I think the MOVE disaster is very unusual in that it doesn't fit well into any of these categories.
In 1985 Philadelphia police bombed a dwelling inhabited by the MOVE group. A gas tank on the roof caught fire. The police let the fire burn so that they could drop tear gas through the destroyed roof int the upper floors. Firefighters were then unable to control the fire. Six adults and five children died in the fire, although some accounts say that some of them were shot by police while trying to flee the building. 61 other nearby dwellings burned down.
Wikipedia has it on the "List of town and city fires" but I feel that doesn't really do justice to the sequence of events. Some town fires are caused by a cow kicking over a lantern or whatever.
Maybe there should be a separate entry for "List of giant fucking clusterfucks where malice, incompetence, and insanity made everyone else as miserable as possible." Maybe they could put the first World War on that list.
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When I first interviewed for a job at Penn in 1990, one of the people I talked to asked me if I was sure I wanted to move to Philadelphia. "Philadelphia," they said, "is a city with big problems."
"I'm from New York," I said. "I don't think Philadelphia has any problems that New York doesn't also have." I was thinking of poverty, crime, racism, pollution, all the problems that big cities have. But I hadn't heard about MOVE, which really was one-of-a-kind.
"Hmmmm," they said.
(I would have come here even if I had known.)
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"One of the people I talked to" in that previous post was Helen Anderson, who told me hair-raising stories of having worked at the Sun Oil refinery in South Philadelphia. Once she was inspecting a gasometer, which is a pillbox-shaped storage bunker for hydrocarbons, the size of a large building. As she came up over the top of the curved roof, what did she see on the other side of the roof but a refinery worker SMOKING A CIGARETTE.
Smoking anywhere on the refinery grounds (never mind on top of the fucking gasometer) was cause for instant dismissal. When the guy saw Helen appear on the roof, he tried to save his job by swallowing the cigarette.
It didn't work.
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Helen also told me the following refinery story which I have not verified: The refinery had dug out some big caverns in the limestone underneath, for hydrocarbon storage. Limestone is porous, but pressure from the surrounding water table meant that nothing would flow out of the caverns; rather water would infiltrate and the refinery would pump it out every so often.
Except one day someone let one of the caverns get too full. The outpressure from the stored hydrocarbons exceeded the inpressure from the water, and the hydrocarbons migrated through the porous rock into the water table.
Then some hapless soul in South Philadelphia turned on their gas range and blew up their house and four others.
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Wikipedia's list of explosions seems to omit Philadelphia's 1956 flour mill explosion that injured 100 and killed 3. Classes were cancelled at nearby Drexel University where 25 students were injured when the windows blew out.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1956/03/30/94288456.html?pageNumber=9
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