logistic, and aerial support, it would be the Americans and Canadians who would have the lion's share of infantry power in Europe until the war's end.
  • The failure of Market Garden also had catastrophic effects for the part of the Netherlands still occupied by Germany, as the Germans reacted to activity by partisans that had been planned to coincide with it by vindictively blockading food deliveries to Dutch cities, causing a famine that killed thousands of people.
• Operation Tidal Wave was a low-level strike against the Ploiești oil refineries conducted by 178 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers of the US Army Air Forces. These facilities supplied Germany with half of her petroleum products, and taking them out was widely regarded as the most critical element of the USAAF's "Oil Plan" targeting all natural and synthetic oil production facilities including the wells at Balaton (west Hungary) and Auschwitz-III/Monowitz plant (Upper Silesia). Ploiești was believed to be the Third Reich's Achilles' Heel, and the bomber crews were all warned in advance that as long as the target was destroyed, it would be considered worthwhile even if every plane was lost and every man was killed. The attack force was assembled in Libya, where a full-scale mock-up of Ploiești was assembled in the Sahara Desert for practice runs, as the mission required careful choreography and split-second timing to hit the target area from multiple directions at treetop level (well below the minimum safe altitude to drop bombs, requiring the ordnance to have time-delay fuses), overwhelming its defenses while also preventing any American planes from being hit by the blast of bombs already dropped. Originally called Operation Soapsuds, it was renamed Tidal Wave at the recommendation of Winston Churchill. Unfortunately, several mistakes, missed factors, and unexpected occurrences turned the operation from a potentially crippling move against the Axis' fuel resources to a chaotic and tragic incident that was ultimately All for Nothing.
  • To avoid tipping off the Germans as to Ploiești's vulnerability, Allied commanders chose to stop all reconnaissance flights over the area. Unfortunately, this meant they weren't aware of a failed Soviet raid that prompted the Luftwaffe and the Romanian military to heavily augment the defenses.
  • The takeoff and flight to Romania was plagued with issues, causing several bombers to have to turn back. One bomber crashed on takeoff, and one of the lead planes (Wong Wongo, flown by 1st Lt. Brian Flavelle) crashed into the Mediterranean due to unknown reasons; the backup lead plane, piloted by the Flavelle's childhood friend, left the formation to search over Wong Wongo's crash site and was unable to catch up again, forcing him to abort and the third in command, 1st Lt. John Palm's Brewery Wagon, to take the lead. Eleven more had to abort due to fuel problems, the bombers got separated because two Group commanders couldn't agree on engine settings, and mission commander Brigadier General Uzal Ent made a critical navigational error, turning at the wrong checkpoint and leading half of the formation off course.
  • Only one formation, led by Brewery Wagon, attacked as planned, but it was heavily damaged by flak and forced to jettison their bombs and turn away as they made their run, and would later crash-land in a field after being attacked by a Luftwaffe fighter with ten survivors. The carefully-planned timing went completely to hell, and the attacking bombers faced not only much heavier opposition than anticipated but also friendly bombs exploding in their faces and many near-collisions with other B-24s.
  • The incredibly low altitude^note Intended to throw off the anti-aircraft gunners at the refinery, who were ostensibly prepared for more traditional high-altitude attacks resulted in the bombers' gunners trading fire with anti-aircraft batteries at point-blank range and pilots having to maneuver over and around smokestacks, trees, and even fence lines and haystacks, throwing the already chaotic formations into further disarray.
  • As mentioned above, the Soviets also got it into their heads to attempt an airstrike on the facility, without notifying their western neighbors. Not only was this attack also a catastrophic failure, but it resulted in the Axis upping Ploiești's already heavy defenses.
