It should have been a day of routine maintenance on November 9, 2010 at the DuPont plant in North Tonawanda, New York. Tank 1, which normally contained 10,000-gallons of polyvinyl fluoride (PVF), a slurry used in manufactured countertops, had been cleaned and inspected in preparation for repairs ...

In 1981, the shuttle Columbia became the first to successfully reach space. From 1981 to 2003, Columbia carried dozens of astronauts on missions, spending a total of 300 days, 17 hours, 40 minutes, and 22 seconds in space. Columbia’s last flight was STS-107, a 16-day research mission ...

Just before midnight on a cool, moonless night in March 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending 13 billion gallons of water in the form of a ten-story high torrent crashing along the Santa Clara riverbed towards the ocean ...

On the days preceding February 26, 1972, Buffalo mining officials kept an eye on a local coal refuse dam in Logan County, West Virginia, as heavy rain continuously fell. The company measured water levels ...

The Vasa was a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after only sailing roughly 1,400 yards into its maiden voyage on August 10, 1628. Now, resurrected from the sea, the Vasa represents a widely-recognized symbol of the Swedish “great power period.”

On October 17, 1989, Ruth Anne Liu-Johnston left her office in San Francisco and traveled toward downtown Oakland. On her way, she drove across the Bay Bridge and took the I-880 connector. As she drove, she noticed her speedometer ...

As the last section of the tower was being raised, the supporting bolts suddenly failed, and the entire section fell, cascading a thousand feet to the ground. On the way down, the falling section sheered away guy wires and caused the entire structure to topple.

At the height of the space race in the 1960s, the United States pursued an accelerated program to put men on the moon before the Soviet Union. Apollo 1 was to be the first crewed mission of the United States Apollo program, the undertaking ...

The SS Sultana was an impressive steamboat that ran regular trips up and down the Mississippi River during the Civil War. Then, in the wake of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the SS Sultana ...

The rain pelted the men that desperately tried to save the dam, located 14 miles upstream of the town of Johnstown, PA in the southwest corner of the state. Hours earlier, Elian Unger, the president of the South ...