A disaster is natural or unintentional man-made catastrophe of substantial extent causing destruction, loss of lives and sometimes permament changes to natural environment.
Ancient times :
Modern times :
- Krakatau volcano eruption (August 27 1883)
- Titanic sinking (April 15 1912)
- Hindenburg disaster (May 6 1937)
- Shooting down of Boeing 747 KAL007 (September 1 1983)
- Chernobyl atomic power-plant explosion (May 25 1986)
- Challenger space shuttle explosion (January 28 1986)
- Estonia ferry sinking (September 28 1994)
- The Boston Molasses Disaster (January 15 1919)
- Halifax explosion (December 6 1917)
- Crashing of B-25 into Empire State Building (July 28 1945)
- Aberfan disaster (October 21, 1966)
- Heysel Stadium disaster (May 29, 1985)
- Hillsborough disaster (April 15, 1989)
- Bijlmerramp disaster (4 October 1992)
Commonly called a disaster :
- Three Mile Island. (March 28 1979) A pump in the reactor cooling system fails; the plant barely avoids a total meltdown. A class-action lawsuit against the company owning the Three Mile Island plant is dismissed nearly two decades after the incident, for lack of evidence. The Three Mile Island incident remains the worst nuclear accident in United States history.
A disaster in database terminology refers to a loss of data which cannot be recovered.