Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 23: Vajont Dam

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Today we talk about a mysterious act of God's love. The slides: https://youtu.be/QueMqRjW5Eo The Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod Some references: fairmount dam image By Yasmeen Elmelige - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51527273 grand coulee dam image By U.S. Bureau of Reclamation - http://users.owt.com/chubbard/gcdam/html/photos/exteriors.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19544 hoover dam image By Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63356878 mica dam image By DAR56 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Jonesy22., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11531284 sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20160114061049/http://www.landslideblog.org/2008/12/vaiont-vajont-landslide-of-1963.html http://www.sopravvissutivajont.org/images2/Secondovajont.htm ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/dmg/pubs/cg/1965/18_07.pdf

there we are okay so now we can do a podcast love to do a podcast yes it's what we're here but we're here to do that's right let me let me start the slideshow and flip her around and minimize this and I can make sure I'm recording and do the introduction hello and welcome to well there's your problem a podcast about engineering disasters with slides I'm Justin Rosniak I'm the person who's talking right now I have an engineering degree so I can talk about engineering stuff and also my computer is complaining about something down there in the corner that's confusing I'm Alice Caldwell Kelly and my

pronouns are she and her I have a law degree for the moment until the coronavirus destroys the entire university system yeah that's right passing by default and my computer works so I'm already like better off than my co-host I am Liam Anderson I am an old man Anderson on Twitter well fuck my pronouns are he him I have a mathematics degree and an economics degree from Rutgers University and I've the asshole on our Twitter account who who was running trade madness okay it's not Roz it's me fucking redirect all complaints to me I'm not here yeah you are not the

selection committee our friend our friend of the show Jeremy's got real mad at me about the Lackawanna and I'm just like I rigged that poll without even really knowing what I was doing just I thought one of the trains looked nicer I did some Russian interference I've actually got a upload the last of the sweet 16 polls right now battle of the Cardinal directions which is the Southern Pacific versus I think the Northern Pacific mmm not there was never an Eastern Pacific you know that that was there was never an Eastern Pacific route was it on John Allen's layout the gory and defeated railroad he had a it was

spelled differently though but he had a couple cars lettered for the Pacific and Western mmm yeah you know which I guess went to Hawaii or something oh so I think I forgot to say my pronouns they're he him anyway so today what we're looking at on the screen here is you can see down here is a dam that's right what's behind the dam is a whole lot of dirt right hmm our ancient enemy yes ever since I'm a fan this show has had a bad relationship with dirt and that dirt is not supposed to be there they're supposed to be water there right today we're gonna learn about the Viant dam disaster is if I is it Viant is a vibe

Vajon I've been so I've been saying Vajon just because it's funnier the Vajon the Vajon dam disaster I've seen it spelled with an I is the thing I think I am then yeah I think it is Viant but before we talk about this we had to go into our new segment the goddamn news news all right in our first instance of news which occurred last week the Chernobyl exclusion zone is on fire it's not good yes we don't want the fire ideal yeah so all this all this fire happening here is also like mildly radioactive which is not good as is all the smoke that's also radiation right see see this arrow was actually that

should be green but fucking Strelok never puts his cigarettes out and this is what happens right like true the stalkers were coming back to the zone the wildlife were turning they were sitting on barrels playing balalaikas because like we are the virus and then this one more fucking time bunch of mutants just dancing around a fire Kalinka Kalinka had a fire do us love squat let's find out got Nick fire when when I did this slide apparently it was about to hit an area with a bunch of waste it's allegedly under control yes good news there's no like history of

state actors trying to like cover up how bad things are going in Chernobyl Ukraine has a highly trustworthy government full of fine upstanding people we've just got a bunch of women to fly my eights to drop anti-semitism on the fire if that doesn't work we're kind of out of ideas I feel like anti-semitism is more known for starting fires thank you yeah yeah it's safely in the hands of the step volunteer fire department okay I still gotta reuse ice on scoop and logos it just had laying around for some fucking reason seriously just had laying around yeah I ain't forget man it's a good thing we don't rely on YouTube ad revenue or

we would not anybody yes we're just we're just trying to alienate at least one country per episode last time Netherlands this time Ukraine I think it will mostly be Italy though which speaking of Italy there is another news that happened which is gotta hit the news again hold on yeah I like how it like starts with sort of a church organ you know yeah I thought when you played it for the first time I thought you're gonna play a hymn I was like okay this is unconventional I like it so this is a bridge in Italy it collapsed with like two vans on it both guys survived that's good because like Italians are doing

social distancing right now so they can't do their favorite hobby of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic screaming at each other so it was just like delivery vans full of Gabba ghoul or whatever yeah I mean I don't understand like Italy it has such a fantastic rail network and yet so many people drive and all the highways are shit they're garbage yeah and all of the bridges were like built by a bunch of rehabilitated fascist modernists in the 70s and so like all of the concrete is just cracking and then just build a giant freeway viaduct over an entire city and then just just collapse it's like the confusing part is

all of it looks like the infrastructure looks really good but it doesn't it doesn't work that good you know because that that the big one that collapsed a while back are you sure this is a Bugatti of not Bugatti the Lamborghini of French man infrastructure projects well it was French then it got taken over by the goddamn Germans everything everything's VW now no I mean did you know that Lamborghini started as a tractor manufacturer and then they got into sports cut yeah no we all know all of us are fucking jalopnik nerds like

you I listen I just I just that's but we all do we all do buddy we all do yeah to be fair Bugatti was born in Milan but does sound very Italian and I know Alpha Romeo used to make trolley buses so I guess this bridge the motorists reported a big crack in it in November you gotta be in rail cars really oh I didn't know that sorry sorry yeah ten seconds do like yeah so there was so there was a big crack in it that motorists reported in November and then they went out and fixed it and I guess they didn't fix it enough because it fell down they put some like some Elmer's glue in there it's fine glue at the bridge god damn it I

have a third here's a third instance of news which occurred I like the delay there yeah there's got like several seconds of silence at the start of the thing so I've got to like try to anticipate you when you say the news so in this piece of news a a a French Ministry of Defense official retired for his surprise retirement party for a surprise retirement party he got Bill Ingwald my favorite diesel from this is right at the bottom where he had no experience of flying and had never expressed any desire to and his friends just like let's let's let's do ling ball him yeah so they gave him a

surprise fighter jet ride for his retirement party at age 64 in this this is a Raphael B fighter jet right or Refale or whatever it's called I don't know it's named after a fast wind it's like calling a fighter jet El Nino oh I see or like a Zephyr or something did it with a Hawaii right so yeah that's true gal as as Alice said had no prior experience flying in military aircraft he was improperly suited up in the G suit right didn't didn't squeeze his legs enough and he was not especially happy in the fighter jet as as it turns out right but you know while he was trying to steady himself he accidentally grabbed

