Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Harbors

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedian/podcaster Caitlin Durante ('The Bechdel Cast') for a look at why harbors are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is episode number 47 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating 4-7. That means episode 50 is just a couple weeks away. The membership drive for episode 50 is just not there yet. I'm really hoping people who hear this message, who are listening to the podcast in the free feed where I give it away, I'm really hoping you'll come through, go to sifpod.fun, become someone who backs this show. If enough people do and we hit our next goal, everybody gets digital art, it's going to be a poster by Adam Koford, who's an amazing illustrator. He's worked with everybody from Riff Trax to Maximum Fun. He will do a one-of-a-kind commemorative poster for all 50 of the first episodes. If we have enough people,

sign up and become part of this podcast. And of course, if you sign up right now, you get amazing stuff right now. You aren't just waiting for a poster. You get a huge library of bonus shows that only ever grows every week. You get to suggest topics. You get to vote on topics. You get plug-free versions of the shows. You won't hear stuff like this. Also, I don't know if everybody knows that patrons can request video messages from me. I've been doing a lot of them since we hit that goal, and it's really fun. A lot of people's road trips and special events and just other times they hear this show with people, you know, I get to be part of it. That feels great for me, and I hope it feels great for them. So again, if you back this show, you get tangible benefits right away. You get us toward future benefits that will come pretty quickly. And there are even more goals

and rewards and things coming up down the line. The full information is at sifpod.fun. Anyway, that's the plug. Here comes the 47th episode of the show, and thanks. Harbors. Known for being ports. Famous for being boaty. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why harbors are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by a wonderful returning guest. Caitlin Durante is a comedy writer, comedian, podcaster, and more.

She co-hosts The Bechdel Cast, which is an awesome movie podcast with a feminist lens. Also, Caitlin offers screenwriting classes. You can go to caitlinderante.com slash classes or follow the link in the episode links for this show to get, you know, advice, expertise, and more from my guest today. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicory peoples. Acknowledge Caitlin recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples.

And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about harbors. Harbors are an incredibly vast topic. There have been different kinds of harbors and locations for harbors all over the world and all over world history. This episode is a quick jaunt through the most amazing things about modern harbors, and quick jaunt through the most amazing things about modern harbors, and then a couple of the most amazing harbors of all time. It's a quick trip, brief visit with a fantastic guest, and I am excited for you to hear it. So please sit back or get in line behind those other boats, because they were here first

at the harbor. You know, politeness matters, even at sea. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Caitlin Durante. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Caitlin Durante is so good to have you back to see again. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do you feel about harbors? Oh, my goodness. Well, Alex, first of all, thank you so much for having me back.

I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to be here. I zoomed here on the tires from the last episode that I did with you to talk to you about harbors, which admittedly, I have basically no relationship with. I don't really feel one way or the other about them, I suppose. I like the idea of a harbor as a place to gaze upon the sea. But I truly, I didn't grow up near, I grew up in, you know, landlocked Pennsylvania. So I didn't really go to many harbors growing up. And now and but then since then, I've lived in cities that have them, I think, like, you know, coastal cities have harbors, but I don't go to the harbor parts of the city. Right. So, yeah, I really have I don't have much in the way of feelings or relationships with harbors. That jibes with my experience, too.

Like we, because Chicago area, there's Lake Michigan there. But I remember as school kids, we would get, I think everybody's school in Chicago, you got brought on a tour of the locks of the Chicago River. And the locks like raise and lower the water for shipping. They'd be like, and this kind of leads to the harbor of Chicago, like all the Great Lakes. And even me as a kid, I was like, eh, okay, sure. Cool. Thanks. Yeah, okay, a harbor, sure. But yeah, and L.A., I think L.A., there's the port of L.A. there, but it's way separate from the city.

So you never see it. It's way down by Long Beach there. Right, right, right. And then there's, I used to live in Boston. There's probably a Boston Harbor. In fact, that might be one of the more famous ones. Yeah. Maybe?

