Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 137: Willow Island Cooling Tower Collapse

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

You would absolutely hate your building to fail *rotationally* Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance 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/

You know how in like English gardens you would have an ornamental hermit? Sure. Yes. What if you could have like the ornamental hermit kingdom? What like is that? There's like a stasis thing. You just have like a pet North Korea. Yeah, exactly.

I feel like international law would not shine down kindly upon you. No, I mean, the thing is, you were before we started, I'll take you to a theory about this, right? Which is archival jujube. Do you wanna explain that for the... Oh, yes. That there's the idea that, you know, we install the North Korean operating system

that phones home the Pyongyang, everything you do. And that way, that way, somewhere on microfilm in the basement of the wrong young hotel will be every action that we ever took as members of this podcast. Yeah, it's like a rough idea to do anything. Yeah, because like, folks have to go to the library of Congress or whatever. Like, it's the safe as it can possibly be. It's going to be on physical media. It's going to be like inner bunker. And people always say, like, you know, the history is written by the vectors.

It's not written by the survivors who's going to survive North Korea ago. We got to give them all of our stuff. Yes. I don't, I don't, this is now a GFI guess. I'm all opposed to this plan, frankly. I said, it's a worker's frankly. It's a work estate. What could possibly go wrong? Wow.

Welcome to, well, there's your problem. Not saving a podcast about jujjay with slides. So I'm, I'm Justin Razznick. I'm the person who's talking right now. I believe in the eternal victory of eternal president Kim Il Sung, my pronouns are he and him. Okay. I am a little bit called by Callie at the time of recording. I might change that. I don't know. Let's take on a revolutionary name. Am I pronouncing she or her? I also believe in the work as part of the Korean.

I absolutely do. Hot, it's really innocent. Fucking subjected to, I guess, some sort of either struggle session or whatever it is. Yeah. Coming to you live from my install of the door of Linux that's fighting me. I used to know the Korean OS. This is why I have a BSD guy. But yeah, my pronouns are he, him. I just,

I want to like Fedora. Okay. I want to like Fedora. And then it feels like Lina's Torvalid's himself basically spits in my mouth and says to Colin Daddy and I don't wanna do that. It's just, you know, I'm sure you used to go with Korean one or whatever the Chinese brown star thing is. Brown star. I don't know what do they call the Chinese OS. Chinese Linux, the only podcast, it does, it's, I don't know what are they called the Chinese OS

Chinese Linux the only podcast does it's but Kylin that's right the most the most long-awaited guns and roses album Chinese Linux Yeah, yeah, I I mean honestly, you know actual Rose can't hit the same notes, but oh red star OS. I went with brown star Yeah, I was like where you get a brown brown. I mean it's brown star. Brown. I did that brown. I like it. Brown. I mean, yeah, exactly. Exactly. But only for operating systems because the one that philosophies on kernel because all programmers are fascists. So of course, that is true. That is true. I'm going to make a nice, so oldly uproising environment. Well. Well, my little assumptions are crazy.

No, fascist, fascist failed. Sorry. What can Brown do for you? Well, right now, I'm fucking waiting on them to deliver my hard cider, which they're not doing. Oh, well. Get your hard cider from a university. I get hard cider shipped to me from New York,

because I'm in a cider club. I can explore that lacer. I get hard ciders ship to me from New York because I'm in a cider club Explore that lacer the the brown like this Round round yeah, yeah, the university round. Oh, oh, yeah, I Maggy if you're listening you didn't go to a good school Anyway, what do you see on the screen in front of you? Is the interior of a cooling tower? Oh, it's fucking GPS. Oh, sorry.

Okay, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Brown University has a lovely campus and the people, the two people I know who went there are very sweet and good people. So it's my favorite of the shitty Ivy League schools. All right, tell me about this collapsed cooling tower that I assume killed lots of people. So what do you see on the screen in front of you? Is a cooling tower with a bunch of debris in it?

That's not supposed to be there. Interesting. Today we're going to talk about the Willow Island disaster, the collapse of a scaffold while building a cooling tower in at the Pleasant's Power Station in West Virginia. It doesn't sound like a thousand to me. Just on the name, the Willow Island disaster sounds a lot more sort of like 18th century and paracicle, you know, it sounds like 50 guys fell into a hole trying to take a very treasure. Death pit, yes. Well, 50 guys did fall into a hole, taking for very high sure in their own creation. First, we have to do the goddamn news.

We have to do the God damn news. Oh, hey, I So I just noted what the shai'er on for for slide three says, Bob, I'm sorry, I didn't put this in. Don't worry about it. He also made what I use that word. Exactly. I'm like half scotish. I'm allowed.

Yeah, you're allowed, but Bob, if you're listening, that's all Alice. That's not me. It's all me. I write the the Chiron's apart from this one the Chirra I guess It would be a chirra so Philadelphia has in our in our race to imitate New York We we don't even have a bus terminal anymore go on the street. Yeah, we got rid of that the Philadelphia bus terminal shut down

more go on the street. Yeah, we got rid of that, the, the Philadelphia bus terminal shutdown. And now it's all, it's all curbside buses. But you have made it all up to that. That's making depressing, dude. That's something we didn't need to export to you. Yeah, mega bus has been here for ages. But yeah, so all of East Market Street is now solid intercity buses. Well, you can't go anywhere anymore. This bus time, the bus district. You can't transfer to other buses because, I mean, you can, but you just sort of sit there on the sidewalk for four hours. If you have a connection and fill, if you're taking Greyhound,

ironically, all these buses are blocking the bus lanes. Yeah. And you're from kinds of buses. Yes, it's incredible. You've got a great start. I feel like looking at buses. Very sort of deterministic view of what a bus is to be like, no, there's bus in my bus lane, you know?

Yeah, exactly. There's too much bus in the bus lane. Adult human bus. You know, yeah, exactly. There's too much bus in the bus lane. Adult human bus. You're signed bus at New Jersey. Yes. I liked what Inga Safran said. She didn't miss what mince words and just said,

this is a humanitarian disaster. Yeah, well, I truly though. Like, I think we need the UN to come in and like, I'll keep you. We need you. We need some blue helmets. We need some blue helmets. We're already UNESCO. Yo, UNESCO troops. Yes. Oh, we are going to protect culture by force. But the, uh, yeah. So, uh, I kind of thought that bit would land a little better. Greyhound. Greyhound was bought by, I believe, Flixbus. And Flixbus has decided to sell off all of Greyhound's real estate holdings. So this is what's happening around the country right now.