the ejection lever right you'd think that there would be a briefing right because like I looked this up I looked up there are fouls ejection seat the cord for it is it's like a little loop and it's like me it's like yellow and black and it's right about where your dick is right between your legs and it looks like a handhold if nobody tells you and you don't like you're not putting your hands anywhere because you're scared to like touch anything you just think oh I just grab onto this because I'm nervous and he pulled the thing I just love the idea of grab bars yeah that's this grab I just fucking shoot the oh

shit handle yeah so he grabbed the he grabbed the strap and out he went right into Germany yeah yeah and he lost his helmet too when he went out of his pants his flight suit was apparently loose around the pants which is just a delightful little fucking a drill tweet detail ejecting myself and I get to the ground and my pants fall off and I'm in Germany so now it's a weird sex thing that's like yeah that's how every German porn movie starts as an elderly French man I mean I look this up I pants and flugin so so so Martin Baker the company that makes the ejector seat for this they

have they have a club right for aviators who eject and they'll like send you a tie so that guy if he wants he can write in and he can get a tie from them so make sure he knows that yeah that someone has to reach out to this absolutely traumatized French pension and be like you can get a pretty exclusive if you want to just get a necktie the other thing is like the plane landed safely despite now being a conversable because the pilot over overrode his like when you eject one the other one goes off at the same time the pilot went oh shit hit the big cancel button and like landed this thing with like half the

canopy missing that's incredibly cool to me oh just be so pissed off that was the thing I was confused about cuz I didn't know that I thought for sure that if one ejected the other one would you just you just in the ejector seat and you're so mad at the other guy just yelling at him on the way yeah I'd be like you know at that point you know just watching the big button start flashing like no no no no no no anyway thanks for nothing asshole I mean like this is the thing right is it's extremely funny which is like weird for stories about ejection seats because they're deadly as shit man like the f-35s one because it's on the

f-35 has like a one in three chance of just snapping your neck if you try and eject actually yeah but bird strike pilot strike that they don't actually I think in the RF they don't let you fly jets if you eject more than twice because it fucks up your spine so badly each time Lord I know right it's real bad they should have like they should make less shitty ejector seats used to be worse like guy I like a relative of mine died in a jet ejection because they didn't used to be what's called zero zero capable they couldn't land you safely if the plane was on the ground at like zero altitude and zero airspeed and the

plane caught fire and the guy in the back seat pulled the ejection seat and the guy went with him and it is not enough time for the parachutes to deploy so just that sucks yeah it's real real bad good Lord yeah ejector seats man that's not so good not so good but that guy does get a necktie yes you better get his neck I saw the ball here folks yeah I think he gets like a little lapel pin or something too I mean yeah I think that's cool I think we should lie we should make up having been it having been ejected from a jet so that we can get those the like the little lapel pens and stuff and then be a good get for us yes

anyway so that was the goddamn news I gotta I gotta go into audacity and chop the first like three seconds of silence off so back to our subject today so let's do some context about dams right hmm number one is to clear up some possible confusion what's a dam and what's a weir right well weir is a machine for drowning people yes this is true seriously yeah they will put up incredibly metal signs at weirs that are just like if you if you fall into the water underneath this you fucking drown because the the way that the current is sort of circles it creates like this sort of artificial waterfall effect where

you cannot swim out of it it rules a lot of times but yeah but a lot of times like co-alcily like dam and weir are interchangeable but usually a dam a dam does not have water coming over the top right yeah though this one in particular did for a brief period of time we'll get into that it exceeded design specification for amount of water that's supposed to go over the top the amount of water that was supposed to go over the top was zero yeah and that was some yeah that's not good and then on the other hand a weir the water all goes over the top right and this is for altering the flow characteristics of a

river or other flowing body of water as opposed to a dam which you know has can have quite a few other you know applications which we'll get into a weir a weir is chiefly useful for making sure people drown and then like that's basically it this this was a this was a fun one so this is the fair amount dam right they call it a dam even though it's a weir and then so there's a big net you can't see it here right or actually the net is a little bit farther back right and that's to prevent boats from going over the the weir here because this is Boathouse Row back here right now one of the things was so for a very

brief period of time I was on the Drexel rowing team for about four weeks then I got cut because because I wasn't good enough for them so and and one of the unique things about the Drexel Boathouse was it was one of the last Boathouses on the row the bachelor's barge club I believe was the name of that of the Boathouse and it was on the other side of the safety net you had to row through a hole in the safety net to get to the Boathouse so you know you better have a good coxson so you don't like drift over the falls and then the boat tips over and we get caught in the vortex down here it does have a pretty metal

sign actually right by the edge of the water. Yeah we should put up one of those signs with the light it looks like a like a stick figure dude in a washing machine it's awesome. Yes it says danger damn. Yeah this is unfortunate. Arguing with it as you're going over it. No, no, no, that's the way. My OCD is like I would I would die because I would climb out onto the where and you see that big stick I would just want to like knock that off because it's like propped up there it's bugging me. I actually saw a while back the the next weir up the river which is up past Maniunk I saw one day like a man crossing the river by just walking over the top of the weir. Are you sure that wasn't Jesus

Ross? I am pretty sure and I was like okay should I shout out to him that like it's dangerous don't do that or that startled him so he would fall off and then get caught in the vortex and then I'd be responsible for his death. Yeah I feel like if he's already on there he's like committed right exactly I don't I do not recommend don't fuck with weirs don't do it no dude don't don't do that no yeah so that's that's honestly that's the main lesson for this episode all right we're done good night everyone all right so anyway the thing that always got me about the danger damn sign right so I was like oh it's

unfortunate they built this before they later invented the safety dam I'm still like what what color is the boathouse at Drexel like from fucking that movie Ronan you know it the it's it's sort of Roman brick and sort of strides very nice it's very it was very nice on the outside not so nice on the inside so anyway there's many types of dams you know in terms of construction right number one is the gravity dam right it's the Grand Coulee dam in Washington state I want to say so the idea here the idea here is you you hold back the water by building a wall which is very heavy right yeah it can be earth

that can be concrete I believe the dams that 617 squadron blew up in World War 2 the dam busters the dams that they busted were like earth gravity dams yeah and and that that's you know that that's a real basic type of dam it's good for like long long spans you know you can pound a whole lot of water as you can see this is um this is where there is a the spillway is active here right so right none of this water going over is generating electricity otherwise it would be going through turbines anyway it's the first kind of dam the second kind of dam is the arch dam right the golden I n64 kind of dam yes yeah of

course this is the most most famous arch dam the Hoover dam of course you see reservoirs at a pretty low level and of course the way this works is you can use a little bit less material because the force of the water on the dam right sort of strengthens the arch right arches of so fucking weird man look like they're so they're implausibly strong structurally yes I we figured that one weird trick out and then we were just able to build like whole as gothic cathedrals and Hoover dam I guess just because thing go curve well I mean and a gothic cathedrals even better because it's got a pointed arch I've never seen

