Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 18: Texas City Disaster

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Today @oldmananders0n, @aliceavizandum, and @donoteat01 test the limits of what we can say about fertilizer-derived explosives on the internet. here are the slides: https://youtu.be/AxA1vb6P2lU here is the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod vast majority of the info and images from the original report: http://www.local1259iaff.org/report.htm other images: john w. brown By Project Liberty Ship, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3264194 ammonium nitrate By Teravolt at en.wikipedia - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14151598 wilson b. keene By http://digital.lib.uh.edu/u?/p15195coll4,8, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11834216 burned-out cars By University of Houston Digital Library - University of Houston Digital Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11834231 oil refinery on fire By Chemical safety and hazards investigation board - http://www.csb.gov/assets/news/image/BP_PLANT_EXPLOSION-1_lowres2.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19192207

Uh, let's do the thing. The thing, the podcast that we do. Yes. Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem podcast about engineering disasters, where the worst disaster is actually my Skype somehow. Yes. Just completely fell apart. You're going to sound so much better now that we're on Discord.

This is true, yes. Well, I think we should sound just about the same, I hope. Or, well, in the final recording, I mean, obviously we're going to hear each other better now. That allows for, like, more better comedy, more podcasting. Yes. I'm Justin Razniak. I'm the person you're listening to right now.

My pronouns are he and him. Okay. I've introduced myself. I am Alice Kortwell-Kelly. My pronouns are she and her. Excellent timing. I love the beer can snap there. Yes.

Excellent timing. All right, Liam, go. Uh, hi. I am Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. My pronouns are he, him. And I am excited to talk about Texas City, Texas, home of the Dimsville Dimmodome.

Yes. The city by the Texas. Yes. Stratford upon Texas. No, no, it's not a tricky one like Kansas City. Ah, yeah. Because Kansas City is, of course, in Missouri. As we all know, yes.

A lot of chiefs fans got very mad at me when I said that, because they were very insistent that some of Kansas City is in Kansas. And it's like, no, no, I learned a long time ago that Kansas City is in Missouri. I'm not going to update that knowledge with any new information. So you're wrong. I think Kansas City, Kansas is basically a tax haven.

Yeah. It's like Sark or something. Yeah. It's the Cayman Islands on the Missouri. All right. So you can see on the, on the, on the screen right here, there's a big explosion and there's a bunch of fire and stuff. Oh, no.

Now, like a lot of explosions, that's not supposed to be there, right? Yeah. I mean, when the explosion is supposed to be there, that's more of a military context, right? Yes. And we're not talking about that. We're talking about the civilian, a peacetime thing. Yeah.

This is actually a scene from the Texas-Israeli War, 1999. Oh, that was a bad one. Yeah. Oh boy, you guys are not going to like this discourse hat. George Bush, George W. Bush lighting up his own oil wells in an act of like dramatic irony. So anyway, let's talk about some context here. This is Texas City.

You can see because it's labeled, right? Yeah. Very, very helpful. Very good. They got that pixelated coastline. Oh, yeah. Yeah, navigating a ship there's a bitch. I hate when I get poppin' when I'm trying to like dock my ship

and I just switch from one water texture to another. Why are we rubber banding? So, as we mentioned earlier, Texas City is in Texas. It's sort of like an inland port near Galveston, right? But Mitski told me that Texas was a landlocked state. No. No, they were wrong about that. Nope.

Sorry, that's cool. You guys don't like Mitski? No, she has a song where she sings that Texas is a landlocked state. And when people got mad at her, she had this explanation that was like, oh, it's only for me and the person I roast it for that it's about. It's a metaphor. It's not that I didn't know that Texas has a coastline. I'm tired of metaphors.

Nope. Yeah, sure, sure you did. I mean, in fairness, if you're like way on the interior of Texas or like in the parts of Texas that are like like West Texas or like like. Oh, yeah, way out there. You know, it's basically landlocked because you got to drive, you know, infinite amount of time to get to the ocean. All right.

So today, Texas City, you know, it's got a bunch of oil refineries and chemical plants like that. It's got a big port, which is down here, you know, right? It's it's it's weird looking at all of those like all of those floating roof tanks. They look like a like a blister pack full of medication when you see them from up in the air like this. Oh, yeah, we're going to we're going to talk more about floating roof tanks in a bit. We're good.

Spoilers. But in the era, this is modern Texas City. We're going to talk about Texas City just after World War Two, right? And, you know, it's a smaller place, more densely populated place, but with fewer people overall, right? You know, because just after the war, not every we haven't gotten into the automobile suburb era. There's no sprawl.

Yeah. And the relatively new oil industry is, you know, paying everyone a lot of money. So Texas City is booming, right? Love a boom town. Yeah. The current ones, the current like back in boom towns, those are doing very well. No problems there. Absolutely not.

Nothing bad happens when you give a whole bunch of people who just graduated high school $100,000 to fuck off to the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And and a job that like where you make like $10,000 a day, but also have like a 20 percent risk of losing an arm. Yeah. It's great. You got 100K on one hand shit.

This is like our alternative career of podcasting doesn't work out. He's not wrong, actually. I hate when we fucking we strike oil under the podcast. We're just we're just going to be like Los Angeles. We're going to be like LA County. We'll just have like a concealed oil Derek just working away in the background and like your backyard. I moved up to Ford McMurray to podcast.

Yeah. You got to fly in with all of your own podcasting equipment. Hey guys, I heard there's a booming podcasting market up here. Yeah, you get up there and you spend you spend like you're working like 12 hours a day in the podcast minds and you realize the only guys making money are the people selling the microphones. If you want to make money in a podcasting boom, sell microphones. Whole town road is still blaring at the speakers for some reason. Is this this this podcast brought to you from Fort Mac?

All right. So for more context, we should also talk about Liberty ships. Oh, boy. We were at these depressing fucking things. I know this looks exciting because it's named John Brown. But it's actually it's a different John Brown. It's like John Brown, who is like, I don't know, secretary of commerce under Franklin Pierce or some shit.

I think he was a Navy guy. Yeah. But like, yeah, this is how you win wars, right? You win wars with logistics and logistics is boring. He was he was named for another. He was a union leader. Ah, he was involved in the he was part of the United Mine Workers and was involved at the Ludlow massacre.

So I guess I guess like based on evidence of like us two people, 100 percent of people named John Brown are cool. Yeah, that seems to be the case. I can't think of a bad John Brown. Can you think of a bad John Brown? No, I know. I can think of bad people with last name Brown. And I can think of bad people with the first name John.

Yeah. But those two things together, yeah. Anyway, we gave a tribute to this to this guy with this kind of hideous Liberty ship. Yes. What is the Liberty ship for the children? So Liberty ship was a mass produced merchant ship. Liberty ship, hmm. Right.

