Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 58: The Station Nightclub Fire

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

your life has value, so don't go to nightclubs Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US ANTHRAX thanks in advance

Okay. Oh, I don't use fucking Chrome. Sorry. Yeah. I'm beginning to think maybe I should move away from Chrome to something else, except that's the only thing that works with Zencaster. I know. I have Chrome just for Zencaster and I use Firefox or everything else.

I wonder if you could, maybe you could like get Netscape Navigator or something. That's just Firefox, Roz. Yeah. Netscape Navigator, but running on your reel to reel and you use it exclusively for this. I remember when I was at Drexel, there was a brief, brief period of time where the Blackboard Learn system worked exclusively on Netscape Navigator. We didn't, we just switched when I, when I went to college, we switched from Blackboards to Moodle and Moodle is the biggest piece of shit in the world, man.

Oh, you're taking me back to a period of my life. I don't like to think about astonishing how much money goes into these software systems that don't work like you're paying more intuition. Anyway, I love academia, I love to pay more for less. It's always a great idea. That's the, I don't know, man, that at least that's the Temple University promise. Well, anyway, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, which has slides.

I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay. I can't even remember this time. Yes. I am Alice Caldwell-Kenley. I am the person who is talking now.

My pronouns, she and her. Yeah. Well, talk to that one guy on Twitter about that. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm your least favorite podcast. So my pronouns are he and him. Yeah. Don't go into the, if you go on our Patreon, either one of you absolutely do not go into

the exit survey section. So it will hurt your feelings. Reason for leaving Alice's tweets. Yeah. You got a couple of them. Yeah. Some people reasons for leaving were just Liam. And I'm like, it's fair.

My ex-girlfriend says the same thing. My ex-girlfriend says the same thing. I had another joke ready to go, but now I can't remember what it is. So let's do a podcast. Wait, did I say my pronouns? He and him. He and him. He and him.

Yes. Yeah. I have never looked at exit surveys and I will never look at exit surveys. It's real bad for you. That's a great way to get some emotional abuse in. Yeah. I was just kind of like, uh, normally, you know, I'm very, uh, going home or whatever else.

I was just like, what do you mean you're leaving? Why would you leave me? Like, uh, I do have an announcement to make, which is that I, uh, my roommate Megan is currently teaching from home, uh, until Thursday. So she's teaching a class of sixth graders while I'm recording this profane podcast. Incredible. Next to her. So if you, if you're wondering why I might be a little more family friendly than normal,

shout out to my mom and dad for complaining about the swearing I do on this podcast. Uh, I was so glad, but Justin, that you, uh, that you bleeped you swearing, you bleeped Liam swearing and then you did not bleep me swearing. I appreciate that. Yeah. Cause my mom can't yell at you, but my mom will absolutely yell at you. I'm allowed to say it. Yeah.

My mom will, will yell at Roz and I, but you can't yell at you. That's right. As John Lennon said, uh, uh, the C word is the N word of the world. Man, John Lennon would have been so fucking canceled if he had only survived long enough. He did get canceled. It's just that a guy did it for us. You guys, the old fashioned type of canceled, you know, off to see the bootleg Beatles as a bootleg Mark Chapman.

Speaking of bootleg bands, um, what do you see in front of you is a small wood frame building, which is burned down. Yeah, I see that. This is another, another one of these deceptively small disasters, which turned out to be really, really big deal because this building was a nightclub. Yeah, boy. Well, huge mistake. I want to say something real quick about this band specifically.

They also, their name is great white. Uh, and I didn't, I didn't put this in the notes in time recently. So during the, now in the age of Corona virus, they performed a show a few months ago, masclists to like thousands of people in the mall. Cool. Very nice. So the second mass casualty event. Yeah.

The great white is home. Yeah. They really love to do that. Uh, so anyway, yeah, today we were going to talk about the fire at the station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Hmm. Two, two great ways of racking up high death tolls, nightclubs and fires. Is this the first nightclub fire we've done?

Yeah, we don't talk about nightclubs. We don't acknowledge nightclubs on this podcast by and large. Well, we have that nightclub peer collapse. We did have that. Let's show up here 34. I think this is the first nightclub fire. Yeah. This is the first nightclub fire we've talked about.

Yeah. But first we have to do the goddamn news. Okay. So NASA put a car on Mars. Cool. I guess. Fancy research car. That's cool.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's, that's, they did it before Elon. In fact, they put two cars on Mars now. So that's cool. Government still kind of works apparently. My least favorite feature of this was people tweeting video. It was like, oh, so you're really just going to scroll past a video with sound from the surface of Mars and go about your shitty memes or whatever and the videos from curiosity

and the sound was just added. This is fake. This is fake sound. Yeah. It's like, don't fucking chide me for scrolling past. That's like, is there shit there? Is there a dude on it? No, I don't think there is.

So I don't give a fuck. You should give a fuck though when you are forced to work in the Martian, uh, sandbines Alice. Yeah. Listen, I'll watch it. I'll watch it. Let's play a red faction. And then I'll have everything I need to know about Mars.

It'd be funny if Elon Musk landed on Mars and then Marvin the Martian walked up and just sat with the Acme disintegrator pistol. Yeah. I do like the idea of Elon and his whatever space colony of billionaires and also indentured servants or whatever they're going to call them gig workers. They get to the surface and it actually turns out that red faction was really real all along with the destructive one. Destructible environments.

Remember those? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over the destructible environments in 2001. Jesus. So, uh, good, good luck to, um, Marvin the Martian. Yes. Marvin the Martian whose job it will be to fight the space car. And also Doom guy.

Yeah. Yep. Ripping and tearing. In other news, apparently you can now sell internet art using non fungible tokens for a lot of money. Oh, yeah. I saw this artists that fucking the people with art degrees have found out about Bitcoin. So it's all over for us.

But for some reason this also destroys the environment. Yeah. Which I mean, it's not all bad. I just, I don't, I don't get it. I don't, I do not get like why we have to do this. Well, because it says so much about our society and also like if we do it enough, it's gonna really sort of put up an upper limit on how much suffering we have to endure because we're just all going to be like drowning and boiling seawater, which is what we want.

This is true. Yes. I just, the idea of a non fungible token when the whole point of money is to be fungible is. No, this is good. This is fine, actually. This is artwork, which makes it unique. It's not unique.

I could do this with two hours in Photoshop. Well, yeah. I mean, I like, I screenshotted this and it's on the screen here. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. What do we know? How can you do that? Getting the token.

Yeah. I guess you're paying for the non fungible token and the art is sort of a bonus. I have been very confused about like Bitcoin in general, like why it was worth money. And I've come to the conclusion that it's all just backed up by the price of energy that goes into mining it. Well, yeah. And I mean, that's only going to go up, which is good, I guess. So people will use more energy to mine more Bitcoin, which will make the price of energy

go up. And there's no way this is ever going to come crashing down on anyone. I love tulips. Someone, yes. I love to buy tulips. I love to trade tulips. Sometimes I'll lay down in the field. I love selling people in them.

Yeah. I think it would be a great idea to build like 50 natural gas plants all to feed Bitcoin mines. I truly, Sean, I'm willing to put aside our differences for an antifada or history as a weapon episode simply on Bitcoin, because I think he would be fucking, I think he's the best person to tackle it. Yeah. Bitcoin, I like having to like be in a former life, I was a finance bro.