a pointed arch dam so I should give it a shot so cool that would be cool yeah so in the third the third kind of dam is the embankment dam right and this is basically a gravity dam but it's made of dirt so I'm I'm I'm wrong and I'm owned this the the World War two row dams with this kind of down so usually like it's dirt there's some kind of impervious membrane somewhere in the dam so not as much water can go through although of course some water can go through because this is this is one of the cardinal rules of engineering everything leaks also also once again our ancient enemy dirt making an appearance here our ancient

enemy dirt pitted against our other ancient enemy water water fish yeah yeah whoever dirt versus fish whoever wins we lose so anyway this is the Mika dam this is in Canada somewhere I'm not sure where exactly and I just use this as an illustration because it's useful for our purposes anyway so what's the function of dams right you stop the water yes you don't have the water go from the place where you where it is to where you want it not to be but there's some further there's some further purposes that build off of that right because you have fun

breaking the water simulation in city skylines yes that's a big one yeah you like play with the fun little arrows that show you the water flow and cause like a backlog because the map is impossibly designed and so just like cascades yeah so one function is of course flood control right another purpose might be navigation right keep the water level deeper so boats can go through another one might be to make a big reservoir for drinking water and the thing is as a result of all of those things lots of politics happen because the ideal the ideal water level for each of those activities is entirely

different right mmm so let's say you have you if you have a dam with a combined purpose you know it has a drinking water reservoir right but it's also for navigation but it's also for flood control all those have different optimum sounds like it'll work out swimmingly yeah if you will Jesus all those have three different all those have three different water levels right if it's a drinking water reservoir you want it topped off as high as it can be all the time so you have a reserve in case there's a drought right yeah if you want to have it for flood control you want the reservoir at a fairly low level so it has

some time give yeah it's got some give to it right you can take on a lot more water if you need to and if you want it for navigation you know since there might be there might be docks there might be you know stuff like that up there which are only usable in a small range of water levels you want to keep it as constant as possible all the time what about if you want to use it to generate electricity yes then you also want to keep the water level as high as possible all the time because the higher the water level the more energy you can get out of the water mm-hmm I see yeah so many things happening here another

thing is and this will be something we'll discuss a lot in this episode once you build the dam you alter the level of the groundwater around the dam right so say up here you know your groundwater level is somewhere near the height of the reservoir right well down here the groundwater level is much lower as a result you you have a certain amount of flow through the ground from the upper level to the lower level right not so much if you're building in a hard rock area but if you're building in sort of soft soil or porous rock you always get a lot of seepage around the damn fucking yeah like if you're building in

limestone or say sometimes you get seepage underneath the dam sometimes you get seepage through the dam which is usually very bad especially if it you know is to an amount that you have a hole very very bad in that case at that point the dam is just basically a total loss you know there's always gonna be a little bit because everything leaks yeah the one the one like axiom of engineering that you need to know yeah just as a force of entropy and I not just that it leaks but it leaks in the way that is most inconvenient to the project you're trying to do yes absolutely and without fail yeah there's

never been like a leak in someone's favor right you've never been like I'm glad that's leaking in the way that it is thank God that the leak from that tank accidentally kept the pressure so low no never happens it's not real so then there's there's other there's other like stuffs that damned dams do like there's a lot of ecological stuff you know it dramatically alters ecosystems by turning a river into a lake you know you gotta build a fish tube you see the fish tube get the fit yeah there's fish tubes and fish ladders the fish tube is definitely funnier fish ladders are cool as hell though yeah but the fish tube

where you just like you ideally by hand you put the salmon in a big polyethylene tube and it just goes like you're sending like vacuum mail is extremely funny and one of the most dangerous situations you can have with the dam is over topping right that's when the level of the reservoir gets too high and the water goes over the top of the dam and if it happens for a long enough period of time it'll start to erode the dam and eventually it will you know just compromise it structurally the whole thing falls down and then a whole bunch of water is on the way down the river and we very little warning so that's a bunch

of big city skylines water flow arrows yes yes exactly like you know exactly my water pump here actually no because I want to put this treatment plan up here so I get free energy the real the real thing is to like hollow out an empty bit of terrain put the dam in and then build the sewage thing so that in 50 years you fill up a lake full of poop and it you just generate power from welcome to Lancaster County baby there was actually a pilot no please don't tell me about a hydroelectric shit lagoon no the idea was that I put miniature turbines in the sewage pipes which would be able to generate energy

from the flow of sewage I hate this I think there was also some component to it which would allow it to harvest some energy from the heat of sewage because usually sewage is pretty hard it's like combination biogas hydroelectric I guess if you get a big enough like lagoon you could do like a tidal power thing I don't like thinking about that's what I'm about to say mostly gross it's all gross it's nasty I don't want to think about sewage poop is butting God why is the water purple now don't worry about it don't worry about it that's gonna be the least of your problems about 15 minutes this is the

viandam right it was built by the society of the society Adriatic the electricity electricity company it's almost like it's French you know but they call the they call companies like societies it's like like an LLP huh it's weird a company was owned by Mussolini's minister of finance just be full be yeah so this is gonna be insanely corrupt right probably almost certainly yeah I don't know how directly normal Italian corruption was bad who boy I don't know I'm aware I live in the United States I don't give a fuck just like you're regular corrupt your regular Italian

corruption meets your fascist corruption and it just like the two things don't interact well yeah watch that sitcom what the Mussolini in like an apart sharing an apartment with a Christian Democrat so this was this still is a 261 meter tall dam that's 860 feet if you're American right when across the Vajran the Vajran Gorge right the Vajran the Vajran Gorge Vajran and that is the world's tallest dam when it was built it's still one of the tallest in the world looks it yeah it's it's it's unpleasant to look at them like it shouldn't there shouldn't be like that no the construction the

construction started 1956 right and this is primarily for electricity generation not really navigation not really flood control there's a little flood control there but not a lot so this is in a steep narrow river valley right you know that's carved by glaciers and then the water did the rest right hmm it's mostly the geology in the area it's mostly Jurassic limestone porous well the Jurassic limestone was the less porous stuff that's from the they call the doger formation right because it has sex and labors yes yes there were outcroppings of newer and weaker limestone from the Cretaceous

area right what what they call the fake taxing formation yes that's porous it's got a lot of holes there's a lot of soil in there there's a lot of clays on and so forth right and geology in the area was relatively well understood there's fairly common landslides but they were usually like slow and predictable in advance if you are monitoring them right you know hmm so now in fall of 1960 they filled the reservoir for the first time right okay cool to a level of 680 meters that's 680 meters above sea level not 680 meters from the bottom of the reservoir right yeah a whole ass reservoir yes shit just make lake by cow but

behind a dam so this was well below the design the design fill or design level right which was I think 710 maybe even 720 meters and well below good yeah well below the crest height of 730 meters they're taking it easy that's good they're not rushing things they're just they're building the sewage plants the pipes outwards and just kind of waiting for this to fill up with purple water yes as the reservoir fills it increases it alters the level of the groundwater up right so it go you know the groundwater level is going up as this groundwater goes up it alters the hydrostatic pressure that's the pressure exerted by the water