I don't know. Is that where they did the tea party? Yeah. know what is that where they did the tea party yeah my amazing american education is really shining today i learned so much and retained it all yeah sorry no it's all good uh yeah that's that's the other i don't have any like research or numbers on this or anything but that's kind of the freaky thing about harbors to me is that they kind of dictated where a lot of cities are and where a lot of people live like boston's there because it has a useful harbor and so that's why it's there and and the things around it are small right oh i

didn't even think about that it's not like it's not that the city came first and then they're like, well, we better have a harbor here because the city's already here. It's that the harbor existed because it was like a good place to set up a harbor. And then they're like, well, we might as well build up a city around this. That seems to be most cities and coasts. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't dig one.

But a lot of them, they're just like, well, the earth has already given us this weird formation and let's live here forever. That's precisely what they say verbatim. That's exactly what they say. Of course. I love humans' relationship with nature. It's beautiful. I think we can get into, you know, on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that's in a segment called I've stats the world to share with you.

I'll share the numbers as we're getting smarter all the time. I loved that. Thank you. Congratulations to Scott Spalding. Caitlin loved that. And that name was submitted by Scott. We have a new name every week. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com.

And it's a short numbers section this week because there's a lot of numbers in the takeaways. But the first number here is 720,000 U.S. dollars. So 720,000, you know, approaching or past two thirds of a million. That is what the city of Baltimore spent in 2014 to build a machine called Mr. Trash Wheel. And this is a harbor cleanup boat that they put like a fun face on. It's really great. Mr. Trash Wheel. Oh my gosh. I'm looking at the photo of Mr. Trash Wheel. He's got big googly eyes. Yeah. It's like, this is the best kind of thing to me where it is a valuable, useful tool and they made it fun. This is a solar powered boat machine kind of thing to me where it is a valuable useful tool and they made it fun this is a solar

powered boat machine kind of thing that floats in the harbor it uses a big conveyor belt to pull trash out of it and since that sort of looks like a big mouth they put googly eyes and kind of a face on it and this is just going around baltimore's harbor doing stuff amazing upon my Google search, I've also discovered Gwenda the Good Wheel, aka, I guess, not to be reductive here, but Mrs. Trash Wheel. And what they did is they put eyelashes on her so that we know that she's a lady trash wheel collector machine. Right. Yeah, it's becoming like a family of those McDonald's mascot characters or something. There's a whole group now. It's the two of them and also Professor Trash Wheel, which is also a lady, and then Captain Trash Wheel, which has a captain's hat. Amazing.

So they're just doing bits in Baltimore in the harbor. It's very fun. Yeah. This is great. I'm glad I learned about this today. Yeah, now like immediate harbor excitement is great. And it's also like valuable. National Geographic says that from when they debuted Mr. Trash Wheel in 2014,

by 2017, it had pulled more than 1 million pounds of trash out of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Oh my gosh, that is such a large amount of trash. It makes me so sad, but I'm glad it's getting cleaned up. That too, yeah. I had no concept of harbor pollution until reading about this. And I was like, oh, it's good. There's a

funny machine doing it this is great one million pounds that's outrageous we gotta start we gotta stop littering at our harbors yeah cut it out fix it stop stop that pick it up mr trash wheel fix our mistakes that we are making as humans it does look like it could talk it would be like i'm trying you know i mean there's what appears to be a mouth there's like this opening below his eyes yeah i feel like that could he he talks well i especially think of you with paddington where there's great voice acting in paddington but like we could find a voice actor for this somebody oh my gosh yeah i mean it well you said paddington so i just want mr trash wheel to be british now and if he's just like if we clean up our trash you won't get a rash or something something better that was me

look it's been a while since i've taken an improv class i was the best i could do but right and neither of us is a trash wheel how are we gonna you know tap into that experience, right? Exactly, exactly. And that is just fun to me. And basically, all the rest of the numbers are in the takeaways. I also, I'm not even going to bother with numbers for this, because it's not something you can really hold in your head. But I was curious, like, what is the biggest harbor? Which harbor is just the number one harbor? And it turns out the busiest harbor in terms of shipping is in Shanghai, China. And then the largest harbor by volume of water is Sydney, Australia. So that's just the thing.

