A list of disasters, crises, catastrophes, emergencies, and other exceptional situations. This list will primarily (but not entirely) be geared toward cases that can tell us something about disaster mediation.
Human history obviously includes more of these than we could possibly list here. Instead of aiming for the comprehensive, let’s instead use this space to assemble a listing of examples that have come up in our readings and class discussions. If there are any examples large or small that you would like to include here please let me know and I’ll be happy to add.
In culling this list let’s keep in mind that the items we select will likely have a “global north” bias as that is where most of us are from and where most of our attention is often focused. Let’s try our best to redress this bias by consciously trying to include international cases, and in so doing, pay attention to the ways that even classifying a given circumstance as disastrous, catastrophic, or exceptional is always politically complicated, based on what we think is normal or acceptable in different socio-economic and geographical contexts.
• Genocide of indigenous peoples in North America beginning with the arrival of the first Europeans and continuing through to the settler colonialist practices of the United States, 15th – 20th century
• Global warming & climate change, from around 1900 to present
• Titanic, 1912
• Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown, Pennsylvania, March 28, 1979
• Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 1980
• Bhopal chemical accident at Union Carbide India Limited, December 2, 1984
• Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant meltdown, USSR (Ukraine), April 26, 1986
• Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am Flight 103), December 1988
• Exxon Valdez oil spill, Prince William Sound, Alaska, March 24, 1989
• World Trade Center Bombing, 1993
• Oklahoma City bombing, 1995
• Y2K bug (disaster averted), December 31, 1999
• 9/11 terrorist attacks, 2001
• Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Sumatra, Indonesia, December 25, 2004
• Hurricane Katrina, 2005
• Haiti Earthquake, January 12, 2010
• BP, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, April 20, 2010
• Fukushima nuclear disaster and Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami, March 11, 2011
• Hurricane Sandy, 2012
• Hurricane Irma & Hurricane Maria, 2017
• Hurricane Dorian, 2019
• COVID-19 global pandemic, March 2020 – ongoing
• Port of Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion, August 4, 2020
• Norfolk Southern freight train derailment, East Palestine, Ohio, February 3, 2023
• Turkey–Syria earthquake, February 6, 2023