Some worst-case disasters of the future

By Lee Clarke

Everything in these scenarios is possible. Many have been discussed in esoteric, scientific literatures. These are certainly scenarios, but they are not fanciful.

Chicago Catastrophe

A train carrying four ninety-ton carloads of chlorine careens toward Chicago. It’s out of control because a fire on the train has disabled the speed controls and incapacitated the conductor. No one ever thought that was possible. It slams into another train at the Chicago Clearing Yard, catches fire, and three of the four chlorine cars burst open. The resulting death cloud kills 2 million people. Luckily, it’s the middle of a snowstorm on Sunday, so a lot of people are home. Otherwise the carnage would have been worse.

Miami Destroyed

A category 5 hurricane slides up the Florida Keys, wreaking havoc and destruction along the way. Just north of the Keys it stalls over the Turkey Point nuclear power station. The cooling pools that hold its waste are destroyed, releasing a lot of dangerous radiation. Worse, the hurricane reveals that there has been a hitherto unnoticed weakness in the reactors’ containment shells. Workers try valiantly to shut down the reactors in the middle of the hurricane but fail, as do both shells. The hurricane moves into the Atlantic Ocean, regains strength, and loops back onto the city of Miami, creating a storm surge that destroys Miami Beach. Emergency planners say, “Who would have thought that a natural disaster and a technological disaster could happen at the same time?”

Northeastern Seaboard Inundation

Scientists have been warning for years that a piece of the outer continental shelf could break off, triggering a tsunami on America’s East Coast. “Stop being so pessimistic,” said the academics, “the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.” But one worst-case day it happens, just as the scientists said, and as a seventy-five-foot wall of water moving at five hundred miles an hour kills millions of people up and down the northeastern seaboard.

Avian Flu Decimation

Flu kills a lot of people on a regular basis. The Z+ strain of H5N1 (a kind of bird flu) is a monster. The question is not if, but when. When it finally happens, 1 billion people fall ill, vastly eclipsing previous predictions. Poor countries are written off. The American public health service, operating on wrong assumptions, vaccinates the very young and the very old. But the Sickness, as it is called, slams young adults and the middle aged, as happened with the 1918 pandemic. Governments shut their borders, because decision makers often panic, which is catastrophic for the United States because very little flu vaccine is actually produced there. With travel shut down, airlines throughout the world go bankrupt, in the early steps of a string of events that bring the world’s economy to a standstill. In the United States, the rich, and high-level government officials, hoard what vaccine they can get, while military officials—understanding that the 1918 flu shaped military operations—consider overthrowing the government so they can secure the vaccine for their soldiers.

Power Grid Goes Down for Three Months

The U.S. power grid suffers a series of breakdowns and terror attacks. There is no electricity anywhere in the country for three months, starting at the end of November. People flee the cities, because there is no food or water there. They leave the sick and old behind. Government decision makers move to Europe, and the country devolves to the early 1800s. Small farms survive, but large ones struggle mightily. People also flee the north, trying to find warm weather. After the country finally recovers, two-thirds of its population has died and the world is locked in economic depression. The United States becomes yet another a third world country with nuclear weapons.

Manhattan Not Worth $24

In Manhattan most of the buildings are unreinforced masonry, exactly the kind of buildings that fall down when earthquakes happen. New York City didn’t require builders to use earthquake codes until 1996. Geologists have no idea why earthquakes happen in places that don’t have big faults. Imagine that a magnitude 7 earthquake shakes Manhattan to pieces in 2050. Five million people are living on the island, and 2 million are killed as buildings collapse. Among the buildings are the city’s old firehouses, although there is so much debris in the roads that fire trucks can’t get to the raging fires anyway. During the week following the New Great Earthquake, the fires consume most of the city and render it uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. The tunnels are flooded and structurally unsound. Engineers don’t trust the footings of the bridges. Although a lot of buildings on Wall Street are still standing, bankers are talking about moving all operations out of New York.

