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Seconds from Disaster

286 statements
55 feature instances
3 referencing feature instances

Seconds from Disaster	type	TVTItem
Seconds from Disaster	label	Seconds from Disaster
Seconds from Disaster	page	SecondsFromDisaster
Seconds from Disaster	comment	Seconds from Disaster is a Documentary series on the National Geographic Channel. The program investigates historically relevant man-made and natural disasters. Each episode aims to explain a single incident by analyzing the causes and circumstances that ultimately affected the disaster. The series uses re-enactments, interviews, testimonies, and CGI to analyze the sequence of events second-by-second for the audience.Narrators for the show include Ashton Smith (American narrator for seasons 1 to 3), Richard Vaughan (British narrator for seasons 1 and 2; narrator from season 4 onwards) and Peter Guinness (British narrator for season 3).
Seconds from Disaster	fetched	2024-03-22T11:01:50Z
Seconds from Disaster	parsed	2024-03-22T11:01:50Z
Seconds from Disaster	processingComment	Dropped link to CallBack: Not a Feature - ITEM
Seconds from Disaster	processingComment	Dropped link to DamageControl: Not a Feature - ITEM
Seconds from Disaster	processingComment	Dropped link to IceAge1: Not a Feature - ITEM
Seconds from Disaster	isPartOf	DBTropes
Seconds from Disaster / int_1237828f	type	Anyone Can Die
Seconds from Disaster / int_1237828f	comment	Anyone Can Die: Or be seriously injured and/or permanently disabled. While not 100% effective for the sake of drama (since some people are interviewed later after the re-enactment unfolds), a good way to tell if someone is dead is if they're mentioned but never interviewed, or if other people, usually relatives, refer to them in past-tense. At some point, the producers got Genre Savvy and would occasionally withhold interviews with a victim until the episode revealed that person was alive. See, for example, one survivor's younger sister in the Bali nightclub episode, or the final survivor rescued from the Sampoong department store collapse.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_1777688d	type	Genre Savvy
Seconds from Disaster / int_1777688d	comment	At some point, the producers got Genre Savvy and would occasionally withhold interviews with a victim until the episode revealed that person was alive. See, for example, one survivor's younger sister in the Bali nightclub episode, or the final survivor rescued from the Sampoong department store collapse.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_1b2b1d2c	type	Violation of Common Sense
Seconds from Disaster / int_1b2b1d2c	comment	"Fire on the Ski Slope": A small group of twelve passengers, after escaping from the burning train, evacuated the tunnel by going downhill, towards the fire, but away from the smoke. These twelve ended up being the only passengers to survive, as all of the rest of them tried to flee uphill. It helped that one of them was a volunteer firefighter, who knew full well that this particular Violation of Common Sense was the smartest thing to do.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_1c445e86	type	Poor Communication Kills
Seconds from Disaster / int_1c445e86	comment	Poor Communication Kills: Literally in some cases. "Meltdown in Chernobyl": The technicians performing the test had no way of telling each other what they were doing, causing them to repeatedly over-correct for each other's mistakes without actually realizing what those mistakes were. "Explosion in the North Sea": The Piper Alpha disaster happened because an LPG pump was turned on, despite having had a vital safety valve removed for maintenance. The paperwork that said the valve had been removed was stored in a different box from the paperwork for the pump itself, because the two parts were technically in different sections of the rig. "Collision on the Runway": A massive number of these of these leads to the pilot of KLM Flight 4805 believing he's been cleared for takeoff, when Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. Most critically, two transmissions that would have alerted him to his error end up blocking each other out on the radio (which wasn't designed to receive transmissions from more than one source at a time), so the KLM crew only hears static and doesn't get either transmission. "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train": Had the driver of the inbound train properly identified himself, the signallers wouldn't have had to implement the General Closure procedure, and would have been able to divert the runaway train to an empty platform. "Titanic/Sinking of the Titanic": The wireless operator for the SS Californian tried to warn nearby ships of icebergs in the area. Unfortunately, he didn't properly announce himself, and was using much less sensitive equipment than the Titanic (which nearly blew out Titanic operator Jack Phillips' eardrums), so Phillips told him to get off the frequency. He went to bed after that, and missed the Titanic's SOS signal. "9/11": Crucial information that the CIA had gathered on numerous suspected terrorists was not given to the FBI, allowing them to sneak into the United States undetected. "Collision at 35,000 Feet/Death in Mid-Air": The pilots of the Bashkirian flight had been trained, in the event of conflicting orders from air traffic control and their TCAS system, to ignore the TCAS system, the opposite of every other country, resulting in both planes descending to the same altitude. The overworked air-traffic controller also mistakenly told the Bashkirian crew that the DHL flight was approaching from the right, when it was in fact approaching from the left. "Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster/Capsized in the North Sea": A lackadaisical working culture resulted in nobody checking that the Herald of Free Enterpriseâ€˜s bow doors were still open - the assistant boatswain had gone to his cabin for a nap without telling anyone, and the first officer had rushed to his post assuming the job had been done already.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_1d3c92da	type	Failsafe Failure