Yeah. They're very busy out there in the Pacific. Sure, sure. But on the hugeness of harbors, that leads us into the first of three takeaways for the show. And takeaway number one, here we go. Takeaway number one. Modern harbors are growing so huge that they are messing up tides. Whoa.

Yeah. They're collectively big enough that it messes with the tides of the earth now, or at least in the United States where we can measure it. No way. Oh my gosh. So maybe humans relationship with nature is not so good. Which obviously, oh my gosh. Wow. Can't the moon do anything about that can't mr moon wheel be like hey right i don't know just a pitch right the british moon up there right if you mess with the tides uh you will i gotta get i gotta i'm gonna get better at this i'm just thinking of different like british hats for the moon to wear a little bowler that i'm into it yeah sure yeah what are those little um kind of like cab driver hats yeah. I feel like working class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I'm going to come up with different rhymes that are better than what I've said by the end of the episode.

So one, something that rhymes with trash, something that rhymes with tides. Okay, I'll work on this. Continue. Like, what if you just left to do that and I just had people listen to me wait i'm just here yeah i'll be back in 10 minutes just give me i just need 10 minutes and then we'll roll yeah we'll get for a little bit cool but yeah and the right the moon obviously a huge factor in tides but just the the sheer massiveness of modern harbors is affecting sea levels and how the tides can flood a city. The main source here is a great article in Popular Science,

and that article is called Humans are Altering Earth's Tides and Not Just Through Climate Change. It's by Philip Kiefer. And the spark for this is a much more famous thing, which is the new phenomenon of mega ships, which are massive, massive, bigger than ever container ships. And those got a lot of attention a few months ago because one of them got stuck in the Suez Canal. And I didn't know our container ships are bigger than ever, but it turns out the Ever Given and these other ones are bigger than the infrastructure we have for ships. So that's how, you know, you get stuck in a canal or something. Wow. Well, you know, that does not bode well for anything. Remember back when Titanic was the largest ship around? Why can't we go back to the good old days where ships were no larger than a Titanic? How is, I mean, I associate you so strongly with Paddington,

but how did I not bring up Titanic sooner with Caitlin Dronto? I know. This is a clear, Alex, get it together. Come on. I mean, the two tenets of my personality are Paddington and then Titanic. That's another thing. I feel like I mostly knew harbors from fiction like movies where there's a cool sweeping shot before or after some kind of sea journey i was

into a british naval epic called horatio hornblower when i was a kid okay and it was like wooden sailing ship times and fighting napoleon but there was a lot of times in harbors doing stuff sure sure titanic embarked and and disembarked, whatever, from many different harbors because it made a bunch of stops before it set off across the Atlantic Ocean. Oh, yeah, that's right. Big harbor ship. It saw so many harbors.

But new size of container ships. Speaking of Titanic stuff stuff am i right so the the the ever given and other ones like it npr's morning edition did a great piece like right after it got stuck in the canal and they pointed out that quote this might seem like a freak event but there are now 100 similar giant container ships around the world, and even bigger ones are being built. And they said that now these giant ones can hold about 20,000 containers, whereas 20 years ago, they could only hold about 6,000. Whoa.

So from 6,000 to 20,000, like we're really just ramping up the size of our boats. And that means we need bigger canals, bigger sea lanes, and bigger harbors to hold them. And that means we need bigger canals, bigger sea lanes, and bigger harbors to hold them. I guess I'm surprised that still so much, so many goods are transported this way. Because it feels like kind of an antiquated way to move goods around. But I guess the sheer volume of stuff, you can only fit so much on a plane, for example. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess I really take for granted how many goods and services. Just kidding about the services part.

