Citation
(2001), "Not everything is new", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 10 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2001.07310dab.004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2001, MCB UP Limited
Not everything is new
Not everything is new
Today bus bombs and car bombs make news headlines, but what was there before motor vehicles? Of course … the horse and wagon bomb! As a historical curiosity, on 16 September 1920 a blast on New York's busy Wall Street killed 34 people and injured some 300.
The explosion was traced to a wagon drawn by a roan horse (also killed). It took the police five days to identify the human dead, but efforts to identify the horse – for investigative purposes, of course – were unsuccessful. Those efforts included summoning an expert on personal "horse identification" and convening all of the area blacksmiths to find the person who had made the horseshoes. There were several modern aspects to the incident. Telephone lines were over-burdened after the bombing, and there was convergence of an estimated 40,000 curiosity seekers at the scene.
(As a footnote, in a more recent example, on 30 January 2001 a wagon drawn by a donkey with a doll to imitate a driver was laden with explosives and used as a terrorist device in Israel. The wagon exploded before it reached its target. The only casualty was the donkey.)
(Israel Television News, 30 January 2001).