Seconds from Disaster / int_1d3c92da	comment	Failsafe Failure: Many disasters featured occurred as failsafes in place were overwhelmed, out-of-order, or unwittingly disabled through human error. In "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train", the train driver releases air from all the brakes of his train to overcome a mis-diagnosed clog in the air-brake system. Instead, he unwittingly sabotages an automated failsafe that locks the air brakes of his train if air-pressure in the brake system is dangerously low. This leads to a literal train wreck when he is unable to stop his train from crashing into a stationary one further up the line. "Crash Landing in Sioux City": The plane was equipped with three separate hydraulic systems for the explicit purpose of avoiding having the entire control system taken out of order by a single event. However, the exploding fan disk of the tail engine just happened to hit the one weak point in the system as all three systems clustered together at the tail. After this incident, valves were added to the hydraulic systems in other planes to seal off breached sections in future incidents.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_21e5b9c7	type	Failed a Spot Check
Seconds from Disaster / int_21e5b9c7	comment	Failed a Spot Check: The "Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster" wouldn't have happened if anyone had noticed that the doors connecting the ferry's car deck to the outside world had been left open.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_259d5879	type	Anachronism Stew
Seconds from Disaster / int_259d5879	comment	Anachronism Stew: In the "Chicago Air Crash" episode, set in 1979, on some of the scenes on the escalator, you can see an LCD display showing the flight times. They were not widely used until the late 2000s. At one point in the episode "King's Cross Fire" a adverstisement for Ice Age can be seen in the background. The episode takes place during 1987, 15 years before the film was released.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_269e82c1	type	Death of a Child
Seconds from Disaster / int_269e82c1	comment	Death of a Child: This happens in quite a number of disasters - in fact, the show goes to great pains to highlight just how many (often small) children die in these disasters just to drive the tearjerker factor in even further. It's even more gut-wrenching when the parents are interviewed. A perfect example of this is the episode covering the Oklahoma City bombing. It's highly stressed that there are several children in a daycare directly above where Timothy McVeigh's bomb exploded, and that the grandson of one of the people interviewed was there. The grandson survives, albeit with serious injuries, but it's noted that he was one of very few survivors from that daycare; most of the children were not so lucky. Especially tragic since this was a deliberate terrorist act rather than a freak accident.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_2ec219ee	type	Butterfly of Doom
Seconds from Disaster / int_2ec219ee	comment	Butterfly of Doom: Often a major final or initiating factor in the disaster. "Comet Air Crash/Crash of the Comet": The decision to secure a window with rivets instead of glue (as originally designed) left a microscopic manufacturing defect in the fuselage of BOAC Flight 781. Over time, the defect grew into a fatigue crack. The fatigue crack then failed, leading to Explosive Decompression, causing the crash of the Comet. The crash crippled the promised rise of British Aviation company de Havilland, allowing two companies, Boeing (which until then was mostly known for their military aircraft) and Douglas (which later merged with McDonnell Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas, most famous for their DC-3 airliner, as well as their own set of military planes) to take the lead with the Boeing 707 and DC-8, changing the world of civil aviation forever. Also, the subsequent inquiry into the crash resulted in unprecedented investigative techniques (such as wreckage reassembly) being developed; techniques that form the cornerstone of accident investigations to this day. "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train": While trying to reset the emergency brake cord, the train driver accidentally pulls shut a valve supplying air to his train's brakes. This leaves him unable to stop his train at the end of the line, resulting in the Gare de Lyon rail accident. Not to mention that the entire sequence of events would never have happened if the emergency brake hadn't been pulled in the first place. "Inferno in Guadalajara": One very small water pipe bent over a gas main, as well as creating a U-bend in the main sewer line in order to get a subway tunnel through, eventually causes a massive sequential explosion which kills over 200, cripples many more, and causes hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Essentially the same thing happened four years later in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this time with a propane pipe cracking under the weight of settling concrete and groundfill above due to a sharp bend; the Guadalajara explosion is even referenced and footage from that episode shown. The faulty experimental engine which downed British Midlands Flight 092 and caused a couple other planes to make emergency landings was never tested in flight prior to release, instead being only wind-tunnel tested; a flight test would almost surely have uncovered the weak fan blade design. "Crash of the Concorde": A strip of metal that had fallen off another plane and was lying on the runway burst one of the Concorde's tires, which sent debris into the undercarriage that severed a wire and knocked fuel loose from one of the tanks, setting the plane's wing on fire. "Collision on the Runway" is loaded with these. Even by the standards of a show that deals in Disaster Dominoes, an absurd number of factors had to come together for the accident to happen; the lack of any one of them would have averted the accident. The most blatant single example is that when the KLM pilot said he was ready to take off, the tower told him to "stand by for takeoff", while the Pan Am tried to warn him that they were still on the runway. Either message alone would have conveyed to the captain that he needed to wait, but because both were sent at the same instant, the KLM radio could not process them and drowned out both messages in a burst of static. "Columbia's Last Flight": A piece of foam from the external tank broke off during takeoff and hit the leading-edge tip of Columbia's left wing. This had been a longtime problem with the shuttle program, dating all the way back to the first mission, and nothing too serious came of it before. This time, however, the foam just happened to hit a critical spot on the ship's wing, allowing hot gases to seep in during the shuttle's reentry, tearing it apart. â€œPlane Crash in Queens/New York Air Crashâ€�: The first officer had been incorrectly trained to use alternating aggressive rudder inputs to recover from wake turbulence, which he did in response to the turbulence caused by the JAL flight in front. Had he not done this, American Airlines Flight 587 would have leveled out on its own. Instead, his aggressive use of the rudder caused the vertical stabilizer to break off, leading to the plane losing complete control. "Crash Landing In Sioux City": Part of the metal in the rear turbine was improperly forged, which resulted in a hairline fracture that slowly grew larger and larger over seventeen years. During the fateful flight, the crack had grown too big and finally split the turbine in half.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_3042a1e6	type	TV Documentary
Seconds from Disaster / int_3042a1e6	comment	TV Documentary: The series is focused on recounting the events of a disaster, presenting the findings of the investigation, going over the aftermath, and reflecting on the disaster's significance in history.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_31a2a33c	type	Stuff Blowing Up
Seconds from Disaster / int_31a2a33c	comment	Stuff Blowing Up: Exploding sewers, exploding buildings, exploding planes, and lots of things going up in smoke due to leaking fuel catching fire, not to mention actual bombs going off. The initial Guadalajara explosion was powerful enough to be picked up on seismographs, where it registered 3.3 on the Richter scale.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_435dfcc7	type	Computer-Generated Images
Seconds from Disaster / int_435dfcc7	comment	Computer-Generated Images: A selling point of the series.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_479d4e5a	type	Would Hurt a Child
Seconds from Disaster / int_479d4e5a	comment	Would Hurt a Child: "Jonestown Cult Suicide". Jim Jones ordered children to be killed by their own parents. "Oklahoma City Bombing", Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist who committed the worst act of terrorism on US soil before September 11, 2001. The childcare center in the Murrah Building was right above where his truck bomb exploded. The United States of America itself, in the Nagasaki episode. The episode pays particular attention to the fact that most of the city's children had been sent out to try and build firebreaks, in anticipation of a firebombing attack similar to what happened in Tokyo. When the bomb hit, they had no chance to escape, and died instantly from the effects of the bomb.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_4856ac40	type	Stock Footage
Seconds from Disaster / int_4856ac40	comment	Stock Footage: Ubiquitous in the show, mostly from news broadcasts and other media significant to the disaster and subsequent investigation.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_48dfb7e4	type	Stock Sound Effects
Seconds from Disaster / int_48dfb7e4	comment	Stock Sound Effects: Often used as part of the dramatisations of each disaster.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_550754dc	type	Improbable Infant Survival
Seconds from Disaster / int_550754dc	comment	Improbable Infant Survival: Occasionally it's played straight, though not in a good way since in most cases the children's parents die, such as the girl in the Zeebrugge example above.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_557838d1	type	Adaptational Attractiveness
Seconds from Disaster / int_557838d1	comment	Adaptational Attractiveness: Compare the actor playing Vitaly Kaloyev in "Death in Mid-Air" to the real Vitaly Kaloyev◊.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_56515a39	type	Artistic License â€“ History
Seconds from Disaster / int_56515a39	comment	Artistic License â€“ History: In "Sinking of the Titanic" the narrator names Newfoundland as a part of Canada. Newfoundland was still a separate dominion of the British Empire in 1912, not joining Canada until 1949.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_5a29f9f6	type	Sinking Ship Scenario
Seconds from Disaster / int_5a29f9f6	comment	Subverted by a miracle in "Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster/Capsized in the North Sea". In her last moments, Herald of Free Enterprise turned to starboard, which allowed her to run aground on an underwater sand barnote ironically, one of several that ships coming into and out of Zeebrugge usually had to navigate around as she capsized. Had this not happened, she would have turned turtle in much deeper water, which would have lead to a true Sinking Ship Scenario and most likely claimed the lives of everyone on board.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_5deb34da	type	Ace Pilot
