Warning Signs Everyone Ignored Before Infamous Events Happened

In the "Iliad," Cassandra is a Trojan princess with a cursed blessing of the type common in classical myth: she is a clairvoyant, with clear knowledge of future events, but she is fated to be disbelieved and discounted by those around her. When she says things like "let's not steal that man's wife" or "let's not let in that wooden horse of unclear provenance" or "listen, your wife has an axe," no one listens to her, generally much to their later (usually brief) chagrin. But sometimes, you don't need a cursed seeress to see that danger is right around the corner. Sometimes, all you have to do is pay attention to the extremely clear warning signs around you, and throughout history, this was sometimes exactly what didn't happen before disaster struck.

Unfortunately, the people receiving warnings aren't always able to respond, and the unwillingness of authorities to do so can lead to colossal loss of life, injury, and damage to property. From industrial accidents to wars to volcanic eruptions, here are some of the worst events to have their warning signs ignored.

Bridges are traditionally associated with concepts like "reliability" and "connection." A bridge should not be exciting; a bridge should be solid and, above all, relatively still. Unfortunately for Tacoma-area commuters and a singularly unfortunate cocker spaniel, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which spanned the waters of the Puget Sound, was a magnificently bad example of bridge construction. It opened on July 1, 1940, and quickly received the nickname "Galloping Gertie" because of the dramatic undulations that rocked the bridge when it was exposed to wind. 

On November 7, 1940, winds of about 42 miles an hour (for reference, the threshold for a tropical storm is 39 mph) rocked Galloping Gertie so hard that the bridge flew apart in one of the worst structural engineering failures in American history. Authorities had managed to close the bridge in time, and so the only death was of a cocker spaniel abandoned in a car, though you might credibly ask why a galloping bridge was ever open in the first place.

The collapse was captured on tape, in part because engineers were filming the installation of supports intended to ease the gallop. A photographer from the Tacoma News Tribune, who had been on the bridge shortly before it fell and struggled to get away, was recorded as saying (via WSDOT), "I was bruised, black and blue from my hips to my feet the next day and for two weeks. I don't think anything more exciting has ever happened to me."

By the mid-1400s, the once-proud Byzantine Empire, which had survived its Western Roman sister by nearly a thousand years, was teetering. Generations of territorial losses to neighbors, most recently the expansionist Ottoman Turks, left the empire holding only a chunk of modern Greece and the area immediately around Constantinople. Nicknamed "the City of the World's Desire," it was certainly the desire of the young and ambitious sultan Mehmed II, remembered by history as Mehmed the Conqueror.

Constantinople had withstood many, many sieges in the past thanks to its magnificent defensive walls, but this time Mehmed had upped his game by bringing massive cannons. He got ready to use them by making peace with Hungary and Venice (who might come to the Byzantines' aid), as well as building a fort called Throat-Cutter Castle to menace transports between the Black and Mediterranean Seas via the Bosphorus Strait. The cannons, not yet especially mobile, were moved from Edirne to outside the city, in full view of its inhabitants.

The Byzantine Emperor sent frantic messages for help, only to have Pope Nicholas V (a terrible human being despite his role as a religious leader) try to use it as an opportunity for political wrangling. Venice and Genoa sent a few boats and some troops, which were of little help. The city walls fell on May 29, 1453, leaving southeastern Europe open to Turkish armies for generations.

In 1973, Israel's Arab neighbors were still smarting from its smashing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, which saw it capture territory from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, including the much-contested Old City of Jerusalem. Egypt and Israel had continued a low-intensity air war until 1970, and as soon as it was ended (under U.S. pressure) the Egyptians moved Soviet-made anti-aircraft weapons to the Suez Canal, which was then the line of control between the countries. Israel did not immediately respond, apparently due to an incorrect but apparently widespread thought that the 1967 victory had convinced Egypt, Syria, and their allies that they would lose future direct confrontations. 

That idea continued even after Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's threats of war in 1971, 1972, and third-time-unlucky 1973. This false-alarm strategy worked, and the Israelis were surprised when the Egyptian preparations they had seen in the summer and autumn of 1973 turned out to be actual preparations for war.

That war began on October 6, 1973, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (and during Islam's Ramadan). The resulting Yom Kippur War lasted three bloody weeks and ended in an effective stalemate, with little territory changing hands immediately. The prospect of indefinite conflict led Israel and Egypt to negotiate a peace agreement in 1979, but as even casual observers of the news will know, a stable peace in the region has yet to be realized.

On April 10, 1912, the huge and luxurious ship RMS Titanic left Southampton, United Kingdom, en route to New York. Famously, she never got there, instead wandering into a field of floating ice in the North Atlantic, hitting an iceberg, and breaking apart. Icebergs, even given their notoriously mostly-submerged nature, are big, white, and visible, and so reasonable observers might suspect that it would take some doing to miss one that's right in front of a ship. Sadly, in the case of the Titanic, they would be correct.

