Stuff You Should Know - How Floods Work

Episode Date: January 26, 2012

Floods happen when more water is introduced to an area than can be quickly removed. That's about it, but there's more to floods, what causes them and the havoc they can wreak. Join Josh and Chuck in this super-saturated episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast-drying solution especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, the saturated podcast this week. Super saturated, bloody podcast. Yep. I don't know why this came to mind. I didn't see any blood

that happened on the news. I think I happened to cross it searching randomly and I thought, hey, it's a good one. Yeah, we covered that one yet. Flooded stuff always creeps me out. Oh yeah? Yeah, I think it goes back to my days in Toledo as a young boy. Many times growing up in my house on Beverly Drive, the mommy would flood, and my basement would flood as a result, and sometimes it would come all the way up to the top step. Really? Yeah, and I just think about all my dad's tools down there, underwater, weren't supposed to be. It was just really creepy because you'd just open the door and step on the landing, and then there's just water. You can see the top couple of steps that suggested all the other stuff that was down there. I think since then,

I've always been fascinated and creeped out by the idea of things that are supposed to be above ground submerged. Like ships, when we talked about the Bermuda Triangle, down there in the trench, never to be found. Yeah, that's creepy. Yeah, same thing with floods, man. It doesn't creep me out like that, but I get it. Okay, so Chuck, I take it you are familiar with flooding. I am. Do you remember the one in 94 down in Albany, the Great Flood, the Flint River Flood? No. Oh man, it was all over the news. In Albany, Georgia? Yeah, I don't remember that. There were caskets, like 400 caskets were loosed and were just kind of floating around. They had this weird tendency to congregate toward trees or around trees, so people started lashing under that

because they had to have a court order to even grab the caskets. But apparently it was the second worst cemetery disaster in the United States. Couldn't find it. 94? 1994. Oh, I wasn't Athens at the time. I was not up on news. It was a big thing. I'm surprised, but it was really creepy. You can see pictures of caskets just kind of floating around. Wow. Yeah, they recently found a human skull that they think was part of the remains that was moved by the flood. Cheese. Yeah. It's amazing how out of the news loop I was while I was in college. Yeah. Because it was pre-internet. Yeah. I didn't get the paper when I was in college. Who gets the paper and reads it? I knew people who sold the paper. I didn't have TV. So, yeah, I knew about the class and working at

McSkelly Grill and sleeping late and all of the kinds of things that I can't talk about. That's awesome. I remember the Gulf War that happened. Well, because of that internet that came after your college years, like two decades after your college years, you can see video of the news footage from 1994. So, you're fine. I'll try that. It's like stepping back in time. I will do so. Well, let's talk about flooding, Chuck. First, I guess to understand floods, we need to give a brief primer of the hydrological cycle. Yes, we do. If you ask me. There's been about the same amount of water on earth for a long, long time. Yeah, I thought this was fascinating. Yeah, but it hasn't always been in the same place as we know. No, and it's not the same water necessarily. Right. There's a

constant loss and gain of water. Yeah, every day you lose water, obviously, to the atmosphere. Yeah, where like the solar rays and other cosmic radiation just blasts water vapors into like nothing. You're gone. You're no longer water. Sorry. As that is going on, volcanic activity in the core, or not the core necessarily, but the inner earth is releasing water and it about balances out on a day-to-day basis. But did you know that volcanoes release water? Sure. After I read this. Yeah, we even did a hot volcanoes work podcast and I don't remember talking about it releasing water. I don't either. When water is generated or introduced into the upper earth in the atmosphere, it comes from volcanoes. Thank God. 60% of volcanic gas is water vapor.

