Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 66: Johnstown Flood of 1889

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

All the horrors that hell could wish, Such was the price that was paid for— fish! 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 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

Yeah, it should accelerate over time, I would expect. Yeah, so long as we keep producing content that is better every time, which. Wow. So long as every episode is better than the previous episode. Wow. So long as every episode makes the previous episode sound like a piece of shit that you don't even want to go back and listen to. I don't mean that people like listen to the old ones and I'm just like, oh, you poor,

you're poor bastard ears. Imagine there's your problem hipster, though. I'm being like, yeah, I like it when they had the lo-fi sound better. It was really good back when it was just the first episode that was me and Alice. I liked it before Liam came on the podcast. I guess I'm going to hurt you now. I will be right back, everybody. I'm going to drive across to West Philly and break Roz's legs.

Damn. You got to get through the Assad, the Syrian army checkpoints. Yeah, that's about to say. Yeah, that's okay. I know a shortcut. Speaking of things breaking, welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Yes.

I'm Justin Rosniak and the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Koldwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her and my throat hurts from doing five and a half hours of podcasting and also laughing so hard. I think I was about to lose my voice. So I will be talking less than normal.

Just the entire comment section goes fucking get in. Yes. Hi haters. Yeah. It's your boy. Yeah, Liam. So I will bravely take up the we're going to do the Russian system. When Alice kills over, I will take up her phone.

Thank you. Yes. You're going to interrupt Justin for all the times. I cannot. Yes. Yes. We've stand ready to take back the podcast from, I guess the, I guess, Ross, I'm calling you the Nazis here.

Well, there's people in the comments of the Smolensk one who are absolutely convinced that Nazis and Poles were like the same thing. Didn't know about that one. People, a couple of people left us a one star reviews being like, they literally said the Nazis were right. I'm just like, no, it's not, that's not what we say. We didn't say that. No, you're being intellectually dishonest.

And I don't respect you at all. But I already say my pronouns were he him. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Okay. All right. Let's do this. We're gathered here today on the occasion of Vladimir Lenin's 151st birthday to talk

about Pennsylvania. Liam. Liam. I have, I have one answer for you. I'll just be against me and then we can't even upload this episode. Because we'll get YouTube struck. That usually assured podcast destruction. Fine.

Good. So Lenin lived, Lenin lives. Lenin will live forever. I am told. That's not how mortality works. But Lenin walks around the world. You know, the strangest tongues believe him, et cetera. Langston Hughes.

Yes. Langston Hughes. Yeah. Before, before he like got canceled for being a communist and he was like, I was never a communist. Despite having written like pro-Lenin farms. Oh, that's not happened. I like them personally.

I didn't agree with this ideology. Just like, just like hastily tucking your Soviet flag back in the House of the American Committee. Yeah. I don't know what's going on with the life of this jacket. I don't blame him for it at all. But it was also very funny in hindsight that he was just like communism, never heard of it.

Yeah. So what we're going to do today, what do you see on the screen in front of you is the scene of utter calamity and horror, right? We're going to talk about a disaster which is like etched into the cultural memory of Pennsylvania. Because it was such a horrible disaster, but also because it kept happening after it happened the first time. We're going to talk about the Johnstown flood of 1889.

I love this painting you have here. It's like a fucking Bruegel. Yeah. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. I appreciate the reports coming out that he's already on Suicide Watch and all I can think of is that scene from Futurama where Bender says, do a flip. Yeah, we call this the double reverse face plant to broken hyoid bone. Yeah, no, the lowest possible bar for American justice has been cleared in that a guy who

we all saw brutally murder somebody has been convicted of murder in the second degree. Yeah. And it says a lot that Roz and I both certainly didn't think they were going to get convicted on all three counts. No, I was shocked. I was shocked. Genuinely shocked that they convicted on a majority of them and stunned that they convicted on all three.

He was convicted of murder instead of manslaughter. I was surprised. Yeah. And you could tell all of the cops were surprised and all of the pundits on the right were surprised because they were fucking mad. Because they're just like, what's the point in living? Yeah, one of the fucking the fraternal order of police, the National Cops Union said that our American way of policing is on trial.

It's like, yeah, that was the idea and it's been convicted. It is a bit frustrating, though, because it's, you know, I've seen that some some people just be like, well, see, yeah, exactly. Like it's just a few bad apples. And this is how it's designed to work. And then they killed a 15 year old girl in Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. While they were reading the verdict.