It's just that Philly is a big hub. And no one thought that you could take a big bus station and move it all to five parking spots. And it turns out you can't. No, you shouldn't do that. Yeah, it's a really bad idea. But we are reaping the consequences of this. And that that bus station is now going to be redeveloped into there's some kind of stupid building or the news shitty sixers arena.

You know, I, I'm actually, I think you and I agree on this, Ross, regarding whatever they're calling it sixers place, which is it's fine where it is. Yeah, they should just keep the keep all that. That's what I don't understand is people are going to be more accessible by transit, the one successful by the Broad Street Line now. Yes. Or we go old school and they have to play all their games at the Polestra. What if they put it, they could do like a FedEx field situation where they build a new stadium

and is really far from the Broad Street Line. And if you walk there, you still have to pay for parking. I'm gonna punch Dan Snyder right in his damn face. Check this shit out. Put the whole stadium underground, save you the space at street level. You can just put the buses on top of that. They play under a bus station. I mean, I'm fine with that given that the sixers exist and break my heart. Play in the vault. Play in the hotel. I believe, I believe Joe and Beige should be punished because he has not delivered us from the second round. Yeah. Under the ground. Play under the ground.

Yes. Into the whole you go, Joel. What they have, they have indoor stadium. So clearly, it's a solved problem. You can do this. Why does it have to be on a certain like Z level? Not the Swedes have like a stadium that's built inside a mountain. Oh, probably most fucking freaks that they are. Hey, sorry. Sorry, Mia. I didn't mean it.

Please, please don't beat me up with your like self. Mia is too tall. It's like six. And it's incredible. I love that one. It's pretty tall. Yeah, Jenny, I'm sorry I called her by implication, you know, on a sort of a national level and moose fucking freak.

God damn it, Alice. I didn't mean it. I mean, it's a comedy podcast. I'm trying to fill it out. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Take a train.

Except you can't. It's just kind of. Just grab it out. I don't want to like believe it. I like to believe it. I love it. like believe it. And like I leave it like a lovely friendship because of like we've we've we've we've got because me all this fucking me.

Me. Yeah, I just I know it the plural of moose is moose, but I always say beasts instead. But in the gun. Yeah, me. Well, the beast big on rain rain deer up there. Yeah, it's good. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm a picky eater. No, I'm not. I know. I'm just giving you a share. It's the whole cause we just say some things that we cannot substantiate. Yeah, the next week I got a friend each other about ourselves. Yeah.

Yeah. I you guys, I don't know if you know this. I'm actually 14 and a half feet tall. I just like that. Cool. I didn't know you Swedish. I actually am part Swedish. feet tall. I just like that. Cool. I didn't I just wait. I actually am part Swedish. My grandfather.

I guess Anderson. Yeah. Like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I should have been a clue. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I like snooze so much. I I I I long to return to my ancestral home and shoot Russians and and just consume. No, no thing. No, no thing. You think of Finland, Sweden and Russia last time there, it was like piece of the

great or some shit like that. Yeah, yeah. And we're going to bring it back, Alice. Yeah, it's no, I was I was riffing on your, your, you know, your Scandinavian heaven joke. I really like. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's what I was riffing on.

Yeah. No, that's, that's a very finished energy to be like, I live in the snow, I have shot everyone I have ever met, or anyone who's come within 500 feet of me. Do you do not speak to me? 30, 30 in one hand in a bottle of vodka the other. Yeah. So this is a rare case of bus bad.

You know what? Sweden, right, kept trying to attack St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg now in Russia, quite bad for trans people. And the Swedes had Hallbirds. What they were trying to do, displaced in time a bit, protect trans kids with Hallbirds. So Kingdom of Sweden, critical support, right? Gustavus Adolfus. He was onto something. Gustavus Adolphus threw a mouthful of snooze and the worst liquor issue you've ever had in your entire fucking life.

We must put that trend trend. That's right. Yeah. For the front man like spinning all over himself. But uh, yeah. So, uh, if, uh, if you run a city, make sure you have an intercity bus terminal because otherwise bad stuff will happen. We're gonna have this shit. Yeah, exactly. Uh, I think the only, like the two cities on the East Coast that actually mandate bus companies use, the terminal are Boston and Washington DC.

And it turns out if you don't actually codify into law that bus companies have to use the bus terminal, they do this shit. Or authority. Uh, poor authority is not mandated. A lot of, a lot of, okay. Okay. And there's a lot of bus companies that are moving out of there. Yeah, they go to the bus and don't go there. The center and shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, you're right. Yeah, they just they just pull up to the Javits center and then they they kick you off like a big. They make you vote for Hillary Clinton. Yes, they hold a gun to your head and say, it's the future.

So yeah, Intercity bus terminal good. I thought this one went with Halberts and when codified by law, yes. It's a good example of road transport is moving a lot of people on a bus. Not as good as the train, but still, it's pretty good. It's okay. If you have an Intercity Bus Terminal, you will not wind up making fun of your Swedish friends on your podcast Still well, they probably still will it just kind of slips out, you know, yeah, I'm genuinely I'm so sorry In other news

I didn't write this headline mom. You can't get mad at me. I'll set it This one's all me so as as we see here, United Airlines Flight 20, traveling from Houston, Amsterdam, to flight of like, I don't know, like nine hours or some shit like that. Two hours in. Gotta be like 12 hours or something. It's a long flight, you know?

Two hours in, and me or two hours in, they start serving, I guess, dinner, and a guy in seat 11G in business class. And business class on this flight is like $7,000, by the way. Like nice business class, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, sort of, I don't even know if they had first on this, but like, if not first and like very close to it, kicks off with the fly's attendance about not being able to get his first choice of meal between three choices

of meals. Sam and ribs and pasta, I'm not sure which one he was willing to like go to bat for. And so they put out the alert for like a disruptive passenger, they had to fly around in circles dumping fuel all over like Michigan for like an hour and a half. And then land in Chicago, get the guy off the plane to get arrested and then refuel and fly to Amsterdam. It's like, oh, I would be a fuck. I would I would I would strangle that man to death with my bare hands. Keep the corpse on the plane. We are making it to Amsterdam Yeah, that also takes flight to Cuba It's a triple seven that probably did have That that's probably a three-class setup. Yeah

Something about United Airlines makes people go crazy. I don't know. I'm not right man. Yeah, I mean I'd so long It's got to be longer than nine hours. I just I'm looking at spa. I'm looking at radar box.com duration nine hours, two minutes, nine hours, 13 minutes, nine hours, nine minutes. Well, this one wasn't nine hours. Ross, I'm good. Oh, buddy. Oh, buddy. Right. The lesson is, you have a duty as an economy flyer to do class war.