So it balances out on a day-to-day basis, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah. Almost as if it's happening that way for a reason. Are you familiar with the anthropic principle? No. What's that? We'll talk about it sometime. Oh, it's not directly relating to this? No, it's about the concept of why everything is so falling and has fallen so perfectly into place. Right. That we are able to notice this and say, wait a minute, it almost seems like we're supposed to be here. Right. And the anthropic principle is like, yeah, and there's like 5 million other worlds out there that didn't happen like that. So we aren't there to say, wow, it's almost like everything fell into place. So we're supposed to be here. Interesting. Yeah. We'll see. You just told me

about it right now. Done. Trick to you. Water can be all around the earth in three different forms, as everyone knows. You have liquids, rivers, oceans, lakes, rain, solids. We've talked about, and this kind of collects a lot of our podcasts in a way, like the clouds, and now we're talking about the Antarctica. Lots of frozen water in that case at the poles, the Antarctica. Or it can be gas, which is water vapor in the air. Yes. And it's all moved around by the wind, thanks to the sun. And remember, I can't remember which podcast we talked about it in, whether it was the sun or clouds or something, but wind is created by the exchange of air. It's warm air is heated at the surface and rises. Yes. Cooler air rushes in to fill that

vacuum. Yeah. There's your wind, pal. Yeah. And then, well, once that warm air rises though, it's also going to get colder and form little droplets of water, which form together to form clouds, which we went over in fluffy little clouds. Right. Yeah. Because the sun heats the ocean surface that evaporates. Like you said, it rises, forms clouds, and then eventually those clouds become pregnant with rain and rain falls down, right? That's right. As the rain falls down, it fills waterways, rivers, streams, that kind of thing. Underground waterways. But for the most part, some of it does go to fill aquifers and that's storage. But the vast majority of it makes its way back to the oceans where the process begins again. And everything is complete in the

circle of life. That's right. The cool thing here is, wind is pretty consistent across the globe. Wherever you live, your weather is pretty consistent. You might think if you live in Atlanta like, oh, that's crazy in December here at 65 degrees. But by and large, if you look at the big picture, your weather systems are pretty consistent on a day-to-day basis. Although, in the case of flooding, anything can happen on any given day to knock things out of whack. Right. So you have a storm comes about a thunderstorm and you're like, wow, that's a pretty bad storm. Because you are capable, your area is capable of experiencing a storm, your area is capable of experiencing a freak storm, like a huge thunderstorm that dumps so much precipitation on the ground in such a short

amount of time that these normal waterways that have been formed to hold the normal amount of water become overwhelmed. The water fills up, spills over the banks and there's your flood. Yeah. And that's the key. What you just said there is these waterways, they form over a great, great period of time. A river doesn't just spring up over the course of a year because there's a lot of rain. It takes like several years. Yeah. It takes a long, long time to sort of get a feel, I guess, of how much rain there is generally. And so this is how big I'm going to be if I'm a river in Georgia. Exactly. This is all I need to be except for the freak occurrence and oh my god, now it's a flood. But then after the flood, it goes right back to where it was before.

It's not, rivers don't tend to plan their size for the worst case scenario. There you go. They're very lazy. That's a great way to say it. Lazy, lazy rivers. So like we said, the most common cause, the one that people are most familiar with, the most common cause of flooding is a large storm that allows an anomalous accumulation of precipitation. Yeah. Rain could be melting ice from a mountain or snow. Yeah. But rain is the one we think about most often. And like you said, because weather patterns are pretty stable over time. In a lot of places, depending on the season, you're going to get anomalous, normal precipitation, right? Like monsoons. Seasonal flooding. Right. So with a monsoon, you have in the winter time, the air

over the land is colder than the air over the ocean. Yes. So the air over the ocean is rising and the air over the land is moving out to fill it up. So that means the wind is blowing out toward the ocean. That's right. In the summer time, the opposite is true. And so the wind is blowing in toward the land and that brings with it the monsoon rains. Yeah. Brings with it water. And this annual monsoon flooding, we talked about it. We didn't call it that because we're not that smart, but in the how the Nile River works. Yeah, exactly. It was, it was and still is a very big part of their, how they thrived over the years was they knew that the Nile would flood each year and extend the water out. And when it waters receded, it left a nice fertile banks

in which to live and plant foods. Right. And remember, we talked about some of the problems from the Aswan Dam and other dams that they built along the Nile to control flooding. Basically say we're going to release this amount of water and go crops year round and people aren't going to lose their houses to the Nile flooding every year. That is actually one of the big causes of flooding to dam breaks. Yeah. Did you see that damn video I sent you? I didn't have a computer. You didn't look, you didn't see it on your, it was flash. It's really neat. I'll look at it later. I can't remember the name of the dam, but it's in Washington state in an October of this year. It had like a controlled demolition and they just blew a hole in the bottom and all of a sudden this

