Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 157: Howard Street Tunnel Fire

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

bawlmore WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ 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/

The podcast is now going. Oh great, where I get to record with my two best friends on the worst day in recent memory. Oh, I'm sorry man. It's okay, I feel fucking terrific. And I get to see rods after this, so there are, there could be worse things, there could be no rods. As I said, mandatory fun, immediately after this. Mandatory fun.

You will receive mental health from this. Mental health is approaching your location. Do not attempt to resist. JUSTIN approaching at high speed. ALICE Extremely fucking high rate of velocity. JUSTIN Yes. Hello, and welcome to... ALICE Hi, Roz.

JUSTIN Well there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him, okay go. Hi, I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now. You may have gotten a glimpse of me if we keep the video in of me being on webcam. I don't think we need to do that.

Perfect, yeah, cause I look like a terrible fucked witch scarecrow, and my pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. LIAM Yay Liam, don't know how I'm gonna follow that up, but I'm sure gonna try. I don't have a webcam for this exact reason. And people, when I guest on other podcasts, they're like, oh, you don't have a webcam? But you guys are really successful. I'm like, yeah.

And part of that is because you've never seen our faces. ALICE Exactly. ALICE We're all self-conscious about the way that we work and also... SEAN I don't like my body. ALICE I don't, yeah. Have you ever considered transition about it, that way you can not like it in a different way? SEAN Like in 4D, right?

Like, oh, body dysmorphia in smellovision. ALICE Wow. Mmm. ALICE The spikid's three of body dysmorphia in smellovision. Wow. Mm. The spike in three of body dysmorphic disorder. JUSTIN What you see on the screen in front of you, in extremely low resolution. It's horrible. I'm really hard to find pictures for this one, actually. I was surprised.

Cause I always remember it as a big deal. You see down here, what vaguely looks like some train tracks, going into a hole with smoke. ALICE Yeah, does this count as like a stop signal, for practical purposes? JUSTIN I believe so, yes. I believe this is a situation you would not want to proceed further down the tracks. ALICE Ah!

Just gun it. Notch eight, you know? FUCK YEAH! JUSTIN We'll get to that later. Oh dear. Yeah. So, but that involved the high rail truck. But anyway.

Today we're going to talk, once again, about Baltimore. But this time, an older transportation disaster than the one that's in recent memory. Which is the Howard Street Tunnel Fire. ALICE You know, for two guys who live in Philadelphia, we mind Baltimore a lot for content. ALICE Shout out to Baltimore, the greatest city in Baltimore County. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE You a bigger fan of White Marsh or something?

ALICE I just, I say these things, I put them out into the world knowing that they're going to be provocative, y'know? SEAN You know the joke, right? Because Baltimore County doesn't include Baltimore? ALICE Yes. Yes. I'm aware of that, because I've seen the TV shows a while. SEAN I was making fun of Roz, because he was like,

do you prefer White Marsh? And I thought he didn't know? I was like, do you prefer white marsh? And I thought he didn't know. I was like, no man, I did once take a megabus from Philly to DC, which stopped at, as a conductor, or whatever you call a bus driver, the white mash mall. And I was like, ah, it's just my dad driving this. ALICE Hold on, check this out. Shoutout to Baltimore, home of the second best bird named NFL team. Yeah, okay. Sure enough.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's the official endorsement of the city of Baltimore by, well there's your problem podcast, second best NFL bird team. And you can go to Vacaro's in Baltimore and then eat your weight in pastries, it's delicious. Never been. I'd like to, but obviously...

I'll take you to Baltimore, we'll go to Vicarra's, and you'll have... JUSTIN Almost great. ALICE Yeah, Balmoralz. SEAN For loyalty reasons I have to go to Philadelphia first, but like, yeah. ALICE Well, of course. JUSTIN I do like the idea of going on vacation from Britain to the United States, specifically to the beautiful city of Balmoralz. ALICE Yes.

SEAN Balmoralz, yeah. ALICE Being like, this is just Yeah. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. ALICE Being like, this is just like the wire once every ten minutes until someone shoots me. And then as I die, I'm like... LIAM Oooh, I might be the one to do it, Nova. ALICE Yeah, and then as you execute me, I'm like, damn, this is just like the wire. LIAM David Lynch, you're a genius!

As my chest cavity's being removed. ALICE Liam, you're like a white brother, Muzo, and I just keel over, you know? LIAM Awww. Uggghhhh. ALICE It was worth it for all the crap, thanks. Not David Lynch, who did the fucking wire? David Simon!

There we go! David Lynch is the wire! David Lynch is the wire! I would say, not a worse one, right? Just a different one. A very different show, yes. I feel bad for Dab, because my are fuckin' blown out on that joke. Sorry everybody.

ALICE It's fine, everyone's still reeling from white brother Muzon, so. LIAM Yeah. Yeah. Get him while they're down! JUSTIN Everyone has to stop apologizing today. Yeah. We're all having a nice time, this is mandatory fun hour.

Anyway, jarring shift of tone, as we go into the goddamn news. ALICE Oh my god, dude. ALICE Oh yeah, there is some actual news happening, huh? Even as we record this. JUSTIN As we're recording even, yes. SEAN Yeah, no, if you listen to this show, and are a Zionist Jew, my advice to you is just turn it off now. You're not gonna like this.

And I'll see you at Shul." JUSTIN Yeah. So, you know, there's a severe problem with anti-Semitism on America's university campuses. ALICE Yeah, these guys with Israeli flags are showing up and telling a bunch of Jewish students that they're all members of Hamas. JUSTIN Yeah, the cops are beating up Jewish voice for peace and stuff like that. ALICE Those fucking hippies. I love them to death, but those fucking hippies.

ALICE Yeah, acts of antisemitism interrogating Jewish leftists as to why they don't have dual loyalty like they should do. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I mean, this has been... LIAM I was talking to my mom about that. JUSTIN Several large campus protests going on, ongoing right now. The big one that has been in the news is the one at Columbia University. And you know, they, the president came out and was just like, well, I think my first

option we should be subtle, we should just violently put this down using the police. Yeah, really, really, really, really just, what, just... not dick out, but that was the first thing that came to mind. Yeah, zero to a hundred is a better phrase than dick out. ALICE I mean, the thing about violently repressing student protests is, I don't wanna say that it always makes the student protests more effective, especially given... LIAM Oh, it sure does.

ALICE The history of student protests in the United States has been not very effective in general, it didn't stop the Vietnam War, it didn't stop the Gulf War, it didn't stop the war in Afghanistan, it didn't stop the second Gulf War, and it's probably not gonna stop this, but... We're sure gonna try, baby! You never know when it's important to try, is the main thing. I'm not being defeatist about this, I'm simply suggesting that we don't

have a good grasp on what works, and anyone who presumes to lecture you on what will, whether that's someone who used to be in Students for a Democratic Society, or whether that is a university administrator, has no idea. LARSON Yeah, and they're being real nasty to these students, they're doing stuff like, they're just saying, okay, you're suspended now, by the way, you have fifteen minutes to collect your things before we lock you out of your dormitory. SEAN Have you considered sucking me from the back?

JUSTIN Yeah. You know, it's just, alright, well, you know, if you show solidarity with the Palestinians, uh, yeah, you're homeless now. ALICE I mean, NYPD turned the LRAD, the noise deterrence device thing, on a bunch of students praying, so, that's the level we're at at time of recording. Texas state troopers are going into UT Austin, and beating the shit out of people. And... JUSTIN People are openly calling for another Kent State massacre at this point. Yeah, they are.

They want it so bad, is the thing. Like, the bloodlust is incredible in some sections of the ride. It's nauseating, is the word that comes to mind. Yeah. And I mean, look, even if that, y'know, God forbid, like, the worst comes to pass there, and there is some serious act of anti-protest violence like that, that also does not stop the protests, right, is the thing. Any more than Kent State stopped Vietnam War protests.

SEAN We're gonna levitate the Pentagon again, baby! ALICE Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but this time we're gonna... SEAN We're gonna levitate the Pentagon and rotate it counterclockwise next time. ALICE Yeah, exactly. We're gonna rotate it and we're gonna lay it out so it's longer than the line. Yeah, unravel the pentagon! Yeah.

Yeah, this is our demand, right, well we have two demands, right, stop the genocide, unfold the pentagon. Let us see the internals! Take us to the pentagon burger king! These are our demands! ALICE Our demands are most moderate. Unfold the Pentagon, end the genocide, and tell me what the fourth section of the sculpture and the CIA statue got themselves.

LIAM Oh, Kriptosia! ALICE Yeah. You know, you can just go in the Pentagon. Like you can take a tour. ALICE I mean, that's not gonna help if I keep levitating it. LIAM What's the fun of that? Yeah. Roz, we're trying to levitate, mean, it's not gonna help if we're levitating it. LIAM What's the fun in that? Yeah, Ross, we're trying to levitate, and the tour's not, I mean, maybe we can get inside and we'll try to do it in segments, but...

ALICE Yeah. Just levitating a portion of the Pentagon. ALICE Area podcasters now most banned people from Pentagon. LIAM Just one section of the C ring just levitates up. Six seats. ALICE Just like, while Zacharias was saling, just like, sitting there sadly in our cells. ALICE Just like, whatever Zacharias was sat away just sitting there sadly in our cells. Just like, whatever like, defense force protection agency there is, being like, well we don't

know if they can levitate the Pentagon, but why take the chance? We're all gonna find out together, dickheads! If you only levitated one section of the Pentagon, you would probably do more damage to the building than 9-11 did. That's probably true. SEAN Well, I, you know, that's, whatever man, I'm gonna shut down the military industrial complex simply by being really fucking annoying. ALICE I mean, so, the way in which the university

administrations have responded to these has obviously been extremely panicked, both by sending in the cops, and also Columbia just, like, boarded off their business school? LIAM Yeah. Good, they should keep it that way. ALICE They built like a Northern Ireland style peace wall around their business school to keep Shay Davide in there? Or out of there?