Yeah. Well, I think it is a knife. Well, it doesn't fucking matter. There are four of you rugby tackler. You guys wear stab proof vests. What one of the problems with bad apples is they spoiled the bunch. Yeah. That is how that phrase goes.

That's how that they release ethylene gas, which causes the other apples to go bad more quickly. So bananas also do that, but that just makes them ripen. So what we're saying is we have to do police abolition and replace them with bananas. Yes. I don't I don't know what that would look like. I mean, bananas are not a very moral fruit. Oh, thanks.

Like bananas to fire department in this analogy. No, no, no. It's more United Fruit Company. Oh, I see. I see the United Fruit Company's fire department. You know, my local. I don't like that as well. My local grocery co-op just switched from getting bananas from some organic thing to

get in Chiquita bananas, which is the United Fruit Company. I was like, wow, OK, now you have to stop using bananas. You should protest that. I could go to the co-op board and yell at them. Yeah. You're not gonna, though. I'm not going to. Yeah, but I could.

Hypothetically, I could. I do like the idea. That's what you make a stick about. Just walking in there like gun drawn. Yeah. We're not we're not. I want the old bananas. I'm just doing fucking cron-start shit.

We are forming an armed worker's Soviet in defense of whatever banana brand we had previously. I'm not going to buy. I'm not going to buy your blood bananas. That's right. Anyway, I don't want to take his blood money. He's a dentist. Gums bleed.

He hasn't been sentenced yet. Could be anything from almost nothing to like. Yeah. I think they'd have a hell of a time giving him almost nothing, though. Yeah. But then maybe that's like hindsight now that he has been convicted in the first place because I was convinced they were going to acquit him. So.

I figure it will not be the maximum sentence other than there are. What is it? Aggravating circumstances. Aggravating circumstances. Thank you. Yeah. Because technically he's he's a first time offender. They wouldn't normally be limited to 15 years unless there are aggravating factors.

Now I would consider being a cop to be pretty fucking aggravating. Yes. And in front of a child. Yeah. Now he gets the full 40 but with 39 years and eight months suspended. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Yeah.

Thank you for speaking it into existence. Getting 40 years of unsupervised probation. I will say it's been it's been a tough week to be a prison abolitionist. And I'm just like, I don't want people in prisons. And at the same time, I hope they literally nail this dick to the floor. There is one solution, which is if you don't have to be in a prison, if you don't have to be in prison, if you don't want to imprison somebody like that, you can. Go back.

You can go like full 18th century England and just have execution as the penalty for every crime. It's all like transportation. We're going to put him on a ship. We're going to send him to Mars. Yeah. This is going to be that he's going to be the first source of labor. Elon Musk's buddy cop movie in space where they both redacted each other.

He is way into the movie. He is Elon Musk's sole source of labor and later protein. I would. I would watch that. I would watch that. Oh, boy. All right. So, um, well, it's still a cab.

Yes. I mean, no matter what that one guy on Twitter who really wants the attention, who thinks I'm counter revolutionary trash, I cry about it to your 400 followers guy who wants the attention. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Your mom doesn't love you. All right.

Who could possibly love you? The podcast that hates you back. That's right. With a smile. All right. So now we need to, before we talk about the Johnstown flood, we need to go through some context here. We need to talk about what's Pennsylvania.

What is Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania is Penn's Woods. Yeah. Some guy, this Quaker showed up. He did a treaty that was one of the less exploitative ones. And then his kids like we're going to find the fastest guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. William Penn himself, if you go on the like the Lenape tribes website, which they have, they're like, Oh yeah, Penn himself pretty good. All that, all that stuff was fine. His kids though. Fuck those guys. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, you don't have to do a land acknowledgement if you're, you know, in like this part of Pennsylvania, right? You're on, you're on purchase to Lenape lands. Yeah. We bought it fair and square. Yeah. Everything actually for a decent deal. Not just like for some beads.

Yeah. Exactly. Everything else. That's a little shakier. It's pretty bad. Yeah. So, okay, we need to talk about the main podcast favorite, the main line of public works, which was a series of canals and railroads to connect Philadelphia over here to Pittsburgh over

here, right? There were a couple of sections. It was supposed to be all a canal, but later they were like, we can't actually do it all as a canal. That's impossible. Right. I was told after I mentioned on a previous episode about the spelling that Pittsburgh used to be spelled and pronounced Pittsburgh.

