Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 125: The Love Canal

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that says "15 miles to the Love Canal" Love Canal, yeah, yeah I'm headin' down the Atlanta highway Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

here's the fucking thing right here's the thing I you may be asking wow this still isn't the Norfolk Southern derailment episode which I say shut the hell up we recorded one but everything we recorded at the time is already out of date so we're not releasing that stop fucking asking us this is the report the problem is that like in particular Justin knows too much about this and is cursed by knowing yeah I see the man who knew too much you got to see the bras cut yeah it's just super imposed on the entire movie yes we did we did record an episode on East Palestine but by the time it was finished everything we said was out of date or wrong I mean you know so we scrapped that one that's why we didn't record we didn't

release very much in February I apologize for that we shouldn't have even tried it but we did and then yeah we were cursed for our hubris it ended up being like free therapy for you though like I hope you kind of like got some of the like feelings out of your system at that moment I would get what gave me therapy was when legislators stopped talking about electromagnetic pneumatic brakes or electronic pneumatic brakes because I was like I had visions in my head of repeating the positive train control mandate and just like you know it'd be uneconomical watching fucking NJT borrow toasters from SEPTA to meet requirements or or like watching like most hazmat becoming uneconomical to ship

by rail and there's like 17 trucks full of vinyl chloride piling up on I-80 you know outside of I-80 yeah so that's a different story I will say that I have a fun aside which is that I so I am now in therapy once a week it turns out it does work sorry so annoying that it works to yeah I think that a lot of my previous experiences because I wasn't putting in a good faith effort but I was also 17 and addicted to drugs so shut up I I do I have mentioned Ross a couple times to my therapist is like so what do you do for work and I'm like all right listen this is podcast right he's also my best friend and also kind of my boss and he's like that sounds complex and he's like fascinated by Ross so if you're

listening professionally yeah this is this is this is a co-op system I'm not your boss yeah you're kind of my boss we all have an equal share in this yeah well I I control the the way the PayPal is distributed so I guess I was about to say so yeah you have the power of the purse here yeah yes uh grand what do they call it in the uh you know X checker yeah you're an X checker you're a challenger of the X checker you don't use that word yeah well it's very stupid what well we all need to keep this in check by having a secret way we could fuck each other over I'm not sure what mine is I like what's the card I can play here I I guess I could like accuse you of being transphobic and get you cancelled like what you could do to be a Ross

yeah there's tons of stuff that's probably noticeable it's not public oh yeah I feel loads I'm even sure that's true yeah I don't think that's true I would have to make it up and they're like you know I'm I don't think I'm vicious enough to do that so I'm not sure there's a lot of bad stuff we've done in our personal lives nothing criminal but certainly stupid and bad yeah I'm not I make it probably borders on criminal but they are they are harmless crimes I make it a policy not to ask you what the number and the speedometer was in any story you tell me about driving anywhere and that's a new speed record in the United States by the way I'm not gonna say that number on air I think we need to go back to the Liam's van thing and we

need to like get you another van but we painted up like one of Alex Roy's fucking cars was like you know fucking Felice intercepted on the side it's like the the A-Team van so I I I have been looking in the in the sort of the long term three to four years plan to sell the GTI um and and finally go back to full-size van life uh much to cringe like oh you should like sell you the car like we can get like a Toyota RAV4 Prime together I'm like nah something's got to think like I gotta do something stupid like yeah you gotta get on the car and that's reliable or safe no it has to be a nugget and then like the nugget has to be a van you know also this is a problem with me I started watching this Australian guy who like yeah yeah yeah yeah I still highly

recommend his channel all of his channels yeah and so I you know you watch enough of that you start calling things nuggets it's uh reprehensible of me oh I say big stinky audio now in just casual conversation I'm like yeah big stinky bass and Corinne's like I don't understand why you have six pairs of headphones that is just like shut the fuck up I need them for different applications uh you don't understand the textures as much as I do yeah it's bluetooth audio don't worry it all sounds like it comes through a string through a through a can attached to a string what are we here for again I want that shit speaking of Australia we're here in love canal speaking of Australia there is a podcast called Bunta Vista of which some bonus episodes are called the Theo

files where they talk about random stuff and one day I was listening to it and they were talking about the love canal and I was like that's our territory you can't talk about that that's our thing this is Bunta Vista social club you are hereby issued with a cease and desist order we don't we don't come to your house uh today what do you see with the business social club that the Cuban band yeah that's what's the reference to so that's the full name I'm calling it by its full name like I'm calling the podcast indoors uh uh yes it's actually the only podcast other than ours I own merchandise for you are a kill bill is virtue a fucking liar do we oh yeah yeah I don't I have a blinds

with my donkey sticker I have a big I have like all of the tf and kjb shirt I have all of that I don't I don't even have all of our own merch you know what I don't have what I don't have is a well there's your problem shut from the fucking live show because you have not mailed it to me oh see the problem is that I the problem is that I wiped my ass with it all right wash it and mail it to me I will not be washing it I will be labeling it as hazmat and sending it on its way speaking of hazmat what do you see in front of you it's bad is a open field and some nasty water uh today we're going to talk about this is what Boston hot dogs are served in folks today we're going to talk about one of America's most famous chemical disasters the love canal but first we have to do the goddamn news

oh folks this one's bad huh yeah so there was a big train crash in Greece and all of field meet if you will uh because two trains just wrecked right into each other uh at high speed yeah like head on on on the same track apparently and just uh it is killed like what like two three dozen people we're up to a 57 I believe Jesus man I get fucking those those numbers going up never makes me feel good you know no so by my understanding here is that um this double track line was single track for track maintenance um and there was sort of this uh the signaling system in Greece does not work very well so there's this culture of you know the station master saying ah yeah that signal is red because it's broken just go ahead and they went ahead and it turned out the

signal was not broken there was a freight train approaching in the opposite direction so these trains crashed head on at very high speed not a great situation it was all full of kids as well or not kids like 18 19 year olds so you know this is a pretty ugly situation overall uh yeah I I I was reading it just not a great not a great a few weeks to be a train guy uh yeah obviously this just sucks uh north southern put another one on the ground sort of waiting for another sunset limited or uh keystone was it the keystone or northeast that derailed in uh Kensington and just fucked up a bunch of people I was a northeast regional yeah I don't know just ship feels very grim right but yeah it's uh a lot of uh like just deferred maintenance causing very preventable

problems right yeah I mean if you look at the uh like carriage on the left there that's on fire which it shouldn't be uh apparently that was like that was the first carriage in that like hit this freight train um this is absolutely horrific picture oh yeah it's uh they they are having to identify bodies from dental records which you know that's just because everyone just got incinerated does remind me of uh a tweet because now this the news is tweet review and whenever I see anything now I just think of a funny tweet that I read like five years ago which is my dentists my dentist can do it all from a simple cleaning to identifying my child remains because the real thing the real thing here is that we can do a sort of like transit broken window theory here and say that you know

the real cause of this calamity began when they led it and they started letting people like graffiti on the side of the trains um and that you know sort of spiraled out of control until we got here and it killed like 3000 people oh I see you're on some of the facebook uh railfan communities yeah that's right yeah the interesting thing is the uh Greek railways were taken over by um the italian state railways who you know also allow a lot of graffiti on their trains but they don't have high speed head-on collisions um one of the sort of classic modes of rail ownership is sort of owned by someone else's nationalized railway that's called competition uh yeah I don't like that one of the more bizarre things about how how railways have been privatized in europe is that they just get

taken over by the state operators of other countries which have not privatized their railways even the united states um a lot of the operations of commuter railroads are run by a company called kialis which is just uh sncf from uh france uh you know so yeah so it's uh we will ultimately all be controlled by french or italians um who will it seems kill all of us uh apparently except in italy yeah well yeah this is a punishment for not being french or italian is to surely be killed gotta look after your own first um yeah so this is this is a very ugly wreck which you know again was caused by something very preventable uh speaking of which in other news

they did it again yeah it's just happening again they put another train on the ground in springfield ohio um this one was not hazmat it was not as hazardous material as it was in east palestine um but it was very it it was caught on video um just the derailment occurring and it's embarrassing um but i think maybe the worst aspect of this um there were four tank cars involved in this derailment two of them were carrying well they were all empty two of them had residual chemicals which are uh precursor to uh polyethylene the other two had diesel exhaust fluid um and diesel exhaust fluid is a fluid you add to certain you know high efficiency high performance diesel engines to reduce the amount of co2 they produce and what it is is

35 percent uh solution of urea uh it's p yeah it's piss it's yeah it's what uh Mercedes uses in the uh the blue tech engines as well yes so darfix southern just dumped among other things two cars of dried piss on to the ground and i i am you know i i know it's not hazmat it's not dangerous but it's insulting um norfolk southern is here shaming the world of calvin pissing on the united states the state of ohio in particular yeah blew it up and we pissed on it hey at least this one's not as much on the ground like visually as the previous one was uh you know i could have gotten a better picture of this because there were quite a lot of cars on the ground norfolk southern this is just uh i one of these steel coil cars caused the derailment

do we know anything about like how or why are we just attributing it to like haunts i don't know what caused this derailment i don't think that information is out yet it was not clear to me from the video what caused it um you know so i i i have no idea to be honest this could have been a lot of things if it was if it was another hot box i wouldn't be surprised but you know who knows just to say yeah beautiful so yeah norfolk southern taking the piss yeah all over ohio all all they have to do is get bought out by uh s ncf or like the italians you know whoever right and everything will be fine yes exactly we we you put s ncf in charge and then we get those stylish electric locomotives and then probably

some exotic other series of failures um no it'd be db shanker uh why not everything else is i think they have a stake in like uh genesee in wyoming now i'm not sure don't quote me on that in other news oh it's bad folks you know we've uh we've unfortunately we've had to cancel our much anticipated appearance of the grand ol apri uh tennessee is back on their bullshit yes yeah it's illegal to be trans in tennessee so it's illegal to be trans it's illegal to like cross dress in a theatrical production you can't stage a couple of tennessee williams plays legally in tennessee at the moment um yeah fucking morons yeah i know people the south are good people by and large but

your legislators are not they should be taken out and beaten with sticks yeah for sure i mean they're they're embarrassments right to like normal people in in like the south but uh this is like one of about five hundred that's not even exaggeration about five hundred so like different anti trans or like anti drag bills um a few of which have the potential to pass like a lot of which don't like this is like unambiguously like the bad thing happening irrespective of what sort of like legal challenges follow or however it's supposed to be implemented or whatever but equally i think you should sort of be a bit judicious about like especially if you are trans who you read about this i think you should be careful not to sort of like absorb all of the shit from accounts that just

track all of these every single one the ones that like have no chance of passing to and feel like this is sort of like a ubiquitous thing and like you know the fucking state cops or whatever are gonna kick your door in the next day because probably not at least not necessarily it is alarming it's concerning it's very bad there's a lot of other bad shit happening um i feel comfortable calling it an attempt at genocide uh but equally it's not ubiquitous and there is like resistance to this in places that like matter and like will affect it um and yeah you know the other thing is state legislators are all insane people um so you know these bills could get randomly passed anywhere but they could also you know uh someone might just shoot someone to avoid getting the

thing passed because again state legislators all insane people yeah there's no sane state legislator out there um you know some of them are on our side though yeah it's it's cool that like this is um you know what the republicans are choosing to do like a full court press on like nationwide is uh like transphobia humanization yeah yeah exactly and like i don't know i i think that's the kind of thing that loses them elections nationally if not at a state level also but that's sort of cold comfort um i don't do anything to distract people from the fact that they aren't doing anything right yeah and it's and again as we've said uh don't blink this one dev i these people have names and addresses good luck to you sure yeah and you can write to them you can write

them a nice letter um yeah and then you and you can include something in that letter to make them have a nice time you could yeah you have a deeply worded thoughts and feelings you could send them a a nice uh present for friends day yeah yeah you've got to make sure your local legislators have a nice time yeah yeah i guess i don't really know what to say to trans people because like every trans person i know i'm not not just in the us is like extremely so like has a high level of baseline anxiety about this and for good reason um so me scolding you about not following fucking alexandra carbio or like fucking erin reid about this is is only one part of it the greatest part of it is like me talking to cis people and this is like yeah you don't have to

like fucking check in because that can be exhausting on its own but just like be aware of the fact that this is like some heavy shit and like you know any sort of like resistance allyship comradeship along these lines is like closely appreciated that's what we're here for buddy hi yeah i mean you know i died like perfectly rational to have anxiety about it you know i'm waiting for some uh i don't know wyoming or somewhere to pass a bill that labels us sex offenders for having a youtube show um yeah well i mean listen we've gotten to one out of 50 states where it's illegal to do a live show um yeah i look forward to that number going up you know i think but but but but but but the one out of the 50 is probably one of the places where it'd be most fun to do

it is the issue that's true yeah i imagine our nashville show every single one of us covered in rhinestones yeah the thing is the nashville's nashville's getting too gentrified now and that's part of the reason why it's swinging further right is that like a long article on like isa.com about this in part like yeah all of the stuff that made nashville famous like country music or like meet and threes and shit like that is now being pushed out by like fun nashville activities from people who like you know work in tech and moved from williamsburg or moved from like the bay area or whatever fun national activities are getting absolutely fucking smoked on broadway and just another another axe throwing bar no fun nashville activities like having a hot

chicken sandwich that isn't hot yeah like oh my god getting wasted at the vanderbilt uh arboretum yes yeah so yeah nashville sort of uh i fear is becoming like a theme park version of itself i was always has that way i guess and like we always uh we always do a well we can't do a gatlenberg show that's the other thing sort it out tennessee brand branson missouri uh while we still can you know i was about to say yeah yeah we're in between yakoff and like gallagher come out smash a bunch of watermelons with a sledgehammer gallagher dead now um that's a great question i don't know our message to the people of tennessee legalize our show correct this injustice we will come to gatlenberg

yeah absolutely we are willing to like demonstrate anything that the people of tennessee the good people of tennessee need from us including leigh siege to dollywood yes including leigh i think we need to lay siege to dollywood i think dollywood is firmly in our camp i think dollywood is the fucking headquarters this shit uh and we expand out from there you know yes and then we robbed you know swift house got it yeah oh my god speaking of nashville becoming an aesthetic remember she used to be a country musician everyone she is from fucking redding pennsylvania remember when you met her in a walmart yeah why miss it yeah you keep meeting people in walmart do you mean john fetterman on a walmart too no i met john fetterman uh at the hip city veg