How many goods are transported and like exports and stuff like that are like transported via ships. Yeah, I think it's the relative cheapness of fuel and that we have boats and it's still the thing. Yeah, like probably a lot of what you and I and the listeners are wearing, using, etc. right now came from a boat at a harbor. Huh. Yeah. I never stopped to think about that. Yeah. The at a harbor. Huh. Yeah. I never stopped to think about that. Yeah. The freaky harbor.

Yeah. And so with these giant or whatever container ships, a lot of cities are expanding their harbors. A lot of them already did that for like cruise ships or aircraft carriers or stuff like that. But the main way to expand a harbor is to make it deeper. And they do something called dredging to do that which is where you remove solid material from the bottom

and so they're dredging harbors like never before and the latest studies say that that might be increasing flooding in cities because it's just a bigger harbor and so it's more chaotic right yikes yeah flooding's not good but uh yeah there's this popular science article talks about a new study it was published march 2021 in the journal science advances and they said that general human development of coastlines has made the tides more intense and made cities flood more often. And Thomas Wall, an engineer at the University of Central Florida, says the number one human development making this worse is dredging harbors. Quote, if you dredge, you have deeper water. If you have deeper water, you have less

friction. So the tidal waves can enter the system more quickly and leave more quickly. Oh, sure. It just makes every city more floodable if you make its harbor deeper yikes and the harbors have to be made deeper to accommodate these bigger ships that would i don't know what the scientific or technical term for this but the bigger the ship the more of it will be underwater like an iceberg for example yeah so they have to accommodate these bigger ships that like just will you know they have to come into the harbor so that these deeper yeah exactly right oh okay so wait so that's what's well i don't like that one bit

i also vaguely remember like o'hare airport stuff as a kid, where they'd say, oh, we're expanding the airport so we can handle this plane. And if we don't do that, we won't get all that plane. Then we'll be out of the loop. And so every city is doing this with its harbor for the big boats. Got it. Or they're not doing it and they're missing out on humongous boats that seem dangerous to me, but it's fine. humongous boats that that seem dangerous to be but it's fine where you know why can't we go back to like mom and pop harbors with their tiny little boats oh that's i'm gonna campaign for you know small business small business harbors with their rinky boats and they have a less of an environmental impact so yeah i'm pro

small you know these amazon style harbors out there just like taking over all these small business harbors i won't stand for it and then the amazon Amazon is water, right? So it's all one thing. It's all coming together, you know? Oh my gosh, it's all connected. Yeah, what would a, like, in real life, I was about to say, like, what would a real life Mom and Pop Harbor be? And I think it's, like, drug runners.

I think that's actually the deal. I just thought of that, but it's fine. Hey, drug runners i think that's actually the the deal i just thought of that uh but it's fine hey forget that drug runners need to make a living too yeah what if what if the drug runners did a big boat and then the port people were like you obviously can't do this weird it's very obvious like just like it says cocaine on the side and then they're like no you can't come here maybe maybe that's how we need to shut down these huge harbors and just like these the manufacturing of these huge boats is to frame them for drug running yeah and then we'll be like oh crap like we can't have these big boats they're all they're just full of drugs we can't have these big boats. They're just full of drugs. We can't have that.

Just a thought. And so with these bigger harbors, they can track the impact a while back and also right now. The study's authors said there are U.S. government tide records going all the way back to the 1840s. So pre-Civil War, we know what some of the tides are places. And they say that in half the locations they have that data, there's been just a straight 100 years of intensifying tides because the harbors are getting bigger. And then they also said that just lately, we've been reporting more and more of what are called sunny day floods, which is when a city floods and it's not raining. It's just the tides doing it. They say Boston's had a bad past year with that. Wilmington,

North Carolina spent about a quarter of the last year experiencing flooding, like a quarter of the year. And then they also have a story about in 2016, there was a sunny day flood in Miami Beach. And so then people found a live octopus hanging out inside a parking garage. Because the tide just booped the octopus up into the parking garage. And that was the deal. Oh, my gosh. Wait, was it still flooded when it was hanging out there? Or had like the water receded? And then there was just like this octopus chilling that's a great question i don't know i have to know yeah right because octopuses can walk a little bit that's a weird thing about them like they've right but uh yeah this one it might have had like kind of a hike like okay i get down

the garage wait for the elevator okay and then like you know it's it's a lot to do i know i hope that octopus is okay yeah and it made it back into the water if it was out of the water. Hmm. Yeah, me too. Why did I bring up this story? Now I'm worried about an octopus. Ma'am. Alex.

