20 TV Tragedies That Happened LIVE

I'm sure there's some infamous ones missing here, like that hurt latino ex husband who killed his ex wife during a interview because he blamed her and her new partner for the death of his daughter.

I appreciate that you didn't show any of the graphic footage, and even very few of the live shots. I was a space mad kid when I saw the Challenger disaster live, in the afternoon or evening time here, with my dad. It very much changed my life, and while it's very of its time I'm glad I got to visit the memorial in person in Arlington Fields, and as it happened the Colombia memorial was right next to it, so new it wasn't even on the map I was using, alongside the memorial to the Iranian hostage crisis heroes, which I personally don't remember, but had heard about and knew enough to be aware and respectful of.

I also remember watching footage of the LA riots, the full context of which I didn't understand at the time, and the disastrous ending of the Waco siege, which was another one I was watching with my dad. How there can be any "debate" about pumping near lethal amounts of tear gas into a building and then shooting at it and then being SHOCKED that the gas suddenly ignites and causes a fatal fire I'll never know.

I wasn't into racing, but I remember my Dad being very broken up about Senna's crash. And I think there were others around then too? The Colombine Shooting absolutely infused my world growing up, even though I live in a country where no school shooting has ever happened. It was just such a seismic event.


9/11. God. I was working. One of my colleagues told me two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, so we all knew it had to be a terrorist attack. When I found out the Pentagon was on fire I really started to panic.

I called my mum and dad about it. They were in the car with my little brother, who they'd collected early from school for a dentist appointment. I told them to turn on the news, and told them two planes had crashed into the world trade center and another had crashed into the pentagon.

"Which station?"
"ANY station, mum! Just turn on the radio! I guarantee this will be covered!"
"Is it air traffic control issues?"
"No, mum. Somebody has declared war on America. We just don't know who yet."

I was let out of work early. It was the first time I'd seen people clustered around radios and TVs. I bought flowers at a local shop and left them at the US embassy, which was ringed by an army of Gardaí with their arms linked. The footage of that day and the days after is forever seared into my memory.


2004. St. Stephen's Day. My radio blared into life to wake me up as my mum was collecting me to bring me to a holiday family lunch. I was half dead lol. I'd gone to sleep way too late the night before. But I remember the music station being all frantic news coverage of an awful disaster in East Asia, and being vaguely worried as I had a friend who taught English as a Foreign Language in a country in one of the areas there.

She was safe back home here.

Every one of her students died.

Every. Single. One.

She still talks about them every now and then. Not so often now, but sometimes something will remind her of one of them and she'll laugh and start explaining the memory to me and... she cries a lot. When she's here she relies a lot on us who knew her from back then, who know why at any moment she might suddenly get upset at some random innocuous thing and start crying. Especially this time of year.


She went back. God bless her courage. She went right back within days. I think she was hoping her former students would come back too, but... she swiftly had to take on new students and got caught up in teaching them and that probably saved her sanity, in retrospect. She basically trained a generation of children of fishermen to speak English well enough to work in the hotels and restaurants there, to replace the staff who had died that day. Back then the fishing industry wasn't doing too well as people were worried the fish may have eaten bodies of the dead - not an unreasonable worry in a lot of cases it has to be said. Anyway, she's still there 9 months of the year to this day and her life seems all but idyllic, as does the life she creates for all of her students. You can tell because almost all of them get fab jobs locally and never bother emigrating, though some spend a year or two abroad for the experience.

2011. Heh. Turns out back then I was temping at Google. The office had lots of TV screens up and we were worried because our manager who was from Croatia happened to be in Tokyo that very day. Obviously we heard nothing from her for quite some time after since the flunkies she'd employed to cover some data cleansing jobs were the last people on her mind lol. But she made it out safely and gave us a very vivid description of her experience.

"It was like the worst earthquake I'd ever felt. And then it got worse. And then it got worse! And then it got WORSE! And then it GOT WORSE!! And it just KEPT GETTING WORSE!!!"
"There was no panic. Every single person queued up quietly to take one bottle of water from an unmanned table. Every single person took one bottle of water, and then moved on."
"Everyone looked at me and could see I was European and was so, so kind to me. Oh you poor thing. How terrible you are here at this terrible time. How can I help you? And they'd lost so much. I was floored."

Meanwhile back in Ireland we realised things were bad but didn't realise just how bad until an announcement was shot out to every work computer and device in the area.

"WE NEED EVERY EMPLOYEE WHO CAN SPEAK ANY LEVEL OF JAPANESE TO MEET IN THE MAIN CONFERENCE ROOM IN THE GASWORKS NOW!"

I found out later that Google Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, were evacuating their staff from Tokyo to a backup location as a precautionary measure, and so the rest of the world's Google sites basically needed to keep Google Japan running smoothly remotely for a few hours. Because people were still using Google maps, gmail, checking in on Google messenger. It was an essential service that had to be maintained.

They got the job done. All I could do was help cover their usual jobs, and watch the news footage of rolling black waves full of stone, wood, and partially intact houses - some on fire - swallow up more and more land.

2015. I don't know why the shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward had such an effect on me. Maybe because even though I was far away I still happened to catch the live footage shortly after? And maybe because I know more than a few people in that particular industry in the US and they were all very broken up about it.

Anyway, to this day that is the reason I have autoplay disabled on all my media and social media services.

Damn! I bet that one kid hates baseball now!

