Survival
People adapting to extreme conditions, damaged systems, isolation, and limited choices.
Investigations
The Warning Was a Man Waving
After the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapsed in 1980, one driver backed away and waved desperately at approaching traffic. Several cars—and a Greyhound bus—went around him.
The Crowd Became the Lock
At Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre in 1903, some exits opened inward. As hundreds pressed toward them, the crowd itself could keep the doors shut. The disaster helped change how…
They Walked Beyond the Search
Searchers thought the missing Lady Be Good crew could have walked perhaps 25 or 30 miles through the Sahara. Months later, five men were found roughly 80 miles…
The Boat Went Over the Trees
The 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami reached 1,720 feet up a mountainside—but that was runup, not a mile-wide wall of water. Down the bay, one fishing boat was carried…
Twenty-Four Feet from Air
USS Tang was sunk by its own torpedo in 1944. For a few minutes its escape trunk was only 24 feet below the surface—until the crew deliberately sank…
The Watch Lost Its Hands
Vincent Coleman died after warning the railway about the Halifax Explosion. Whether he saved the famous 300-passenger train is disputed. What his last message definitely did may have…
A Wall in the Dark
When fire trapped hundreds inside Illinois’s Cherry Mine in 1909, a small group built a wall underground to keep poisonous air out. A week later, rescuers found them…
The Fire He Lit Himself
In 1949, smokejumper foreman Wag Dodge stopped running from the Mann Gulch Fire and deliberately lit another fire in front of himself. His crew had never been trained…
Almost Home
On April 27, 1865, three of Sultana’s four boilers exploded as the overloaded steamboat headed north from Memphis with more than 1,900 former Union prisoners aboard. More than…
The Rescue Machine Nobody Had Ever Needed
USS Squalus sank off New Hampshire in 1939 with 33 people trapped alive inside. The Navy used the McCann rescue chamber to bring all 33 survivors to the…