What Went Wrong III

The story of the worst high-speed rail disaster in Spanish history, when on July 24th 2013 a high-speed train derailed on a curve just outside the railway station of Santiago de Compostela, killing 79 people. Nearly a decade later, justice for the family members of the victims remains elusive, with the trial still grinding slowly through the Spanish courts.

The story of one of the worst cable car disasters to hit Italy - an aerial tramway car that plummeted to the ground killing 14 of 15 passengers, the lone survivor a 5-year-old Israili child whose parents did not survive.

The grounding of the Ever Given mega container ship in the middle of the Suez Canal on March 23, 2020 delayed billions in trade and highlighted the fragility of global supply chains. It took six days and two of the most powerful tugs in the world to pull the massive ship carrying nearly 20,000 containers free from the sand banks where she was wedged.

120 miles north of Aberdeen, Scotland in the North Sea, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded and sank on July 6th, 1988, killing 165 of the men on board, as well as two rescue workers whose ship was trapped in the burning, disintegrating oil rig. 61 workers escaped and survived - several tell their stories here. 30 bodies were never recovered.

The Ethipoan Airways Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya which crashed six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard. It is Ethiopia’s deadliest accident ever, and was the second MAX 8 accident in less than five months after the October 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash in Indonesia. This story investigates the computer error that led to the eventual grounding of the jet.

The story of the deadly Kings Cross fire on the Piccadilly line of the London Underground on November 18th, 1987. A simple cigarette butt or match falling into the space between the wooden escalator and the highly greased mechanism may have started the inferno that killed 31 and severely burned 143 people commuting through the tube station that day.