Well Someone's Gotta Be First To Post

Ok, here's a group that I never thought I'd see. I didn't really think of myself as a disaster buff, but when I went to my shelf sure as shit there were a bunch of what I would call "what went wrong" books. I have a particular yen for airline disaster books which is kinda perverse because I have to fly fairly often. I think I like these types of books because I've always been fascinated by how small, seemingly insignificant actions can have a snowball effect that ultimately results in a disaster.

So how about there rest of you. Why disasters?

> Why disasters?

I have been book obsessed since I discovered at age 5 that I could read for myself. Maybe 15 years ago, I was browsing in one of those junky "antique" stores where you might find just about anything. They had some books, including a whole shelf of engineering books from the late 1800s/very early 1900s. I walked out of there with a box full for about $10 (wish I could find more bargains like that!), and added an "old books" dimension to the obsession.

I have spent all my adult life trying to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, or respond to disasters of one type or another, so disasters just came with the territory - I had read articles, etc. but found the contemporaneous accounts fascinating. For example, if you read Great Galveston Disaster from 1900, it sounds eerily like Katrina. (Actually I have the first edition on this one, although it is not in great shape.)

I don't get much into aircraft related disasters (except of course 9/11). Mine seem to fall into categories like natural disasters Rising Tide, fires History of the Great Conflagration, explosions City on Fire, pandemic The Great Influenza, bad decision-making Into Thin Air, mining Fire and Brimstone, and general technology failure Sinking of the Titanic.

I was surprised we have so few shared titles within this group right now – maybe because it is a small group and we are all still working on data entry? Sorry, I made my library private for now because I panicked when I saw my user name proliferating across cyberspace. I am waiting for one private field where you can document info you don’t want the whole world to see.

I am a writer, partly writing horror. Yeah. So... Um...

As far as I can remember I got into disasters either from a Reader's Digest book that accidentally made it into my parents' home when I was a teenager, or when I first read Darkest Hours (in my 20's). I am fascinated by the human side of disasters--how some people become heroes while others panic and become beasts. I have a preference for reading about man-made disasters over natural disasters.

morgensd, I agree with you that the concept that "if any one of these incidents had been avoided there might not have been a disaster" is fascinating. Maybe a lesson in living for all of us--every decision is more important than we can possibly realize!

oregonobsessionz, I'm intrigued that you are involved in the prevention, etc. of actual disasters. I had thought that most disaster buffs had the luxury of having never experienced the real thing. The closest I've come was when a school burned down about 8 months after I did my student teaching there. I did get to observe the fire, and, thank goodness, no one was hurt or killed.

mackan, I can definitely see how disaster books would be helpful in your line of work. I'll be visiting your catalog to see if any of the books you've written are there!

So, new question for discussion: How close have you been to an actual disaster? I'll be back to share a couple of other close calls I've had.

Morgensd, I had a similar experience. When I cataloged my books in LT, there were so many books tagged "disaster" and related topics (like "Red Cross") that I had to make a whole shelf for them. "Why disasters?" Because I'm a Red Cross volunteer!

Furdog asks "How close have you been to an actual disaster?" I once watched a man shovel three inches of mud out of his living room. I was volunteering with Red Cross and had gone out with a caseworker to distribute clean-up kits and identify people who needed more help. Physically, that's the closest.

I've also done remote volunteering, such as working on a call center. While that wasn't physically close, I spent much more time at it and spoke with some people who were at the scene.

I just stumbled into your group and realized that I too have a few disaster books from the originial Sinking of the Titanic to Young Men and Fire to By Permission of Heaven. For a peace and quiet loving person I surprise myself.

P.S. You guys need a group pic. Maybe the great fire of London, Galloping Gertie, the destruction of Pompeii, the 1905 San Francisco earthquake, you know, fun stuff.

Video of Galloping Gertie is readily available on the internet. And some of the turn of the (20th) century books (Galveston hurricane, SF earthquake, etc.) have photos that apparently weren't sufficiently lurid, so they retouched them. Remember the WTC "photo" that showed some kind of demon in the smoke? That sort of thing.

I see we have some new members. Welcome!!

Yes, a photo would be nice. Haven't thought of Galloping Gertie since I saw the video in a college physics class (longer ago than I care to admit). I thought of the Johnstown Flood, but confess a bias: it was the first major natural disaster response of the American Red Cross.