That wasn't obvious. And having to explain like my out of date understanding of Bitcoin circa like 2015 to a bunch of people who simply do not give a shit. You're just like, wow, I can't even believe the shit that's coming out of my own mouth. Like this is embarrassing for me. It's like a lot of people mine for mathematical hashes, which for some reason store value. If you, what's on the screen right now, there's a website called cryptoart.wtf, right? For those of you listening in podcast format as opposed to watching in YouTube format,

what I have here is a gift that says banned in China with some barcodes above it, right? And then it breaks down the ecological cost of using the blockchain in order to, I don't understand if it's like- Make some sort of a point about why it's bad to use the blockchain, a thing which you could just explain with your words. To use the blockchain to make a non-fungible token for this was 262 kilowatt hours of electricity or the same as a EU residence electricity consumption for four weeks. Worth it.

So worth it. It's the future. I mean, assuming we have a limitless supply of free energy, right? I mean, if they can come up with a perpetual motion machine, I'll be fine with Bitcoin. I won't be mad at it anymore. Until then, I think this is a pretty bad idea. It's fine. It's going to be fine.

It's going to be fine. Energy. It's not like there's a cost to energy. What is with the China angle on this, by the way? You can hit, there's a randomizer on the site that gives you like a random piece of crypto art each time, and I just randomized it until I got one that was lame enough to put on the show. I assume there's, I don't know, maybe you scan the barcode and it goes to the Tiananmen

Square Massacre because a bunch of these like crypto folks are also crypto-fash, and they love to hit China. You can't scan the barcode because it has a drop shadow. I'm tired. I'm out. YouTube, YouTube, this is your podcast now. I'm going to be to announce my breakaway podcast, Fuck Justin Rosniak, dropping everywhere in about 20 minutes.

All right, well, I think that's the goddamn news. OK, so we have to talk about nightclubs. I like the image you stole from cinema is dope.com. Yes, they stole it from airplanes. They stole from Paramount Pictures. Shout out to the fits in the background of this photo. I appreciate every single one of them. I like the sailor hat, yeah.

The sailor hat the most, I think, but I do like. Look on the left. Look on the left. We got a guy in a bumblebee striped shirt. Yeah. Oh, yes. That's the, that's the protagonist of B-movie, 20 years after the movie. This is the, this is the disco scene from airplane.

Ah. Yeah. I, I, you know what? I would watch a gritty reboot of airplane if it's starred bumblebee shirt guy. You'd watch that, right? And he's like, isn't a gritty reboot of airplane just the Nicholas Cage 9-11 movie? There's a Nicholas Cage 9-11 movie. There's a Nicholas Cage 9-11 movie with John Turturro.

It's called World Trade Center. Oh, yeah. Nicholas Cage is a firefighter. He has a moustache. John Turturro is a post-authority cop and they get stuck in an elevator on 9-11. It's great. And by great, I mean, it's, it's, it's really, it's a, it's atrocious, man. Stuck in an elevator as the conceit for a movie is always entertaining.

Yeah. Although I did see one that was like stuck in an elevator and also one of them is the devil. Is that just called devil? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And then they're like that. Yeah.

In the elevator control room, who's like spiritually in touch with this on the basis that he's Hispanic. That's like the whole angle is like, yeah, no, I think there's a devil here because Spanish. Oh, oh, oh, oh, didn't that come out like 2006? Yes. Yeah, it did. He's like, I feel a presence of evil, but like Spanish Lee using, using my, using my

Hispanic powers. Oh my God. So nightclubs, they suck, right? They're full of people you don't know who you don't like. Well, that's why they're illegal now. Sometimes they're full of people you do know who you don't like. The music's too loud. Everyone's shouting.

The lights are annoying. People keep bumping into you. The drinks are expensive. There's a cover charge, right? And, you know, in addition, there's lots of ways to be killed in nightclubs, right? Like a fire or a stampede. Maybe there's a mass shooting. You can also get coronavirus.

That's one. It can collapse into the Delaware River. Various, maybe you get stabbed or something. I don't know. Yeah. My point is go to a quiet empty bar like in the old. Don't don't go to the bars because we're already there. Not, not literally here now because of the COVID.

Right. But yeah, when you come into the bar, it is it is my favorite. Roz and I once went to a bar. I don't even remember what time it was. It was like 2 p.m. on a Saturday, probably. And it's nice little bar at 24th and Sansom. And that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And do you remember it was me, you, the bartender and that guy, like gambling on soccer? Yes. Yeah, he was just like, oh, hey, guys. So we're just like, hi, we're going to be here for how we met. Two hours to drink in silence. Yes. Leave us alone. Bring me chicken tenders.

So here's a question. What's the best way to avoid being killed in the nightclub? Don't go to the club. Don't go to the nightclub. Yeah, that's the best. The first good idea. But let's say dark on Tinder and realize that no one will ever make you happy. And then start drinking.

Start a podcast with your friends. Start a podcast with your friends. Let's say you are in the nightclub and you don't want to leave. Leave, you got to make use of the most important building system, which is means of egress, right? So one of the best ways to avoid a problem is to run away from it, right? This is why building codes make requirements for means of egress. There's a fire you can leave.

Maybe there's a toxic gas leak you can leave. There's an earthquake you can leave. It's a bomb thread. Just leave the building and just get out of the building, right? Maybe radiation hazard is some kind. I don't know. Someone far enough away from it is fine. Just leave the building, right?

As it clearly states in IBC section one thousand one point one, which I've reproduced here, if it sucks, hit the bricks. Oh, you reproduced it. Yeah. Yeah, no credit to Deshezza. Fuck them, they don't need it. Yeah. Too many followers already. Exactly. So this is particularly relevant in areas with high occupant load, right?

Theaters or nightclubs, stuff like that. Buildings have maximum occupancy limits to ensure that evacuation can occur in a prompt fashion. And, you know, the more exits you put in the building, the more people you can have in the building. It's also a good habit to get into, although the downside is that you act like either Jason Bourne or somebody with CPTSD.

But a good habit to get into is if you go into a place, when you do that, have an idea of where the ways out of that place are. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's very helpful. Actually, to get a little paranoid about that sometimes. Yeah. There's a always always sit with your back to a wall so nobody can come in and shoot you while you're eating spaghetti and meatballs. The both me and my mom do that. And I listen.

I will say it's always it's always funny. It's all with an anxiety disorder. When the first thing you do when you walk into a new place is to find out where all the exits are. And it's a thin, thin line between. I'm just like, I need to know all the ways I can get out of here. I need to know all the all the ways that I had to. Like if I had to jump out of a window and like drag

Roz along, because in this situation, in this hypothetical, Ross has like broken his leg or something bravely, bravely broken his leg, trying to dive behind the bar to steal beer. Yeah, that's that's why that's why you want an all on a plane. Why you want all anxiety disorder exit row because we are ready for that responsibility to the point that we will spend the entire flight expressing about it. Yes. Like, yeah, and it's a thin, thin line between like having an anxiety disorder

and having that kind of like tactical Jeff Cooper brain disease. We are like, I am in condition yellow all the time. And do it. Why are you doing a barrel roll on the floor? And you're just screaming, conditioned yellow at some horse or rider. All right, listen, condition orange, motherfucker. Just like taking the drinks tray like you think it is a shield doing some Captain America shield throwing. That's just it's just you and a bad cover band.

And they're just like, why are you here? You're like, condition red, condition red. Yeah, I've been fucking activate. So one of the problems with having lots of exits is that in venues like night night clubs, you know, they like to have one entrance, right? And the reason you have one entrance of the night club is so people can stand in line behind a velvet rope for a long time. And VIPs can walk past them, right?

Yeah, and you can develop a cult of personality around the bouncer spend. Exactly, right? She wants a pack bond with anything, man. The result of this is that while, you know, this building may have many means of egress, lots of people instinctively try to leave the building the way they came in, right? Yeah, because they don't have anxiety disorders and are normal people. They will be like, yeah, no, I'm not going to think about this.

I'm going to have a nice time and enjoy myself instead of planning out all of the different scenarios as to what could happen. Yes, ruin this. Yeah. You know, so one of the ways we came up with to combat this instinctive response is to invent the exit sign, which is good, but not enough, right? You know, not everyone pays attention to these things. I mean, they're so common, you don't even notice them. Yeah, they're just kind of like background.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the thing you have to do is just take note of the exits when you go into a building, save yourself before you save others. And if you get put in an exit row, spend the whole flight obsessing. Become Jason Bourne is what we're saying. Yeah, you have to like you have to live your life in such a way that everyone who sees you do anything, whether that's like take out the garbage or go to the store for yogurt at five p.m.

Because you want some yogurt is like Jesus Christ, that's Jason Bourne. You know, I knew it was coming to I know I do as someone who tries to avoid flying because of the aforementioned anxiety disorder. It is always nice to sort of sit in one of those rows where you're like you're looking over to the right and like, you know, and they know, you know, you're just like, all right, we are going to be the best anxiety written cooperative display crash has ever seen. What you've got to do is like the only way you will feel comfortable

on a plane is if you are an airline pilot. So you've got to become one of those and then you can be like, oh, now all of the anxiety that I have is totally justified and I can do stuff about it. Man was not meant to fly. If we were, we'd have wings. Yes. Just do what Ross does. Drink 14 beers and then still spend the entire flight having a panic attack.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, the last time I flew transatlantic, I think it was, which was like five years ago, the last time it was on a plane. I drank like a crap load of beers and I still had massive anxiety and I couldn't sleep. It was the middle of the night and everything. First live show in Glasgow, then when you guys can like double down and could like combine the anxiety of going out of the house

for the first time in a year and a half. I'm going to say tomorrow, baby, I'm ready. Hell yeah. And also flying. Yeah, I don't take a boat. We will take a boat. I don't want to think about what both Roz and I, Roz, who's like, I've always figured that that with Roz, if he starts panicking, you should start panicking.

And like once what sort of plane all bets are off, we're going to have to sit on opposite sides of the plane. Just screaming constantly. I don't know, man, I have to like the other fun detail about an anxiety disorder, which is I'm panicking all the time until the precise moment when things are actually bad. And then I enter a stasis and like, and it's like, where were you? The rest of my fucking life.

Somebody loses like their arm and there's arterial spray going everywhere. And I'm just like, yeah, yeah, I like to think of myself as extremely competent, but only in moments of crisis. Well, we've I've had my girlfriend say, like, not going to obviously get too far in details, but has had a couple crazies. And I am I am literally like Zen from Overwatch. I'm I'm I'm two feet off the floor. I'm I'm just like juggling orbs.

Yes, I'm Zenyatta from Overwatch. I'm just speaking very slowly and calmly. And normally I'm right hard from Overwatch. So luckily, we're going to go to a place you don't need to fly to, unless you're Alice, which is beautiful Rhode Island. OK, most of America's most mob affiliated states. It is. It is. Good God, it is. Providence is Boston's shittier mobbed up younger brother,

but the brown campus is nice. So, you know, there's wonderful things in Rhode Island. You can drink some Narragans at beer made in New York. Made in New York. That's a disappointing. You can become a baseball player and then nearly bankrupt the entire state because it's the size of a parking lot. Yeah, you can have some New York system hot wieners.

Excuse me. Yeah. Yeah, it's called. Don't want to move on, move on rapidly. So she has to Google it herself. Yeah, exactly. You can drink some coffee milk. That looks pretty good. It is delicious and confirmed. You go to Providence and, you know, you see the mob. There's there's a really big Navy base.

You can you can go to Ocean State job lot. New ports nights. I actually stayed in Warwick not all that long ago, and I forgot what a shithole it was. And it's not gotten any better since I was a kid. You could you could check out the state police who have the most fascist state police uniform, which is saying something. They're fully, fully like you think Massachusetts is bad.

This is like this is the stagic. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is like fucking 1941 foul gelled looking motherfuckers. I love it, man. Oh, yeah. What else is in what else is in Rhode Island? Me setting the fire alarm off. God, OK, well, I know all of my exits are so bad to say. Pretty certain we can just shout out to my friend, Maggie, who went to Brown. Yeah, just just kind of keep keep talking.

You can get out of the line very quickly. This is going to be fun to edit out. No, leave it. Leave it all in. Actually. United States Naval War College. It's a new port. That's OK. All right, fires out. All right. Yeah, I think we managed.

I did not die. Just leave all that in. Yeah. All right. One of the things you used to be able to do in Rhode Island was go to the station, which was a nightclub in West Warwick. Oh, and it looks great. Oh, fuck. Dude, if this wasn't if this was not a club, I would be there every night.

Is that was the Osborne in the middle? Yes, I think so. Is that on the left? I want to say Alice Cooper. I was thinking I was thinking Alice Cooper. Originally, I thought Mick Jagger, but it can't be Jagger. His mouth looks weird. Oh, yeah, I did not know that Alice Cooper was one of the great types.

This was conveniently located just a few miles from I-95 and T.F. Green Airport, the worst airport in America. I trust me on that one. OK, Phoenix, Phoenix, it's not a harbor, baby. Well, I mean, at least you can get places from Phoenix. You're the only thing to do in Phoenix. You know, I had, you know, T.F. Green had had zero flights for like three consecutive years after 2015.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Like that one, that one field in the Everglades, when they thought that everybody was going to use supersonic airliners, they built an airfield out in the middle of the fucking Everglades and then nobody did and it just kind of sank into a swamp. So this is this building. This building was built as a restaurant in the mid to late 40s, right?

Um, which is that no one can quite figure out exactly the year it was built. Always a good sign. Always a good sign. Yeah. This is, of course, during a particularly bad time for building construction, you know, the combination of the old bad stuff, the new bad stuff. So I don't know, wood frame construction, but also asbestos. Yeah, I'll say one thing for asbestos. It fucking doesn't catch on fire easily. Yeah, I was about to say this one probably got updated at some point.

You know, sort of auto oriented, single story wooden box with a small basement that had a couple of renovations over the decades. It had a pretty significant fire in 1972, which they essentially rebuilt the interior of the building afterwards. They had they renovated the front of the building after a car smashed into it in 2001. Yes, has this Wendy's, the old school Wendy's greenhouse sticking out of it. I wonder if that's where the car hit.

Oh, that's what I was thinking. Yeah. There's a major renovation in 1991, which converted the building from a pub to a nightclub. Right. Those are two separate uses under the code. So they made it worse. Got it. Yeah. So nightclubs are held to higher standards because they frequently kill a whole lot of people, right? Yeah, there's so many more people in them.

So your your your model code at the time is the one before IBC. I forget what it was called. It required a sprinkler system for this use change with no exceptions for older structures. Now, the local code, which is what actually governs, not the model code, may have may or may not have grandfathered this building in, right? Again, I cannot stress enough that Rhode Island is the United States's most mob affiliated states. Oh, oh, God.

Yeah, I figure they would that the mob would go make them use their sprinkler contractor, unless they just pay the contractor and the sprinkler contractor never installed the sprinklers. I see that's shoddy workmanship. Mm hmm. Yeah, you're going to have like a through line to a sprinkler guy. I'm a little annoyed. Tony Paparoni didn't come down, you know, every every six weeks to like a do you just come in swinging a baseball bat?

And it's like, did you test your sprinklers yet? They actually got to go through the whole thing like Tony Paparoni, the mob building inspector. I would kind of support the idea of outsourcing most infrastructure inspection to the mob, if only for the fact that it would lead us to the snowpiercer thing of them just showing up in the like blue windbreakers with mafia on the back. I'd appreciate that. Do I say snowpiercer?

You just fuck. But you know what I mean? Yeah, but you have a whole you have a whole like a whole the fucking mob windbreakers on the train. You know the thing I mean is original cyberpunk brain working good. Snow crash. There we go. You have a lot of them either. So yeah, you have like, you know, like the the staff shirts,

the hand that all the every event has, but instead of staff, it says mob. Yeah. Ask, ask a friendly mobster for directions. Guy trying to get in the back of a concert with a fake mob hivers. So, you know, I mean, OK, this building kind of fire pretty significantly once in 72. And it was it was good enough they could use it again. I mean, so who cares if there's a sprinkler system in there or not, right?

Yeah. So. OK. In June of 2000, after a change of ownership, right, the new owners who were two brothers, Jeff, two brothers, two brothers, Jeff, Jeffrey and Michael Derrick, Epstein, Derrick, Darian, right? No, not Jeffrey. First of all, Epstein may have been a psychopathic pedophile murder or whatever, but he would have had the capital to actually use acoustic foam as we'll get to. That's what that's about.

They decided to renovate the nightclub to improve acoustics and alleviate noise complaints from the neighbors, right? And in the last episode, we made some I made a couple of jokes about podcasting safety, but let's talk about acoustic foam here. Chances are if you've wanted to improve your podcast audio quality, you've thought about putting a foam on your walls, right? We have never wanted to improve our podcast audio quality.

Yes, I have not put foam on my walls. I've thought about it, but then you guys all complained in the comments. So if you don't get that, I'm just going to hang a bunch of tapestries up. I'm going old school. Hey, put some put some Oriental rugs up. Yeah. Yeah. Become the company, become the carpet woman.

So, you know, and you may have looked at professional acoustic foams and like walked at the price, right? You know, they're pretty expensive, right? For what they are. And, you know, maybe you're smart, you're a savvy shopper. So you decide, well, why don't I just go get some egg crate packaging foam? You know, it's the same thing, but it's much cheaper. You go buy that, you put it up on the walls and it works fine, right?

But there's a reason that the acoustic foam is more expensive. Capitalism. Which is that it has to meet actual requirements for being in a building, right? Namely, it has to be fire proof or at least fire resistant, right? So it's more expensive than regular polyurethane foam, both because of the materials, but also because of the rigorous testing required to prove the material meets fire code. And that testing is expensive.

And so the company producing the foam needs to amortize the cost of the testing over sale of the product, right? Just a bunch of mafia foam testers. Yeah, you got the mafia version of NIST. Hey, so we understand you've been cheaping out on your acoustic foam. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to nail one of your hands to your cut rate foam.

And maybe next time you come back to Tony Pepperoni's acoustic supply. Yeah. It's the idea of like mob rackets, but all the stuff that they sell is actually genuinely very good quality. Yeah. Yeah, this is Giovanni from Underwriters Labor Toys. We encourage all of our customers to buy the genuine article, you know,

otherwise you're going to get your dick nail to the floor. That's what the nine hundred and sixty dollar standard peanut butter is from NIST. It's protection money. You know, so standard polyurethane packing foam is not fire rated, right? It ignites very easily. It produces a very thick black smoke. It produces carbon monoxide and it produces hydrogen cyanide gas as it burns. Right. Fuck. Yeah.

Cool. Great. Just grenfelling myself in order to make my podcast one percent better. Yes. So we do it for you, fans. If you've put out packing crates, a packing egg crate foam on your walls to improve the quality of your podcast. Think twice before you take a smoke break in your podcasting studio, right? Might I encourage you to try smokeless tobacco at by snooze.com.

Prevades. You're just going to start doing ad reads for them like without them even paying us. Great. You know, I just I'm a believer in their products. Roz, I'm not compensated for this. If I were compensated for this, I wouldn't have got my feelings so hard about the Patriot Exit Surveys. You just got a Patriot Exit Survey that was like if he says by snooze.com one more time, I'm hitting the fucking cancel button.

And you, of course, were like, you know, you want to buy some snooze? I wasn't for leaving. They they they support big tobacco. Yeah, it's sort of ironically at this point, unfortunately. So Jeffrey and Michael Der Darien do not think about, you know, getting the proper acoustic foam, right? Instead, they bought five hundred and seventy five dollars worth of egg crate packaging from a packaging foam from American Foam,

which was a local foam distributor, right? They ordered it COD, not suspicious at all. Those of our listeners who don't remember television advertisements with the blue background, COD is cash on delivery. Um, again, Rhode Island. Yeah. So they got this foam and they glued it to the walls of the nightclub. Mm hmm. Do we know the glue?

No, I didn't look that up. It's going to be like modeling. I was thinking that was just me or Elmer's job. Yeah, it's testers, model airplane glue really stink up the place. Yeah, but that said, you could have fixed anything to anything. No, you can only fix plastic to other plastic because it's not actually glue. It's a plastic cement. It sort of dissolves the plastic into other plastic.

I think that would work fine. Yeah, I mean, because it's how often do you need to glue something that's not plastic and you're really at your case. It happens quite often, but subscribe to the Patreon so I can move somewhere where I can have the room to get into scale modeling. We want to tell you to move to Philly and you keep not listening to me. Yeah, because there's a fucking pandemic. Is what I'm isolated in Ross's guest room.

That's not my problem. Also, subscribe, subscribe to the YouTube because I want one of those plaques. Oh, I do want one of those plaques. This is true. All right, so let's look at the plan of the building, right? So most of the foam was around the walls back over here, right? Especially around the stage back over here, right?

You see, there's a kitchen. There's a bar. There's a dance floor. You got the sun room. Man, I bet like food in this place was fucking great. Just looking at it, thinking about what kind of foods you got. Teddies, just Teddies. And you had a number of means of egress here, right? There's an exit from the kitchen.

There's a side door in the main bar. There is an exit door for the band right next to the bandstand, right? And then there's the front entrance, which is a pair of double doors, right? But then there's a single door behind that and then this sort of constrained entryway on each side here, right? Just to keep the queue. Yeah, exactly, right? Oh, you got a whole maze of fucking offices and like storerooms and shit at the back with no exits.

Yeah, there's bathrooms up here, the offices back here. I have no idea what this crap is. I think it's the store. There's a second bar back here. One interesting thing of note is a report from the Washington Post indicated that the flat the band door back here was actually covered in foam. Like as a separate piece so it could move or just like foamed over. I believe it was a separate piece so it could move.

OK. It's funny. It's a me if you don't, if you just have it behind a thing of foam that you have to like cut it through. Yeah. So. All right. Let's talk about the incident. Oh, boy. OK. So the band was Jack Russell's Great White, right? Which is Jack Russell's solo band.

Along with one other member of the original Great White, which had broken up in 2001. Oh, that's sad. Yeah. Shout out to the guy with the big security shirt, though. I appreciate that. That could have said mob if we lived in a better society. This is true. Yes. That that boy in front of the stage is he thick, boy.

It's a wide man. That's a wide man. It's very dangerous. Dangerous, synthetic materials. Look at that jacket. I do like our guy in the cowboy hat. And what I think is a sock jersey. But I couldn't be certain.