Well, it's because my brain went there where I was like, it's probably dead. Or like, it's probably not okay. or like it probably is not okay. And the last thing, speaking of marine life, in response to these giant ships, a project toward finding ways to make the harbor deeper but also make it have more friction and slow down the water and also bring back marine life. So it's their podcast.

We'll link an episode of 99% Invisible called Oyster Te oyster texture which is about people trying to bring oysters back to new york city's harbor in a way that also makes it less flood prone and better cool so that's going on out there people are trying to be creative and also like new york still wants the huge ships but they're trying to be creative about it so they're like oysters that's the solution yeah cool i like i love that yeah i mean potentially a plot to eat a lot of oysters but but who knows it could just be that yeah all right off of that we're going to a short break followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec.

I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney,

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no running in the halls. And there's two more takeaways here, and the next one relates to another city, Boston. It's takeaway number two. The Boston Tea Party probably had almost zero impact on Boston's harbor water. All the fish and stuff were probably fine based on just measuring stuff. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, really.

A lot of marine life coming up. It's like if the highway was full of animals in a positive way. It's amazing. So the tea that got dumped in the harbor, the marine life were just like, hmm, a spot of tea. But they weren't harmed by it or anything. Right. Many little

padding fishes just checking it out. They're really happy. Raincoat underwater does make sense. Don't eat it. Yeah, the reason they're fine is it was just too small of an amount of tea and the harbor is huge like it's not good for fish but it it just dissipated it wasn't very much yeah sure it's probably like one part per million kind of thing more or less one part t

another nearly a million parts seawater yeah okay. Okay. That makes me feel better. Thank you for sharing that. And people have done pretty detailed work on it. But like the basics of the Boston Tea Party, this was December 16, 1773. And I'm drawing on a book called The American Tempest by historian and journalist Harlow Giles Unger. But he says, December 16, 1773, the Patriots estimated six to seven dozen of them dumped at least 10,000 British pounds worth of tea into the harbor pounds the money. And 10,000 British pounds then is about a million dollars today. So a million dollars of tea into the harbor. Yeah, very valuable and a lot. Yeah. And the men also like disguised themselves as Mohawks,

because they felt that the free living Mohawk native people were like, had the same vibe as the freedom loving colonists. And also in actuality, the Mohawks immediately allied with the British when there was a revolution. They hated the colonists. Of course. But these guys dressed up as natives, did this thing. And then also Unger's book says,

among other things, the night they did the tea party, they were shouting stuff like, quote, Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight. Which is like, so they were even thinking like, we're going to dump so much tea, it'll be tea. Ha ha ha. Look at us. Wow, they're so clever. Wait, here's a question.

And I don't know if you know the answer. But did they brew the tea before dumping it? Or did they just dump a bunch of like tea bags into the sea? Tea bags, yeah. Okay. Yeah, just a bunch. Or even loose leaf tea. i don't know if they used bags at the time yeah but yeah just a bunch of somebody grew a bunch of tea and they were like push forget it okay well i'm glad they didn't like waste the time brewing it first only to then dump it it is fun to imagine rioters like steeping and then doing it is really good like three minutes wait no no it hasn't been yeah it hasn't been three minutes yet give me a second

the wait it's green tea one minute one one or two minutes okay okay where the maybe the the sea life were like the marine animals maybe maybe they just got a little overly caffeinated. But then otherwise they were okay. Yeah, it seems like that would be fun. Yeah. Just a little, they're getting a little more done that day. You know, that's cool. Yeah.

Right. Exactly. More business of whatever they do. Yeah. Exactly. More business of whatever they do. Yeah. The other source here for like the math of the impact of the tea is it's a really fun book.

