Most Expensive Mistakes In All History – Part 4

You've made some pretty big

mistakes

in your time—maybe you dropped your new iPhone out of a plane mid-flight or accidentally hit the gas instead of the brakes—but whatever your mistake was, it could have been much worse. more

expensive

, you could have accidentally blown up two multi-million dollar airliners, sent a billion dollar rocket to its doom, or sunk a ship in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, suddenly your

mistakes

don't seem so bad, hey, brace yourself Feel even better about your own mistakes as we take a look at more of the costliest mistakes in

history

.

A costly typo. Well, it's time to confess. I make typos all the time, but none of my embarrassingly poorly written texts or tweets could come close to being wrong. Dan's collector's eBay seller in 2007. He had listed a bottle of Allsop's Arctic Ale on the auction site completely corked and complete with a wax seal that came with a laminated note. The 1919 note explained that the bottle was one of a very limited one. collection that had been brewed specifically for a polar voyage back in 1852, this certified it as a real and incredibly rare item, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to any avid brewer or beer specialist, but collector Dan had made a big mistake that had been lost. pee on your spelling of all sops, this was in the day before

most

websites returned results for misspelled searches, so the beer only received two bids and was ultimately sold to a buyer called voodoo score in Oklahoma for a pitiful $304.

However, Voodoo Score was not going to make Collector Dan's mistake. He put the beer back on sale less than two months later and with the correct spelling, the bottle received 157 bids in just 10 days. The beer eventually sold for an eye-popping $503,000. Oh man, I bet collector Dan. uses spell check on everything he writes now combat fire did you know that a single 20 millimeter bullet for an m61 vulcan, a rotary cannon found on some fighter aircraft, costs 27? That's pretty

expensive

, but not as much as the chaos a single bullet can accidentally cause. As a mechanic at the Florence Air Base in Belgium discovered in 2018, this mechanic was working on an F-16 fighter jet and in one of the base's hangars while another F-16 was being refueled nearby, but somehow They accidentally shot one of the fighter planes.

Vulcan cannons the shots hit the refueling F-16 setting it on fire and damaging the other in the process despite the quick response of the firefighters the 18 million dollar plane was destroyed along with damage to the second plane it is estimated that the destruction was somewhere in the region of 27 million dollars and all for a few bullets or was it in official press releases that there was no mention of an accidental misfire only that a fire broke out at the base taking the two planes with it, but the Headlines would suggest that mechanical failure was definitely to blame for this costly mistake.

What do you think this costly mechanical mishap was or is the source of the fire? So embarrassing that the Belgian air force doesn't want us to know what really happened. Let me know what you think in the comments. ever given, unless you lived under a rock in 2021 you've probably heard the never given name mentioned in the news, this 1,312 foot behemoth is one of the longest container ships in the world and is capable of carrying over 20,000 containers at a time during In perspective, this thing is longer than the height of the Empire State without its antenna. Now, on March 23, 2021, the usual given was traveling through the Suez Canal, an essential Egyptian waterway that acts as a shortcut for ships traveling from Europe to South Asia without it.

It is necessary to travel the entire coast of Africa adding approximately 4,350 miles to a ship's trip, the only problem is that the channel is narrow, just under 80 feet deep and less than 700 feet wide, the last thing you would want to do . is trying to steer a bulky boat through this small channel during adverse weather conditions and high winds, which is exactly what Evergivens captain Krishnan Cantaval decided to do. Underestimating the weather, the captain quickly lost control of the boat, which It became hopelessly stuck in the canal for more than a dozen tugboats were called in to try to pull the ship from shore.

Komatsu excavators and other equipment dredged more than a million cubic feet of sand surrounding the ship, but even with all this help, it still took six days and seven hours to finally achieve it. The sizeable ship was freed and that's when the cost of this mistake began to accumulate: it had blocked more than $400 million worth of goods passing through it per hour, amounting to a staggering $31.5 billion in commercial losses, in addition to that, the court ordered the ship's owners to pay 900 million in compensation, which is approximately equivalent to 32.4 billion dollars in total. The canal authority later announced that Captain Conteval was entirely responsible for the grounding, but that costly compensation of al

most

a billion dollars fell on the shoulders of his employers while it was a high price to pay, which was always made up for in social media with some absolutely priceless memes.