oh okay well i met claud jerry and i you know if we should have put some news in about john fetterman that's because that's fucking sad too like i'm proud of i'm proud of our large boy for getting the help oh yeah 100 and uh if you think that that means he shouldn't be serving uh eat the shit out of my ass yeah you know the other thing is he's a he's a fucking senator he he has five years to live this down no one's gonna remember this and like i don't know 2050 or whenever that is the other thing about the other thing about uh just real quick uh us smokeless tobacco is headquartered in nashville uh so if y'all could fucking get it together that'd be great i'd like to make the pilgrimage all right i think that was the goddamn news missed you guys

okay so before we talk about the love canal we have to ask what is niagra false i got this one all right so let let me let me do this house please you're 19 years old you're with your parents and your friend on a trip home from toronto ontario canada because you were visiting the university of toronto you're 18 whatever the fuck you were visiting york university and uft uh two schools you do not even bother applying to because you will not get into either uh your dad uh really wants to take you to niagra falls a place you've been a million times because your dad is obsessed with hydropower all right you then go to niagra falls and your dad drives the wrong way down the one-way bus lane nearly killing you and the entire party in your

car he is then blocked by a bus throws his 2000 Jeep Cherokee into reverse nearly kills an elderly woman and her grandchildren and then says i don't understand what the big deal is about and then you get out of the car and look at the water and then maybe you go on made of the mist and go to the terrible casino they have there and they and then maybe you buy a five pound Hershey bar because you're a little stressed and maybe you eat the whole thing in the backseat of your dad's 2000 Jeep on the way home wow really painted a picture for me thank you beautiful fresh anderson strikes oh yeah yeah i'll tell that story on the podcast but uh stencil that mess side of the fucking like van you know belongs on like an f-35 cockpit but like my answer is going to be

niagra falls is the most romantic vacation destination in an america where international travel is not yet commonplace you watch movies from the 50s or 60s and they have like newlyweds and shittin them they are going on their honeymoon to niagra falls that's like the horniest place boomers could imagine and i don't know why it's just gushing we hadn't discovered the west yet yeah yeah but you like you couldn't fly anywhere really so you just like keep going i'll be right back someone's at my door sorry fine i'm bringing my fucking doorbell i think i think niagra falls is nice i enjoy i enjoy going there i've never been i'd like to uh well you know when we when we when the uh when when we go to visit the race car team you know yeah just just along this like i

guess even if michigan like decides to like pass an anti transfer we can look at it from the canadian side like the less impressive side it's new york uh it's new york okay cool word i mean new york's like swinging rightwards thanks to the sort of crystal magic of eric adams having a sort of counterproductive effect um i i swinging right words but i don't think it'll swing rightwards in that way i think you got enough you got enough uh you know just sort of uh how do i describe this like a led weight of progressivism to counterbalance everything else you know there's people trying to bring it right but i don't think they're gonna do anything um yeah i mean like new york republicans are weird though too because like i mean trump for one thing and a bunch of guys like

him but then also like weird upstate guys and yeah no it's it's it's strange it's a strange state um but love to visit one day um but yeah so uh Niagara Falls um Niagara Falls it's horny boomer destination yes it's got uh it's got um we just proceed with the uh the the podcast here it's got yeah i think so 167 feet of elevation change between lake eerie and lake ontario which is a good thing and a bad huge huge sort of watershed that just dumps straight over like cliffs and like has been eroding those cliffs back for the past however many thousands of years yeah you got the you got the two falls you got the canadian and american falls

which one is do we know which one's which i think the canadian one's the one on the left it looks like dog shit and the american one's the cool one on the right no the canadian falls with the horseshoe falls oh okay fuck okay well you know i apologize to the the nation of canada for impugning the the forms i gotta check the border here um you know because the US canadian border is fucking weird as hell too um oh yeah yes the american falls are actually in america okay because i was uh i was confused when i was looking at it earlier and i was like wait the american falls are in canada no they're in america um what else about Niagara Falls oh yeah you could like die going over these in a barrel if you wanted for a long time or sometimes you live yeah very occasionally

um a guy tightrope walked over them at one point or so it was a delivery for the wrong fucking house oh my god so uh yeah we were talking about how america like Niagara Falls is a repository to a large amount of like american bullshit yeah uh tightrope walkers uh guys in barrels um the suspension bridge which no longer exists there's a really cool the rock that fell in uh although i think that was on the canadian side uh there's a sick whirlpool uh Niagara on the lake is a really cute little tourist trap that i've loved since i was a kid i hear that it's got a microclimate that makes it very good for wines yes uh absolutely uh incredible uh ice wine country up here too i heard that from a canadian guy yeah

he does podcasts so that's a friend of the part royally and my boss at trashy itcha yes um so this is a good and bad thing having this big elevation drop we'll stop we'll start with why it's a bad thing which is it's bad for shipping right yeah it turns out to be 168 foot freefall is is bad for cargo you can't put like a grain carrier over this you know no especially if you want to go up uh that that's even harder we've got like a sort of a 400 mile long system of locks you know yeah so you know it's really easy to ship a whole bunch of stuff on the great lakes because they're they're uh you know these big freshwater lakes and that

means you can build a ship and it lasts forever that tells the evidence that's gerald yeah wow pour one out i mean it's still there it's it's like uh like the thing about plane crashes you know no one's ever left one up there yeah yeah exactly the fresh water shipping is interesting because a boat will last like a hundred years easily um so you know your solution here is you know if you want to go between two different lakes that are at different elevations you need some canals right um and there's several canals in the region by the late 1800s right the big one was the eerie canal that went from buffalo to new york city it's still an operation in the late 1800s it's actually still an operation

today there's a very small amount of commercial shipping on it but a lot of that a lot of that traffic was being taken by railroads but your inter lake shipping was being facilitated by the welland canal in our case the third welland canal and that had 26 locks which were 45 feet wide and 270 feet long and that allowed ships of a fairly respectable size for the day and uh to pass through and those were much larger than any ocean going ships that could potentially come up the st laurence river so you know the inter lake shipping was very much a thing in the late the 1800s which is you know sort of the period we're going to be talking about for sure is this it here the the welland canal this is the fourth welland canal

which was built in 1930s and that one is still out in operation today cool my lanka oh yeah i got a bunch of a bunch of big locks put your big ships on there you know um but this elevation change is also a good thing because you can extract energy from water flowing downhill what kind of like mount part most monastery built into the side of a mountain shit is this hey how much you stopped oh okay i don't remember yeah this is a huge magnificent yeah yeah it's a bunch of industry uh that was built out of the side of the night yeah this is built out of the side of the niagra escarpment and they diverted water from the falls used it to power water uh water wheels and turbines and stuff then discharged it back in the river right so

niagra factory his own hydroelectric power station yes yes so niagra falls with this huge source of like free energy for industry in you know the late 19th century lots of people located their factories there because it was cheap and it was very efficient and uh you know so this is how niagra falls becomes this early center of in industry as much as it was a tourist destination i i have kind of a stupid question uh wouldn't know the answer i is proximity to both the united states and canada advantageous at this time i mean i have to assume it is like is that like a reason for its development or it's just like oh big fall go boom that toronto is right there yeah so you know you've got a you know that that's a big city

but i think the free energy is really the uh the kind of kick starter the big kick starter here yeah i just i just really love this like this photo i want to make it sort of like beautiful little diorama of it you know oh yeah it's be nice on a model railroad or something you know yeah no one does like model canals which is a shame i think you do sort of a rain gutter regatta yeah so there was this guy named william t love right uh oh so and he is some guy who made a lot of money off of railroad investment i one of the problems with this guy is we don't actually know a lot about him um well like sort of uh we have sort

of a deflation problem here a deflationary problem in that like back in the 1890s or whatever there were like a million like guys and now there's only like two or three guys yeah i that that that is true you know back back in the 1800s it was like you know you you could become a millionaire by like with like $50 you can't do that anymore no and everybody was like running like schemes and angles and shit whereas like now only a fraction of people are doing that yeah i'm doing a scheme or i'm doing uh what's another bunkham hockham things of this nature yes exactly snake oil yeah so he's sort of this music man type character right boy yeah he comes in he talks a big talk and then he leaves um this is about 1890 um he wants to build just north of the city of

