What went wrong ? Countdown to Catastrophe

The story of the worst high-speed rail disaster in Spanish history, when on July 24th 2013 a high-speed train derailed on a curve just outside the railway station of Santiago de Compostela, killing 79 people. Nearly a decade later, justice for the family members of the victims remains elusive, with the trial still grinding slowly through the Spanish courts.

It was one of the worst cable car disasters in Italy: A cable car crashed to the ground, killing 14 out of 15 passengers. The only survivor was a 5-year-old Israeli child whose parents did not survive.

The grounding of the Ever Given mega container ship in the middle of the Suez Canal on March 23, 2020 delayed billions in trade and highlighted the fragility of global supply chains. It took six days and two of the most powerful tugs in the world to pull the massive ship carrying nearly 20,000 containers free from the sand banks where she was wedged.

120 miles north of Aberdeen, Scotland, in the North Sea, the Piper Alpha oil rig exploded and sank on July 6, 1988, killing 165 of the men on board and two rescue workers whose ship was trapped in the burning, disintegrating rig. 61 workers managed to save themselves and survived. Some of them tell their story here.

The Ethipoan Airways Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya which crashed six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard. It is Ethiopia's deadliest accident ever, and was the second MAX 8 accident in less than five months after the October 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash in Indonesia.

The story of the deadly Kings Cross fire on the Piccadilly line of the London Underground on November 18th, 1987. A simple cigarette butt or match falling into the space between the wooden escalator and the highly greased mechanism may have started the inferno that killed 31 and severely burned 143 people commuting through the tube station that day.