I'm not entirely clear. JUSTIN This is Robert E. Lee's fault. ALICE Well, yeah, isn't everything. If you're not familiar with this guy, he's like a business professor nominally who spends most of his time screaming at students on YouTube. RON Shouldn't he be teaching? ALICE Well, I mean... SEAN Ross, do you know a single professor that

can teach? ALICE It's business school as well, what's he gonna teach? Like, profit is like... as well, what's he gonna teach? Like, profit is like... SEAN Oh, I know, line go up, Mr. Vaughn, yeah. JUSTIN Look, I know one professor who can teach, but Dr. Mark Brack is retired, so... ALICE Yeah.

They retired the one teacher. JUSTIN They found one professor who's good at teaching, and yeah, he's retired now. Don't go to university. ALICE Anyway, as ever, I would say the kids are alright. Like, their hearts are in the right places, they're doing the right thing, the good thing by protesting. And a considerable personal risk, y'know?

And I don't wanna just be like, oh, the thing that matters about this is what people in the West are doing, right? Because if you wanna talk about universities, the Israelis have killed thousands of university students and killed most prominent academics in Gaza. Every university in Gaza is destroyed at this point, and they've been destroyed gleefully on video by people who filmed themselves doing it on purpose. Which by the way is one like, add it to the list of war crimes. Right?

JUSTIN It's like they opened up the SimCity disaster menu and just targeted every hospital, you know? LIAM Yeah. I will say, as someone who believes... my most lib opinion is that academia good, actually. ALICE Yeah, of course. I, I will say this, what you said, the kids are all right. It is heartening to see like, uh, teenagers get real fucking mad at this shit. And it's, it's, you know, uh, I have a, uh, a coworker, uh, a related note who is Iranian, uh, she immigrated from Iran to the States, her daughter's visa to the

university of Michigan is being held up in part because of this bullshit nonsense. Because if you want to get out of Iran and come to the United States, where you would be an asset to academia, you can't do that because we're mad at Iran now, make that make sense. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

It's life-saving cancer research, but who gives a shit? We're gonna bomb Tehran. Yeah. Don't wanna facilitate a brain drain. Don't wanna do any of those kind of strategic things. Yeah! That's good! That's what we should do! That's why China has better 5G than we fucking do, is because we just didn't renew the guy's visa.

And that's why I support open borders, because I should never have lag. Yes. Absolutely. There you go. Open borders not because of human dignity, but because I should never have lag. Yes. Absolutely. Open borders not because of human dignity, but because I want my games to be fast. Every border implies not just the violence of its maintenance, but the worst 5G of a gamer on the other side of it. It's right. It's okay, Elon is gonna fix it with Starlink.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna. All the things. All the things that he does. That is the one that they should take away from him by force at first. Not to be like, full, like, you know, NAFO dog man, right, but like, the shit that he did in Ukraine, where he's like, just like, oh, suddenly he spoke to a Russian guy and

is like, okay, cool, well, war's over, I guess, because he's like the dumbest, most easily led Nazi cunt on the internet, and is just like, yeah, fuck it, okay, these guys don't need internet, because I'm scared they're gonna start World War III or whatever. A man who believes in Rokos Basilisk, they should take him out the back and fucking **** him. SEAN LLOYD Leave it. Leave that in.

Rokos... Rokos modern basilisk. I don't support everything that the Ukrainian government has ever done, or is, but I do think they should be allowed to execute Elon Musk. Only that would actually be pretty good, yeah. You gotta give them that. You gotta give them two things, right? You gotta give them, like, they are the victim of an unjust invasion, which they are entitled

to resist by, like, the sort of means available to them in the same way that Palestinians are, and you gotta give them the ability to execute Elon Musk. Yeah. No, all by that, but I wanted to talk about my idea, which is Starfish Link, in which I just send 900,000 pictures of my butthole to Elon Musk, overwhelming him so much he walks into the fucking sea. Yeah, that's reasonable. That might work.

He's a fucking Nazi. And you know what, Dave, you'll have to bleep this, but I look forward to the day that Elon Musk sees picture 9000 of my butthole, and just, and hopefully fucking f*** himself, I hope. I don't... Or my butt, you know that movie The Ring, except The Ring is my butthole and Elon must kill himself. I don't have a joke here, I just really hate the guy.

ALICE The other thing about the campus protests, I think, is, hauling it back to something vaguely like a topic, right, is that, like, if administrators had been at all smarter about this, it would still have been evil, but they could have avoided these problems for themselves, right? But because the system is what it is, you have to prove all of the people who say that the violence in Gaza and police violence in the US is part of the same overall structure by immediately sending in the cops and talking about sending in the National Guard and stuff.

Whereas if you had done nothing, if you had done absolutely nothing, and just sat on your arse, collected your immense administrative salary for your hedge fund disguised as a university, and just gone, this'll fizzle out because they'll get bored. And it'll get smaller, and it'll be like, you know, there'll be like a small little protest camp that, like, one of our business professors can be insane about, and eventually the people who aren't Palestinian will get bored and peel off. That might have even been true. But, like, by sending in, like, state troopers in the NYPD, or by sending in, like, the National

Guard, god forbid, all you're doing is galvanizing this stuff. But they can't do otherwise, because that's what the system is, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, they probably have inspired, like, fifty other protests that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You know, I wouldn't be surprised to see even, like, the most politically inactive campus I've ever been on, Drexel University, having a protest soon. I mean... ALICE Yeah, I mean, if you're a student listening

to this, you should go to one. You should organize one if there isn't one. Like, this is a good thing for you to do. And I think also I appreciate how all of the attempts to, like, bait and provoke and to lie on the part of the opposition have not worked. Did you see that one video of the guy who, like, took his wife to the protests at Columbia, wearing a shirt on which she had handwritten... ALICE Yes, yes.

Good lord. ALICE...shoe, front and back. JUSTIN I saw that. That was just embarrassing. ALICE Yeah. And it was like, my wife bravely confronted these anti-Semitic protesters, and not only did no one either notice or confront her, but behind her there was a giant banner saying like, Jews for a free Palestine.

And none of those people noticed, or either. It's just... JUSTIN They're just like, you know, like a big circle around her, just like, you're fucking moron. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's the level of regard it deserves, you know? And I'm proud of all of these kids, not just for protesting, but also for like, sort of remaining above that kind of thing, and like, being organized

and being... ALICE And making it not just engagement bait, right? ALICE Yes. Yeah. ALICE I hear ya. ALICE Cause like, when I was like, 1920, I was a fucking idiot, is the thing. ALICE Oh, me too. So was he.

JUSTIN If you would've asked me, like, can you organize a protest in a way that has like, a designated media person, so when a guy from the Atlantic comes looking for quotes to make us look bad, we refer them to her? I was gonna mention that, yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't have been able to do that, I wouldn't have been that smart with that discipline. And these kids are... No, I would have just started yelling probably like pro-Hamas slogans, doing something like

that. You would have endorsed Hezbollah, I would've said that, like, Ukraine should get the right to execute Elon Musk. ALICE Yeah. What does our want demand, and it's a weird list of them. ALICE And that's fine for a podcast, I think, but it's probably not okay for these kids to be saying, and they're smart to be, sort of, canny and disciplined.

ALICE Well done on not taking the bait. JUSTIN Yes. Yeah. ALICE Oh, and showing up with, like, the Hamas red arrow on a t-shirt. ALICE Just a big, like, Hamas red arrow on a stick. You can, like, hold over the... JUSTIN Oh my god. That would be really funny.

ALICE AAAAAAAAanks where you climb the campus in the middle of the night and you put a big red arrow over it. Okay, that is pretty funny. JUSTIN Please no, please no, do not do this. ALICE Don't do this! JUSTIN Don't do this! ALICE That's the sum total of my protesting advice life experience, is, this idea that I have is funny, never do it.

JUSTIN Don't do it. Oh yeah, don't, don't, no, no, no, you're gonna get... Okay, before we get into any other big ideas, let's go to the next news item. Yeah, so this is a fun little story. I don't know if you saw this, but today, time of recording, a couple of the household cavalry, like, army horses... ALICE You like, busted loose? ALICE Yeah, they didn't like what was going on, they didn't like what was transpiring, and they decided to quit the army, in a way they're normally supposed to do.

Yeah, they deserted. And so like, five horses, just like, unseated their riders at Buckingham Palace, and just went loose through central London. One of them... JUSTIN The horses are organizing shit. Horses Union, how?! ALICE My, y'know, 32F horses, 4M, 5M, 4M, have organized against me.

Um, I mean, obviously it's not good to get thrown off a horse, as you see here, the white one is covered in blood, which I don't know if that's horse blood or, like, cavalryman blood, but either way, not great. ALICE Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. SEAN Horse has said unified Ireland now. ALICE Yeah. I mean... ALICE If horses knew what a unified Ireland was, they would support it.

SEAN Unfortunately horses are the dumbest animals on God's green earth. ALICE Yeah. Which makes them unionists. JUSTIN Can you imagine if there were more horses on the road, though? If you were still using horses and carts in the horse uniform? SEAN You could just say, what if everything were West Philadelphia at like 10pm?

ALICE When you learn to drive in this country, they do include on the list of hazards, like, horses. I'm hitting the big fucking Hazard Perception Test button on this. Like, this is a hazard. JUSTIN I have seen one of the West Philly Cowboys lose control of a horse on my street. It was very funny. The thing is, losing control of a horse is, it has the high level of risk of physical injury, death, disability, but also high slapstick comedy value.

