Wellington Avalanche

During the early morning hours of March 1, 1910,  an avalanche roars down Windy Mountain near Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mountains, taking with it two Great Northern trains and 96 victims. This is one of the worst train disasters in U.S. history and the worst natural disaster (with the greatest number of fatalities) in Washington.

On February 23, 1910, after a snow delay at the east Cascade Mountains town of Leavenworth, two Great Northern trains, the Spokane Local passenger train No. 25 and Fast Mail train No. 27, proceeded westbound towards Puget Sound. There were five or six steam and electric engines, 15 boxcars, passenger cars, and sleepers.

The trains had passed through the Cascade Tunnel from the east to the west side of the mountains, when snow and avalanches forced them to stop near Wellington, in King County. Wellington was a small town populated almost entirely with Great Northern railway employees.

The train stopped under the peak of Windy Mountain, above Tye Creek. Heavy snowfall and avalanches made it impossible for train crews to clear the tracks. For six days, the trains waited in blizzard and avalanche conditions. On February 26, the telegraph lines went down and communication with the outside was lost. On the last day of February, the weather turned to rain with thunder and lightning. Thunder shook the snow-laden Cascade Mountains alive with avalanches. Then it happened.

Ninety-six people were killed, including 35 passengers, 58 Great Northern employees on the trains, and three railroad employees in the depot. Twenty-three passengers survived; they were pulled from the wreckage by railroad employees who immediately rushed from the hotel and other buildings where they had been staying. The work was soon abandoned; it was not until 21 weeks later, in late July, that it was possible for the last of the bodies to be retrieved.

The immediate cause of the avalanche was the rain and thunder. But, conditions had been set by the clear cutting of timber and by forest fires caused by steam locomotive sparks, which opened up the slopes above the tracks and created an ideal environment for slides to occur.

My personal view on the matter: Had the clearing of wood and forest fires not happened, this incident would have been chalked up as a normal disaster, much like an earthquake. However, mankind has yet again played a part in causing this to happen, which is not surprising at this point as humans have over the years, destroyed Earth's natural resources in favor of development or self-productivity. Not that it's wrong per se but such disasters could have been mostly prevented if there weren't excess destruction.

References:

Lange, G. (2003, January 26). Train disaster at wellington kills 96 on march 1, 1910. Retrieved from http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5127

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, pummeling a region that included the fabled city of New Orleans and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi. In all, more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced.

Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the category 3 storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center. The hurricane's storm surge — a 29-foot wall of water pushed ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast — was the highest ever measured in the United States. Levees failed in New Orleans, resulting in political and social upheavals that continued a half decade later.

Katrina ranks as one of the most punishing hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Damage, costing billions of dollars, has made it one of the costliest storms on record. In New Orleans, floodwaters from the breached levee rose to rooftops in the poorest neighborhood, and in many areas residents were rescued from roofs of homes that became uninhabitable. The hurricane's howling winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 evacuees had taken shelter. An exodus of hundreds of thousands left the city, many becoming refugees, finding shelter with nearby relatives or restarting their lives in states as far away as Massachusetts and Utah.

The response from Singapore was swift, with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong writing a letter to then-President George W. Bush, offering help to the devastated areas. As a result, four helicopters were sent to help the Texas Army National Guard.

However, the hurricane protection failures in New Orleans prompted a lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the builders of the levee system as mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965. Responsibility for the failures and flooding was laid squarely on the Army Corps in January 2008, but the federal agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity in the Flood Control Act of 1928. There was also an investigation of the responses from federal, state and local governments, resulting in the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, and of New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Eddie Compass. In addition, controversy surrounded the relief efforts and the US government was heavily criticized for mismanagement and lack of leadership.


My personal view on the matter: When chaos strikes, humans tend to panic and scatter. Paranoia will hit and the government will be accused of inefficiency and inability to act in dire situations. This became highly evident in the Hurricane Katrina situation as crime rates increased along with more accusations of racism. I feel that people should try to remain calm instead of become hysteric. Yes, lives are lost, including their loved ones but pushing blame around won't help anyone out or fix any problems. They need to understand that authorities are always doing the best they can.

References:

Hurricane katrina. (2010, August 25). Retrieved from http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricane_katrina/index.html 

Hurricane katrina - wikipedia. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina

 Singaporean response to hurricane katrina. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singaporean_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina