The BEST episodes of Seconds From Disaster
Every episode of Seconds From Disaster ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Seconds From Disaster!
Accounts of famous technological disasters and their subsequent investigations.
#1 - Fire on the Ski Slope
Season 1 - Episode 9 - Aired 8/31/2004
November 11, 2000, started out as a normal day at the Kaprun ski resort in Austria, as a Furnicular train climbing the slopes breaks down in a tunnel. Passengers then realise it's on fire. Only 12 make it out alive, leaving 155 people to die horribly. But how could such a modern train break down and catch fire?
#2 - Wreck of the Sunset Limited
Season 1 - Episode 6 - Aired 8/10/2004
September 1993. The captain of a towboat unwittingly causes the collapse of a bridge over the Big Bayou Canot. When an Amtrak train comes along, it derails with 47 lives lost. Why was such a hideous mistake made? How could it have been prevented? Could it have been prevented at all? Wreck of the Sunset Limited explains why over 40 people died that Autumn day.
#3 - Norway Massacre: I Was There
Season 6 - Episode 1 - Aired 7/22/2012
On July 22, 2011, a gunman goes on a terrorist rampage – starting with an explosion in Oslo and ending with the slaughter of dozens of teenagers.
#4 - Deepwater Horizon
Season 5 - Episode 5 - Aired 4/15/2012
A look at the series of decisions and mistakes that led to the world's largest oil spill disaster, and that 11 workers on the rig died.
#5 - Skywalk Collapse
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/10/2006
On 17 July 1981, 1,500 people had gathered for a dance in the Hyatt Regency Hotel when, in a catastrophic disaster, the skywalk collapses killing 114 people and injuring countless others in the worst US structural failure.
#6 - Killer Quake (Kobe Earthquake)
Season 2 - Episode 6 - Aired 8/30/2005
On 17 January 1995, the Japanese city of Kobe was rocked by the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which destroyed buildings and killed over 1000 people and left thousands homeless. Why couldn't the top of the art equipment predict a disaster of this magnitude?
#7 - Flood at Stava Dam
Season 1 - Episode 11 - Aired 10/12/2004
On July 1985, Italy's Stava Dam collapses and demolishes 70 structures killing 268 people in the process. Was there a fault in the design of the dam? Is this something that could happen to any dam around the world? Find out how a structural failure leads to a massive catastrophe with Flood at Stava Dam
#8 - Disco Bombing (The Bali Bombing)
Season 2 - Episode 8 - Aired 9/20/2005
Bali, located in Indonesia, is one of the most popular resorts in the world. But 202 die on the night of October 12, 2002, Muslim terrorists detonate several bombs in local nightclubs. Its the horror of 9/11 all over again.
#9 - Meltdown in Chernobyl
Season 1 - Episode 7 - Aired 8/17/2004
We make mistakes every few seconds of our lives. They are unavoidable. But sometimes the results can be disastrous. On April 26, 1986, a series of catastrophic blunders leave dozens dead when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melts down.
#10 - Pearl Harbor
Season 4 - Episode 2 - Aired 9/12/2011
On December 7, 1941 Japanese forces attack United States military installations in and around Pearl Harbor, thus bringing the US into World War II.
#11 - 9/11
Season 4 - Episode 1 - Aired 9/5/2011
On September 11, 2001 two aircraft are deliberately flown into two buildings of the World Trade Center and one is flown into the Pentagon. Another crashes in a field in rural Pennsylvania.
#12 - Space Shuttle Challenger
Season 3 - Episode 18 - Aired 1/31/2007
On a cold winter day in 1986, space shuttle Challenger takes off from Cape Canaveral to start Mission 51-L. 73 seconds later, Challenger's boosters explode and send it into the ocean in pieces. What happened? Was a fault to blame? Or was there ice on the shuttle?
#13 - Paddington Train Collision
Season 4 - Episode 3 - Aired 9/19/2011
On October 5, 1999 two trains collide at Ladbroke Grove junction near London's Paddington station after the driver of one fails to stop his train at a red signal.
