Darkest hours

Each year the slag heap grew higher, casting an ominous shadow over the elementary school lying near its base. Meanwhile a natural spring was eroding the pile from within. The mountain of rock was refuse from the great colliery at Aberfan, Wales, a menacing man-made waste that by October 21, 1966, weighed over two million tons and reached upward 800 feet. That was the day the heap moved. Within minutes, a rumbling river of rock had buried the school and seventeen other buildings. One hundred forty-five persons died. One hundred sixteen were children. Disaster at Aberfan is the first among many hundreds of entries in this extraordinary volume, an encyclopedia of human catastrophes. Some were natural disasters, "acts of God." The 1960 earthquake in Morocco which killed 12,000 people was one of these. Others displayed the hand of man working toward his own destruction. The tragedy at Aberfan ranks in this category. While doing research for a series of articles, Jay Robert Nash began to probe further into the subject of disasters. "I found that no volume existed that provided a thorough, all-encompassing, and exact . . . chronology of the world's major disasters," he said. Nash consumed three years preparing one, filling, organizing, and filing literally tens of thousands of index cards in the process. As a result of this prodigious undertaking, some 900 disasters, from sinking ships to famines, are treated in depth, often accompanied by eye-witness accounts from the survivors themselves; over 400 of these are illustrated; thousands of other catastrophes are listed in the appendices including the world's war dead and notable wartime ship sinkings; the bibliography itself contains some 2,000 entries. A colossal undertaking by any yardstick. But Darkest Hours is no mere listing, no dry catalog of events. In hundreds of instances, Nash's research led him behind the event itself to the intensely human story of reactions to catastrophe. He has put together fascinating accounts of incredible courage and frequent heroism. In the Anchorage, Alaska, quake in 1964: "Dr. Perry Mead, Anchorages's only neurosurgeon, was operating on victims when he was told that his twelve-year-old son had attempted to rescue his baby brother and been killed along with the baby. The valiant doctor, tears streaming down his face, continued his operations." Nash has also recorded equally compelling tales of extreme cowardice, avarice, and greed. In 1971, Iraq received a shipment of foreign seed grain which had been chemically treated to prevent dry rot: "The grain was stolen from the docks of Al Basrah on a wholesale basis and then sold to starving residents. A monstrous epidemic of mercury poisoning ensued. . . ." The descriptive accounts cover air crashes, mine disasters, storms, catastrophes at sea, train wrecks, and many others. In most cases, a prerequisite for inclusion in the general narrative was that the event must have taken the lives of twenty or more persons. An invaluable reference tool for both specialists and the general public, Darkest Hours also makes intriguing reading in its own right.