Yellowstone Eruption Kills the Northern Hemisphere

Yellowstone National Park sits on one of the largest volcanoes in the world. A super volcano. The last time it blew in a big way it spewed eight thousand times more ash into the air than Mt. Saint Helens did in 1980. The probability that it will erupt is low, as it is with most worst cases. In 2200 the unlikely happens, and Yellowstone erupts and throws so much magma into the atmosphere that it obliterates sunlight over the Northern Hemisphere. Cities depopulate. Agriculture collapses. South American countries become the new superpowers.

The New Jersey Graveyard

For years the chemical industry has claimed it can safely self-regulate. This, notwithstanding numerous security breeches over the years. There are a handful of facilities in New Jersey that store some of the most dangerous chemicals you could imagine. Terrorists can imagine them just fine, of course, because they think in terms of worst cases. One day they mount multiple attacks on major facilities in the state. Only one succeeds, however, because a furniture-truck driver notices something suspicious on the turnpike and interferes with the plot. Still, the one place where they do succeed puts 12 million people at risk of death or injury. What is the worst that can happen? Only the imagination can limit that.

Asteroid Explosion over Pakistan

Astronomers tracked the killer asteroid for a long time, but then lost sight of it because Congress cut funding for the Program to Avoid Near-earth object Impactor Collisions—PANIC, as politicians derisively referred to it. Few people, other than worst-case thinkers, worried about the object, however, because even if it struck the earth it would most likely fall into an ocean. But it explodes over Karachi, with the force of a five-megaton nuclear weapon. Five million people disappear in the blink of an eye. Since they were in the middle of yet another dispute with India over Kashmir, Pakistani military officers think that India has launched nuclear weapons against them. Millions of people are incinerated in the ensuing five-minute war.


2. Worst Case Disasters of the Past

Tenerife

This is presently the worst air disaster, in terms of body count. In 1977, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, 583 souls were lost when two Boeing 747s slammed into each other. What’s so interesting about this disaster is that it took maybe a dozen things to go wrong to create it. If any one of those things had not happened, the disaster would have been averted. I call this the “small causes problem” in chapter 3 of Worst Cases , where I consider how to use counterfactuals to discipline worst case thinking.

9/11

This has to be on anyone’s list. It’s on mine for its cultural and political significance. We can call up, at will, the image of that second plane slamming into the south tower. Over and over and over again. The immediacy of those images lets us put ourselves in that plane. September 11 put us in a worst case mood.

USS Indianapolis

This is my favorite disaster. It was the worst inside of worst. In Worst Cases I use it as an example of “imagination breakdown” and “scapegoating” on the part of the navy. The USS Indianapolis delivered parts of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian, in the South Pacific, on July 26, 1945. Then it went to Guam for its next assignment, which was to head for the Philippines for the invasion of Japan. At Guam, a vice admiral decided it didn’t need an escort, although Captain Charles McVay had requested one because the vessel had no antisubmarine weaponry and would be sailing through waters where subs had been sighted. McVay followed Navy procedure, which was to zigzag in clear weather. But as midnight neared, the skies clouded over, so McVay ordered a stop to the zigzagging and went below decks leaving orders to resume the maneuver should the skies clear. Right about midnight the skies cleared for a few moments, right at the time that a Japanese sub surfaced. Two of Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto’s torpedoes found their target. Of the 1,196 sailors aboard the Indianapolis, 300 went down with the ship and the rest went in the water. They weren’t rescued for almost five days, during which sharks ravaged the surviving sailors. Only 316 survived. McVay was scapegoated by the navy, as often happens. But the real failures were the navy’s, and I spend more than few pages on the case. In the end, it was only luck that anyone at all was rescued.

2004 Christmas Tsunami

A huge earthquake broke around eight in the morning, eastern standard time, near the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The quake produced a tsunami that crossed the Indian Ocean; it traveled seven hours to kill people in eastern Africa. It even passed into the Pacific and was recorded as far away as the west coast of North America. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Entire communities were wiped from the earth; it threw into doubt the continued existence of whole countries. One reason we need to look closely at that disaster is that it throws into bold relief the issue of “globally relevant disasters.” Chapter 2 of Worst Cases shows how we’re more vulnerable to such threats.