Yeah. It's all founded by your people, Alice. I will henceforth be calling it that under protest. That's fine. I'm a Pittsburgh erudentist. We do have Edinburgh, Pennsylvania. Nice. There's a state university there.

There's, you know, what you would do is the main line of public works was a railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia, Pennsylvania, which is on the Susquehanna River, right? We've seen the remnants. You made me stop there. Yeah. We did actually go stop there last year and see all bunch of it. Yeah. Then you brought sectional canal boats along the railroad.

It was a canal boat that could be divided into two or three sections, put on flat cars for the railroad part. Then you put it back together when you got to the canal. You canaled it up what was called the Eastern Division Canal and then the Juniata Division Canal. That went up the Susquehanna River and then up the Juniata River. Juniata. Juniata.

I'm from there. I get to correct you. Okay. That went to a place called Holidaysburg. In Holidaysburg, you hauled the boat out of the water. You split it up again and you went over the Allegheny Portage Railroad, right? That's this guy here and also this tunnel here. The boat was hauled over the mountain because of a problem with canal engineering, right?

It's hard to go uphill. Yeah. You're going to have like a lux and shit. Now, because railroads were still in their infancy, they were actually built exactly like canals. It's also hard to go up hills. Is this the place where you made me walk up an incline plane after making me walk across a two-lane highway?

Yes. Yeah. So fun aside, everybody. There I was tremendously hungover, mad at the world. Who was that? Yeah, but it was your fault. No, dude. It's not like, oh, and to be fair, no one put a gun to my head and said, Liam, chug this

beer. Yeah, because I wasn't there. Ross did a baton march to me and we had to walk up this incredibly steep hill because that's where the incline plane used to be. And then Ross made me be the incline plane and I, too, had to haul a canal boat, which was very uncomfortable. And then he laughed at me and tricked me and said, hey, fat boy, run. And I cried.

I do love the stories of like urbex with Ross. So they're always entertaining. Someone's always on the verge of throwing up because they've been drinking a little too much. I got to go on the road with you guys. Come to you once international travel is possible again. Just slip the border. Slip the border.

Yeah, that's true. So the Allegheny Portage Railroad. That's this section between Johnstown and Holidaysburg, right? This is sort of built like a canal in that the railroad parts are flat. Then there's an inclined plane where the weight of cars ascending and descending the grade sort of pulls them up and down along with some assistance from a stationary steam engine. No one actually thought railroad locomotives could go up and down hills yet.

So it was built like a canal. Slash backwards. Very dangerous. It was built like a canal, but it wasn't a canal. And the main reason why it wasn't a canal is because they couldn't find a good source of water at the top of the grade in order to fill the locks, right? And you could get the water up there if you pumped it up there, but that was expensive, right?

Usually what you want to do with a canal is go with the cheaper option where you just sort of reroute existing waterways to fill the canal. And they just couldn't do it in that section. That's why that section was a railroad from the start. So, you know, once you hauled it over the mountain, you got the Johnstown, you put it back in the canal. This is the Western Division Canal. That went all the way to Pittsburgh.

But the Western Division Canal also had some issues we'll get to in a second. Now, the main line of public works itself was an extremely expensive, I wouldn't say quite unmitigated failure, but it never really competed with the Erie Canal in New York, right? The whole system got sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1857, who immediately diverted most of the traffic to the railroad. The whole system, the whole canal system you see here, you know, covered a lot of Pennsylvania. This was not completely closed until 1901, but it fell out of disuse pretty quick. It fell into disuse and that fell out of disuse.

So, now the Western Division Canal had a problem. Johnstown's the high point and it sort of flows downhill all the way to Pittsburgh, right? And one of the things is there, you know, the rain there is pretty seasonal. And a lot of times during a dryer months, you know, or during conditions of drought, the canal wouldn't have enough water in it to operate properly, right? You wouldn't be able to fill the locks very quickly. You wouldn't be able to move as much traffic as you wanted, right?

So, after the canal's first season of operations in 1934, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania commissioned an engineer named Sylvester Welch to find a way to impound water to use during dryer months, right? And he says the way to do this is to dam the Kanema River. I don't know if that's how that's pronounced. Good enough. I'll take it properly. Yeah.

It's Lenape for Otter Creek. Oh. Hey, but earthen dams. I love a good earthen dam. Oh, yeah. So, they started, they authorized construction in 1836, but they only began work on it in 1840. This is the sixth year of operation for the canal, right? Work stopped in 1842 when the dam was half finished.