You know, which was produced for in World War Two, right? They produce these to an entirely uniform design. And they're designed for just carrying stuff, right? Break bulk cargo. And break bulk cargo is stuff that's like in crates and barrels and in sacks or on pallets or something like that, right? Not something like use the big like longshoremen hooks to like move it. Yeah.

Yeah. And like this is a project of like FDR and his flirtation with American quasi-socialism of we'll just do a five year plan. We'll just build one ship over and over again, do like crank them out one a day. And win the war. Yeah. Yeah, and win the war, you know. So, you know, the idea is we try and build these Liberty ships faster than the Germans

can sink them, right? Which you do. Yeah. Yeah. Like you get all of these movies and stuff about how like how fraught the peril of like the U-boat captains and shit was. They never stood a chance. They could have been incredibly good at it.

Doesn't matter because you sink one of these and in the time it takes you to do that, like you've built 10 more. Oh, yeah. Arsenal of democracy shit. Like, yeah. So these were these were built to an old fashioned design. They used the triple expansion reciprocating steam engine because steam turbines were in short supply and reserved for warships, which meant they were powered by fuel oil, which

will become relevant in a few minutes. And so they were designed to carry 10,000 tons of cargo. They were the first ship with welded construction and as opposed to riveted construction because that was faster. Yeah, much faster, much cheaper. Yeah, like I remember from like Glasgow shipyards, riveters. It's a fucking pain in the ass to rivet stuff and it requires some. Not the welding isn't a skilled job, but it's it's tricky in a way that's, I think,

takes longer and like is more expensive if you fuck up. Yeah, because the guy has to like, you know, heat up the rivet and then he's got to toss it 20 feet to you. Right. And then you got to like grab it and stick it in real quick without burning yourself. 00:10:08,880 --> 00:10:12,640 This is a Looney Tunes sort of situation with riveting. So some of the early ships took 230 days to build.

But the average over the war was 42 days to put one of these together. Stem to stun. Yeah, there was one for for a stunt. The SS Robert E. Peary was built in four days and 12 hours by Kaiser Permanente, which is now a health insurance company. Yeah, those guys. The last good thing that they actually did before they went back to like having won the war, taking away people's health insurance for getting cancer.

Yes. Yeah, great. We love doing this shit during the war. Like I know Britain, we built a Halifax bomber with the like fancy lattice framework in a day just by working uninterrupted, just by having shifts come in and out and keep like literally handing the thing over to the next guy. So we love that as a PR stunt. More faster, more better, right?

That is true. We put the Empire State Building together in like a year, man. Thinking about the T-34 is like rolling off of the factories like unpainted because white takes the time. That seems white. It's fine. Paint adds weight. What's rust?

Yeah, paint does add weight. T-34 is not going to survive long enough for it to matter, I promise. That's what you want in a tank is weight reduction. And you get that like cool unfinished paint job thing that previously only the US Army Air Forces were doing. It's true, yeah. You love that like sleek aluminium look. You know, it's very cool.

Weren't they stainless steel? Well, yes, but I just mean the like polished metal look. Yeah, okay. So we built 2,710 of these guys, 2,400 of them survived the war. That's pretty good. All things considered. There were some problems with them though. Tell me about the problems.

Some of the early ships had hull cracks in them, right? No, that's not ideal. And at least three of them just split in half with no warning. Yeah, you don't want to see that. Yeah, it's not so good. I mean, I guess it's fine if you're trying to build something that like maybe it gets sunk by a Yubos anyway, right? Like you just write that off as the cost of doing business.

But it's kind of harder to do that in peacetime. Look, less, I mean, just over one tenth of one percent of these ships suddenly split in half for no reason. I think that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take those odds. Although there are 1,500 instances of significant brittle fractures, which I notice you're not telling the people.

It's fine, but it's like when you get like an airfix model or something and you're like kind of you don't use enough glue or whatever and it just kind of like snaps the parts of the little spas. It's fine, you know. You just stick it back together. It's probably rough handling. Yeah. Blame the crew, of course.

Yeah, you salvage one of these and you just find that the the paint on the hull has like this enormous thumbprint on it and you're like, ah, that's what's happened. Yeah. So this was replaced by the victory ship late in the war and that was built to a more modern and less sucky design than this. But also gave us the John Brown too. Yeah. But a lot of Liberty ships that survived the war formed the basis for new commercial

merchant fleets, right? Because you can buy them cheap. Oh, yeah. A ton of people got very rich off of like all of the surplus kind of surplus to requirements socialism products that the US government or whoever just cranked out very cheaply. Well, it's good, Aristotle Onassis. Yeah. Yeah, you want a Liberty ship?

You got five bucks. Yeah, buy a collect. I mean, that's still true. You can buy, if you want, you can buy a Land Rover in the UK very, very cheaply, so long as you're willing to drive out to the middle of nowhere because the fucking army will just like sell it to some guy for nothing. It's like a government surplus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, I love that. Oh, yeah. I'll just check it every few weeks. 150 bucks for a two and a half ton truck. Yeah, sure, whatever. Yeah, the next, the next Patreon episode is going to be that you guys get a Humvee. Roll it up to the live show in my doos and a half. Yeah, all the podcasters in the back.

Go, go, go, go. Smashing into the video. Yeah, I really like the Humvee like ambulance body, the like tall backed one. I think that's cool. I think we should get like a mobile podcasting lab in there. Oh, I like that. Or I'd buy the version of the Sherman tank with like the chain designed to clear mines on it and then I would bring that into the venue.

Yeah, just tearing up a bunch of roads as part of an anti-car action. There you go. See, I'm doing praxis. Yes. That's that's all we needed to do praxis properly was to finally buy a tank. Yeah, you get the like mine clearing tank and you systematically obliterate the works of Robert Moses. Yes. Yes.

Now there'll be no debate over whether to tear down the PQE. I'll do it for them. We'll just do it. Yeah. You thought killdozer was excessive. Yeah. We finally found the kind of tankies that we are at its mine clearance tanks. Yeah.

So one of these ships that was sold off after the war was the SS Grand Camp. French for big camp. Yes. Yeah, Grand Camp. Looks like shit there, I notice. Yeah, it does look like shit. I mean, if I can paint the thing a little bit, maybe. They did paint it a little bit.

You can see there's a patch here. There was a guy, a guy just came around with like a really long thing of masking tape. Don't want to get paint on the rust. Let's even make sure that's even. Yeah, it'll be fine. So the SS Grand Camp, formerly SS Benjamin R. Curtis was bought by Company General Transatlantique. All right, you didn't fuck that up too bad. The Company Opportunistique de surplus de allies.

