Counting Down Twelve of Nevada’s Deadliest Catastrophes
Think Nevada, and most people think Las Vegas. But, at 110,571 square miles, the Silver State is a massive place. Larger than the UK and almost the size of Spain, the driest state in the United States is mainly desert. Punctuating the arid void are casinos, lots of them.
Hundreds of casinos in Nevada stretch far beyond the famed Las Vegas Strip. Laughlin, Carson City, Ely, Henderson, Enterprise, Sparks, Winchester, and Reno, to name a few, are home to some of Nevada’s 450-plus’ large casinos’.
Smoke pours from the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas at the height of a 1980 fire that killed 85 people. ©GettyImages
Of course, not everything that glitters is gold. Statistics show 75 per cent of visitors to the state in 2022 gambled. Combined, they lost $14.8 billion in those ‘large casinos’ during the year. Very few people leave Nevada showing a profit on their gambling.
But there have been more significant calamities than people leaving Nevada with less money than they had arrived with. The history books show America’s seventh largest state has had more than its fair share of disasters and human tragedy. Here, in date order, we have listed twelve of Nevada’s most catastrophic events.
12. No Tracks Left by Train Saboteurs
On August 12, 1939, a glamorous streamliner steam train, the ‘City of San Francisco’, derailed near Harney, Nevada. Twenty-four people were killed and 121 were injured. The derailment was caused by sabotage of the tracks. Despite a $5,000 reward (later increased to $10,000) and years of investigation, those responsible for the crash were never identified.
11. Off Course TWA Flight Kills 22
On January 16, 1942, a TWA Douglass DC-3 crashed into a cliff 15 minutes after taking off from Las Vegas Airport. All 22 people on board perished. Amongst those killed was screen actress Carole Lombard – the highest-paid actress in Hollywood who was married to Clark Gable.
It was reported Lombard had flipped a coin to take a seat on the plane – the alternative was a train journey. A subsequent investigation recognized safety beacons usually used to direct night flights had been turned off. It left the pilot and crew of the twin-engine craft without visual warnings of the mountains in their flight path.
10. One Survives a Second DC-3 Crash
A few years later, on September 5, 1946, a second Douglas DC-3 met with disaster when attempting to land in dense fog at Elko Airport. Twenty-one people perished, but there was one survivor – a three-year-old boy who was thrown clear of the burning wreckage.
Elko, a city in north-east Nevada, had a second aviation disaster in November 2016 when three crew members and a patient were killed when an air ambulance carrying a heart-disease patient crashed in a parking lot at Elko Airport.
In February 2023, another medical flight came down in Nevada. All on board, the pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic, the patient, and a family member of the patient were killed in the crash near Stagecoach, east of Reno.
9. All 49 Killed in Head-on Horror
In April 1958, a United States Air Force jet and a United Airlines jet flying between Los Angeles and New York City collided mid-air just west of Las Vegas. All on board both planes, 49 people, were killed.
A subsequent inquiry found neither crew was negligent for a failure to see and avoid each other. The crash site was originally unpopulated desert land, but it has since been developed. Remarkably, there is no permanent memorial to those who perished.
8. Tahoe Snowstorm Takes Plane Down
The most significant loss of life involving an aircraft in Nevada happened in March 1964 when a ‘Paradise Airlines’ Lockheed Constellation that had taken off in San Jose, California, attempted to land at Tahoe Valley Airport. It crashed during a snowstorm, killing all 85 people aboard.
Due to heavy snow and the remoteness of the crash site, it took a month to recover all the bodies from the impact area – 8,675 feet above sea level. There is a small memorial at the Genoa Peak crash site. The strewn wreckage left there has since been collected and placed at its base.
7. Killer Drive on Reno Sidewalk
It was the transportation of a different kind that took the lives of six and injured an additional 23 on Thanksgiving Day (November 27), 1980, in Reno. This was the day Priscilla Ford, a woman suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, drove her Lincoln Continental car down a crowded sidewalk, mowing down pedestrians in the process.
Deemed competent to stand trial, she was sentenced to death in 1982. Ford spent over two decades on death row until she died from complications from emphysema in 2005, aged 75.