water surge come pouring out and fills this area up and then it starts to recede and you see the water behind the dam to start to go down as the water in front of the dam starts to go up. It's really neat looking. I have to check that out. Yeah. Or if you're from Pennsylvania or a historian, then of course you know about May 31st, 1889, the Johnstown flood and it wasn't just Johnstown, by the way, it's known as the Johnstown flood I think because that was the largest town that it flooded. Yeah. But it was I think 14 miles upstream from Johnstown was the South Fork Dam and it hit a couple of towns on the way, finally hit Johnstown, six to ten inches of rain in 24 hours to the tune of a 60 foot wall of water going 40 miles per hour. Wow. Rushed through town,

20 million tons, not gallons, 20 million tons of water and it was the first big disaster relief effort by the Red Cross. Oh really? Yeah. I got a number of 2,209 deaths, 17 million in damages which would be over $400 million today. Wow. Like close to a half a billion in damages. Wow. And Springsteen fans might remember that from the song Highway Patrolman. He sings about the Johnstown flood. Really? Yeah. That guy. Nice dude. He's a folk hero, isn't he? He's all over it. We also remember we talked about in the Human Caused Earthquakes episode, The Viant Dam. Oh yeah. In Italy, a landslide caused a wave to go over the dam and killed 2,000 people. It seems to be the number when a dam breaks or for each 2,000 people die. You know what I think is cool

is after having done like 400 plus shows, like our world is starting to narrow a bit. Yeah. You know what's really crazy? What? As we've already had this discussion and now we've come back to having it again. Really? That's really narrow. Well, I just think it's cool when you do a podcast on flooding and it's also one about the Nile and clouds and volcanoes and I mean, we're still a long way from covering the sun. We're a long way from covering everything, but our worldview is narrowing in a good way. And now we're like men and knights. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs.

They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Land plays a big part, because you can have a lot of rain, but depending on what kind of land it's falling on, it's going to affect how much it floods if it floods at all. Like the soil in the middle of a forest is going to really soak up a lot of water. Hard clay or rock or obviously

concrete and asphalt aren't going to soak up much, if anything, so that's going to lend itself to flooding. Yeah, and agricultural lands, croplands that have been tilled, they're more prone to flooding than woodlands. Do you want to know why? Yeah, why? I was wondering. You got that? We're about to circle right back again, buddy. Two earthworms. That's exactly why. That's why woodlands don't flood like farmland. Because there's more little passageways from earthworms? Yes, and if you till cropland, if you till the land, it has a deleterious effect on the earthworm population. Are you still saying that word like that?

Yes. The earthworm population in the area, they basically leave, they take off, or else they're cut in a bunch of pieces. So that's why. It does have a very deleterious effect. Deleterious. Deleterious. Is it species? No, I was wrong on that one. You got called out big time. It's species. It's deleterious. It's not deleterious. Say, talk about species. Species. I was wrong on species because there are two acceptable ways of saying that. No, there's a right way, species. No, no, no. If you look it up, it says species or species. I can't say anything. I can't even keep track of the difference between I and me.

Concrete and asphalt, which I mentioned, Josh. Here in the western world, there's a lot of that going on. If you go to a city like LA, which I lived in, as you know, they have these concrete flood relief channels built in. Yeah, you don't even have to go to LA. You can travel there via the movie Greece. Oh, like the LA River Basin? Is that what that is? Yeah. Yeah, that is in T2. It's in the movie Them. And where they have the car race. They call it the LA River, which is kind of funny. Yeah. Before they paved it with concrete, they used it for the canoe scenes in a lot of the Tarzan movies in the 30s. It's all just smoke and mirrors. Yes, it is. Mash was in Malibu for God's sake.

Levies, Josh, are another reason it can flood, as we all saw with the disaster with Katrina in New Orleans when the levee breaks, as Robert Plant said. Got no place to stay. No, you don't. And do you remember earlier this year, when they purposely opened the Morganza spillway? Yeah. Basically, they sacrificed some local cropland for a lot more downriver. Yeah. And that's one of the points in this. Like the reverse of the thinking, usually, or how it has been historically. Well, that's the point they make about all levees, though, is generally they're great for that area, but there's generally, there's going to be a problem on down the line at some point.