Nice. In 1847, part of the dam fails, right? How bad are we talking? I don't think it was like a major flood, but it was a flood. Okay. Yeah. Work continued in 1851 and was completed in 1852. So, with the South Fork Dam and the Western Reservoir, as it was called, finished, the

canal could now operate reliably in drought conditions. And it did so for one year. Then the canal went out of business. That's more years that your canal has worked for, Roz. So, the whole thing was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which of course at this point had built a railroad, right? And that sort of drove the canal out of business. So, they had all this canal infrastructure they didn't really know what to do with.

Well, flow trade stuff. Car floats. Car floats everywhere. Oh, God. Well, when you think about it, they were designed to operate the reverse of that. Car floats everywhere. Float car, I guess. Float car.

It was a boat car. So, this dam, you know, they finished it. It was basically brand new. They had no idea what to do with it. They just sort of let it sit there for a while. Come down to the Pennsylvania Railroad pre-owned canal lot and sale center. We have the best deals available for you. You want a canal?

This bad boy will fit so many boat cars in it, no problem. You want to take coal and shit from the mountains? You can take coal and shit from the mountains. You want to give a bunch of immigrant laborers, dysentery, a whole bunch of shit no one's ever heard of? And you bury them in basically a siding for 25 fucking years and then you lie about it? You can do that. No problem.

No problem at all. Come down to Pennsylvania excess canal storage. Joe, ask for Joe. Yeah, we sold this canal to the 1901 version of Megatronics. Yeah. Megatronics little little do we know has a 990 year. Yeah, Megatronics S 1900. Yeah.

The ninja swords are really just for decoration, actually. Yeah, those are actual ninja swords. Those are actually from the fucking war. What's the name of the period? The Sengoku period. Here's I guess. Okay. So this is an earth and rock filled dam.

Two feet high, 918 feet long, 10 feet wide at the crest up here, right? 220 feet wide at the base. It had a 70 foot wide emergency spillway, right? Your basic theory of operation here, you know, the dam holds back a reservoir, right? There's this control tower here from which you could use some control rods to open sluice gates that fed into five cast iron pipes. Those cast iron pipes went into a stone culvert underneath the dam and then an outlet into the little Kanama River, right?

You know, so you could discharge as needed to fill the canal. You could drain the whole reservoir if you needed to in case you needed to do repairs, you know, as originally designed, the dam worked pretty good, right? But again, it was abandoned almost immediately after it was finished, right? Here's our reservoir. Here's the South Fork Dam is up here. There was a spillway on the side, right? Now, and you know, at the time it was built, this railroad that runs straight through it was not there,

obviously. So, you know, the dam wasn't really being maintained after it fell into disuse, right? In 1862, the culvert in the dam collapsed and sort of washed out. They didn't do any repairs on that, right? The Pennsylvania Railroad sold the dam and the reservoir to Pennsylvania Congressman John Riley, right? John Riley kind of sits on it. But what he does, what he does do is he sold the cast iron discharge pipes for their scrap value, right? Hell, yes.

Literally early 20th century strip the copper wiring out. Mid 19th century. Oh, fuck. Game changer, pioneer of visionary for ripping shit out of other shit. Before that, before this, guys had to like steal the lead off of church roofs. But this guy was in the like stolen scrap metal game in a like a way that people wouldn't be for decades. Yeah. So anyway, so now it was impossible to dewater the reservoir if you need to do repairs on the dam, right?

A deal? Yeah, exactly, right? So in 1879, a man named Benjamin Franklin Ruff organized a recreational club for rich guys in Pittsburgh. No, thank you. I prefer my Benjamin Franklin smooth. Just walking up to him like touching his face, being like, oh. It'd be a smooth Benjamin Franklin. Unblemished by cirrhosis and everything else he probably had.

That would be, I guess, the statue on the bench at University of Pennsylvania. Post smooth Ben Franklin's. Oh, you rub it for good luck. Fuck you. Fuck your dumb school should have gone to temple. Smooth Ben Franklin hanging out with smooth Bernie Sanders. So Benjamin Franklin Ruff organized this club with Henry Clay Frick. Oh, shit.

My favorite industrialist. You remember from very nearly getting popped by Emma Goldman's boyfriend, Alexander Berkman, who burst into his office with a gun and a sharpened steel file to try and kill him. And came damn close from back in the day when you could just go to a guy's office and be like, oh yeah, this is the building named after the guy. Hi, I'm at two o'clock and just get shot. He is an actual guy. He has a name on his door and everything. And you won't get taken out by like a black water sniper nest as soon as you come within a mile of his house.