And this was commonly known in the United States just as the French line. Because you don't want a bunch of Texans trying to pronounce Company General Transatlantique or whatever, right? At least enough overlap with Louisianans that they might get at least part of it. And you would be wrong. Yeah. Or they're all just talking about their gumbo. You're going to get us threatened with like an alligator jig for this.

I love the Cajuns. I love that in the United States, we have an entire subgroup of rednecks that only speaks French. I married a Creole. So like the fancy French speaking people. Yeah, I know. It's funny though, because there's only like a few thousand of them. And so like every self would be like, oh, yeah, Beyonce is probably like my second cousin.

It's like, did not get any of that Beyonce money though. Yeah, we're going to have to get this grift. Yeah, for sure. You can tell Beyonce is French because of the accent. How's that Beyonce money? If she was an Anglo, it would just be Beyonce. All right. It would just be Beyonce.

Oh, good job. So this ship was built in 1942 by California Shipbuilding in Los Angeles. And so this is events just prior to April 16th, 1947, right? Love events just prior to something. Yes. So I believe it had taken on a cargo of machinery, bales of twine, and a few cases of small arms ammunition. Just for seasoning.

Yeah, exactly. You couldn't do anything in the fifties or the forties. This is still the forties, right? This is just the forties, yeah. Yeah, you can do anything in the forties without a couple of cases of small arms ammunition. Just a little sprinkling, you know. Yeah, you go to the store and like, you know, you get in your like Ford's flat six and there's a bunch of like loose cartridges

rattling around the floorboards. And you're just like, I just moved that out of the way. It's fine. It took on all this at the Port of Houston, right? But it had to go to Texas City to take on its main cargo of 2,200 tons of ammonium nitrate, right? Oh, good. Yeah. And that was bound for that was bound for still occupied European countries.

For use as fertilizer, right? So you're saying this was an inside job? False flag operation. We're going to take a bold stance that this never actually happened. This was this was this was heading over to Germany to prevent former Nazis from starving. Oh, yeah, I know. Lame. Lame.

Now, loading ammonium nitrate was banned in Houston. Why is this? Fuel oil and fuel. We have we yeah, you're jumping you're jumping ahead. And also, I'm going to say very little for the next slide on the basis that a Muslim says the words ammonium nitrate and a SWAT team fucking comes down my chimney. Oh, yeah, we may we may not have that much time to finish the podcast. You don't want to accidentally Oklahoma City yourself.

Yeah, he just like you just hear the flashbangs come in. It's fine. Just go on without me. Let us finish the episode. At least you fucks. Yeah. Alice, ask the nice men if they'll let you save the audio before they take you to prison. Yeah, for sure.

Habeas podcast. Ammonium nitrate, chemical formula, NH4, NO3. Right. La la la la fingers and ears. Alice, just bleep yourself. You're fine. Yeah. You know, it's it's it's artificial fertilizer, right?

You stick a ammonium together with a nitric acid and you get ammonium nitrate. Such as in these readily available household chemicals. Now, it's got it's got a whole bunch of nitrogen in it, which means it's a good fertilizer. But also it's got a whole bunch of nitrogen in it, which means it's a good explosive. Poor Alfred Nobel. He was the first to like really get in on since salt pieces to really get in on the fact that it turns out that you try to make fertilizer and you have inadvertently created very good explosives.

Just one of those quirks of organic chemistry. Yeah. You know, it turns out Brando is not wood plants, clay, crave. They crave explosives. Very a stick of dynamite in your yard, folks, it'll grow into a dynamite tree. I remember the good old days where you could go to the general store and smoke in a by half a stick of dynamite. I don't believe that an armed society is a polite society necessarily,

but it was a much weirder society when you could just go to the general store and be like a case of Jellignite, please, and some opium. Hey, man, you get a few cases of sternum. You could have a good old time. You should probably get that. You should probably get rid of that the edit. Yeah, just this being the 40s, you could just like drive your Ford with like the car for just rattling around.

Drunk. Don't forget you could be drunk. Drunk off your ass. Because DUI wasn't illegal then. Yeah, but you have a pickup truck with two comically large crates. They both say TNT on the side. It's stenciled, known as bad knife. You have a grease gun and a pack of morphine sorettes on the passenger seat, just loose.

If you crash into anything, you get impaled on your own steering column. It was a weirder time. So the thing about ammonium nitrate on its own, right, it's very stable. Yeah, that's what you want. Yeah, it'll burn, but you need additional components to make it explode. Violently, right? Which makes it the basis for a popular industrial explosive, right? That's ANFO.

Industrial recreational political. It has many purposes. Yeah. So ANFO is literally short for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Oh, it does with a 10, I suppose. Now, if you remember, back a few minutes ago, we talked about how Liberty ships were fueled and you may be able to see a problem developing here. Really like low grade bunker fuel oil, right?

A lot of impurities. Oh yeah, the worst stuff from the bottom of the distillation column that's just been sitting there for weeks. You could just say old crown. Yeah, which is why all of the engines like are constantly like knocking and banging and grinding and shit, throwing off sparks. Well, no, because they just burn the oil to generate steam as opposed to trying to run it through an actual engine.

And that'd be dumb. Don't do that. I'm going to try and do that. I'm going to get like a marine engine and run it off of like fuel oil. It's not going to work. The funny thing about fuel oil is the one thing you really can't use it for is fuel. At least not in an internal combustion engine. Ammonium nitrate fuel ish oil.

Yes. So all right, let's talk about some of the events the day of, right? I see a caption here that says looking east along north side of warehouse O showing the SS Grand Camp a few minutes before the explosion. Yes. Oh, that's not robotic. Thank God. Yeah, I have a question, which is in order for us to have this photograph on our podcast,

this guy, I'm presuming it's a guy took this photo and then ran out of town. It's like, oh, it's smoking. Fuck now. Yeah. Goodbye. This was taken by, I believe, the captain of another ship that was nearby, which we'll talk about in a second. Huh.

Not going to be nearby for a long. And after he took this photo, he's like, I better go back to my boat and make sure everything's OK. And then the other boat, you know, this boat done blowed up. Ah, OK. So the SS Grand Camp had been docked at Texas City, right? And it was being loaded with big paper bags of ammonium nitrate by like a bunch of long shoremen, right?

Because plastic hadn't been invented yet. You just have paper. Yeah. It's fine. Like a big grocery sack. Plastic had been invented yet, but we hadn't started using it for back-a-light shipping ammonium nitrate. So a big, a big, beautiful, perfect, bakelite cask full of ammonium nitrate.