Seconds from Disaster / int_5deb34da	comment	Ace Pilot: "Crash Landing at Sioux City". The pilots kept the plane in the air until they could land at an airport with emergency crews waiting, despite the loss of all hydraulic controls, saving the lives of many (though tragically not all) the passengers and preventing ground fatalities.. Part of this was that one of the pilots (who had actually been on the plane as a passenger before the crisis hit) had studied the crash mentioned in... "Terrified over Tokyo". The skill of the pilots again likely saved many lives on the ground in getting the plane out of anywhere populated. Also, they kept the plane flying longer than anyone running the same situation in a simulator ever has. In addition, had the JSDF arrived in time, they would have been able to save many more people than just the four survivors. A number of passengers in the tail sectionnote the rest of the plane was obliterated on impact, but the tail section broke away from the main structure and consequently escaped the brunt of the impact survived the crash, only to die of hypothermia and untreated injuries in the ensuing hours. "Collision on the Runway" is a deconstruction. The pilot of the KLM flight was held in high regard by the airline because of his extensive experience— which possibly led to his crew and even air traffic control deferring to his wishes when they absolutely should not have done so.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_61ce93fd	type	Big Disaster Plot
Seconds from Disaster / int_61ce93fd	comment	In "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train", the train driver releases air from all the brakes of his train to overcome a mis-diagnosed clog in the air-brake system. Instead, he unwittingly sabotages an automated failsafe that locks the air brakes of his train if air-pressure in the brake system is dangerously low. This leads to a literal train wreck when he is unable to stop his train from crashing into a stationary one further up the line.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Seconds from Disaster / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: The series often features individuals that went above and beyond, giving their lives to save others from the disaster. "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train": AndrÃ© Tanguy, the driver of the stationary train in the path of the unstoppable runaway one, frantically warned his passengers over the intercom to evacuate. Staring death in the face, he stayed at his post repeating the warning until the two trains collided head-on, killing him instantly. He is named the hero of the accident, credited with saving dozens of lives. "Plane Crash in the Potomac": A passenger later identified as Arland D. Williams was seen repeatedly handing away lifelines and flotation devices that could have saved him to the very few other survivors of the initial wreck, and drowned when the tail end of the wreck dragged him under the water. The 14th street bridge that was the site of the wreck was later renamed for him.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_7317b97d	type	Awakening the Sleeping Giant
Seconds from Disaster / int_7317b97d	comment	Worse, their intended primary targets, the American aircraft carriers, were not in the harbor at the time of the attack. Also overlaps with Awakening the Sleeping Giant, considering what happens to the carriers and men that partook in the attack only months later.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_74cc759a	type	Atomic Hate
Seconds from Disaster / int_74cc759a	comment	Atomic Hate: "Nagasaki - The Forgotten Bomb" is about the US nuclear attack on Nagasaki, Japan in World War II. The episode makes particular emphasis on the fact that most of the people in the city were trying to continue their lives, despite hearing of the destruction of Hiroshima a few days earlier. To make matters worse, the bomb fell at the same time as a group of children got to work building firebreaks in anticipation of a major firebombing.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_78d0ebcf	type	Crying Wolf
Seconds from Disaster / int_78d0ebcf	comment	Crying Wolf: In "Paris Train Crash", it's noted that the brake system was known to overload and jam when the emergency brake was pulled, so when the driver found that the brakes wouldn't release after he reset the emergency brake, he (rather understandably) believed that it was the same malfunction, rather than realizing that he had actually tripped a failsafe designed to stop the train from moving with insufficient brake power. Adding to the problem was that there were no additional indicators to tell the driver that a safety system had been activated in response to insufficient brake pressure, meaning there really wasn't any clear way to distinguish between an overload and tripping the failsafe.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_7b71edf4	type	Going Critical
Seconds from Disaster / int_7b71edf4	comment	Going Critical: Two disasters are nuclear meltdowns, though this trope is averted as both are depicted accurately: "Meltdown in Chernobyl": A steam explosion blows the roof and containment off of the Chernobyl reactor, leading to a massive, uncontrolled release of radioactive material and one of the two worst peacetime nuclear disasters of human history. "Fukushima": Damage from a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami, loss of power related to it, and a build-up of hydrogen leads to a meltdown and explosions that damage the containment of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, leading to the second worst peacetime nuclear disaster of human history — one that's still ongoing today.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_7fbb2a3	type	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!
Seconds from Disaster / int_7fbb2a3	comment	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: "Inferno in Guadalajara": The chain of explosions was likely set off by a spark created when a utility worker trying to fix the gasoline odors slammed down a manhole cover. "Meltdown in Chernobyl": A safety test conducted by inexperienced employees kicked off the disaster.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_859bbabc	type	The Cassandra
Seconds from Disaster / int_859bbabc	comment	The Cassandra: Multiple people on Montserrat mentioned that the volcano was soon to erupt. The same thing happened at Mount St. Helens. Especially bad in the episode about the Puerto Rico shoe store. The retelling of the disaster has him insisting that something is wrong, that there is some kind of a gas leak, and how he had a bad feeling. Turns out he was right...
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Seconds from Disaster / int_8c96ae78	type	No One Could Survive That!