Yeah, you have to, and this is the only three times you can do it. Disruptive passenger, you can just be like, I thought he was going to 9-11 aside the position. I thought he was going to 9-11-2 the seers tower Yeah, we had to positional us fix you him. We had to do it. I Feel sorry for anything as I stand over his corpse eating up rib Yeah, I sealed carry through TSA

Yeah, it's the world west of and this. And this is the other thing, right? I've been thinking about this for a while. I know my rats. I know my rats. I know my rats. As the air marshal flings you to the ground. Yes. Like ever since COVID, right, particularly, no one knows how to behave in public anymore.

No, absolutely right. It's always been bad. But like we like if you lock down or to all or whatever, that inflicted such a fucking psychic wound, right, that now no one knows how to be in public anymore. And everybody's just a fucking animal. Like genuinely the rate of like disruptive passengers has gone way up since COVID. It's been going up every year since it started. And like now it's like a some like one in 200 something flights, which is a lot of fucking people considering how many flights are in the air at any one time.

People freak out our planes, they all drive worse than they used to. They all drive worse than they like shouting through. They smoke through. They throw shit at concerts. They smoke on the. That's smoking on the. L smoking on the. You should be executed in public. You should be dragged behind the train as your method of execution.

Yeah. I get to wear a big top hat. My wax mustache and I get to personally run you over with the. I mean, here's the thing, I was on the subway here like a few months ago and a guy was like smoking meth on the subway across from me. I'm like, okay, I've never done meth, right? I understand it's quite morat, I know.

I understand that it makes you quite keen to have more meth. Yes, that's kind of the way. But to the point, you can't get off the train first and find like, like, absolutely an outcome or something. Yeah, it just just rude, really, to be honest. So, yeah, no one knows how to act in public anymore. I mean, it's really grim and bad and I don't know why. I think this guy should be required to pay for the fuel that was dumped in Lake Michigan.

Yeah, I bet especially like what Alice said is is actually it's almost more depressing where you realize this guy unless he was flying with points paid thousands of dollars to throw a temper tantrum. Yeah, fully. He paid like $9,000 to waste hours of his own time and get arrested. Yeah, exactly what this Focker did, too, because I have flown United First Class. You're supposed to select the meal before you get on the flight. In fact, hours before, so the catering truck knows what to bring.

And this guy probably just didn't do that. And then he got mad because he's an idiot. Yeah, I have flown first class courtesy of an airline credit card a couple of times. And I was flying. I got an upgrade to first class. I was flying home for more land out. You can guess where in Orlando I was. And the stewardess or flight attendant was just like, oh, can I get you a drink? And I had like, because I'd been on vacation in drinking quite a lot. And I was like, and I was like, yeah, let me just get like a scotch on the rocks.

This lady, and I don't know if it was her poor and the drinks or what, heard that and was like half a gallon of scotch directly into his mouth got it, and I got a glass 6 to 8 ounces of scotch, and I was like, no wonder people disrupt flights, like I might disrupt and take this plane to Cuba. I mean, I guess it got off the Ph.L, then it'll like stop taking your alcohol on flights, that's not a carry on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing is, like, it's two things at once, right?

It's on the one hand, no one knows how to behave anymore. And on the other, all the stuff that, like, you would want to behave in has gotten way worse to the point that it's like way more of an imposition for you to, like, be normal. And there's shit that that does like annoying you and provoke you and stuff. But like, if I murdered everybody who like, eight crisps on trains, you know, I would go to prison and... Oh, we, we, yeah. So I told Raz this once, many years ago, I was dipping on a train and the guy sat next to me was like, that's disgusting and got up and went to another seat.

And Ross goes, what? You're spinning it into his mouth. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, no one knows how to be normal in public and they're also making it much harder to be normal in public. Yeah. So making it much harder to be normal in public. Yeah, so I'm excited for a round, I guess. I'm excited.

Well, yeah, because you can't do that either because you have to sit out in a rain for five hours to get the bus. And Greyhound Bus was just involved in an accident that killed like 13 people. Oh, fun. Someone said the podcast. Well, I think you're then that's better than that one time that the guy cut the guys head off and then cannibalized them on the bus or whatever the fuck that was. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm a new state, right?

Oh, no, no, it's kind of like Toronto. I don't want to know that that's pretty high on the Liam fear index. Yeah. Getting your head cut off and cannibalized on the bus. I mean, I, you know what, though, I was, I, not the two men, I've never happened to one person. Yeah, well, I was a direct,

I guess, I guess a pretty good record of that not. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, like, I listen, man, you know, I'm, I'm a big boy. I imagine I would be a sumptuous treat for a cannibal, little fatty, but, you know, I, I imagine I'm sort of a wagyu type, very fatty and rich, right? Anyway, like a mopling. Yeah, I got that nice marvelous.

Please don't eat me. That's pretty high of only inferior index. All right, what is cold? Next slide, please. Yes, okay, that was the God damn news. Please remember to be normal in public Stop eating people are gray out bus. I have put I put Scomo in here to trigger some Australians Scomo Um in the slides What what what is Cole? Um, what's called?

Off be fucking call me. Yeah, Yeah, well, this is the thing. He brought a lump of it into the, into the parliament in order to say, rack off me fucking Cole. Um, nice. I, I like the idea of taking Cole and just like threatening people with it. Yeah. It's like, hey, you, you, you, yeah, I'm gonna beat you up. I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like,

I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, I like, like, reverse in the class. So let's go, Arson. He didn't really have the, like, the ability to threaten people. So he's just sort of, like, holding out the lump of coal and sort of, like, gesture away, but like a sort of, like, skull of yore, right? Where he's just like, yeah, do it. Consider, you know, coal. Oh, I should just get a lump of coal with me at all times.

That'd be far. You are, you are Polish. Your people do belong in the mines. I don't mean that brutally. I know that you yearn for the minds, Ross. It's true. I'm the guy I'm the guy with the coal mining enthusiast hat that after the revolution is being told I have to be a poet. I wanted to hear for the mind. And I write poetry about the minds that they say now? You just like, I've like walked away.

So what is coal? It's the rock that burns. It's made out of old plants that were underground before bacteria figured out how to make them into oil. Yeah, so you got a forest. It collapses into a peat bog. The peat bog collapses into like a seam of coal.

And then you know, you dig it out of the ground. Yes, dig it out of the ground. You burn it and then your house is warm. There's different grades of coal. There's bytuminous coal. There's anthracite coal. There's brown coal. There's all kinds of coal.

