Large-scale natural disasters in the world. The worst catastrophes in the history of mankind. The biggest disasters in the history of mankind

Catastrophes have been known since ancient times - these are volcanic eruptions, and powerful earthquakes, and tornadoes. In the last century, there have been many water disasters and terrible nuclear disasters.

Worst water disasters

Man has been sailing on sailboats, boats, ships across the vastness of the oceans and seas for hundreds of years. During this time, there have been a huge number of disasters, shipwrecks and accidents.

In 1915, a British passenger liner was torpedoed by a German submarine. The ship sank in eighteen minutes, being at a distance of thirteen kilometers from the coast of Ireland. One thousand one hundred and ninety-eight people died.

In April 1944, a terrible disaster occurred in the port of Bombay. It all started with the fact that when unloading a single-screw steamer, which was loaded with gross violations of safety regulations, there was a strong explosion. It is known that the ship had one and a half tons of explosives, several tons of cotton, sulfur, wood, gold bars. After the first explosion, there was a second. The burning cotton scattered in a radius of almost a kilometer. Almost all ships, warehouses were burning, fires started in the city. It took only two weeks to put them out. As a result, about two and a half thousand people ended up in hospitals, and one thousand three hundred and seventy-six people were killed. The port was restored only after seven months.

The most famous of the disasters on the water is the death of the Titanic. Colliding with an iceberg during the first voyage, the ship sank. More than one and a half thousand people died.

In December 1917, near the city of Halifax, the French warship Mont Blanc collided with the Norwegian ship Imo. There was a strong explosion, which led to the destruction of not only the port, but also part of the city. The fact is that Mont Blanc was loaded exclusively with explosives. About two thousand people died, nine thousand were injured. This is the most powerful explosion of the pre-nuclear era.

Three thousand one hundred and thirty people died on a French cruiser after a torpedo attack by a German submarine in 1916. As a result of the torpedoing of the German floating hospital "General Steuben", about three thousand six hundred and eight people died.

In December 1987, a Philippine passenger ferry named Dona Paz collided with the tanker Vector. Four thousand three hundred and seventy-five people died in the process.

In May 1945, a tragedy occurred in the Baltic Sea, which claimed the lives of about eight thousand people. The cargo ship "Tilbek" and the liner "Cap Arkona" came under fire from British aircraft. As a result of the torpedoing of the Goya ship by a Soviet submarine in the spring of 1945, six thousand nine hundred people died.

"Wilhelm Gustlov" - the so-called German passenger liner, sunk by a submarine under the command of Marinesco in January 1945. The exact number of victims is unknown, approximately - it is nine thousand people.

The worst disasters in Russia

There are several terrible catastrophes that have occurred on the territory of Russia. So, in June 1989, one of the largest railway accidents in Russia occurred near Ufa. There was a massive explosion as two passenger trains passed. An unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture exploded, which was formed due to an accident on a nearby pipeline. According to some sources, five hundred and seventy-five people died, according to others - six hundred and forty-five. Another six hundred people were wounded.

The death of the Aral Sea is considered the worst environmental disaster in the territory of the former USSR. For a number of reasons: soil, social, biological, the Aral Sea has almost completely dried up in fifty years. Most of its tributaries in the sixties were used for irrigation and some other agricultural purposes. The Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. Since the inflow of fresh water was significantly reduced, the lake gradually died.

In the summer of 2012, a massive flood occurred in the Krasnodar Territory. It is considered the largest disaster in Russia. For two days in July, a five-month rainfall fell. The city of Krymsk was almost completely washed away by water. Officially, 179 people were declared dead, of which 159 were residents of Krymsk. More than 34 thousand local residents suffered.

The worst nuclear disasters

A huge number of people are exposed to nuclear disasters. So in April 1986, one of the power units of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Radioactive substances released into the atmosphere settled on nearby villages and cities. This accident is one of the most devastating of its kind. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the liquidation of the accident. Several hundred people died or were injured. A thirty-kilometer exclusion zone has been formed around the nuclear power plant. So far, the scale of the disaster has not been clarified.

In Japan in March 2011, an explosion occurred at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant during an earthquake. Because of this, a large amount of radioactive substances entered the atmosphere. At first, officials hushed up the scale of the disaster.

After the Chernobyl disaster, the most significant nuclear accident is considered to have occurred in 1999 in the Japanese city of Tokaimura. An accident occurred at a uranium processing plant. Six hundred people were exposed to radiation, four people died.

The worst disaster in human history

The explosion of an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is considered the most destructive catastrophe for the biosphere in the entire history of mankind. The platform itself went under water after the explosion. As a result, a huge amount of oil products got into the oceans. The spill lasted one hundred and fifty-two days. The oil film covered an area equal to seventy-five thousand square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico.

In terms of the number of victims, the largest disaster is considered to be that in December 1984, the year occurred in India in the city of Bhapol. There was a chemical leak at one of the factories. Eighteen thousand people died. Until now, the causes of this catastrophe have not been fully elucidated.

It is impossible not to say about the most terrible fire that occurred in London in 1666. The fire spread at lightning speed throughout the city, about seventy thousand houses were destroyed, about eighty thousand people died. The fire continued for four days.

Terrible are not only disasters, but also entertainment. The site has a rating of the scariest rides in the world.
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August 14, 2008 10:05 am

The tragedies of the 20th century - there are hundreds of them ... Mountains of corpses, blood, pain and suffering - that's what revolutions, world wars, political upheavals and monstrous incidents brought with them. And all of them, as a rule, are carefully photographed and recorded...

And this terrible list is opened by photos from the board of the infamous Titanic...

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THE TRAGEDY OF THE TITANIC. More than eighty years have passed since the moment when, on a frosty night from April 14 to 15, 1912, south of the island of Newfoundland, the giant Titanic, the largest and most luxurious ship of the beginning of the century, sank, colliding with a drifting iceberg. 1,500 passengers and crew were killed. And although there were enough terrible tragedies in the 20th century, interest in the fate of this ship does not weaken even today. Before you is a rather rare photograph of the ship three days before sailing...

Unfortunately, we will have to come to terms with the fact that the exhaustive truth about the death of the Titanic will never be known. Despite two investigations carried out immediately after the floating palace was swallowed up by the waves, many details remained unclear. The ship sets off on its fateful voyage...