I don't know if you remember, during, I think it was some of the Brexit protests maybe, but there was a Met Police mounted riot cop who lost control of the horse and went full tilt into a sign, in a way that she just got perfectly wily coyot lost control of the horse and went full tilt into a sign, in a way that she just got perfectly wily coyoted off of the horse, and you're like, that's gotta really fucking hurt. It's also really funny to watch, I'm gonna watch this like five or six more times. Like, buy the same token, this. JUSTIN If you run a red light on a horse, do you get

the ticket, or does the horse? ALICE I mean, would you like to try and ticket that horse? It's covered in blood and it's mad. Like... JUSTIN Yeah, but what if the rider is still on there and he's lost control, and it's like, well, it's not his fault. ALICE You sort of approach the horse and slap a

ticket onto the horse, and it kicks you in the head, killing you instantly. JUSTIN No, no, no. The guy who named Kicking Horse Pass survived. SEAN I like that you know that. That makes me really happy. ALICE One thing I will say is, you know who the real winners are in this situation? SEAN On horses.

ALICE Is street photographers. Right. Because imagine, like, obviously this looks very creepy, it looks very portentous and ominous, but like, if you're a street photographer, you're just walking down the street in central London and all of a sudden you're presented with this? Like, something's going pretty well for you. Like, I'm walking around with the camera a lot and I'm often thinking like, oh, you know... I wish there would be two runaway horses.

I wish there was some horse chaos occurring. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And there so seldom is. Y'know? But, someone was there on the scene, y'know? And I'm so glad they worked, because the pictures of it, like, this is a pretty low resolution version because it's just pulled off the internet, but like, they're genuinely, really, like, compellingly sharp.

So yeah. They did get a little horse. For more, see our photography bonus. Oh please do, it's one of my favorites we've done. But like, they've recovered all the horses, all of the horses are now back in the army. It sucks. AHH, BOO! I think they should've just let them run free and be like a sort of feature of central London

for a while. That would be fun. Yeah, there's just some horses that hang out, y'know. Watch out for the wild horses, y'know? Sort of dodging, lying bikes and delivery drivers and stuff. JUSTIN They would get hit by a truck instantly. ALICE Yeah, it's true, and as you see in the background there, we do let a lot of HGVs just use main roads in central London, so.

Yeah. I dunno, I think maybe the solution is, instead of, like, pedestrianization, you know, we love pedestrianization. LIAM Horstization? ALICE Equestrianization. LIAM That's the word, I love it. I'll just go front myself. ALICE I think, I'm not sure where this is, this might be the strand, we just equestrianize

that. We just have a big, like, hippodrome there. LIAM That does slap, I do like... Yeah. ALICE You're gonna regret this when you realize about dealing with the poop. ALICE I mean, listen, London streets are not that clean to begin with. ALICE And in many ways it's like, return with a V, right?

Because like, all the streets of London are usually covered in horseshit. And so we're just going back, y'know? Also maybe we could train them to use big litter trays or something, I don't know. You're gonna have to have a municipal pooper scooper service. It creates jobs, it's Keynesianism. You gotta have the guy who equestrianizes the road, the guy who does the road markings, the guy who picks up after the horses, it's perfect. That's three good union jobs paying a living wage right there.

Equestrianize Britain. JUSTIN All right, yeah, we gotta go back to horses. We gotta have more horses, so we can strengthen the horse union. ALICE Horse good, car bad. LIAM Yes. LIAM I'll buy that. Why not? JUSTIN We just can't have atmospheric railways.

ALICE No, no. Not one Irish guy is gonna shit his pants. And that's what the municipal pooper scooper is for! ALICE There you go! ALICE Absolutely. Cleans up after horses and one terrified Irish man. JUSTIN Yes. Well, speaking of horses, that was the goddamn news.

We do have to talk about horses a bit. ALICE My eyes sort of unfocused looking at this dread map, and I briefly pictured it as a kind of battle map. It kind of looks that way. JUSTIN It kind of is. Battle between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baltimore in Ohio in Baltimore. ALICE The Pennsylvania Railroad draws up its troops at Mount Vernon, y'know?

It's a Civil War map. ALICE No, that's still probably what the Pentsu would do, so... JUSTIN There is some Civil War relevance here. So, Baltimore has historically been the terminus for a number of important East Coast railroads, I mean, the BNO, which is in blue, the Pennsylvania Railroad's in red here. Over here in brown, we have the Western Maryland Railroad. Which it deserves.

You have the Ma and Pa, the Maryland and Pennsylvania up here in orange. And then there's a number of things going on here. But in sort of the early, whatchamacallit, in the early 1800s, in the mid 1800s, this was the terminus of the B&O mainline, which is... One of the B&O. Yeah, the B&O, this is the Baltimore, Ohio, this is where the B&O Railroad Museum is now. That's mile zero the B&O. And then it was the terminus of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad over here

at the President Street station, which somehow still exists. And if you were going south from New York, Philadelphia, points north, you came down the PW would be, and you went down to the President Street station, and then your train car was unhitched from the locomotive and hitched to horses, and they pulled you down Pratt Street until you could get to the B&O station. This is what we like, you know? Train, and then intermodal horse. Yeah.

Intermodal horse, yes. Um, you know, but every train on the East Coast had to do this. Intermodal intra-urban horse. Exactly. So you had horses pulling freight cars and all this crap, it was very annoying, it was very slow, it almost got President Lincoln assassinated. ALICE Run that one by me again? JUSTIN So, when President Lincoln was, I forget exactly why...

ALICE I mean, I got some bad news about President Lincoln first of all. JUSTIN No, no, he did get assassinated later, but this would have been before most of the Civil War happened. ALICE Oh. Yeah, you kinda needed him alive for that. Yeah, cause he took a train from, I wanna say New York to Washington DC, and of course, you know, Baltimore was a big Confederate city. And they had to pull his presidential train car through downtown Baltimore.

And they wound up, they just did it at like two o'clock in the morning because no one was awake. ALICE So, like, the reputation of Baltimore in the 19th century is, like, racist, but very sleepy about it. JUSTIN Yes, they're too sleepy to be racist. ALICE You gotta get your race hours in in order to hate minorities. JUSTIN The other big railroad that terminated here was the Baltimore Potomac up here, which was the Pennsylvania controlled line to Washington DC. Now after the Civil War the trains started getting bigger, the situation with hauling

all the trains down Pratt Street became untenable. So the Pennsylvania Railroad does two things. Number one, it solidifies its control over the P, W, and B going northward. And then they build the Union tunnels here and the B and P tunnels over here. And then all of a sudden, they have their own nice Pennsylvania station up here that they can use,

and they don't have to use any of that street trackage. And so, around 1873, this was all finished, right? All their traffic is no longer on city streets, except for their very, like, the local freight deliveries, which still ran until like 1980 or something. God damn. Yeah. So, the Baltimore and Ohio has a more complicated problem though, because they have their original terminus in Mount Clare, and then there's no clear way forward from there, right?

Hmm. They're kind of boxed in. They're boxed in, yeah. In 1884, the Philadelphia-Willmington-Baldimore was finally completely acquired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to kick the B&O trains off of it entirely. So they no longer have access to this up there, they're like, nah, fuck you. Right? I love railroad wars.

Yeah. So, the B&O is like, alright, we'll build our own line to Philadelphia, with Blackjack and Hookers. And that's the Philadelphia branch up here. Or the Philadelphia subdivision. ALICE 1870s, quite possibly. JUSTIN Yeah. So, and there's still a problem here though, which is how do you link the two halves of

the railroad together. Um, initially this was done by a car float over here, um, I think there was also some other route. This map is from Trains.com, by the way, and it shows the situation in about 1949, so this is not exactly what it looked like. Here's a little bit of an older engraving of the original situation, where the trains came off of the Camden station, they went onto Pratt Street, they went around the Inner Harbor and they went into President Street. ALICE I know it's also Gay Street, hell yeah, representation,

we've always been here, et cetera et cetera. JUSTIN There's a Gay Street dock, even. ALICE I love to dock at Gay Street. JUSTIN So, you couldn't bridge the harbor, for reasons we mentioned in the previous episode, regions that were... ALICE You've run a ship into it, y'know? Couldn't bridge the harbor, for reasons we mentioned in the previous episode, regions that were- You've run a ship into it, y'know? Yeah, yeah, pretty well demonstrated a few weeks ago.

No one wanted to try tunneling under the harbor. There was only one way to go. Build a tunnel directly underneath downtown Baltimore. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Can we get some like, Minecraft footage, or possibly Dwarf Fortress footage over this? Oh yeah, that would make sense. That would be a good one.

So the Baltimore and Ohio's Camden station is down here, next to Oriole Park at Camden Yards. I hate how things are at things now. They're at things. Well this is one of the first things to be at a thing. Cause that is a... That's a relatively old ballpark at this point. They invented the preposition for this.

It is a good ballpark though, Camden Yards. It is a good ballpark, yeah. I enjoy going to Camden Yards. What makes a good ballpark, as opposed to a bad ballpark? Sight lines, relatively cheap drinks, just a good atmosphere. Standby lines? No, not in baseball! Oh, no, no.. JUSTIN No, not in baseball. ALICE Not in baseball.

No. No. No. Not in baseball. No. No. That's the cool thing about all the different parks have weird little idiosyncrasies and stuff like that.

JUSTIN The newer ones seem to be like... ALICE That's allowed and encouraged. JUSTIN Yeah. The newer ones seem to be sort of, whatchamacallit, zooming in on a standardized baseball field design. How weird can I get with it? If I'm designing a base... Barry! Can I be like, yeah, the field's at like a 45 degree angle.