And interestingly named given that it comes from the Greek four Cole, which is Anthrakes, so it's Colish Cole. Yeah, it's more Cole than Cole. It's the really good Cole. But we're not gonna talk about the really good Cole. What's cooler than Cole? Ice Cole. Yeah.

Hello. Oh. Okay. It deserved love and a boo. Like, if you think that's just sort of curiously like by level response, uh, thank you, Al. So the, um, uh, the thing about call is you burn it. You get energy from it.

You can use it to heat your house. You could use it to power steam locomotive. You could use it to power a stationary steam engine. You could use it to, you do all kinds of things by burning coal, one of which is to generate electricity. Right? So how do you do that? As with all electricity, we have not figured out

a smarter way to do it than make thing turn thing. Yeah, it's always, it's always you spin a fan, right? It's always, it's always, it's always you spin a fan, right? So you take the coal and a lot of times, you know, you dump it off at the power plant, power plant, a lot of times has like a big pulverizing system that turns it into like a fine dust that dust is put into a furnace. They burn the dust and the, and then there's what's called a water tube boiler, usually, where water is heated into super high pressure steam, right? That steam is fed into a turbine. That turbine spins around, it spins a dynamo, and the dynamo creates electricity that

then goes that down a wires and then it goes into your house and then you can turn your toaster on, right? But you do have an issue with these systems, which is that after the steam goes through the turbine, it loses some heat, but it doesn't lose enough that you can send it back around again, right? Because otherwise you get a lot of back pressure

Which means it doesn't move efficiently. This is the difference in like a closed cycle and an open cycle power plant, right? Like in an unique context too, yeah Yeah, so you know usually the the the the actual water that goes through the turbine is recirculated But you do need to condense it back into water before you can use it again as steam. One of those things about the carno heat cycle is that you get more efficiency, the higher the change in temperature. So what you do about that is you have a big condenser, and in order to reject heat from the steam, you have other water that goes through. heat from the steam, you have other water that goes through. It goes in, it gets hot and then it goes out, right?

So, you know, this is this is sort of a very common way of doing it. And then coal power, coal power plants, weirdly, we're kind of marginalized until the 1970s, 1970s, when coal got really cheap, before that everyone was into nuclear and hydropower. This is one of those things about how did we kill the United States nuclear industry? It was coal. It wasn't environmentalists. It was coal. Well, she didn't have hippies. You didn't have hippies to be like aton craft nine dunca. You had to have like coal guys instead. Yeah. Yeah. Over there was, you know, over there in Germany, it was coal too. I mean, you know, coal just got really cheap real quick. Um, through stuff like the powder river basin or in Germany, you got the big brown coal mines, you know, the giant giant bucket wheel excavator that eats a town, you know, with the people still in it's screaming in German. So, one of the things is that if you want to use this water, it gets hot.

And that causes environmental pollution, right? You know, it causes lots of problems. So ideally, you want to cool down that water before returning it to the environment. So you need, you need a system for this, right? So your early, you know, thermal coal power stations, they just dumped it back in the river it came from. And that sort of sterilized the river, which is not ideal. So one of the earliest solutions here was something called a cooling pond like this. This is Lake Anna in Virginia. I believe it's near a nuclear power plant actually.

You have a big lake, right, and you take the water in at one end and you put it out at the other end and there's sort of a just let it cool on its own right. These things to be very popular is like swimming holes. It's not even like radioactive and it's nice and warm. Exactly right you know you can go out on a boat on it and so on and so forth. But if you don't have room for that. You build something called a cooling tower. Right?

It's interesting to me that these are always sort of like the like the symbol for pollution if you're in a hurry, right? It's not even a smoke stack. It is a cooling tower. It's a cooling tower. Yeah, which is actually a pretty benign structure. All things considered. So here you're you're rejecting the heat into the atmosphere rather than into the water. Right. So one option is you have this, this is a mechanical cooling tower. It has big fans on the top, right? That sort of you have like essentially the hot water comes down and sort of a waterfall on the outside of the box, right? And then air is forced in and is drawn out by the big fan and then goes at the top. So the hot air comes at the top and the water is cooled as it recirculates through the whole unit, right? That requires

energy input though, mechanical energy input, right? Hmm. Hamster on a wheel next to the cooling tower. Exactly. A lot of hamsters all the way big. One big hamster. Really big hamster. Yeah.

I believe a really big hamster is a, like a cap of error. No, no, no, I think of that. Bigger than that. Like a 500 foot hamster. Which I do kind of have a pet now. That'sas to think Cliff heard the big red hamster. Yeah. Yeah. So if you if you don't want to supply mechanical and effort, you can also build something called a hyperbolic natural draft cooling tower. Oh, hmm. So I've tried these guys here. this cool shape sort of like, yes,

hill looking thing. Yeah, real big, really, really big, right? But it's just a big, open cylinder, not a cylinder, hyperbolic shape. Inside, there's like sprinklers, the sprinkler sprinkle water all through the entire structure, the hot water, that water, of course, creates hot air, the hot air rises, it comes out the top of the tower, and as that hot air rises, it forces cool air to come in through the bottom, which is open, which then further cools that water. So this is simply through the chimney effect here, you are creating a strong air current which cools the water, right? I wonder what it's like to be like

near one of these when it's in operation, you know? It's probably a lot of wind. Yeah, I'd be cool. I do that. I'd be glad we got a windbreak do that. You might have some kind of you might have some kind of psychological experiment being performed on you like in that movie.

Yeah, maybe like the end of Brazil, you might be getting to watch it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the thing that that's the thing that really keeps the power plant running. It's the guy being tortured in the center of the

the one to work with my mail us I guess I like the idea that like we're not very well equipped to deal with the sort of like the shape of room that a cooling tower describes uh, and we just like we get in there and we're like, oh, this makes me anxious. Uh, I quite like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that shape does not appear in nature, man. By volume, it's just a very, very large structure, which is visible for miles and miles around. These things are going to be 300, 400 feet tall.

They have massive diameters. These are elemental shapes which appear on the horizon long before anything else. I mean, and limin or lighter generation, you can see for that's the nuclear power plant near Philly. You can see that that power plant and the cooling tower and the giant cloud of steam, you know, for like 40, 50 miles around if you're in the right spot. That's fully going to like future archaeologists are going to be like, oh, they put their kings in here, you know? No, just really big hamster. Probably a really big hamster is next to these. Really big hamster, like running around the inside. Hi, it's Justin. 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. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks to get what you pay for. 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. 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. But, uh, yeah, so these, these, uh, cooling towers are needed at all kinds of thermal power plants. If it runs on, you know, whether it runs on, let's say, you know, coal or nuclear or some kind of biomass or, you know, even certain kinds of natural gas plants. Yeah, because we haven't worked out a better way to generate power than spin wheel and to spin wheel, you need steam and you need to condense the steam. That's right for right species, unfortunately.