  • 53 American bombers were lost^note  Jose Carioca, a B-24 of the 93rd Bombardment Group, was shot down by a Romanian fighter over the city's outskirts, spun out of control, crashed on a street, and slid several blocks before exploding in the Ploiești Women's Prison, killing the bomber's crew and nearly 100 civilians on the ground, and 55 more came back with serious damage and casualties aboard^note  One B-24 had 365 distinct holes shot in it. 440 men (average age 19) were killed^note One Romanian farmer grabbed his rifle when a B-24 crashed into the field outside his house. He found nine of the ten Americans aboard dead, while an 18-year-old gunner was still barely conscious despite having been torn in half at the waist. The farmer shot him in the head to end his agony and 220 more captured or missing. Five men received the Medal of Honor, more than any other single operation in history, three of them posthumous^note  Lt. Col. Addison Baker, commander of the 93rd Bombardment Group (Heavy), and his co-pilot, Maj. John Jerstad, posthumously received theirs for maintaining their Group Lead position after heavy damage to their B-24, Hell's Wench, forced them to jettison their bombs before reaching their target—the Columbia Aquila refinery—, then staying at the controls and trying to gain altitude to allow their crew to bail out. 2nd Lt. Lloyd Herbert Hughes of the 398th BG(H) posthumously received his for staying on his bomb run while burning alive after his plane, Ole Kickapoo was badly damaged by ground fire, then set afire by the explosion of a bomb from another B-24. Hughes's bomber crashed moments after dropping their bombs on the Steaua Romana refinery, killing Hughes and four of his crew and mortally wounding four more, leaving two others miraculously uninjured. Col. John "Killer" Kane, commander of the 98th Bombardment Group, and Col. Leon Johnson, commander of the 44th, were the only surviving recipients, leading their respective groups through hellish fire to hit the Astra Romana and Columbia Aquila complexes.
  • The refineries were damaged, but not critically, as most of them were operating below capacity anyway, and in fact, within a month, most of them were producing considerably more fuel and lubricants than they had the day before the attack. Ultimately the Ploiești refineries only stopped supplying the Germans in the aftermath of Malinovsky and Tobulkhin's Jassy–Kishinev Offensive of August 1944, during which Soviet troops secured the facilities as Romania switched sides.^note Several historians will, however, point out that while the primary manufacturing capabilities of the Ploiești refineries were unaffected, there was significant damage to the auxiliary systems and reserve storage tanks, which was not repaired by 1945. There is some speculation that this damage meant that, while the refinery never lost its mainline production, the lack of these secondary and auxiliary storage would come to bite Germany in the ass later in the war, when such reserves would have been vital to the war effort.

Other

• One of the most infamous accidents in music history was the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, an event famously coined by Don McLean in his Signature Song "American Pie" as The Day The Music Died. This incident had great ramifications for the music industry, and it was largely the result of a series of unique events:^note  It is one of the rare cases where the music industry and transportation converge into one Disaster Domino chain.
  • Buddy Holly had terminated his association with his back-up band, The Crickets, at the end of 1958. However, he realized he had to go back on tour since he wanted to recoup his funds and save up money to move to New York City to be with his wife Maria, who was pregnant with his child, and to be more involved in the New York music scene. As such, Holly signed up with the General Artists Corporation (GAC) to organize a tour. GAC managed to sign up several new artists to join, among them Valens and Richardson. Holly himself managed to form up a new band to perform with him.
  • GAC quickly organized the "Winter Dance Party" tour in the American Midwest in January and February of 1959, starting in Milwaukee. It was very poorly organized and planned. All artists had to perform every evening for 24 days straight with no break, and during the day they would travel by bus to the next venue. The amount of travel time between venues was also a serious problem in of itself, with the distances not even considered by GAC. In a case of negligent planning, the company had the tour zigzag erratically across the region rather than a simple circle pattern, with some venues being up to 400 miles away despite being adjacent legs on the tour. ^Example One venue was in St. Paul, Minnesota; the following day the venue was in Davenport, Iowa, a distance of more than 300 miles south; then the next day's venue was in Fort Dodge, IA, over 200 miles east from Davenport; then it was in Duluth, MN the following day, over 360 miles north of Ft. Dodge (Duluth, mind you, is much closer to St. Paul than it is to Ft. Dodge or Davenport).
  • The bus rides between venues were long, often ten to twelve hours in the freezing midwestern winter, with all musicians forced into a single vehicle. Not only that, but the buses used were inadequate and unreliable, regularly breaking down and being replaced by equally unreliable buses. Five separate vehicles were used in the first eleven days of the tour. The buses also lacked adequate heating units, making the travel extremely frigid for everyone, with Holly's drummer even suffering from frostbite in his feet when one of them stalled, hospitalizing him and forcing him to pull out of the tour.