on the ground okay so long you so far yeah once they filled it to 680 meters there was this 700,000 cubic meter landslide right just slid right in the reservoir hmm that's not good I mean at least they didn't build a school in the path of it so you know looking not too bad yeah but then how are you gonna get your whatever 800 dollars from the government what do you think guys that's true how about my Xbox now exactly yeah this landslide you know it slides in causes a big wave but it's small enough the dam can handle it right you know and the wave travels up and down the reservoir but you know engineers looked

at this and they're like okay we got a problem here right hmm so they want to start monitoring the area and we'll talk about this in a bit to show exactly how they did it but for four kilometers upstream of this incident right a series of what are called geodatic stations were installed and that sounds insanely high-tech right it's basically just like a marker oh yeah like a like a marker pen so it's a little it's just like a little metal round doohickey which is installed in a concrete base and has a fixed and known location right so you can then triangulate your position based on other geodatic points yes they put

some trick points in okay that's what they did and you know so they could measure how far the ground was moving because there's also a big crack that opened up further up from the landslide right so they knew there was a bigger problem developing here in the meantime they also board several drill holes into the ground to determine if there was some plane where the land was shifting right mm-hmm and they they board that way down to a depth of 90 meters right yeah they also dug in at it and that's a horizontal hole which is usually is for entering a mine in this case it was exploratory right I read the Junji

Ito manga oh yes yes exactly like that except you know slightly slightly bigger this one you could actually get out of without being mangled yeah so they they they drilled and add it into the ground to see if you know they could go and sort of inspect the the the rock manually again they're trying to find a plane where the ground is sliding right mm-hmm and they could not find that continuous slide plane at all yeah yeah yeah does that mean does that mean that like the sliding is coming from all of this porous like cretaceous limestone at once it either meant that or that there were several like smaller planes

right and you know stuff was going stuff could slide it like at it in a smaller amount you know the fact they couldn't find it just meant they couldn't find it right and no one wanted to invest in like deeper geotechnical investigation but they did observe a small amount of creep right some of these geodetic stations were moving a centimeter or a week or so which is mmm that's I'm thinking in like volcanic numbers here right but like it's not so good especially they're all moving in no way in no certain way yeah thank you even worse they didn't see a consistent trend directionally so they thought you

know maybe there's like several things which are sliding which is a lot less of a problem than the whole thing sliding at once you just you have a bunch of small problems instead of one huge problem yes so but it still meant a landslide was inevitable right the real question was how big would it be how long would it take and could engineers control it mmm it's fine you just you just like build some build build some reinforcement go somewhere back then it's fine put up a sea wall yeah more endless endless fractal dams each protecting the dam downstream yeah there you go there will be no landslide

because of our waterproof compartments all of Italy is now compartmentalized into protection for one dam I mean there were some there was some talk of trying to stabilize the the the slope you know and no one could figure out a way to actually do that it was just too big of an area right so the theory was they would try and make the slide happen in a controlled fashion you just get the like the the Rangers from Colorado to just fire off one of their like surplus artillery pieces and try and like trigger an avalanche easy peasy it's one of my favorite things is triggering avalanches with like artillery or was like rockets

at Rawls their theory was less explosive the idea was if you could modulate the height of the reservoir up and down I should let the head of boring give me the artillery give me the how it's a yeah 120 millimeters of freedom that may have been the safer option if they could modulate the height of the reservoir they could alter the rate of creep here and maybe cause the slide or various slides to happen in a controlled fashion right but they can't but they can't understand or model how the creep is happening so how are they gonna control it by altering it you know you just raise the water level and see what happens

ah okay you just you just fucker I believe we call this the fuck around and find out yes what would that be in Italian even um so the main problem the dam engineers wanted to avoid was the potential of a large landslide that might cut the reservoir in two right you know enough mass falls in the reservoir that it completely blocks off part of it dams yeah that could cause a dangerous situation where they have no control of the reservoir behind where it's cut in two and it would also make the dam

useless for generating electricity right would be extremely funny though you just be like you spend all this time building this dam and within like a few months the just the geography is like fuck you I'm gonna do a better dam yeah exactly you know but if there was a series of small slides over a period of time that could easily be contained by you know the dam um there was a similar dam in Italy uh the uh Pontus side dam uh had a landslide fall into the reservoir in 1959 and that dam easily contained the wave although it did overtop a little bit and that killed one guy um just get swept over the side or I think so yeah that's

not a good way to go no no that's so good thank you thank you it did prove the theory that dams could withstand this type of wave right mm-hmm but well not for that guy yeah not for that guy yeah he's dead but in the in the interim the decision was made that they were gonna lower the level of the reservoir they were gonna monitor this area for any movement that resulted and they were going to dig a two kilometer bypass tunnel on this side of the reservoir so that they could get water out the back here in case when the slide did happen it cut the reservoir in two this again is so sissy's skylines to me this is me I build the dam it's not generating electricity I have the speed turned up to maximum I lose patience and I start

fucking around in the canals menu and then you find out yeah and then I find out hold on I gotta use the restroom I'll be right back yeah nor is the forums how is how is train madness doing right now uh the people really fucking like hustle muscle as it turned out as we all know okay quit DMing me about fucking hustle muscle uh is it southern general still in because I really like the green is who I forget if it's uh southern is it just southern or southern general uh no the southern got knocked out uh f yeah the southern got knocked out by the rock island uh the round of 32 yeah it was pretty bummed I like the southern I'm just happy the new haven got knocked out because I was sick of fucking looking at it yeah I mean I the thing is I like I like the green

because I like a non-standard train color it's the same thing as like um Atlanta coastline it's so thick or purple exactly I was talking about on Twitter about cop cars because I somebody had this thesis that the the like obviously cops aren't cool we're an anti-cop podcast and all this but like cop cars potentially cool but the cop car that's cool is the one that was that like cops were using when you were 10 years old so for me it's like the kind of like the long caprice uh but some people like the like really square crown victoria and stuff I was just I was just picturing like whatever sad voxel from like the 80s oh no fuck like like a like a voxel astra from like it's like rovers like rovers like a rover 75 no dog shit no but like somebody

posted a photo of uh the their sheriff's department which had like crown vicks but in like green and white and I was like I don't I still don't like cops but I respect the hell out of that color choice you know do something different it's funny you mentioned that because uh for many years I actually don't know if it's still the case one of our listeners will have to correct me and be pedantic in the comments but Connecticut state highway patrols were all unmarked huh but they were all crown vicks so they got so the cops got wise or just look well if they're if people are just looking out for fleet cars you know basically black white whatever uh and blue just paint them they started getting yeah like a dark green like I saw a dark purple one once huh I love I love to