Yeah. So it's February 20th, 2003. There's 462 people in attendance for this concert, right? There's a lot of people in this little building. People really want to see Jack Russell and one member of Great White. Yes. Their band manager was a man named Daniel Michael Vichel, right?

He was 26 years old, which I thought was interesting that he was managing this band full of people who were at this point, probably 50. He had the bright idea to use pyrotechnics indoors as part of the show, right? I love the hitman games. Yeah. Excellent work, 47. Now head for an accent.

So he had four gerbs, right? Those are like big sparklers. They're taking our gerbs. Taking our gerbs. They were going to go off all the band played Desert Moon, which is one of their, I don't know, they had like a really hit it signal single, but it was like it's a song they're apparently known for.

I don't know anything about Great White. People would recognize it. And then the Gerbs would go off and everyone, all 462 people would be having a nice time. Yes. There were two of them going vertical. There were two of them at 45 degree angles, right? Like in front of the stage.

So, you know, the lights go out, the opening acts come on and go off. The main act goes on in 11. The pyrotechnics go off as scheduled, right? I mean, that's a success story. Pyrotechnics work. Pyrotechnics work. Yeah. Well, the thing is, the two, the two that were at 45 degree angles sprays, sparks directly onto the foam and ignite it instantly.

Oh, yeah. So, all right. Some of the crowd, especially the people in the back, start to evacuate immediately. Other people think this is part of the show. Oh, man. Sure. I mean, it's it's trying out of your body.

You're drunk out of your mind. You're watching Chessie Dadrock. Of course, there's going to be stuff on fire. Yeah, this is true. Apparently in the music video, there's also like a whole bunch of fire. So people thought. Yeah, you can't you can't really see it that well.

You're like maybe trying to like look over somebody's shoulder. Sure. So, OK, so this is this is a nightmare scenario if you're part of a band, right? Because all of a sudden, you go from musician to evacuation coordinator, right? And chances are you have no idea what you're doing. As far as I know,

only one person has managed to do this transition properly. And that was Frank Zappa. Because in December, 1971, Frank Zappa and the mothers were playing at the casino in Montreux in Switzerland. Someone shot a flare gun into the ceiling of the venue and the roof got fire. It's rock. Yeah. What a asshole. You can hear on the recording that the band stops

and Zappa has to start calmly directing people to the exits. I'm a guy. Yeah. And as a result of this, no one no one no one died or was seriously injured in that particular fire, even though we did get the song Smoke on the water out of it, which is almost as bad. And the casino itself, the venue burned down and then exploded. You know, and then and then the next week, Zappa almost died from being pushed into an orchestra pit because karma is fake.

I think it's great that we just have unfenced holes in stages. Yeah, right. Now, Jack Russell, who is the lead vocalist for Great White and I guess inventor of the terrier. Yeah. Inventor of the dog. Yeah. He's he's no he's no Frank Zappa. Right. About 20. Is this him in the mom jeans? I believe so. Yeah.

OK. No. About. About 20 seconds after the fire started, the band stopped playing and Russell just said into the microphone, wow, that's not good. Well, he's not wrong. It's not wrong. He's correct. So he had like a bottle of water up there on the stage with him. He tried to throw that at the fire and musicians. I love them dearly, but often times.

How can I put this delicately? Looking at a bunch of burning egg crates that's like spraying off carbon monoxide, which means you're already getting dumb her without even realizing it. Yes. And you have your like fucking bottle of Irish spring or whatever. Yeah. All right. So the band.

The band hits the bricks. They get the hell off the stage, right? And patrons started rushing for various exits, but mostly the main entrance, right? The polyurethane foam burned extremely rapidly and filled the venue with really thick black smoke in under about two minutes, right? Sort of ignited the wooden structure behind it.

Now, this is even mine. It started around just after 11. Here's 1124. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, it's not gone well. This whole incident was caught on film, which I haven't watched and I refuse to watch. I did for this once again.

I'm giving you the bifidulfin advisory, which is like, I know some of you have the same broken brains as me, which will be like, oh, yeah, I should see this. Yeah, don't don't do that. Do it. I also have not watched it. My anxiety disorder keeps me out of nightclubs just fine. Thanks. So Brian Butler was a cameraman for WPRI TV.

Providence's Fox affiliate, right? And he was recording B-roll for a story on nightclub safety. Which was being which a reporter was doing. Yes, it's like Gandhi's joke about Western civilization. Nightclub safety, I think, could be a good idea. And the reporter who was who was doing the story

actually was Jeffrey Derdarian, who was part owner of the nightclub. Oh, God, yeah, I see this in the notes. And just like, what are you? Don't want vetted this. You couldn't find one other. Rhode Island. It's a very small state. It's difficult to avoid. It's very small and very corrupt.

It's very hard to avoid conflicts of interest as a result. It is very corrupt. My my some of my favorite stories are from my dad back when because Providence and I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head had, like, the most corrupt mayor in the history of Mayors, whose name I'm totally blanking on. I was like started with a C kind of Italian, like Cucinelli, Ciccioli, something like that, comedically corrupt, like kind of celly.

Most corrupt. Yeah, fucking most corrupt Rhode Island politician is what I'm doing right now. That's hard. That's like the Yankee body. She Yankee. She Yankee, Yankee, Yankee. It actually has on his Wikipedia page both pronunciation and Italian pronunciation.

I get the address. We just have to use the Italian pronunciation. But the sea. She. Yeah, he he he actually this is true, but I just like to think of he was the guy who like fronted the brothers the money for it. Yeah, it was like. But the insurance money on it really.

This is the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page is was an American politician, attorney, radio talk show host, political commentator, convicted felon, mayor of Providence, Rhode Island for over 21 years. Yep. What was he a convicted felon after or before the mayor? Oh, this would be after, after. So he's not. He's no Marion Barry. No, Marion Barry did nothing wrong.

This is true. Come on. It's a personal use. Now, I mean, coming back from prison and running for mayor and winning is the kind of energy I need. Mm hmm. All right. So the timeline here is very short, right? Within five minutes, flames were coming out the roof of the venue, right? The building was engulfed in the interior earlier than that.

By the time fire crews got there, it was almost all over. Some of the eyewitness accounts are kind of conflicting. And there's a few reports actually indicated that a bouncer blocked patrons from using the stage exit. So this is why people love bounces so much. Yeah. So these are you can see the fire. You're about to die of smoke inhalation.

You're still standing there like no band only. I mean, at least you kind of again have the excuse of you're breathing in a load of carbon monoxide, the gas that makes you dumber. Yes. So here's a few. Here's a few eyewitness accounts from the very extensive NIST report. So this is from Paul Vanner, a club employee. After the fire started on the sides of the stage, Vanner moved to the sound

control booth towards the back of the concert space and picked up a fire extinguisher that was stored there. He said, I hit the pin, hit the trigger just to make sure I got something coming out of it. Then I'm heading for the stage and realize a fire extinguisher has no chance against this. We've got to get out of there now. And then then he did so, of course.

Christopher Travis, who was a club patron. Travis was somewhere in the middle of the crowd when the fire started. He said nobody wanted to give up their spot. People felt like it would just be put out. Travis did not start to evacuate until after the lights in the club had gone out. Jesus. Robert Riff, who is another club patron. Riff was attending a concert with a friend on the night of the fire.

Upon noticing the growing fire, he and his friend began to evacuate. We both turned and headed for the main door, which was the only door we knew of. They're made their way to the main door. He said, just as we reached the point where the two hallways came to one, the thick black smoke just completely filled the room. I couldn't see. I couldn't breathe. As I got within inches from the front doorway, I just came to a complete stop.

