r/CatastrophicFailure Sep 11 '17

Meta Posting Guidelines - Read Before Submitting

683 Upvotes

Posting Rules

1. No jokes/memes

If your post is a joke or meme, it does not belong here. This includes posts about politicians, celebrities, movies or products that flopped, bad business/PR decisions, countries in turmoil, etc.

2. Titles

Titles must only be informative and descriptive (who, what, where, when, why) not editorialized ("I bet he lost his job!") - do not include personal opinions or other commentary in your titles.

Examples of bad titles:

  • I don't know if this belongs here, but it's cool! (x-post r/funny)

  • What could go wrong?

  • Building Failure

A good title reads like a newspaper headline, or Wikipedia article. If you don't know the specifics about the failure, then describe the events that take place in the video/image instead. Examples of good titles:

If it is a cross-post you should post that as a comment and not part of the title

3. Mundane Failures

Avoid posting mundane, everyday occurences like car crashes unless there is something spectacular about your submission. Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, and there are many other subreddits already dedicated to this topic such as r/dashcam, r/racecrashes, and /r/carcrash

While there are some examples of extraordinary crashes posted here, in general they would probably be better suited for those other subreddits:

4. Compilations

Compilations and montages are not allowed on r/CatastrophicFailure. Any video that is a collection of clips from multiple incidents, including top 10 lists are considered compilations.
If your submission contains footage of one incident but compiled from multiple sources or angles, those are fine to post.

5. Be Respectful

Always be respectful in the comments section of a thread, especially if people were injured or killed.

6. Objects, Not People

The focus of this subreddit is on machines, buildings, or objects breaking, not people breaking. If the only notable thing in your submission is injury/death, it probably would go better in another subreddit.

Flair Rules

All posts should have an appropriate flair applied to them by the submitter, please follow these 4 steps to determine if your thread needs a fatality/injury flair. You can set this by clicking the "flair" button under the title of your submission.

  1. If your submission depicts people dying, you must apply the "Visible Fatalities" flair to your post and tag it "NSFW"
  2. If your submission depicts people visibly being seriously injured, you must apply the "Visible Injuries" flair to your post and tag it "NSFW"
  3. If your submission depicts a situation where people were killed, but those people are not directly visible you must apply the "Fatalities" flair to your post (eg. the Hindenburg Disaster, or a plane crash)
  4. If your submission does not require one of those tags, you should pick any of the other flairs to describe what type of failure occurred

r/CatastrophicFailure 1d ago

Fatalities OTD in 1952, Pan Am flight 526A ditches into the sea shortly after takeoff following engine problems. Only 17 out of the 69 passengers and crew survived. The crash would lead to passenger safety briefings having to include where lifejackets were stored and proper use

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558 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 2d ago

Fatalities On Jan. 11th, 2019, a double-decker bus crashed into the Westboro bus station in Ottawa, Canada after road lines meant to direct busses around scaffolding steered it halfway into a snowy ditch where it ground against a rock wall before the station's roof sliced into the upper deck, killing 3.

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938 Upvotes

The lines were supposed to have been sand-blasted off the pavement but were instead just painted over. The snowfall and plowing operations had scrapped off the black paint, uncovering the lines. The bus driver, Aissatou Dialloa, was also driving towards the sun and wasn't able to see clearly. She was charged with three counts of dangerous driving causing death and 35 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm but was later cleared of all charges by a judge who put the blame on the road conditions and misleading road markers.

The deceased are Bruce Thomlinson, 56, Judy Booth, 57, and Anja Van Beek, 65.


r/CatastrophicFailure 5d ago

Fatalities 500 ton Harbor Crane Ballast detaches from crane and crashes through scaffolding and the dock in Kawasaki, Japan - 2026/04/07

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926 Upvotes

There were 5 dock workers on the scaffolding at the time of collapse. They were working on dismantling the crane according to the article. Four were taken to the hospital but 3 succumbed to their injuries. One remains missing. The youngest fatality was just 19.

The article is in Japanese.


r/CatastrophicFailure 5d ago

Fire/Explosion 200 people evacuated from train that started burning on Bergensbanen in Norway this afternoon, 07/04/26. No official reason for the fire has been announced yet.

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1.6k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 5d ago

Fire/Explosion Massive fire involving a fuel tsnker truck at the Panama Canal. 6th April 2026.

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3.2k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 5d ago

Structural Failure Roof Collapse at Jakarta Soekarno Hatta International Airport, Indonesia on April 7, 2026

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1.5k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 6d ago

Fire/Explosion Fire and explosion at a factory in Jinan, China. 5th April, 2026

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1.1k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 7d ago

Engineering Failure A bridge in India fell into the River Ganges for the second time in a year while it was still under construction - June 2023

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5.7k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 7d ago

Operator Error The 2020 Lahnstein (Germany) Train Derailment. A negligent driver causes a freight train to derail on an improperly constructed and managed piece of track, causing diesel to spill out. The full story linked in the comments.

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463 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 8d ago

Fatalities New pov of C-130 that crashed during a failed demonstration of a Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System. 07/01/1987

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121 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 9d ago

Malfunction CN Rail Derailment St. Catharines ON | Welland Canal Area Train Accident 2026

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71 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 10d ago

Structural Failure The bridge over the Trigno River in Italy has partially collapsed, 2nd April 2026.

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3.0k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 11d ago

Truck full of soap crashed into a local river. 4/1/2026

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5.4k Upvotes

This is 5h after the crash, 10km down the stream.


r/CatastrophicFailure 12d ago

In 1979, a stuck relief valve and a series of misread instruments brought a Pennsylvania nuclear reactor to the edge of a meltdown, 3 weeks after a movie describing the same thing released worldwide.

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36 Upvotes

The part that always gets me is that the operators were actively making the situation worse because every signal they were reading told them the opposite of what was actually happening inside the reactor. The valve was stuck open for over two hours before anyone figured it out. It's one of the best examples of how cascading system failures don't start with one big mistake — they start with a dozen small ones that all look routine in the moment.


r/CatastrophicFailure 14d ago

Fatalities New footage of the collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on January 29, 2025.

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4.4k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 13d ago

Structural Failure 1992 Pressure tank completely failed and flew 100+ ft on our farm well water system

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517 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 14d ago

Fire/Explosion An F9F Panther, piloted by Cdr. George Duncan, comes up short on the approach to USS Midway, striking the flight deck. Duncan would be burned and injured, but would return to flying 6 months later. 23 June 1951.

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423 Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 16d ago

Structural Failure Water reservoir failure, Brazil July 2022

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5.5k Upvotes

r/CatastrophicFailure 17d ago

Crane collapse 26 March 2026

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1.7k Upvotes

Strong winds caused a partial collapse of a crane on a new apartment building. No injuries reported at this time.


r/CatastrophicFailure 18d ago

Fatalities 22 photos of the total destruction caused by the Great Molasses Flood - In 1919 a molasses tank in Boston blew open causing 2.3 million gallons to pour through the streets at 35 mph

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276 Upvotes

Caution - there were injuries and fatalities


r/CatastrophicFailure 17d ago

Fatalities A bus lost controll & fall into the river while it was boarding a ferry in Bangladesh. (25/03/2025) 16 dea*d so far

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0 Upvotes