January 17

If your travel plans happen to involve stopping off in South Carolina, you might want to throw a hazmat suit or two in the trunk of your car. On the 17th in 1966 a Strategic Air Command B-52, carrying four 70-ton hydrogen bombs collided with a KC-135 tanker during a refueling maneuver over the quaint fishing village of Palomares in Spain. One of the bombs went in to the sea, where it was recovered a little over two months later. The remaining three landed in Palomares, spilling their radioactive contents over a wide area. The Air Force was forced to excavate more than 1,750 tons of contaminated material from the village, which, of course, was sent back to the United States and disposed of in South Carolina.