I don't know that you could do that, but there's stuff like... No, that would be, that's just, whatchamacallit, the one in Philly. The Baker Bowl. The Baker Bowl is was like, yeah. That one in Nashville, there's one in Nashville that had a hill. Yeah. It's like a real actual hill. And yeah, we did a, we did a bonus of, if anyone's interested in this, we did a bonus of 10,000 losses with rods where we talk about like these designs that I've

always found pretty fascinating. Yeah. I buy baseball would be better if it would, if it was worse. Yeah. Sports are better when found pretty fascinating. Yeah, baseball would be better if it was worse. Yeah, sports are better when they're worse. Yeah. So actually though Camden Yards is nice. It's one of the first, it was the first modern retro ballpark. It has, the concessions are nice and convenient, you know, the sight lines are good, so on and so forth. Shout out to Camden Yards.

ALICE So the train station's right there. So the Howard Street tunnel went from the Camden station, up Howard Street, to a new station at Mount Royal, which is still there, but it doesn't see trains anymore. ALICE Long ass tunnel. But I mean, you can tunnel under a city and put trains in it, like many cities have. Oh yeah, no problem. This is 1895, though. So there are some issues.

One city has done this, at this point. Exactly. Two more cities are shortly to follow. So it has a relatively steep grade, it handles full-size mainline trains, so steam engines would have to work very hard to pull heavy trains through the tunnel. If you're doing heavy work with these steam trains, that means a lot of smoke, and in a tunnel that's a bad situation.

You end up with the same thing of the early London Underground, of what happens if you get to the station and you have suffocated all your passengers. Yeah, not good, not good, you want to the station and you have suffocated all your passengers. JUSTIN Yeah, not good, not good. You wanna avoid that. So. The BNO turns to a new technology, electrification. ALICE Hell yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Cutting edge.

Still can't do it on a lot of places today, it seems. JUSTIN Yeah, it's lost technology. LIAM This looks so fucking sick. JUSTIN Yeah, it's state cutting edge, yeah. So, y'know. ALICE This is scientific Americanny. JUSTIN Yes. So. The very first mainline electrification system in the United States was installed

in the Howard Street Tunnel to haul trains through the tunnel and through several tunnels that followed it. These electric locomotives are attached at the Camden station, and were either detached when a passenger train made a stop at the Mount Royal station, or the freight trains, they would actually just keep going up the line, and they would uncouple them on the fly and put them in a siding, and the freight train would continue on towards Philadelphia. ALICE Like how enthused everyone in this looks. Like the engineer sticking his head out of the cab, the guy in the tunnel waving to him,

just like, yeah, fuck yeah, this is the future. JUSTIN Aaron's like, yeah, this is fucking great, we're doing the future here. Remember when things could happen? Yeah. Pretty soon we're gonna electrify all trains. Oh, you hold onto that thought, buddy. So, this was done with a 675 volt DC third rail system, which was initially on the ceiling. You notice this very strange pantograph here.

The idea was to give more clearance, that the two third rails would be next to each other on the ceiling, and then the pantograph would just sort of ride in a slot on the rails and be offset. ALICE I prefer this to like a third rail on the line in that it feels less likely to kill me for looking at it wrong. JUSTIN Oh, yes. But it didn't work very well, so they eventually put third rail on the ground. Haven't there been some places where they tried to do, like, third rail along the side, like the tunnel?

There's like, some really weird one-off proprietary systems that do something like that. Especially if you have something like... Something that's like cable-holed, you know, and does not have electricity on board as a result. You have a third rail that's entirely for lighting and heat and air conditioning. ALICE I think this is the way Glasgow did it for a while. But don't blame me on that. JUSTIN That would make sense, yeah.

Eventually they actually installed something called a gauntlet track down here, which is essentially a track in the middle that was offset to give higher vertical clearance, but if you were using that track you couldn't use the other two tracks. And they actually had the third rail on like, swiveling mounts, so it could be just slid into position. What? Bro, be just slid into position, rotated into position. It's very strange. ALICE What?!

ALICE Do not just be standing in this tunnel waving when there is a 675 volt DC line that is moving around like a kind of mobile platformer game. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. It's not a good situation, I would avoid that. But yeah, the way you would handle this is the steam train comes into Camden, you shut off steam, you know, you close the, you close up the cylinders, you do all this stuff and the electric locomotive pulls you through. So you're not creating a significant amount of smoke while you're in the tunnel and no one suffocates. It's a good system. And it was very, very successful

and thus it was not extended or replicated. Yeah, that sounds rather... Yeah. The B&O Philadelphia subdivision was never very busy because the Pennsylvania Railroad just had better connections and went more places in the northeast. Traffic to New York and the B&O, for instance, if you were sending a car from Baltimore to New York City via the Baltimore to Ohio, you would have to be interchanged onto both the Reading Railroad at Philadelphia, and then the Central Railroad in New Jersey in Trenton, it's adding a lot more time. So, you know, this huge tunnel was

used by as few as like six trains a day, right? ALICE That's American rail infrastructure. There you go. Yeah, it's really cutting edge to solve a problem that shouldn't really exist. Yeah, competition is great. Alright, let's fast forward a bit. Dieselization happens, so the third rail is ripped up in 1952, right, here's one of the B&O's passenger trains at Harpers Ferry. You get these very beautiful trains that are also killing the planet. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE A lot of them.

JUSTIN The Baltimore, Ohio becomes the Chessie System in 1976. ALICE Aww, with the cat. Fantastic. JUSTIN With the cat, yeah. They discontinue passenger trains altogether in 1958. Chessie System becomes CSX in 1986. ALICE Boring corporate. Bring back the cat.

JUSTIN Gotta bring back the cat, yeah. Oh, you should see their heritage units, they suck. ALICE Yeah, they're awful. JUSTIN They do have a Chessie heritage unit, and it looks awful. In 1987, the Chase Maryland accident happens, which I'm sure we'll talk about in the future. The entire Northeast freight railroad system is restructured as a result of this. Nearly all freight traffic on the M-Track Northeast Corridor

was rerouted onto the old B&O Philadelphia subdivision. And as a result, the Howard Street Tunnel becomes one of the busiest tunnels in the country, with 28 to 32 large freight trains passing through it every day. ALICE I mean, finally a use for this thing. Like, you have it under the city, it's not going anywhere, it's quite well built, like... SEAN Yeah, and also... ALICE Yeah, it has that, right through the center

of the city, which I assume will be fine. ALICE It's in a tunnel, it's fine. SEAN It's fine, yeah. ALICE Okay, well, we'll see. ALICE I've got the ground. Listen, if there's one thing I want between me and the hazmat, it's ground. LIAM Right, yeah. Yep, yep.

Yep, alright. ALICE Actually, I'd probably go ocean before ground, but ground also... SEAN That's where I put my car batteries! ALICE Yeah, exactly. Hazardous waste belongs in the ocean. ALICE I hate seals! ALICE Universal solvent, really good diluter, insulator, like, yeah, insulator? No it's not.

But like, you know, throw it in the ocean. It's fine, it's a safe and legal thrill. ALICE Dilution is the solution to pollution. LIAM That's right. JUSTIN We'll see a few more shots of this building here, this is the train shed for the Mount Royal station, which you can actually go down there and watch trains there, it's really nice, I've been down there a couple times. So, you know, now with all this extra traffic it was also reduced to a single track for

higher clearances. ALICE Okay, sure. I mean, it helps you not run a hazmat train into another hazmat train? SEAN Well, we haven't had that problem yet. ALICE If the next slide is about a fucking chemical, I'm... SEAN Oh. Well, every train goes through this tunnel, including of course dangerous hazmat trains, which may be carrying chemicals such as tri-propylene. ALICE.

Motherfucker! Yep! Oh, that's... Mmm, boy. I like that the slide says, I have no idea what this is or what it does. JUSTIN. That is true. I don't know.

No, Google wasn't very helpful either. ALICE. It's a clear colorless liquid with a sharp odor. I mean... JUSTIN That's a lot of things. ALICE Yeah, it's vodka, like, I dunno. JUSTIN It's some kind of hydrocarbon, it's got nine Cs, it's got 18 Hs, there's a double bond in here, I guess.

I have no fucking clue. People get it delivered by the tank car load, such as these big 28,600 gallon tank cars. The only information I found is, it's used to make other chemicals. And also lubricating oil additive. Yeah. ALICE This is, like, so much of the chemical industry is just this stuff, right? JUSTIN I actually, I actually, I...

Listeners, I did try to find out what this was. ALICE Yeah, I believe it, yeah. The hogs have Google. The hogs have Google. The safety data sheet for tri-propylene glycol. JUSTIN I probably should've just put that up here, yeah. But yeah. It's flammable.

That's another thing you should know, cause, y'know, it's a hydrocarbon, they're all flammable. So anyway, on July 18th... I don't want this thing out either. Oh Jesus okay. Yeah yeah you know something's gonna go well because there's a CSX trade here. Yeah exactly. So well they've been doing a lot better than Norfolk Southern recently I will say that. Yeah I know but like Rod's let me let me ask you a question buddy. Yeah. In a world where you have to pick between me pissing on your face and shitting in your mouth, which would you rather have? Is it neither? ALICE Is this also your argument for voting for Biden? LIAM It is not!

ALICE I wrote in Roz, on Tuesday. LIAM Uncommitted. Right in Uncommitted. JUSTIN Yeah, I wrote in Uncommitted yesterday, yeah. I was like really frustrated, I had to go vote, even though, that's partially because I- Well the ballot question was important, I thought, but- Yeah, the ballot question, I can see arguments for both sides, I voted no. I also voted no. I mean, I'm sure we're gonna-

What is this? Let me, Monday morning, pause and back your vote. It's about the indemnification of registered community organizations in an event where they are sued in connection with a Zoning Board of Adjustment decision. Well that's how they got Acorn, right? So like, yeah, of course not. Yeah, it's uh, it's kinda like, y'know, I just think voting no means they're not gonna be able to nimby as easily. Um, but uh, y'know, I just think voting no means they're not gonna be able to nimble as easily.