Yeah. Oh, that'd be beautiful. Oh, one thing, one thing I did find out about this is that when they were loading this, the long shoremen said, just because it was Texas, right? And it was the summer or whatever. When they were loading them, the paper bags were hot to the touch. This is not a good sign. Yeah, as bad as they've, if it's hot for, you know, Texas hot, that's pretty hot.

That is true. Lugs have melt while I'm trying to load my melting fuel. So yeah, the loading takes a while. It's very labor intensive. It's a multi-day affair, right? It's not like today where you load a bunch of containers on the ship. Here it's like guys have to grab the beach individual bag that weighs like 50 pounds and like throw them on the ship.

It's like individual, individual longshoremen and they're all, because it's in the 40s, they're all fucking in the like mob affiliated union. They have to spend seven hours a day like flicking a switchblade open and closed. Yes. You have a mandatory switchblade break. Yeah. They're all smoking. Mandatory smoking.

Yeah. Mandatory smoking and switchblade break. That's pretty impressive coordination though, so not what is the war? Around eight in the morning, right? After they opened the cargo hold to start doing more loading, smoke was seen inside the cargo hold, right? Where the ammonium nitrate was being loaded. Damn it, you take your smoking and switchblade break outside the hold.

Yeah. And that's the thing, no one actually knows how the fire got started, but people speculate it was someone, you know, discarded a cigarette. It always is. When we get to King's Cross, we'll get there. Oh no. Probably a cigarette and a broken switchblade. Just a stack of like innocently horny old magazines and like

a smoldering pipe. I will be right back. That's fine. Just yeah, just like a corn cob pipe and like a stack of like old playboys or something. Wait, so are were they whacking off in the ammonium nitrate hold? I would assume. I mean, this being the time when like this is before sexual harassment was invented. So do I, I had to imagine we're just jerking off everywhere.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You just do it with impunity. This was invented in like 1970. We're like a guy with a big collar wheeled in a VHS and a TV and like showed you a little film about how that sexual harassment to just be jerking off and some ammonium nitrate. Before that, you just, yeah, nobody, nobody knew any better. That was fine. Yeah, I was about to say, who came up with this idea?

Where did the VHS tape come from? Some academic feminists telling us we can't we can't jerk off in the ammonium nitrate. It's a safety issue. I have the moisture will damage the cargo. You can't do it not for not for reasons of like sexual harassment. You actually can't do it. You can't do it for practical reasons. Well, maybe that was the problem was they didn't have enough guys jerking off down there.

And like that's what allowed that heat to build up. You just like suggesting they should extinguish the flame via Bukaki. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying we need some kind of like cum bucket brigade arrangements. We have a we have a go to normal podcast. I was about to say like all of our diversions where one of our number has to leave we've we've caused a disaster.

Yeah, we are worthless without all three of us here. Yes. Yeah, we are. We are like the fucking planet is listen to our podcast about info and cum. I feel like it's important for me to just say some absolutely ridiculous dumb bullshit because the MI5 agent listening to the previous bit is like, OK, well, this fucking dumb ass isn't going to do any terrorism. Because she's just she's just talking about cum now.

Yes. Liam just knocked my door open. God damn it, Liam. Ow. Get your shit together. You missed a whole digression about cum and about the role of cum in the workplace. Yes. Just masturbate in the bathroom like an adult.

Well, this was the bathroom. I have to assume no dudes pissing on it and stuff too. We couldn't piss on it. Well, we'll actually we'll actually talk pissing on it wouldn't actually make it a more effective fertilizer because urea is a very effective fertilizer as well. But in this case, there was an issue as I stated before. There was a fire that was sort of smoldering in the hold, right? The longshoremen get down there and they're like, we need to fight this fire, right?

True. So, you know, the first thing to do is they get a big containers full of water. They lower it into the hold with a crane and people dump it on the fire, right? Sure. Sounds like firefighting, I guess. Yeah, they do some firefighting, right? Well, they do that twice and it doesn't really reduce the amount of fire there is, right? It keeps coming back, right?

Like they tamp it down for a bit and then like five minutes later, it's just smoking again. Yes. So, the longshoremen say, you know, this isn't enough. We don't have enough water. We need a hose, right? A hose full of cum. Yes. Have I got news for you?

So, they call for, you know, a hose full of an unspecified liquid. It's cum. Just say cum. Well, what do you think firefighting foam is? Industrial cement. Yeah. But the whole village is pregnant and shit. You're such fucking dumbasses.

And I read the actual report for this report from after the incident. Someone, and it doesn't say who, denies the request because the amount of water a hose would put on the ammonia, the ammonium nitrate, would damage the cargo, right? Oh, sure. We're just currently a bit on fire. It is on fire, yes. Only a bit, though, if I got. Well, the water would damage more of the cargo than what was currently on fire.

Yeah, but I feel like there's an error in calculation there in terms of not understanding that stuff being on fire tends to put stuff near it also on fire, that being how fire works. I feel like maybe the size of the fire was not clearly communicated to whoever's job it was to protect the cargo from getting wet. This is the southern thing, is you just like, you take a paragraph to say the thing, and so you, you know, I declare that there may be a risk of conflagration in the vicinity of fire.

Wow, dude, you declare. There's a joke that was on a TV show, but I predates it. It's like why the South lost the Civil War was all of these general officers standing there with their hands in their coats being like, why, general, I do declare that the Yankees may appear to her. Oh, shit, here they are. What's good, guys? You know, maybe, maybe because it took them so long to say it, at around 830,

the captain says, why do you declare? I believe we should abandon ship. Yeah, he sounds the fuck horn like horn. Yeah. So everyone on board got the fuck out. I don't think anyone who was actually, any, any longshoreman who was actually working on the boat stayed in the area long enough to get blown up. Wise.

The two, the two acronyms, the one you respond to with the other, ANFO and GTFO. Yes. So, so at this point, there's a pretty vigorous fire on the boat. Again, this is, you can see the smoke here, right? All the smoke was orange. Oh, cool. And, and so some of the townsfolk of Texas City decided, you know,

hey, we're going to crowd around and watch. We want to go see the firefighting happening. Of course. Yeah, you have like the spectacle. People love street theater. Same thing with Chernobyl. Hey, you want to go see the power plant catch fire? It's got these weird, it's got these weird colored flames.

It looks cool as hell. Oh, shit. Yeah. So 26 firemen arrived on the scene with four fire trucks, right? And they started to set up water lines to fight the fire properly, right? And some witnesses on scene reported that the sea was boiling around the ship from the heat of the fire. Shouldn't, shouldn't be doing that.

I see you've never been to Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, just, well, Cleveland is, it's not boiling. You just walk across, right? Like, you know, it's the river was on fire. Oh, OK. But I'm thinking of before it caught fire, it had like the thick crust. There was the thing that caught fire. But you could just like, you could just like have a like a stroll across the river.

