Mega Disasters

Mega Disasters is an American documentary television series that originally aired from May 23, 2006 to July 2008 on The History Channel. Produced by Creative Differences, the program explores potential catastrophic threats to individual cities, countries, and the entire globe.

The two "mega-disasters" of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 inspired the series and provided a reference point for many of the episodes. Excepting only two shows devoted to man-made disasters, the threats explored can be divided into three general categories: meteorological, geological, and cosmic hazards.

Format

Each episode of the series generally follows this pattern:

Episodes

Coventry

Coventry (ⁱ/ˈkɒvəntri/) is a city and metropolitan borough in the centre of England. It was the capital of England more than once in the 15th century when the seat of Government was held in Coventry. Coventry's heritage includes the Roman Fort at Baginton, Lady Godiva, St Mary's Guildhall (where kings and queens were entertained) and three cathedrals.

Coventry is located in the county of West Midlands but is historically part of Warwickshire. Coventry is the 10th largest city in England and the 13th largest UK city overall. It is also the second largest city in the West Midlands region, after Birmingham, with a population of 337,400 in 2014.

Coventry is situated 95 miles (153 km) northwest of central London, 19 miles (31 km) east-south-east of Birmingham, 24 miles (39 km) southwest of Leicester and 11 miles (18 km) north of Warwick. Although harbouring a population of more than a third-of-a-million inhabitants, Coventry is not amongst the English Core Cities Group due to its proximity to Birmingham. Approximately half a million people live within 10 miles (16 km) of Coventry city centre.

HMS Coventry

Six ships of the British Royal Navy have been named HMS Coventry, after the city of Coventry in the West Midlands.

Seconds From Disaster

Seconds from Disaster is an American documentary television series of 67 episodes that first began broadcasting in 2004 on the National Geographic Channel. The program investigates historically relevant man-made and natural disasters. Each episode aims to explain a single incident by analyzing the causes and circumstances that ultimately affected the disaster. The series uses re-enactments, interviews, testimonies, and CGI to analyze the sequence of events second-by-second for the audience.

Seconds from Disaster was broadcast on the National Geographic Channel and originally consisted of 45 episodes over three seasons. Following its original conclusion in 2007, the series was put in hiatus and was replaced with Critical Situation. In 2011, National Geographic revived the series, announcing it would air a new season from September 5, 2011. It began with an episode about the September 11 attacks. It showed 22 more episodes.

Narrators for the show are Ashton Smith (American narrator for seasons 1 to 3), Richard Vaughan (British narrator for seasons 1 and 2; narrator from season 4 onwards) and Peter Guinness (British narrator for season 3).

German battleship Bismarck

Bismarck was the first of two Bismarck-class battleships built for Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine. Named after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the primary force behind the unification of Germany in 1871, the ship was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg in July 1936 and launched in February 1939. Work was completed in August 1940, when she was commissioned into the German fleet. Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz were the largest battleships ever built by Germany, and two of the largest built by any European power.

In the course of the warship's eight-month career under its sole commanding officer, Capt. Ernst Lindemann, Bismarck conducted only one offensive operation, in May 1941, codenamed Rheinübung. The ship, along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, was to break into the Atlantic Ocean and raid Allied shipping from North America to Great Britain. The two ships were detected several times off Scandinavia, and British naval units were deployed to block their route. At the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck engaged and destroyed the battlecruiser HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, and forced the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to retreat; Bismarck was hit three times and suffered an oil leak from a ruptured tank.