  • After arriving at Mason City, Iowa on February 2 for the next gig (which would turn out to be the last one the three artists would ever perform in), Holly finally had enough of traveling in the freezing busses. He had the venue-owner charter a plane from the local Dwyer Flying Service to fly him and his band to the next venue in Minnesota, over 300 miles north of Mason in the middle of the night after the gig.
  • Initially, only Holly & his two bandmates were to fly on the plane. However, Richardson had a minor case of the flu and asked Holly's bassist^note  Who was future country legend Waylon Jennings. Notably, Jennings jokingly told Holly that he hoped the plane would crash, and was haunted for the rest of his life. for his seat, who agreed & gave it to him. Valens likewise asked for the seat from Holly's guitarist and won it in a coin toss.
  • After the performance in Mason City, Holly, Richardson, and Valens were driven to the airfield to board their plane, a small Beechcraft Bonanza, piloted by the young-pilot Roger Peterson. Peterson, on paper, had over four years of flying experience, but he was not yet qualified to operate in weather that required flying solely by reference to instruments (aka poor visibility requiring use of pilot instruments to properly fly).
  • The Bonanza itself was notable in that it was a model with a distinctive "V" tail, which combined the horizontal and vertical stabilizers into only two surfaces, as opposed to the more traditional "T" shape with three surfaces (one rudder, two elevator). While the design was meant to improve drag and thus make for a faster and more efficient flight, the V-tailed Bonanza models in particular were troubled with a reputation for excessive stress on the tail surfaces, which often resulted in midair breakups and being hard to handle by pilots unused to its flight characteristics, especially in high winds.^note Contrary to popular belief, however, the plane was not named "Miss American Pie", thus serving as McLean's inspiration for his signature track's title—the actual song title itself was a play-on-words of the phrase "As American as Apple Pie" to reflect the national pride and prosperity which was popular during the time of the incident.
  • The weather was very cold, windy, and full of clouds that hampered visibility. Although deteriorating weather was reported along the planned flight route, the weather briefings Peterson received failed to relay this information. The plane with all four men then departed at 12:55 am local time... and disappeared from sight minutes after taking-off. Repeated attempts from the control tower tried to contact Peterson via radio, but to no avail.
  • At 9:35 am the following morning, the wreckage of the plane was found just six miles from the Mason Airfield, with all four men dead. Based on investigative findings of the accident and wreck, the aircraft entered a stall and crashed shortly after take-off due to a combination of poor visibility, weather, and pilot error.
    • As a sad byproduct of the disaster, Maria Holly was so devastated upon learning of the death of her husband, that shortly afterwards she suffered a miscarriage, likely brought on by mental trauma.
  • The disaster did not end with the deaths of Holly, Richardson and Valens. In fact, the incident would have massive ramifications on the music industry itself. By the late '50s, rock n' roll music was on shaky ground caused by various scandals, lawsuits, controversies, arrests, and even disk jockey corruption^note "Payola", where the music industry paid stations and presenters to play their records without anyone disclosing the payments, was investigated by the House and Senate in 1959, which began to tarnish the genre's reputation. The abrupt death of three rising stars in the rock n' roll scene would be a major blow to the entire genre. Soon, record executives lost interest in promoting any new artists, contracts were terminated, many remaining artists went to different genres altogether, and the teen audience that initially fell in love with the genre were forced to move on. The loss of Holly, Valens, and "Bopper" is typically seen as where the 50s Rock n' Roll music scene came to an end, hence why it is known as "The Day the Music Died". Rock Music soon faded out of popularity, and would not truly reemerge into the mainstream until the arrival of The Beatles and The British Invasion in 1964.
• A related concept that was extremely prevalent in American foreign policy during the Cold War was "Domino Theory". According to leading American policy makers, each successful spread of the Communist ideology with the support of the USSR would further imperil other nations surrounding the newly communist nation. Each victory by the Communist bloc would build momentum and make the next revolution much easier. The theory gained traction after the successive communist revolutions and takeover of East Asian countries such as China in 1949 and the Korean War in 1950, as well as the establishment of the "Iron Curtain" in Europe and fears of a communist takeover in Greece, Turkey and Iran. President Eisenhower summarized the principle early in the Cold War:
  "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences"
  • The conclusion drawn as a result was that any attempt at spreading Communist or Socialist ideology had to be stopped early on, and as harshly and thoroughly as possible. This included democratic and left-leaning movements who were even remotely suspected of having sympathies to Moscow. It also pushed American policy makers to take increasingly unpopular, unethical and/or risky measures to fight fears of Communism abroad. Because the prevailing logic suggested that any defeat would further embolden the enemy, American leadership often refused to back down even in unfavorable conditions.Ultimately this cumulated in the "escalation" of American involvement in Vietnam, where over 500,000 American servicemen were deployed to stabilize the failing South Vietnamese government.