get pulled over by like one of those indian buses with like all the bells and fringes on horn okay please I uh I I liked that the uh I like that the italians will use whatever like lamborghini pursuit vehicles yeah yeah yeah buck the UAE whatever because human rights abuses are bad like yeah all right it's sick to watch like a lamborghini with a siren on it do 250 like yeah we're a cop car podcast now we got distracted we started talking about cop cars special interests entirely engaged weird italian alpha Romeo cop car cop cars you just got to like outrun them until they break down oh the sad little zero emissions ones just like all right just make it back on the electrics go and the siren turns off I've been saying for decades that cop

stuff is too cool to be wasted on cops like you you you have the cool car and you get to like drive around with a siren on it and you use it to like just do cop stuff fuck off wasted opportunities I always liked that a guy I knew bought what I believe is basically the cheapest 2004 Maserati Quattroporte in the United States and just like this thing as far as I know has just never fucking worked but this is the same guy uh there are a pair of brothers uh Graham and Taylor if you're listening uh thanks thanks for trying on my van uh they both owned alphas and just like the their obsession with just cars that don't work and the italians being like look how pretty it is it has a b12 and just like a cylinder bank explodes out of nowhere look uh you got to

have the pin inforina uh like a bodywork and then you'd park it outside for a half an hour and it falls into like a pile of rust yeah the with either the 458 of the 488 uh had a nasty habit sorry sorry ross this is what happens when you have two car people share a podcast with you is we just get a quorum you wanted to repeat yeah who's fault is this asshole so i well we got to talk about dams is the thing no we don't it's canceled it's canceled we're really out of cars so what if you put cop car lights on top of the dam oh that'd be cool can you imagine with one of those big old spotlights when someone's annoying you by using recreational purposes get pulled over by a dam you just look in the in the rear view mirror and there's just like a gravity dam cool

all right um here here here's here's here's an important chart we're gonna look at we're gonna talk about the next all right hold this back up topic the next three years after this first slide right which is riveter crack notice that's me about my sex life oh my god all right so here are here are three important three important graphs they're all on the same uh yearly scale you can see on the top you can see this has been photocopied about six times that how that's how you know it's an official document um i like the scare quotes around piezo meters like they don't think that's a real unit of measurement so um that last one i don't actually know exactly what it means it it's measuring electricity distance i i was about to say yeah i i don't know what a

piezo meter would do in this maybe maybe it's like the amount of like what did you get off the dam based on the height of the reservoir um that might be it there might be also some kind of um piezo meter that measures the hydrodynamic head um i somebody tell us in the comments is it is it i don't even know if it's like dynamic head or static head or what we can know none of those we can we can put into our taxonomy of like plain guys who all got mad at me on tenorife yeah yeah you got you're not knowing the planes take off into our head when i don't give none of you will ever fly a plane i don't fucking care that's what that's one of the yeah one of the things about um um sort of uh fluid dynamics is they don't usually talk in terms of pressure they

talk in terms of head which is just like the equivalent pressure of how many feet or meters of water weird anyway i want to keep i want to put damn guys into our taxonomy of guys to find out how uptight they are about this stuff also of note i managed to anger spanish-speaking people because i mistakenly thought that a restaurant was more delicious than it was i forgot i forgot that the word churrasco exists and so i thought isn't it yeah i thought that a steakhouse was a place that just sold churros and i was like man this sounds really good and it was like i got really excited about that i would like to point out that the dutch guy i specifically bashed like whatever three episodes ago uh commented in the uh in the tenorife uh disaster video it was like

fuck you too and i just want to say to that guy uh i appreciate your gamesmanship uh and not your fucking football team and not your fucking country i'm done airing my grievances we need to talk about this has been grievance corner hard find char we need to talk about the charts all right call us through the chart we're going through the charts all right number one precipitation we're not going to talk too much about that number two reservoir level right okay so this is on a scale for 580 meters to 700 meters up here this is not started zero important to know um so anyway uh over the next three years the dam was nationalized in 1962 right by yeah intonation alley per la energia electricity it's called enol it's still there it was privatized in 1992 of course because

enol yes uh the bypass tunnel was constructed shortly after the 1960s slide that was in this time period before they started raising the level of the reservoir again right so at that point they start to try and increase the water level in the reservoir um now you can see compared to the height of water in the reservoir in this chart and the rate of movement in the chart below it right this is in centimeters per day right and then that is a scale from zero to three right so as they fill the reservoir gradually right there was not so much movement there's not so much creep you can see it increasing at a steady rate but it you know it seemed like it was under control right oh good it's uh it's working they filled it up to just about 700 meters

there was a peak in the amount of creep and then they started empty in the reservoir again you know just sort of to see if they were they had control right you withdraw the fuel rods and then yeah yes exactly so at this point right they they had a maximum creep of about a centimeter a day and so they decided all right let's see what we can do after they empty it out and the rate of creep stops goes basically back to zero or one centimeter a week or so they decide to fill it back up and this is when you know we're sort of moving into the fall of um or they they start filling it back up over the summer um the rate of creep is increasing by the time so weird also that this is happening so slowly right like you go to work every day day in day out and each day is

like a little like dot on the chart you can only look at this for like a month at a time right exactly like each one of these is a full year they start filling it back up and they fill it up to about 700 meters right just as soon like at the end of summer right at the end of July right and right if you've been to Italy in late summer in early fall you know there's a shitload of rain it rains a lot so at this point they have to actually let the reservoir um take on a lot more water just because there's so much rain right and the creep started to accelerate right and it accelerated a lot oh good i just see the the arrow that goes up yes i take the mean off scale high mm-hmm yeah kept going up um so once you know at some point

the engineers realized okay we need to we need to get this under control again they start trying to draw down the reservoir as quickly as they can but again there's look at this bar right here that's a lot of rain there's only so much water they can let out of the reservoir once a safely be based on the physical constraints of the equipment right so right you know they start saying all right we got to draw this reservoir down as quickly as possible this is in late September right as they drew the reservoir down the rate of creep kept increasing right so eventually it was at this chart goes up to three centimeters a day it was at 20 centimeters a day at one point fuck no yeah it has it has reached the top of the chart above it essentially that's

absolutely terrifying now they were doing surveys this whole time to see you know how are the geodetic stations moving so on and so forth um i don't know if this is because they had more precision once the movements were larger around october eighth the engineers realized two things number one was that the geodetic stations were all moving as one unit not independently one big union yes they all got their red cards and like they're doing industrial action yeah they're marching on the basket keeping them down the other thing they noticed was that the area that was sliding was about five times as large as they thought oh holy fuck yeah yeah coming into work to realize that no no fuck off i'm going home it's your problem now yeah just like realizing

that you now work on top of a bomb essentially yeah so sorry ross i just have a quick question yeah when did you say this dam was built this dam was built between 1956 and 1960 okay if i recall correctly yeah i was gonna make a joke about you know how fascists are always like well moot the lady ran that you know he that trains ran on time and it's like yeah but they're fucking dams have a habit of breaking down and killing people that doesn't fucking work yeah so we can we don't have to be historically accurate to blame this on Mussolini all right thank you alice this is true you understand right now we do get to yell at italian politicians in a bit so the um yes the almost as if this this political apparatus that exists entirely as a bunch of like

