October 10

On October 10, 1986, a shallow earthquake struck beneath the San Salvador metropolitan area, unleashing violent shaking on steep volcanic slopes and dense hillside neighborhoods. Landslides, collapsed masonry buildings, ruptured utilities and fires transformed streets into rubble. Hundreds to perhaps more than a thousand people died, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands were left homeless. The disaster exposed how shallow seismicity, unstable slopes and informal urban growth can turn a moderate quake into a city-changing catastrophe.

On the morning of October 10, 1980, a shallow, powerful earthquake of about Mw 7.3 struck near the town of El Asnam (renamed Chlef), in northern Algeria’s Tell Atlas. In minutes whole neighborhoods fell, improvised rescues began, and the scale of loss — roughly 2,633 dead, about 8,369 injured and some 200,000 homeless by common estimates — forced a nation and its engineers to reckon with how they built and protected their towns.

On October 10, 1971, a scheduled Aeroflot passenger flight departed Moscow and, during its initial climb, suffered a sudden on‑board explosion that tore the airframe apart. The aircraft crashed near the capital, killing everyone aboard. Soviet investigators concluded that an explosive device detonated aboard, but public records identifying a perpetrator or motive remain limited.

On October 10, 1957, a graphite‑moderated reactor at the Windscale Works in northwest England caught fire during a routine annealing operation. The blaze burned for days, releasing radioactive material that contaminated nearby countryside, provoked milk bans, and forced Britain to confront the risks of weapons‑grade plutonium production. The episode altered reactor operations, emergency planning, and public trust in nuclear secrecy.

On the morning of October 10, 1918, the Royal Mail Ship Leinster was torpedoed off Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in the Irish Sea while steaming the coastal run to Holyhead. Struck close to shore and gone within minutes, the attack by the German submarine UB‑123 cost 501 lives and left a coastal town scrambling to pull survivors and bodies from cold October waters less than five weeks before the armistice.

On the night of October 10, 1911, mutinous units of the New Army in Wuchang rose against Qing authority after a clandestine explosion in nearby Hankou forced conspirators to act. Their sudden seizure of the city set off the Xinhai Revolution, a cascade of provincial defections that ended two millennia of imperial rule and led to the Republic of China. The uprising was both a spark and a product of long-term failures: military modernization, railway nationalization, and decades of revolutionary organizing.