Admit it, we humans are prone to accidents. Back in stone-age we must've stumbled upon fire by accident as well. But not all accidents are good, or cheap.
They come with a price-tag and sometimes the tag is tad too heavy for human mind to comprehend. Take the list below for instance.
1. Titanic - $150 Million
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We've all seen Leonardo DiCaprio drown in this one, and laughed at his stupidity for not climbing that wooden door. But heck, that's old story, the real loss of Titanic when it sunk in 1912 was Titanic itself. It was considered to be the most expensive ocean liner ever built for its time. And boy, was it loaded! The ship cost $7 million to build which according to today's price is $150 million! That is one big hole in the pocket.
2. B-2 Bomber - $1.4 Billion
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Army machinery is expensive, and fragile. Okay, we aren't really clear about the latter, but it does need some thorough maintenance and babysitting. So what goes wrong when you keep the air-conditioning of a plane-hangar at the wrong temperature? You get a bill of $1.4 billion. Simple, somehow moisture made the computer controls of the plane damp, causing a data distortion which eventually caused to plane the crash, while taking off! The place where it hits the hardest was it was one of the only 21 B-2's ever built!
3. Prestige Oil Spill - $12 Billion
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Oil spills are always expensive, and cause some heavy-duty carnage to the ecosystem. There have been quite a lot of those happening for a while, yet the worst of the lot was the Prestige oil spill in 2002. Prestige, an oil tanker carrying 77,000 tonnes of fuel oil caught itself bang in the middle of a storm, causing one of its twelve tanks to burst. Expecting a greater calamity, the captain requested the ship to be steered into the closest harbour but was denied access. Eventually the ship sank resulting in 20 million gallons of oil spilling into the sea. A heavy loss for man and the ecosystem in equal measure.
4. Columbia Space Shuttle - $13 Billion
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We remember the Columbia crash of 2003 in its vivid totality for it one of the astronauts lost in the accidents was none other than Kalpana Chawla, an Indo-American who was on-board the ill-fated flight. Columbia was made in a budget of $2 billion in 1978, equivalent to $6.3 billion as of today. The investigation costed $500 million and search and recovery of debris cost another $300 million. Eventually the final figure came out to be $13 billion making it one of the most expensive accidents in recent history.
5. Chernobyl - $235 Billion
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This one gave us a glimpse of the apocalypse. Chernobyl in Ukraine housed the nuclear power plant to generate energy for the then Soviet Union but due to procedure violations and careless safety measures, it caused a gradual meltdown so colossal, the whole settlement had to be evacuated and devastated the life of more than 200,000 people, and the count is still going up. It all started in 1986 when calamity struck, and went on till 1991 when eventually the authorities shut down all the reactors and evacuated everyone. The aftermath saw physical and mental deformities in the following generations and cancer-struck population who were affected by the radiation. The worst part being that Chernobyl is still off-limit and the radiation levels over there are way beyond the fatality level for humans. The total expenditure of evacuation, resettlement, clean up, compensation, etc comes to $235 billion, and still counting.
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