As soon as Captain Smith was informed that the last ladder had been removed and secured, the pilot set to work. On the pier, they gave the mooring lines that fastened the bow and stern to powerful coastal bollards. Then the tugs set to work. The long hull of the Titanic, centimeter by centimeter, began to move away from the pier ... A retouched photograph of the departure of the Titanic ...

Hundreds of passengers on the promenade decks of the Titanic and thousands of people on the shore watched the complex maneuvers of sailing. Seeing off...

And then something happened that could have ended very sadly. The steamer New York was in the harbor. At the moment when the Titanic passed by, the bows of both ships were on the same line, the six steel cables with which the New York was moored stretched and there was a strong crack, similar to shots from a revolver, and the ends of the cables whistled in the air and fell on the embankment into a frightened, fleeing crowd ...

Of course, there are no photographs of the sinking Titanic. But. There are quite a few pictures taken from the rescue ship "Carpathia". More than 100 people managed to get on board - all those who survived on five boats ... "Carpathia" ...

Iceberg Killer...

Boat No. 12 is one of those that managed to reach the side of the "Carpathia" ...

Rescued. Aboard the Carpathia...

Newspapers. Terrible news...

HOLODOMOR. This terrible word is used to refer to the mass death of the population of the Ukrainian SSR from starvation in 1932-1933... In the USSR, the scale of the tragedy and its true causes were simply hidden... But witnesses recall that the streets of cities and villages were littered with corpses of the dead, people's hunger...

At present, there is a point of view in the scientific community, according to which the mass death of the population of Ukraine was caused by the conscious and purposeful actions of the Soviet leadership...

During these terrible years, at least 4,500,000 people died in Ukraine...

Corpses were everywhere...

Hospitals and morgues failed to cope with their duties ...

Improvised cemeteries stretched for tens of kilometers on the outskirts of the city ...

Foreign journalists took photographs out of Ukraine at the risk of their own lives. And yet, something leaked to the press ...

THE LAST AIRSHIP Crash. On May 6, 1937, the German aircraft Gidenburg exploded and burned down - at that time the world's largest airship, the length of which was about 248 m, the diameter was more than 40 m. It was built in the 30s as a symbol of the new Nazi Germany ... Photo of that time from the archive of the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" ..

He could fly 15 thousand km at a maximum speed of 135 km / h. On two floors of the passenger compartment there were 26 double cabins, bars, a reading room, a restaurant, galleries, kitchens. The ticket cost over $800. "Gidenburg" was destroyed by fire while approaching the mooring mast in Lakehurst (New Jersey, USA), completing the flight from Frankfurt (Germany) ...

32 seconds after the explosion, the airship, more than 2 times the length of a football field, resembled a fantastic charred skeleton made of curved metal. This catastrophe claimed 36 human lives...

The explosion was heard fifteen miles away. Thanks to the courage and self-control of the captain, the crew and 62 passengers were saved. The fire was directly linked to the use of hydrogen, the only carrier gas that Germany had available, since the US refused to supply helium in commercial quantities. There was another version of the attack - in the early 1970s, information appeared that the enemy of the Nazis, Erich Spel, one of the members of the team, had planted an hour mine ...

PEARL HARBOR. The most famous US naval base in the Hawaiian Islands. On December 7, 1941, during World War II, Japanese carrier-based aircraft launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and disabled the main forces of the American Pacific Fleet. On December 8, the United States and Great Britain declared war on Japan...

The sun rose over Pearl Harbor that day in all its usual tropical brilliance. It was Sunday and the fleet was "at home". The officers and sailors were thinking about the upcoming day of rest. As always on Sundays, the wake-up call was given late. At that moment, when the sounds of the bugle died away, unknown planes appeared in the sky. Without any delay they began dropping bombs and torpedoes...

50 bombers, 40 torpedo bombers and 81 dive bombers attacked Pacific Fleet ships anchored in Pearl Harbor...

When the last Japanese planes left, it turned out that the losses of the navy and marine corps were 2835 people, of which 2086 officers and enlisted men were killed or mortally wounded. The losses of the army amounted to 600 people, of which 194 were killed and 364 were wounded. In addition to damage to ships and hangars, 92 aircraft of the navy were destroyed and 31 aircraft were damaged, while the army lost 96 aircraft ...

HIROSHIMA - REVENGE FOR PEARL HARBOR? The Great Patriotic War ended on May 9, 1945. But the war didn't end there. It lasted until September 2, 1945. And there were fights. And there were victories. And there were victims. And there were tragedies. And the most terrible of them is the atomic bombing of Japanese cities ...

The area of the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 was about 26 square meters. miles, of which only 7 were completely built up. There were no explicitly designated commercial, industrial, and residential areas. 75% of the population lived in a densely built-up area in the city center...

The commander of the air regiment, Colonel Tibets, gave his aircraft the name "Enola Gay" - in honor of his mother. The case of the atomic bomb, located in the Enola Gay's bomb bay, was covered with a lot of both joking and serious slogans. Among them was the inscription "from the guys from" Indianapolis "...

On August 6, at about 8 o'clock in the morning, two B-29 bombers appeared over Hiroshima. People continued to work without entering the shelter, and looked at enemy aircraft. When the bombers reached the city center, one of them dropped a small parachute, after which the planes flew away. At 8:15 a.m., there was a deafening explosion that seemed to rip apart heaven and earth in an instant...

A blinding flash and a terrible roar of explosion - after which the whole city was covered with huge clouds of smoke. Among the smoke, dust and debris, wooden houses flared up one after another, until the end of the day the city was enveloped in smoke and flames. And when, finally, the flame subsided, the whole city was one ruin. Charred and burnt corpses were piled up everywhere, many of them frozen in the position in which the explosion found them. The tram, from which there was only one skeleton, was packed with corpses, holding on to the belts ...

A single bomb, with a capacity of 20 thousand tons of TNT, exploded at an altitude of 600 meters above the city, in an instant destroyed 60 percent of the city to the ground. Of the 306,545 inhabitants of Hiroshima, 176,987 were affected by the explosion. 92,133 people were killed or missing, 9,428 were seriously injured and 27,997 were slightly injured. In an effort to reduce their responsibility, the Americans, as far as possible, underestimated the number of victims - when calculating losses, the number of killed and wounded military personnel was not taken into account. Many died from radiation sickness. There was nothing left of those who were near the epicenter - the explosion literally evaporated people ...

