The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center elicited a large response of local emergency and rescue personnel to assist in the evacuation of the two towers, resulting in a large loss of the same personnel when the towers collapsed. After the attacks, the media termed the World Trade Center site "Ground Zero", while rescue personnel referred to it as "the Pile".
The year 1986 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
The New York Marriott World Trade Center was a 22-story 825-room hotel within the original World Trade Center complex in Manhattan, New York City. Situated on the original Three World Trade Center, It opened in April 1981 as the Vista International Hotel and was the first major hotel to open in Lower Manhattan south of Canal Street since 1836. In November 1995, it was bought by Marriott Corporation and renamed the Marriott World Trade Center.
Two overhead walkways in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed on July 17, 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216. Loaded with partygoers, the concrete and glass platforms crashed onto a tea dance in the lobby. Kansas City society was affected for years, with the collapse resulting in billions of dollars of insurance claims, legal investigations, and city government reforms.
The Pemberton Mill was a large textiles factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, originally built in 1853. On January 10, 1860, at around 4:30 p.m., a section of the building suddenly collapsed, trapping several hundred workers underneath the rubble, in what has been called "the worst industrial accident in Massachusetts history" and "one of the worst industrial calamities in American history." Of the hundreds crushed under the wreckage, an estimated 88 to 145 of them were killed instantly, and 166 were removed, albeit critically injured.
The Highland Towers collapse occurred on 11 December 1993 in Taman Hillview, Ulu Klang, Selangor, Malaysia. Tower Block 1 collapsed from a major landslide caused by heavy rains that burst diversion pipes. The Highland Towers consisted of three 12-storey buildings or "blocks". The collapse of Block 1 resulted in 48 deaths. Residents of the other two blocks and neighbouring establishments were evacuated due to safety concerns.
On 28 January 2006, the roof of one of the buildings at the Katowice International Fair collapsed in Chorzów / Katowice, Poland. 65 people have died in this incident.
At 22:43 on 24 May 2001, a large portion of the third floor of the Versailles Wedding Hall collapsed in Talpiot, Jerusalem, Israel. Twenty-three people fell to their deaths through two stories, while another 356 were injured to varying degrees.
The 1990 Luzon earthquake occurred on July 16 at 4:26 p.m. (PDT) or 3:26 p.m. (PST) on the densely populated island of Luzon in the Philippines. The shock had a surface-wave magnitude of 7.8 and produced a 125 km-long ground rupture that stretched from Dingalan, Aurora to Kayapa, Nueva Vizcaya. The event was a result of strike-slip movements along the Philippine Fault and the Digdig Fault within the Philippine fault system. The earthquake's epicenter was near the town of Rizal, Nueva Ecija, northeast of Cabanatuan. An estimated 1,621 people were killed, most of the fatalities located in Central Luzon and the Cordillera region.
The 120 Squadron "Kestrel" is a helicopter squadron of the Republic of Singapore Air Force based at Sembawang Air Base. First formed in 1969, it is the first and oldest RSAF operational squadron in service. The squadron goes by the motto of "Strive To Achieve". Since 2006, it operates the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter and has participated in Singapore's National Day Parade together with 127 Squadron CH-47SD Chinook for the traditional National Flag Fly Pass.
The September 11 attacks were the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history, causing the deaths of 2,996 people, including 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers who committed murder–suicide. Thousands more were injured, and long-term health effects have arisen as a consequence of the attacks. New York City took the brunt of the death toll when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan were attacked, with an estimated 1,600 victims from the North Tower and around a thousand from the South Tower. Two hundred miles southwest in Arlington County, Virginia, another 125 were killed in the Pentagon. The remaining 265 fatalities included the ninety-two passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 11, the sixty-five aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the sixty-four on American Airlines Flight 77 and the forty-four who boarded United Airlines Flight 93. The attack on the World Trade Center's North Tower alone made the September 11 attacks the deadliest act of terrorism in human history.