6. Las Vegas’ Grand Toxic Disaster
1980 also produced the deadliest disaster in Nevada history and the third-deadliest hotel fire in modern US history. On November 21, an estimated 5,000 people were in the MGM Grand, a seven-year-old casino and 26-story hotel with more than 2,000 rooms.
According to Wikipedia, when the deadly fire was noticed, it took just six minutes for the entire casino floor to be fully engulfed. Thankfully, the fire never travelled beyond the first floor, but with toxic fumes and smoke ascending and entering people’s rooms, 75 of the 85 people killed succumbed to smoke inhalation.
5. Busboy Behind the Vegas Hilton Blaze
On February 10, 1981, just 81 days after the MGM fire, another Las Vegas hotel fire broke out. This time, the tragedy happened at the Las Vegas Hilton. Eight people were killed as a result of the actions of Philip Bruce Cline, a hotel busboy who was under the influence of drugs.
Cline had set fire to a curtain in an elevator lobby on the eighth floor of the hotel’s east tower. The blaze spread rapidly and, in addition to the deaths – for which he received a life sentence – approximately 350 people were injured, including 48 firefighters.
4. Plane Tragedy After a Fun Weekend
On January 21, 1985, a Galaxy Airlines flight carrying 72 people and returning from a casino gambling and Super Bowl betting trip sponsored by Caesars Tahoe crashed shortly after take-off near Reno Airport. Pilot and ground staff error was blamed for the tragedy, which killed all but one person – a 17-year-old boy who walked away from the wreckage almost unharmed.
George Lamson Jr. has since traced and reached out to 13 other ‘sole survivors’ from around the world. In 2014, he told CNN: “Reaching out to other sole survivors has made a major difference in my life. It has helped me expand my understanding of what happened to me. It has also helped me be of some help to my fellow sole survivors.”
3. Killer Cook Strikes a Blaze
On October 31, 2006, casino cook Valerie Moore set fire to a mattress in the hallway of downtown Reno’s Mizpah Hotel. The ensuing blaze led to the death of 12 people. Thirty more were injured as a result of Moore’s actions. It later transpired the 47-year-old was a paroled killer. She is now serving 12 consecutive life sentences.
The Mizpah Hotel was renovated in 2011. Listed amongst the Historic Hotels of America program, it is now over 100 years old and, according to legend, remains one of the most haunted places in Nevada.
2. Air Race That Became a Nightmare
On September 16, 2011, 11 people died (including the pilot), and 69 were injured when a vintage WWII-era P-51 Mustang air racer crashed into spectators during a horrifying disaster at the National Championship Air Races in Reno. The Galloping Ghost hit the ground at 400 miles-per-hour, filmed by stunned and horrified onlookers.
Investigators declared the crash’s probable cause was the loosening of nuts on the left elevator trim tab system. Unbelievably, 41 years earlier, the same aircraft – then known as Miss Candice – had crashed while attempting an emergency landing at the same event at the same airport.
1. The Madman Shooter in Mandalay Bay
The 2017 Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting has faded from the public psyche alarmingly quickly. The largest mass shooting in the history of the USA killed 58 people at the scene or shortly afterwards. Another three have since died as a result of complications of their injuries.
No other US shooting has resulted in more than 60 injuries. The madness of 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who fired more than 1,000 rounds from his 32nd-floor suites in the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel, resulted in 867 innocent people being injured.
The events of the fateful evening and the aftermath of this mass murder were captured by a 2020 Journeyman documentary titled, ‘Money Machine’. Since its making, and more than five years since the crime, the proceeds from Paddock’s assets – including two homes, an investment property in Nevada, a vehicle, and 49 guns valued at $1.3 million – have been distributed amongst the families of the 61 victims.
Disaster Can Flare up at Any Time
Of course, these are just a few of the tragedies that have beset Nevada. In 2015, 35 were injured and one person killed in a sidewalk ‘mow down’ in Las Vegas. In the summer of 2024, 32-year-old Lakeisha Holloway is set to go to trial charged with the crime.
And way back in history, spare a thought for the 35-plus killed in the 1869 Yellow Jacket Mine Fire; the 10,000 left homeless following the 1875 Virginia City Fire and the 2,000 left homeless following the 1879 Eureka Fire.