Auschwitz - 40 HA OF DEATH. The largest extermination camp, it was called the death factory, the death conveyor, the death machine. In fact, in Polish Silesia, on several thousand hectares, the most monstrous state in the world was built with a population of several million people, of which less than three thousand survived, with its own system of values, economy, government, hierarchy, rulers, executioners, victims and heroes. The inscription above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp read: "Work makes you free." Entrance to Hell...

"You were brought here not to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp. Remember, there is only one way out of here - through the crematorium's chimney." So through the loudspeakers the voice of the deputy commandant Frach was broadcasting ...

The engineers were given the task: we need a crematorium, because otherwise there would be too many problems with the bodies of the dead. Engineers calculated: three furnaces, coal, loading 24 hours a day. They gave the answer: you can burn 340 people. The bosses thanked the engineers, but set a new task - to increase production capacity ...

Two tons of human hair - this is what they did not have time to use. The camp supplied them at 50 pfennigs per kilogram. The industrialists took it willingly - they got an inexpensive durable fabric and ropes ...

Gold horns from glasses were neatly folded in a special room ...

The central entrance... People were brought in wagons...

Up to six people slept on the bunks. During the winter, many were incontinent. And all this flowed from the upper bunk to the lower. Going to the toilet at night was a nightmare. The guards beat people because they had instructions: the latrine must be clean...

At the same time, the Germans experimented with gas. It was fed through holes in the ceiling. People didn't know where they were going. They were told that for sanitation. The SS men checked whether the prisoners were alive or not. They took a nail and poked it into the body… The road to the gas chamber…

"Cyclone-B"...

The anger was taken out on the Russians. There were twelve thousand of them, maybe sixty people remained. For example, they had such a punishment: in the barracks, the doors were opened from one side and the other, but it was winter, and the prisoners had to stand naked. The guards also poured cold water on them from a hose...

They prepared soup for the prisoners, of course, without fat and meat. When they carried a full cauldron, the stew spilled. People licked the ground if a drop fell. The SS men also beat for this ...

Toddlers show hands with numbers...

Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. There were less than seven thousand people left. The Germans destroyed all five crematoria, gas chambers, and most of the prisoners were taken out. Those who remained said themselves: we are no longer people after what we experienced here ...

DEATH OF GOEBBELS. During the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the main ideologist of fascism, Joseph Goebbels, took poison, having previously poisoned his family - his wife and six children. The corpses, according to his dying order, were burned. Before you is a photograph depicting the corpse of a criminal. The shot was taken in the building of the Imperial Chancellery on May 2, 1945 by Major Vasily Krupennikov. On the back of the picture, Vasily wrote: “We covered the causal place of Goebbels with a handkerchief, it was very unpleasant to look at it” ...

TSAR-BOMB, "IVAN", "KUZKINA'S MOTHER". A thermonuclear device developed in the USSR in the mid-1950s by a group of physicists led by Academician I. V. Kurchatov

The development team included Andrei Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babaev, Yuri Trunov and Yuri Smirnov.

The original version of the bomb weighing 40 tons was rejected by the designers as too heavy. Then the nuclear scientists promised to reduce its mass to 20 tons, and the aircraft builders proposed a program for the appropriate modification of the Tu-16 and Tu-95 bombers. The new nuclear device, according to the tradition adopted in the USSR, received the code designation "Vanya" or "Ivan", and the Tu-95 chosen as the carrier was named Tu-95V.

The results of the explosion of the charge, which received the name Tsar Bomba in the West, were impressive - the nuclear "mushroom" of the explosion rose to a height of 64 kilometers, the shock wave resulting from the explosion circled the globe three times, and the ionization of the atmosphere caused radio interference for hundreds of kilometers from the landfill within one hour ...

The test of the most powerful thermonuclear device in the world took place on October 30, 1961, during the work of the XXII Congress of the CPSU. The explosion of the bomb occurred within the nuclear test site on Novaya Zemlya at an altitude of 4500 meters. The power of the explosion was about 50 megatons of TNT. No casualties or damage have been officially reported...

THE MURDER OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY. The tragedy happened on November 22, 1963, on Friday..

The number of proposed clues to this incident is steadily moving towards infinity. What is known for certain?

On November 22, the president, along with his wife and Texas Governor John Connally, drove from the Dallas airport to downtown. More than 200,000 people greeted the President on the way of the cortege through the business district of the city. At some point, the car braked, and that's when shots rang out.

The bullets hit John F. Kennedy in the head and throat. The president fell into his wife's arms, and the next shot was severely wounded in the back by the governor of Texas.

This 40-second recording, made on a simple video camera by someone from Dallas, became the most famous recording in the world. Immediately after the shots were fired, the car rushed to the clinic, where 14 surgeons fought for Kennedy's life ...

...but despite their best efforts, he passed away 35 minutes later...
45 minutes after the assassination attempt, the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was apprehended. But he was also mysteriously killed - after 2 days he was put to death by the owner of the nightclub Jack Ruby. Well, the new president of the country was US Vice President Lyndon Johnson. By the way, he was traveling in another car of the same motorcade ...

The VIETNAM WAR began in August 1964 with an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, during which coast guard vessels of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam fired on American destroyers that provided fire support to government forces in South Vietnam in their fight against guerrillas ...

For the defense of South Vietnam, the United States deployed an army of half a million across the ocean, equipped with all types of modern weapons, except nuclear ...

American soldiers fought fiercely in the impenetrable jungle against the pro-communist guerrillas (Viet Cong) ...

On vast areas, they destroyed dense foliage with pesticides that hid an elusive enemy, mercilessly bombed partisan areas and the territory of North Vietnam - all in vain ...

Subsequently, hostilities covered the territory not only of Vietnam itself, but also of neighboring Laos and Cambodia ...

50,000 Americans died; Vietnamese were killed many times more. By the beginning of 1968, the war reached a stalemate, in May 1968 peace negotiations began, which lasted more than four years ... On January 27, 1973, the US administration signed an agreement on the conditions for the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. The war, which the United States thought was a cakewalk, turned out to be America's nightmare. The post-war crisis continued in the United States for more than 10 years. It is difficult to say how it would have ended if the Afghan crisis had not come under the arm ...
In the second half of the 20th century, mankind learned two terrible phrases - "world terrorism" and "technogenic catastrophe" ... Starting from the 60s of the last century, spaceports and factories, trains and planes, houses and nuclear reactors explode one after another in this world ...