No. Yeah, right. Species. Unfortunately, no. So here, here is a power plant. This is Pleasant's power station. It is in West Virginia, in the Ohio River. You see why people are like Atom Kruff, nine Danker, because you're like, what the fuck is that coming out of the top of that giant terrifying shape? And it's like this cloud, this cloud, it's a cloud machine. Load map, map clouds. It's a big vape, really.

Yeah, genuinely. I fully believe that we would have more nuclear power plants if we just painted the cooling towers around the outside, instead of leaving them as they are, which looks slightly terrifying. We have a big smiling atom on the side. Yeah, genuinely. Partis the power of the sun.

Yeah. How are the atom? Well, I mean, suns go asms, and it doesn't. Sure. There had been a pair of power stations on this side previously, right? But by the 1970s, we had this extremely cheap coal prices. The Allegheny Energy Company decided they wanted a new big power plant, right? So Pleasant's power station was designed, had two large generating units.

The whole station was capable of generating 1.3 gigawatts of power, right? It's a lot. Yeah, this is near the town of Willow Island. There's a dam. You can get the coal on a barge, which means it's cheap. You know, it's West Virginia, so the labor is cheap. This is sort of, I wanna say downriver of what you're gonna call it, wheeling. So yeah, this is a great place for supplying electricity to growing regions. I'm not sure exactly when this thing started construction,

but we also have to talk about concrete, right? One of our favorite materials. Yes. What is concrete? That's kind of cement. No, it's not cement. It's different from cement. I'll say cement when you meet concrete.

It makes me mad. It makes me unhappy. It does make it mad. That's a factually true statement. Yes. Concrete is made of several ingredients. You have water. You have cement. You have water.

What the fuck is cement? It should get cement is a binding agent. Cement is the chemical that actually makes the concrete stick to itself. Okay. Yeah. So you have like Portland cement, you have like, you know, all these other, it's sort of the fine dust that reacts with water to turn the whole thing into a rock. So yeah, you have water, you have cement, you have your aggregate, which is like sand and gravel, you have admixtures, which is anything else you stick in it, right? Romans invented concrete, then we forgot how to make it, then we remembered how to make it.

I forgot to remind us of a gap. Yes. Now, concrete, you pour it as a liquid into some kind of form, and then it starts to cure. Right? So it will reach its final strength in 28 days. They made a film about it. But you know, it will reach some kind of adequate strength where you can work on it much more quickly, right? If you are like you're putting a building up or you're putting up some kind of continuous poor structure like a dam, like something else like that where you know I have to, I want to pour a lot of concrete very quickly. I don't have the weight for the concrete to reach final strength. I can wait for the concrete to reach pretty good strength

and then keep working. A lot of times today, that's seven days, but we'll get to that in a bit. And then concrete is, there's lots of properties about it that you can measure in various scientific ways, but of course the fun one on the job site is you do the slump test. We talked about this before. Yeah.

Yeah. You put the concrete in the cone and then, and then you level it off on top and then you take the cone off and then you measure how far it slumps. I'm curious why has high impact violence on this. So I'm very, I'm very sexual slump test. Yes, this is this is for those of you on the audio version of this podcast. There's a picture here of famous EA sports titles slump test 2018. Slump Dog Millionaire, if you will. For PS4. So yeah, Concrete is, you know, it's a building material. It's pretty good.

We use it for a whole lot of stuff. There's some, but, you know, you can't instantly, like say, well, we poured the Concrete and I can walk on it. It's hard. We can immediately keep working on other stuff on the building or whatever it is you're putting up, right? Sure. And this means for a structure like a cooling tower,

you have to wait a while before you can, each layer you build, you should wait a while before you can, you know, each layer you build, you should wait a while before you build the next layer. And you have to remember when you poured it. Yeah, that's usually a good idea. We can't even keep track of that in restaurants sometimes. So anyway, So anyway, the point or the Plezins power station cooling tower was built with a patented jump form system. Ooh, lovely diagrams. Yes.

Look me while figure out what's going on. I'm still not sure what's going on. That's okay. We never do it anyway, buddy. But this is sort of a, this is sort of a, so a jump form is when I'm building some kind of structure out of concrete that has like a relatively constant shape up and down some kind of vertical structure. So rather than build formwork for the whole thing, I pour the concrete in a forms, and then once that is cured sufficiently,

I jump the frame up to the next location for the concrete again. So it's like a flying scaffold where it's like, it's hanging off of the bit that's like, it's not done yet, but it's done enough to sustain the weight of the scaffold and what's above it. Yes. And then as you get to the bit above that, done yet, but it's done enough to sustain the weight of the scaffold and what's above it. Yes.

And then as it, as you get to the bit above that, it's like cured enough that it's, you know, okay, sure. So it's a lot of maths, but I get what's going on. It's elegant even. Yeah, but you just keep, you just keep, you know, jacking it up, you know, once every once in a while. Yeah. So the jump forms on this were patented design from a company called Research Catrail, right? That's on the voting, man. They're from Summerville, New Jersey.

That sounds full voting. Yeah. And so because the hyperbolic shape of the cooling tower is fairly complicated, this required a lot of stuff that could be adjusted, you know, changed around as you went up and down the, or as you went up the cooling tower, because, you know, you had to redo the formwork to adjust for the diameter. You had to do all kinds of stuff. I mean, back in the day, you develop a whole cult around this and you end up with like, from Masonry or whatever, with the guys who can do those maths. Now it's just like, oh, it's some guys in New Jersey.

Yes. I think they should have a cult. I think they're entitled to have a cult. It's what I'm saying. Yeah. What are, man? So like each day, you come in, you adjust the formwork for the new diameter.

They shove the scaffold up five feet. You pour the new concrete, and then you go home. The thing is secured by anchor bolts, which are driven through the more cured concrete. You have these big gantry's on top, the cat head gantry. And there is a static line here on which there's a pulley and then this other line where they bring big buckets of concrete up. You can see this is a vertical diagram here, a plan diagram. There's the concrete truck drives up into the central loading station and that's where they load these buckets of concrete. Right? And then they're hauled up.