nato stay behind fascist freak shows purely to keep the pc i out of power they have some problems uh anyway don't don't ask any questions about propaganda duet or the years of lab or the use to come back to go out and go to the dog no yeah i've uh you're a communist you're actually revisionists um that's true that's i am i keep they should have said more tanks into hungry i keep thinking about that one italian communist splinter group that decided that they were allied with isis because they were doing anti imperialism don't those guys rule yeah i've seen some uniriotic defenses of uh basher al-asad and i will constantly go up here and say don't

fucking root for that guy man please oh yeah one thing i can't put before this podcast is a series of charts i've learned this now that's true we have no tolerance for this in the remedial engineering class so once they realized that this this movement was much higher than anticipated yeah and it was all one one unit like i'm sure that i'm sure that geotechnical guy on staff was like oh unfortunately my boss is like uh like extremely well camouflaged fascists but like yeah great i'm so october 8th um you know they they open all the sluice gates you know they try and discharge as much water as possible as quickly as possible you know no regard for

like downstream flooding or anything like that because this needs to be drawn down immediately right um it was expected the reservoir would the the wall would collapse and or the landslide would happen in mid november right um but of course there's still a lot of rain coming in the reservoir so it's not draining too quickly even though they're causing downstream flooding and all that crap right sure in the next day um oral reports said that um the level of water in the reservoir actually went up oh good yeah i don't get to work in turning around i'm sure that like all of the people downstream of this dam were like made aware of all of this there was some evacuation that occurred but again there was not is not expected to slide as soon as it did now the next day

on the night of october 9th 1963 surveyors reported 80 centimeters a creep on this day right oh geez the outlet tunnels couldn't keep up with the reservoir inflow one of the intake gates was not working properly uh which they never determined why um possibly due to an underwater water uh an underwater slide which had already occurred right so just blocked that closed huh so it had been previously expected that in the worst case slide it would require about 20 meters of of headspace in the reservoir to contain the wave that would occur right and this is based on a couple of assumptions number one that the the slide would be smaller and that it would occur over a period of minutes right um well at 10 40 that evening the slide that was expected to happen

in november happened and three weeks uh like it was much larger than they expected and it didn't happen over minutes it happened in 45 seconds oh yeah just yeah we just a large amount of everything up here just went down in there yeah it falls in the thing yes it does the thing went in the thing the thing that always gets me about you know a lot of these episodes that we do is just like for some of them it's like yeah there's you know a slow building creep that everybody kind of knew about like didn't expect to be so long and then the actual disaster is like it just takes no time basically it's just fucking over yeah yeah there's like this there's this like inflection point right where it just kind of like tips and once this happened that's it just it's so fast it's not

really comprehensible yes so all right what was the result of a whole bunch of landslide falling into a reservoir right now for reference this is the dam right here okay temporarily closed temporarily closed because of coronavirus um so and then the reservoir extended you know way way back here right and then we got a the outlet goes through this valley right into the piave river here and then it goes out and it goes to uh the ocean right so this this way fits into a category of ways we call mega tsunamis right is that good well the distinguishing factor between a regular tsunami and a mega tsunami is a mega tsunami is caused by a a sort of impact or large displacement of water as opposed to a regular tsunami which is usually caused by a seismic event right um you

dump something in instead of something shaking yes so this this slide turned out to be 200 million cubic meters of rock and soil right mm it went down so quickly that it it displaced enough air that even talking about the water the air it displaced blew out windows and ripped the roof off buildings in the village of casso and also in the village of uh longer ronnie longer ron longer whatever you know you can see castle on the map there yeah so so you got a sonic boom off the landslide that's cool uh yes that's the one cool thing that's going to happen yeah so the wave once the once the earth and soil fell on the reservoir the wave reared up the other side of the valley now this village casso is 250 meters above the level of the reservoir yeah we saw those

a steep uh embankments very very steep embankments uh and it took out about half the village that's so then that's the water came back down and this is all at like 10 40 at night um and and then a lot of it went towards the dam right and it overtopped the dam and seems fine again they expected they needed about 20 meters to contain the wave it went over 250 meters i'm trying to think of just like from a first person perspective what 200 what a 250 meter tall wave looks like really what what's a 250 meter tall building what's what's that in bush device 70 750 feet uh that's uh what's that about uh liberty one or liberty two in philly i think it's 789 some yeah some like that you just look up and there's there's there's that much

there's that much tall of water but also unlike the um unlike looking at a skyscraper it just extends on either side um yeah i love to think about that i'm definitely going to be able to sleep very well tonight uh so the first thing that happened was all the staff on site of the dam were just immediately atomized by the wave um oops so that wave crashed over the dam it fell in the valley right and it proceeded to fuck up all the villages upstream and downstream the it flew if it flowed upstream past uh castello lavato here and it kept going for a while i don't think it caused serious damage beyond up here downstream it kept going it destroyed uh longaroni uh it destroyed uh prerad go which is farther down it also destroyed a village called villanova

which is not a philly school to come out of this it is not a philly school it is not a philly school not a philly school it's not do you pay wage tax out there in radner no you don't it completely wipes away the the the floor of the river valley it turns it into a mud flat right fuck very fertile though um so and there's seismic tremors from the slide that were felt as far away as rome and brussels brussels that's like 400 miles yeah it's a big big landslide um now in addition to fucking up everything down here um the wave also went further up the reservoir right now i entirely missed this town here aerto but there was another town here san martino right just wiped off the map um so i mean you you got to be feeling pretty good

about yourself if you're an ater and you're like doing one of those italian small village things where you have an insane beef with the village next door yes where you just like shoot fireworks at each other every year so we won so why is every why is rural isserley composed entirely of two fought but the um so there had been some limited evacuations that had begun the previous day but still anywhere from 2000 to 200 to 2500 people died or went missing in this disaster the one thing which is incredible is that through this whole incident the dam stayed up the engineering baby yeah um well you know the main force from the wave is vertical so you know in the over topping only happened for a brief period of time they lost the top

eight feet of the dam other than that it was still there how how did how did it kill all of the stuff like where were the um uh they were where was the like i believe they were in a building near the top and then there was like a hotel further up which was also partially offices as a kid i always thought like all of the offices inside a dam were like inside the dam uh because that would be cool so sometimes they are the issue there is it's hard to have windows yeah that's true yeah people like to have windows i don't know i i i trade a window for like having a really cool curved office and just being like oh this this wall uh just an atomic bombs worth of energy full of water this wall nothing like maybe a mountain goat that is inexplicably climbing the side of

the dam they do that god that gives me so much fucking vertigo i don't want to think about that um all right so let's look at some more photocopy documents that are gonna cause us to go off track so what happened here geologically speaking right um so okay the the dam is right here the villages are over here you can see they're highly abstracted because this is a photocopy document which means it's very precise technically this was i see that your notes for this slide just say explain map yes so this was the first slide right here right and the second slide is this entire area here oh no like a half a mountain just falls into the fucking reservoir yes um so if you're looking for a perspective on a building

