Browse Disasters
10 results
Australian Bushfires 2019-20
2019-2020
Before the flames became a continent-scale emergency, Australia had already entered a season of broken heat, parched forests, and exhausted warning systems — and then Black Summer arrived, proving how quickly a familiar landscape can become a firestorm.
Black Saturday Bushfires
2009
On one summer Saturday, Victoria’s fire weather stopped being a forecast and became a furnace: the day the air, the wind, and the landscape aligned against whole towns, and Australia had to learn what preparedness means when fire behaves like a storm.
Camp Fire
2018
Paradise was built in a corridor of trees and power lines, in a country that knew what wildfire could do — yet on one dry November morning, a single failed transmission component helped turn a town into an evacuation route with flames on both sides.
Chicago Fire
1871
A city built fast, cheaply, and largely of wood met a fire that found every weakness at once—and in the ashes, Chicago discovered what a modern metropolis would have to become.
Great Fire of London
1666
In September 1666, London’s narrow lanes, timber houses, and neglected fire defenses turned a single bakery flame into four days of urban ruin. The fire did more than erase a city center: it revealed how catastrophe can force invention, including the birth of modern fire insurance.
Maui Wildfires
2023
A town built at the edge of flame, and a wind-fed fire that outran warnings, roads, and memory itself—turning Lahaina into the deadliest wildfire disaster in modern U.S. history.
Paradise Fire
2018
A town built in the forest learned too late that its roads were no longer an escape route, but a bottleneck. When the wind turned fire into a moving wall, Paradise had minutes to choose between the car gridlock and the flames.
Peshtigo Fire
1871
On the same autumn night that Chicago burned, a smaller town on Wisconsin’s bay entered a furnace so intense that the nation nearly forgot it existed. Peshtigo became the deadliest wildfire in American history — and its victims, scattered in pine towns and farm clearings, were buried under the shadow of a bigger headline.
Portuguese Wildfires 2017
2017
In central Portugal, a landscape shaped by heat, drought, and abandoned land became a chimney of flame — and on one road, trapped motorists learned how quickly a forest fire can become a firestorm.
Yellowstone Fires
1988
In the summer of 1988, Yellowstone did not simply catch fire—it revealed how a park built on the idea of preservation had misread one of its oldest natural processes. The flames would consume nearly a third of the park, and force America to ask whether fire was an enemy, a renewal, or both.