Of course. So it was theorized at this point that like some fuel oil got in contact with the ammonium nitrate, you know, possibly from it being so goddamn hot. Happens. I mean, you fucking, that's the thing with like oil. If you work with any kind of oil, it gets everywhere. You can't control all of it. And once a little bit of it like catches fire, it's a lot of fire.

Yes. This is not so good. So anyway, at 912, the SS Grand Camp blew up. But blew all of the pixels out of this photo. Yes, it did. It was so it's such a big explosion that most pixels in the area were destroyed. Solve the time. Yes.

So this this explosion was equivalent to 2.7 or 3.2 kilotons of TNT, depending on which measurements you use, right? So maybe numbers. Yeah, that's your nuke, basically. That's about one-fifth the size of the little boy atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Goddamn, that sounds unpleasant. I suppose it helps that this is happening,

not just at ground level as opposed to an air burst, but also partly in the sea. So, you know, some of that energy is just going down into the boiling water. But I mean, it helped, but it also caused some problems, which we'll talk about in a second. Oh, good, yeah. So, all right. So the first thing that happened was the entire Texas City Fire Department

was murdered immediately, apart from one guy who hadn't shown up yet. But I feel like this is like a lot of these things. When we do these disasters, it's either the long, slow, agonizing deaths, which, you know, you feel very bad about. Or it's this, where you're just like one minute, you're fighting the fire and like having a nice time being a Texas City Firefighter. Like the fire with your bros, yeah. Yeah, and the next, you're just kind of missed, right?

That's not, yeah. It's that, it reminds me of the, what had happened after Lackmack and Teak. They're like, yeah, we basically don't need ambulances because everybody's dead. Yeah, it's like, I still feel bad, but if I had to pick one of those ways to die, I'm going with the, I'm with my bros. I'm just vibing. I'm having a nice time.

And then there's nothing there anymore. There's no more of you. Yeah, exactly. Which would be a shame because this podcast barely stays on the rails as it is. Yeah, we were saying while you were off the air that like with one of us gone, it just doesn't work. Yeah, it just devolves into inanity. Well, thank you very much for...

listening to me complain about that time. Roz did me dirty and allowing me to be on the podcast. No, seriously, it didn't, it didn't work with two people. We did the first episode and all of the comments were like, it was this dumb asshole who keeps interrupting Justin. Now we out dumber him. Yes, exactly. You got to change that power dynamic.

So several firefighting crews from local industries also showed up and they were also murdered, right? Oh, pretty wiggly. And the ship was obliterated entirely. There were huge shards and metal propelled thousands of feet through the air at supersonic speeds. So there were two explosions in short succession, right? Because the aluminum, the ammonium nitrate was stored in two holds. So it blows up one that hits the other and then that goes up to...

Yes. The sympathetic destination, a phrase I really love. It's like, well, you know, if you're going through it too, man, I'll just, yeah. Wouldn't that be empathetic? Not sympathetic. You would think, but I think it is cold. I don't know why, but it's called a sympathetic detonation. That's that's that's weird.

I don't like that. I like empathetic detonation. I think it's more accurate. So now windows are shattered in buildings as far away as Galveston, which is 10 miles away across the bay. That's what you get for not using Linux. Yeah. And Baytown, which is 25 miles away, these shockwaves were propagated

through the water much farther than they were through the air. Yeah. Because like when like Laxmagantique and Halifax, when we ever talk about that, people heard those pretty far away, but it didn't like do a lot of damage to them, right? Yeah. Whereas this, you just kind of get the fucking like shockwave of this. And it just breaks all your windows. And all of your windows are made of like just regular glass because it's 1947.

And so like everybody gets horribly maimed. It's cool. Oh, yeah. You you crash your truck full of Jellignite and morphine sorettes. That causes another disaster. Let's show it. Let's show it. Jesus, it's a miracle the whole fucking country didn't go up and like this chain reaction of

like all of the incredibly dangerous shit that everyone was living with the whole time. Just like everything is like a separate piece in a Rube-Goldberg machine that like this sets off all of the like leaded gasoline. The leaded gasoline explodes like a. Oh, let your kids lick it. Yeah. That takes out the like radium chemistry set factory next door. The leaded gasoline got us, you know, a couple decades of GOP dominance of government.

Let's talk about tetraethyl lead. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about the chemist who invented tetraethyl lead CFCs and then also died in a machine of his own design. Hell of a career. Yeah. That's what you don't want to do when you become an industrial chemist. So the the ship's anchor was found 1.6 miles from the site.

They built a park around it. You can still go see it. It's still in the same spot. Well, I mean, it makes sense. That's the like it's a bit of solid metal. It's meant to be heavy and immovable. So just that's still in the end of a long chain. It just gets fucking and it just gets yeeted into into East Texas.

And away we go. One smashes nice nicely with the suck trade. Oh, to have been someone riding that anchor. Be like the flat earth guy who died. Rest in power to that guy. RIP. So now here's the thing. This explosion was in a heavily industrial area, right?

With mostly petrochemical industries. Because that's all industry was at that time was you make insanely dangerous stuff out of other insanely dangerous stuff. I'm the guy whose job it is to like paint the radium paint onto this like can of benzene with no gloves or anything. Yes. As a result, a bunch of stuff caught fire. Now, call the fire department.

Oh, yeah. Call Jeff because he's the last one left. Hey, Jeff, are you coming in to work today? But it's just body parts are falling all around him. He's just like, yeah, fucking damn it. Everybody, everybody, you know, has just been turned into mulch. But you get like the text from your boss that you get like, hey, we're going to need you to come in.

Yeah, I know you took the day. But like, it's just really it's really short stab. Yeah, we're really short handed now. Jeff's just texting back. Damn, that's crazy. Good luck though. I once had a coworker who texted my boss. Damn, that's crazy.

Good luck though. So all right, let's let's look at some of the industrial facilities surrounding the boat and what happened to them. We got the we got the fucking like the Henry Ford racism factory. Oh, no. Oh, no. Not the racism. My copy of the Dear Blood Independent.

Start with every new Ford. All right. So there's a lot going on here. I believe the main slip here where it says to is where the boat was. Right. And then wasn't. And then wasn't. Yes.

Then the boat was spread evenly through right next to it. You have you have a grain elevator there. Those things are death traps. You got to be careful with those. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think the grain elevator actually survived pretty much intact. Somebody taking grain safety seriously.

Finally. Yeah, thank God. Well, just on account of being a solid concrete bunker. Hmm. I don't remember if it's two or if it's one. It may be one, but I think by this point, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. Yes.