Once out of the building, Riff attempted to assist others and evacuated. I tried pulling on one man and could not get him to even budge the tiniest bit. I grabbed onto a woman who was trapped at the bottom of the crush and couldn't get her to budge either. He eventually left the area of the main entrance and observed the scene from the parking lot. Said we could we could see people coming out of the windows. Yeah, I mean, we've takes me back to to Hillsborough, our episode on that.

Well, like once people get crushed in like that, you can't move them and people just sort of die anyway. Yeah. Walter Castle, another club patron. Castle attempted to use the door by the stage early in the fire's development. His statement indicates that he was told by a club employee that the exit was for band members only. Castle said, I come to find out it was a band exit.

I ended up throwing him out of the way. Boom. Yeah, good. Here's Antony Beddencourt, a West Warwick, Rhode Island police officer. I tried to shoot the fire. I tried to shoot the fire. No, yeah, I proceeded in a direction towards the incandescent style. No, you very humanely actually beat the fire with his baton.

Officer Beddencourt was pushed out of the main exit of the club by the initial rush of people. Once outside, he apparently heard people kicking at windows and proceeded to break some of these windows with his baton. Literally the only good thing you could use a baton for when he finds it. Yeah, I know. Obviously, like talk about the humanity, just sort of people in these situations. But I like the idea that this is probably this being where I would like a horrifically

corrupt cop who just like beats people for fun in poor neighborhoods. How many racial slurs you think that baton's got engraved into it? And he's just like, oh, I can use this not to hurt people, but to help people. He's just smashing windows and calling them all the n-word for some reason. They're just like, well, he's seen my life, but I kind of wish he hadn't. Many, many people got out with their lives and nobody got out on slurred. I drank both a large cup of coffee and a blue monster energy. So I apologize for the bathroom break there, but it was I was an unstoppable train of

waste removal. That's fine. At least you didn't set the fire alarm off. Yes. So he and other officers helped numerous people, both conscious and unconscious, exit through the windows. Eventually, the officers could no longer reach people immediately and the officers could no longer reach people immediately inside the windows and began

to call the call for the occupants to come to the window, right? According to one, according to Betancourt, one occupant just ran through one of the windows. Oh, hell, yeah, just trucked it. Yeah, dude's rock. And he said, yeah, he opened up a nice hole. That's that guy. That guy goes back and watches the footage of the burning building. Every soul often to see if there's video of him punching a hole through a

window and just running, running through it. Aaron Donald style is. Oh, this hurts so much worse than sugar glass. Right. Jenkins. Yeah, that meme would have been current at the time. Yeah. Oh, don't tell me that.

We're all so old. Yeah, this was 18 years ago. I remember this happening. I hate Rhode Island. Um, here is an image from the camera man who had evacuated through the door. This is about four minutes or so after the fire began. You can see, um, yeah, that spoke as you can see.

Fuck all because it's turned the inside of the club into a volcano. Yes. I was like, oh, sorry, I thought I was watching Great White or one member of them, plus the guy who invented dogs. And I've now been transported to fucking Herculaneum. Here I am at Vesuvius live on the scene at Vesuvius. Things, as you can see, are going poorly. You ever see the guy at Vesuvius who just was jerking it when he got like

flash fried? That's cool. Yeah, what else are you going to do? So, um, I remember there was one eyewitness account from one person who got trapped in the crush at the door. I couldn't find it again to put it in there. And it's like, yeah, you could just get this guy just got trapped at the bottom of the crush of people with a whole bunch of like corpses on top of him. No, but he was close enough to the exit that he got some fresh air and didn't die.

Oh, good. Yeah. What a way to survive, though. Holy shit. I had to grab like a fireman's boot with the only arm he could free from the pile to indicate that he was there. No, thank you. Yeah. So. All right. The fire department showed up. This is the worst kind of a floor plan you can ever see right here.

The fire department showed up quickly. They extinguished the fire pretty quickly because, you know, it's just a small structure fire, right? Not a lot of opportunity for life saving, though, right? You know, you got a stampede and a major fire is not a great combination. You're fighting against the tide, basically. Yeah. A lot of people got killed all over the building. The largest number was right here in the vestibule.

You see, they found 31 dead people there. You know, and there was some. But, you know, people were getting killed everywhere, like in the sunroom here. You know, there's some people who went in the back of the building died. People died in the bathroom. Not a lot of people at the bar died. That seemed to be the place to go if you wanted to survive this one. So here's a rule of thumb, though.

We're going to talk about this one right here on the dance floor. Rule of thumb, do not reenter a burning building. But my stuff. Yes, understandably. But no, do not enter a burning building. Do not reenter a burning building under any circumstances, unless you're a firefighter and you know what you're doing. I mean, even then, you might want to avoid that, too.

Yeah. So the guitarist for Jack Russell's Great White, Ty Longley re-entered the burning building to grab his guitar, right? So now. I have some questions. Question one, was this like a guitar with sentimental value? Because if not, that's more sad that you're like, oh, yeah, I I need this badly enough in order to survive that I am willing to jump into a fucking volcano caldera.

To be fair, it's probably his most prized possession. And it's very hard to replace because he has no money, which is why he's playing in West Warwick, Rhode Island. Yeah, nobody who's playing this show is having a great time already. No. But I but I see your point. Yeah. But this is like deceptively easy, right? Or it looks easy enough, right?

Go in the building. Go 10 feet this way, grab the guitar, go back out, right? Easy, simple, right? And, you know, musicians' equipment is expensive and musicians don't make that much money, right? So it's not like any of these guys have insurance. Yeah. Um, so he goes in to grab his guitar and dies. Oh, yeah. OK, then.

I mean, sounds obvious when you say it like that. Yeah, I mean, I guess he got lost or something, you know, because again, the whole the whole building is fighting through Vesuvius. Yeah, it's what you might call an environment incompatible with life right here. It's like deciding you're going to fucking like go do a Venus mission. Like, I mean, you don't have a space or anything. You're just going to walk around for a bit and see how you manage. Yeah, I bet I could do.

I could I bet I could go spend five minutes on Venus. No problem, right? No, it turned out of a cloud. Yeah. No, you get flattened into a pancake by the pressure. Like crushed like an, you know, and not good. Oh, canned Ross. No. Oh, I'm not I'm not going to go to Venus. But it's convenient and easy to carry format. So in addition to Ty Longley, you know,

it's about a hundred people dead at the end of the day. We're 98 dead on the day. Two others die in hospital shortly afterwards. In this conflagration in this small building. And there's 230 people with like significant injuries from smoking, elation and burns and thermal trauma, so on and so forth. This is a pretty bad mass casualty event. All things considered, especially that's an overwhelm the hospital's number.

Yes. I mean, the good news and I say good with a heavy air quotes here is that like most of the people who died just die outright and there's no helping them. So you're not like having to chase down all of this stuff that you could be doing because it turns out it's not really something that you can, you know, it's either prevention or nothing, which. What's the aftermath here, right?

So the NIST performed an extensive investigation, including full scale mockups and two thousand three computer simulations, right? And they concluded that while a sprinkler system would not have contained the fire, it would have at least given people adequate time to evacuate, right? This is a pretty out of the ordinary fire. All things considered, because you had four hundred and something people essentially packed in a packing crate, right, which then caught fire. Yeah, we locked a bunch of people into an egg box.

Yeah, not not not good, not good. But if there were a sprinkler system, it may have given people time to evacuate. And after this, everyone got sued, right? The band got sued. Club owners got sued. State of Rhode Island got sued. The town of West Warwick got sued. Yeah. Sealed Air Corporation, it was the manufacturer.