Niagara falls which is a cross border city um he wants to build what he's gonna call model city new york right wow that's a new town what a catchy title a new town yes um so this is gonna be your ideal city built north of the town i already circled this i don't know why i circled it again um emphasis you know this is gonna be wrong syllable sorry it's gonna be built for two million people it's gonna have two what yeah it's gonna have parks it's gonna have high quality housing it's gonna have a rational street grid it's gonna have good sanitation it's gonna have high tech factories he's trying to build he's trying to build neom right no this is the this is the america this is the american neom like trump said he's gonna do american neom so he's bringing it back

yeah he's bringing it back yeah mm-hmm yeah and in order to power it all he's going to build a canal oh this is also gonna be a dry town by the way of course it's a model city you know why wouldn't it be a model of temperance yeah yeah in order to as opposed to that as opposed to ransom bill up here which is a model town dedicated to the idea of kidnapping yes so in order to power it right because he wants to be a fully electric city he needs a nearby source of energy right and there's you know two lakes a substantial change in elevation between them so the obvious solution was to build a canal and a clean efficient hydroelectric plant right in the center of model city right and this canal would go 14 miles from east diagram falls down here to lake ontario

but in the reverse direction of what i just mentioned i like the nipple diagram you've drawn here yes so now by 1892 his ambitions had broadened the canal would not only be supplying power it would be for maritime shipping between the lakes for much larger ships than the nearby well in the canal over here could do also be an american canal as opposed to a canadian canal but making canals is like miserable work it's worse than making railroads like that's why Stalin had to have like like political prisoners do it and shit you know yes yeah it's hard work you gotta dig a lot of stuff you know that's why they don't do them so much especially like 1890s like you got like what like steam hammers and shit but like you know you got

you got you got steam shovels and mike mulligans because i'm like mulligan it's a bike mulligan and his steam shovel it's a children's book we don't have that here it's called great park yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah the steam shovel digs itself into a hole and then yeah yeah yeah yeah we can really burden yeah yeah yeah yes so this was going to be one of the the great wonders of the world right so construction begins in earnest in east niagara falls in 1895 or 1894 excuse me but in the meantime events are occurring we have to talk about some guys oh we have here

charge westinghouse oh no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no thomas eddison nicola tesla oh oh for three yeah i i i just don't respect a man without a mustache reasonable someone out there is keeping a big list of like stuff that you don't respect it's a lot like yeah yeah yeah i i thomas eddison is definitely the the least of these three anyway so thomas eddison's electric lighting system gets sort of fully into a bunch of elephants oh my god this gets into gear in the late 1870s right he's uh he's supplying electricity it's the sort of low voltage direct current system

first it's for powering street lights then later lighting people's houses and businesses directly like you know they have actual lights inside the buildings right but your direct current had a problem it could not be transmitted very far because of its low voltage yeah the electrons are wiggling enough to like have enough energy to get no the electrons are the electrons are just going you know straight they're going they're going around the whole circuit as opposed to wiggling back and forth so this requires lots of small power stations which are in the middle of populated areas and resulted in a whole bunch of competing electric lighting companies all of which had

technology just different enough to get around eddison's patents right and this is how uh in several places but not mostly new york city uh the air above the streets becomes this horrible mess of electric wires um because there's all this kind of like a weird cast of mind that i just like everything you show me i'm like wow that's beautiful because i'm really fucking tired but i'm like yeah this is nice i like this this is like modernity happening it's cool this is not a guy about to be uh brutally executed here that is a guy about to be executed very much yeah oh yeah that's that's down there yeah that's the leader in the slide yeah i don't understand why they should probably at least you know execute execution is cruel and inhumane except

when i'm doing it but even so like back up a little bit fellas all right so all these streets particularly in new york city become this big mess because there's all these competing power companies then there's telegraph uh wires telephone wires there's burglar alarm wires there's fire alarm wires because back then the burglar alarm or the fire alarm was just a wire that went straight to the police or the uh the fire department um and uh you know worse still if you needed a voltage other than 110 volts you needed to have an entirely separate line run from a separate power power station to your business right so there's there this this whole thing is a huge mess with early dc electrical power

so this other guy george westinghouse who invented our nation's civil war era breaking systems on railroads he wants in on the electric light business right and he read about these new developments in alternating current technology in europe um it just knows the something george westinghouse also looks uncannily like heat boosted judge wearing a bad disguise yeah yeah you put a fate you put like a stage moustache on him and like i was i was wondering what keeps him i thought i think you were a bear but yeah and that's the answer p better judge yeah so here's about new developments in alternating current alternating current at this time in the united states was used for these huge things called

moonlight towers which is essentially you know uh you have a a giant street light that's like 110 feet tall and there's just like two giant light bulbs on it big like down that way oh like bring those bad bad arkham city sort of deals yeah they still they still have them in austin texas i'm gonna look this up right the fuck now yeah but this what's the rules yeah this alternating current was considered because it ran at high voltages it was considered too dangerous for indoor use right oh so some hungarian guys we have oh boy it's gonna be tough we have carole zipper now ski we have autoblathy we have mixa dairy right here um they develop a new technology called the

transformer right about in disguise okay it's not allowed in tennessee anymore yeah in 1884 right um now because of science transformers only work with alternating current um i don't know why i tried to look it up and i didn't understand it electrical engineering is magic which yes only they can talk to the the the fucking door electrons you know what this means is you can step up or step down voltage arbitrarily and higher voltage means you can transmit the electricity farther distances without losing any uh any power in there right yeah you can see an implementation of this idea in the video game uh workers and resources so if public public yes so here's the idea right instead of having many power plants supplying

small areas why not have one big power plant generating high voltage and transmitted an arbitrary distance and then step down the voltage at or near the customer right yeah so westinghouse jumps on this idea he buys the patents in the united states right alternating current was practical for lighting but it wasn't really until 1888 nicola tesla comes through he invents an alternating current motor right now we have a complete electricity system which is suitable for home use industrial use so on and so forth right um they set up a death demonstration system in great barrington massachusetts which worked perfectly no transmission loss over 4 000 feet which was just under the range of the dc systems um but with much higher performance

anderson gets really worried at this point because the ac system is so vastly superior to his dumb ass dc system right um you need fewer wires the wires are smaller it benefits from economies of scale he starts this pr campaign to demonstrate that ac was dangerous which initially it was because your wire installation was really bad people kept getting randomly electrocuted by shorted wires uh you know and that's that's just from the fact that there's so many wires and so many electric companies and electric companies are showing like being founded and then going bust so frequently that you know you'd have four million wires and like four thousand of them were from defunct companies so they just

