A witness said, on August 8, 1975: it “sounded like the sky was collapsing and the earth was cracking.” What came next was the single most deadly infrastructure collapse in human history.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.