A Fairchild FH-227 carrying five crew and forty passengers, many of them rugby players from Stella Maris College's "Old Christians" team, hits the side of a mountain (later named as Cerro Seler) in the Andes Mountains. Twelve of the occupants die instantly; more die as the survivors wait to be rescued. The sixteen remaining survivors are rescued more than two months after the crash.

The Camilla, a Finnish roll-on/roll-off cargo ship in Canadian waters, suffers a main engine failure.^[1] With a storm approaching, the captain declares an emergency to the Canadian Coast Guard. A squad of Canadian Armed Forces rescuers from 103 Search and Rescue Squadron fly to the ship and the sixteen members of the Camilla's crew are safely evacuated.

A JR-207 type train, bound for Osaka on a commuter service, derails on a curve at a speed greater than the limit for that section of track. The two front carriages crash into an adjacent apartment block. 107 people are killed and 555 are injured.

An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 on the Richter scale rocks Pakistan. Two ten-storey blocks in the Margalla Towers, a luxury apartment complex in Islamabad, collapse.^[2] A rescue team from the United Kingdom, Rapid UK, goes to Islamabad to help rescue victims from the towers.

The 300-bed Tulane University Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana takes in patients from other hospitals during Hurricane Katrina. Relatives of the patients and others also arrive until there are over 2,000 people at the hospital. The hospital is being powered by emergency generators in the basement and has no running water. When the basement starts to flood after the hurricane, the decision is made to evacuate. The patients, staff and everyone else are airlifted from the hospital's car park roof by helicopter.^[3]

7 men are trapped underground. They are not saved until over a week later.^[4][5]