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BAIKONUR, OCTOBER 24, 1960. "The Nedelin catastrophe". The explosion of the R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile during tests at the spaceport ...

More than 90 people died in the explosion and the resulting fire, including the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces ... According to unofficial data, there were 165 of them ...

Designer Academician M.K. Yangel, who was absent for a short time before the start, miraculously survived ...

The disaster was classified until the end of the 90s ...

However, much less tragic events were then classified. Interestingly, to this day there are rumors in Baikonur that the Soviet Union sent people into space even before Gagarin. But since these attempts ended in the death of the astronauts, they were kept secret ...

And the monument to the dead turned out to be very modest ...

BLOODY TUESDAY IN MUNICH. On September 5, 1972, at the 20th Olympiad, the most monstrous tragedy in the history of sports occurred. At 3:30 in the morning, 8 heavily armed terrorists belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization Black September broke into one of the houses of the Olympic Village. They managed to take 11 members of the Israeli sports delegation hostage. The security of the Olympic Village simply did not notice the terrorists ...

After climbing over the metal mesh that encloses the athletes' dormitory, the terrorists unpack their weapons and enter entrance No. 1 of house 31. A few seconds later they persistently knock on the door of the room in which the Israeli classical wrestling referee Yosef Gutfreind is located. Gutfreind is famous for his heroic physique and the strength of Hercules. Seeing suspicious people, he leans on the door with his whole body and detains the criminals for a few seconds...

One of the terrorists orders one of the hostages to show the rooms where the rest of the Israelis live. He refuses, and the terrorist fires a burst of Kalashnikov at him. In doing so, he saves the lives of shooters, fencers, race walkers and swimmers...

Still, 12 Israelis were captured by the terrorists. Demands were put forward - the immediate release of 234 terrorists from Israeli prisons and 16 from prisons in Western Europe ... Negotiations were conducted until late in the evening ...

The bodies of all eleven dead athletes were sent to Israel. During the unsuccessful operation, two German citizens also died: a policeman and a pilot of one of the helicopters. In the homeland of those killed in the mourning ceremony, in addition to relatives, the head of the government Golda Meir, all ministers, Knesset deputies, members of the sports delegation who left the Olympics, thousands of Israeli citizens took part ...

CHERNOBYL DISASTER. On April 26, 1986, 187 control and protection system rods entered the core to shut down the reactor. The chain reaction had to be broken. However, after 3 seconds, the appearance of alarms for exceeding the power of the reactor and increasing pressure was registered. And after 4 seconds - a deaf explosion that shook the entire building. The emergency protection rods stopped before they had gone halfway...

From the roof of the fourth power unit, as if from the mouth of a volcano, sparkling clots began to fly out. They went up high. It was like fireworks. The clots scattered into multi-colored sparks and fell in different places...

The black fireball soared up, forming a cloud that stretched horizontally into a black cloud and went to the side, sowing death, disease and misfortune in the form of small, small drops ..

And at that time people were still working inside. There is no roof, part of the wall is destroyed ... The lights went out, the phone turned off. Coverings are crumbling. Paul is trembling. The rooms are filled with either steam, or fog, dust. Short circuit sparks flash. Radiation control devices go off scale. Hot radioactive water flows everywhere...

After the largest man-made disaster in world history, such pine trees were born in the Zone ...

...such animals...

...and these kids...

These photos were taken for one of the secret reports to the Central Committee of the Politburo of the USSR...

Now almost all the houses in the Zone look like this...

THE 1988 EARTHQUAKE DESTROYED THE CITY OF SPITAK. Also in Armenia, the cities of Leninakan, Stepanavan, Kirovakan were destroyed. 58 villages in the north-west of the republic were turned into ruins, almost 400 villages were partially destroyed.

450 mine rescuers arrived in Armenia from the fraternal union republics. 6.5 thousand servicemen, 25 teams of military doctors, 400 units of army equipment are involved in rescue work in the disaster zone.

Tens of thousands of people died, 514 thousand people were left homeless. The loss of national wealth amounted to 8.8 billion rubles.

Over the past 80 years, this is the most powerful earthquake in the Caucasus...

On March 1, 1995, FAMOUS TV JOURNALIST VLAD LEAVES was KILLED in the entrance of his house.

The murder of the general director of ORT and just a popular person was a shock to millions of people. He was so loved and popular that even the then head of state, Boris Yeltsin, dropped everything and rushed to Ostankino to apologize to the TV people. The investigation began almost immediately, sketches of the alleged killers were made and published, but a hot pursuit search yielded no results.

Over the past 11 years, the wording of the messages of the Prosecutor General's Office has hardly changed. Only the volume of investigation materials has changed: this year there are already more than 200 volumes.

CAPTURE OF BUDENNOVSK. On June 14, 1995, detachments of Chechen fighters under the command of Shamil Basayev entered Budyonnovsk and took about 1,500 hostages. The terrorists, having put forward the cessation of hostilities and the beginning of negotiations in Chechnya, as a condition for the release of the hostages, entrenched themselves in the city hospital.

On June 17, special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB made several attempts to storm the hospital. During these operations, both the terrorists and the stormers were killed and wounded, but the hostages suffered the most (from the fire of the stormers) - up to 30 people died and many were injured. During the assault, the terrorists forced the hostages, including women, to stand at the windows and shout to the Russian servicemen: "Don't shoot!"

After the failure of the assault on June 18, with the mediation of S.A. Kovalev, negotiations began between Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and Basayev, during which they managed to reach an agreement on the release of the hostages. The conditions for their release were: the cessation of hostilities on the territory of Chechnya and the resolution of disputes through negotiations. A detachment of militants left on buses provided by the federal side to the mountainous Chechen village of Zandak. At the same time, 120 hostages who volunteered to accompany the terrorists were used as a "human shield". In total, as a result of this terrorist act in Budyonnovsk, 105 civilians were killed, including 18 women, 17 men over 55 years old, a boy and a girl under 16 years old. Also killed were 11 police officers and at least 14 servicemen.

THE MURDER OF YITZCHAK RABIN. Any Israeli knows the name of the killer of the Israeli prime minister. Yigal Yigal Amir is a member of the underground ultra-ultra-right nationalist organization Eyal (Lions of Judah).