short each other out occasionally it'd be like work it would be like you would touch your telegraph in your office and get a four thousand volt shock so people are constantly getting randomly electrocuted by this stuff now this is also it's a very new york city centric problem because most other cities made you bury the wires um but new york city did not do that but this does receive outsized press because it's new york city right but this is like not uh not sort of an inherent problem of the ac system it's just a result of high voltages um and another guy herald pidney brown he takes up the cause right he writes the new york post he says these electrical companies are recklessly endangering

the public with cheap ac electricity he says that the ac systems must be limited to 300 volts eventually becomes comes before the new york board of electrical control um and a bunch of uh electrical engineers just mock him because he doesn't know what he's talking about so he's a recreation of this experience in the comments yes so he tries another idea um well if the if the if the board of electrical control isn't going to listen to me maybe the public will i'll do this through a stunt which is to torture and kill stray dogs yeah one of the sort of like bangers of the like 1890s you know you could do anything by killing stray dogs sort of just around yeah so i had people love doing that shit back then

bad times like a stray dog yeah or really any animal like you could just sort of anytime you're at a sort of crossroads in your life you could go what if i did some animal cruelty about this and it would be a pretty safe bet that it would work yes he did several public demonstrations showing the relative safety of direct current versus alternating current by shocking dogs with direct current at increasing voltages and then doing one shock at alternating current which invariably killed the dog sometimes he'd do this multiple times a day what the fuck guy get help or be executed i i don't mind when people who are cruelty animals are are gruesome executed well that's a good segue here this catches the eye of the new york the

state of new york's justice system who want a new way to kill people right well so harrell disappointed to the board to determine what kind and how much electricity to use the new electric chair great um now to demonstrate man to demonstrate to the board in the press that alternating current was what was needed uh he uses it to kill several cows and a horse look at him in the chair south carolina uses the electric chair in the fifties on a 14-year-old black boy look it up oh boy incidentally the um like execution official uh for this is euphemistically the uh the state electrician which is in my head is one of the sort of like all-time examples of like bureaucratic euphemism yeah that's uh yeah um so you know this is another thing designed to

smear the reputation of alternating current um the first use of the electric chair was on august six 1890 with westinghouse generators and equipment um and the technicians in charge botched it and the victim writhed in pain on the chair for several minutes while i tried to shock him to death you know westinghouse said they westinghouse said they could have done better with an axe yes and then the new york sun reported two weeks later that uh harrell was on the payroll of edison electric uh but nevertheless this pr campaign campaign went on you know they kept the electrocuting animals and people right until thomas edison left his electrical company in 1890 to pursue other projects and then the company instantly uh switched to uh producing alternating

current uh systems because direct current was so stupid um and thus thus ended the war of the currents one of the dumbest slap fights in history yeah uh standard fights are are great fun uh you guys remember blu-ray at hd dvd and then there was the third one that i can never remember that uh tecmoan did uh gotta do laser discs yeah bring them back laser discs love that love that under thomas edit war of the currents there's uh categories cruelty to animals an essential feature also tecmoan great channel uh we're just recommending recommending stuff here now but what does what does this have to do with with the fucking model city yeah the practical implication of this is that william t loves model city was designed around the

central concept you needed a big centralized hydroelectric power plant serving the entire city with 110 volt dc power i was pushing like big um slow electrons through fucking yes like weak ass wires okay and by 1894 it was clear that dc was on its way out and ac was the new thing industries didn't need to locate next to power plants or along rivers anymore power plants could be very large they could be distant from population centers the impetus behind the canal uh was gone you know power generation but the work continued for a while uh william love laid out a street grid at model city there were a few streets and houses built uh and shops and so on but the canal was doomed um you know the nearby welland canal was widened into the third welland

canal uh which meant loves shipping canal would be redundant right and then the panic of 1893 caused most investors to pull out of the project there was still work continuing at a very slow pace for a long time but the thing that really put the kibosh on a project was a law meant to preserve niagra falls in 1906 which prevented diversion of more water out of the niagra river because so many people had been diverting it for factories and full shit oh they're just like uh it looks like shit you know william t love moved on to other projects model city remained a hamlet as it is to this day do we know anything about what what he went on to do no he disappeared completely disappeared went over the falls went over the falls yeah

is that his real name i don't know i don't know yeah ironically despite its environmentally friendly conception model city is now home to an enormous landfellow and by waste management oh yeah they have like a nuclear waste dump there now so the canal uh what was excavated of the canal was about a mile in east niagra falls new york and it just sort of sat there for several decades no one knew what to do with it um check out our famous hole yeah it's a big hole comes to the hole until 1920 when the city of niagra falls started dumping garbage into it hey free landfill oh yeah it's just a big hole there are some garbage in the hole yeah hold on i'm gonna try and change the slide but i have a cat in my face oh which one milkshake hi milkshake hi milkshake

so now we have to talk about ross michelot is now coming 12 facts ross oh my god yeah now we have to talk about the hooker electrochemical company oh we'll call him that put a businessman on the job yes god damn it milkshake i can't see the notes well first of all you got a guy called elon which is never good yeah he's a guy yes so elon huntington hooker founded the hooker electrochemical company in 1903 to produce chlorine and caustic soda this dude killed 400 000 people oh yeah it was cited in niagra falls because of the cheap electricity needed to make the process of electrolyzing salt profitable uh these products were its core business but the company diversified

into more products like dyes perfume solvents on and so forth all of this created a whole lot of nasty chemical waste that had to be dealt with but a really cool tank car livery well yeah the bright orange tank cars i wonder i wonder who made this this is for uh some video game you know i i've been very very well modeled um you know you got all the uh um actually very low poly considering the amount of detail uh some handsome person did that i'm sure um look at the little rivets on there amazing oh yeah beautiful oh hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to people are annoyed by these so let me get to the point we have this thing called patreon right the

deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month uh sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for um it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them the money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month uh join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that back to the show in 1942 they received permission from the city of Niagara Falls to start dumping waste into the love

canal so the canal was drained they put a very thick clay lining on the bottom and they just started rolling barrels of all kinds of nasty things into the big ditch right oh good that's just a little there it's fine yeah it's fine oh it's an impervious barrier you got to stop worrying about that yeah they just threw any old stuff in there they threw about 22 000 tons of it in there great about 10 years later in 1952 the company begins to notice you know there's a lot of residential development around this canal hmm well we were here first keep dumping boys yeah maybe we should avoid future liability find a new dumping site don't give don't give up the ship come on yeah have the courage of your convictions keep burying stuff in there so the Niagara Falls

city school board comes to the rescue um so it's the 1950s Niagara Falls is not sort of the post industrial wasteland it currently is yeah I noticed I I know the different color of the grass yeah like city skylines you got a fucking pollution overlay in real life the city is growing it needed a new school right in the growing neighborhood of love canal right and this is the sort of up-and-coming middle-class neighborhood I had lots of kids and had lots of young couples right sure yeah and I can assume only good things are gonna happen from here on out right well like this is America like those are the people bad stuff isn't supposed to happen to well this is true for you so the school board begins the process of condemning nearby properties

but they negotiated directly with Hooker Chemical Company right and Hooker sold this property to the school board for a nominal fee of one dollar with the stipulation that Hooker Chemical could not be sued for any future contamination injury illness or death resulting from the chemical dump on the property should we get to ask some questions if you're the other one with it they put an impermeable clay barrier yeah that's in like all the contracts probably so why even worry about it yeah this is why you read the terms and conditions folks yeah the school board was like yeah sure whatever oh they're definitely not gonna eat shit just in a minute here so the caretaker of these 22,000 tons of hazardous chemicals was no longer a chemical company that had experience