The Chi-Chi earthquake, was a 7.3 ML or 7.7 Mw earthquake which occurred in Jiji (Chi-Chi), Nantou County, Taiwan on 21 September 1999 at 01:47:12 local time. 2,415 people were killed, 11,305 injured, and NT$300 billion worth of damage was done. It is the second-deadliest earthquake in Taiwan's recorded history, after the 1935 Shinchiku-Taichū earthquake.
The first of the 2009 Sumatra earthquakes occurred on 30 September off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia with a moment magnitude of 7.6 at . The epicenter was 45 kilometres (28 mi) west-northwest of Padang, West Sumatra, and 220 kilometres (140 mi) southwest of Pekanbaru, Riau. Government and authorities confirmed 1,115 dead, 1,214 severely injured and 1,688 slightly injured. The most deaths occurred in the areas of Padang Pariaman (675), Padang (313), Agam (80) and Pariaman (37). In addition, around 135,000 houses were severely damaged, 65,000 houses were moderately damaged and 79,000 houses were slightly damaged. An estimated 250,000 families have been affected by the earthquake through the total or partial loss of their homes and livelihoods.
On June 29, 1995, the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea, collapsed due to a structural failure. The collapse killed 502 people and injured 937, making it the largest peacetime disaster in South Korean history. It was the deadliest non-deliberate modern building collapse until the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh.
The 2011 Van earthquakes occurred in eastern Turkey near the city of Van. The first earthquake happened on 23 October at 13:41 local time. The shock had a magnitude of 7.1 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). It occurred at a shallow depth, causing heavy shaking across much of eastern Turkey and lighter tremors across neighboring parts of the South Caucasus and Levant. According to Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency on 30 October, the earthquake killed 604 and injured 4,152. At least 11,232 buildings sustained damage in the region, 6,017 of which were found to be uninhabitable. The uninhabitable homes left as much as 8,321 households with an average household population of around 7.6 homeless in the province; this could mean that at least around 60,000 people were left homeless. The other 5,215 have been damaged but are habitable. A separate earthquake within the same earthquake system happened on 9 November at 21:23 local time. 38 people were killed and 260 people were injured in the 9 November earthquake.
The collapse of the Royal Plaza Hotel occurred on 13 August 1993 in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat) in Thailand, killing 137 people and injuring 227. Taking just less than 10 seconds, the building collapsed and transformed the 6-storey complex into a pile of rubble, leaving only the front elevator hall which was separately built from the rest of the structure. Gradual deformation due to creep weakened all the ground floor support columns and when one failed the rest rapidly followed, resulting in an almost complete vertical collapse. Several people were rescued from the rubble and trapped victims called for help using mobile phones. Violation of safety regulations and an unprofessional approach on the part of the engineer were deemed to be the cause of the disaster. Police arrested the owner of the building and five others. Rescue operations continued for more than 20 days, until 3 September. It is one of the most fatal and disastrous man-made accidents in Thai history.
Structural integrity and failure is an aspect of engineering that deals with the ability of a structure to support a designed structural load without breaking and includes the study of past structural failures in order to prevent failures in future designs.
The Rana Plaza collapse occurred on 24 April 2013, when the eight-storey "Rana Plaza" commercial building collapsed due to a structural failure. The rescue team's search ended on 13 May 2013, with a confirmed death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building. It is considered as one of the deadliest structural failures in modern human history, as well as the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history, and the deadliest industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh. Amnesty International called it "the most shocking recent example of business-related human rights abuse."
On 25 August 2020, a building collapsed in Mahad, India killing at least 12 people and trapping at least 60 others.
On June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:22 a.m. EDT, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, United States, partially collapsed, causing the deaths of 98 people. Four people were rescued from the rubble, but one died of injuries shortly after arriving at the hospital. Eleven others were injured. Approximately 35 were rescued the same day from the un-collapsed portion of the building, which was demolished ten days later.