It's called What If? It's by the cartoonist Randall Munroe, who does XKCD. And it's just a bunch of amazing questions. And he mainly looks at what would happen if you tried to turn the Great Lakes in North America into tea. And he said that, like, first he researched the standard ratio of tea to water for good tea, which is apparently two grams per hundred milliliters or two grams per 3.38 ounces. It's all just numbers. But that, yeah, that information means absolutely nothing to me. Yeah, it kind of me too.

And I looked it up. So, yeah. But then he says, OK, if you dumped like the entire world's annual harvest of tea leaves, if you dump that in the Great Lakes, it would barely impact the water at all. And that's even if you could get the lakes like super hot. So it boils and makes tea you know right right and then he proceeds and says okay well now let's look at the boston tea party and quote boston harbor has a volume of about 0.44 cubic kilometers which means that the quote unquote tea brewed in 1773 would have been even more dilute than our Great Lakes tea, end quote.

Hmm. Okay. So it's just an insignificant amount of tea leaves were thrown in there and the water was fine. Not a big deal. Cool. It's like when you're in a big swimming pool and you pee in the pool thinking, oh, yes, I'm peeing in this pool, but it it's gonna be so minuscule compared to the rest of the water in the pool that no one's going to notice to be clear i don't pee in pool people and pools usually have me over come on yeah please please still invite me to your pool party i promise i won't

pee in your pool i only did that when i was a kid and i'm an adult now i i did it as a kid and then like casually described the behavior to an adult and they were very angry with me yeah yeah they were like you don't do that and i was like it's chlorinated and stuff it's probably fine i'm little i don't pee that much probably fine yeah people need to relax but that said sometimes i do still pee in the ocean but also fish pee in the ocean so like it's not a big deal anyway I usually pee in a toilet yeah if any if any adults are listening to this

chill out that's what we think adults yeah just relax listen and let me pee where I want to pee which is usually in a toilet I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing anyway what were we talking about why am i talking about the boston tea party yeah

right right right more like the boston pea party hey there we go yeah also i mean the past was foul one or two of those guys probably took a pee break mid tea party oh like come on 100 when they also they they got such a kick out of doing the tea Also, I mean, the past was foul. One or two of those guys probably took a pee break mid-tea party. Oh, 100%. They got such a kick out of doing the tea party that they did more of them. And three months after that, in March 1774, more guys tried to do another Boston Tea Party over again. And it was 60 of them boarded a ship called the Fortune, forced the crew below deck, and dumped that ship's tea. But that ship had way less tea than the previous ones. And so it was only 30 chests of tea. And they so we're even more confident that didn't impact the water. Okay, good. I did not realize they tried to do other tea parties.

This Unger book talks about also like New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, a few other cities imitated the first Boston Tea Party. So it was actually sort of a national tea destruction situation sparked by Boston. Sure. reenactors got permission to dump some tea into Boston's Harbor. They only dumped 100 pounds and still no impact. But people are very fixated on filling Boston's Harbor with tea leaves. And the good news is it seems like it's fine. It just kind of degrades and that's it. Now is this 100 pounds as far as like weight or was that still a hundred pounds in british currency weight yeah that's a good question though cool cool yeah they should hey hey britain switch to the euro i don't i don't like having this this word that means the same thing to deal with it what are you doing every other all these other countries it's nice to have a nice universal currency

yeah i agree yeah switch to american dollars then it's all one thing it's easy for me every everyone in the world should be using american dollars everyone should be speaking English and no other languages. Three meals a day at McDonald's makes it simple. Come on. Yeah. Hamburgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Right. And play baseball and american football and those are your only two activities right what else do americans like um uh nbc's netflix is the office only show that's

it now it's peacock but you know what i mean one thing for everybody. Not the British office. Only the Steve Carell one, everybody. Right. I forgot. Yeah, but that's the Boston Tea Party not destructive toward the harbor, which is good news. And also Unger's book and a few other sources claim that the initial Tea Party, Britain could have just kind of let it go, because it wasn't a ton of wealth in terms of tea and so on. But apparently, after the dumping of the tea, Britain passed a bunch of very punitive laws called the Intolerable Acts in the US, future US. And one of them was that they completely closed Boston's harbor. They just