The Titanic sank on April 15, and just two days later the Chicago Examiner (via Encyclopedia Titanica) reported that a previous ship, La Bretagne, had received warnings from a Newfoundland lighthouse about dangerous amounts of ice in the water. The captain of La Bretagne assumed the Titanic must have received the all-directions radio warnings, as several other ships had. Captain Mace went on to report that, radio warnings aside, the clear skies had allowed him to see the icebergs and to direct his crew to avoid them.

Even more alarmingly, when the Californian transmitted to the Titanic to warn them that the Californian was dangerously surrounded by ice, telegraph operator Jack Philips told them not to interrupt him while he was forwarding messages from passengers. If all these warnings had been heeded, it's entirely possible the Titanic would have safely made it to New York.

Scientists, if not all politicians, agree that climate change is real, it's happening, and it's going to have some increasingly strange and unpleasant effects as our world warms. As this happens, we cannot credibly claim not to have been warned well in advance, because the alarm was sounded as far back as 1856. However, the researcher involved was an amateur (but accomplished) and a woman, and since what she was saying was inconvenient, her caution went unheeded.

During the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an American women's rights advocate and natural philosopher (as amateur scientists were then called), read some interesting geological findings. At the time, fossils were indicating a very different composition of plant life in the distant past, which suggested there had been more carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Foote set up a simple experiment of glass cylinders filled with different gases and noted that the one containing carbon dioxide heated the enclosed thermometer more quickly than her others. Foote's work was presented by a male colleague at a conference in 1856, and short summaries of her work were published in 1856 and 1857, but concern about the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at large did not break through. Foote, who was a signatory to the women's rights petition at the first Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, might at least be pleased that American women did receive the vote ... eventually.

On September 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy whipped ashore at the extreme southeastern tip of Louisiana, smashing the beach town of Grand Isle and flooding parts of New Orleans, with water reaching the roofs of some houses in the city's east. "Billion-Dollar Betsy" was the first storm to cause nine figures of damage to the United States; she also claimed 81 lives and drew attention to the fact that New Orleans — a bowl-shaped city mostly lying below sea level and surrounded by wetlands, lakes, and a large meander of the Mississippi River — was extremely vulnerable to a hurricane. This cultural powerhouse, shipping linchpin, and petroleum hub clearly needed protection, but slow and incomplete action was to later doom many of the city's residents and cultural treasures.

In 2003, a report in Civil Engineering Magazine noted that refurbished levees would be finished along the city's northern edge "in the next decade," with ones along the curving southern border probably needing a few more years. The city still didn't have them by August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina sloshed ashore along a path eerily similar to Betsy's, pushing a storm surge into the city that overwhelmed many of the existing defenses. The flooding and subsequent governmental failure to manage the humanitarian crisis left an official toll of 1,833 dead and much of the city in ruins.

In late 2019, a new virus appeared in the city of Wuhan, China. By March 2020, entire countries were effectively shutting down, issuing stay-at-home orders of varying strictness and watching as COVID-19 spread anyway, sickening, disabling, and killing people worldwide. The state of emergency in the United States lasted over three years. Could any of this chaos have been prevented?

A report commissioned in 2021 by the World Health Organization found both national and international responses to the initial outbreak lacking. The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response argued, among other points, that China had reported the novel virus and its spread too late, that the WHO had subsequently reacted too slowly in declaring an international health emergency, and that the WHO had further dithered in waiting to advise travel restrictions. Furthermore, individual countries, especially the United States and those in Europe, had not responded forcefully until filling hospitals made the gravity of the situation unavoidably clear, effectively wasting the critical month of February 2020. The report included recommendations for avoiding a "repeat" in the case of another, similar epidemic; unfortunately, it may take another outbreak to determine whether these have been sufficiently enacted.

In 2003 a fire at a West Warwick, Rhode Island, nightclub called The Station, also known as the Great White fire after the headlining band, was among the worst nightclub fires on record, with 100 dead (including a member of Great White, guitarist Ty Longley) and many more injured. The blaze started the evening of February 20, when pyrotechnics — Great White was and is a hair metal band — were activated at the band's entrance, igniting the polyurethane foam that had been installed as soundproofing. As an added hazard, burning polyurethane releases the toxic gases hydrogen cyanide (of gas chamber infamy) and carbon monoxide. In under five minutes, the entire nightclub was ablaze.

Astonishingly, The Station had recently passed a fire inspection. On November 20, 2002, fire inspector Denis Larocque had cited the club for nine minor violations; these were addressed, and Larocque approved the upgrades during a follow-up visit on December 2. According to The Providence Journal, when questioned later, Larocque said he hadn't noticed the dangerous foam because he was "blinded by anger" about a badly installed door (which swung inwards, rather than a far-safer outward-swinging installation).