So the bulk of the impact was was on the Monsanto chemical company. Oh, no, my corn syrup. Oh, it's the same Monsanto as it is now. But this is before they were a GMO monopoly. I just I keep noticing different things. There's a molasses tank. We almost had a Boston molasses flood again. Bonus episode coming soon, folks.

But I'll do that. He's channel. It's just like diagonally bottom left of the Monsanto chemical company. There's a molasses. Oh, yeah. There is just a big tank of molasses. And then south of that, you have like a very, a very like 40s thing

of we love to do like cutesy alliteration. The carbide and carbon chemicals corporation. Fucking Batman animated series. Just thinking that that sounds like where Joker fell into the vault. Yeah, they have like a beautiful hand painted sign. The Monsanto chemical company at this point, they're they're making styrene, right? Which is this is a precursor to the plastic, right?

Yeah, it's it hasn't gotten into the polycule yet. So it's just styrene. Yeah, it's it's monogamous styrene. And that's not not polystyrene, right? And and styrene is used for a lot more than just polystyrene. But you know, for the purposes of discussion, you know, they're making plastics, right? So their big warehouse was just adjacent to the explosion.

I think it's this building here because this was a converted sugar factory. And that bore the brunt of the explosion. It was just annihilated, just just wrecked, right? And the rest of the factory caught fire. One notable thing is there are a pair of Benzol tanks. And I'm not sure what Benzol is, because I couldn't figure it out. I don't like the word I don't like the syllable Benz in there. I'm pretty sure it's just pure benzene.

Which as if we go back and listen to the lack of a gun to get episode, Justin, you mentioned is like one of the few chemicals that even the oil industry is like, yeah, there's just no safe level of this. It's it's it's it's what anti nuclear activists think your nuclear waste is. Yeah, you don't want to like you don't want to touch it. Yeah, it's like it's it's what. Fuck who is who is that chemist who like splashed some like I think some fluoride on her gloves and it just penetrated through that and like killed her a month later.

Like with some mercury salt or something. That that's kind of like what Benzene is like. You don't hydrogen fluoride. Yeah. Yeah. Don't breathe in nonstop for the last few months. Thank God. Of course. Yeah. Well, there's an HF tank somewhere in this image, but I don't know where.

I also see the humble pipeline company. I buy my video game bundles from them. We'll get to them in a second. So those two Benzal tanks burned for seven days. The Monsanto plant was a total loss, just completely destroyed. Well, I mean, Monsanto didn't seem to like do too badly out of it. So yeah, they seem to come back pretty well. Another one down here was the humble pipeline company, which you pay what you want for

a like a selection of pipelines. They didn't make pipelines. They ran a pipeline. What they made what they made was oil. Oh, okay. They had 10 tanks here. You can see their lettered. I don't know what the letters are for.

The bund or crushed. No, seriously. That's what it says on the on the like legend. Oh, does it? Yeah. But be for be for burn see for minus a serious crushing. Ah, okay. That is so helpful.

These these tanks were in older design, right? And so they they had wooden floating roofs on them, right? The rest of the tank was metal, but they had a wooden floating roof. And as a result of this, when one of them caught fire, the roof also started burning and started releasing embers out, which ignited other roofs. We don't need no water. Let the mother fucker burn. I was about to fuck you.

Fuck you. I was about to make that show. All 10 of these tanks were full on the day of the explosion because they're expecting a couple of tankers to come in. Can't cannot catch a fucking break, I guess. No. Yeah. So eight of the 10 tanks caught fire, you know, through a chain reaction of just the

wooden roof burning up and going through the air and setting another wooden roof on fire. Um, one of them was extinguished in the other seven. They didn't have enough firefighting equipment to do anything other than let them burn out. So why why build these floating wooden roofs, right? There's got to be some some reason other than just like the aesthetic, right? They were old. OK, this is an extra bit I'm adding in post because I don't think I answered that question adequately.

The reason you have a tank with a floating roof is for two reasons, right? Well, really one reason, which is to limit the amount of space that the liquid inside the tank, in this case, oil has to evaporate, right? So for instance, so the floating roof floats right on top of the surface of the liquid, so there's no room for it to evaporate into a gas. This is good because it limits the amount of liquid you lose through evaporation, and it also prevents, you know, the possibility that you'll get just the right air fuel mixture in there and it'll either catch fire or explode spontaneously.

So the floating roof prevents both of those things. They're usually not made of wood anymore. All right. Back to the regularly scheduled podcast. OK. So the Texas City Terminal Railway had this big yard here, right? And there were 362 railcars in there, and they were all either damaged or destroyed. F.

They also lost four locomotives, I think. Even more F. Yeah. Jesus, imagine you're just like plowing your fields out in East Texas and a fucking like 460 locomotive just buries itself in your beet field. And some other miscellaneous damage, right? So there was a 15 foot tidal wave on account of the explosion. Oh, good.

Which managed to repel this barge about 200 feet inland. There were two light aircraft flying in the area. The explosion just knocked them out of the air. One thing I read was that they actually they just shared the wings off of them at the spas. Good Lord. Yeah, I just like snap the wings off. This is not great. Note the 150 foot oil barge washed ashore by the high tidal wave that caption says.

Yeah, I think I think I would have noted that. Yeah. Just just a little thing. That's not supposed to be here. So most commercial buildings in Texas City were damaged or destroyed. Most homes in Texas City were damaged or destroyed. Huge amount were condemned. Mm.

Like McGonagall stuff again. Yeah. All the firefighting equipment in the city was destroyed. Power and water were knocked out. I think power was restored to most of the city by noon-ish. That's pretty good. But like how are we doing on like environmental contamination? Like where's all that benzene going?

I mean everywhere. Yeah, of course. Every single spot. Just got a thick layer like a sheen. Yeah, yeah. This is my benzene facial. So then, you know, and okay, so at least 581 people were killed and like 8,500 people were injured or so.

Jesus. Just from like various steering column impalements, non-safety glass lacerations, radium paint ingestion. Yes. You just like your hand, you're handling your big like crate of mining explosives that you go to the store and the thing goes off 20 miles away and it just jogs your hand and you just blow yourself up. Yes.

Yeah, very sad. And the death toll may be higher from undocumented workers and sailors who were, you know, at the port at the time. Always is. We talked a little bit about that in the Grenfell episode about how people thought for months that the death toll was much higher than it was reported because a lot of the people who got killed didn't matter to the authorities and same again. So cool.

Yes, but we're not done here. Of course. Oh, well, thank God for that. So look at the look at the consistency of the fuel oil on that water. Oh, yeah. I mentioned before that that photograph was taken by the captain of another boat. This is that boat. It's not supposed to do that, is it?