with hazardous waste it was the school board well I know some attention that you as a nation elect only the most qualified people to your school yes the possible outcome I was about to say we were talking about state legislators being insane school board guys oh my god yeah oh yeah buddy so Hooker Chemical before before they handed over control of the property installed an impermeable clay surface a pile of drums right and then they built right around here I believe the 99th street elementary school cool or as you may know it Xavier Academy yes if you look at if you look at the actual boundary of the site is something like this so in the process of construction workers came across several barrels of chemical waste and the project architect recommended moving

the school to a location that wasn't on a hazardous waste dump instead the school board said I move it 85 feet north where there aren't any barrels oh okay but but that so you just move that whole sort of like square up a bit yeah yep you just do a little side step damn kids yeah yeah yeah later some of the adjacent land to the canal was sold to developers who built houses on them and sold them on to happy new owners was largely they had to have like been fucking digging up barrels and shit like and they had to have known don't dig in your yard call 811 before you dig yeah but I mean the developers right like yeah don't worry about that

yeah there's several streets that were built and while they were building the streets and digging the sewers they they breached the clay lining and were constantly digging up barrels of chemical waste yeah but these uh these developers were under no obligation to inform the new owners that there was a giant chemical waste uh dump in their backyard um because no houses were built directly on top of the site they were built immediately adjacent to it and then the giant the the canal itself was your backyard cool okay oh America but it was sort of like advertised as like this is this nice wide open recreational field you know don't let your kids eat the dirt

pretty early on no things started to seem off right uh because there are all these weird lumps appearing in the field there'd be like holes there'd be like you know all kinds of stuff uh kids would get rashes if they were playing in the field barefoot uh as I mentioned workers who were installing sewers and new streets they noticed foul odors that seared their throat they kept running into barrels barrels with some kind surface on their own this impermeable clay lining was punctured by construction numerous times including at least one occasion where it was excavated deliberately and used this fill on another part of the site they reduced reuse recycle yeah sure

or but you know minor problems development just continued right now simultaneous to this we get this thing called the environmental protection agency thank you Richard Nixon yes got bullied into it and uh you know now it gets to be a sort of like fun like piece of trivia like uh Richard Nixon was more like more progressive than like any republican president since yeah also uh legal services where my parents used to work so this this has to be viewed in the context of america in the 1950s through the 1980s but bad bad pollution was a crazy um uh there was litter everywhere you know half the landscape was abandoned cars because you bought a new one each year rivers caught fire not just in cleveland

that episode is coming don't worry shut up there were there were city buildings they were all covered in soot and diesel emissions yeah the whole thing smelled like kebek everything looked terrible um there's hazardous waste it was disposed of haphazardly basically everywhere or maybe they burned it right frequently near residential neighborhoods this is the point at which like uh you know they're like popular science or popular mechanics whatever we'll tell you how to change your oil and when you go what do you what do i do with the used oil they go you know dig a hole put it in the ground i was the first time crin was in york i was driving her around and she said why is everyone burning their trash and i had to explain that you simply don't

worry about yeah i mean this is why like a whole generation of american politicians are also like climate change deniers is because they had fixed in their heads this idea that like in the environment is when there's a big fucking like you know smokestack coming off like depositing acid rain directly onto your shit right it's why like whenever trump talked about like climate change or whatever he was so inconsistent about it because like you talked to him about the environment and he'd go like yeah we're gonna have like the most beautiful cleanest water like clean air and shit because that was relatively uncontroversial because people don't like smog and like are able to get their heads around that as opposed to shit like climate change which they aren't

yeah this is back in the day when the accepted way to dispose of used car batteries was to just burn them in giant burn pits because now we've been doing now we throw them in the ocean obviously but just safe and they go through uh so uh sort of nixon's epa was as much as anything sort of a reorganization of existing federal programs to clean up pollution right but congress moved pretty quickly to give it a lot more powers under the clean air act of 1970 the clean water act of 1972 you know the epa's power and influence continually increased under the nixon administration which is probably not what nixon wanted but you know congress passed those bills i mean he was he was kind of busy with the like uh bureaucracies that he was trying to

suborn you know yeah yeah i was like oh you know i got a whole new agency it seems nice i could do a lot of stuff with it anyway um and you have these really effective campaigns against you know visible pollution right like smog like trash stuff like that co2 was not regulated and it still isn't that's a different story but the the epa was very very effective um and they hired an italian man to pretend to be native american yeah and tell you that like when when you litter you make him cry yes well this is this is actually a uh a nade campaign from a private company keep america beautiful incorporated but it's sort of associated with that era era is that the crying indian advertisement which was iron iron it's kaudy yeah yeah

so anyway we get this new environmental protection agency what do they do um you know we start getting serious signs of trouble in uh the love canal neighborhood right yeah one thing to turn that kid into a box turn the kid into a box fine yes can't even afford clothing he has to have a box which is the modern version of a barrel um he can go over the falls i don't think you can go over the falls in a box i don't think that's survivable sorry kiddo i don't really phrase this like a cocktail recipe you know you go to a bar you're like give me a love canal give me give me 82 chemicals and 25 years thanks for everything it's western fucking guineas or like a ramos genfes

so there there had been this um you know situation for a long time that folks had noticed you know they would get random chemical puddles after it rained in their backyard but no one really thought much about it um a few particularly hard winners hit niger falls most notably in 1975 and 1976 all the snow melt caused the water table to rise uh oh and all of a sudden this impermeable clay barrier which now had lots of holes in it um you know the water table rose above that all the leaking chemicals came to the surface um and this meant that folks in the love canal neighborhood found they had nasty sticky black residue in their basements their sump pump stopped working and the plants were dying in their backyards there was chemical waters everywhere what's interesting to

me really about this is the extent to which people sort of who are interviewed by uh like the local journalists who are first looking into this story viewed it as like a nuisance at first like others gross puddles or whatever it's unpleasant like you have to drain it and shit but it's not like a health threat and like some of that's genuine like uh sort of sort of attitude and some of it's also the fact that a chemical company is still like 3000 jobs in Niagara Falls yes some of it's also like uh gee i don't want to move please don't make me have to move understand especially if like you don't have any savings you're still paying off the mortgage and like when when shit gets bad later or worse later it's like you can't sell the house no one

will buy it from you right yes uh get these sort of abnormally high rates of birth defects you know lots of miscarriages you know lots of kids with intellectual disabilities right and very high rates of unexplained illness in people um and the Niagara Gazette starts this sort of extensive and long-running investigation starting in 1976 but it took years for anyone to start to try and address the problem right yeah they have this report so Michael H. Brown who like uh you know does door-to-door surveys and stuff and like really like bothers people in power about this um but it it's sort of to no avail for like years yeah there's like a long drawn-out process where people slowly become it starts to realize

huh this might actually be an issue this may be a problem um as a really bad blizzard in 1977 uh 45 inches of snow fall on Niagara Falls the water table is high enough at this point that you know there's there's just chemicals killing the grass in the fields nothing grows there everything turns black and nasty um you know the whole neighborhood looks like shit because it's you know a chemical wasteland um and this woman named Lois Gibbs starts to put all these problems together in 1978 uh Lois's son had epilepsy and asthma and a whole bunch of other stuff she managed to find out that huh her five-year-old son's

