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".
On July 17, 1981, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, suffered the structural collapse of two overhead walkways. Loaded with partygoers, the concrete and glass platforms cascaded down, crashing onto a tea dance in the lobby, killing 114 and injuring 216. 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 collapse of the Hotel New World was a civil disaster that occurred in Singapore on 15 March 1986. The Hotel New World was a six-story building situated at the junction of Serangoon Road and Owen Road in the Rochor district when it suddenly collapsed, trapping 50 people beneath the rubble. 33 people died and 17 people were rescued.
The Armero tragedy occurred following the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia, on November 13, 1985. The volcano's eruption after 69 years of dormancy caught nearby towns unprepared, even though volcanological organizations had warned the government to evacuate the area after they detected volcanic activity two months earlier.
The Pemberton Mill was a large textiles factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, originally built in 1853. On January 10, 1860, at around 4:30 PM, 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.
Urban search and rescue is a type of technical rescue operation that involves the location, extrication, and initial medical stabilization of victims trapped in an urban area, namely structural collapse due to natural disasters, war, terrorism or accidents, mines and collapsed trenches.
The 2003 Boumerdès earthquake occurred on May 21 at in northern Algeria. The shock had a moment magnitude of 6.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). The epicentre of the earthquake was located near the town of Thénia in Boumerdès Province, approximately 60 km east of the capital Algiers. The quake was the strongest to hit Algeria in more than twenty years – since 1980, when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake resulted in at least 2,633 deaths.
The September 11 attacks of 2001 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 Knickerbocker Theatre was a movie theater located at 18th Street and Columbia Road in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in the United States. The theater's roof collapsed on January 28, 1922, under the weight of snow from a two-day blizzard that was later dubbed the Knickerbocker storm. The theater was showing Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford at the time of the collapse, which killed 98 patrons and injured 133.
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 Via Canosa 7 building collapse was a deadly accident that occurred in Barletta, Italy on 16 September 1959. 58 people were killed and 12 injured in the structural collapse of a five-story housing complex just one-year old.
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.
On 4 April 2013, a building collapsed on tribal land in Mumbra, a suburb of Thane in Maharashtra, India. It has been called the worst building collapse in the area. Seventy-four people were killed, while more than 100 survived. The search for additional survivors ended on 6 April 2013.
The Rana Plaza collapse was a structural failure that occurred on 24 April 2013 in the Savar Upazila of Dhaka District, Bangladesh, where an eight-story commercial building called Rana Plaza collapsed. The search for the dead ended on 13 May 2013 with a death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building. It is considered the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern human history, as well as the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history and the deadliest industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh.
On 21 November 2013 the roof of a Maxima shopping centre in the Zolitūde neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, collapsed at 17:44 local time resulting in the deaths of 54 people, including three rescue workers, and injuries to another 41 people. An unknown number of people were able to leave the store on their own after the initial collapse. It was the worst disaster in Latvia since 1950, when the steamer Mayakovsky sank in Riga, killing 147 people. The disaster is often called Zolitūdes traģēdija by Latvian media outlets.
On 31 March 2016, a 150 m (490 ft) steel span of the under-construction Vivekananda Road flyover in the Girish Park neighbourhood of Kolkata, India, collapsed. 27 people died and 80 more were injured in the accident.
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 thirty-five were rescued the same day from the un-collapsed portion of the building, which was demolished ten days later.