Not supposed to do that. This is actually another liberty ship, the SS Wilson B. Keane. You know that there's not much way it's split in half. It might have done that on its own. You said that didn't happen that often. Rough handling. Rough handling, yeah. Rough handling, yeah.

Well, okay. So the firefighting and emergency response started immediately after explosions were heard because they were heard as far away as Houston, which is like 60 miles away. It's only 47. So at least people don't think that the Russians have like nuked them yet. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Firefighters and medical personnel showed up from as far away as Los Angeles.

And of course, you know, this is a big, big firefighting job because everything was on fire. And of course, most of the people with the detailed firefighting knowledge in the area were not available. We're dispersed over the area and a fine cloud. Yes. Apart from Steve, who is still texting, like, yeah, I'm not coming in. I took the day. I told you no.

Yeah, I took the day two months in advance. Fuck you. Going fishing. I have turned off my work phone. I was very clear about this. Unlike the Liberty ships, very tightly compartmentalized. So one of the first jobs that the emergency responders needed to do was to make sure there were no more explosions.

Hmm. You could start. You've got to keep a close fucking eye on that grain elevator. Another ship, not the one in the picture. This is a third ship, right? It was nearby the explosion. It was called the SS High Flyer, right? Great name.

And it had been it had been being loaded with a certain cargo at the time of the explosion. And that was 961 tons of more ammonium nitrate. Oh, good. Oh, it's very consistent. Were you doing foreshadowing when you called Texas City a boom town? Yes. Texas City has actually seen several more booms in addition to this one. Once the the Grand Comp had exploded, it tore the High Flyer from its moorings

and it had drifted into a third ship, which was the Wilson B. Keen, which is this one here, right? You know, it got wedged in there. Like no one could get it out too easily, right? So, you know, that it required a bunch of hard work to get it free. And the idea was and it had also, of course, caught fire. Of course. Yeah, because everything was on fire by this point.

It looked like Mordor. And it also inadvertently dropped anchor. Yeah. It's like, why is this thing stuck in there? Because the dude left the handbrake on. Apparently, yeah. So so they so a bunch of longshoremen who were still there, you know, in a bunch of other folks were like working hard to free this burning ship full of ammonium nitrate from another ship,

which was the Wilson B. Keen was full of flour. So not so bad. Equally dangerous. Yeah. I would not be doing that. I would I would be running for Mexico by that point. Yeah, it's about to say I'd be right there with you. So the idea was they were going to try and get this boat free.

And they were going to tow it farther into the harbor. And they were going to leave it there and it would blow up on its own time, right? That's that's that's why he's far away. Yeah. So do the ending of the third Batman movie. Was it Dark Knight Rises? Yeah. It took it till 11 p.m. for tugboats to arrive to move the ship.

You know, it's been about 15 hours or so. A little bit less than that, excuse me. And work to free the ship was slow. Uh, no one could get it out. And then at about 1 12 a.m. it exploded blew up. Yeah. So that didn't injure or kill so many people, you know, only the people who were working on it. And as well as a few people on the tugs that were positioned nearby to grab it instantly.

Inadvertently did a drone strike to themselves before the invention of drones where you just do a double tap where you just like you kill a bunch of people in an explosion. And then you kill a bunch of people trying to like rescue people from the explosion with another explosion. Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Very nice. Very, very efficient because it caused a lot of extra property damage as well.

No one knows exactly what was damaged by what explosion because, you know, the devastation was so complete. Sure. So after this, there were no more really significant explosions. And I mean, a significant explosion here is a very high bar to clear. I mean, a lot of stuff was still blowing up all over the place. But um, but it took them seven days to fully extinguish all the fires or for the fires to burn themselves out.

And it took them a month until they gave up recovering all the bodies. Run out of shovels. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I guess this is a parking lot about a quarter mile out from the explosion. Looking like fallouts out here. Yeah.

So all right. So the aftermath and the lawsuits. All right. So immediately the mayor organized the Texas City Relief Fund. And it was immediately co-opted by the mob. Of course. Back to the switchblade breaks again. Yes.

So, Sam and Rosario Macio. It's a Macio. It might be Maccio. I don't know. Sam, Sam murdering JFK Aduchiliano. Yes. Yes. So they were famous for openly running large illegal casinos in Galveston.

Yeah. Yeah, there was I believe one incident where the local sheriff refused to comply with in order to raid one of the casinos because he said, well, it's private club and I'm not a member. I mean, Chris has a story of like his grandpa from about this time of being waved through Louisiana state police or highway patrol checkpoints and getting escorted to the governor's mansion with a truck full of booze. Just to be like, yeah, this is the governor's booze. What's the problem?

I see no problem here. Southern corruption is really like a whole other thing. I have a long, long story of, well, a long held opinion that I feel like we could have done okay out of a Huey long presidency where everyone has universal basic income, but it's in an incredibly crooked way where you like have a no show job at a factory run by like Bo who is someone's cousin. It's like 25 Supreme Court justices passing every civil rights law, but they're all surnamed Long. Do you have socialist or you have Marxist, Leninist or what ideology are you?

I'm a Huey Longist. All right. So at this point, the nickname for Galveston actually was just the free state of Galveston because none of Texas's laws applied there. One statistic I read was like one in 62 people in Galveston were sex workers. So it was New Vegas? Yes. Cool.

Well, the other thing is that the mobsters running the place went on to really be some of the first people to have found the Las Vegas Strip. Of course. Another proud moment of Jewish history. And also probably murdered JFK, which I've been saying we need to do a Kennedy assassinations bonus episode. That'd be fun. We're finally going to solve it, guys.

We're going to do it. We're going to look at it with the keen eye of STEM education. Yes. Nobody's ever done hard science to this shit. Nope. We will be the first pioneering a brave new world. Once you get that like map, that overhead plan of Dealey Plaza and you, John Madden it, we're going to solve this shit right quick.

Yes. So the Galveston mobsters, of course, they immediately organized a benefit concert for the effort for the city of Texas City. Yeah, they got Sinatra. Of course they fucking did. Bring a fucking ding ding. You just have Dean Martin there with an extremely dry martini. Right.

Cool. I'm not sure if they got Dean Martin. I only wrote down Sinatra. All those people did play at Galveston clubs, which were all run by the mob. And which were all had illegal gambling out in the open. I can't believe there's gambling in this establishment. And during prohibition, you could just get booze there and no one cared.

They had slot machines in convenience stores, apparently, in Galveston. The way of the future. And we like, I guess, you can just Elliott Ness that shit to death. Yeah. They have fun police. The relief fund raises a million dollars. Fire insurance pays out four million dollars. Reconstruction of Texas City costs one hundred million dollars.

