“Spectacular Disasters” is a 1950s black-and-white film combining real footage and commentary on a variety of calamities, beginning at mark 00:30 with a freak accident in 1932 when three sailors were hoisted into the air by USS Akron (ZRS-4)— two of them plummeting to their demise. The film continues wth footage of a helicopter crash, a smokestack crashing onto nearby buildings, and a bridge being destroyed by an ice flow in Warsaw, Poland. Mark 03:00 covers the dramatic 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, which had spanned the Tacoma Narrows strait of Puget Sound between Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula. At mark 04:30, the film recounts the 1945 crash of a B-25 Mitchell bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building in a foggy New York City, as smoke “from flaming gasoline-soaked wreckage” is shown rising from the structure at mark 04:47. Disasters at sea conclude the film as freighters are shown being tossed about at sea at mark 06:00, leading to an eventual sea rescue, we see the 1952 sinking of the cargo ship SS Flying Enterprise (mark 06:45), and of course revisit the sinking of the HMS Titanic (mark 08:08).
The B-25 Empire State Building crash was a 1945 aircraft accident in which a B-25 Mitchell bomber, piloted in thick fog over New York City, crashed into the Empire State Building. The accident did not compromise the building’s structural integrity, but it did cause fourteen deaths (three crewmen and eleven people in the building) and damage estimated at $1,000,000 ($13,303,142 in 2016 dollars).
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