But, y'know, who knows. It's a city ballot question, people always vote yes on those, so, whatever. SEAN Yeah, I was a little frustrated that I had to go in at all, but, friends of the show, Matt wrote me in for president, which I thought was very funny. LIAM Hell yeah. We never get any, like any questions, any referenda apart from like...

SEAN It's gotta... Brexit. ALICE Yeah, we can't be trusted with them, clearly. I'd like the opportunity to do those kind of bullshit policy questions. I think it'd be fun. SEAN The other thing is, my next door neighbors are effective organizers, because if I don't go to vote they know and they yell at me. LIAM They do.

ALICE This is the way that you organize people, right? You find out what they're not doing and you shame them. LIAM Shameworks! ALICE Exactly. ALICE Do not ask me about what I am not doing, and do not shame me. JUSTIN Yeah. Well, they run the polls, so, if they don't see me they know. ALICE Mmm. So, if they don't see me, they know. Yeah.

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. You 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.

ALRIGHT, so, July 18th, 2001. It's a beautiful pre-911 morning. Uh... Oh yeah. Yeah, no one knows what's gonna hit him. Just before 3pm, CSX train L412-16 left the West Baltimore Yard, which I believe is now disused, bound for Philadelphia, with 31 loaded and 21 empty cars. Excuse me, 29 empty cars. Including eight Hazmat tank cars.

That's a 60 car train, which they would be a very short one. ALICE The sheer length of American freight trains is always cool to me. JUSTIN Oh yeah, they just, you know, now it's like, everything's 250 cars, it's crazy, yeah. Anyway, so, the train was travelling around 25 miles an hour, and as you enter the tunnel you're going through a short downgrade, right, So you're easing up on a throttle, you're around notch five. And as you go through the lowest part of the tunnel, you start to have a steep upgrade. So at that point, you start to notch up to notch eight, which is the highest throttle setting on a diesel locomotive.

So, you know, the engineer is trying to take up the slack, keep the train stretched through this entire situation. So you're not having weird in-train forces. And he gets about 1800 feet from the north portal and the train dumps the air. It goes into emergency. Something had happened on the train to break the air hose, so the emergency brakes come on automatically.

ALICE And that's good, right? That's what we want? ALICE Well, better than it not happening. Like, potentially. Actually. ALICE Oh, I don't like the it depends answer here. We don't have a runaway train. JUSTIN Yeah.

Sometimes the emergency brake going on is extremely bad. Sometimes it causes the derailment it's supposed to prevent. Cool. ALICE So, sort of the airbags of trains. JUSTIN Yes, exactly, exactly. It's better than not having it, but it can still cause problems. So the crew is unable to radio dispatch to make anyone aware of the situation, hey, we're stuck in the tunnel, because they're in the tunnel.

And apparently the radio just doesn't work. ALICE Yeah. One of the things about the ground is that, aside from being good at protecting you from hazmat, it's also very good at protecting you from radio signals. JUSTIN Mmhm. Eventually the conductor used his personal cell phone, which is today a really big no-no, to call dispatch and tell them they had a problem in the tunnel. And why is this now frowned upon?

It's like, oh god, I forget which accident. Someone was looking at their phone and crashed a train. Was that Frankfurt derailment, or was that the allegation? That was the allegation, right? That was an allegation there, but it was not the case. SEAN Right, right, right. My bad. JUSTIN It was, it might've been the one where

Union Pacific slammed into Metrolink, I don't reme- I am not 100% certain on that one. ALICE So just because, like, you can't be looking at your phone. JUSTIN Yeah, you're not supposed to look at your phone. ALICE Even when the frame has stopped and you can't use the radio? Yeah, they're a lot more psychotic about it now. Huh. Yeah.

So anyway, yeah, a lot of times it needs to be turned off and stored in your bag, unless there's really extenuating circumstances. You know. Seems pretty extenuating to me, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, in this case, okay, we gotta call dispatch somehow. They told them they had a problem in the tunnel, and eventually they wind up saying, alright, we're sitting here, the fumes are getting pretty bad, we're gonna move the locomotives out of the tunnel.

ALICE Diesel trains still in an unventilated tunnel. Mm. JUSTIN Yes. Mm. ALICE Didn't even occur to me at any point during this that they started running diesel trains through this. Right, right. Good things are happening to your lungs, Nova. Good things. Breathe deep, baby. So, the engineering conductor had moved the train out, moved the two locomotives out of the tunnel, but the whole train is still in there, right? And so it takes a while to figure out exactly what's going on here, but eventually, after a lot of back and forth between the dispatchers, the crew, the Baltimore fire department, when

smoke starts to come out of the tunnel portal, so on and so forth, they manage to figure out, oh, we had a problem, something's on fire back there. And no one can figure out exactly where it is. ALICE Just in the tunnel that runs the whole length of downtown Baltimore. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. There is a serious fire somewhere in that tunnel, and we don't know where it is or what- ALICE A 70s action movie setup, you know?

JUSTIN Yeah. So what had in fact happened in there was that several cars full of timber and paper products had derailed, as well as one car. SRIX3 30015, which is... what is it? Car number 52 here. Right here. Car number 53? Yeah, it says on the note 53.

Yeah, but the note is wrong, is the thing. Out of line. Yeah. So, this car had derailed in such a way that pretty much eviscerated itself, you know, it derailed, it leapt off of the wheels, then crashed, and you know, it was real bad. So it was pretty heavily damaged, and it was of course full of that wonderful chemical tripropylene. So it caught fire. pretty heavily damaged, and it was of course full of that wonderful chemical, tri-propylene.

So it caught fire. ALICE Anything to be done with the design of the tanker, that could've mitigated this? JUSTIN We'll get to that in a bit. ALICE Okay. SEAN Same question. JUSTIN But yeah. So, y'know, it just sort of, it has a bad time. It breaks open, it catches fire. And it wasn't until 4 p.m. CSX

dispatch determined there was a serious problem and they called the Baltimore City Fire Department. The fire department showed up at the Mount Royal Station at the north end of the tunnel, about 4 10, and they couldn't get into the tunnel because of all the fire and the smoke. In the meantime, the Baltimore City Fire Department had another call to make, oh god, how bad is it, do we have to evacuate the city? ALICE Yeah, because this thing runs under the whole thing, right? JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE And it's hazmat.

You could be giving everyone in Baltimore like, every canter. JUSTIN Yes. LIAM That they don't already have from living... Yeah. That they don't already have from living, yeah. So, they decided not to evacuate the city, but to tell people to shelter in place along the route. They did, however, evacuate Camden Yard Stadium in the middle of a doubleheader. Incredible. Yeah, and someone finally got to use the emergency broadcast system for something other than

a test. It feels good as hell when it's not like, the nuke, or whatever. LIAM Right, where you're just like, I get to break this bad boy out, yeah. JUSTIN Exactly. So confusion reigned in Baltimore City as Howard Street was completely blocked with no alternate routes, right at close of business for most commuters. The light rail system was shut down because it goes straight up and down Howard Street. Residents of the city were told to stay indoors and shelter in place, turn off your air conditioning so you don't breathe any horrible fumes.

ALICE. Close all your windows. Yeah. At 545... ALICE. Sounds like a pretty amateur hour disaster response, or am I reading that wrong? I mean, that's still standard around all kinds of stuff. Oh, sure.

Sure. Sure. At 545 they sounded the Civil Defense Sirens. Knights! And no one knew they still had them, or what they were supposed to do if they heard them. Just the vibes! And the vibe? Bad.

Yeah, I was about to say, I assume, if I hear the Civil Defense sirens, I assume that, like, y'know, the Zeros are closing in, and Battleship Yamamoto is steaming under the Francis Scott Key Bridge, y'know? ALICE Would you like my drop of the Foster Steam siren that goes on a World War II destroyer? LIAM Sure, why not. ALICE A Foster Steam siren. This thing. JUSTIN There you go.

I like it. LIAM Fantastic. Did you say. I like it. Fantastic. You say Yamamoto? Like the pitcher? As opposed to Yamamoto, the battleship? Yeah, the battleship is Yamato. But you think you have Isoroku Yamamoto, the admiral. Oh, okay.

I... Okay. I'm not a World War II guy. Obviously Yoshinibu Yamamoto, who is a baseball pitcher for the Dodgers. But yeah, sure. Either one. It's fine. Thanks for exposing me as, but yeah, sure, either one, it's fine. JUSTIN Thanks for exposing me as a bakuganjin, y'know?

SEAN I don't know what the fuck that means. ALICE Gaijin. JUSTIN Gaijin. I don't speak Japanese. Yeah. SEAN And, it, it, it, mmhmm. ALICE I don't know anything about Japan. SEAN Uh huh.

I know. ALICE I mean, I don't either, and like, my Japanese is terrible, but like, uh... LIAM I didn't know for the last second. ALICE Yeah, my partner's partner speaks Japanese to a fluent level, so I end up with a bit, like, through osmosis. LIAM Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. JUSTIN So, it was impossible to get in the tunnel to determine the extent or the location of the fire. One of the first indications of the location of the problem was when a 40-inch water main

fractured underneath Lombard Street directly over the derailment. Oh no! Is this it here? This is the main, yeah. Fuck. Here's a guy, and presumably a welder here, for scale. Although this might also be some kind of Inger Sarand compressed air system, I have no idea. ALICE I was thinking it was, but yeah, you know better than I am.