The murder happened on November 4, 1995 in Tel Aviv, in the evening after thousands of people demonstrated in support of the peace process. Wounded in the back by 2 bullets, Yitzhak Rabin was taken in the back seat of a government limousine to the nearby Ichilov hospital.

By 11:00 p.m., Rabin's personal secretary reported that the prime minister had been shot to death.

The aging leader of the Workers' Party, Yitzhak Rabin, whose policies were subjected to the most severe criticism, was canonized at the moment. In Israel, it is now customary to name squares, streets and educational institutions after him ...

EXPLOSIONS OF HOUSES IN MOSCOW AND VOLGODONSK IN 1999. A series of terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999 claimed the lives of more than 300 people. The explosions occurred in a situation where fighting was going on in Dagestan between federal troops and invading armed detachments of separatists from Chechnya, led by Shamil Basayev ...

Explosion on Guryanov street. On September 8, 1999, at 11:58 p.m., an explosion occurred in the basement of a 9-storey residential building at 19 Guryanov Street (Pechatniki district) in the southeast of Moscow. The building was partially destroyed, one section of the residential building collapsed. Rescuers worked on the ruins of a residential building for several days ...

According to official figures, the explosion killed 109 people and injured 160 people. As it was established by explosives experts, an explosive device with a capacity of 300-400 kg of TNT went off in the basement of the house. The blast wave deformed the structures of the neighboring house 19. A few days later, houses 17 and 19 were destroyed by explosives, the residents were relocated to other houses...

The media speculated that it was a terrorist attack. September 13 was a day of mourning for those killed in the explosion. On the same day, a sketch of a man who allegedly rented a basement in a residential building was shown on television ...

Explosion on the Kashirskoye Highway. On September 13 at 5 o'clock in the morning there was a new explosion on the Kashirskoye Highway in an 8-storey residential building number 6/3. As a result of the explosion, the house was completely destroyed, almost all the tenants who were in the residential building - 124 people - died, 9 people were injured and rescued from the rubble, 119 families were injured. Due to the fact that the house was brick, almost all the inhabitants who were in it during the explosion died ...

On the same day, September 13, stockpiles of explosives in sugar bags were found in the Maryino area, sufficient to destroy several more residential buildings. A state of emergency was not introduced, but unprecedented security measures were taken in Moscow and other cities, all attics and basements were checked. Residents of residential buildings spontaneously organized round-the-clock duty for several months ...

On September 16, a few days after the explosions in Moscow, at 5.40 am, the city of Volgodonsk, Rostov Region, was rocked by a terrible explosion. Near the police department building and next to a 9-storey residential building at 35 Gagarin Street, a GAZ-53 van filled with explosives exploded. A funnel with a diameter of 15 m and a depth of 3 m was formed in the courtyard of the house. 437 people lived in 144 apartments of the panel house - 18 people died.

A TRAGEDY IN THE TRANSITION ON PUSHKINSKAYA SQUARE. Another powerful explosion thundered in Moscow. The explosive device was planted by two young Caucasians...

Allegedly, they approached commercial tent number 40 and asked to sell them goods for US dollars. The seller refused, so the young people asked the seller to look after the bag while they went to exchange dollars for rubles. Literally a few minutes after they left, an improvised explosive device with a capacity of 400 grams to 1.5 kg of TNT went off in a bag ...

According to witnesses who were at that moment in the transition, first there was a strong bang, a bright flash, then an explosive wave swept through the tunnel and heavy smoke poured down. People began to run outside. Those who were closer to the epicenter had numerous burns and wounds, blood was shed. The explosion was so powerful that it literally tore off the clothes from the victims ...

As a result of the explosion, 7 people died, 93 sought medical help. Of these, 59 people were taken to city hospitals, 34 refused hospitalization. Three children were among the victims...

DEATH OF "KURSK". On August 12, 2000, a tragedy broke out in the Barants Sea, chaining hundreds of millions of people to TV screens.

For several days, Russian and British naval forces have been trying to rescue 118 crew members of the nuclear submarine from underwater captivity.

However, all efforts were in vain...

As the investigation will later establish, the cause of the tragedy was the explosion of the so-called "thick torpedo" in the torpedo compartment. All submariners on board were killed.

TRAGEDY ON DUBROVKA. On October 23, 2002, at 9:15 pm, armed men in camouflage burst into the building of the Theater Center on Dubrovka, on Melnikova Street (the former Palace of Culture of the State Bearing Plant). At that time, the musical "Nord-Ost" was going on in the Palace of Culture, there were more than 700 people in the hall. The terrorists declared all people - spectators and theater workers - hostages and began to mine the building ...

At 10 pm it became known that the theater building was seized by a detachment of Chechen fighters led by Movsar Baraev, there are women among the terrorists, all of them are hung with explosives ...

On October 24, at a quarter past midnight, the first attempt was made to establish contact with the terrorists: Aslambek Aslakhanov, a State Duma deputy from Chechnya, entered the center building. At half past twelve, several shots rang out in the building. The hostages, who managed to contact the TV companies by mobile phones, ask not to start the assault: “These people say that 10 hostages will be killed for each of their killed or wounded”...

On October 26, at five o'clock 30 minutes, three explosions and several automatic bursts were heard near the building of the Palace of Culture. At about six o'clock, the special forces began an assault, during which nerve gas was used. At half past seven in the morning, the official representative of the FSB said that the Theater Center was under the control of special services, Movsar Baraev and most of the terrorists had been destroyed ...

At 7:25 a.m., presidential aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky officially announced that the operation to free the hostages had been completed. The number of neutralized terrorists in the building of the Theater Center on Dubrovka alone amounted to 50 people - 18 women and 32 men. Three terrorists arrested...

On November 7, 2002, the Moscow prosecutor's office published a list of citizens who died as a result of the actions of terrorists who seized the theater center on Dubrovka. It included 128 people: 120 Russians and 8 citizens from near and far abroad countries. Five hostages received gunshot wounds as a result of the actions of militants. The four dead hostages could not be identified for a long time, and their names were not included in the lists of the health authorities...

SEPTEMBER 11 - WAR WITHOUT RULES. America has never known such a tragedy... The worst nightmares have come true... Manhattan, 8 hours 44 minutes in the morning on September 11, 2001, a minute before the tragedy.