elementary school was built on top of a toxic waste dump oh who could have foreseen this hmm perhaps the school board maybe yeah this is a thought so she and a few other people start this door-to-door effort to get enough support to create something called the love canal home owners association this is not the bad kind of home owners association where you know where they regulate where you can put your trash can well because the thing is they can't regulate your lawn because nothing grows on it yeah you're having a bad time and congratulations you have three kinds of cancer no one's ever heard of you're sort of eldritch horrors growing on your lawn that's the only thing you can reliably grow hey listen home owners association may be fascist

tyranny uh but you have to have faith that they are sort of like the thin blue line between you and eldritch chemical horrors you know this is true yeah um a few other organizations show up there's renters association which is mostly african-american in the neighborhood who plays the role you know folks are mad they want someone to take action but there really isn't anyone who can take action there's no procedure for dealing with a problem like this there's no government agency who's in charge of this nominally the epa is but they can't really do anything it's interesting i had a look at like local politicians and stuff and i found that like local health commissioner like i think i think he's a county official

said that you know they did some testing and stuff and he said it's an exposure to like such and such a chemical was like it's only as dangerous as smoking a couple of cigarettes right yeah a famously healthy activity you know inspiring confidence yes yeah yeah and then the uh the the mayor was just like eh it's fine don't worry about it great yeah no one wants to like address any of these problems even though they're at this point so obvious right um it's not until 1978 that the relatively new epa gets involved and after just a little bit of testing they realize how bad the problem is right um it's it's it's so bad that there's there's one detail and and ask if i found well you know the guy goes to interview some people and he goes outside and

there's like one tree left in the whole neighborhood like on their lawn and the leaves are like oily to the touch um there's all kinds of nasty chemicals down there there's mostly um you know there's sort of these uh precursor chemicals to chlorine and stuff like that but you know there's there's so much crap down there that like no one i don't think it's ever been like established what was down there um i know there's a whole bunch of dioxin which is one of the nastier ones oh yeah by by father nastiest um and it again to keep citing michael brown the thing that i really like is that he draws an explicit sort of colonial violence metropole fucking comparison and goes oh yeah dioxin you mean the shit that is in agent orange and is the reason why they had to stop using agent

orange uh that chemical yeah um but yeah so the epa found like sort of fairly huge concentrations of dioxin and like people's sump pumps and stuff right yeah real real nasty and of course if it's in the sump pump i'm sure that stuff's being aerosolized in your basement yeah i think they worked out at one point that the for one of the basements they measured the sort of like safe exposure time was like 2.4 minutes or something like that so you know in 1978 the epa gets involved the new york state health commissioners granted emergency powers and they decided okay we're until we can fix this problem we're going to evacuate children and pregnant women from the area yeah the evacuation is sort of like weirdly inconsistent too um like they evacuated like

one part that they think is most seriously affected but another part that is like increasingly like obviously also affected they just leave for a while um but also that they are sort of like forced to concede one thing which is that like uh the residents are so concerned that like the shit leaking out of the ground will explode that they make the state stage like 75 buses like just a parking lot nearby in case like it catches fire or explodes or something like that and they have to like evacuate everyone immediately so these buses are just like sat there park i'd like years yeah for years while this goes on while this rumbles on through the like just drivers there just sitting there like uh smoke they'll say they're like this is not as bad

yeah i think they just like showed up parked the buses there and like left but yeah like the uh i'm imagining sort of like the old b-52 program where the the jets could be in the air in like two months yeah you scrambles here evacuation bus yeah yeah but uh yeah they they closed the 99th street school the one that's built directly on the chemical waste dump um and you know you have these nasty chemicals showing up uh which are very stable in the environment these are dioxins are really bad because they're really stable they don't degrade with time in the way that a lot of other chemicals do um but a big issue here is there's not really money to actually clean the place up because hooker chemical was immune to litigation the school board can't really

pay for it if even if they wanted to i mean i wrote in that like uh that clause in the contract it's like no you can't sue us can't sue us yeah i'm like purely on the sort of like contract law of the time i'm i'm sure that's fine like i'm sure there is no remedy and contract law against them right there's another problem that since it was a general landfill before it was a landfill for hooker chemical residents couldn't really conclusively prove that the toxic chemicals showing up in their backyards and basements were the same toxic chemicals hooker chemical had disposed of on the site you know who knows there might be other toxic chemicals there too that the city had disposed of who knows whose chemicals these are i don't know you don't either

shut the hell up this problem got so obviously bad someone had to do something um and this is not like a unique problem to the love canal right all of america at this point was covered in improperly disposed of toxic waste uh the love canal just happened to be one of the worst instances of it that was closest to a population center you know safer maybe time is beach missouri um you know and you can see here in the picture this is the valley of the drums which is near louisville this was another nasty hazmat site at the time right but a lot of the times you couldn't find the responsible party to pay for remediation of these toxic waste sites sometimes the responsible party no longer existed or was sufficiently legally

legally shielded to be off the hook you need some kind of solution here to get these sites remediated it's time for the unelected jackbooted federal thugs to create or begin to create a class of strict liability law uh which is now the reason why the acf can kill your dog for any reason they want and not just for liability but like retrospective liability as well yes and the solution is this thing called superfund or the the company had super fun yeah sound sounds really great i want to go to the superfund uh going to the superfund site at love canal yeah sounds like waterboarding at guantanamo base sounds great if you don't know what those things are go to the go to the superfund site at love canal i'm gonna take a bunch of ecstasy

uh this isn't a rave what oh i fucked up badly so the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act of 1980 the superfund act maybe one of the only progressive and useful pieces of legislation passed by the carter administration um the idea was you take a an excise tax on petroleum and chemical manufacturers and that would pay for a perpetual trust fund for the sake of remediating environmental disaster zones like the love canal or the valley of the drums in kentucky or places like that

hell yeah and so this is what lets removal and proper disposal uh start in in the love canal site residents were sort of initially housed in motels while this happened um a lot of people speculated they'd be allowed to return to their homes that didn't happen they all got demolished um folks got shuffled around a bunch sometimes you get let back into your home then told to evacuate again and let back in um you couldn't really remediate the site properly it's it was too much contamination yeah i think most of the epa ever wanted to do with it at that point was try and maybe like turn it into a park in a hundred years time yeah uh nine hundred and fifty families were bought out at fair market value had their houses demolished and then you know the neighborhood

of love canal was no more and if you're renting you just ate shit i guess yeah i didn't read what happened to renters but i assumed yes it was very expensive it was very disruptive there are actually a lot of folks who were opposed to the remediation because they just didn't want to move you know so uh yeah they solved the problem by kicking everyone out well that will do it yeah you kick everyone out you put a cordon around it and you just like chalk it up to experience yes um you know in the end they were still doing remediation work until the mid 90s i think 1994 in 2004 the cleanup was declared to be complete though this site has not been redeveloped of course right bushy was the sort of like mission accomplished banner sort of getting some extra

use out of it like we've declared victory over the chemicals yes we have uh we have we have decemicaled the site um so this neighborhood is still abandoned essentially but as much as anything this is due to the decline of the upstate new york economy um room hooker chemical company which is now a division of accidental petroleum was found negligent in 1994 they were ordered to pay 129 million dollars the environmental protection agency the total cost of cleanup in the eminent domain of properties was 400 million dollars cool so like very little comparatively yeah they paid for just over a quarter of the total cost wow um there were lots of lawsuits from residents these were largely settled out of court of course yeah yeah