Well, the same thing with concrete storm basins. It's the same. You're basically just saying, all right, let's get the water through here. And then when the tax base runs out at your county line, you handle it. Yeah. And here's your flood county beneath us. Well, what I couldn't find about the Morganza spillway was the effect. I saw like 100 articles on the fact that they're going to open it up. And then the only article I found post releasing, like I think it was the first time since 1973, they opened up a lot of these gates was like a week after they said, well, it doesn't look like it's going to be as bad as they thought. And that's all I found. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it was a huge cluster that was on the Army

Corps of Engineers. They created an incorrect estimate and it really screwed up a lot more land than they thought. Oh, really? If it's the same one I'm thinking of. It was this year, last year? Yeah, it was spring when the rivers were rising. And they said, we can't demonstrate New Orleans again. So we're going to open up a lot of these gates. Like up in like Missouri or something, right? No, no, no. It was in Louisiana. Okay. Well, there was one in Missouri where they let this levee loose and flooded some cropland and it ended up like screwing things up all the way down and over to like Tennessee. Wow. I can't remember. So I guess those are two different stories. So if you live in Louisiana, I'd like to know the effect because I know they said it wasn't as

bad as they thought, but I couldn't really get a pinpoint of the damage. And I want to know what happened in Missouri. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about the coastline. Yeah. And we didn't mention, by the way, hurricanes too. Yeah, tsunamis. Yeah, tsunamis, hurricanes, big problems as far as creating flood conditions. That's right. But yeah, the coastline, you're talking about levees and dams, they fall into manmade ways of diverting water to other people's problems. Yeah. And we've figured out ways of, I guess, protecting our beautiful coastlines from Mother Nature. That's building walls, basically, sea walls. It's like, have your worst waves, you're not going to erode this beach. But the problem is, is the whole process of erosion is part of creating and keeping beaches healthy.

Yeah. And beautiful. Yes. I remember I used to go to Hunting Island, South Carolina when I was a kid. And my mom went not too long ago and she said that they have actually, like the whole coastline is different now from when I was a kid. They had to move a lighthouse inland because it had eroded so much. But they just, you know, they let it happen because it is a natural part of beaches and it's a natural like oceans, beaches, rivers, they're all dynamic. Right, exactly. You know, they're all going to move earth and water. And that's just the way it's supposed to be. And when humans step in to try and prevent that, bad things can happen. Well, and we try to prevent it because we tend to settle near water. It's easy transportation. It puts living on the beaches nice.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, even with the river too, it's like there's your cropland. Yeah. There's your easy access to irrigation, easy transportation, food, water, obviously. So we need to live near water. And then when these natural processes happen and takes our houses away, we're like, okay, let's figure out how to how to solve this. And sometimes the solution is just kind of exacerbates the problem. That's right. Or creates a new one. Yeah. So we just got to figure things out. I think we're working on it. Okay. This is one really cool part. I thought was, you always see how, you know, a flood, floodwaters will wash a car away or something. Yeah. And it doesn't even look like that much water. Yeah. And you think, you know, I drew my, I drive my truck

like through a river in the North Georgia mountains. And you just plow right through it. Yeah. And that's like twice as deep and really rushing river. You say take that nature. Yeah. Take that nature. But the difference here is, I thought this is really interesting is, is water, what water wants to do is level itself out. So when you've got a lot of water from a flood in a place where there's previously no water at all, it's going to want to find its level as soon as possible by rushing really hard. So it's just going to be a lot more force than the steady stream of a river. Yeah. It's really as easy as that. That's all there is to it. So like a couple of feet of water can wash a car away. Two feet. Two feet of water in a flood condition, where it's rushing from one,

from a higher, higher level to a lower level, balanced out, can wash a car away. That's nutty. And six inches under those conditions can knock a human off his or her feet. And that's how people die in a flood. Well, I think half, half of the deaths associated with most floods are from people trying to forward a rushing, um, uh, water in their car, spillway in their car. Yeah. That's the problem because you get carried out and you're in your car and you're trapped and that's that. That's sad. It's very sad. Uh, flash flooding, the most dangerous of all floods. Yeah. This jogged my memory when it was talking about, um, Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado. I think we might have hit on that at some point because it jogged my memory too. You want to talk about it? Well, yeah,

