February 2004 Disasters

Updated September 9, 2022 | Infoplease Staff

• Feb., Canada, U.S., and Europe: Record cold and record snowfalls in the month of February were seen: blizzard conditions in North Dakota, exceedingly heavy snowfalls in North Carolina, and heavy snowfall in the eastern Mediterranean and in western Europe.
• Feb. 1, Mecca, Saudi Arabia: At the Hajj pilgrimage, attended by more than 2 million people, a stampede during the stone-throwing ritual killed 251 pilgrims. This annual ritual by Muslims involves throwing stones at three columns of stone that symbolize the devil's temptation of Abraham. In 1990, the stampede killed 1,426 pilgrims, making it the deadliest in the history of the Muslim pilgrimage.
• Feb. 5 UT, Papua, Indonesian A 7.0 magnitude earthquake killed 31 people (Feb. 6, local time).
• Feb. 10, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: An Iranian Fokker-50 enroute from Tish Island to Sharjah, Iran, crashed while landing, killing 43 people. There were 3 survivors in critical condition.
• Feb. 15, eastern China: 2 deadly fires claimed the lives of more than 90 people. One fire was in a department store in the city of Jilin; the other was in a temple in Zhejiang province.
• Feb. 18, Neishabour, Iran: Rail cars loaded with fertilizer, petrol, and sulphur products broke away from the locomotive, rolled 31 mi down the rails, caught fire, and subsequently exploded, killing more than 320 and devastating five villages.
• Feb. 24, northern Morocco: A 6.4 magnitude earthquake in northern Morocco near the coastal city of al Hoceima killed 628 people and left 15,000 homeless.
• Feb. 26, Sarajevo, Bosnia: The crash of a twin-engine turboprop plane in fog in the south of Bosnia, killed Macedonia's President Boris Trajkovski and eight others. Trajkovski was praised for his work in uniting his ethnically divided country after the break up of Yugoslavia.

See also Major Earthquakes Around the World 2004

See also Estimated Deaths from Earthquakes, 2004

See also Recent Volcanic Activity