A series of unfortunate events made me move on to a new fortress from my prosperous not-so-little 3x3 city. We reached a peak population of 203 and were doing well... until...
Something odd happened involving the undead. I'm not sure exactly what--I think I accidentally slaughtered an undead peregrine falcon and the remains escaped into the fortress and started an outbreak. However it happened, at one point I got an alert that one of my furniture movers got attacked by a peregrine falcon foul vapor husk (and there are no foul vapors in my territory) and within a few minutes, several dwarves were infected. OF COURSE this happens while my best warriors (20 soldiers) were out raiding the elves again, thus leaving my only option to burrow until reinforcements came home. Somehow they all got struck down; I'm not entirely sure how. If it hadn't said "foul vapor husk" I would have thought a necromancer was hiding in the bushes somewhere and then died suddenly, killing all the zombies.
So, that was unfortunate, because now I had a biohazard to deal with, and among the infected were some high-skilled dwarves. Meanwhile, I had about a dozen goblin prisoners I wanted to execute, so I built their cages down in a hollowed-out mine tunnel and wired them to a level across the room. I had designated the cages' contents for dumping to strip the goblins of their equipment, and waited for a long time as all the mechanisms were hooked up. When it was all done, I set up my archers about 20 feet away and pulled the lever to release the goblins. However, the first arrow that was fired was going THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. The goblins were still armed! Now I had a dozen armed goblins running free in the mines! There was a skirmish, and three of my archers died in the melee. Meanwhile, some passing citizens saw all of this and FTFO, at which point the goblins started chasing them down and killed a few. The military proper came home at this point, so I immediately ordered them into the mines to clean up the mess, but the populace was already very spooked.
Does designating cages sitting in stockpiles (I had actually done d-b-d before "building" the cages to wire them to the lever) not strip enemies of their equipment? I see it marked as dump in the stocks screen, but no one ever comes to claim it.
I could have taken the time to recover everything, but at that point I decided I wanted to move onto a new fort.