At 8:45 a.m., the first kamikaze plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The frame shows how the second flies up ...

One of the towers, 110 stories high, was rammed through...

Explosion and immediately a strong fire. The last one to answer the phone from the upper floors shouted "We're dying!"

A series of powerful explosions took place along the perimeter of the Twin Towers...

The fire burst out. The top of the building "falls" into the base ...

The two tallest buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed after holding on for less than an hour...

The streets of Manhattan south of Colon Street are shrouded in such dense smoke that rescuers cannot get there...

BESLAN - A BITTER LESSON. At about 8 am on September 1, 2004, near the village of Khurikau, on the border of the Mozdok and Pravoberezhny regions of North Ossetia, about 60 km from Beslan, armed men stopped a local district police officer, a police major, and put him in their car. According to preliminary data, it was with the help of the certificate of an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the militants in a GAZ-66 and two cars easily passed several checkpoints on the way to Beslan ...

During the solemn assembly on the occasion of September 1, they broke into the territory of school No. 1. In total, according to the education committee of the Beslan administration, there were 895 students and 59 teachers and technical staff of the school on the line. The number of parents who came to take their children to school is unknown...

Opening indiscriminate fire into the air, the militants ordered everyone present to enter the school building, but most - mostly high school students and adults - were able to simply run away. Those who could not do it - elementary school students and their parents and part of the teachers - were driven into the gym by the bandits...

Then everything happened like in a nightmare... An explosion was recorded inside the school. Data on the number of hostages is still scattered. According to the lists compiled by relatives and parents of students, it was found that 132 children can be in the school. In total, according to unconfirmed reports, the militants managed to capture from 300 to 400 people...

There is evidence that the gym is mined ... Bodies are burning in the gym, they are flooded with water cannons. Strong explosions inside the school are heard with some persistent periodicity. Meanwhile, the crowd slowly but surely begins to approach the building. Soldiers of the internal troops are trying to get in their way. "Better let it go," one of the men says calmly. And they retreat. People want to go to the gym and see with their own eyes how many people were killed there...

The hostages are shot, they die of dehydration and suffocation...

This is what the gym looked like after the assault...

Sad results: in Beslan they say that about six hundred people were saved. No one denies that there were at least a thousand hostages - so the total number of victims is about 400 people. There is still no exact data - many are missing ...

At the end of December 2004, the strongest earthquake and tsunami in the last 40 years occurred in six countries of Southeast Asia.

The first and most powerful earthquake occurred on December 26 at about 03:00 in the Indian Ocean. Literally a few minutes later, a destructive tsunami wave reached land - first of all the island of Sumatra (Indonesia), and then Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives /

Eyewitnesses told how, in absolutely sunny, calm weather, the water suddenly began to recede from the beach, and then a six-meter wave formed. Those who were able to escape in these few minutes were saved. Tons of water swept away everything in its path: people, cars and even entire hotels.

The number of victims reached 400 thousand people. About 100,000 more have not yet been found or identified.

The largest number of victims - more than 10 thousand - was registered in Indonesia, off the coast of which there was an epicenter with a force of 9 on the Richter scale.

Then hundreds of settlements were flooded and wiped off the face of the earth.

Seismologists call the December events exceptional. According to them, no more than five such earthquakes have been recorded over the past century.

This region of Southeast Asia still cannot recover from the terrible destruction.

Today, the attention of the whole world is drawn to Chile, where a large-scale eruption of the Calbuco volcano began. The time has come to remember 7 biggest natural disasters recent years to know what the future might hold. Nature steps on people, as people used to step on nature.

Calbuco volcano eruption. Chile

Mount Calbuco in Chile is a fairly active volcano. However, its last eruption took place more than forty years ago - in 1972, and even then it lasted only one hour. But on April 22, 2015, everything changed for the worse. Calbuco literally exploded, starting the ejection of volcanic ash to a height of several kilometers.

On the Internet you can find a huge number of videos about this amazingly beautiful sight. However, it is pleasant to enjoy the view only through a computer, being thousands of kilometers from the scene. In reality, being near Calbuco is scary and deadly.

The Chilean government decided to resettle all people within a radius of 20 kilometers from the volcano. And this is only the first step. It is not yet known how long the eruption will last and what real damage it will bring. But it will definitely be a sum of several billion dollars.

Earthquake in Haiti

On January 12, 2010, Haiti suffered a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. There were several tremors, the main of which had a magnitude of 7. As a result, almost the entire country was in ruins. Even the presidential palace, one of the most majestic and capital buildings in Haiti, was destroyed.

According to official figures, more than 222,000 people died during and after the earthquake, and 311,000 were injured to varying degrees. At the same time, millions of Haitians were left homeless.

This is not to say that magnitude 7 is something unprecedented in the history of seismic observations. The scale of destruction turned out to be so huge due to the high deterioration of the infrastructure in Haiti, and also because of the extremely low quality of absolutely all buildings. In addition, the local population itself was in no hurry to provide first aid to the victims, as well as to participate in the removal of rubble and the restoration of the country.

As a result, an international military contingent was sent to Haiti, which took over the government in the first period after the earthquake, when the traditional authorities were paralyzed and extremely corrupt.

Tsunami in the Pacific Ocean

Until December 26, 2004, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Earth knew about the tsunami exclusively from textbooks and disaster films. However, that day will forever remain in the memory of Mankind because of the huge wave that covered the coast of dozens of states in the Indian Ocean.

It all started with a major earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1-9.3 that occurred just north of the island of Sumatra. It caused a giant wave up to 15 meters high, which spread in all directions of the ocean and meaning from the face of the Earth hundreds of settlements, as well as world-famous seaside resorts.

The tsunami covered coastal areas in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Myanmar, South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Maldives, Seychelles, Oman and other states on the Indian Ocean. Statisticians counted more than 300 thousand dead in this disaster. At the same time, the bodies of many could not be found - the wave carried them into the open ocean.

The consequences of this disaster are enormous. In many places infrastructure was never fully restored after the 2004 tsunami.

Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption

The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic name Eyjafjallajokull became one of the most popular words in 2010. And all thanks to the volcanic eruption in the mountain range with this name.