ALICE Enjoying those shirt sleeves. I can't see, because of the resolution, but I know in my heart this man has a pocket protector. ALICE Yeah, staring into the pit. SEAN I would have loved to have had higher resolution photos, but this is before we invented pixels. Well, like, as with Salang, I feel like tunnel fires, by definition. Very poorly documented. Yeah, not very good pictures, yeah.

So the 40 inch water main fractured under Lombard Street directly over the derailment. This cut off water and power and internet to downtown. ALICE & LIAM Not the internet! ALICE Yeah, because there was also like... ALICE The 2001 internet, you can't get on Geocities anymore. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, I can't go post on something awful about this. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. JUSTIN Watch Mayor Martin O'Malley start a war. You are being invaded, moron!

ALICE Watch Mayor Bush start a war. You are being invaded, moron! Mayor Martyn O'Malley started- I was gonna say, Mayor Martyn O'Malley started- Yours was way funnier and I stepped on it, I'm so sorry. I thought Martyn, I think Martyn O'Malley was the mayor at this point, I'm not sure. Martyn O'Malley, you got a children's book ass name, you sound like the mailman in a town where everyone's a bear, yeah. He's commissioner of the Social Security Administration. I got that from Twitter, it's just, I have tweets in my head.

SEAN Oh, it's okay. We all have disorders. I spent yesterday doing a psychiatric evaluation, and the doctor was basically the least helpful psychiatrist I've ever had, and that's saying quite a fucking bit. ALICE Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty broad spectrum. Yeah. I've had some pretty useless ones, but she was just creme de la creme of why, of just why do you even have a fucking doctorate is my question. But yeah, uh, Marlon Malley. Yeah. He, uh, yeah, he, he, he was elected

mayor in 99 and was reelected in 04, and then became governor in 06. Oh, there you go. So... Why's he so smooth? Like, is that... Yeah, I've googled him and his skin, very very light. Oh, porous, right?

Yeah. Like a real, like, serumed looking motherfucker. Like... Uh, is that retinol? Is that a thing? Smooth mayor. Yeah, do you not know about, like, as part of the skincare routine? SEAN I know about retinol, but I don't really know

what it does. I, so I have a wife, right, I have this wife. And she does a skincare routine, but she explains it, it's that noise from... ALICE It's a skincare routine, it's really really simple. What you wanna do, is you wanna wanna do twice a day, you wanna do a cleanse, you wanna like, to, you know, like, wash your face, then you usually get like a cleanser and a toner combined.

I have one! CR CeraVe. I use it twice a day. That's kinda all I do, honestly. Then what you wanna do is you wanna put a little bit of serum on, as a kind of like pre-moisturizer, and then you want to moisturize. And you also want to like, fairly regularly also be doing like a scrub as well. And that's a skincare routine.

I can barely shower once a day. Attaboy. Yeah, depression manifests in many forms and it fucking sucks. I mean, in my case it kind of turned out in a beneficial way, where like, anxiety manifested in doing a very exacting skincare routine twice a day. JUSTIN So anyway. The water main. ALICE Drop the skincare routine, Roz.

JUSTIN Yeah, having a... well, my skincare routine is having a 40 inch water main, straight to the face. I mean, you will be moist. You will have been fucking moisturized. I AM AMORUS FROM THE GOOL! You will be cleansed, you will be toned, you will be moisturized, and you will be scrubbed. Like... Try the, try the, well there's your problem, Skincare routine, where we come to your house

and open the water main of a feet... We open a 40 inch water main in your face. ALICE Yeah, doing like a kind of very expensive like moisturizer bottle that's just full of Baltimore City municipal water. Pretty good, actually. JUSTIN So, one of the positive things about the water main breaking, is that all that water went straight into the tunnel and did dampen down the fire a lot.

ALICE Oh yeah, because fire hates having a water main open over it. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. ALICE It's one of the key techniques of defeating fire. JUSTIN But now, downtown Baltimore has... there's no water, there's no electricity, there's no internet, it's uninhabitable. And a fire is still burning.

And it burns. And Baltimore, downtown Baltimore is uninhabitable. Where am I supposed to post on something awful about this? Yeah, exactly. I was gonna do the much more obvious joke about whenever anywhere is said to be uninhabitable which is, and then the water main collapses, you know? Oh sure. I'm bad at jokes, Nova.

Sorry. No no no no no, it's fine, it's a cheap joke, it's hacky, you know,? ALICE Oh, sure. I'm bad at jokes, Nova. Sorry. ALICE No, no, no, no, it's fine. It's a cheap joke, it's hacky, y'know, I don't even have anything against Baltimore. ALICE I love Baltimore. I've been so drunk in Baltimore, it's a great city. ALICE Attacking an underground fire! So, they don't figure out how to get... ALICE Can you tell me where Saddam Hussein is in this...

PFFT. Yeah, yeah. It's probably like right about here, you know, that Saddam Hussein. It's a pretty good freehand Saddam Hussein, I'll be honest. That's not that bad, actually. So you have a problem of like, how do you actually extinguish this fire? Once you figure out where it is, it's a million miles from either entrance, you can't get the hoses in, you can barely get people in, because you need, like, y'know, a self-contained breathing apparatus, y'know, you need like

a whole... it's a whole rick of a roll to get any manor equipment in here to fight the fire. Right? Eventually, they manage to find a manhole, a single manhole, that gets you into the tunnel, near the fire. Now, the fire... FUCK that, fuck going down a manhole with breathing apparatus on. Into the fire?

Yeah. So, um... The fire has been... The smoke hoppers, because they have to hop from the end of them. It's been tamped down somewhat, but it's still burning quite hot. I mean, at the peak peak this fire was estimated to be at, y'know, that whole tunnel was 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. ALICE & LIAM Fuck my ass, dude.

ALICE Just seal it off, it's the fire's city now. LIAM Yeah, sorry. ALICE Baltimore's big centralia, like, it's fine, it's over. JUSTIN At 1030AM the following day, firefighters were finally able to gain access via the manhole at Lombard Street. The situation there was not great. There's 11 train cars on the ground, the fire has thoroughly consumed the tripropylene

tank car. Adjacent to that car was a car full of hydrochloric acid, which was leaking. Oh. Okay. And then? Yeah. which was leaking. Ohhhh. Okay. And then... yeah. And then there were cars full of wood and paper products, which were still burning. I'm more concerned about the hydrochloric acid.

The hydrochloric acid is a big issue, because in order to go in there and fight the fire, they want to be able to drain that car, or just not have hydrochloric acid there. Right? So, here's what they do, they do a pretty wild thing. Firefighters go down with the hose, and they put it into the hydrochloric acid tank car, and then they pump the hydrochloric acid out of the car and into a tanker truck at the surface. While the fire is still burning.

ALICE Fucking crazy. Jesus wept. Yes. That's... MacGyver. Shit. That's incredible. Yes. I mean, that's just amazing firefighting. Like, not to, like, sort of, uh, like, not as if I know anything about firefighting, but on the scale of firefighting, where one end is Texas City all, like, jerking off onto

it, and the other end is this, right? Because this is like, it's inventive, I hope, works, it's audacious. It worked perfectly. They got the whole thing, I mean, it took a long time to fill the tanker trucks, because they needed several, because the tank car is bigger than the tanker trucks, but it worked perfectly. Amazing. By 7pm that day, the first truck was on its way, and then by then it's only a couple more tanker trucks before they have the whole thing empty.

They're also trying to do fire suppression this whole time, but they can't quite knock the fire entirely down. They're working in the tunnel, it's nasty, it's dark, it's smoky. You're working on, again, on oxygen, on compressed air, cause, y'know. ALICE Next to a hose full of hydrochloric acid. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. And so, one thing... SEAN Situation's bad.

ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN But, um, at some point, y'know, they've knocked down the fire to the extent that, uh, CSX decides, alright, can we pull some more of these cars out of the tunnel? SEAN Sure. JUSTIN So... SEAN Oh my god, dude. ALICE This is a high rail truck. ALICE People try and invent these as like, new modes of transport all the time.

I saw one called a ferromobile, where they were like, you'll be able to drive your regular-ass car on train tracks for some reason and we think this is gonna be a business. JUSTIN Yeah, sure, why not. LIAM Why not! Cool. ALICE Why not! Cool. JUSTIN So, if you can get the rest of the train out, that does reduce a lot of potential fuel for the fire, also you save the merchandise, you know?

Because I believe they also did wind up shipping the hydrochloric acid to the intended destination. ALICE Well done, boys. JUSTIN So, to do this, they need to get some guys in there, close the air hoses on the train cars, so that they could then release the brakes and bring everything out, right? Just send the locomotive in there and pull the rest of the train out. So, with more breathing gear, two CSX guys, a guy from the Maryland Department of the Environment, and a contractor from the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid system, which is just sort of this big consortium that all the manufacturers in Baltimore have, where if there's an emergency cleanup we pool

our resources. They all get in a high rail truck, and they enter the tunnel from the north portal. Fuck that. Drive this pickup truck into the fire. ALICE Okay, that's bold as hell. JUSTIN So anyway, one of the guys panics and exhausts his air supply immediately and they have to reverse out at high speed. Would you not?

Like, you see that shit, you're like... ALICE Big sweepin' breaths. Oh, absolutely. Would you not? Like, you see that shit, you're like... HAAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA Big sweepin' breaths. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you're not keeping up box breathing doing that shit. That's gone poorly, yeah. I mean, I guess a bunch of Firefighters were keeping up box breathing doing this shit, but like, you know, probably not the train guys.

