Branch David­i­ans at Waco

There may be some­thing strange in the spring air. This is the week for disasters.

On April 19, 1993, seventy-​​six peo­ple died after a fifty-​​day siege at the Branch David­ian com­pound in Waco, Texas. One hun­dred sixty-​​eight peo­ple died in a ter­ror­ist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Mur­rah Fed­eral Build­ing in Okla­homa City on April 19, 1995. Four years later, on April 20, 1999, twelve stu­dents and a teacher were killed, and twenty-​​four oth­ers injured, in a shoot­ing spree at Columbine High School in Col­orado. Then, on April 20, 2010, an explo­sion on the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil rig in the Gulf of Mex­ico killed eleven work­ers, injured 17 oth­ers, and released mil­lions of bar­rels of oil into the Gulf.

Alfred R. Mur­rah Building

It may be that any week in his­tory has as many ter­ri­ble events. But four such hor­ri­fy­ing cat­a­stro­phes in less than twenty years, with anniver­saries no more than a day apart, it’s enough to make any his­to­rian take notice. (more…)