Disasters

C’est Chic

C’est Chic is Chic’s second studio album, released in 1978 on Atlantic Records. It contains 'Le Freak', which topped US Hot 100, R&B, and Club Play in October 1978, and 'I Want Your Love', which reached number 5 on US R&B, number 7 on US Pop, and number 4 in the UK. The European version was originally titled Très Chic, featured a more risqué cover, and had a different track listing before being withdrawn. The Globe and Mail described it as 'a sleekly elegant variation' of disco; the Los Angeles Times judged that, aside from 'Le Freak', the album consists of pedestrian disco pieces and plodding R&B ballads. All songs were written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers unless noted otherwise.

Disco Inferno

Disco Inferno is a 1976 Philadelphia soul-disco record by The Trammps, produced by MFSB mainstays Ronnie Baker, Norman Harris and Earl Young, and co-written by MFSB arranger Ron Kersey. Its title track was inspired by the 1974 film The Towering Inferno. A Dolby noise reduction error during mixdown — later corrected by engineer Jay Mark — gave it an unusually wide dynamic range, making its kick drum and staccato strings hit with uncommon physical force. It landed on the Grammy-winning Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977. The record is not subtle, not ambient, not ironic. It is urgent, rhythmic, and built for motion.

A Night to Remember

A 1958 British drama reconstructing the sinking of the RMS Titanic with procedural fidelity, based on Walter Lord’s 1955 book and informed by survivor testimony. Directed by Roy Ward Baker and produced by William MacQuitty, it avoids sentimentality in favour of chronological precision, using authentic sets, restrained performances and Geoffrey Unsworth’s understated cinematography to trace the collapse of routine, hierarchy and certainty.

Armageddon

A 1998 American action film directed by Michael Bay, Armageddon follows a team of oil drillers recruited by NASA to destroy a Texas-sized asteroid hurtling toward Earth. With a $140 million budget and an ensemble cast including Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, it prioritises emotional clarity, physical craft and relentless momentum over scientific plausibility or psychological nuance. Though critically divided, it became the highest-grossing film of 1998 and remains a benchmark for large-scale, character-driven spectacle.

Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter is a 1970 Direct Cinema documentary following the Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour to its violent end at the Altamont Free Concert. Shot by Albert and David Maysles with Charlotte Zwerin’s editing, it records studio sessions, concerts, negotiations and the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter — without voiceover, interviews or moral framing. Its power lies in its unblinking chronology and refusal to resolve what it witnesses.

Godzilla

Godzilla (1954) is Toho’s foundational kaiju film, directed by Ishirō Honda and conceived after the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident. It follows scientists and officials responding to a prehistoric creature mutated by hydrogen bomb tests. Shot in black-and-white with pioneering suitmation effects, its tone is sober, almost documentary-like. The film avoids monster-movie tropes in favour of bureaucratic realism, scientific debate, and quiet devastation. Though its pacing and formal restraint challenge modern expectations, its thematic urgency — on nuclear consequence, institutional failure, and irreversible change — remains undimmed.

Godzilla Raids Again

Toho’s 1955 follow-up to Godzilla is a lean, effects-driven kaiju film directed by Motoyoshi Oda under tight deadlines. It introduces Anguirus in a destructive Osaka showdown, prioritising spectacle and procedural urgency over the moral weight of its predecessor. With Haruo Nakajima in the Godzilla suit and Eiji Tsuburaya refining his special-effects techniques — including variable camera speeds and outdoor ice sets — the film functions as both a commercial necessity and a technical bridge to the franchise’s expansive future.

History Is Made at Night

Frank Borzage’s 1937 romance stars Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer as lovers separated by deceit, class, and a shipwreck. Written by Gene Towne and shot by Gregg Toland, it moves from Parisian farce to transatlantic pursuit to maritime disaster — all held together by emotional sincerity rather than plot logic. Its strengths are in performance, composition, and moral clarity; its weaknesses lie in tonal inconsistency and contrived early turns. It is a film of conviction, not compromise.

Life, and Nothing More...

Abbas Kiarostami’s 1992 drama follows a director and his son driving through post-earthquake northern Iran, seeking the child star of his earlier film. Shot in a spare, observational style, it blends documentary immediacy with fictional framing to explore how life persists amid loss — not through grand statements, but through detours, conversations, and quiet acts of endurance.