Or maybe it was the Department of the Environment guy. Or maybe it was the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid guy, I dunno. It was the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid guy, I dunno. JUSTIN It was the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid guy. ALICE Yeah, of course it fucking was. JUSTIN So I think the Department of the Environment guy also wound up being hospitalized. ALICE Just sort of like, vibes, or...? JUSTIN I'm not sure.

The sources that I had were... I assume it's just the CSX guys were tougher because of Railroad. ALICE They built different... JUSTIN Exactly. So this was on day three, they try again later that day, by 4am on day four the cars that were not on fire had been removed from the tunnel. Which leaves the cars that were on fire. ALICE Yeah, I mean, they've been in with this fucking high rail. And they've done the thing.

JUSTIN And they brought the cars out, they sent a locomotive in, they brought the cars out, I have no idea if the guys on the locomotive had breathing apparatus. ALICE You probably have to, like... JUSTIN Must, yeah. ALICE Again, I'm sort of struck with, given how bulky all that shit is, how do you drive a truck, or a locomotive for that matter, wearing it? Like... LLOYD It was actually...

I know the Southern Pacific used to use it regularly for steam locomotives, actually. They would just give you an asbestos breathing helmet. Because of course it was asbestos, right? ALICE Yeah, for safety. We've been mulling an asbestos episode at some point in the future, and that's gonna be a good time. I'd love to talk about all the kinds of asbestos suits. Mmhm.

There's so many. Yeah. Some people have like a latex or a leather fetish. I have an asbestos fetish. No I don't. I'm gonna vomit. I'm gonna vomit, bud. I'm gonna puke, and that'll be it. Alright, alright.

I crave death. Anyway. So that left the cars that were on fire. Some of them were upright and still on the tracks. What do you do about that? You pull them out while they're on fire. Yes. Yeah.

Fuck. Yes. Yeah. Fuck yes! I love this shit. This is precision railroading to me. Yeah, like, somewhere around day six, you know, firefighting efforts that contained the fire to a low smolder, and CSX just went in and pulled the still burning cars out of the tunnel, so you could fight the fire in the open. You can see this boxcar smoking here. As we learned from East Palestine, being on

fire does not mean it's not good for full track speed. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or like that train in Wadden, Ontario. It was just on fire recently. ALICE Mmhm. Being on fire is not a failure condition that accepts you from being moveable. JUSTIN Yeah, being untied. Yeah.

So, in total, this fire had shut down Baltimore for five days. Buses had to be rerouted. Buildings were closed, roads were blocked, three Orioles home games were cancelled. Oh no! Yeah, commuter trains were cancelled, the MTA light rail was unusable for months, the whole inner harbour had been closed to boat traffic, the fire was officially finally declared extinguished a full six days after it had started. Wow.

Woof. Yeah. But uh, no one died. When did they get their internet back? That's the real question. When were citizens of Baltimore able to post again? JUSTIN I think they got that back up online relatively quickly, but it was slower. Because it was a big cable that got got.

ALICE And unlike a water main, bursting an internet cable over a fire doesn't do anything to the fire. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, it's not like all the packets come out and then it's sort of... Yeah, so internet traffic does count as a dry fire suppressant. But everyone was relieved that the risk was over. Until two weeks later. Uh oh.

Why? Oh no! A bunch of chemicals leaked into the sewers, and two weeks later they exploded in every manhole cover and the city flew twelve feet in the air. Oh my god. This is not a real city. This is not a serious place. You can't be having the fucking loony- ALICE AND LIAM LAUGHING. ALICE AND LIAM LAUGHING.

Did anyone die doing that? Like, I walk over a lot of manhole covers. No, everyone was fine, this is a Looney Tunes disaster. Let this be a lesson to you, don't walk over a manhole cover in case shit like this happens. Something like this could happen at any moment, yeah. Any time. Any time. Any time. Any time. Any time.

Any time. Especially if there's been a train fire in a tunnel downtown for a long time. Mmhm. Yeah. Oh look at them, they're fixing it. Yeah, they're fixing the tunnel. So the tunnel held up surprisingly well, despite this raging inferno for six days. This is ultimate like, 2001 fashion, is to wear the cargo shorts to the fire.

LIAM The thing you're taping, yeah. I like repairing the tunnel, open parenthesis, LOL, close parenthesis. JUSTIN Yes. That's in the notes. After they removed all the damaged cars, the track was repaired, trains were back using the tunnel again on July 23rd, 2001. Good for full track speed, send it." Um, yeah.

It's a tunnel, it's not going anywhere, you know. It's not going anywhere. It's got a bunch of chemical fumes in it, whatever. Out of service for a grand total of seven days. Despite an intense investigation, no cause for the derailment was ever determined. Just, no. Vibes. SID We don't know.

ALICE Sad. SID The NTSB has a lot of theories about what could've happened, including like, y'know, like bad railcar maintenance, or it just randomly climbed over the rail, or something, we don't know what happened. ALICE Bit-Bitflip. SID Yeah. ALICE The mysterious act of God's love. SID Yeah.

ALICE Sasquatch. Mothman. SID Yes. Probably cryptatch. Mothman. LWX Yes. Probably a cryptid. This could be a cryptid type situation. But... ALICE 100%. Like, if you're a cryptid and you get under the wheels of the thing you might die in a way that's totally untraceable, and foul the airline, and then the brake goes on.

Yeah, perfect. LWX Yeah. I mean, well, if the train derails the airline snaps, regardless. ALICE Hmm. I mean, well, if the train derails, the airline snaps, regardless. Mm. Yeah. I mean, yeah, maybe... could be anything. You know? Maybe like, Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States was about this, you

know, and 9-11 was kind of the unexpected choke bonus. So here's the thing, though. Where you ask, alright, were there any kind of mitigation strategies put in, was there any kind of improvement to anything after this to prevent it from happening again, it could have been much much worse if it had been like a more explosive chemical. I believe one FRA administrator was like saying, well if there had been an explosion it would have shot out both ends of the tunnel like a bazooka.

Did they improve anything? And the answer is no. ALICE What, did... I mean, I wasn't expecting them to like, replace the tunnel, because like, the tunnel's fine, but like... JUSTIN That was one of the first ideas, was maybe we should replace the tunnel with something more modern. ALICE No, shut up, coward!

JUSTIN Which obviously did not happen. Here we are back in the train shed of Mount Royal Station, and you may notice, well, that's a tanker car on the ground, and another tanker car on the ground behind it. ALICE Yeah, this one seems to be in slightly higher resolution, too. SEAN Yes, because this is in 2018. ALICE Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. They're just gonna keep derailing trains here. ALICE Oh, and terrific.

SEAN So people made some... like, some people made some noises about rerouting Hazmat trains around Baltimore, but that would require building a new tunnel, or a whole new railroad, and you just can't do that anymore, right? Mmhm. No. No, not unless there's coal involved. Right. So what we're seeing here is essentially like, this is a way in which Baltimore could have

a second infrastructure crippling disaster at any time. JUSTIN At any time, yes. ALICE At this time, baby. This is a making of infrastructure so cool. JUSTIN Further up the line, in this direction, there's been a couple of infamous incidents recently, where a bunch of retaining walls from the other part of the Baltimore Belt Line collapsed.

That was a few years ago, almost took out some houses, and then I think some people's cars fell on the tracks. ALICE Oh jeez. JUSTIN And then they managed to derail a freight train on the bridge right after this, and drop a bunch of freight cars onto the Baltimore Trolley Museum. ALICE I mean, at this rate, it's like a wonder that CSX didn't dump a train on top of the boat, like, that took out the bridge. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, I was about to say.

We should look into whether CSX took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge. So, CSX is currently in the process of enlarging this tunnel for double stack container cars and other large freight cars, and, you know, with today's monster freight trains, which like to derail for no reason at all, it's never a better time for Baltimore disaster enthusiasts. ALICE To 250 car long trains, every car of which is full of car batteries and acid, slamming into each other at full track speed, directly onto downtown Baltimore. Yes.

Cool. Well, y'know, something to look forward to, I guess. It's nice to know that we're never gonna run out of subjects, y'know? They'll never stop the Simpsons. We will be going with similar diminishing quality returns into like, season 45, well there's your problem. JUSTIN Exactly, exactly. We'll have to start re-duxing all disasters.

ALICE Would you want to do that, Silverbridge? ALICE I mean, listen, I don't know that we really did Silverbridge justice because it was Liam-less. And we were still figuring out what the deal was gonna be, and we didn't know the deal was gonna include Liam, so, shit, maybe. Like... Yeah, that was before Liam muscled his way into the podcast. That is what I did, and you're welcome to...

Yeah, to improve it. Yeah, Liam was indignant, he was like, you started a podcast without me? And you two are still roommates at that point, so you had the welcome home cheater. Yes, yes, yes. No, I mean, it's a pleasure, and doing this is great, and I will look forward to doing it with you when Baltimore is destroyed by the next one. Yeah. I have friends in Baltimore, I will feel bad about it, but on the other hand I do have

an enemy in Baltimore, so I'll feel less bad about it. So these things, there's a calculus happening here. JUSTIN Well, there you go. Yeah. So what did we learn? SEAN Oh, go to Baltimore I guess. ALICE Make the tank cars a bit better, maybe. SEAN More rigid maybe.

JUSTIN That is one of the things here, this is the newer DOT 113 tank car, as opposed to the older DOT 111s, and they are a lot better in derailments than the old cars were. ALICE We did learn something. Sort of. JUSTIN But that regulation was not changed in response to the Howard Street Tunnel Fire, that was from Lac-Megantique. ALICE Oh, yeah.