The foam got sued. I'm sure they won't worry. They probably put don't use this to line the inside of your nightclub with them. I think they ended up settling out of court. I think pretty much all of these folks got settled out of court. Yeah. The television station got sued. The company being nearby. Yeah. The company who built the speakers.

The band was using got sued. They used to use some foam in the speakers. Uh huh. And Heiser Bush got sued for some reason. Home Depot got sued. I don't know that one. I don't know why they got sued. Um, we probably sold in the glue.

I don't know. Maybe the radio station, which promoted the show got sued. Yeah. American Foam Corporation got sued, right? Did they sell them any of the foam? Or was it just because they had foam in the name? I think American Foam Corporation sold them the foam, but the foam was manufactured by Seal Air Corporation. They sued the concept of foam.

Yes. Yeah, they sued the inventor of foam, George Foam. Lord Foam, well. So most of these folks, most of these folks settled out of court. Something like $150 million was awarded to the victims. You know, a lot of the victims wound up, even if you were uninjured, a lot of folks wound up with like post-traumatic stress disorder and other nasty conditions like that. Yeah.

No, I mean, bear in mind, one hundred and fifteen million divided by four hundred and sixty two. You're still getting like 50 grand. No. Yeah. It's a lot of Xboxes. That's a lot of Xboxes. It's just going to say a lot of Xboxes. Yeah. Of course, that's that's going to run through in therapy real quick.

But you know, it's true. Well, that's two hundred forty eight two hundred forty eight thousand nine hundred seventeen dollars. Yeah. You buy a house and then you can. Yeah, you know, that'll fill that house with Xboxes. Yeah, that'll that'll come for you during the the nightmares and the unending psychological trauma. You're buying a house in 2003 as well.

So, you know, oh, shit, you buy a town with that kind of money. It was worth it. Oh, God. So now who went to prison? This is the next one. Daniel Michael Bachel, the the band's manager. The guy who set up the gobs. Yeah, the guy who set up the gobs.

He pleaded guilty against the advice of his lawyers. Sentenced to 15 years, eleven suspended, right? That seems a little unnecessary. Yeah, well, some of the victims wanted a harsher sentence, but also there were a lot of victims who thought it was really stupid to send some at all. No, I can kind of see both ways. I go back and forth on that. Like, on the one hand, he's a guy who'd like thought,

oh, we set up some flame cannons indoors at this kind of dodgy nightclub. It's disputed whether he had permission to set up the cannons or not. He said he had explicit permission by the nightclub owners to set up the gobs. And the nightclub owners said, no, no, we didn't say that he did. I think he must have had permission. And the other thing is this this guy is like 26 years old, right? And that's like 26 year old is a prime period of your life

for making incredibly stupid decisions. Yeah, I joined a podcast. Um, so he was paroled in March 2008. He also was immensely remorseful afterwards. I think he sent handwritten letters to every single one of the victims. Apologizing. I figured that's why he pled guilty as well. Now, Michael and Jeffrey D'Darian, right, pleaded no contest to avoid a trial.

Michael got sentenced to no low contest. The dickhead's guilty. Yeah. Michael sentenced the same sentence as the manager for years or 15 years with 11 suspended Jeffrey to 10 years suspended. Michael was released June 2009, right? I think they were less remorseful overall. You're telling me nightclub owners that unsympathetic? I'm incredible.

The lot where the building stood was turned into a memorial park, right? And the governor of Rhode Island made indoor pyrotechnics illegal at venues which hold fewer than 300 people. Oh, OK. Now, the station nightclub was rated for 402 people or 420 people, depending on the source I looked at. So into a slightly smaller scale version of this will never be allowed to happen again in our tiny state.

Hooray. And the NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, I think that's right acronym. They decided to mandate sprinklers to be installed in all nightclubs with no exceptions, right? With that mandate being up to local municipalities to accept and enforce. Yeah, I love federalism.

Well, the NFPA is a private organization. Yeah, you can't even have like a federal like fire protection thing because small government. Yes, exactly. Right. So, you know, what did we learn from this? Don't go to nightclubs. Don't go to nightclubs. Don't go to them. You have to go to a concert. Go to one that's outdoors.

Which is your only option for right now anyway. This is true. Yeah. This is for your own good. Good Lord. All right. Well, like it's one of those things where like COVID is doing us a favor. It's like along with masking, making it so that like this is the first year when a bunch of people just haven't had a bad cold or a flu. We're also like not burning to death in nightclubs

and also no school shootings. Yeah, exactly. The small, small cost of five hundred and something thousand senior citizens. Yeah, it's five. It's five. And I don't know what the global total is right now. Oh, yeah. Many, many. Hey, but on the plus side, you can always read Andrew Cuomo's book about leadership lessons that he learned from this pandemic.

I'm sick of my deck of wonder. Thank you, though. I I so someone's got to do something about that guy. I'm not I'm not suggesting anything illegal, but someone's got to do something about that guy. I think he's currently being hashtag canceled by cancel culture. So you may get your wish. Oh, well, I'm sure cancel culture will get him out of office in some fashion because it's so effective, right?

Go go speak at a CPAC next year. Yeah, I hope you can see that next year. More uncanceled. We'll go full Zeldmiller. Wondering wondering what to do with my like warehouse full of liberal ass, Cuomo sexual merch. You're going to go with wondering what to do with my warehouse full of corpses. So also, yes, Cuomo has been Franklin. Well, anyway,

yeah, nightclub fire safety is fucked up along with many other things. And don't go to nightclubs and I don't do it. And if you do, if you absolutely have to be Jason Bourne, know where the exits are. Always always have a secret plan to leave. Have a friend with an anxiety disorder and get them to teach you to think like them. Yeah, like the last time I was in a big venue, I think it was I think it was to see Chapa

Trap House at Union Transfer. Union Transfer, yeah. Yeah, Liam and I were there just like standing in the back like, oh, there's a lot of people in there. We're going to we're going to hang by the exit here. We can see the stage just fine. The fire starts and just you have a bunch of podcast listeners being like, is this irony?

There's a bit burning to death, burning to death. Just as a bit. Yeah. I can't wait for our first live show, which begins with a one hour safety briefing about the emergency exit. Definitely start with a indication of where the emergency exits are in the venue. This weekend safety briefing. Don't increase the population. Don't decrease the population.

Don't end up in the hospital newspaper in jail. You end up in jail. Establish dominance quickly. Have a good weekend. Oh, man, I remember his general orders. All right. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Are you timing all the drops?

Right. I've nailed it this week. All right. Today's Safety Third comes from France. Oh, yeah. Wee wee. Oh, it's so long. Please allow me to tell you about a crazy event that happened to me back in April of 2018. OK, I used to work in a small village in France, in sort, insert mandatory baguette joke and French here. And they get the makeup.

Oh, for a company manufacturing and assembling seat frames for the Peugeot 3008 and 5008. Yes, bad car, I know. Anyway, back then I was in the last leg of my apprenticeship to validate my master's degree in industrial performance. The main subject of this apprenticeship was on the optimization and improvement of the supply chain between the stamping machines and a laser welding robot.

My old memoir was built around this robot and its improvement. This will become relevant later. So on this early afternoon of April around 3 p.m. I was drinking a coffee at my desk during one of the many breaks. Only we French know how to do. Yeah, because you have unions. Yeah, exactly. You can go you can go hold the boss hostage. You know, you fistfight a cop.

Don't give a shit. Exactly. The firefighters come back you up fistfighting the cops. Which is when? God, firefights are cool. Which is when I began to feel the ground shaking. No, this wasn't unusual. I mean, everyone who has worked in the stamping industry will know that it's when you're not feeling teeth shattering vibrations that something is off.