in 1976, July 31st, Colorado was celebrating its centennial and at about five or six o'clock it started rain and it was a really weird thunderstorm that didn't move. It just planted itself for four hours over, uh, Big Thompson Canyon, rain 12 inches in four hours. And that's how much the area gets in a year usually. I mean, yeah, that's crazy in four hours. And, uh, a 20 foot high, uh, rush of river going about 14 miles an hour, uh, by nine PM washed through the canyon and it was so like out of nowhere, which is what a flash flood is. It's not like, Hey, you know, with the Johnstown flood, they had warnings, even though people didn't heed them. Right. And most of the times, you know, a flood's coming. But with the flash flood, they were just like trapped. Plus there,

there also just happened to be thousands of campers down there celebrating the centennial of Colorado. It was, well, the perfect storm. But the river that feeds the canyon normally, Big Thompson River, um, is apparently normally pretty slow moving. The old big city. But because of this flash flood, it was dumping 233,000 gallons, 882,000 liters of water into the canyon per second per second. So that's a lot. So basically a flash flood is like a flood, but it's even more concentrated and the water is moving even more violently. That's crazy. Uh, I got the number between 139 to 145 dead. Five were never seen again. 400 cars, 420 houses and 40 million, which would be about 150 million today. And interestingly, three years ago, this one guy

was found alive in Oklahoma that they thought died. He got, he left town that morning and like didn't tell people. And I think they were, that he came up in records and he was like, no, I'm, I'm out here in Oklahoma. I'm, I'm just fine. I didn't, he didn't even realize that he was on the death list. Weird. Yeah. Well, but they still room every July 31st. They still pay remembrance, obviously in Colorado. Good for them. Yeah. Um, there's also, I mean, you think about cars being washed away and people being knocked off their feet and being flooded in canyons, but there's also a lot of problems with flooding after the fact. Sure. Like a flood brings with it a lot of silt and mud and nastiness sewage sewage. And, um, when the floodwaters recede

once again, um, all that stuff sticks around. Yeah. Apparently Florence, Italy suffered a pretty big flood on the, um, Arno River. Right. Yeah. 1966 and Florence, of course, is one of the great repositories of Renaissance art. And a lot of the repositories in that repository were basements and for stories and that stuff got flooded. And apparently they got a lot of the stuff back to at least good quality. A lot of it, but they were, I looked up, um, there were 600,000 tons of mud and sewage. Oh my God. After they left, 14,000 works of art and a hunt, um, sorry, three to four million books and manuscripts and records. And I don't know how many out of the 14,000 were restored, but I bet it wasn't 13,500. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Because a lot of

this stuff was completely destroyed. That's, that's awful. Yeah. It's very sad. At least invading hordes didn't set in on fire on purpose. Yeah. Also killed about 100 people. Yeah. Which you always hear about the artwork. Like I had to really research to find the amount of deaths. Really? Yeah. Well, not that much research, but a few extra clicks. Um, and then diseases is another big problem too. You said sewage chemicals. Yeah. Um, the deceased, all of this is mixed together and Albany. That probably was not a fun soup. No. So if you are, uh, if your area is flooded, you want to basically boil any water that you're going to drink or drink, bottle water, um, get one of those one, uh, air, water manufacturers that sucks the water vapor out of

the ambient air and converts it to bottled water. Oh yeah. Did you hear about the netty pot deaths recently? No. These two people in Louisiana died and they believe it was from using the netty pot, which I use on a daily basis. And it got, they got a brain eating amoeba. Gross. Into their nasal passage from using contaminated water to netty with. And my friend, you know, I've been netting for like six years every day. And my friend was like, you about that? Oh, do that. Why are you? I was like, come on, dude. Did your friend know that he sounds like that when you say when you know, I was, I was aping him. He sounded much more intelligent than that. Okay. But I'm not going to stop netting. Well, you have to boil the water at least do yourself that favor. I'm not

going to do that. Chuck brain eating amoeba would not look good on you. I'll take my chances. All right. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy, number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops,