Out of this world, the CEO of the Roswell Honda dealership hired a direct mail marketing company to send 50,000 scratch-off tickets to local residents and one lucky ticket holder received a grand prize of $1,000, but a typo spelled in the ad meant that all 50,000 tickets were grand prize winners, so instead of offering just a thousand dollars, Jeff's dealership was now offering 50 million. You get a car and you get a car and everyone gets a car. Oprah will have to up her game. Fortunately, Jeff discovered the typo. Before the last 20,000 tickets could be released, but the damage was done, the marketing company apologized profusely and to avoid any PR damage they offered 5 Walmart gift cards and the opportunity to enter a contest with a Even bigger prize looks like Oprah's car gift crown.

It's safe for another day now I can't give you a car but if you hit the like and subscribe buttons below I can give you free videos and endless entertainment. Yes, it's not exactly the Oprah moment she wanted, but it's still a good deal, all done. Great, what awaits us in the next container catastrophe? Have you ever prepared to go out? You realize the weather is bad and decide to stay inside. If the captain of the Apis had this kind of foresight, then this ship wouldn't be in this video. In November 2020, the 1,194-foot Japanese container ship set sail from Yantian to Long Beach, but 1,600 miles into the journey the ship encountered a major storm in the middle of the Pacific, while ships like this are designed to detect and, even certain point, resist inclement weather.

The conditions were so brutal that the containers stacked on the deck of the ship began to move and the storm brought down 1,816 units of the 14,000 that the apus was carrying to sea. The captain had no choice but to turn the ship around and try to dock and kobe , when it docked, the extent of the damage had to be seen to be believed, containers were crushed, others were barely balanced on the ship, it was a massacre, it is estimated that this incident resulted in cargo loss worth over 200 million dollars per second The largest cargo loss in the

history

of shipping, while an official investigation is still underway, theories have been floating about the cause of this incredible catastrophe.

Some believe the captain had analyzed the weather patterns and knew a storm was imminent but decided to take the risk because he was on a tight schedule and simply assumed it wouldn't be that bad, others speculated that freak waves that no one could have predicted reached over 50 feet. high, something that not even large boats like this can handle well. The investigation is still ongoing, so for now all authorities can do is say goodbye to this fatal $200 million mistake Fukushima back in 2011 a magnitude 9 earthquake, the strongest ever recorded, hit Japan causing A 130-foot-high tsunami waves devastated the coast of Japan on

part

of which the Fukushima Daiichi was located.

The nuclear power plant systems at the plant detected the earthquake and automatically shut down the three reactors that were operating at that time. moment. Emergency diesel generators were turned on to keep the reactor cores cool, as they remained incredibly hot at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit even after the reaction. stopped that's when a 46-foot-high wave hit Fukushima, flooding the plant, destroying 31 of the 33 emergency generators and stopping the cooling cycle. Temperatures in the reactors soared, reaching more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and triggering a nuclear meltdown along with a series of deadly explosions. hydrogen and oil explosions over the six days that followed around 980 petabequerials of radioactive material contaminated the surrounding areas this is approximately 18 of what was released by the famous Chernobyl meltdown initially this was seen as an accident that no one could have predicted and, without However, in 2015 it was revealed that scientists had warned plant operators that this could happen, they had highlighted the fact that critical backup generators were built in low-lying areas that were at risk of being damaged by a large tsunami, but Tokyo Electric Power Co plant operators ignored these warnings.

Instead, they favored their own flawed internal data which they claimed meant tsunamis of that size were simply not possible. Their ignorance not only cost them a power plant worth $2.2 billion, but the cleanup will actually lead to the cleanup. It is currently estimated that even now, more than 10 years after the merger, it will take another 30 years and an additional cleanup effort of $76 billion, yes that's billion with a b. It turns out that removing intact nuclear fuel, dismantling nuclear reactors and disposing of heavily contaminated water comes with a tremendous cost and one that could have been avoided if only they had listened to people who knew what they were talking about, wow what a concept, go bankrupt, I can't pretend to understand the stock market, I'm a youtuber not a business genius, but then again, even professional traders make mistakes in the market, sometimes I don't mean short selling or Whatever the terminology, I mean, sometimes they make a typo, a really big typo in December 2005, Japanese brokerage firm Mizuho Securities.

I wanted to sell one share of the company J Com for 610,000 yen, approximately five thousand dollars at that time on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, this was JCom's public debut on the stock market, so it was really important that the deal went off. as planned, but it couldn't have been What would have gone worse if I tried somehow instead of listing one share at six hundred and ten thousand yen, I listed six hundred and ten thousand shares at one yen, that is, less than a cent each One, even though the number of shares listed was more than 41 times what JCOM had available, the stock exchange processed the order anyway.