Seconds from Disaster / int_8c96ae78	comment	No One Could Survive That!: Plays out with horrific consequences in a few episodes. "Terrified Over Tokyo": Part of the reason that the Japanese authorities don't rush to the accident site is that they assume everyone's dead anyway. When they finally do arrive, they not only find four people alive, they also find that others had survived the crash but had died waiting for rescue. "Superstore Collapse": After just a few days, government officials assert that they don't believe anyone is left alive in the remains of the building. Not only does this leave Yoo Ji-Hwan and Park Seung-hyun trapped far longer than they might have been otherwise, but the suggestion is made that other survivors might have been killed by the debris-clearing efforts, since crews were operating under the assumption that there was no one alive that they had to worry about.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_94cc2c28	type	Exact Time to Failure
Seconds from Disaster / int_94cc2c28	comment	Exact Time to Failure: An iconic feature of the series, every significant event in the timeline is listed with an exact time to the moment of disaster.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_95c2a9dd	type	Outliving One's Offspring
Seconds from Disaster / int_95c2a9dd	comment	Outliving One's Offspring: "Amsterdam Air Crash/Schiphol Plane Crash/Plane Crash in the Suburbs": Two parents leave their children home alone to visit some friends a few blocks away. Minutes later, a jumbo jet crashes directly into their apartment.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_973d220f	type	Never My Fault
Seconds from Disaster / int_973d220f	comment	Never My Fault: The San Juan Gas Company in â€œPuerto Rico Gas Explosionâ€� constantly refused to accept responsibility for the chain of events that caused the Humberto Vidal explosion, trying to blame other factors that were deemed unlikely by the investigation. They even went as far as to attempt legal action on the NTSB for a â€œflawedâ€� preliminary report, and continued to deny any wrongdoing even when faced with 1â€™500 lawsuits.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_99ddfcec	type	Unwitting Instigator of Doom
Seconds from Disaster / int_99ddfcec	comment	Unwitting Instigator of Doom: On a few occasions, the disaster can be traced back to the actions of a single person, and the unforeseen consequences thereof. "Tunnel Inferno": The truck driver of the margarine and flour truck who only realized his load was catching fire far too late, and then left his engine running while he ran for his life. "Meltdown in Chernobyl": The reactor crew performing the safety test were all this — had the test just not been done, the disaster never would have happened. "Paris Train Crash/Runaway Train": The woman who pulled the emergency brake on the train had no way of knowing that the driver's attempts to reset the brake system would lead to a fatal collision. "King's Cross Fire/London's Subway Inferno": The smoker who carelessly discarded their still-lit match on the escalator, starting a fire that killed 31 people. The episode even notes that, based on the evidence, this was something that happened a lot, but no one had ever really noticed because every other match had extinguished harmlessly; this one just happened to land in exactly the wrong spot. "Derailment at Eschede": Had the conductor chosen to notify the driver of the train instead of going to investigate the piece of metal sticking through the floor of the train, the driver may have chosen to bring the train to a stop before it derailed. "Texas Oil Explosion": The driver of the white pickup truck who left his truck parked running near the leaking blowdown stack. "Death in Mid-Air": Peter Nielsen becomes this when he orders the Russian plane to descend, unknowingly contradicting their TCAS instructions. If he had said nothing, the Russian pilots would almost certainly have obeyed their TCAS system and climbed to avoid the other plane. To make matters worse, even if the Russian crew hadn't listened to TCAS and had done nothing, the DHL plane, which was descending in accordance with their own TCAS, would have passed harmlessly underneath the passenger plane. Similarly, Nielsen could have chosen to tell the Russians to climb rather than to descend, or he could have chosen to issue instruction — any instruction — to the DHL pilots, who were trained to prioritize TCAS and would likely have continued to descend regardless of what Nielsen told them to do. Instead, he inadvertently gave the one order that kept the planes on a collision course. "New York Air Crash/Plane Crash In Queens": First Officer Stan Molin encountered wake turbulence from a Boeing 747 which had taken off earlier and countered it by doing exactly what he was trained to do. Unfortunately, what he had been trained to do was to mash the rudders so hard that the vertical stabilizer snapped off, causing the plane to go into a flatspin and crash into the Rockaway Peninsula. "Hotel Collapse Singapore": The structural engineer forgot to calculate the building's dead load (the weight of the building itself) when the strength of the support columns was calculated, leaving the building doomed to collapse fifteen years later.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_9a2aee13	type	Heroic Bystander
Seconds from Disaster / int_9a2aee13	comment	Heroic Bystander: Many episodes mention the heroics of average people stepping up to save others. In some, they even manage to bring the individual(s) in question for an interview. "Collision on the Runway": Jack Ridout, a passenger on Pan Am Flight 1736, barely survives the horrific side-on collision with KLM Flight 4805. Although injured and suffering burn wounds, he opens one of the aircraft's exits and braves the burning plane to help several passengers exit the aircraft. He is credited with saving 12 lives. In context, he and the 12 are among the 61 people that escaped the Pan Am alive. "Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster/Capsized in the North Sea": In the wake of the capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise, stories of heroism include a man acting as a human bridge to allow others to escape, and a truck driver saving a five-year-old girl, who lost the rest of her family in the capsize. "Crash Landing at Sioux City": Jerry Schemmel, who survived the crash landing with minor injuries, quickly reached the exit of the plane. Before he could get out, he heard the cries of a baby amid the flames. Without a second thought, he darted back into the wreckage and carried the child to safety. "Plane Crash in the Potomac": Lenny Skutnik, a Congressional Budget Office assistant, jumped from the 14th Street Bridge into the freezing cold waters of the Potomac to save a terribly injured woman from drowning after she managed to escape the plane crash but was unable to hold onto a dangled life preserver from an overhead rescue helicopter. "Bali Bombing": After a bomb explodes outside the Sari Club in Bali, locals run to help. Australian football player Ben Clohessy, in the club with his teammates, also helped to lift survivors over a four and a half metre high wall outside the club to safety. "Kobe Earthquake": Yoshio Fukumoto, who was driving his bus along the Hanshin Expressway on the last leg of his trip from Nagano Prefecture to Kobe, was unlucky enough to be driving on an elevated section right as the main shock of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake struck the city, toppling the expressway section just in front of the bus, though the section he was on held. In spite of the intense shaking making the bus slide across the road from side to side, he was able to bring it to a stop just in time, and then ensured everyone made it off safely. Once the shaking stopped, he even climbed aboard once again to retrieve the bus's insurance documents, even though the front wheels were over the edge of a sheer drop where the section of road ahead had fallen away.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_9c1f758a	type	Kill It with Fire