Paradoxically, not a single person died during this eruption. But this natural disaster seriously disrupted business life throughout the world, primarily in Europe. After all, a huge amount of volcanic ash thrown into the sky from the Eyjafjallajökull vent completely paralyzed air traffic in the Old World. The natural disaster destabilized the lives of millions of people in Europe itself, as well as in North America.

Thousands of flights, both passenger and cargo, were cancelled. The daily losses of airlines during that period amounted to more than $200 million.

Earthquake in China's Sichuan province

As in the case of the earthquake in Haiti, a huge number of victims after a similar disaster in the Chinese province of Sichuan, which occurred there on May 12, 2008, is due to the low level of capital buildings.

As a result of the main earthquake of magnitude 8, as well as smaller concussions that followed it, more than 69,000 people died in Sichuan, 18,000 were missing, and 288,000 were injured.

At the same time, the government of the People's Republic of China severely limited international assistance in the disaster zone, it tried to solve the problem with its own hands. According to experts, the Chinese thus wanted to hide the real extent of what happened.

For publishing real data about the dead and destruction, as well as for articles about corruption, which led to such huge numbers of losses, the PRC authorities even imprisoned the most famous contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, for several months.

Hurricane Katrina

However, the scale of the consequences of a natural disaster does not always directly depend on the quality of construction in a particular region, as well as on the presence or absence of corruption there. An example of this is Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Southeast coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico in late August 2005.

The main impact of Hurricane Katrina fell on the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The rising water level in several places broke through the dam protecting New Orleans, and about 80 percent of the city was under water. At that moment, entire areas were destroyed, infrastructure facilities, transport interchanges and communications were destroyed.

The population who refused or did not have time to evacuate fled on the roofs of houses. The famous Superdom stadium became the main gathering place for people. But it turned into a trap at the same time, because it was already impossible to get out of it.

During the hurricane, 1,836 people died and more than a million were made homeless. The damage from this natural disaster is estimated at 125 billion dollars. At the same time, New Orleans has not been able to return to a full-fledged normal life in ten years - the city's population is still about a third less than in 2005.

March 11, 2011 in the Pacific Ocean east of the island of Honshu, shocks with a magnitude of 9-9.1 occurred, which led to the appearance of a huge tsunami wave up to 7 meters high. She hit Japan, washing away many coastal objects and going deep into the tens of kilometers.

In different parts of Japan, after the earthquake and tsunami, fires broke out, infrastructure, including industrial ones, was destroyed. In total, almost 16 thousand people died as a result of this disaster, and economic losses amounted to about 309 billion dollars.

But this turned out to be not the worst. The world knows about the 2011 disaster in Japan, primarily because of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which occurred as a result of the collapse of a tsunami wave on it.

More than four years have passed since this accident, but the operation at the nuclear power plant is still ongoing. And the settlements closest to it were permanently settled. So Japan got its own.

A large-scale natural disaster is one of the options for the death of our Civilization. We have collected .

Most explanatory dictionaries interpret the basic meaning of the word "catastrophe" as an event with tragic consequences. It is precisely such events that still terrify our contemporaries with their scale and the number of dead people and animals, the history of our planet has not so few. The most terrible catastrophes sometimes influenced the further development of the affected countries or even the entire civilization.

With the development of technology, people began to develop such ocean spaces that were unsuitable for their existence, and then turned their dreams and aspirations to the sky. With the advent of huge ocean cruisers, multi-seat passenger airliners, the number of those killed and injured in disasters has significantly increased. In the last century, man-made disasters have been added, which can also be called one of the largest.

The largest air crash in civil aviation

Tenerife is one of the worst air crashes, which resulted in the death of 583 people. It all happened on March 27, 1977, directly on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport, located near the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands). All passengers of the Boeing KLM were killed, including 14 crew members, with the exception of one passenger, Robina Van Lanscot, who decided to interrupt the flight to meet a friend and got off in Tenerife. But on board the Boeing Pan American after the crash were survivors. 61 people managed to escape - 54 passengers and 7 crew members.

Due to the terrorist attack that occurred the day before at the largest airport in the Canary Islands, Las Palmas, it was closed, and Los Rodeos Airport was heavily overloaded due to these events. It was a day off, a lot of planes, rejected by Las Palmas, filled all the stops. Some of them were on taxiways. The reasons that led to the terrible disaster are known:

fog, visibility was initially limited to 300 meters, and a little later became even less;
lack of lights on the borders of the runway and taxiway;
the strong Spanish accent of the dispatcher, which the pilots did not understand well, asked again and clarified his orders;
the lack of coordinated actions on the part of the pilots when negotiating with the controller, they entered into a conversation and interrupted each other.

KLM subsequently claimed responsibility for the tragedy and paid substantial compensation to the families of the victims and those affected.

On May 5, 1937, a German cruise ship was launched, named after Wilhelm Gustloff, one of the leaders of the Swiss National Socialists, who had died the year before.

The passenger liner had ten decks, was designed for 1.5 thousand people, it was served by 417 crew members. The ship was built using the most advanced technologies, and it was very comfortable. The liner was intended primarily for long and leisurely cruises. In 1939, the Wilhelm Gustloff was handed over to the German Navy. Soon he became a floating hospital, and then after 1940 he was assigned to the school of submariners in Gotenhafen. His color again became camouflage, and he lost the protection of the Hague Convention.

After a torpedo attack carried out by a Soviet submarine under the command of A.I. Marinescu, "Wilhelm Gustloff" sank off the coast of Poland on January 30, 1945. According to official figures, 5,348 people died, however, the exact number of passengers remained unknown.

On November 7, 1941, near the coast of Crimea, the Nazi aircraft sank the Soviet ship "Armenia", on board of which, presumably, there were more than 3,000 people.

From the point of view of ecology, one of the largest catastrophes is currently taking place on the planet - the decrease in the level of the Aral Sea and its drying up. The so-called Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake on the planet after the Caspian Sea (which due to its isolation can be qualified as a lake), Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa.

But after the flow of the Syrdarya and Amudarya rivers, which fed the Aral, began to climb through the irrigation systems built, the lake became shallow. In the summer of 2014, its eastern part almost dried up, the volume of water decreased to 10%.

All this led to climate change, which became continental. On the protruding bottom of the former sea, the sandy-salt desert Aralkum appeared. Dust storms carry the smallest particles of salt interspersed with pesticides and agricultural fertilizers, which at one time got into the Aral Sea from fields through rivers and can adversely affect the health of people and animals. Because of the salinity, most species of marine life have disappeared, ports have closed, people have lost their jobs.