Holland 747 Crash

When I use this one in speeches, people often ask me if I made it up. In 1992 an El Al 747 was taking off near Amsterdam when two of its engines caught fire. The four-hundred-ton plane sheared five floors off two buildings and exploded in a fireball. As if that weren’t bad enough, the plane was also carrying most of the chemicals necessary to make Sarin nerve gas and not-so-depleted uranium in the tail. Luckily, eighty-three tons of what officials call “oil industry explosives” were off-loaded just before the crash, or it would have been worse. The death toll was not high on this one. But it is a worst case because it is so bizarre.

Three Mile Island

This is our best worst case. Nobody died when a reactor core in Pennsylvania came within thirty minutes of breeching its containment shell in 1979. TMI was hugely significant for political reasons. After it, public sentiment turned decisively against nuclear power. More important is that the accident put government regulators in a position where they would, finally, have to actually regulate, rather than merely promote, the industry. In disasters there are always winners as well as losers, which is one reason I titled chapter 4 “Power, Politics, and Panic in Worst Cases .”

Baltimore Tunnel Fire

This is one of the most important near disasters in recent times. Not enough people know about it. In July 2001 a train was traveling through a tunnel in Baltimore tunnel when it caught fire. The train was carrying some very dangerous, and very inflammable, materials. A water main above the tunnel broke, electricity was knocked out for a lot of people, and Camden Yards had to be evacuated. Baltimore officials even sounded the city’s civil defense sirens. It was only luck that prevented major loss of life. What if a ninety-ton chlorine car had been in that tunnel? Worse, what if the fallen train had been carrying high-level nuclear waste? The steel freight cars were so hot they were glowing orange. There are credible estimates that the fire burned at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. Even the most conservative estimates are that it burned at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty-four hours. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s rule for transporting nuclear waste is that the containers must withstand 1,475 degrees for thirty minutes. Had the worst case happened, people would say, as they usually do, “Who would have thought of that?”

AIDS

Over 7 percent of the adult population in sub-Saharan Africa is infected with HIV. Twenty five million people there have it, with millions of new cases every year. There are also alarming increases in infection rates in the Caribbean, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. This is a crisis of massive proportions, and we’re not doing enough to combat it. This is an example of how distributions of the world’s riches is sometimes connected with vulnerabilities to calamity.

American Airlines Flight 587 Crash in Queens

Two months after the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania disasters an American Airlines jetliner broke apart soon after takeoff from Kennedy airport, crashing into Queens, NY, and killing 265. The plane’s tail broke off in flight, which is quite rare. It had taken off after a Boeing 747 and got caught in that plane’s turbulence. In Worst Cases I argue that the composite materials use in the Airbus A-300 were strongly implicated, along with production pressures in the airline industry. But the National Transportation Safety Board exonerated the machines—pilots call it “blaming the dead guy”—and mentioned nothing about the tight scheduling between takeoffs. This is a sad example of narrowing the imagination so that some worst cases are ruled out of consideration.

Tambora

This one happened a long time ago, but it could happen again any day now. Only a few scientists are thinking about it. Tambora was a volcano that blew itself to pieces in 1815. It sent a volcanic column twenty-eight miles high and darkened skies, entirely, over a distance of 370 miles. The next year, 1816, is known as the “year without a summer” across the Northern Hemisphere. The death toll was ninety-two thousand, the vast majority from starvation caused by cooler temperatures. It was a taste of the worst case projections of large-scale, sudden climate change. Volcanic eruptions have been influential in changing many cultures and societies. Tambora is an example of a “globally relevant disaster.” We haven’t studied GRDs nearly enough.

1918 Spanish Flu

It wasn’t really Spanish. It’s called the Spanish flu because Spain reported its cases more honestly than other countries. It was horrible. The flu blanketed places in about two weeks; the whole thing came and went, all over the world, in less than a year’s time. It made militaries sick, and public health and government officials acted terribly. People wore gauze masks at baseball games. The usual estimates are that 40 million died, but some say that perhaps 100 million people lost their lives during the 1918–1919 pandemic. It is a portent. We’re a little alert to the worst case possibilities, right now, because of the avian flu threat. But the key lessons from the 1918 pandemic, and similar events, do not seem to be, as it were, in the air. Experts know what those lessons are. The knowledge is available. Who is listening?