Seconds from Disaster / int_9c1f758a	comment	Kill It with Fire: Swissair Flight 111 ends up going down when an electrical fire breaks out in the cockpit, frying all necessary electronics needed to fly the plane. Said inferno also kills or incapacitates the plane's Captain through smoke inhalation, while he attempted to contain the blaze.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_a0efb4e7	type	It's Probably Nothing
Seconds from Disaster / int_a0efb4e7	comment	It's Probably Nothing: In many cases, there are warning signs before the disaster occurs, but these warnings are dismissed. In Guadalajara, gasoline starts coming out of taps and showers in nearby homes, but no one considers evacuating. Before the collapse of the Hotel New World, debris starts falling, and the hotel's supporting columns and walls visibly crack. Nobody appears to understand the implications of this before the entire building goes down. Similarly, in the Sampoong Department Store, signs of the building's instability were visible before the collapse, but the owners chose not to shut the store down because they didn't want to lose business by being closed. Prior to the Uberlingen disaster, two other planes came dangerously close to colliding under nearly identical circumstances. This close call should have been a major warning to fix a flaw in the system, but was largely ignorednote it was being studied, but with none of the urgency the potential for disaster would seem to warrant. Instead, the same problem occurred again, and this time the pilots were unable to avert tragedy.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_a5fa59c9	type	Punishment Detail
Seconds from Disaster / int_a5fa59c9	comment	RyÅ«jirÅ� Takami, just moments before his train derailed at Amagasaki Station. It is believed that this was actually part of a chain of similar reactions; fearing the harsh retraining program that JR West would give him for a chain of mistakes he had made along the way, unease developed into concern, which gave way to anxiety after he overran a red signal, causing the train to automatically brake to a stop, then sheer terror after he overshot the platform at Itami Station and had to reverse back, as he realised there was nothing he could do to avoid punishment. Blinded by the fear of what he would surely endure upon returning to the office, he was rendered incapable of operating the train safely, to the point that in the moments before the derailment he only used the service brake to try to slow the train down (rather than the emergency brake, which while it wouldn't have stopped the accident, may well have reduced the speed at which the train left the line), as using the emergency brake came with its own strict penalties. In any case, Takamiâ€™s final moments were likely spent in abject horror, realising that he had doomed both himself and his train to destruction. Mercifully, death came swiftly, as he was killed instantly when his cab slammed into the apartment building after the train came off the wheels.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_a70223	type	Karma Houdini
Seconds from Disaster / int_a70223	comment	Karma Houdini: The Texas City explosion would have been averted had it not been for one worker carelessly leaving his truck running next to the blowdown stack that began to malfunction a few minutes later. As far as official sources state, he was never prosecuted for his negligence. The passenger who pulled the emergency brake on the train that went on to be involved in the Gare de Lyon rail accident minutes later because she missed her stop. While a more minor example than the others in this list, this set in motion the events that ultimately caused the accident.note However, although the episode doesn't note this, she was punished with a fine — which she paid without objection — for her direct action of misusing the emergency system; it's just that she wasn't held responsible for the events that followed, because she couldn't reasonably have anticipated that as a consequence of her action and because too many subsequent factors also had to come into play to cause the crash. Everyone from the CEO to the plant managers of the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. No one was found guilty of the massive corruption and negligence that led to the deaths and suffering that resulted from a completely preventable chemical disaster, to the degree that calling Bhopal an "accident" is almost insufficient.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_a7d5e560	type	Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy
Seconds from Disaster / int_a7d5e560	comment	Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: In "Death in Mid-air", Peter Nielsen was basically doing the work of two air traffic controllers at once because his partner was taking a break against company regulations. Because of the excessive workload, he fails to notice that Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and DHL Flight 611 are closing in on each other until less than a minute before the collision, and in his fatigued state he gives the Bashkirian crew faulty instructions that eliminates the last chance they had to avoid disaster.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_aa30e350	type	Sole Survivor
Seconds from Disaster / int_aa30e350	comment	"Zeebrugge Ferry Disaster/Capsized in the North Sea": In the wake of the capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise, stories of heroism include a man acting as a human bridge to allow others to escape, and a truck driver saving a five-year-old girl, who lost the rest of her family in the capsize.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_ab27d196	type	Apocalypse Cult
Seconds from Disaster / int_ab27d196	comment	Apocalypse Cult: "Waco Cult", the story of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. "Jonestown Cult Suicide", one of the worst peacetime mass suicides/mass homicides inspired by religion in recent history.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_acf33d00	type	Nice Job Fixing It, Villain
Seconds from Disaster / int_acf33d00	comment	Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Pearl Harbor attack is seen as a Japanese disaster, rather than an American one. Among other reasons, the Japanese airmen missed hitting important facilities such as dry docks, sub pens, and fuel storage tanks near the harbor, opting instead to attack the American battleships docked at Battleship Row. Worse, their intended primary targets, the American aircraft carriers, were not in the harbor at the time of the attack. Also overlaps with Awakening the Sleeping Giant, considering what happens to the carriers and men that partook in the attack only months later. The episode ends with "the Empire makes one of its greatest blunders, and pays the ultimate price", to footage of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_ad1db87c	type	Oh, Crap!