Among such catastrophes, affecting the population of the entire planet with their disastrous consequences, first of all, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant should be attributed. During the explosion of the fourth nuclear reactor, it was completely destroyed. Work on the elimination of the consequences has not yet been completed. After April 26, 1986, all people were evacuated from the crash site within a radius of 30 km - 135,000 people and 35,000 livestock. A protected exclusion zone was created. Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia suffered the most from radioactive substances that got into the air. In other countries, an increase in the radioactive background was also noted. More than 600,000 people participated in the aftermath of this disaster.

The largest earthquake in Japan, which occurred on March 11, 2011, and then the tsunami, caused the radiation accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, which has the highest, seventh level. External power supply facilities and backup diesel generators were disabled, which led to a failure in the cooling system, and then the meltdown of the reactor core at Units 1, 2, and 3. The entire financial damage, which includes decontamination work, compensation to victims and internally displaced persons, is approximately $189 billion.

Another catastrophe that affected the state of the entire biosphere of the Earth is the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, which occurred on April 20, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill caused by the accident was the largest ever. At the time of the explosion itself and in the ensuing fire at the semi-submersible unit, 11 people died and 17 out of 126 were injured, who were on the platform at that moment. Two more died later. Oil flowed into the bay for 152 days, in total more than 5 million barrels fell into the bay. This man-made disaster had a detrimental effect on the ecology of the entire region. Various species of marine animals, fish and birds have been affected. And in the north of the Gulf of Mexico in the same year, an increased mortality of cetaceans was recorded. In addition to oil, on the surface of the water (spot size reached 75,000 km²), a large number of underwater oil plumes formed, the length of which reached 16 km, and the width and height - respectively, 5 km and 90 m.

These are just a few terrible accidents that can be classified as the worst disasters in the history of mankind. But there were still others, sometimes less known, that brought people a lot of destruction and misfortune. Often these catastrophes were caused by war or a whole series of accidents, and in some cases the destructive force of nature brought grief.

Unfortunately, these things happen. There are probably no right words to describe them, and God forbid to be in such situations.

We present to your attention the most terrible disasters in the world.

The worst plane crash ever

The rating "The most terrible plane crashes" is headed by Tenerife. The fatal collision of 2 Boeing-747 aircraft belonging to different companies (Boeing-747-206B - the brainchild of KLM, operated the next flight KL4805 and Boeing-747 - the property of Pan American, operated flight 1736), happened on March 27, 1977 on the island of the Canary Islands , Tenerife, on the runway of Los Rodeos airport. Many people died - 583 people who were in these two planes. What exactly caused such a devastating accident? The paradox is that the imposition of unfavorable circumstances on each other played a cruel joke.

On that ill-fated Sunday spring day, Los Rodeos airport was very congested. Both aircraft were maneuvering on a narrow runway, including complex 135-180-degree turns. Interference in radio communication with the controller and between pilots, poor weather conditions and visibility, misinterpretation of commands by the air traffic controller, the strong Spanish accent of the controller - all this inevitably led to disaster. The Boeing KLM commander did not understand the dispatcher's command to abort the takeoff, at a time when the commander of the second Boeing reported that their huge aircraft was still moving along the runway. Fourteen seconds later, the inevitable collision occurred, the fuselage of the Pan American Boeing was badly damaged, gaps formed in some places, and some passengers escaped through them. A Boeing KLM without a tail and with damaged wings fell onto the runway 150 meters from the point of impact and drove along the runway for another 300 meters. Both affected aircraft caught fire.

All 248 people from the Boeing KLM aircraft died. The second plane lost 326 passengers and nine crew members. In this most terrible plane crash, the American star of Playboy magazine, actress and model Eve Meyer, also died.

The worst man-made disaster

The worst disaster in the history of oil production is the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform, built in 1976. It happened on 07/06/1988. According to experts, this terrible accident cost 3.4 billion US dollars and claimed the lives of 167 people. Piper Alpha is the only burnt oil platform on Earth, owned by the American oil company Occidental Petroleum. There was a huge gas leak and, as a result, a colossal explosion. This happened as a result of ill-conceived actions of the maintenance personnel - the pipelines from the platform fed the general oil pipeline network, the supply of oil products was not stopped immediately after the disaster, waiting for the command of the higher authorities. Therefore, the fire continued due to the burning of gas and oil in the pipes, the fire even engulfed residential complexes. And those who were able to survive after the first explosion were surrounded by flames. Those who jumped into the water were saved.

The worst disaster on the water

If you remember the biggest disasters on the water, then you immediately remember the pictures from the movie "Titanic", which is based on real events in 1912. But the sinking of the Titanic is not the biggest disaster. The greatest maritime disaster was the sinking of the German ship "Wilhelm Gustlov" by a Soviet military submarine on 01/30/1945. There were almost 9,000 people on board the ship: 3,700 of them had completed elite training for military submariners, 3-4,000 representatives of the military elite who had been evacuated from Danzig. The tourist sightseeing ship was built in 1938. It was, as it seemed, an unsinkable 9-deck ocean liner, designed according to the latest technologies of that time.

Dance floors, 2 theaters, swimming pools, a church, a gym, restaurants, a cafe with a winter garden and climate control, comfortable cabins and personal apartments of Hitler himself. With a length of 208 meters, he could go half the world without refueling. He could not sink a priori. But fate decreed otherwise. Under the command of A. I. Marinesko, the crew of the Soviet submarine S-13 conducted a military operation to destroy an enemy ship. Three torpedoes fired pierced the Wilhelm Gustloff. It immediately sank in the Baltic Sea. Until now, no one in the whole world can forget the most terrible catastrophe.

The biggest environmental disaster

The most terrible catastrophe from an ecological point of view of ecology is the death of the Aral Sea, which, before the drying up, scientists called the fourth lake by world standards. Although the sea is located on the territory of the former USSR, the disaster affected the entire world. Water was taken from it in uncontrolled volumes for irrigation of fields and gardens in order to ensure the fulfillment of political ambitions and unreasonable plans of Soviet leaders.
Over time, the coastline moved so deep into the lake that many species of fish and animals died, more than 60,000 people lost their jobs, shipping stopped, the climate changed - droughts became more frequent.