• The events that led to the cancellation of the 2016 NFL Hall of Fame game were a comedy of errors so comical that for football comedy webcomic The Draw Play, the artist/writer freely admitted they couldn't think of anything funnier than what had actually happened for that day's strip. For context, the National Football League begins each season with a preseason exhibition game in Canton, Ohio, birthplace of the league and the site of its Hall of Fame museum. The stadium in Canton is actually used by the local high schools for the rest of the year, and thus before every Hall of Fame Game the grounds crew is required to repaint the field for the event. For whatever reason, for the 2016 game the grounds crew had purchased the wrong type of paint for use on the artificial turf field, and thus hours before game time the paint was still wet. In order to try and get the paint dry before game time, the grounds crew attempts to use space heaters on the playing surface. This works at drying the paint, but also has the side effect of melting the small rubber beads that make up the artificial FieldTurf playing surface into a congealed, solid rubber mess. In an attempt to solve the latter issue, the grounds crew attempts to use paint thinner on the playing surface, and it is at this point that someone realizes that paint thinner is the last thing you want to be covering a surface people are going to be tackled onto, and the game is outright canceled.
• The Scottish Wars of Independence started after a series of unlucky events and bad choices spiraled out of control. First, King Alexander III fell off his horse and died, leaving no male heir to inherit the throne. Then, his heir presumtive Margaret of Norway randomly died of sickness on her voyage to Scotland. Then, because the Guardians of Scotland had earlier given King Edward I the privilege to involve himself in the situation as a mediator, he took the opportunity to take over Scotland by making John Baliol his Puppet King. Things just got worse from there.
• Mentioned in this 2018 reddit post in which the submitter discusses why it's important for people to be able to admit when they're wrong or they don't know something. Long story short, an employee made a simple, easily-correctible mistake, but rather than ask for help — and have to admit that he didn't know how to fix it — he tried to fix it anyway, but because he didn't understand what had gone wrong in the first place, every attempted "fix" just compounded the problem, to the point where he turned one small mistake into darn near wrecking the entire system.
  "What was a mistake that could have taken 15 minutes to correct is now so f***d up that even I can't recover it fully."

• The 1972 Munich massacre, where during the ‘72 Summer Olympics Palestinian Terrorists killed 11 Israeli Athletes (9 of whom were hostages). There were a myriad of poor decisions made before and during the incident that contributed to its violent outcome:
  • For starters, the Olympic games in Munich had a lax approach. The previous 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City was already controversial for the excessive, often-harsh security during the event. With WWII and the image of Nazi Germany still fresh in worldwide cultural memory, West Germany sought to avoid the image of militarism as much as possible. But this mentality meant that there was less security present, despite knowledge that an incident was planned regarding the Israeli team.
  • The lack of security allowed athletes to climb over the Olympic-Village fence in the middle of the night (itself a major security problem), should they want to, and several did with no incident beforehand. In the early-morning hours of September 5th, the terrorists climbed the fence with help from some unsuspecting athletes, secretly carrying assault rifles, pistols, and grenades in duffel bags. They soon found the housing for the Israeli team.
  • After several minutes and a scuffle, the terrorists entered the quarters. Two Israeli athletes were killed in the initial break-in, and the Palestinian terrorists captured nine others, with the rest of the Israeli Olympic team narrowly escaping when they realized what was happening. With 9 hostages held, the terrorists made their demands: the Israeli release of over 230 Palestinian Prisoners. From here on, negotiations were attempted:
    • Israeli authorities immediately and firmly refused to negotiate with the Palestinian perpetrators, not only because they banned any negotiations with terrorist groups, but also because they knew that doing so with such groups would give an incentive to future attacks.