said no more shipping here, you can't do it. And so then the whole city of Boston was like, let's do a revolution. Forget it. So it's very Harbor based the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. How about that? Cause the whole tea party thing, I, okay. We're at me. I would have been like, yeah, I'll keep this tea. Cause I want this tea and then i'll find another way to protest i mean i get right that's true i'm not gonna waste my precious tea that's wasteful um i'll just do something else but also i wasn't you know in the mindset of a colonist in the 18th century. So I don't really know. I mean, was it effective? I guess not.

Because like England was just like, we're going to close your harbor. I hadn't thought about that way where, because the tea belonged to the East India Company. It's like British semi-government tea. It's owned by them. And so they didn't have to destroy it. They could have also stolen it and kept it for themselves. Yeah, they should have just stolen it.

Right. Yeah. That's what I... Yeah, why destroy it? They did it all wrong. We have a lot of notes for the Sons of Liberty. Just if someone can get them on the call. Yeah.

I've got a bone to pick. Yeah. Well, and speaking of history, the final takeaway here is also history. Takeaway number three. In World War II, the Allied D-Day operation involved an incredible temporary harbor. Hmm. I think this is, it's, the most famous part of D-Day is the combat and the landing and everything. I think it should also be famous for immediately after D-Day, they set up an amazing temporary harbor on the coast of Normandy there.

Hmm. Had no idea until researching this yeah i didn't know is it so it's temporary so it's not it's still in use yeah was it just like for the war efforts yeah it's no longer in use there's we'll link to an atlas obscura page where you can see bits of the ruins of it like old pieces of it but um so that's because it was made of concrete and so it's still there but no one one. Yeah, no one uses it anymore. They just used it because the Germans held all the harbors nearby. So they needed to make something.

Got it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And we'll have pictures linked for people, too, because it was just very large. But the super basics of D-Day, it was June 6th, 1944. 156,000 troops from Britain, the US and Canada land on the beaches, fight through German fortifications. And then once they had that beachhead, it's like, great, we just invade, you know, German territory now, France and into Germany. But the trick is, how do you supply these guys? How do you get them stuff the best way is by sea. And so before the

invasion, they planned a way to build all of the pieces of a harbor in advance and then pull them over with tugboats as soon as the invasion worked. Like as soon as this works, we're going to set up a harbor on the beach with pieces we made before. It's really cool. It's all engineering stuff. Wow. I also with D-day especially i feel like i mostly know about it from movies like i i've been reading about it but it's mostly like saving private ryan and so it's interesting to think about nerd nerd harbor stuff with it that is not in the movie yeah where's hey mr spielberg where's the D-Day movie about the harbor, the temporary harbor that gets set up? Yeah.

Huh? Why isn't that the plot of a blockbuster movie? Yeah, I guess, I guess I know why. But still, yeah, come on, Steven. Come on. Come on, do it. So this could kind of be a movie scene. It's a history book about D-Day. It's just called D-Day. And it's by Sir Martin Gilbert, who's a British

historian and Oxford fellow. But he says that in 1943, there was a secret conference between FDR and Churchill in Canada. And that's where they agreed, we'll do D-Day, we'll invade through Normandy. That's the plan. And before that conference, Churchill wanted to go through Norway instead. He said, no, let's go this direction. And one way they convinced him Normandy was a good idea was to show him this like harbor scheme that they figured out. And they showed it to him on the boat to the conference in Canada. Like he was all the way headed to the meeting and they were like, look at these plans we have for a temporary harbor.

And Gilbert says Churchill was in his pajamas in a ship stateroom being shown like all these harbor diagrams. And that helped convince him to do it. So that would be fun. Maybe that's a scene. Yeah. I'll write it up with my screenwriting skills. I mean, I know you don't like to talk about your screenwriting master's degree, but you do have one of those. And so that is an option. Yeah, I would never bring it up. But now that it has come up, yes, it's true.

