Big man-made disasters don’t often happen in Britain, which made the Aberfan colliery slip even more shocking. The Welsh Valleys village of Aberfan grew up around the nearby coal mine that was established back in 1869. By 1966, the settlement had grown, and the village was surrounded by seven huge spoil piles – waste material from mining.
This industrial accident took place at a chemical plant north of Milan, Italy. On Saturday July 10 1976, the factory was producing a chemical called 2,4,5-Trichlorophenol, which has been used as a chemical weapon and in weedkillers, according to the journal Chemosphere.
The explosion at Chernobyl is one of the world’s most infamous man-made disasters — and with good reason. It started innocently enough, with engineers performing a routine experiment that was supposed to find out if the plant’s emergency water cooling would work during a power outage.
The story of Libby, Montana, began when settlers arrived in the 1800s and the town expanded thanks to mine and railroad construction. In 1919the discovery of a mineral called Vermiculite changed Libby’s fate.
Oil spills are among the most visible man-made disasters of our times, and 2010’s Deepwater Horizon incident is reputed to be the largest marine oil spill in history. The name comes from the drilling apparatus at the centre of the incident. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig was a floating platform that was drilling an exploratory oil well around 18,300 feet (5,600 meters) below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico, as Live Science has previously reported
On December 2, 1984, there was a gas leak at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, according to The Atlantic. It was caused by malfunctioning safety systems, and a runaway pressure increase saw 40 tonnes of a chemical called methyl isocyanate leak into the atmosphere.
Most people think of lava flowing from a volcano, but in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, you’ll find the world’s biggest mud volcano. It was created by an explosion at a gas well drilled by an energy company, although company officials claim that an earthquake around 155 miles (250km) away provoked the problem.
There aren’t many man-made disasters that are as large or as visible as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There’s nothing particularly complicated about what’s gone on here: a huge amount of rubbish has made its way into the ocean over the past decades because of negligent humans.
Climate change has seen wildfires become a far more common threat around the world, and 2018 saw huge areas of California affected by some of the worst fires in recent memory,. More than 100 people died in more than 8,500 fires across California, and the fires destroyed more than 24,000 buildings and burned two million acres of land.
This incident took place in the Chinese city of Jilin in November 2005, and saw a series of explosions at a petrochemical plant. In the immediate aftermath of the blasts more than 10,000 people were evacuated from the local area, according to the New York Times. That’s bad enough, but it’s not the full story. The explosions released around 110 tons (100 metric tonnes) of pollutants into the Songhua River, and that was a big deal – because several large cities depend on that river for their water supply, according to the Environmental Emergencies Centre