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The Fart That Killed 10,000 People, and Other Weird Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 18, 2020 34 min

Wheel - Panjandrum — The Great Panjandrum. War History Online

20. The Brooklyn Bridge Disaster

The Brooklyn Bridge disaster. Getty Images

May 30^th, 1883, was a holiday, so crowds headed for the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge’s promenade – the city’s highest vantage point back then. A pedestrian bottleneck formed on the Manhattan side, and as the tightly packed crowd pressed forward, some people were pushed down a short flight of stairs. People screamed, and some jumped to the erroneous conclusion that the bridge was about to fall. The result was a deadly stampede.

In the resulting chaos, twelve people were crushed to death, and hundreds more were injured. Subsequent investigation pinned the disaster on a failure to place police along the span, in order to keep the crowds dispersed and moving. It became standard practice thereafter for policemen on the bridge to keep people moving along.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.