Mizuho, ​​realizing the error, tried to cancel the order, but the stock exchange does not cancel transactions. like this even if they are wrong fortunately the stock market did not allow the shares to be sold for only one yen, but they were sold for only 572,000 yen, approximately 4,767 mizuho rushed to try to buy back as many shares as he could, but when the trading ended That day, Mizuho had lost 40.7 billion yen, or about $336 million at the time. 372 million dollars today Mizuho had to pay for the mistake, but then they tried to sue the Tokyo Stock Exchange for allowing such an obvious mistake to go unanswered.

They asked for 41.5 billion yen, but the court only awarded them 10.7 billion yen, less than a quarter. of what they lost, so if you ever need a reason to double, if not triple, check your work, mizuho just provided 40.7 billion of them in the millennium tower, do you ever get that feeling that something isn't Alright. Residents of San Francisco's Millennium Tower know what that all feels like. Very good, along with a strange sense of tilt, this elegant blue-gray tower was completed in 2009 and is the tallest residential tower complex in the city. Residents quickly purchased more than $100 million worth of luxury condos, but then things started to go wrong in '58.

The story's luxury complex was leaning in 2016, it was revealed that the main tower had collapsed.sank and began to lean. It was eventually revealed that the tower had not been built on solid bedrock but on deep, dense sand, while the building was not at risk of property values ​​of the a

part

ments plummeting and lawsuits began. Developers blamed nearby construction efforts that began two years after the tower was completed. They drained the surrounding area, which made the construction site safe, but also compressed the dense sand and caused the Millennium Tower. next door to settle, but documents were later discovered showing that the city's building inspection department knew there was a possibility of this happening and allowed the residents to move in anyway.

It was a big scandal, but that wasn't the worst part for 2018, the sinking had increased. to 18 inches with a 14-inch pitch then on September 8, residents began hearing creaking and popping sounds, the pressure from the pitch had begun to break the building's windows and cracks were appearing in the masonry to fix it, the initial plan It was to drive 52 piles. in the bedrock on the north and west side of the scraper is a construction project that will cost about $100 million to repair over the course of 10 years, although that is the lower end of the estimate, complications could cause the price rises up to 500 million dollars depending on the necessary works and considering that the total slope of the building at the top is now 26 inches, an increase of 10 inches since the so-called repair of the building began in 2020, I believe this will be an incredibly expensive repair.

Explosion in upper Tianjin at 11:30 p.m. m. On August 12, 2015, the Chinese port city of Tianjin was suddenly rocked by a series of massive explosions. The explosions were so large that they caused earthquakes of magnitude between 2.3 and 2.9 and the explosions themselves could be seen even from space. Shock waves devastated the city, damaging buildings and claiming the lives of almost 200 people, but what caused such a large series of explosions? Well, at 10:50 pm, about 40 minutes earlier, there were reports of a fire in a warehouse in the new Benhay area, but this was not just any warehouse, it was a hazardous chemical storage facility containing thousands of tons of sodium cyanide, sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate. really volatile and highly explosive stuff, it turned out that the safety regulations requiring public buildings and facilities to be built more than a kilometer away from the dangerous place had simply not been followed, which meant that none of the locals were aware of the danger they were in. just that, but really poor record keeping meant that those responsible for the facility were unable to identify all the substances being stored, so on that very hot day in August improperly stored chemicals caught fire, causing explosions with a force of more than 280 tons. of TNT along with the loss of human life, hundreds of buildings and new Renault, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Kia cars waiting to be shipped from the port were almost destroyed;

They were less than 300 feet from the original plastic and bore the brunt of the explosion. Approximately 26,000 new cars were completely ruined, causing damage estimated at 3 billion yuan, about $473 million, and that was just the beginning. The supply chain disruption cost a staggering $9 billion. The third largest supply disruption in China's history. Prison sentences were imposed. 49 government officials, executives and warehouse staff for their role in circumventing safety regulations that led to the disaster, the families of those who perished received some compensation and the government also promised to buy back property damaged by the explosion at a rate of 130 percent, this means that the oversight ended up costing a staggering 10 billion dollars, all in total.

Well, I didn't think it needed to be said, but if you're in charge of literal explosives, make sure they're stored safely. safe. The Tianjin explosion, no one on Earth would be stupid enough to make the exact same mistake again. Well, let's go back to 2020 and go to Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, a fire engulfed a warehouse at the port and less than 20 minutes later. This happened incredibly, this explosion was almost five times bigger than the one witnessed in Tianjin and released a shockwave that physically shook the entire country of Lebanon, but surprisingly, it turned out that the root cause was exactly the same as the one used to store these warehouses.

