Ellensburg was all set to be the state capital in the summer of 1889 until a fire on the Fourth of July destroyed the town.

That’s the sort of history lesson, the kind of hidden gem Covington author Greg Oberst discovered while writing his second book, “Disasters of the Northwest: Stories of Courage and Chaos,” which was released last summer.

“Despite the ominous title,” Oberst said, “it’s a great history lesson for the Northwest.”

Oberst’s first book, “Washington Sports Trivia,” was published by another imprint within the same company, Overtime Books, in the spring of 2010.

This latest tome was released under the Folklore Publishing name. Originally Oberst was given a five month timeline to complete the book about disasters in the region compared to the two months he was given for the sports trivia book.

When all was said and done, however, “Disasters of the Northwest,” took a year to complete including editing and re-writes.

“The first thing we did was work with the publisher to figure out what was a disaster, what qualifies as a disaster,” Oberst said. “Is it strictly a body count? Is it a structure loss? Is it both? That was a hard thing to define because disasters can impact in other ways too and have lingering effects that are only known later.”

Rather than use a definition of a disaster based on lives lost or property loss, Oberst said, the decision was made to look at the breadth of impact of a disaster on the Northwest in whatever form that took.

For example, the Nisqually earthquake of 2001 had a significant impact on many, and though it didn’t kill anyone it was a disaster, Oberst explained.

With that in mind, Oberst worked with the publisher to generate a list of 50 to 60 disasters that was then whittled down to fit the proposed page count.

It’s worth noting that the Nisqually earthquake would be evaluated in a different way than the Ravensdale Mine disaster of 1915 because disasters had a different impact on society 100 years ago.

In addition to a page count, there was a word count Oberst was supposed to target.

“So, we had to think about how many words it would take to tell the story,” he said. “Some disasters would take a couple of pages and others would take a few more to tell the whole story.”

Another framework that was set up was organizing the book into three categories: natural disasters, accidental disasters the military and wartime disasters.

Oberst said most readers may be surprised at the military and wartime disasters stories because one wouldn’t necessarily associate the Northwest with such incidents yet there were quite a few, primarily plane crashes, to write about with the expansive military presence as well as The Boeing Co.

Other surprises in the book may be the trolley which went off a bridge in downtown Tacoma which resulted in the deaths of 100 people or how Olympia became the state capital despite the fact that Ellensburg was the preferred spot thanks to a fire.

“What I really loved writing and in putting this book together is it’s a good history lesson to understand disasters, to understand our history, to understand why things are the way they are today,” Oberst said. “Case in point,  Ellensburg was poised to become the capital, they had even built a governor’s mansion there. It was just booming in Ellensburg. Then there was a fire that burned down the entire town just a month after the Great Seattle Fire. But those fires answer the questions about why Olympia is the state capital, why there are so many brick buildings in the Pioneer Square area. It’s because everything before that was built of wood and it all burned down and is all gone so it was all rebuilt with brick.”

Then there was the mine explosion in 1915 in Ravensdale which ultimately led to the city disincorporating, the only municipality in King County history to do so.

“The Ravensdale disaster, certainly because it was in my own back yard, was fascinating,” Oberst said.

“During the process of evaluating which disasters would make the book and which won’t, we came across the worst mine explosion … it was so easy to research because it was so close. Then uncovering the desecrated cemetery where most of the miners were buried back in 1915. There’s 20-some grave sites up there, all virtually the miners, completely forgotten and badly desecrated by vandals in the 1960s and gone unrepaired and still sitting that way right now.”

The cemetery became so desecrated because the explosion forced the mine to shut down and the area didn’t recover to the point that anyone could take care of it.

It is a tough place to find, Oberst said, and he nearly missed it when he took his daughter with him on a hike to find it while researching the book.

With some help from the Black Diamond Historical Society and a little bit of digging on Google, Oberst had a rough idea where the cemetery was located, which is now surrounded by newer homes and overgrown by brush.

“You had to be right on top of it to find it,” he said. “We spent maybe an hour there, we wanted to see how many headstones we could find, to see if we could find any markings on them that indicated dates but we couldn’t.”

History of the region’s natural disasters from our own backyard to the attempts by the Japanese to attack the mainland during World War II proved fascinating work for Oberst who said he hopes the book can provide some important lessons and build on what many students learn in school now.

“The unknown nature of the really important events of our history is disconcerting to some level particularly when you look at something like a desecrated cemetery that sits there in that state,” he said. “Something like that should probably be more widely known so maybe some kind of action could be taken. That’s the thing I love about the research part of writing, the little nuggets that you uncover, that go beyond interesting, that make you feel that much more educated and that much more informed about the world that we live in.”