In a particularly bitter irony, the afternoon before the fire, the state fire marshal had publicly praised Rhode Island's fire safety codes, indicating that they made conflagrations and stampedes similar to a recent Chicago tragedy unlikely in the Ocean State.

In 1960, Canadian scientist Frances Kelsey was working for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and she found something she didn't like. She had been given a file for a drug, thalidomide, that was widely used in Europe, particularly Britain, to help pregnant women with insomnia and morning sickness. Kelsey, who had only been at the USDA a month but had previous experience testing drugs that could cross the placenta from mother to fetus, didn't think the application for approval was complete: it offered insufficient data about safety or efficacy. William S. Merrell Co. of Cincinnati, the drugmaker, nagged her; Kelsey stuck to her guns. By 1961, the first reports of side effects had come out: children born to mothers taking thalidomide were born with serious limb deformities, with either flipper-like structures or lacking them entirely.

U.S. mothers had dodged a bullet. Canada, which had received essentially the same application at about the same time as the one to which Kelsey objected, did not. Even after Britain and Germany pulled the drug from the market in late 1961, Canada dawdled for three more months before yanking thalidomide from its markets. Over 100 Canadians were ultimately born with thalidomide-related birth defects; an advocacy group now protects their interests. Thalidomide was ultimately approved for use in the United States — for leprosy.

Over a two-year span from fall 1982 to summer 1984, journalist Rajkumar Keswani wrote several articles warning of unsafe conditions at a chemical plant in Bhopal, a green lakeside city in central India. Keswani's sources included employees of the plant and a report on safety conditions commissioned in 1982 by the plant's owner, the American company Union Carbide. The journalist warned that the report found a number of concerning issues, including defective or simply missing equipment, as well as high employee turnover. Pressure gauges were broken, tanks had no indicators of how full they were, and sprinklers were simply absent. And as early as 1975, a bureaucrat had recommended the factory be moved away from the populous city.

The chemical plant wasn't moved, and on the night of December 2, 1984, Bhopal came to regret it. A huge cloud of methyl isocyanate (a chemical used in the manufacture of pesticides, polyurethane foam, and plastics), along with other chemicals, poured from the plant, instantly killing thousands. Eventually, over 20,000 people are estimated to have died from the toxic gas leak, and over half a million people were injured and left disabled in the world's worst industrial disaster in history. 

Union Carbide settled out of court with the government of India (not with survivors directly) for a relatively paltry $470 million, later selling its Indian branch to Dow Chemical. For its part, Dow claims to have clean hands, as it did not operate the plant at the time. Meanwhile, survivor groups continue to advocate for accountability and redress.

In October 1985, Colombian geologist Marta Lucía Calvache Velasco and her colleagues made what should have been a startling report to the Colombian government: The Nevado del Ruiz volcano, located in the north of the country, was about to erupt. While the threat wasn't declared to be imminent, with months or years on the outside given as a likely timeline, precautions were strongly advised.

Unfortunately for most of the population of the nearby town of Armero, the Colombian government was distracted: the country's long-simmering civil war had again reached the capital, Bogota. Additionally, no real system existed to transmit warnings to local governments or residents who could act upon them, nor was the Colombian infrastructure able to consistently and effectively monitor the area for tremors that might indicate a large eruption. 

The volcano did not wait for these matters to be resolved, and on November 13, 1985, the volcano awakened. Some ash had fallen on the town that evening, but both local religious leaders and the fire department had urged calm. Disastrously, the heat from the volcano was melting some of the glaciers that lay atop it, producing the conditions for an especially fast and dangerous form of landslide called a lahar. A massive lahar was funneled into a narrow riverbed, and the river burst its banks and buried Armero, killing some 25,000 of the 30,000 residents. This horror did, at least, lead to improvements in Colombia's disaster preparedness: a similar eruption less than 4 years later claimed no human lives thanks to improved detection and warning systems.

Mining produces waste, which might be evident: not everything you dig out of the ground will be what you want. Unfortunately for the mining town of Aberfan, Wales, one of the accepted means of disposing of such waste is to stack it in huge piles. By the fall of 1966, a "tip" (pile of mining waste) containing 300,000 cubic yards of debris and rising 111 feet stood outside Aberfan. Most residents did not realize that it had been placed over a spring on porous rock, but did know that the rainy autumn had left the tip, and everything else, saturated. On the morning of October 21, this massive wet mound collapsed, sending a wave of watery debris into Aberfan and burying, among other buildings, an elementary school. Tragically, 144 people died, 116 of them schoolchildren.

A tribunal found it all to have been avoidable. Their report noted that Aberfan regularly flooded, with the water visibly contaminated by coal waste. Many people had expressed concern to authorities about the tip, including members of the town council, local politicians, parents of students attending the destroyed school, and members of the public, including that a promised retaining wall had never materialized. Full responsibility was assigned to the National Coal Board, but charges were never brought against any individuals.