Pike River Mine disaster
The Pike River Mine disaster was a coal mining accident that began on 19 November 2010 in the Pike River Mine, 46 km (29 mi) northeast of Greymouth, in the West Coast region of New Zealand's South Island following a methane explosion at approximately 3:44 pm (NZDT, UTC+13). The accident resulted in the deaths of 29 miners. The Pike River Mine incident ranks as New Zealand's worst mining disaster since 1914, when 43 men died at Ralph's Mine in Huntly. It also resulted in the country's worst loss of life caused by a single disaster since the 1979 crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901, although it was surpassed three months later by the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
Hans Monderman was born
Hans Monderman was a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator. He was recognised for radically challenging the criteria used to evaluate engineering solutions for street design. His work compelled transportation planners and highway engineers to look afresh at the way people and technology relate to each other. His design approach is the concept of "shared space", an urban design approach that seeks to minimise demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians, often by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and regulations. Monderman found that the traffic efficiency and safety improved when the street and surrounding public space was redesigned to encourage each person to negotiate their movement directly with others.
Montreal and Lachine Railroad opened
The Montreal and Lachine Railroad was Montreal's first railroad. The railroad was opened on November 19, 1847, with service between Bonaventure Station in Montreal and the St. Lawrence River in Lachine. Built to bypass the Lachine Rapids, it was 12 km long. The railway merged with the Lake St. Louis and Province Railroad in 1850 under the name Montreal and New York Railroad. In 1857, it merged with the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad as the Montreal and Champlain Railroad. It would eventually be absorbed by the Grand Trunk Railway.
Ferdinand de Lesseps was born
Ferdinand Marie, Comte de Lesseps was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia. He attempted to repeat this success with an effort to build a Panama Canal at sea level during the 1880s, but the project was devastated by epidemics of malaria and yellow fever in the area, as well as beset by financial problems, and the planned Lesseps Panama Canal was never completed. Eventually, the project was bought out by the United States, which solved the medical problems and changed the design to a non-sea level canal with locks. It was completed in 1914.