To be fair, the benefit would have been at least five million dollars, but like four million dollars of that went on to like spray painting furniture gold. Like buying a Cadillac dealership for some reason. Just all weirdly invested into sanitation companies. Well, you know, there's no garbage on the streets. I can't complain. Yeah. After this, there is a supreme court case, Elizabeth Daylight at all versus United States.

Right. So this was the first ever class action lawsuit brought against the U.S. government under the brand new Federal Tort Claims Act, right? And they're trying to recover damages from the government for the explosion caused by the ammonium nitrate they had ordered. Well, right. Because this was a government shipment of ammonium nitrate over to Europe. It was going to do some some martial plans shit, right?

Yeah. So this lawsuit escalated the Supreme Court and they ruled against them in a four or three decision. Like, no, fuck you. This is national national security thing or something like that. Of course. Of course. And yeah.

Yeah, it was like it was it was a discretionary power that the federal government was exercising to like blow up a small part of the United States. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. Also, you still, I guess, a lot of costs for lawyers. Cool. Eventually, Congress took pity on them and they did some federal relief funding

almost a decade later. That's the congressional, the speedy congressional response that we love to see. Yes. Yeah. That's how Bernie Sanders is going to implement the Green New Deal and save us all. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the fucking I feel like what's going to happen is if, inshallah, we get a Bernie presidency in a hundred years time, we'll get an act through what's left of like the

Moon Congress saying that the Green New Deal would have been a good idea. Look, look, look, stay positive. Stay positive. Stay positive. Deep breaths and stay positive. And through the nose out through the mouth. So what happened to Texas City after this, right? I see some on fire.

Yes. The other Texas City disaster. The industrial plants were rebuilt pretty quickly, but downtown Texas City never really recovered, right? There's still a lot of vacant lots near the explosion to this day. And some of that's because of benzene contamination and stuff like that. But, you know. Oh, well, at least they can't, at least they can't enough to be like, hey, maybe don't build

your house on the the the extremely cancer chemical. It was an interesting contrast looking at this refinery where there was like a nice buffer zone between the housing and the refinery versus, say, here in Philadelphia, where there's that one little enclave of row houses in the middle of the refinery. Yeah, like just off of Paschunk Avenue. I wonder if there's any kind of demographic reason for why that might have happened. Anyway, yeah. Impossible.

Yeah. Just go ahead and buy this this lot as part of like a Johnny Knoxville style dare to see how many cancers a person can get at the same time. So the lack of recovery in the downtown, I guess, has as much to do with post-war city planning as the disaster. I mean, suburbanization wrecked everywhere. They fucking they didn't have to took away the explosion factory. NAFTA did not take away the explosion factory because what you're looking at here

is the third largest oil refinery in the United States located in Texas City, which has has blown up several times since then. Occupational hazards. Most recently in 2005, which is what we're looking at here. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah, refineries blow up every once in a while and we just tolerate it. Yeah, it'll be fun when the one near you just takes out two thirds of this podcast.

They are they are shutting down Atlantic refining company. Finally, after 150 years, I thought the White House overruled them on that and like made them. They're still trying, but it doesn't look like it's going to go through. OK, well, great. Finally, you don't you don't have to live next to like a leaky tank of HF anymore. No, I live near a nice, safe, two gigawatt nuclear power plant. People who haven't heard our nuclear power, our Three Mile Island episode with Lindsey will not know that you're not being ironic when you say that.

Yeah, exactly. Now, Limerick Generating Station is why I can produce this podcast with impunity. All the electricity I use is 100% carbon free. You're welcome. You're welcome. Well, 80% electricity I use is 100% carbon free. But anyway, that's the story of the Texas City disaster. The Texas City of the ammonium nitrate massacre.

Texas City is a boom town which has boomed many times, but this was the most significant boom. Got them. Yep. Roasted. That was the podcast. Next podcast will do the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Finally, get it right this time. Yes.

Talk about that dog. Yeah, talk about the dog. And does anyone have any commercials before we go? Listen to Trash Future. It's a very good podcast. I'm also on it. We are talking about, for our next bonus episode, Jacob Rees Mog, Noted British Shithead Politicians.

Terrible book. We were going to read that and torture ourselves. You're going to get beyond Augustus Willby Northbourne Pugin? Yes. Yeah, we're doing some more Victorians. I think we have W.G. Grace, the cricketer. Yeah, so it's going to be entertaining. We're bringing comedian Nish Kumar back for that just to torture him with that.

So that's going to be very fun. All right. When's Franklin? When is Franklin? When is Franklin? Allegedly, it's coming soon. Yeah, allegedly coming soon. The finished line is within sight, by which I mean I'm still working on those goddamn models.

And I didn't get any work done on them last week. But this week, I think I will get some work done on them. What you need to do is, instead of those Lancia lions, just get a 3D model of an orb with the lion emoji on it and just use those. And just be like, yeah, this was way easier. Just an orb with a lion texture. Yeah, but it's like all of the math textbooks that are like, assume a cow is perfectly circular.

Yeah, assume a lion is perfectly spherical and of uniform density. Yeah, the lion exists in a vacuum, hypothetically. That's going to cause some problems. No, but back to rat viscera again. No, I'm imagining like there's a lion stuck in your vacuum cleaner. Just trying to picture the sound that that would make and having a nice time. And yes, Franklin 11 is coming soon. I promise. Pinky swear.

And follow me on Twitter at 2902. You're back, bitches. Yeah, I'm back. And that's my commercial. All right. And finally, I am Liam Anderson. I'm at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. Yeah, no, I have nothing to add of note. Subscribe to our Patreon. When's the next episode going up?

The bonus episode about gun is coming soon. I'm going to try and get that up shortly after I get this up. So maybe not that shortly. It might be a day or two, you know, just because if for the upload speed of nothing else. Sorry. Shit takes almost as long to upload as it does to caption. I love you use net. Plus, you'll get retro Alice as opposed to new crisp Alice.

Yes, that's right. I said I sound like shit on that one. And I'm doing most of the talking. So yeah, pay us money for that. Yeah, give us your money. Give us your money. Yeah, give us your money. Give us your money.

I will be talking about the SA80 program, which led to like a very dumb assault rifle for the British Army. It's it's a great deal of fun. Yes. Yes. Gun, gun, gun, gun, gun. The gun, the gun is good. The penis is bad.

Yes. Forget forget how the rest of that line goes. That's the entire line. Oh, is it? Okay. Unless you're doing call and response. And sorry does does. Yeah, I don't have.

Oh, no, there is more to it. Never mind. I don't remember what it is either. Hey, you're relevant. Yeah. Yeah. Well, goodbye, everybody. Yeah.

Yeah. Bye. Bye. Bye. 01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:14,000 01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:14,000 01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:14,000

01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:14,000