You can just walk right up to him and just like do the job, right? But didn't come off. I have to say. And then our gizm has failed ever since. That's right. Shut up, fellas. Should have organized this stuff in some kind of a state. No, we can't do that.

That's no, shut up. He made his fortune through coke, right? Not the good kind. No, it's not Coca-Cola and it is not cocaine. It's coaking coal, which is used in the steel industry. Working in Pennsylvania, land of opportunity. So he wound up buying the reservoir and the surrounding land. And the intention here was to repair the dam, use the reservoir and the surrounding land for fishing and hunting.

Right. So rich guy stuff. Yeah. So they go about doing this in 1881. It was very popular. Started attracting a lot of Pittsburgh's upper crust, including of course, Andrew Carnegie, right? The steel guy, Samuel Ray, who was eventually president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Andrew Mellon, you know, the Mellon Bank guy, a whole bunch of other people.

One of the fun things is if you sort of go through the history, a lot of the guys that joined this club didn't like each other. They just really crazy. Yeah. A bunch of old rich guys all trying to arrange hunting accidents for each other. Yeah. Oh, no, Barnaby. I seem to have shot you 37 times. Actually, it's a Pittsburgh accident.

So I know I shot you in 45 times. I'm sorry. They stealers. Shut the fuck up. I love the idea that that's what Andrew Carnegie talked like. No, he was fucking. The one thing I remember about Andrew Carnegie is the reason why I pronounce his name Andrew Carnegie, which is that he demanded under threat of serious legal action, a correction in every newspaper that pronounced like that suggested his name was pronounced that way. And he insisted this dying day.

It was Andrew Carnegie. And he would absolutely. No, it's Andrew Carnegie. Yeah. Yeah. We're alive and you're dead. We're alive. Lenin's alive and you're not.

Mm hmm. I'm sorry. I get a little antsy when I've been recording for like five hours haunting Pittsburgh. That's right. That's actually true. But whatever. So the, you know, a whole bunch of other people who went on to be like Congressman and stuff like that, joined this club called the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. When Langston Hughes wrote that the strangest tongues receive Lenin, he was talking about Pittsburgh.

Yes. Thank you. Yeah, sure. That's all of Pennsylvania, which has probably more regional dialects than I think any other state. I thank God every day I don't have one. Yeah, you don't have an accent at all. At all. At all.

At all. At all. At all. At all. Whoa. Hello. I'm Alice Coldwell Kelly. Next slide, please.

Okay. So this is the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club club. It looks like shit. No, I really like this. Look at the sightings, Alice. Yeah, look at the sighting. No, I don't like it. Oh, are you looking at the sighting when you're on the porch?

I'm so rich that anarchists are trying to stab me with a sharpened file. No, I like that. I want nicer sighting. I like this. Alice is like 140 years old. Yeah, it's called maintenance. Yeah, the National Park Service on today. No.

That's why it looks like this. Yeah. Yeah, it's because big government intervened. Way to go, Alice. No, big government's probably the only reason it's still standing up. That's true, yeah. Yeah, to be fair, if it were maintained by anarchists, it would have melted it down for firewood already.

It's just a polycule living in the ruins. Yeah. So the South Fork Reservoir, right, was not a great place for the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club because it was an artificial reservoir. And as such, it had no fish, which makes fishing difficult. This is rich guy stuff. It's water, but it'll be so I assume there are fish in it. Right.

Fish fucking it. The fish are all talk thinness. They had to bring in like tens of thousands of fish on trains from places that had fish. Backing up my big trailer full of live fish. Do you have a picture of the fish train? I do not. I wish I did. Damn.

I don't know. I guess you just throw them in a tank car. Sure. And then. It's my worst nightmare, but I'm morbidly fascinated by the idea. Can you imagine being the guy who had to load that? Just like, well, my sense of smell is gone and I am in a state of open rebellion against my employer.

Yeah. A bunch of rich weirdos want to fish. I have I have like a tank car full of Koi. Yeah. So they had to stock the reservoir with fish artificially, right? Artificially. Yes. That's right.