Now, so in each time they move the jump form, it's called a lift, right? So the first ring of concrete, you pour that lift one, the second one's lift two, so on and so forth, each one's five feet. So this patented system relied on sort of a delicate balance of everything. Yeah, it's really impressive, but it's also like kind of like watching a symphony, you know,

yeah, shit going on, lot of moving parts. Essentially, the theory here was that you would be able to do a poor each day. I say, well, I would watch the fuck out of a time lapse of this film, like a dream or something, you know? Pretty good. Yeah. But the whole system had to be balanced to avoid overloading the freshly poured concrete. And it's not really a reader because of the shape of the thing, right?

So. Yes, exactly. And it's not really a read them because of the shape of the thing, right? So yes exactly Now so so all these lines provide some stability But you know, you have to load the concrete in a specific order to avoid overloading part of the thing You know, and it was very complicated. It had a very good safety record though. There was nothing that was like especially worrying about it to this point, at least as far as anyone knew. And so this scaffold, it also, there's a top level where you're pouring the concrete. There's some lower levels where you're finishing the concrete, you're grouting stuff some and so forth. So it's a pretty big structure.

And that's progressively more terrifying being up on that scaffold Yeah, you're going up obviously it gets much you're much higher up And you're much you know, that's something that's good if you're afraid of heights obviously So yeah, this is how they were putting up this structure. So anyway, the first cooling tower got put up fairly quickly, right? But not quick enough for Allegheny power. They wanted to get the second cooling tower up as soon as possible. It's always a fucking cool for a guy.

Got a Russian. So they started, they started cutting some corners here. They and their sub countertrender research. What's it called? What the hell was it called? Research catch rail, right? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. So there are the workers are on lift 29, right? There are 165 feet in the air, 166 feet really. They're hosting the concrete to the top of the tower in the morning of April 27, 1978. But they're not delivering it evenly because, you know, workers are at different, you know, stages of the construction process and they're trying to just get the thing done as quickly as possible.

This is not a problem because, yeah, once the concrete gets up there, they load them into these things, which are called Georgia Buggies. Oh, I love these. These are so cute. It's a little, it's a cute. It's a little tiny. Yeah, it's a little tiny. It's shaped like a friend. This is what it is.

I just drive that around the scaffolding the way you need the concrete, right? If you can't see it, it looks like a little tiny, like, tracked engineering vehicle with a bucket that just tips stuff. It's great. Yeah, you just drive it around. You have a great time. Yeah. It's like. Yeah, he's drive it around. He have a great time. It's like like a golf card, but for concrete. And like this is this is the seventies.

You've probably got some like some unhealth and safety full shit in these. Like in the day, you're definitely doing some high jinx. You're doing some shenanigans. It's big. The buck is big enough for like three dudes to write in. So yeah. It's like 1970s construction to you know, it's like no one has safety clothing. Everyone shirtless and short shorts.

Danem. Yeah. So I only had a hard. So I'm dead already. So once yeah, whatever I will get to that. I need a hell mix of anything falls on me. I'm dead already. If I only need a hardhead, I'm on the top of the tower. There's nothing above me. Buds. But you know, in this rush to complete the tower is quickly as possible.

The lower row of anchor bolts, which would have been bolted into lift 26 down here, which was at this point three days old. They just didn't tighten them. They didn't use it. It's finger tight. It's fine. You know, exactly finger, finger tight. You mean, I have to go all the way downstairs and get the torque wrench. Yeah, we're there. We're 51 men working on the scaffold that day. So around 10 a.m. the first load of concrete was hoisted towards the number four cat head. Right. The number four cat head is here if you look in the plan. So they're hoisting it towards number four. Yeah.

And then the second, the second load comes up pretty quickly afterwards. And they send it up to number five, because that was who was ready. Directly adjacent to directly adjacent. So the north side of the cooling tower has all the concrete on it at this point. We're just bearing the load there. And the number four cat headline went slack. Oh, dear. 28 and the scaffold failed slowly and continuously in a counterclockwise direction all the way around the cooling tower. Oh, that I don't care for a tool. Because, yeah, presumably, like, because of the point of moving the whole scaffold, you get up there with a crane, right? And you get down there with a crane. You see that thing, like, right? And you get down there with a crane. You see that thing like coming

around towards you. Yeah. There was one emergency staircase. Not much you could do there. No. So yeah, this is sort of the whole thing. this sort of the whole thing that can you go down like 165 feet worth of stairs in under a minute. That point is like, maybe I think my chance is sliding down the outside, you know. This is the worst theme park ever. I'm riding the Georgia buggy down. Yeah. This is the worst theme park ever. I'm riding the Georgia buggy down. Yeah Marry me with the Georgia buggy. Yeah, the first and furious movies taught me that full damage doesn't hurt you if you're in a vehicle

So I'm gonna get in the Georgia buggy and it's just gonna like go at like terminal velocity and I'm gonna be fine Be with it. Yeah, yeah, you gotta put a put a roll cage on there, you know Yeah I'm gonna be with it. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta put a roll cage on there, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So the whole scaffolding falls inside the cooling tower. The people on the ground saw this happening. They all dove under the ramp where the concrete treks dropped off the concrete. They all survived. I mean, really quick thinking.

Really quick thinking. Really quick thinking, yeah. But all 51 men on the scaffold were killed like instantly. Dude. Yeah. This is, I believe, the worst construction accident in US history. Jesus. Certainly West Virginia history. I think it's the worst industrial accident of any kind in West Virginia history, which you think it has to do with.

Pretty impressive feet on this. Yeah. I mean, well the worst industrial accident of any kind in West Virginia history, which you think it has to do with. Pretty impressive feed on. Yeah. I mean, the thing is mining has been racking up disasters, like, you know, lunchpale day in, day out for decades, if not centuries, and then, you know, a long comes like working at height and just like wipe some all off the board. Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, it's just complete new contender here. Um, you know, first round draft pick. Yeah, the carnage was so complete that many of the men were only able to be identified by the contents of their pockets. Oh, it's a, again, very seventies, you know, no, no dental records, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, know, no dental records, no that shit no DNA. It's like

No, we're not in West Virginia Don't do that I'm just saying there's poverty there. Yeah, I know we've done a DNA analysis like one guy died it So which guy which guy is a smoking unfiltered palm all so it's just fucking all of them Yeah, it's like who's a post of like, who's wife and who's pocket and who is like a union card that says what? And it's like, uh, fuck. Yeah.

