Scrawled Shortcuts through the Research Maze

Take a break from campus blackouts and Halloween preparations to investigate great scary moments of the past.

Encyclopedia of New York City

Information about NYC Blackouts---…aside from the famous ones in 1965 and 1977, did you know there were NYC blackouts as early as 1881?
REF 974.71003 E56e

Engineering Disasters and Learning from Failure

From the space shuttle Columbia to Chernobyl and Bhopal, technology plays an increasing role in 20^th and 21^st century disasters.
http://www.matscieng.sunysb.edu/disaster/

From the Titanic to the Challenger:  An Annotated Bibliography on Technological Failures of the 20th Century

Reading list on our best known engineering catastrophes.
REF 016.620042H567f         

Space Shuttle Disaster

Physicist Richard P. Feynman was among those who deduced the 0-ring failure in the Space Shuttle.* *His description of the investigation:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt

Encyclopedia of Forensic Science

CSI information, as well as investigation of the TWA-800 crash.
REF 363.2503 B433

EM-DAT: International Disasters Database

Check out stats for major disasters 1900-2005, by type, place, and date.
http://www.em-dat.net/

See also Worst United States Disasters, from Infoplease:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001459.html 

Databases of the past

Read about disasters of the 19^th and 20^th centuries via New York Times Historical and Readers Guide Retrospective on the Research Resources page.

Warning: Browsing Library resources can be frightening!