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Coastal Delaware, Maryland and Virginia have always been vulnerable to the power of storms. In the early nineteenth century, storm-driven shipwrecks led to the construction of the Delaware breakwater. In 1933, a storm created an inlet on the south edge of Ocean City and changed the character of the Maryland resort. The Ash Wednesday nor'easter of 1962 devastated oceanfront communities, led to the creation of beach replenishment projects that pushed...
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Richmond has had its share of man-made and natural calamities throughout its illustrious history. In 1811, fire destroyed the Richmond Theatre on Broad Street, tragically claiming seventy-two lives in one of the worst urban disasters in American history. As Union forces approached Richmond in the final months of the Civil War, Confederate troops ignited the city in flames, leaving scars still visible today. The international Spanish flu epidemic did...
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A September morning in 1989 changed Alton's history forever. At 7:34 a.m., a Dr Pepper truck collided with Mission School Bus no. 6. After the bus and its occupants plunged into a water-filled caliche pit, twenty-one students lost their lives. The resulting investigation flooded the small South Texas community with reporters and lawyers. The heavily scrutinized legal battle divided the city, but it did ultimately produce changes in school bus safety...
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Every summer, thousands flock to the Jersey Shore for its beaches and boardwalks, but lurking in the depths beyond is a historic threat to tranquility. Dozens of shark attacks and interactions have occurred throughout Jersey Shore history that reveal bravery, heartbreak and the hubris of man. A boy paid a gruesome price for teasing a trapped shark in the first recorded attack in 1842. The three bloody attacks of 1960 left one man's limb amputated....
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In the fall of 1870, a massive flood engulfed parts of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. What began near Charlottesville as welcome rain at the end of a drought-plagued summer quickly turned into a downpour as it moved west and then north through the Shenandoah Valley. The James, Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers rose, and flooding washed out fields, farms and entire towns. The impact was immense in terms of destruction, casualties and depth of water....
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For more than 150 years, East Tennesseans have experienced disasters of historic proportions. The 1902 Fraterville Mine explosion took the lives of 216 men and boys. A 1904 head-on passenger train wreck in New Market claimed the lives of 64. In 1906, Jellico was practically destroyed by the explosion of a train car loaded with dynamite. Floodwaters near Rockwood in 1929 took the lives of 7 Boy Scouts and their Scoutmaster. An explosion in 1960 at...
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Indiana suffered enormous losses in the Great Flood of 1913, yet this disaster is largely forgotten. The combined tornado and flood barreled through Terre Haute, killing more than twenty. In Peru, 114 miles away, the circus lost most of its animals in the storm. At the southwestern corner of the state, a "sea of water," as local papers put it, washed over Evansville, turning streets into canals. In the capital, levee failures left hundreds homeless...
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Heralding the coming spring, the weather forecast promised a warm and sunny Easter in 1913. Little did the citizens of Tippecanoe County realize that a furious deluge would cause the Wabash River to swell to an ungovernable and lethal height. Bridges collapsed, whole buildings came unmoored from their foundations and washed away and heroic rescue attempts saved lives and cost others. Using previously untold stories and images never before seen in...
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Author Janis Thornton reveals the stories of a day in Indiana like no other.
Palm Sunday 1965 started as the nicest day of the year, the kind of weather that encouraged Hoosiers to get out in the sun, fire up the grill, hit the golf course, or roll down their car windows and take a leisurely drive. That evening, however, throughout northern and central Indiana, the sky turned an ominous black, and storms moved in, quickly manifesting as Indiana's...
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In the beginning of the twentieth-century, the Connecticut River Valley was a thriving manufacturing hub for fabric, arms and brass. But early in the spring of 1936, nearly two feet of rain created havoc on a massive scale, killing more than one hundred people and leaving tens of thousands homeless, unemployed and without power for weeks. Patrols were conducted in rowboats on city streets. Typhoid and other public health issues complicated recovery...