Seconds from Disaster / int_ad1db87c	comment	Oh, Crap!: Multiple moments: Dr. Bendaari upon learning the residents of Bhopal have been exposed to MIC, and that it's a life-or-death struggle that no conventional eye drops will help. Geoff Bollands, with a closeup of his eyes, when he notices the pressure gauge of Piper Alphaâ€™s gas pipes are at critical levels, just before the first explosion. RyÅ«jirÅ� Takami, just moments before his train derailed at Amagasaki Station. It is believed that this was actually part of a chain of similar reactions; fearing the harsh retraining program that JR West would give him for a chain of mistakes he had made along the way, unease developed into concern, which gave way to anxiety after he overran a red signal, causing the train to automatically brake to a stop, then sheer terror after he overshot the platform at Itami Station and had to reverse back, as he realised there was nothing he could do to avoid punishment. Blinded by the fear of what he would surely endure upon returning to the office, he was rendered incapable of operating the train safely, to the point that in the moments before the derailment he only used the service brake to try to slow the train down (rather than the emergency brake, which while it wouldn't have stopped the accident, may well have reduced the speed at which the train left the line), as using the emergency brake came with its own strict penalties. In any case, Takamiâ€™s final moments were likely spent in abject horror, realising that he had doomed both himself and his train to destruction. Mercifully, death came swiftly, as he was killed instantly when his cab slammed into the apartment building after the train came off the wheels. Both flight crews of Pan Am Flight 1736 and KLM Flight 4805 have this when they realize the latter is speeding down the runway right at the still-turning former plane.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_b3eecaae	type	Colony Drop
Seconds from Disaster / int_b3eecaae	comment	Colony Drop: Following Columbia's breakup, around 84,000 pieces of the shuttle rained down across East Texas and Louisiana. Miraculously, despite some close calls, nobody was injured.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_b47d95be	type	No OSHA Compliance
Seconds from Disaster / int_b47d95be	comment	No OSHA Compliance: Ironically averted in "Fire on the Ski Slope". The train that caught fire fulfilled all safety regulations. However, said regulations were hopelessly outdated, as they did not take electric power, the hydraulic braking system or the fan heaters that started the fire into account.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_c8a8c595	type	Retirony
Seconds from Disaster / int_c8a8c595	comment	Retirony: Edward Smith was to make one last trip across the Atlantic as ship's captain before retiring. Unfortunately, he was to captain the doomed Titanic.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_ca326e1e	type	Chekhov's Volcano
Seconds from Disaster / int_ca326e1e	comment	Chekhov's Volcano: At least two, for the eruptions at SoufriÃ¨re Hills and Mount St. Helens are also shown as episodes.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_cbe687ab	type	Corrupt Corporate Executive
Seconds from Disaster / int_cbe687ab	comment	"Bhopal Nightmare": Corruption and cut corners in the management and maintenance of a Union Carbide pesticide factory, solely due to the desire for extra profits, was the cause of one of the most deadly chemical accidents in history. Worse, due to a cover-up and blaming employees, the Corrupt Corporate Executive involved got away with zero consequences.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_ce1c73e2	type	Just Plane Wrong
Seconds from Disaster / int_ce1c73e2	comment	Just Plane Wrong: The Boeing 757 featured in the episode about the Uberlingen mid-air collision is an example of this; Boeing 757s are best known for their wide and round nose, with the cockpit situated pretty close to it; in the episode, the CGI 757 has an oddly pointy nose with the cockpit set back, making it look somewhat like a 747 without the hump and upper deck, when viewed at a glance. The crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was an example of an airline's management falling victim to this trope. The American Airlines training program at the time taught pilots that wake turbulence could cause an aircraft to roll up to 90 degrees without aggressive action by the pilots, which is possible with smaller aircraft but not with an airliner the size of the A300. Consequently, the first officer reacted to a wake turbulence encounter by making a series of rapid-fire rudder inputs that over-stressed the vertical stabilizer until it separated, causing the aircraft to lose control and crash.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_d49f90ea	type	Western Terrorists
Seconds from Disaster / int_d49f90ea	comment	"Oklahoma City Bombing", Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist who committed the worst act of terrorism on US soil before September 11, 2001. The childcare center in the Murrah Building was right above where his truck bomb exploded.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_e26d8285	type	Explosive Decompression
