While all of the listed accidents caused immediately massive numbers of lives lost, further widespread deaths were connected to many of these incidents, often the result of prolonged or lingering effects of the initial catastrophe. This was the case particularly in such cases as exposure to contaminated air, toxicchemicals or radiation, some years later due to lung damage, cancer, etc. Some numbers in the table below reflect both immediate and delayed deaths related to accidents, while many do not.
Engineering
Explosions
Accidents with at least 200 deaths. This list does not include bombings, aviation incidents, or mining disasters.
Deaths
Date
Incident
20,000
30 May 1626
Wanggongchang Explosion in Beijing, China, in the Wanggongchang Gunpowder Factory, destroys part of the city and kills 20,000 people[1]
3,000
18 August 1769
A lightning bolt caused the Brescia Explosion of a gunpowder depot in Brescia, Italy, destroying one-sixth of the city[2][3]
3,000?
1 November 1948
Boiler and ammunition explosion aboard an unidentified merchant ship evacuating troops of the Republic of China Army from Yingkou, China, for Taiwan in early November 1948.[4][disputed–discuss] Other sources suggest this figure is inaccurate.[5]
Windscale, Seascale, Cumbria (now Sellafield), England. [There were no deaths due to deterministic effects (i.e., people receiving a high dose of radiation, rapidly becoming ill, and dying); the 100–240 figure is an estimate of the number of people who died later in life due to cancer caused by radiation from the accident[30]].
Chernobyl disaster. The official report is 31 immediate deaths, 64 recorded cancer deaths by 2008, and potentially up to, but no more than, 4,000 total cancer deaths.[33]Far-higher death toll estimates have been made, but these are disputed.
2005 Al-Aaimmah bridge stampede (note: because the stampede was triggered by reports of a bombing, this figure is also included in the higher estimate for casualties of the War in Iraq)
Crowd crush during an attack by the RAF Bomber Command in World War II as they made their way into Galleria delle Grazie, a railway tunnel used as an air-raid shelter.
Accidents with at least 10 deaths. This list does not include aviation or other transport accidents involving sporting teams traveling to or from a sporting event.
Deaths
Date
Incident
1,300
Between 284 and 286 AD
Collapse of a wall of Circus Maximus (Rome, sometime within the reign of Diocletian)[66]
Yellow River Dragstrip, a dragster crashed through a chain-link fence into spectators, killing 11. 12th person died later in hospital. (Covington, Georgia, US)
Accidents with at least 10 deaths. This list does not include incidents involving gondola lifts, ski lifts, and similar types of cable transport.
Deaths
Date
Incident
Location
104
10 May 1995
Vaal Reefs mining disaster: A locomotive crashed through a safety barrier and fell into a mine shaft, hitting an elevator which was carrying 104 workers, and causing it to plunge to the bottom of the shaft.[103][104]
A methane gas explosion at the St. Helena gold mine severed the cable of a double-deck elevator, causing it to fall 1.4 kilometers to the bottom of the mine shaft, killing all 52 people on board. 10 others who were not in the elevator were killed in the explosion.[105][106]
A descending elevator became stuck in the Vaal Reefs mine shaft and then fell to the bottom of the shaft when it abruptly became unstuck, killing all 31 miners on board.[107][108]
Intelsat 708, Xichang Satellite Launch Center, Sichuan, China, Launch vehicle veered off course immediately after liftoff and struck a nearby village, officially killing at least six people (although other estimates put the death count higher).
A mining accident is an accident that occurs during the process of mining minerals or metals. Thousands of miners die from mining accidents each year, especially from underground coal mining, although accidents also occur in hard rock mining. Coal mining is considered much more hazardous than hard rock mining due to flat-lying rock strata, generally incompetent rock, the presence of methane gas, and coal dust. Most of the deaths these days occur in developing countries, and rural parts of developed countries where safety measures are not practiced as fully. A mining disaster is an incident where there are five or more fatalities.
The Chernobyl disaster, considered the worst nuclear disaster in history, occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, then part of the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine. From 1986 onward, the total death toll of the disaster has lacked consensus; as peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet and other sources have noted, it remains contested. There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer. However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to occur due to the disaster's long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe. Such numbers are based on the heavily contested linear no-threshold model.
↑ MiguelGalindo y Galindo (21 October 2019). Catástrofe de Chalchicomula(PDF). Secretaria de Fomento. pp.233–237. Archived(PDF) from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
↑ Jar Torre, Luis (November 2009). "Un Desastre a la Española". Revista General de Marina (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 4 April 2023. Retrieved 14 September 2022– via páginas personales de Juan Manuel Grijalvo.
↑ Benjamin K. Sovacool. The costs of failure: A preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907–2007, Energy Policy 36 (2008), p. 1806.
↑ Benjamin K. Sovacool. A Critical Evaluation of Nuclear Power and Renewable Electricity in Asia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2010, p. 396.
↑ "IAEA Report". In Focus: Chernobyl. Archived from the original on 11 June 2008. Retrieved 31 May 2008.
↑ Mommsen, Theodor (1892). Chronica minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII. Added t.-p.: Monvmenta Germaniae historica... Edidit Societas aperiendis fontibvs rervm germanicarvm medii aevi. Avctorvm antiqvissimorvm tomvs IX, XI, XIII (in Latin). apvd Weidmannos. Archived from the original on 30 October 2020. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
↑ 1993年6月2日北角籠笠意外12死(無線)1[June 2, 1993: Nakasa, North Point died 12 accidentally (wireless) 1], 8 July 2014, archived from the original on 21 December 2021, retrieved 14 June 2020
This article includes an events-related list of lists.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
