
The Eastland disaster killed more passengers than the Titanic and the Lusitania - anarbadalov
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/
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reddog
I will see your Eastland and raise you the even more obscure sinking of
Mississippi steamboat Sultana in 1865. Loss of life between 1168 and 1547.
It's the worst maritime disaster in US history (the Titanic was an British
ship in international waters with an international passenger list).

The reason you've never heard of it is because Abraham Lincoln was
assassinated the day before, an event that sucked up all the nations newsprint
and popular attention.

There is a pretty good documentary on it on one of the big streaming services.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_the_19th_century)

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gerdesj
Fair one but rather a lot of that list of maritime disasters has white and red
ensigns (UK) next to them. We obviously haven't quite got the hang of the big
blue wobbly stuff.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(steamboat)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_\(steamboat\))
is well worth a read. It is well written in my opinion and the Talk page only
has the usual nonsense "controversy" on it. This time it's whether to worry
about SS as a naming prefix!

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TylerE
That's just what you'd expect, as in the 19th century Britain probably had
more ocean going vessels than the rest of the world COMBINED.

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bydo
The Titanic is famous because of the hubris involved; it was the biggest,
fastest, most luxurious ocean liner ever, that sunk basically just because its
captain was trying for the Blue Riband on its maiden voyage (also, a lot of
rich and famous people died). The Lusitania is famous because it was a
hospital ship attacked during wartime and was used to drum up support for
allies entering the war (it was a major factor in the US entering).

For whatever reason we don't really care about normal civilians dying en masse
during peacetime accidents. So many people died in the General Slocum disaster
that it wiped out the Little Germany neighborhood of New York:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum)

~~~
endymi0n
Pretty much this — there's a large mindshare bias towards the more dramatic
and relatable incidents.

My favorite party question is what the most deadly power plant accident in
history was. And the predictable answer "Chernobyl" is wrong by a whole order
of magnitude, which seems to surprise many:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam)

For even more extreme examples for drama & negativity bias, feel free to have
a look at actual death causes vs. news exposure: Terrorism is overrepresented
by more than three orders of magnitude, while almost nobody gets killed by a
bad guy but rather by heart disease: [https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-
news-reflect-what-we-die...](https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-
what-we-die-from)

All in all, humans are pretty pathetic at objectiveness.

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jfk13
It's a bit of a stretch to refer to Banqiao Dam as a "power plant accident".
It was a dam failure. Sure, it was part of "a project to control flooding and
provide electrical power generation" (from the wikipedia article), but AIUI
the failure was nothing to do with the power plant; it was simply the dam.

~~~
stickfigure
That seems overly pedantic, like saying Chernobyl was a "reactor failure" that
has nothing to do with the power plant.

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lb1lf
And, of course, compared to the sinkings with the largest loss of lives,
neither the Eastland nor the Titanic seems particularly -hm, for want of a
better word - impressive.

The Wilhelm Gustloff, sunk in the Baltic Sea in the closing months of WW2 -
10,000 lives lost. The Goya, sunk in the same waters in April 1945, cost
approx. 7,000 lives.

The worst peacetime accident was in the mid-eighties, when the Philippine
ferry Doña Paz capsized, killing more than 4,000 people.

~~~
eindiran
Something that makes the Eastland quite horrifying is that it didn't take
place far out at sea: it took place in the Chicago River. I don't know if
you've spent any time in Chicago, but the river goes through the heart of the
city. You're walking to the market and you hear some hubbub by the river. You
turn the corner, and boom, suddenly you see a few thousand people get flipped
into the water and start drowning. Even if "only" 800 of them actually drown,
it's still a horrifying thing to see.

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MattGaiser
The headline is playing a trick for clicks. More people died on the Titanic,
but the Eastland has more deaths if you only count passengers and now crew.

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coldcode
As an engineer (ok software engineer but still) terrible engineering is always
interesting: why would anyone build a ship like this without a keel, and why
would anyone put 2000+ people into a ship designed for 500? Also why would
anyone put massive top heavy weight on a ship with no keel and not do any
calculations? And why did someone buy a ship like this because it was cheap
and not ask why?

Engineering disasters always have lessons you hope someone learned before it's
you in or on it.

I once won a cruise ship shipbuilding contest (use any materials you can find,
it has to hold a two sixpacks of beer for 30 seconds) with a little raft that
had both a tall keel and full water bottles for stability. I learned all this
from engineering disaster shows.

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anonAndOn
> why would anyone build a ship like this without a keel

Because you want a shallow draft in a riverboat. [0]

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverboat#Design_differences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverboat#Design_differences)

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jhbadger
The article briefly mentions the writer/journalist Carl Sandburg, but doesn't
mention that he wrote a particularly brutal poem about the event. Here's a
link to a copy:

[https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/30232/...](https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/30232/sand-
east.pdf)

~~~
macintux
Thank you, that’s a fascinating read. Sandburg was right: we pay attention to
flashy disasters, while slow-rolling ones are barely newsworthy.

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aaron695
If you're interested in light retrospectives this is ok for a modern day ferry
disaster -

What Went Wrong in the South Korean Ferry Disaster? (28 mins)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o)

The MS Estonia also has doco's on Youtube

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cozzyd
I learned about this recently at the Chicago Maritime Museum (a fascinating
small museum that I hope will survive the pandemic).

One of the most interesting things they have on display is a dive suit that
was used in search and rescue efforts for the Eastland disaster.

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pfdietz
It was sad, but not as sad as the similarly named Easthill mining disaster.

[http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/mining-
disaster.html](http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/mining-disaster.html)

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vmh1928
Hmm, designed for 500 people, modified several times to up the passengers to
2000+, modified again to add lifeboats and vests. Sounds a bit like the
737-Max.