I like how Mojo spells columbine as "coline". 😂

The troubling thing about Budd Dywer was that if you research it more, you'll find that he was probably actually innocent

i watched 9-11 live up here in toronto ontario canada. after the towers collapsed i immediately went to the largest blood donor clinic in toronto. several hundred others also arrived. the crowds so huge i never gave blood that day. i spent the day in line, just hoping i could do something to help (as did so many others).

Honorable mention-The Trump attack on the Capitol.

Saw bud dwier shoot himself ,also saw WTC get hit and collapse

So the situation for PaIestinians was already dire in 1972 and still nobody cared or did anything to this day to create humane conditions

Also the Bradford Stadium disaster.

Heaven forbid youtube actually shows what was shown on live TV. YouTube’s censorship is astonishingly extensive and ridiculous. They’ve sensitized everything, even the Holocaust.

I would like to add Gilles Villenueve’s fatal accident in 1982. This one was especially disturbing because you just saw him suddenly fly into frame, there was no other indication he had crashed.

15:05

Honorable mention:
Brittanie Cecil
2010 Haiti earthquake

18:00 YouTube randomly recommended an hour long video of a recording of tv on 9/11/2001. Some channels stopped airing, some ran “banner ads” informing about the event.

8:12 I grew about an hour from Waco. The day this happened my dad was watching the siege live and forgot to pick me up from school.

Senna died in Imola, Italy, not San Marino.

Terrible tragedies but surely better gun control laws may have saved the shooting victims

15:29
"I wish I could've met you, but now it's a little late..."

19 minute video with over 10 advertisement breaks. Cmon YouTube

If you're not gonna show all of the actual footage, this amounts to clickbait. Fake-ass channel.

I remember watching coverage of the tsunami. I was 9 years old. Completely horrifying. And Dale Earnhardt.... I still cry about that

I was ten when we had a half day because of 9/11. I thought everyone was afraid of a nuclear explosion. My teachers were looking through the window because we could see Twin Towers from jersey. I remember getting home and waiting til like 10 at night for my dad to get home because no one had a cell phone. he worked around newyork and drove through holland tunnel everyday. No one knew if their loved ones were gonna come home.

They found out about dwyer being innocent to.

Click bait

I remember when the Columbine School shooting was considered the worst possible school shooting to ever happen and nothing on that scale would hopefully ever happen again. Now it feels like there is a school shooting every few months to the point that nobody seems to care anymore.

The ads for your videos getting ridiculous i counted 18 fucking ads

Protesting American healthcare? Sounds like he did it to himself

Stories and lotsa commercials...I'm outa here!😒

The one time the correspondent almost got hit by a car while reporting on how many accidents happen at that corner was pretty disturbing.

I was in middle school when 9/11 happened i saw everything. It was so horrific. I still cry when i realize i saw all those people die over political bullshit.

My son in Queensland phoned me at 6 am and said to turn the TV on immediately, we were living in Tasmania at the time. I just couldn't believe what was happening. It was amazing the number of people watching West Wing who thought it was part of the show. My other son who lived in Beloit, WI, lost a couple of his students.

9/11 was more than likely enabled by our government. Enough of the lies

9/11… I was 21 years old working in that Tuesday Morning at Eckerd Pharmacy in BFLO NY. About 500 Miles from NYC. Felt like it was just down the road. I left work early (sick) at 8:30am. Got home just in time to turn on the TV, about 10 min later the 2nd plane Hit! I watched the News Channels for the next few days in Complete Shock!

According to the video, we all remember where we were and what we were doing on 9/11. Feel free to share your story here if you like. I would like to hear the stories. Anyway, Im not American, I'm Canadian, UNFORTUNATELY!! I remember on 9/11, I was asleep on my couch, and my mom had the TV on, watching what was happening and I was half asleep and half awake, hearing the news and I thought i was dreaming it. Then i got up and realized it was real. I was in grade 10 at the time, so eventually, I got up and went to school. When I got to class, I told my friend about it who didn't believe me for some reason, haha. The teacher came in about 30 seconds later and told the class about it, so that confirmed my story. So then he brought in a TV and we watched the news for that whole class. The whole thing was nuts at the time. I wonder why our class got the TV. There definitely wasn't enough TV's for every class in a pretty large high school, and I've always wondered why our class was one of the ones that got a TV. It was good to be able to watch the news and be informed. Perhaps because my teacher was an older guy, he had seniority and thus got the TV. It's not important. I've just always been curious about that.

I know there are many but do you guys remember the forced bank robber that blew up after them people put that device on his neck and made him rob that bank in Eire Pa he was a pizza delivery guy

No one cares about Waco. They asked for it. Stupid idiots.

Sorry but the man that fell trying to get a baseball is an idiot 🤡😂 probably drunk and if not clearly stupid.

Unfortunately you forgot or failed to include the very first public televised captured mass shooting in the U.S. That of former marine Charles Whitman shooting innocent people atop the University of Texas Tower in 1966... killing many and thereby resulting in the original formation/creation of a swat team... an emergency police deployment first response unit!

The Boxing Day Tsunami wasnt broadcast live. What we saw was video tape, much of which was from security cameras.

I vaguely remember the challenger explosion, but I was only six then, most of what I remember has been from docs. I remember waco, I remember columbine, I remember I was working at Staples when 911 happen. We had to removed Dr.Grip pens from the shelves because the country was sensitive in the aftermath, and a picture of the twin towers was on the packaging for the pens. My mom said for her, THE tragedy was JFK.