#14 - Collision at 35,000 Feet
Season 4 - Episode 4 - Aired 9/26/2011
On July 1, 2002 a cargo airliner and a passenger airliner collide while they are over Überlingen in Germany. The two aircraft crash, killing all on board.
#15 - Bhopal Nightmare
Season 4 - Episode 6 - Aired 10/10/2011
On December 2, 1984 in Bhopal, India, a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant results in the deaths of 3,000 people.
#16 - Japan's Nuclear Nightmare
Season 5 - Episode 1 - Aired 3/11/2012
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami off Japan’s coast caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
#17 - Mountain Tsunami
Season 5 - Episode 3 - Aired 3/25/2012
In 1963 a landslide from Monte Toc into the reservoir of the Europe's highest dam caused a giant flood wave that destroyed the village of Longarone and other villages, claiming over 2,000 lives.
#18 - Waco Cult
Season 5 - Episode 4 - Aired 4/1/2012
After a 51-day siege at the ranch of an armed religious cult, the FBI tries to force people out with tear gas, but a fire breaks out and almost 80 people die.
#19 - Massacre in Mumbai
Season 5 - Episode 6 - Aired 4/22/2012
On 26 November 2008, terrorists attacked two luxury hotels (one of them the famous Taj Mahal Hotel), a Jewish educational center, a café and a train station in Mumbai, killing 166 people.
#20 - Jonestown Cult Suicide
Season 6 - Episode 2 - Aired 11/5/2012
On November 18, 1978, when enigmatic cult leader Reverend Jim Jones calls all his followers together in South America, the resulting tragedy becomes the largest mass murder-suicide of US citizens in history - 909 are dead.
#21 - Terrified Over Tokyo
Season 6 - Episode 6 - Aired 12/3/2012
On August 12, 1985, the rear pressure bulkhead burst on Japan Airlines Flight 123, destroying the vertical stabilizer and severing all four of the aircraft's vital hydraulic systems. The crew kept the aircraft flying for 32 minutes until it clipped Mt Osutaka and crashed, killing all but 4 people out of the 524 passengers and crew aboard.
#22 - Chinook Helicopter Crash
Season 6 - Episode 10 - Aired 1/7/2013
On June 2, 1994, a Royal Air Force Boeing Chinook helicopter crashes on the Mull of Kintyre, on the west coast of Scotland. All 29 people aboard die, 25 of them being counter-terrorism officers who battled the IRA. The initial investigation cites pilot error as the cause, but several more investigations take place over the next 17 years before this verdict is overturned.
#23 - Cable Car Collision
Season 4 - Episode 5 - Aired 10/3/2011
The Cavalese cable car disaster of 1998 (as distinct from a cable car disaster in the same location in 1976), occurred on 3 February 1998 near the Italian town of Cavalese, a ski resort located in the Dolomites, some 40 km north-east of Trento. The disaster, which led to the death of 20 people, occurred when a U.S. military plane cut a cable supporting a gondola of an aerial tramway.
#24 - Eruption on Montserrat
Season 3 - Episode 19 - Aired 3/7/2007
On the Caribbean island of Montserrat is the Soufrière Hills volcano. Nearby is Plymouth, the island's capital. In 1995, Soufrière Hills came to life and spewed ash over the island. Everyone is evacuated to the north of Montserrat. Two years on, the eruptions get worse and in 1997, Soufrière Hills erupts violently. Pyroclastic flows rage down the mountain and destroy Plymouth and Bramble Airport, killing 23 people. It generates a small tsunami. People crowd onto ships to escape their home, knowing it's been destroyed.
#25 - Comet Air Crash
Season 3 - Episode 14 - Aired 11/15/2006
The DH Comet is the first jet airliner and the pride of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. But on January 10, 1954, BOAC Flight 781, enroute from Rome to London, explodes catastrophically and crashes, killing 35 people. The investigation begins, but when South African Airways Flight 201 crashes exactly the same way taking another 21 lives, all Comets are grounded and the investigation takes a step forward.