    • The Israelis did offer to the German Authorities to send in their own Special Forces to rescue the hostages, since they were trained for such situations. But this offer was rejected.
    • The German Authorities then had to negotiate with the Palestinian Terrorists. They offered to give them unlimited funds in lieu of prisoner-release, but this was rejected.
  • By the afternoon, the Germans came up with a rescue-plan: a group of over thirty police officers, disguised as athletes, would infiltrate the compound through its ventilation shafts to kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages. But this quickly fell-through for two reasons:
    • The German Police brought in had no experience in combat or hostage situations.
    • Most damningly, the entire event of the Munich Hostage Crisis was captured on live TV. With the Olympic Games, the area was full of journalists from around the world who were covering the event. When the German Police were preparing and attempting to enact their operation, camera crews were capturing every step. The terrorists, meanwhile, had access to a TV in the compound where they were able to watch the police prepare for the attack. They then threatened to kill their hostages then-&-there, so the police had to withdraw.
  • With no other options against the now-careful kidnappers, a final negotiation was made to ensure every hostage survives unharmed and (ostensibly) to submit to the terrorists’ demands. In the evening, the German authorities promised the terrorists that they would have them flown to an Arab Country with their captives. Having no room to budge, the mayor of the Olympic village had to assure them two helicopters to fly them safely to the nearby airport.
  • The way to the helicopters led through a parking house, where another opportunity for an ambush was planned. Unfortunately, two of the perpetrators walked ahead once there, and heard noises from police snipers stationed within. This led to the terrorists using a bus to securely transport everyone the short distance to get to the helicopters, where they boarded them with their hostages and departed.
  • At 10:30 PM, the helicopters containing the terrorists & hostages arrived at the airport in Fürstenfeldbruck. A final plan was made beforehand to rescue the hostages: Police would place 5 snipers around the main airport building and an airplane with 5 regular police officers dressed as crew aboard was present to strike. Should some of the terrorists enter the plane, they'd be overpowered, with the rest of them being taken out by the snipers. The German authorities assumed that there were only 5 total hostage-takers, so they planned to outnumber them 2-to-1.^note  This belief that there were only 5 terrorists came from a news estimation from earlier that day. However, in a case of negligence, the German authorities never sought to confirm whether there were only 5 terrorists in total, and instead took the assumed-number as definitive. This unsurprisingly would have negative consequences for the operation.
  • However, the "crew", seeing the danger of this plan, left the plane at the last minute without consulting or informing command. Making matters worse, the terrorists took the German Helicopter pilots hostage once they arrived, violating their own agreement with the German authorities, and making the operation even more complicated for the police. When two of the terrorists entered the plane and saw it empty (keep in mind: they were supposed to be ambushed by the disguised police once inside), they quickly realized the trap and ran back to warn the others.
  • At this point, the snipers opened fire. Against previous information, the kidnappers where not 5, but 8 members. Adding to this was the 11pm nighttime limited visibility even when lit up by the airport's floodlights, and the fact that technically none of the police-snipers had actual sniper training; they were all just standard policeman chosen by skill and were not properly equipped (eg. using standard assault rifles rather than marksman rifles, with none of them having nighttime scopes).
  • The German Police sharpshooters did manage to take out the two terrorists holding the pilots at gunpoint while they were on the tarmac (who then fled and ran for safety), but the Israeli hostages were still tied up in the two helicopters. With the German police losing the element-of-surprise, the Palestinians took cover beneath the two aircraft and returned fire, killing one police officer. Soon, what was supposed to be an ambush became shootout/stalemate between the terrorists and the police, lasting for more than an hour.
  • Armed personnel carriers were called in. But they were delayed and arrived shortly after midnight due to the roads being blocked by traffic. Panicking at the sight of reinforcements, the terrorists finally realized the hopelessness of their escape plan, and opted to kill all 9 hostages tied up in the two helicopters. At the first helicopter, one of the terrorists fired-&-unloaded his Assault Rifle on the 4 hostages aboard before throwing a grenade into the aircraft, causing the copter to explode into flames, incinerating & killing the hostages; at the second, another terrorist also unloaded his assault rifle on the 5 remaining hostages, killing them all. Afterwards, the surviving terrorists desperately tried to flee the tarmac and were shot down by the police. Only three of the eight terrorists survived the night, with relatively minor injuries each.

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