More than 3,000 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate that had been confiscated from a rebel ship in Beirut waters more than six years before its cargo was confiscated and transported to the Port 12 warehouse but, although officials knew what the cargo was, They failed to store it. In reality, it was an accident waiting to happen, so in 2020, when an unknown source started a small fire in the warehouse, the nitrates exploded with the force of 1.1 kilotons of TNT, one of the explosions did not most powerful nuclear weapons in history, nearby buildings devastated the siding. Cars caught in the blast wave were destroyed and 300,000 people were left homeless.

The magnitude of the devastation was incredible and the cost was very harsh. It is believed that the insurance losses alone reached 3 billion and it is estimated that the explosion cost more. of 15 billion dollars in economic damages I can't believe it, I have to say it again if you have explosive materials, store them properly, it really shouldn't be that difficult to understand the Challenger disaster on January 18, 1986, the American space shuttle Challenger managed to take off from its launch site at Cape Canaveral had been delayed for several days due to bad weather and technical problems, but now it was finally happening.

All systems seemed nominal, the weather seemed good and the seven crew on board were ready, but then, 73 seconds into the flight, this happened one minute 15 seconds speed 2900 feet per second altitude nine nautical miles distance down seven dogs the ferry suddenly broke up in a column of smoke and debris millions watched the first major ferry accident in human history on live television, tragically there were no survivors and People wanted answers, a special commission was created to determine what It went wrong and the response surprised everyone. The rocket booster's rubber O-rings, which were intended to prevent gases from escaping, had been affected by the record low temperatures experienced on launch day.

It ruptured shortly after takeoff, allowing pressurized gas to leak into adjacent fuel tanks, leading to structural failure and the resulting explosion, but the worst part by far was that NASA knew about the joints. torics that Alan McDonald, an engineer working as a NASA contractor, had refused to approve. the rocket for launch because it was concerned about the O-rings' ability to perform in such cold temperatures, but NASA decided not to heed McDonald's warning as they were under pressure to launch a minimum of 24 missions a year, so They proceeded with the launch. and unfortunately it wasn't just the lives of the crew, this incredible carelessness cost the challenger rocket, its development and construction cost approximately one and a half billion dollars in the mid-1970s, the cost of replacing the challenger with all the fixes to the many designs.

The defects plus all the equipment on board amounted to more than $3.2 billion, or $4.7 billion in total, adjusted for inflation, that's about $24.5 billion today. I think he was too much of a gentleman to say anything, but I bet Alan I really wanted to tell you that the mv tri color on December 14, 2002 at 2 in the morning the mv tri color was sailing over the English Channel the car of 55,000 tons and 627 feet carrying a giant carrying 2,871 luxury cars from Zabruga to the port of Southampton advancing through the thick fog another smaller ship, the Kuriba, was traveling alongside the tricolor and suddenly disaster struck the Kuriba without warning.

However, in the nearest port, the tricolor had capsized on its port side in the shallow channel of the stain. Fortunately, the 24 crew members were evacuated in time, no lives were lost, but approximately $100 million worth of luxury cars were lost. So what exactly happened well? The two ships were traveling along a busy sea route when a third ship, the Cleary, passed in front of them, the Kuriba accelerated to try to overtake the tricolor, but the tricolor did not slow down and her helmsman clearly had the same idea. . The Clary was understaffed and therefore could not take any measures to prevent it in time.

However, what is truly incredible is that in the 15 minutes leading up to this event none of the three ships used their foghorns or radios to communicate with each other, so the Kariba, unsure of Clary's intention, accidentally rammed to the tricolor. All three ships were found to be at fault, but that was only the beginning of the tricolor's problems. It was a year before the ship could be salvaged and Smit's salvage team divided the wreck into nine sections over the course of three months, they did this by assembling two working platforms on either side of the wreck and used a large cutting wire. to cut the sections, the separated sections were then hoisted, placed on a barge and transported back to Zabruga will be scrapped, none of the luxury cars could be saved.

The grueling extent of the salvage alone cost $40 million and, combined with the loss of luxury cargo, brought the total cost of this failure to a staggering $140 million. Enough to give anyone a sinking feeling, which of these costly mistakes do you think was the worst? Have you ever made a super expensive mistake that could compete with any of these? Let me know in the comments below and, as always, thanks for watching.