Hi, Everyone--

Just noticed that I never got back to share how close I had come to disaster.

I don't know if this really counts, but it was pretty spectacular by my measurements.

I did my student-teaching at the local junior high school, and then moved on to a job at a nearby bank. It was just a few weeks later that news flew through the bank that the school was on fire.

I went up there on my lunch break to watch it burn. (Let me mention right away that no one was killed or injured.) I have to say I found it both awesome and awful to watch the building come down.

The fire had been set by two boys holding a flaming trash can up to the ceiling in one of the bathrooms. The first that anyone else knew was when the flames shot through the ceiling of the auditorium. The band instruments were all out on stage, and they say nothing was left of them but a puddle of brass.

I think that this fire and the way it turned out is a testament to the wisdom of frequent fire drills! If any students had not come out of that building in an orderly manner, there would have been casualties. Even the paperwork in the school vault was destroyed, the fire was so intense.

And of course, this is also a lesson in the necessity for schools to meet modern fire codes. The building that burned was about 80 years old. An attached annex that was built in the 1960's and had fire doors survived without damage.

I never complain when the fire marshal comes to the school where I work now, or when we have a fire drill. I've read about the fire at Our Lady of the Angels School, and it makes me realize how much worse the junior high fire I saw could have been if just one or two additional things had gone wrong.

furdog (9) wrote: "The building that burned was about 80 years old. An attached annex that was built in the 1960's and had fire doors survived without damage."

Wow! That's a real object lesson. Sometimes it's one or two simple things that make the difference between catastrophe and a minor inconvenience.

I started with a fascination of disasters from two reasons.

I have an overriding interest in both History and Geology. Where these two intersect is Natural Disaster.

The second is that for some reason my mother always seems to be in a slightly skewed path of a natural disaster. She posted in Anchorage Alaska before the 1964 earthquake, leaving a couple of months before its occurrence. She has slept through a tornado in Arkansas, left a day before Mount Saint Helens erupted, and doesn't recognize when she is being shaken by a fairly serious earthquake. Pretty impressive.

Hi, geohistnut! Good to see someone posting here again. This group has been pretty quiet lately.

I've currently got two books started that are disaster-relted. One is natural disaster, one is not.

A Sudden Sea is about the great Hurricane of 1938.

Report from Ground Zero is, of course, about the rescue and recovery efforts at the WTC on 9/11.

I've long been fascinated by disasters and the safety lessons that can be learned from them to avert or better survive future disasters. (Sadly, too often we fail to learn as we should.)

I've been reading a great deal on gardening lately and haven't had time to read on disasters. My last read disaster read Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan was so heartbreaking, such a long drawn-out grinding disaster. Think I'll make the next disaster volcanic, maybe Toba.

I just bought The Worst Hard Time a few weeks ago. From your post, I definitely get the impression should wait a while until I've recovered from Report from Ground Zero (which I've almost finished) before I read it.

Just received Fire in the Grove: the Cocoanut Grove Tragedy and its Aftermath through InterLibrary Loan. I have to read that next, as it has a very short loan period.

Our system doesn't have it either, I've got it down for ILL as well. Your ILLs are short? Ours (unless owning library specifies otherwise) check out for 28 days.

Hmmm.

Here, the patron due date for an ILL is based on the due date of the owning library. Each library in the state system sets its own ILL loan period, and sets its due dates accordingly. Some are generous, some are stingy. And some set the due date and then are slow to ship the book out, or shipment takes an unusually long time.

So, as a result, ILL loan periods vary widely. This one was short, just a couple of weeks. The last one I had was for over a month.

I just finished Fire in the Grove. In a nutshell, a decent account of a terrible tragedy and much of the fallout which followed in its aftermath -- personal, medical, legal, political. I was disappointed by the lack of footnotes (there were only a few) or a bibliography.

I thought Stephanie Schorow's chapter on the Cocoanut Grove in Boston on Fire told the story in a more compelling manner, but of course, with 245 pages, Fire in the Grove did have added detail. (Schorow does a much better job in documenting her sources, however.)

I also just realized I never posted after I finished Report from Ground Zero. It was an amazing read.

I've reviewed both books here:http://www.librarything.com/profile_reviews.php?view=tymfos