Monday Accident & Lessons Learned: Have You Learned from the Top Ten Deadliest Accidents in the US?

The Weekly 10 published this list of “The 10 Deadliest US Industrial Accidents.” See the article here:

http://open.salon.com/blog/jrobertg/2009/07/14/weekly_10_the_10_deadliest_us_industrial_accidents

The 10 most deadly are:

1. Texas City Ammonium Nitrate Explosion in 1947 – About 600 killed.

2. Port Chicago Ammunition Depot Explosion in 1944 – 320 dead.

3. Piper Alpha in 1988 – 167 dead (not a US accident but was included in his list because it was a US company)

4. Triangle Shirt Factory in 1911 – 146 killed.

5. Pemberton Mill in 1860 – 145 dead.

6. Grover Shoe in 1905 – 58 killed.

7. Little Rock Air Force Base Titan Missile Silo Fire in 1965 – 53 dead.

8. Imperial Foods Fire in 1991 – 25 dead.

9. Phillips Chemical Plant Explosion in 1989 – 23 dead.

10. Boston Molasses Disaster in 1919 – 21 killed.

Each of these accidents have lessons to teach us. From things as simple as not locking fire doors to the complexity of process safety, these accidents point to problems (potential improvements) that every site should have already learbned but – as we see in more recent accidents – many sites have not learned.