But these vibrations were a little bit different. I didn't have time to question what it could be. When suddenly I was deafened by a huge roar coming outside. I stood up just in time to see the two Mirage fighter jets had just flown right overhead. As I am a huge avgeek, I just laughed it off, almost cheering those two pilots. I even said out loud, how cool was that to a colleague?

And that's right when the emergency siren or the factory started. Oh, boy. As we evacuated to the factory parking lot, I learned from other colleagues that part of the workshop roof had collapsed because of the jet wash, or at least that's what we thought. I sort of see, there's a beam bent here. Yeah, I see a thing here that says perforation du toit, which I appreciate. Ten minutes later, a panic security officer came back and told us to leave

the company grounds and move it back at least 300 meters. As it turns out, they had just found a bomb in the rubble. Oh, OK. Yeah. Needless to say, we promptly retreated. We had to wait an hour or an hour and 30 to about two hours for the IED team of the Gendarmerie Nationale to come. Gendarmerie, how do I? How do I pronounce that?

No, you're fine. You're fine. It's fine. I believe that's the the the. So yeah, it's these these liberal French military units. They're all about gender, you know, the gender, the gender, the gender army. Oh, we're going to get canceled. Well, it took them an hour and a half to arrive because they had to do all their pronouns first.

It's true, yeah. Pro down check at 16,000 feet. That's impressive stuff. All right, cadets, it's three in the morning. We're going to suck at our pronouns. Yeah, so thankfully it was not a live bomb, but the remains of an inert one used for training, which still had about 25 kilograms of explosive in it. I think I think the French Air Force

have a very different definition of the word inert. We got very lucky as there were no fatalities and only two lightly injured personnel due to the roof collapse. It was break time, so no one was in the workshop. That's France. If this shit had dropped 100 meter on the left, it would have hit a highly explosive grain silo and 75 meters further. It would have hit an equally explosive gas tank used for forklifts.

So once again, the fucking exemplary accuracy of the armada layer. Yes. Once the explosive scene gave the all clear, we were able to go back to our cars and leave and life pretty much resumed as usual. A few minutes later, the B.E.A., which is the French equivalent of the NTSB, submitted its report on what happened. L'entesbe. L'entesbe.

The two mirages were on a training mission that involved the bombing run on a military terrain in eastern France. During these missions, it is commonplace for the pilots, even if it's nonactively encouraged by the Air Force, to practice the bombing run by simulating a few while on the way out to the military area. Right. And as it turns out, our factory was commonly used as a practice target by these pilots. That is that sounds so fucking safe.

Oh, man. What happened was that during the simulated bomb run, the Tom Cruise wannabes came up a little bit too fast. Yeah, I feel the need for speed. When they pulled up, the G forces were enough that the latch is holding one of the inert bombs failed. And the bomb punched the hole right through the wall of our workshop, causing parts of the roof to collapse and ruining one of our machines. You can see here's the hole it made.

The bomb. In the machine. Aventre. OK. Yes. Well, I got to say, good shot. Yeah. Just pow, just nailed it right between the two massive hazards. That's pretty much just about what one of the best bombing runs you can come up with right there.

He hit that target. Yeah, fuck this machine specifically. So the Air Force maintenance crews ended up getting the blame. But since they are not 100 percent sure of which part of the holding system failed first, no one was sacked. It's so shitty that it was them and not the pilot. You know, I guess you've got to maintain like the dignity of the officer corps, even when they're doing fake attacks on people's workplaces.

The damages were all paid to the company for an undisclosed amount, of course. And now the conclusion, the bouquet finale, if you will. Remember how I said my whole apprenticeship tended on one machine? Oh, no. Well, I guess which one was ripped open by the bomb. Oh, man. Sorry, buddy. Professor, yeah, I am the Air Force.

The Air Force bomb, my thesis. What do you mean, no extension? No, wait, I'm a truther about this. This is too good to be true. It's an inside job. You had a friend in the Air Force, who was really, really good at bombing. Really owed you a favor. It turns out that just calling it in on this thing with a laser target design.

So a laser, this, this hole was actually made by the laser, not by the bomb. So it turns out having a bomb blow up your working subject is a pretty good argument to ask the jury for clemency. Um, all is well, it ends well. I ended up getting my master's degree. I now have a fulfilling job as a supply chain engineer. And I have a very fun story to tell my friends and some podcasters.

Thank you so much for reading. I haven't closed some of the picks and a report of the incident submitted by the VEA in French here. Oh, we appreciate it. We have some like genuine inside insight here. Congratulations on the degree and on the job. And I hope that you station a network of anti air defences around whatever you're working on in future.

These bastards never, we never saw this happen again. And therefore I have purchased a shulker self-propelled anti air gun. Keep up to good work on a podcast. I really enjoy it. And I'm always looking forward to the next episode. And hey, if you ever want some French made industrial disasters, I'd be glad to help you find some information. Hell yeah, I like this one.

This was good. Yeah, this is good. Yes. Shake hands with danger. Don't. This is something that could have been avoided with proper safety procedures. Obviously. It's right.

You know, if they had just armored their building, they'd be fine. This is why you need to consider surface to air missiles as part of your factory safety. You never know when you're going to get bombed. All right. So our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Yes. Yes.

So what do we have commercials here at the end? I have one. Me, Abby Thorn from Philosophy Tube and my friend Devon have just started a podcast called Kill James Bond about why James Bond is such a dickhead. We have a pod bean. We have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash kill James Bond. It works much like this in that it's a podcast and you can listen to it with your ears.

I highly recommend it. I listen to the first episode. We have a fucking theme song. We put so much effort into this, man. Yes. Yes, it's a good podcast. You should listen to Kill James Bond. We have a Patreon is patreon.com slash W-T-Y-P pod where you can get bonus episodes.

Yeah, our next bonus episode is on the Bradley fighting vehicle, I believe. Yeah, we're basing this entirely off of the documentary Pentagon Wars. Exactly. We're going to have Nate and Francis from Hell of a Way to Die on again. We haven't recorded yet. Sorry for that, but our schedules didn't line up until next weekend, which is when we will record it. And I will stay up all night editing it and then upload.

Yes, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm not this is the life you chose. And then we have we can receive mail now. Yes, we have a P.O. box. Thank you to whoever sent me seven pounds of peas. Really appreciate that. Don't send me peas anymore, please. Fuck it, send him more peas.

I don't know what the shit gets to me. We also have much. We do have much. If you want international shipping on the merch soon, so we will figure something out. Liam and I are just going to mail ourselves, mail ourselves. Yeah, that's probably what we need to figure out some way of like, I guess if you if you if you want it, like fucking email the podcast account

and we'll work something out. Jesus Christ. And then we'll figure out a spreadsheet or say Google Forms or something. Send us money. We'll send you stuff. Yeah, that's right. And you can just send us stuff. If you want to send us stuff, you can send it to well, there's your

podcasting company P.O. Box 40178 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19106. All right. Thank you. That's the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States for more precision. As opposed to the other Philadelphia's out there, which are in other in other Pennsylvania's, in other Pennsylvania's.

Yes. Um, so if you send it to Philadelphia, Greece, things, Greece, or is it Turkey? It's there's there's a bunch of Philadelphia, Philadelphia. There's a new Philadelphia in Ohio, and I think there's actually a new Philly in Moss in in Pennsylvania. I'm tired. All right.

There is a second Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Um, yeah. Um, so make sure you make sure you get the right Philadelphia. Yeah. All right.