He's the guy who only comes down from the holler to work on the cooling tower. And this is a prototype of the guy they came up with on the trailbillies who had never heard a coronavirus but did know about the woke mind virus. So, you know, they bring in fire departments, rescuers coming in from across West Virginia and Ohio, but there wasn't really much to be done. There have already been turned into pancake. Yeah, he just goes to the floor. Basically, they got killed basically instantly.

This is like crazy how much the like how much higher the cooling tower gets, you know, I mean, I guess it doesn't matter. You can't get any more dead. Yeah, like, still, you know, yeah, yeah, this is 166 feet right here, and you got a figure that's got to go up like that. You know, it's gonna be like 3, 350 feet tall when it's done. That's a big building. Yeah. Hey, you can see the scaffold just mangled pile of boards

and that's still yeah, you know The fall didn't kill you the splinters will Do we did anything change as a result of this about how we build willing to house? Well There was a national bureau of standards investigation afterwards, which concluded something fairly obvious. The concrete hadn't had adequate time to cure. Oh, really?

I'm able to stand. Yeah, one day turns out not to be enough. Wow, I'm shocked and amazed by that. I'm stunned by the memorial that you've put up here, which is a cooling tower made out of concrete. Yeah, that seems like more bed. It's adding insult to injury. I feel right.

Right. Right. It also very weird to see like a cooling tower shaped memorial. It's quite surreal. Square would have been fine. Yeah, they got the Home depot garden center benches Um God

But um, so you know the national Bureau of standards, which is the forerunner today is national Institute of standards and testing You know, they said all right the concrete needed more time to cure. Also, there were some modifications they made to the sort of root goldbirds scaffolding system, which compromised the safety and overloaded the Sundercured concrete. I'm just, I'm having another West Virginia moment here, which I'm seeing the number

of shed surnames on, on this plaque. Oh, yeah. Lots of steels. Yeah. Lots. Oh yeah, lots of steals. Yeah, lots of steals, lots of blowers. So yeah, you just lose like, I guess like five brothers. Half the family, yeah. Family, right. And while justice was served,

Oshaf find research, Cat Catrel $108,000. That does not seem like enough money, not very much money. He'd get it. It's about like what, $1,700 per worker. Yeah. Or not, $21,000. I had some amount. It's a block.

It was a block. It was a full Xbox. It's a full tree fine. Right. About $2,000 worker. It was block boxes. Yeah, all tree fine. Right. About 2000 workers. And it was sort of unclear how the scaffold system worked as well as it did for as long as it did without this kind of catastrophic failure.

One expert just said it was dumb luck. Ah, but they never overloaded it in this way. Just really good at like working in synchronization with each other by accident. Yeah, if you, as long as you performed the expert ballet of hauling the concrete up there perfectly every single time. If you slip in the concrete, you die. Yeah, that, that sounds medicine terrifying. Yeah, that sounds medicine terrifying. Synchronized pouring. I've watched that as an Olympic sport. Hell yeah, if you did it at ground level, I would watch the fuck out.

You know how they have to like world police and fire games. They should have the world construction games. Show me that. I watch it. I do. That exists. Yeah. We got a sponsor one of those.

And here's the thing. There were no reforms that came out of this. Cool. What's so ever? They just didn't do everything and it took. It took ten years and two buildings to collapse in Fairfax, Virginia and Bridgeboard, Connecticut. buildings to collapse in Fairfax, Virginia and Bridgeboard, Connecticut for any sort of OSHA standard around letting concrete curious sufficiently to believe implemented, right? And this is why today you're much more likely to do these boars like

once a week rather than once a day. Is this why the US is getting it shit kicked in while all those time-lapse videos that's like in China They built a hospital in like six minutes sort of thing I do a prefab on that. It's different You know because prefab, you know, you just you just let everything cure in a yard and then you move it over there Wasn't a god shot a genuine question. I want to know why China is kicking our asses of building hospitals Oh, that's that's question. I want to know why China is kicking our asses of building hospitals. Oh, that's that's because they actually want to do that. The problem is they wanted more. We could do that if we wanted to. It's just the non-

lot more money to be made in not building hospitals than building hospitals. See, that's the advanced kind of capitalism. It's why they're lacking behind with the state capitalism. Exactly. What you need to understand is the best way to make money is to do nothing. There's a few episodes. Yeah, exactly. If we could just sit here and watch the Patreon number go up and do some kind of arbitrage, you know.

Instead, here we are. Maybe we are idiots like fucking assholes. Yeah, making product. That's stupid. Should I outsource this? Yeah, I'm going to direct the GPD. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. February 32nd. 2000. Yeah. It's super leap day.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, day. So yeah, this was the worst construction accident in US history to my knowledge. And almost no reforms came out of it because construction was not important. It's not bad. Yeah, yeah, I'm really not. Yeah, they didn't even get the memorial until, you know, 20 years later. I mean, this is something which I think a disaster, which is almost completely forgotten about. I mean, it's not something you hear in like the usual cannon of engineering disasters, you'll get in like, you know in college or something like that. If you're studying engineering, this is something that was swept under the rug, something

that just sort of I hadn't heard about it until a couple of weeks ago. And I was like, damn, that's really bad. Why don't we talk about this more? Wow. And yeah, I guess because it happened in a rural area, known cares about West Virginia or that section of Appalachia at all, you know, is sort of these horrible accidents or fact, the life out there, especially on the Ohio River, on a kind of river in the chemical valley stuff like that, you know, it's, it's one of those sacrifice zones, you know.

Yeah. So, you know, it's it's sad. I'm a dad. It's an able to an affolature. Yeah. Right. If this happened in like New York City, you know, you would you would you would have, you know, memorials, everyone would remember it because this happened, you know, on the Ohio River in the middle of nowhere. To people who people don't deserve the dignity of a

fucking memorial. Yeah. Well, the stretch to call this memorial particularly. Yeah. This is what we found at Home Depot that day. Yeah. Do not put if I if I die, right? I don't want you to put a memorial out of concrete, particularly if I died in a concrete related way.

I don't want you to put a concrete memorial to the thing that killed me or that I died with. I don't know, I kind of like it. I think it's kind of cool. I think it'd be fun if they memorialize me with a concrete monument of the thing that killed me. Yeah, concrete pizza boy. Yeah. that killed me. Yeah concrete pizza boy. Yeah. It sets that's milkshake now. Chocolate chocolate and chocolate. Chocolate milk. Yeah exactly. The memorial of milkshake looming over me. I'm very exactly. You're like directing the podcast right now. There's a giant concrete cat. Yes. I'm buried under like a giant concrete diagram of like an occluded like heart vessel or something Oh God, yeah, that'd be the thing if it was a medical thing I'd be boring if it was like a cool thing

It would be cool. If you die yeah, if you do is I want to saw one of those little like quirky professional humor things If you do like a badger, I want to say that, support your local medical examiner, die strangely. If you die strangely. Oh, like that. Yeah. So what did we learn? Absolutely nothing.