JUSTIN So, yeah. I mean... ALICE This could happen to you... not to be the voice of your anxiety disorder, but this could happen at any time. At any time. JUSTIN Visit Baltimore while it still exists, folks. It's nice. ALICE Yeah. Tick off all the stuff that's gonna be underwater in twenty years, seal the endangered species,

and visit downtown Baltimore. JUSTIN Yeah. You can go see the city of Baltimore County. Yeah. You can go see the aquarium, you can go to the B&O Railroad Museum, you can go to the Trolley Museum if they haven't dumped a train on it. Mmhm. Yeah.

I mean, listen, CSX can dump a train on any of these things, at any moment. Yes. At any moment CSX can and will dump a train onto you and your family. The train will crash through your house. Even if you're like, 20 miles from the railroad. ALICE There's a anti-train cartoon, like a newspaper cartoon about this, where like, a train busts through the wall of a family eating breakfast, like, as a kind of like, steam train monster, and I've long thought that this was

like the correct attitude to take, except to think that, yeah, this is cool. Oh yeah, that'd be pretty funny. I mean, there's a Thomas the Tank Engine about that. But that's a... But not about this. That's another story. Yeah. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Hello, November and the rest. Not wrong. Oh, perfect, thank you, yes. We have our priorities in order, I see. Long time first timer mechanical engineer here with the story of how I survived getting hit in the chest with a frying angle grinder. ALICE Oh, that's way worse. And most other kinds of angle grinders.

JUSTIN Yeah. Also, English is not my native language, so I apologize for any typos or misspellings or wrong uses of phrases. I just like the idea of a frying angle grinder, I think I'm like... ALICE Two and one! JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, exactly, it's two, I think I'm like... Two in one! Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's two, I can make some ash rounds with it, y'know? Hey, when I have to re-season my angle grinder, but I also now feel bad for this joke. So I apologize, particularly since you emphasized my name, which is the correct thing to do.

So this story takes place two years ago when I got hired to work on a recall for some Yutong passenger buses. ALICE Largest bus manufacturer in the world, no less. JUSTIN Ooh. The ZK-6129 tourist bus, that could carry a maximum of fifty people. ALICE I have a disparaging remark to make about, like, Chinese automotive engineering. They don't name them. They don't know how to name them.

They gotta name them. There's a lot of names you could use, but instead they have the kind of post-Soviet communist thing of being like, oh, this is the beloved YK 6129, and it's like, you gotta give it a name, please. I beg of you. Yeah, it's gotta have a name. Yeah, a name would be nice. The problem with this bus was that the supports for the back suspension were faulty and needed

to be replaced. This job involved opening the last two exterior doors between the rear axle where the battery is restored, that's this here. Then you have to cut a square out of the back panels to get to the support that needed replacing, that's this square here. That's beautiful engineering, to be like, yeah, just cut through this place. JUSTIN This is surprisingly common on, like, you know, transit vehicles and stuff like that. It's like, wow, when this part needs to be replaced,

you do need a full metal shop to do it. ALICE Hell yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. So replacing the supports was relatively simple. First we lifted the back axle to released the tension on the supports, then made them drop, which is the important bit. Then we unscrewed two massive bolts at the bottom that held in the wheel. You fight with your whole ass against the 14 one inch screws that hold the support, then sliced the top part of the half inch thick steel plate support with an angle grinder to finally drop them.

That's the screw. I will be real with you. That does not sound relatively simple to me. That sounds like a pain in my arse. JUSTIN That does sound like a pain in the arse. I mean, it's like, ah, the procedure's simple, but you can't access anything, right? ALICE Mmm. Anything that involves like, 14 screws, particularly, like, I'm not considering that simple. JUSTIN Yeah, that's annoying.

Then am I put in side by side with the new supports and cut off at the same height so they would fit in the same position, screw them into place, then re-sew to both the support and the interior panel walls to hide my work. Right, so you gotta put the plate back in place. And it all in all would usually take me a full day of work to do one bus with almost an hour to spare. Now, you might be thinking that this doesn't sound too hard to do, which is actually... ALICE I'm not thinking that!

I'm thinking the opposite of that! JUSTIN That's actually the opposite of what I'm thinking, yeah. ALICE I'm thinking the opposite of that! Yeah. You... Whoever wrote this, I think you work too hard. I think you need to reevaluate your attitude to your work in favor of more laziness, because, like, I don't consider this relatively

simple. JUSTIN LAUGHS. That's because the pictures I sent you guys are from the right side of the bus, which has a much larger compartment than the left side, because the right side is where the batteries are stored. The left side was barely half the size of the right side, so barely enough for one person to sit, let alone stand.

And also operating... So you did this in a closed space. Yeah. And also operating the angle grinder on the right side was easier, because the place you stand to operate the grind meant you could hold it in a position where it pulled away from you rather than towards you. Now, as earlier, I mentioned how we lifted the back axle to release the tension on the supports. This was a trick I learned a few weeks into the project, but did not master until after

this accident. Oh boy. Oh Jesus. Because what happened is I was cutting the support and just as I sliced through the last portion of it, I hadn't lifted up at the proper height and the angle to release the tension and instead the support fell on itself and completely squashing, squashing, let's go with squashing there. This is new and interesting word, actually, I might start using it. The blade in the angle grinder and causing it to fly off of my hands, crash into the

metal wall a few feet in front of me, bounce back and hit me square in the chest. Jesus. ALICE Do not, like, do yourself like the fucking circular sawblade zombies in Ravenholm, dude. Like, yeah. LIAM Oh, yes! JUSTIN Now thankfully, the same motion that caused the blade to get stuck also broke it, so when the angle grinder flew back at me it was already disarmed and all the damage it did was some nasty bruises.

Which was something I realized a good thirty seconds after I fell out of the bus screaming like a little girl when I suddenly remembered I needed to breathe and proceeded to do a quick check for any missing body parts. So there was nothing beyond a bruised ego and some light bullying from my co-workers, or my high-pitched scream that apparently the entire shop heard before running to check on me." ALICE This is the thing, you can't do anything in these situations. You like, oh, you fell into the vat of hydrochloric acid, but you

made kind of a funny noise as you did it, you know? Like, you got kicked off a horse, but it was kind of funny to watch. Uh... Yep. You gotta get a nickname from that one. Dangerous, dangerous injuries. Often funny. Is the terrifying thing.

So, remember kids, always make sure the angle grinder is spinning away from you, and always wear as much protection as you can. Thanks. I'm gonna go a step further than that, and protect myself by not doing relatively simple automotive repair jobs like this, for a living. If I can possibly help it. Yeah. Thanks for all the work you do, you keep me entertained on my now soulless but less dangerous

job of spare parts supply distribution. Love Diego from Central South America. South South America, I'm not sure what... Central South South America is like Chile, I guess. That's, yeah, it's gotta, well... We don't know anything. But that's also like Central South America, and like, Central North South America.

I mean, ultimately South South America is Antarctica, so maybe this guy's doing the buses on like, South Georgia. It could be, it could be like, Chile and Argentina, you know, they cover a lot of that. That's true, yeah. Long Chile. Thank you Diego, for mentioning me by name, and no one else. Please, please try to remain safe and spare parts of play distribution. You shouldn't get any like, circular saw blades coming at you, but CSX can drop a hazmat train

on you at any time. JUSTIN At any time, yes. ALICE At any time. LIAM At any time. JUSTIN Alright, I realize I may have done these next two slides out of order, so I'll just do this. That was Safety Third. Our next episode is on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? I don't, but you do.

I do have a commercial, yes. So, come to Space Melt Cinema Presents Airplane, with Justin Rosniak of Well There's Your Problem, that's the podcast you're listening to right now. Essentially, it's gonna be a thing where we go to a place, and we all watch, I talk a bit and then we watch the movie Airplane. Space Melt Cinema is, you know, just, we get a big screen, and people watch movies that are fun to watch together. Right?

ALICE Right, doing like podcast comedy about movies, never gonna catch on. JUSTIN Yeah, I was wondering if anyone had ever done that before, if they'd, you know, talked about movies on a podcast. It might be a good idea. This is May 4th, at the Ukrainian club. Slav-Ukraine. Exactly.

If you have contrarian takes about the war, if I can shut up about them, so can you. Atta boy. Atta boy. Yeah, doors are at 8, tickets are $17, but closer to $20 with the fees, I didn't set the price. ALICE It's a really good movie, and you're really funny. So I can guarantee this is gonna be a good evening.

JUSTIN Yes. Exactly. And we will have custom hot dogs. Yeah. Yeah, we have a hot dog roller that we're bringing. That, you know, it's gonna be a good time. And there's beers, don't worry. So yeah, May the 4th, come to the Ukrainian club.

Check this shit out, May the 4th be with you. Ohhhh. Ah, ah. Yeah, that's... yeah. Like in Star Wars. It's like in Star Wars. It's like in Star Wars. That's the airplane sequel, though.

ALICE Yeah. ALICE Also pretty good, surprisingly. JUSTIN I only watched it once, I don't think I liked it. Maybe I have to watch it again. ALICE Actually, I'm not gonna make that claim because I haven't seen it since I was a kid, so like, mm. JUSTIN Yeah. Alright. Oh, and it does have an intermission, so you can use the restroom. LIAM No, you can't. JUSTIN Yeah. have an intermission, so you can use the restroom. No you can't. Hold it.

Hold it. I also have a bit of an ad, which is, uh, donate money to Lutheran Settlement House, we need it, we're doing our big fundraiser, thank you. Good. Okay, yeah. Put that link in the description. Yeah. Thank you.

Always donate money to Palestine, to Palestinians, buy eSims, all of the rest of it, protest vociferously at every opportunity. JUSTIN Yes. But watch out for CSX crashing a train through your protest. ALICE It can happen at any time. LIAM It can happen to you! JUSTIN Alright, that's a podcast. ALICE Alright.

See ya. Bye. JUSTIN Auf Wiedersehen.