The Mysteries of History (April 16 Edition)
Fertilizer Explosion; Virginia Tech School Shooting
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
1947 — Texas City Explosion Kills 581
public domain image from wikimedia commons
Ammonium Nitrate is used as an explosive. It was apparently a careless tobacco fiend who caused the Ammonium Nitrate that had been loaded onto a ship in Galveston Bay near Texas City, Texas to catch fire and explode on this date in 1947. The explosion was of such magnitude that 581 people were killed and 3,500 injured, most of them severely.
The blast was heard 150 miles away and the ship’s one-and-a-half ton anchor was blown two miles through the air.
A nearby chemical storage facility also exploded, killing 234 (almost half) of the employees on site there. Additionally, a housing complex consisting of 500 homes was leveled. Other ships in the harbor were lifted into the air or pushed across the harbor. One of these abandoned ships exploded the next day, killing another two people.
Questions: What was done to prevent future disasters of this sort? What other disasters have struck the Galveston area throughout history?
2007 — 32 Killed at Virginia Tech
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this date in 2007, a young man shot and killed 27 of his fellow students and five staff members at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Note: If a person’s motives were possibly to gain notoriety for their evil deed, I will often refrain from naming them. The victims should be the ones remembered, not the perpetrators (except as cautionary tales).
The shooter, a senior at the school, had first killed a female freshman and a male in a dorm, went off to mail a package to NBC news, then returned to the school and proceeded to kill the rest of his victims. The package contained selfie photos of the mass murderer brandishing a weapon and a selfie video of him complaining about other students.
The reason the attacker had time to go on his post office errand before continuing the mayhem was that those responding to the first shooting were fixated on the female victim’s boyfriend as a suspect, and so limited their attentions to him, failing to issue a campus-wide alert as they were so sure they already “had their man.”
The horribly violent and demented student later killed himself.
Questions: Do you think shooters who end up killing themselves know ahead of time they are going to end their own lives? If so, what do they think they are accomplishing by taking others with them? Is it revenge? A desire to be notorious, or remembered?
Read about “The Secret Lives of Kids” here.