it's b and y melon center and filling jeez that's christ i've been i've been up pretty high in that building to do like construction work before i don't want to think about that being a whole bunch of water no so okay so they did boreholes like here they did a borehole over here there's one here you see the adit to the god even the the symbol they used for the adit looks sinister there was one borehole they took down to 172 meters and they did not find any shear plane um yeah the adit is over here right so pay attention to section a to a prime right that's facing this way um do i need to explain to the viewers how to read sections yes what a section is all right so you need to explain that to me okay i don't know shit okay so this is a section symbol here

um and the section symbol so we're looking in plan view right it's a map we're looking vertically down this is a horizontal view where you're looking along the plane of the long line facing the arrow at each end of the section marker right and you have a on one side and you have a prime on the other side so we know when we look in the section which side is which i see that's smart that's how you do like a three-dimensional map and two that's cool there's also a section b and or b prime and b on over here but i didn't include that because it's less interesting um hey but i i learned an actual like useful skill from this podcast yes so geologic cross section a a prime right showing location slide plane ground water levels

and rock units the main thing we want to look at here is this line this line with the x's is principal slide plane location approximate right and you reconstruct this here here's a borehole here's another borehole here's the really deep borehole they just missed it oh don't like to see that here's the blank turmoil here's the village of casso up here um do you see how far like this is the water this is the water level here all that shit went in there and then that all went way up there i mean this kind of raises the question of like what the fuck else were they supposed to do how could this been have been avoided plausibly other than just with hindsight dig like 100 meters deeper yeah so i i i would say that like

everyone cheaps out on geotechnical engineering that's the only thing i learned in geotechnical engineering class because i sucked at it i was really bad but i was also like you should spend more money on this yeah higher higher and more dirt guys yes the dirt is is the dirt is your nemesis and you have to like hire a guy to master the dirt i respect the dirt guys because they are smarter than i am yeah i feel that i like that dirt is so deadly that like you can reliably get killed on a construction site digging a trench something that does not seem like particularly dangerous to the untrained eye until it just collapses i the thing the thing is like by far the most complicated thing i learned in engineering school was dirt it's just it's there's so much

going on it's always doing stuff yeah yeah much like that simpson's line about how modern medicine knows almost nothing about the back because the interesting stuff is in the front uh like modern engineering knows very little about the ground is are there mole people down there we don't know uh yes there are there are there are more people my geotechnical engineering textbooks are about the only ones where it was like yeah most of the stuff was actually discovered in the 80s cool before that was just people chewing dirt to figure out how what the texture was yeah but you don't queue it on people think that there's more people they think they're more children they think they're like being held underground by the deep states it's weird

hmm i i mean that sounds it's probably true i don't know if we had better geotechnical engineering we could probably figure that out objectively yeah yeah so you know they just missed the the sheer plane right now the aftermath here so this is where stuff gets kind of dumb oh good and this was a little difficult to research because i don't speak italian very well that's fine you just just speak english and wave your hands around exactly i know enough to say uh parley in glaze uh hey parley in glaze so uh anyway um so and there were also some back issues of italian communist newspapers which i didn't have access to so uh some of this is from the inexcusable

lack of practice behind the paywall yeah uh no they don't call yourself a leftist unless you have a complete archive of the pc i's newspapers so some of this is from the wikipedia article i'm sorry oh you can complain to me in the comments um no you can't no you cannot you can't actually leave i will be on you if you try that shit so a lot of the italian media was very unified on the cause of the disaster right which was it was an act of god completely unpreventable completely unpredictable no no responsibility can be attributed to any person right man they fucking love doing that shit why did god blow up the balonia railway station you know uh well why did god hang reberto calvi a bunch of weird

theological questions here this was the position taken up by um democrat zia christiania you know the italian christian democrats right they were in power at the time under prime minister giovanni liani not not a real name yeah i i still think about i my favorite i think he was a christian democrat italian leader is a guy called betino crashy who uh at one point was like pelted with coins by hecklers for being insanely corrupt at rules italian politics is the the funniest kind of politics everybody except the communists was simultaneously in a conspiracy with the cia the mafia the vatican age is wild i just told you that alan dellis did nothing wrong yeah oh and also libya for some reason uh it's very weird trans icon alan dellis just just doing the like

thomas jefferson things last time but with alan dellis pronouns he him so all right um the christian democrats party specifically called it a mysterious act of god's love what and we can't even pin this on protestantism this is some purely catholic entirely catholic so every outlet was saying some variation on this except one which was elunita which was the newspaper of the partito communista italiano right which i do with a class struggle hey i'm doing class struggle over here and they you know fairly clearly identified there's some human and corporate elements responsible for this disaster and they were like okay some people should be brought to justice here you know because maybe the idea of inducing a landslide was a bad one

you know that weird weird idea would go off i guess of course indra uh montanelli who was an influential journalist christian democrat of course accused the communists of being jackals you know speculating on the pain and on the dead politicize this tragedy do not politicize the tragedy yeah thoughts thoughts and prayers only yes only thoughts and prayers you know that's a christian democrat way um you know and the christian democrats accused the pc i of sending propagandists into the victims refugee camps a whole bunch of other stuff they did uh well it was just people in the pc i who like new people who lived in the area you know some of them in fact were communists um weird and it'll just you can just pick a town they'll just be communists living in it

incredible yeah some kind of conspiracy at work never think that uh you know it's not like it was you know one of the one of the strongholds of european communism um now the communists are all in the hipsterest neighborhoods of rome they're all like malan and churin but yeah yeah the brooklyn of italy no rome rome is like by italian standards is weirdly fascist uh like in particular like now lazio for instance the most fascist football team in europe or at least west europe so giovanni leone the prime minister he he did promise to get relieved to the victims but then he lost the uh prime minister uh ship uh he's no longer in italy you got such long-lived governments then he became a lawyer for the um the state energy company and he tried to get the payouts reduced

i had to i had to run this through google translate from one website but um you know the payouts were something like a million and a half lira for the dead parents if the child was a minor otherwise just a million lira 800 800 000 lira for cohabitating brothers 600 000 for those not living together you know these there were those those who lost seven relatives their house raised the ground they obtained six million six million lira which is before you explain how much six million lira is i would like to direct it i'd like to direct everybody to the art brutes song 18 000 lira in which you rob a bank for that much because it sounds like a loss of money uh it lira like whether turkish or italian always seems to be like you just take the thousand off yeah exactly the

six million lira at the time was equivalent about 45 000 euros in 2002 how many xboxes is that that's a good amount of xboxes actually i want to say that's like 20 xboxes of course if you were an adult you'd build a gaming pc the honor yeah for some reason not a water cooled one don't know why uh i don't want to bring up those memories um so finish school you know so the the the victims individually received a pittance now what was not a pittance what's the business assistance look there's a lot of important businesses like uh barone sanitation uh operation gladeo front company number 69 uh the aldo morrow my kidnap and murder warehouse uh the legitimate businessman social club look i'll give you where you want but you can't argue with the results count the rings