Of course, the regulators didn't learn anything either. I mean, you know. It was too on purpose. The regulators didn't learn anything either. I mean, you know, it's weird how this accident was so bad and led to no real reform. Obviously, cooling towers and unusual structure to build, it requires very complicated and unique scaffolding. But you know, this is not this is something that was sort of no one really did anything for this app.

Yeah, do you think maybe it's like more known and like more specialized circles, like, you know, if I can cooling tower engineer monthly has like a, you know, sort of in memorial, like assay prize once a year or something. Yeah, that's gotta be, that's gotta be it. If you're in the cooling tower trade magazine. I don't like when cooling when I don't like when trade magazine sort of switch their names like when you know the railway became like rail or whatever when they started doing that like no article increasingly unspecific like now and vaguely associated with the thing so the cooling tower trade magazines probably was called like cooling cool Yeah cool cool magazine. Yeah

To cool magazine Anyway, if you're building a cooling tower Yeah, please yeah, make sure that your construction work is a synchronized. You only build it once. You can afford to wait a bit for the concrete to cure. Time is money and that really is the problem. Yeah. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. 50-50 chance of getting that all. all normally I would be shot for being Italian. Allowed to the applicable subset of Justin, Alice, Ye Liam and guest.

I don't think you're being clever. No wrong. Incorrect. I have recently found your podcast and find your dark humor helpful for living in this totally rational society that isn't as weak as a bridge made of paper mishay Well, well, I have a few possible safety thirds to contribute as I've had many jobs in my life my go-to story makes people never want to eat movie popcorn again Spare everyone then I will instead regalia with the tale my father told me when I started work as a chemistry stock clerk. No, no, no, no, no, no, come back and email us with the popcorn one. I want to hear the popcorn one. Yeah, my father went to college in the late 50s and was from a small farming

community. So he worked hard to catch up to the more privileged people for whom chemistry 101 was too basic to be interesting. But they were also too dumb to pass the test that would let you skip it. Among those people was a student who we shall call Halfwood. Halfwood was mostly self-taught from chemistry journals, and thus this approach to lab safety was mostly fuck around and find out. So a few weeks into the semester and the class has gotten the chemical separation. Yeah, they didn't let us do this in chemistry 101.

No. Halfwood breeze through as a signed experiment decided since he finally had access to a separate Tory funnel and the chemical stores that he was going to make iodine nitride. Why? Now, this is fun. Why? Yeah. Because it's fun.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Now, iodine nitride is interesting because it doesn't really want to exist. Same. That's depressing. Let's say that. Yeah, we have a page shot on autopilot. Yeah, exactly.

We're going to get a community strike. Please, please keep subscribing to the patreon. I just I hate to wait beyond a cuba. I can love stuff going on. I love you so much, buddy. Oh, thank you. All right, back to the popcorn that we don't get. Therefore, when dried, I had dined nitride explodes at the touch of a feather with a bunch of purple-ish brown iodine smoke. See attached. Oh, damn.

Okay. And small quantities, and in this photo, it's detonating a few grams. This is a fun chemistry magic demonstration. But in large quantities, it can shatter glassware and make a lot of toxic iodine vapor. Now, if this was a college I worked at, then he would have gone to the stock room, asked for the materials, and then would have been told he didn't need any of that for the experiment. Yeah, you're sort of chemistry almyra. It's like, I'm not assuming you that.

No, I can't have a dream job, you know. But since this was the 50s, and this was a basic 101 class, the stars were just a cabinet that kept stuff the students would need with no stock room clerk in sight. Needless to say, with such lacked procedures, Halfwood proceeded to make about about 100 times the amount of iodine nitride shown in this photo, so he could show it off to all his friends. Thankfully for my dad, while the college didn't have a clerk, it did have a lab teaching assistant, checking on the students to make sure they got through the distillation alright. When the TA walked by, he saw that instead of the white crystals half-wit was supposed to be making, the drying dish was filled with purple crystals.

He asked half-wit if this was this product from the experiment, and half-wit replied that he had already turned that in, and then he was making iodine nitride. At this point, the TA dumped an entire bottle of water on the dish, pulled the fire alarm and evacuated students from the lab. I broke absolutely heroic. Since the fire alarm had been out, out, out. The big, concrete thing of milkshake looms. Yeah.

Yes, he's standing on my shoulder. He's getting in my face. He's Yes, he's standing on my shoulder. He's getting in my face. He's going to lick my hair in a second. If you saw that photo on Twitter that I posted yesterday, he's doing that. Oh, there he is. That crap. Okay.

He's in front of me now. Since the fire alarm had been pulled. Since the fire alarm had been pulled. Everyone from the building, I I scratching himself on the microphone. Everyone from the building filled around outside for about a half hour waiting to go back to their experiments. Instead, they were ushered into the big lecture hall. They're the professors of the chemistry department explained that half-wit had found out that the fastest way to get expelled in college history. What's the choose to

manufacture explosives while messing around after finishing experiment then delivered a long Stati lecture about not making anything in lab other than what you were supposed to listen. Is it a crime to be neurodivergent? Well, you're just right. You're what learnings a crime now? Yeah. Yeah, it's so old. It's a multi-sword. 1984. 1984. We go into the war with Eurasia. 1984 If you're making something if you're only making the stuff your Spunk of wrong pole revolution If you're only making the stuff that you are and are supposed to then how is it an experiment? You know what I mean? Yeah, right are you gonna learn anything?

Because The work by virus is ruining universities. Uh-huh Thanks for all the laughs amidst the tragedy your faithful new listener Paul Thanks Paul. Please get back to us with the popcorn thing. Yes, I want the popcorn. Sorry. Yeah Well, I was safety third the popcorn thing. Listen to how I've always had that. Yeah. Follow all of us on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter to Blue Sky. Follow all of us on Twitter to 3 threads, etc. No, follow me on. No, no, no, no, no, threads is the worst.

But yes, it's unusable, dude. Terrible. This cat has decided the microphone is his new scratching. All right, well, that's an episode. New host, Alice, go record trash future. Recording kill James Bond. We're going to Rambo full. It was fucking terrible.

I'm not excited about that. Hi guys. Bye. I'll feed us in.