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The Wallingford tornado of 1878 took less than two minutes, but it killed at the rate of one person per second. Twisters in Connecticut are incredibly rare, but they're often disastrous and sometimes deadly. The Windsor tornado of 1979 destroyed a field of aircraft that had survived World War II. The 1787 Wethersfield tornado ripped off a barn roof in New Britain, traveled on to Newington and finally subsided in Wethersfield after destroying a family...
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On September 15, 1896, Crush boasted the highest population in Texas. Built near Waco, the town provided the staging ground for a publicity stunt ramming two trains together at top speed. Showrunner and Katy Railroad official William Crush thought he had planned for every contingency. But when elephant-sized chunks of steam locomotive began raining down into the packed stands, the extravaganza quickly unraveled into one of the Lone Star State's most...
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On May 31, 1935, a storm system surged along the Republican River, bursting its banks in a matter of minutes with a roar that could be heard miles away. The greatest flood to hit the tri-state area of Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, it left behind a landscape rearranged beyond recognition and claimed more than one hundred casualties. However, amid all the destruction and sorrow, amazing acts of heroism and unwavering courage were reported throughout...
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Beneath the churning surface of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary rest the bones of shipwrecks and sailors alike. Massachusetts' ports connected its citizens to the world, and the number of merchant and fishing vessels grew alongside the nation's development. Hundreds of ships sank on the trade routes and fishing grounds between Cape Cod and Cape Ann. Their stories are waiting to be uncovered--from the ill-fated steamship Portland to collided...
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Discover the hurricanes, blizzards, and historic floods that have shaped the history of the Chesapeake Bay.
Even before John Smith's crew weathered its first squall, the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries had been ravaged by every type of storm imaginable. A 1769 hurricane altered the course of history, demolishing the shipping channels of Charlestown and making Baltimore the dominant port. A once-in-five-hundred-years storm, Tropical Storm Agnes,...
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Southeast Minnesota has regularly felt the wrath of nature.
In 1890, a driving straight-line wind on Lake Pepin overturned the Sea Wing, killing ninety-eight people within minutes in the worst marine tragedy in Minnesota history. In 1940, a raging blizzard trapped duck hunters on islands in the Mississippi River and left motorists stranded across the region, leaving dozens injured or dead. Then, in 1965, flood waters of the Mississippi River and...
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Central New York, a region renowned as one of the snowiest in the world, has a long and stormy relationship with its winters.
From the Lake Ontario port in Oswego to the busy streets of Syracuse and Utica, every community in the region has found themselves buried from brutal snowstorms.
Author Jim Fafaglia draws from personal memories, family diaries and newspaper accounts to craft a two-hundred-year history of Central New York's whiteouts, blizzards...
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A fire of frightening magnitude was not a question of "if" but "when" in young Prescott, and on July 14, 1900, the feared conflagration found its spark. After several years of drought, a candle slipping from its holder was all it took to utterly destroy Prescott's business district, red-light district and famous Whiskey Row. People grabbed what they could to rescue it from the flames, but the party didn't stop. Even the piano from one saloon was moved...
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In 1948-49, Nebraska experienced a winter like never before. Brutal cold, unbearable winds and record snowfall made roads impassable and life difficult for locals. Farmers and ranchers struggled with hunger due to a dwindling supply of coal and food. The governor requested federal aid, and the U.S. Air Force dropped bales of hay into pastures for animals. Many locals perished in the weather, and icy roads forced the state to redesign and rebuild highways....
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In 1893, Fargo was simply trying to thrive amid an impending national depression. One Wednesday afternoon in June, a ferocious fire quickly devoured hundreds of businesses and more than thirty blocks in the heart of the fledgling city. Residents were stunned, but they weren't defeated. Through perseverance, grit and some helpful insurance money, owners immediately began rebuilding. The arduous reconstruction ended up protecting the city against unemployment...
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