Seconds from Disaster / int_e26d8285	comment	"Comet Air Crash/Crash of the Comet": The decision to secure a window with rivets instead of glue (as originally designed) left a microscopic manufacturing defect in the fuselage of BOAC Flight 781. Over time, the defect grew into a fatigue crack. The fatigue crack then failed, leading to Explosive Decompression, causing the crash of the Comet. The crash crippled the promised rise of British Aviation company de Havilland, allowing two companies, Boeing (which until then was mostly known for their military aircraft) and Douglas (which later merged with McDonnell Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas, most famous for their DC-3 airliner, as well as their own set of military planes) to take the lead with the Boeing 707 and DC-8, changing the world of civil aviation forever. Also, the subsequent inquiry into the crash resulted in unprecedented investigative techniques (such as wreckage reassembly) being developed; techniques that form the cornerstone of accident investigations to this day.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_e4ba33fc	type	Disaster Dominoes
Seconds from Disaster / int_e4ba33fc	comment	Disaster Dominoes: Investigating how these unfold in Real Life disasters is the premise of the series. "Collision on the Runway": A bomb planted in Gran Canaria Airport kicks off a series of events that would lead to two fully loaded Boeing 747s colliding on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport over 100 kilometers away, resulting in the deaths of 583 people in the worst accident in aviation history. The bomb led to the planes diverting to Los Rodeos. The hot weather at Los Rodeos led to most of the passengers disembarking for the terminal. Once all the passengers made it back, a pair of children were unaccounted for, causing the Pan-Am flight to be delayed and put immediately behind the KLM flight. The delay meant that both planes were taxiing through the fog. The fog necessitated communication through radio by the pilots, but a technical glitch meant that they couldn't understand each other. This miscommunication was what made the disaster from this point onwards irreversible. "Explosion in the North Sea": The loss of the Piper Alpha oil rig was the result of a chain of events that ultimately stemmed from a bad paperwork system. During the recap, the narrator even points out four links in the chain that, had any one of them been done differently, would have mitigated, or even outright prevented, the disaster. â€œCrash Landing in Sioux Cityâ€�: Metal fatigue in UA Flight 232â€™s tail engine fan disk eventually resulted in the fan disk explosively disintegrating. By horrible chance, this also severed every single hydraulic line, making the plane completely unpilotable. "Fire in the Cockpit": Overheating from Swissair Flight 111's inflight entertainment system causes a spark to break out in the plane's wiring just above the cockpit, which causes metallized mylar placed there to ignite, creating a blaze. The pilots then turn off the air conditioning, which causes the blaze to become an inferno and consume the cockpit. The fire then burns out all of the plane's important wiring, including the autopilot and instrument panels. Captain Zimmerman then attempts to fight the fire, ultimately dying or being incapacitated by smoke inhalation. This leaves First Officer Low to pilot the plane alone, with no instruments to help him, thick smoke filling the cockpit, and zero visibility in the night sky. The plane ultimately crashes into the water at 345mph, killing all 229 passengers and crew.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_f8f71b5f	type	Buried Alive
Seconds from Disaster / int_f8f71b5f	comment	Buried Alive The survivors from the Hotel New World were trapped under the rubble for several days before rescuers were able to retrieve them. When the Hyatt Regency walkways collapsed, a number of people who were on the ground floor and the lower walkway were buried. In this case, all of the surviving victims were rescued within hours of the incident. One of the survivors interviewed in the Sampoong Department Store episode was trapped in the rubble for over a week, due in part to the government's decision to prematurely halt rescue efforts only a few days after the disaster because they thought there was no way anyone was still alive. The end of the episode reveals that she wasn't the last person left alive in the building either; another woman was pulled out a shocking seventeen days after the collapse.
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Seconds from Disaster / int_ffad4e9f	type	Shown Their Work
Seconds from Disaster / int_ffad4e9f	comment	Shown Their Work: One of the most famous survivors of the USS Forrestal disaster was actually future US Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain; in fact, the plane hit was either McCain's or the one right next to it (there was too much damage to tell after the fact exactly which plane was hit). His name is never spoken in the episode, but a brief shot of an assignment board does show the name McCain listed.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Seconds from Disaster	hasFeature	Abusive Workplace / int_2b358443
Seconds from Disaster	hasFeature	Spoiler Title / int_2b358443
Seconds from Disaster	hasFeature	TV Documentary / int_2b358443

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