right so all up and down the piave valley is now a lot of light and heavy industry right it's all like imperatively sided you know like um say the entire village of villanova is now an industrial park on a floodplain with like one little road in and out there's this little industrial park here which is built into a cliff there's this industrial park here right you know this is all like impractical sites like you're trying to build this big production facility on a cliff or in a little valley listen billion dollars stop stop asking questions okay uh just don't don't do that have you seen the consequences of love uh it's a great movie so don't don't ask the question consequences of god's love is 250 meters of water jumping over a dam so if if you were a survivor and you owned

a business license at the time um it had to be like a specific kind i think it couldn't just be i i ran an ice cream stand it had to be something something bigger than that yeah yeah you had to you had to be a friend of us gelato stand um not not ice cream gelato um italy's great i love italy um so i'm not sure it's gonna love us back after this i love the country of italy that i i that's why i'm highly critical of it um yeah people won't know i like a thing unless i relentlessly mock it yes this does not apply to uh to the netherlands by the way ruthless critique of all that exists and also uh the netherlands look we're going through a struggle session here um so all right so if you owned a business license at the time you were offered you know to restart

this business a generous 10-year tax credit you got some public subsidies you got some low interest loans right but these benefits were also transferable right you could sell them on to a larger corporation oh Jesus right yeah and they would use these benefits to build factories for free weird how that happens huh you just you just gotta like donate it of your own free will to like some big company there's like total little jet don't worry about it now i think there were some geographic requirements but uh most companies were able to get around it they built somewhere else but some did decide to build in the the river valley here um and that's why there's so much heavy and light industry just right here just crammed into these improbable spaces

is because people sold their tax credits to nice random um operation gladio front companies every single building that we see on that screen is filled with like explosives and small arms and paving stones yeah it's just done from gerard estate still just racking up the tax credit so yeah that's um that's how it completely like changed uh the landscape of this part of italy and it did industrialize it a lot but you know it also murdered a lot of people and possible to say whether it's good or not exactly right so and you know at the end of this the dam is still standing um bridge looks like shit though oh yeah they changed that this was a nice arch bridge before carrying this pipeline that's a shitty bridge you gotta you gotta like fix some of the like

corrugated iron sheeting on the roof there yes just get a guy who doesn't get vertigo to do that there's a little walkway on top of the dam you can walk across cool um we should do that the bypass tunnel i actually still generates electricity but there's no plan to attempt to fill the reservoir again yeah it makes sense just like well we kind of had enough of dams at this point yes so that's the story of the crap what's the dam called again vion vion yeah the vijandam yes uh next week we're gonna do the tocoma narrows bridge disaster no before that we're all gonna be assassinated for like talking about operation gladiator thank you cia front this this podcast is actually a cia front so that's true that's true if we're open about it

they can't do anything to us yeah we are the like national food company or whatever yeah yeah just just like abstract art we're a cia up we're we're right up there abstract art identity politics um chopper trap house yes uh the black socialists of america yep yeah uh what else is the front i did say that one weird food company already uh what uh is like uh nintendo obviously all the of course nintendo 100 percent um yeah that's what you get for not going pc dsa is actually cia but they don't know it um yeah that's some man who is thursday shit like it's all independently every dsa person is themselves personally a cia agent but they don't

know that everyone else is he's just all sending reports on each other to each other about each other the make work program but ubi has to start somewhere all right we all we all we all must eventually report to um uh langley um yeah yeah actually since we've talked about alan dallas you know it would be a good bonus episode would be the cia oh god that would be fun um my dad's company picnic used to be across the street from the cia in langley every year it used to be they tried to uh make it seem like it was um some kind of federal highway administration building oh sure yeah and eventually they gave up and like yeah it's a cia um but the nsa being like we don't exist and i'm just like there's a 95 exit for you

it's not on 95 it's on the ball the more washington uh parkway yeah i'm sorry it just says nsa and it says restricted access secret government shanigan's next right it stands for no such agency yes god what does what does wtyp stand for there's some something um we trained your puppy to do cia stuff yeah we we we train your propagandists yes yeah there we go that's our that's our front all right um we do cia episode i will be the uh not the heal uh whatever whatever the bad guy is in wrestling i'll be that that is a hails the hill oh it is a hill i will unironically argue for the united states uh intelligence community all right let's actually go let's do that let's do it all right um before we go it does anyone have any commercials um listen to trash future it's a

very good podcast available for podcasts are sold we also have t-shirts designed by yeah right fucking we gotta we gotta fucking do something about uh we gotta take care of union p is the thing not to sound too much like the irish man no no no now we're that's definitely i heard yeah i i heard you print t-shirts no do we do we have the rights to the artwork we do yeah we have the oh we can we can just we should just go basically it go rogue and put them myself go rogue and put them myself i i would say i would say i would put this to the audience before we start recording and that is how owned would we be if we put them on some kind of like easy custom printing service that you could just fucking buy one right and we do our best to make sure that it's union but obviously

we can't like guarantee their supply chains i believe that is an open i believe that is an open question i left some space there so people could make their answer yeah thank you thank you everyone we will take it on board this is a two-way street this way we can develop parasocial relationships and someone can like i don't know climb my fence a year from now and try to say i will tell you right now this is a house that very much believes in castle doctrine i was gonna say using the podcast proceeds to buy a big sign that says we don't call 911 yeah all right you listen we uh we have defense measures in the house yeah we're not gonna we're not gonna talk to you about certain like tactical preparations

but do do not climb the fence we're purge ready i gotta find the baseball bat after speaking of that that's a good point yeah the enforcement stick has been missing for a while i think it's a closet it's probably a closet under all the balloons oh oh do you not like balloons rise i don't like balloons no you don't and i have to pick them up i'm i'm literally i'm wearing a holster with an airsoft macarof in it while i'm recording this i loved by the way your uh your pennsylvania patches yes i'm gonna fuck it there's gonna be some selfies and uh obviously we can do this off the you know off the recording but dm your address and i'll send you one of those uh those uh patches you want it from south fulini hell yeah okay yeah

sweet all right all right good uh my my commercial is franklin 11 still going i'm still working on stuff yes yes it's happening it's happening stop talking to me just in doing castle doctrine from within his room yeah just fucking blowing holes in the door to stop you asking about i'm gonna do one of these episodes eventually so he's gonna say or i'm gonna say something real fucking stupid and you're gonna hear me physically get up and go yell at him i thought that was happening earlier when there was like some ruckus in the background i thought one of you was gonna hit the other one let's i'm not walking 20 fucking feet the other good all right yep yeah yeah this this is run for a very long very long time yes so uh we shall

see you next week yeah i think that's a podcast all right bye everybody good bye