I do have a master's degree in screenwriting from Boston Harbor. No, just kidding. It's Boston University. Just drinking tea in the water like, this fuels my writing. This is great. Exactly. Yeah. Feels good.

Like, this fuels my writing. This is great. Exactly. Yeah. Feels good. But yeah, so they built, these were called Mulberry Harbors. That was just a code name, but it was, the first thing they did is take a bunch of old ships, fill them with concrete, and the plan was sink those to kind of make a wall and form, it's called a breakwater.

It's something that kind of keeps the ocean currents out of a harbor. So they built a bunch of those, and then they built 146 caissons, which are big, heavy foundations for piers. 20,000 workers made these along the River Thames in England. And then they organized 150 tugboats to pull all the caissons straight to Normandy. And within hours of the invasion, the tugboats were headed over with harbor pieces. So this was, there was like a rear admiral running this. This was like, this was a massive operation to get a harbor going immediately as soon as they took the beach.

Yeah. It sounds like, yeah yeah it sounds like they just like assembled it i'm picturing like within like five minutes they got this harbor together it probably took longer than that but i'm just like right that was their dream i think yeah was like as soon as the troops go harbor boom yeah yeah yeah and they uh the book says that within nine days of D-Day, they'd enclosed two square miles of sea, which is the size of the English port of Dover, that harbor. And then they built two harbors. One of them got wiped out by a storm, but the other one ran for 10 months and it handled 2.5 million men, half a million vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies through this one temporary harbor at the beaches of Normandy. That's impressive. So then the troops in Europe that they were invading could have food, supplies, reinforcements, everything they needed. Yeah, that sounds necessary.

Yeah. Wow, okay. Didn't know about that. Now I know. Wow, okay. Didn't know about that. Now I know. One of the things that helped the D-Day invasion work is that the Germans thought that D-Day was a fake out and there was going to be a real invasion somewhere else. And part of the reason they thought that, according to Gilbert, is that there was no harbor where they were going. So it was like, well, how are they just going to invade a beach and then supply those guys? Doesn't make sense. So this was useful for fooling the Germans. Tricky, tricky. those guys doesn't make sense right so this was useful for for fooling the germans tricky tricky

and churchill was like tricky tricky i'm tricky tricky hitler sorry gotcha gotcha yeah exactly wow and that's how we won the war through our surprise harbors our tricky tricky harbors yeah folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to caitlin dorante for sailing into this harbor of fun. You know, harbor facts. How about that? Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating

story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is harbor seals. Harbor seals, one of the most common seal types and one of the cutest and one of the most incredible. They have a bunch of abilities and stuff. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than three dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring harbors with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, modern harbors are growing so huge that they're messing up tides. Takeaway number two, the Boston Tea Party had almost zero impact on Boston's harbor water. And takeaway number three, in World War II, the Allied D-Day operation involved an incredible temporary harbor. incredible, temporary harbor. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. She's great. Caitlin Durante co-hosts the Bechdel cast on iHeartRadio every week, along with her co-host

Jamie Loftus. I'm also linking Caitlin's Twitter and more. Her last name is spelled D-U-R-A-N-T-E. And her website, CaitlinDurante.com, has several levels of screenwriting classes for you. That is a thing you can do with Caitlin, my guest today. You can hop into your own tea-filled screenwriting harbor. Make it happen. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in Popular Science, it's called Humans Are Altering Earth's Tides and Not Just Through Climate Change. And that's by Philip Kiefer. Also turned to a lot of history books this week. And one of them is called American Tempest.

That is by journalist and historian Harlow Giles Unger about the Boston Tea Party. And another book, it's simply called D-Day. That is by the historian Sir Martin Gilbert. Absolutely amazing look at it's simply called D-Day, that is by the historian Sir Martin Gilbert. Absolutely amazing look at Operation Overlord and D-Day. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons.

I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.