Disasters and mankind go together like orgies and deviants. In both cases it is possible to have one without the other, but what would be the point? You’re not going to get the same bang for your buck (both puns intended). Generally disasters not caused by man are referred to as an act of God, but with all due respect to the man upstairs, he’s got nothing on man when it comes to disasters. The same goes for orgies.

But enough about orgies (for now). At present there is an underwater oil well gushing more goo into the Gulf of Mexico than a 1980’s Peter North ever gushed onto the Canyon of Christy. Because of this catastrophe, people are angry, and rightfully so. A bunch of wildlife is going to die, Gumbo in New Orleans is going to be at least twice as unhealthy as before and the poor BP CEO might lose his job. Things are pretty bleak.

But guess what? There have been worse. Man has created disasters far worse than this one. In fact, we’ve found 10 man-made disasters that were worse then the current one in the Gulf. So sit back, buckle up and take a ride down disaster boulevard to see ten events that were so bad they’ll make you want to wake up tomorrow and buy some BP stock.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

If you happened to watch any of HBO’s recent miniseries “The Pacific” then you know the Japanese didn’t have a lot of quit in them. While that trait is an honorable one, their timing wasn’t very good when they bombed Pearl Harbor considering America was in the midst of creating the most destructive weapon the world has ever known. You could argue that they forced our hand by refusing to surrender or you could say that Truman was a sadistic son of a bitch that had an insatiable lust for mass casualties. Either way, for better or for worse, it happened and god willing it will never happen again. You hear that Kim Jong Ill? Are you listening Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Dammit Dick Cheney, get out of Joe Biden’s office!

Chernobyl

When gas prices go up to around $4 again get ready to hear the masses start clamoring for nuclear power. When they do be sure remind them of what happened in 1986 when things went wrong for the residents of the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. Nuclear power is great when it is contained, but the problem is that you can’t always contain it. Then again, you can’t always contain underwater oil wells either but at least when they break they only lead to disfigured ocean life, which, let’s face it, is already pretty jacked-up looking anyway. When radiation hits little kids like it did in Chernobyl the results are nothing short of devastating.

Derweze: The Door to Hell

“The Door to Hell” was an accidental discovery made by geologists that were drilling in the area that is now Derweze, Turmenistan in 1971 when their drilling rig collapsed into the earth and created a huge cavern filled with natural gas. As the story goes, the surviving geologists feared the release of the gas would be harmful to nearby villages so they elected to light it on fire, creating the world’s most awesome, never-ending barbecue. While this “man made disaster” did kill a few geologists, it is somewhat out of place on this list, but due to the awesomeness of a huge hole in the ground that is eternally on fire, it makes the cut.

Love Canal

Before it became a popular nickname for Paris Hilton’s vagina, Love Canal was a serious environmental disaster much like, well, Paris Hilton’s vagina. In one of life’s little ironic coincidences, the Love Canal disaster was caused by none other than Hooker Chemical. See, Hooker Chemical dumped 21,000 tons of toxic waste into the land in the 1940’s, covered it up and then sold the land to a school district. Pretty much what you’d expect from a company called Hooker Chemical. In the late 70’s a couple of hippie journalists started snooping around and uncovered a high rate of birth defects and got everyone all riled up about the fact that they were living on a toxic dump site. The story went national, the town went by the wayside and big corporations continued to do exactly what Hooker Chemical did across the globe.

9/11

In September of 2001 some a-hole terrorists hijacked a few planes and caught America by surprise with an unprecedented attack on our soil. Since that time we’ve engaged in a “war on terror” that has resulted in a lot of bombs going off in the desert and a bunch of Al Qaeda jagoffs with names impossible to pronounce getting picked off by drones when they pop out of their caves to take a tinkle. Unfortunately, there is still an awkwardly tall bearded f*ckwad with bad kidneys wandering around in the mountains of Pakistan that is due for some payback. If we do manage to take him alive someday let me be the first to suggest tying him up in Times Square and lining up all the widows and orphans from 9/11 to take a hammer to his tiny nut sack over and over until he finally realizes that even if there is an Allah, there’s no heaven for a Bin Laden. Only the permanent hell of a hammer to the balls day in and day out.

Destruction of the Rainforests

The Amazon Rainforest used to be a lot bigger. These days it is shrinking, and according to scientists, that’s a bad thing. Something to do with oxygen and global climate change. I’m not really sure how it works, but I know that more rainforests=good for the environment. So why are the rainforests going away? Since 1970, 91% of the deforestation has been used for livestock pasture. But before you vegans go getting all pissed off at us meat eaters remember this fact – Brazil is the world’s second largest producer of soy beans and most of the current deforestation has been a result of soy farmers expanding the production. What does that mean? All your tofu and soy lattes are just as much of a contributing factor to the problem. So put that in your hippie-dippie pipe and smoke it.

Bhopal

In 1984, 500,000 people in India were exposed to a toxic gas leak in the middle of the night. Estimates vary on the final death toll, but over 2,000 people died right away and as many as 8,000 more may have died within the first weeks of the accident at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant. The only other gas tragedy that ever came close to the toll of Bhopal took place at my uncle’s house last Thanksgiving when my naive cousin pulled his finger as I walked behind him.

Everything Hitler Did

Hitler was a real dick. I mean, he was off the charts. Not only did the son of a bitch have the mother of all superiority complexes, but he convinced an entire nation of insecure people to think that they were somehow superior even though they had just gotten their ass kicked in World War I. We won’t go into his body of work, because that has been well documented, but we will ponder just how much of his dickishness can be attributed to the sh*t stain he kept on his upper lip. Is he more of an asshole for electing to have such a mustache or did the mustache itself bring out the worst qualities within him? I suppose we’ll never know because the spineless coward killed himself rather than face the music for the atrocities he committed. Pussy.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Did you know that somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific there is a swath of trash estimated to be two times the size of Texas? Well, there is and it’s a real disaster. The BP oil spill sucks and it may well go on for quite some time, but eventually it will be cleaned up. This oceanic trash heap just keeps getting worse and is impossible to clean up. The only real advantage is that someday the trash heap will be so big that we can all walk from LA to Hawaii.

Lindsay Lohan

If this list were cobbled together just a few years ago, the umbrella-weilding, head-shaving Britney Spears would have been the hands down winner of a celebrity man-made disaster. Britney, you’ve been dethroned by the walking time bomb that is Lindsay Lohan. Where to begin, where to begin; lezbo cat fights at bars, “powder” on the foot in front of the papparazzi, suing because a commercial might have made a crack at her expense and faulty SCRAM bracelets that magically go off even though Lindsay swears she hasn’t had a drop of booze. Maybe she just wore an old shirt and the liquor seeped into her blood stream through osmosis? Lindsey has done more damage to herself and her reputation than BP could ever do with a silly oil spill. Hell they could drop kick a dolphin covered in oil and still not look as bad as the catastrophe that is LiLo.