Fictional Disasters

Structured the same way as a real MineArchive disaster record — cause, what happened, aftermath — but sourced to canon rather than to an inquiry or an Inspector's Report. See Fictional for how these are kept separate from the real archive.

A Song of Ice and Fire

• The Flooding of Castamere
  During the reign of King Aerys II Targaryen, exact date not given · Flooding / Inundation
  A single song is enough, centuries later, to end an argument — because everyone already knows exactly how the last one who tried this ended up.

Discworld

• The Summoning Dark at Koom Valley
  Not dated (contemporary with the events of Thud!) · Flooding / Inundation · 0 fatalities
  The Summoning Dark didn't need to break into Vimes from outside — it just needed him to forget he'd promised to read to his son at six o'clock

Dungeons & Dragons

• The Fall of the Phandelver's Pact
  More than 500 years before the adventure's present · Other
  A battle nobody won closed the mine as effectively as any collapse could have — and left something behind that made sure it stayed closed for five hundred years.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VII

• The Corel Reactor Disaster
  Before the story's present; exact date not given on screen · Explosion
  A disaster with two separate villains — the reactor that failed, and the company that burned the survivors to cover for it.

Final Fantasy XVI

• The Fall of Drake's Fang
  878 (five years before the main story's present day) · Other
  A nation's entire war effort, and the career of the man who had made himself its indispensable economic advisor, both ended in the same few minutes -- and five years on, Valisthea still isn't sure who was actually responsible.

King Coal

• The North Valley Explosion (King Coal)
  Autumn, in the novel's single year · Explosion
  Boards and a tarpaulin over the pit-mouth for three and a half days, with a hundred men below.

Life Is Strange: True Colors

• The Cover-up Blast
  28 April 2019 · Explosion · 1 fatality
• The Haven Springs Mine Flood
  Roughly eleven years before the game's 2019 present · Flooding / Inundation · 7 fatalities
  The cover-up of this disaster, kept intact for roughly a decade, is what Typhon later kills Gabe Chen to protect — see the Explosion and Cover-up Blast, below.

Middle-earth

• Durin's Bane
  T.A. 1980 · Other · 2 fatalities
  Two kings of Khazad-dum died in quick succession over the same vein of mithril, and the response was to abandon the richest Dwarf-realm in Middle-earth rather than go back down after it
• The Bridge of Khazad-dûm
  15 January T.A. 3019 · Fire · 1 fatality
  Cinema's most quoted line from this scene — 'You shall not pass!' — is not what the book actually says; Tolkien's Gandalf says 'You cannot pass', twice
• The Sack of Erebor
  T.A. 2770 · Fire
  A disaster with a survivor list of exactly two named dwarves — a king and his son, out a secret door — and an epilogue that took a dwarf, a wizard, a hobbit and thirteen years to even attempt putting right.

My Bloody Valentine

• The Hanniger Mine Accident (My Bloody Valentine)
  Valentine's Day, twenty years before the film · Explosion · 4 fatalities
  Five buried while the town danced; one came out alive, and a year later came back for the supervisors.

Star Trek

• The Gallitep Mining Accident
  Before 2357 (exact date not given) · Gas / Asphyxiation
  A disaster with no depicted body count of its own, whose real legacy was turning a medical diagnosis into a kind of criminal record — and, in the end, a death sentence for an innocent man anyway.

The Stars Look Down

• The Neptune Colliery Inrush (The Stars Look Down)
  A snowy Monday morning in the winter before July 1914; the novel gives no calendar date · Flooding / Inundation
  Eighty-nine dead in fifteen minutes and nine more dying in the dark of the Old Neptune, jowling on the rock for rescuers who arrive too late.

Until Dawn

• The Blasting Crew Disaster
  13 December 1951 · Collapse / Roof Fall · 18 fatalities
  The disaster that, through Bragg's secretive handling of its survivors rather than the cave-in itself, actually created the monsters the rest of the story is about.