Sennan Asbestos Disaster

Kazuo Hara’s 2016 documentary Sennan Asbestos Disaster observes survivors of industrial asbestos exposure in Osaka over many years. With no narration, score, or archival inserts, it tracks legal battles, medical decline, and daily endurance — treating latency, embodiment, and institutional slowness as its core subjects.

1931 China floods

The 1931 China floods were a meteorologically driven, multi-phase disaster spanning June–August 1931 across China — especially Wuhan and Nanjing — culminating in a dike breach at Lake Gaoyou on 25 August. Verified evidence includes hydrological extremes (record water levels, nine cyclones in July, >600 mm rainfall), systematic fatality estimation (University of Nanking survey, official reports), institutional responses (National Flood Relief Commission, League of Nations, Lindbergh aerial survey), and disease outcomes (31,974 cholera deaths in 1932). Disputed claims include total death tolls: Buck’s survey estimated 150,000 drowned — less than a quarter of all fatalities in the first 100 days — while an official report claimed 140,000 drowned and 2 million dead from drowning or starvation. No source reconciles these figures with the verified cholera toll or provides demographic corroboration. The event exposed limits of Kuomintang governance and flood-control infrastructure but did not trigger structural reform.

Carrington Event

The Carrington Event is the only historical episode with contemporaneous, instrumented, and visual evidence tying solar activity directly to terrestrial electromagnetic disruption. It did not prove the solar–terrestrial link — that came later — but it forced astronomers to take it seriously. Its intensity remains unmatched. Its mechanism — a double-CME sequence — is plausible but not confirmed. It changed nothing in 1859 beyond prompting suspicion. Today, it anchors worst-case planning for grid failure — yet no modern system has been tested against anything like it.

The Challenger Disaster

A 2013 TV movie dramatises Richard Feynman’s investigation into the 1986 Challenger explosion. It establishes cold-temperature-induced O-ring failure as the cause, shows Feynman discovering he has cancer mid-inquiry, and highlights institutional resistance—but offers no evidence of what changed afterward, no contested interpretations, and no insight into the astronauts’ experience beyond their likely death at takeoff.

Chernobyl disaster

The Chernobyl disaster was a cascade of physical failures triggered by a safety test conducted under unstable conditions — not human error alone, but design flaws made manifest. The Soviet state responded with delay, staging and silence until external detection compelled admission. The record establishes sequence, scale and official action — nothing more.

Exxon Valdez oil spill

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a major environmental disaster caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989. Approximately 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil spilled, making it the second-largest oil spill in U.S. waters by volume and the costliest disaster ever with no direct human fatalities.

Three Mile Island accident

The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the TMI-2 reactor beginning at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, releasing radioactive gases and iodine; it is rated Level 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale and remains the worst U.S. commercial nuclear power plant accident. The event originated in the non-nuclear secondary system and involved a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve causing coolant loss, compounded by operator failure to recognize a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and procedures.

Lloyd's of London

Lloyd's of London began as a coffee house on Tower Street run by Edward Lloyd, where sailors and merchants gathered to arrange marine insurance informally before the participants formed a proper society in 1773. For most of its history, policies were backed by wealthy individuals called Names carrying unlimited personal liability, a system that paid off through disasters like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the Titanic but nearly collapsed the market when asbestos liability claims from decades earlier surfaced in the 1990s, bankrupting a meaningful share of the Names underwriting the losses. The market has since restructured around corporate capital with limited liability.

Pompeii

Mount Vesuvius erupted over roughly two days, first burying Pompeii under nearly eighteen hours of falling pumice that let many residents flee, then killing those who remained with pyroclastic flows hot enough to be fatal even at a distance of ten kilometres. Pliny the Younger's eyewitness letters, written years afterward, long placed the eruption in August, but a 2022 study using seasonal produce, clothing and coin evidence redated it to late October, correcting a chronology that had stood for centuries.

1883 eruption of Krakatoa

Fujita scale

The Fujita scale is a damage-based tornado classification system introduced in 1971. It is not a wind-speed measurement tool. Its F0–F5 categories remain operationally useful. Its theoretical F6–F12 levels were never used. Its wind-speed estimates were unverified and later shown to be inflated.

Richter scale

The Richter scale is a local, instrument-specific amplitude scale — not a universal measure of earthquake size. Its rigour lies in its narrow definition, not its breadth.

Shigeru Ban

Thermal imaging camera

Ventilator

Ai Weiwei

Antelope Canyon

Pyroclastic flow

San Andreas Fault

Volcanic lightning