are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. On the podcast, Hey, dude, the nineties called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and

nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey, dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I guess that's it. I got nothing else. I got nothing else. You want to call out for anything in particular? Yeah, sure. If you live

in big Canaan or or Johnstown or any story. Yeah, I bet you got some some personal anecdote. Yeah, I'm a family member man. Yeah, you can. Oh, wait, we haven't done Listener Mail yet, man. We're about to jump the gun. Oh, we thought you're about doing that. I was about to like give our email address. Well, if you want to learn more about floods, you can type in floods in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And I said search bar so it's Chuck's turn for Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this request from Adam to save birds before the bull request of what request from Adam to help save birds before the bull. Okay, he has he has a thing going on and it ends at this bull. I got you. So we want to get it out. I come to humbly beg a favor guys.

He said he could apply us with beer if his loyalty is not sufficient. In this case, it is sufficient. I don't know. Beer can be mailed. My NGO's fundraiser needs a plug. We are the Alamos Wildlands Alliance and the research director there and we're trying to create a reserve in a rare habitat. We also do research and education in a remote part of northwest Mexico. We run a biological field station called the Navopatia Field Station. You can check us out on Facebook. And our website is www.alamoswildlands.org. That is A-L-A-M-O-S wildlands.org. And it's a U.S.-based nonprofit. It's very small. Run by volunteers, mostly he says. Run by birds. Run by birds. And for the second in a row, they're doing a fundraiser called the birdathon. And it's like

a walkathon, but instead of miles walked, people get pledges for the amount of bird species they see in a given day. My team had 163 last year. Wow. One day. It's pretty good. It is a fun way to raise money for conservation in a place that is unique and rare. It runs from January 30th to February 5th. We often have a super bird Saturday when most people go out the day before the bull. It's a football game played here in the United States. American football, not European football. Not soccer. Or the rest of the world football. Yes. More teams are always welcome. We have at least eight now, though some have yet to register. And anyone can start their own team or just donate. It's really easy and it's on our website. The money goes to a good cause, is text

deductible. And here's something sad, Josh. The environment and animals only get about 2% of charitable giving worldwide. I have to be honest. I'm surprised that the environment and animals, they says. Yeah. So humans get the other 98%. Which, you know, charitable giving is good, no matter what, but forget about our free creatures. That is pretty low. Attached are some pictures of my team, the lucha doors. We wear masks and capes while birding. So kind of ties in nicely. Totally. With the podcast we did on Mexican Red Sea. Yes. Which was not this one. Can we post that picture? I don't know. I'll check. Okay. And then he is his wife's team. It's called the boobies named after the blue-footed booby, a common bird that we have down here.

Regardless, guys, thanks to both of you for helping to make being smart cool again. So please go check out www.alamoswildlands.org and sign up and sponsor someone for this bird-a-thon Superbird Saturday. Get a team together. Help these guys out. That's awesome. Tweet, tweet. Did you mention the s bowl? Did you use the actual name? Because I think we can get in trouble for that. We're saying s bowl. I don't think you should say it. Really? Yeah. We'll find out. How can we get in trouble? Like apparently they actively sue people who use that word. Like even mentioning it. Like remember the Simpsons? They never mentioned where they were going when they went to that huge football game in Dolly Parton, the episode that Dolly Parton was on. Now I have the half time of my

life. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. All right. So we can just beep that out and people will be like small. What's that? Right. Exactly. Nice. Okay. Well, if you have an NGO that you think we'd like to plug, we're happy to do that from time to time. You can tweet to us, especially if it's a bird NGO at SYSK podcast. You can send us some sort of message on Facebook at Facebook.com. And you can send us an email. Remember now to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. Adios. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The HowStuffWorks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the

reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. In 1967, Joseph Stalin's only daughter flees Russia for her new home, America. Hello to everybody. I am very happy to be here. That story alone is worthy of a podcast,

but Svetlana Svetlana is about what comes next. And it's the craziest story I've ever heard. It has KGB agents, a Frank Lloyd Wright commune, weird sex stuff, three Olgas, two Svetlanas and one neurotic gay playwright. That's me. Listen to Svetlana Svetlana, January 30th on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.