5 Forgotten Disasters Nobody Talks About

History remembers the Titanic. It remembers Pompeii. It remembers Chernobyl.

But some of the deadliest disasters in human history? Barely a footnote. These five events killed thousands, destroyed entire communities, and reshaped the world around them. And most people have never heard of a single one.

1. The Peshtigo Fire (1871)

On October 8, 1871, the city of Chicago burned. Everyone knows that story. What almost nobody knows is that on the exact same night, a fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin killed six times as many people.

The Peshtigo Fire remains the deadliest wildfire in American history. An estimated 1,500 to 2,500 people died in a single night. The fire moved so fast that entire families were incinerated before they could reach the river. Survivors described a wall of flame that created its own weather system, generating tornado-force winds that threw rail cars off their tracks and sucked the oxygen out of the air.

The town of Peshtigo was erased. Not damaged. Erased. When rescuers arrived, there was nothing left to rescue. The heat was so intense that coins fused together in people’s pockets. Sand on the ground had turned to glass.

But the Great Chicago Fire dominated every newspaper in the country. Peshtigo was forgotten before the ashes had cooled.

2. The Halifax Explosion (1917)

On December 6, 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc, loaded with wartime explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the narrows of Halifax Harbour. The Mont-Blanc caught fire. Dockworkers, sailors, and townspeople gathered along the waterfront to watch the burning ship.

They had no idea they were staring at 2,925 tons of high explosives.

At 9:04 AM, the Mont-Blanc detonated. The explosion was the largest man-made blast in history until the atomic bomb. It produced a pressure wave that traveled at over 1,000 meters per second. A tsunami swept the harbor. Temperatures at the blast center reached 5,000 degrees Celsius.

Nearly 2,000 people were killed. 9,000 more were injured. The blast flattened everything within a half-mile radius. An entire neighborhood called Richmond was wiped off the map. The next morning, a blizzard dropped 16 inches of snow on the rubble, burying survivors who were trapped in the wreckage.

One detail that still haunts researchers: hundreds of people were blinded by flying glass. They had been watching the fire through their windows when the shockwave hit.

3. The Lake Nyos Disaster (1986)

On the evening of August 21, 1986, something happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon that had never been documented in human history. The lake exploded.

Not with fire. With gas. A massive pocket of carbon dioxide that had been building up in the deep waters of the volcanic crater lake suddenly released in what scientists now call a limnic eruption. An estimated 1.6 million tons of CO2 burst from the lake in a single violent outgassing.

The cloud of gas, heavier than air, rolled down the surrounding valleys at nearly 100 kilometers per hour. Carbon dioxide displaces oxygen. Everything in the cloud’s path suffocated.

1,746 people died. 3,500 livestock were killed. The gas cloud traveled up to 25 kilometers from the lake. Survivors who had been on higher ground described waking up to find everyone around them dead. There were no wounds. No burns. No visible cause.

Scientists found entire villages where every person and animal had simply stopped breathing. The silence was the worst part, according to rescue teams who arrived days later.

4. The Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984)

On the night of December 2, 1984, a pesticide plant operated by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, leaked approximately 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas into the surrounding neighborhoods.

What followed was the worst industrial disaster in history.

The gas was heavier than air, so it stayed low, moving through the densely packed streets and slums surrounding the plant. People woke up choking. They could not see. Their lungs were burning. Thousands ran through the streets in complete panic, not knowing which direction was safe.

Official death counts vary wildly. The Indian government initially confirmed 3,787 deaths. Later estimates from relief organizations put the figure between 16,000 and 30,000. Over 500,000 people were exposed to the gas.

The long-term effects were devastating. For decades after the disaster, communities near the plant reported elevated rates of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory disease. Contamination in the groundwater persisted. Survivors and their children continued to suffer.

The legal aftermath dragged on for years. Union Carbide paid a $470 million settlement in 1989. Adjusted for the scale of the disaster, it amounted to roughly $500 per victim.

5. The Banqiao Dam Failure (1975)

In August 1975, Typhoon Nina stalled over central China and dropped more than a year’s worth of rainfall in 24 hours. The Banqiao Dam, built in the 1950s with Soviet assistance on the Ru River in Henan Province, was designed to withstand a once-in-a-thousand-years flood.

Typhoon Nina produced a once-in-two-thousand-years flood.

On August 8, the Banqiao Dam failed. The collapse sent a wall of water 10 kilometers wide and 3 to 7 meters high racing downstream at nearly 50 kilometers per hour. Within hours, 62 other dams in the region also failed in a catastrophic chain reaction.

The immediate flood killed an estimated 26,000 people. But the aftermath was far worse. The floodwaters destroyed crops, contaminated water supplies, and left millions stranded. Disease and famine in the following months killed an estimated 145,000 more.

In total, approximately 171,000 people died. 11 million were displaced. It remains the deadliest dam failure in human history, and one of the deadliest disasters of the 20th century by any measure.

The Chinese government classified the event for years. Details only became widely known outside China decades later. Even today, the Banqiao Dam failure is missing from most Western lists of major disasters.

Why We Forget

There is a pattern here. Disasters get forgotten when they happen in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or to the wrong people. Peshtigo was overshadowed by Chicago. Halifax was buried by World War I. Lake Nyos happened in rural Cameroon. Bhopal happened in India. Banqiao was classified by the Chinese government.

The scale of suffering does not determine what we remember. The scale of media coverage does.

These five disasters killed a combined total of over 200,000 people. They destroyed cities, poisoned communities, and reshaped safety regulations around the world. And most people have never heard of them.

That is worth remembering.