50 More Disasters Made Worse By Human Folly

If there is one thing about human beings that you can count upon, it is our tendency to make a bad situation worse. Owners and builders take shortcuts when erecting a structure, and it collapses, killing those inside. Government agencies and profiteers build housing without appropriate fire safety in mind, and residents perish in preventable fires. A ship's captain fails to foresee the consequences of risky maneuvers close to shore. Munitions and explosives are stored in populated areas and handled without care. Employees handle poisonous materials while their bosses assure them their work is harmless. Environmental disasters that last generations are the result of ineptitude and greed. Government officials fail to learn lessons from one pandemic, and history repeats itself a century later. A man damages a flood levy in an attempt to avoid his wife and get drunk. Another man tries a dangerous procedure at home that he saw on television. And then when disaster strikes . . . other people pay the price for their folly. In this follow-up to "50 Great Disasters Made Worse By Human Folly," experience fifty more disasters made worse by human greed, ignorance, emotion, and lack of common sense, including one of the first disasters captured in photographs, the worst air disaster in world history, recently declassified accidents involving spacecraft, an attempt to exterminate sparrows, the Great Lego Spill, some of the largest explosions in human history, a preventable flood that killed hundreds of thousands, the sizzling-to-death of football fans, the destruction of a skyscraper ignited by illegal fireworks, and the disastrous response to two deadly pandemics.