but ultimately we had this sort of positive legacy here you know the love canal saga was you know they they created a positive positive legacy of the superfund right which is this progressive system one word for it requires the company's most likely to cause long-term environmental damage to pay into a fund to remediate that damage right anyway in 1995 congress did not renew the excise tax so now so now that the superfund money comes from the general fund um and it was extremely underfunded until 2021 when joe biden's big dumb x infrastructure bill reinstated the excise tax so it's cool that biden yeah thank you joe and a lot of not good things uh it's a lot of contrasts yes i i keep saying this i think he's probably like the

most progressive democratic president now like acceptable to the democratic party establishment which is fucking depressing the most progressive current democratic president yeah well yeah yeah we greet this with the enthusiasm it deserves and we wish him another four years of senescence yes hey maybe we'll die and we can get like president kamala maybe maybe we'll switch vice presidents to some someone weird next time around edge edge edge edge food edit food head head but listen i mean like as much as i don't like joe biden as much as i believe that he's amongst other things are rapists i do think he is the man who is about one heartbeat away from

hillary 2020 whatever america's choice to apologize to her oh oh if we had a hillary presidency it just you know the country the democratic terfs would be unleashed uh anyway did we learn anything what have we learned yeah um i mean do not trust corporations american school boards have a weirdly large amount of power including eminent domain shit which they like at this time certainly did not exercise responsibly but maybe is too much for like the kind of person who runs for school board anyway oh yeah the lower mary and school board has been wild and out recently um you know they still have all those powers yep and they use them for evil and violating children's uh right to privacy oh yeah love doing it

just because pollution isn't sort of of immediately or sort of medium term visibility to you doesn't mean it isn't happening isn't bad uh please please a crumb of science in response to like any environmental policy ever um instead of just doing like oh we're gonna clean it up and make it look nice um because yeah this exposes the limits of that about as well as anything i can think of does before you buy a house there's this website called historic aerials dot com what you do is go check what they were doing there in 1930 yeah and have a look and see what color the grass is um why are these strange oil slicks here why are all the animals dead usually best judgment um this could happen to you could happen to you

well not exactly because you won't be able to afford to buy a house ever the renting that's a good point yeah you could you could you could experience this whole kerfuffle as a renter and get no compensation whatsoever yeah i'm sure the landlords got compensated though yeah certainly well they were homeless so well we have a segment on this podcast called safety third shake hands for danger oh i don't yep hi ross liam yay liam and guest no guests today we completely forgot to open the podcast as well we didn't even do pronouns

hi i'm liam anderson and not too late now too late now that's alice called well kelly and her pronouns are she her and that's just shut up and that's just in ross liam and his pronouns are he him all right go okay and and also devon they use they them i apologize in advance for this being an abnormal safety third especially with it being spoilers fatal happening almost essentially it's great uh happening almost a century ago and being a third or fourth hand account but i thought it was worth sharing with the class regardless this safety third is a tragic tale from my family's past and the days just before workplace protection protections were really a thing and concerns a distant cousin well i'm not sure of my exact relation to all i know he is a

relative of my great grandmother whose maiden name was tulis the following is largely a summary of the only complete account of the incident i could find written by john stark bellamy the second in his book the killer in the attic our story takes place in cleveland ohio in 1928 sorry actually i like cleveland but yeah once again burn rocky river to the ashes patrick tulis my distant cousin and patrick clary his co-worker were digging shafts for the support pillars that would support west prospect avenue behind the then under construction terminal tower which upon his completion a year later was the second tallest building in the world man remember cleveland used to be a big sassy cleveland had the tallest building in the united states outside of new york

city in chicago until the comcast center was built in philadelphia wow yeah i'm looking at him now yeah now i have the third tallest building outside of new york city in chicago actually no i think there might be a couple bigger buildings in los angeles but uh that is always like cleveland's got some big buildings so not half a year before the incident involving my cousin around noon on june 9th 1928 several men working in a concrete well 192 feet deep had returned to the surface at ontario avenue on the eastern end of the construction site when the surrounding area was hit by an explosion which was determined to have been caused by one of the workers lighting a cigarette in the vicinity of a methane seam

cool classic yeah eight were injured but no fatalities occurred during that incident but october 16th 1928 around 7 30 p.m. who had about where the intersection of west prospect and west superior is today the patrick's tully and cleary had just finished digging a tapered shaft 103 feet deep and the adjacent set shaft that they had dug before was being filled with liquid concrete even with the shafts having linings for reinforcement two feet of clay rich soil that had not been described as big or that had been described as being like quicksand is obviously not the best buffer between one and a torrent of concrete and predictably the wall of the adjacent set shaft gave way burying both patrick's alive under 150 tons of

concrete fuck that no thank you i used to have nightmares about this sort of shit um yeah only one startled cry was heard from the bottom by a man on a scaffold higher up the same shaft and then silence the rescue efforts began at once lasting through the night and into the next day with workers shoveling out wet concrete with buckets then turning the chisels and pneumatic drills after the concrete began to harden was very obviously became a recovery mission uh the two men almost certainly suffocated within 15 minutes of being buried under 40 feet of concrete i really was less yeah after 15 hours of digging the body of patrick tullis was found against the side of the shaft pinned there by a surge of concrete an hour later patrick

cleary was uncovered standing upright his hand merely inches away from having grabbed onto a hoist that would have saved him the report on the incident cleared the two of any negligence and found the shaft collapsed to be due to poor judgment and construction on the part of the project engineer hired by spencer white and prentice the firm in charge of the project spencer white and prentice's own investigation claimed the tragedy was a mysterious act of god's love and maybe a teensy bit of sand in the clay rich soil because of course it was and not not not a problem that could have easily been prevented by pouring the concrete and letting it dry before sending expendable irish workers down to dig another shaft the toolists and

cleary families were awarded $6,500 each after lawsuits equivalent to $111,500 or about 370 x boxes in today's money let this be a reminder to you all do not go in the hole especially if you especially if you are an irish immigrant laborer in the 1920s keep on being great and raz please give milkshake and pizza boy extra pets for me incredibly depressing yeah uh caissons fucked up you know what they still send people down to inspect caissons before they fill in with concrete yeah they still put people in the hole and you shouldn't go in the hole yeah they still put people in the hole not not a job i would like no no thank you anything was digging and there's a

lot of digging in this episode um call 811 before you dig and whatever they tell you then just don't dig just don't do it or if you dig don't go in the hole yeah 100% it's like a very shallow trench like an inch you know i think i think you can still um i think now you can put a camera in the hole but a lot of times they just put a person in the hole well because it lends that sort of like thrill of danger right yeah exactly there's probably some guy who's like yeah i want to go in a fucking hole this sort of death wish sort of attraction to the hole being beguiled by the hole yes uh yeah this could happen to you if you call in the hole don't do it go like me can never be beguiled all right well that was safety third

so kind of danger our next episode will be on Chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go um we're about to have a p.o box again full coming i was about to say the the p.o box we've been putting in the description for a long time has been uh inoperable we're about to have a new one it's about to be operable yeah but it will be a different p.o box from the one that i've been putting in the description change the description of you i i don't know i just did very handsome we gotta put out enough episodes that all those old episodes are far back enough in the scroll back that no one looks at them and they only get the accurate information the hard part is to put out a lot more episodes so yes

i'm really tired can i go to bed good night everybody yeah good night everyone bye off see you next time