It's twice as annoying people. I wouldn't interrupt, but I'm rallying. Now, because they wanted to protect their fish investment, they installed a fish screen in front of the spillway for the dam. Fucking enclosure happens again and again. Because they don't want the fish. They don't want the fish to escape the reservoir. Now, the fish screen did prevent the fish from leaving, but it also caught debris, right?

And required frequent cleaning to keep the spillway. Yeah. I'm the guy who has to clean the fish screen for the rich weirdo. Now, there was another problem with the club and that was excess, right? Members of the club didn't want to drive their horse and carriage all the way around the lake to get to the clubhouse. That's understandable. But they're not driving.

Someone is driving them. 1880s pistol to their head. Yeah. It has a seven mile perimeter and the coach goes like seven miles. Read a book. I thought you were just telling Roz to read a book like unsolicited advice. Yeah. I always will do.

It's Carnegie there in his carriage reading Harry Potter or some garbage. Yeah. Reading inexplicably atlas shrugged. So to fix that problem of access, the top two feet of the dam were lopped off to create a wide path for horses and carriages on top of the dam, right? Now, two feet doesn't sound like a lot, but you got to think about the shape of a reservoir here, sort of the cross section, right? The top two feet of the reservoir have the widest cross section of the whole reservoir.

So every inch counts when you're talking about this sort of stuff, especially at the top of the dam, right? Now other than this, you know, they tried to do some maintenance on the dam, right? It kept springing leaks because it hadn't really been maintained for like 20 years previously. That'll do it. Their idea for fixing leaks in the dam was they would just patch the leaks with mud and straw. You're the richest industrialist the world has ever seen to that point.

Yeah. And they didn't become the richest industrialist the world had ever seen to that point. They might properly do maintenance or paying full price for materials. You don't get rich by spending too much. I mean, yeah. So the thing is these bud and straw patches didn't work very well and they settled unevenly, right? And it created high and low spots on the dam.

Now there was one member of the club named Daniel Johnson Morrill, who was a Republican congressman from Johnstown. He expressed severe concern about the state of the dam. He even offered to repair it with his own money, which was an offer that club president, Benjamin Franklin Ruff, turned down. You know, really abrasive Benjamin Franklin. Yeah. Yeah.

Both of these members have free money, man, flood. I do want to point out that it's pronounced as far as I've heard it, Kanemaw. Kanemaw. You actually pronounce it. Kanemaw. Kanemaw. Kanemaw. Kanemaw.

Very good. Thank you. OK. I'm done. That's all my jokes. It's very impressive. Anyway, so I guess we have some context here at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, right? It's the...

Sorry, folks. It's at the confluence of the Stony Creek River and the Kanemaw Rivers, right? Question. What is the lime green ulcer on the left here? It's probably a golf course. It's a golf course. Gross. Gross.

It says romance and adventure like Johnstown, Pennsylvania. There's a University of Pittsburgh campus there. Once again, Pitt, Cure, Polio, and Penn State did. So... Abolish golf. Take all the golf courses, make them into housing. I wonder where... You could live under the holes like it's an old disused Nike bunker.

Yeah, just do that. Just tunnel them all out. Be a golf mall lock. This was a... Golf chat. Golf mall people. Yeah. This was a big railroad town.

It's on the Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line. It had a lot of steel and metal works. Even to this day, they're still there. They just don't... You can tell by the river. Yeah. And even back in the day, it flooded pretty frequently. Another thing is they had a lot of coal that's just off screen.

Now... Laughing too. Yeah. Bituminous coal. This was the... The good shit. Yeah. Well, no, they're not good.

Well, it depends on how you define good. The bad shit. Yeah. That's Pennsylvania, baby. Now, for a long time, John Stannet is subject to pretty frequent flooding, right? And folks knew that like, all right, if there's a certain amount of rain, it's time to head upstairs because stuff's going to get wet, right? So anyway, on May 31st, 1889...

Oh, boy. John Stannet was hit with the worst rainfall ever recorded in Pennsylvania, at least up until that time. It wasn't probably until Hurricane Agnes that it was broken. As far as I know, I could be wrong. You can still see that fucking golf course looking out like a fucking mitten. It's like giving you a thumbs up. I hate it so much.

So... Fuck golf courses. Six to 10 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, right? The Kanema River was overflowing its banks and some streets in Johnstown were under 10 feet of water, right? Now, that morning, the new president of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, Elias Unger, maybe Unger. I don't know.

That's a name. Yeah. He woke up and he saw that the South Fork Dam was close to overtopping. Uh-oh. So he went back to bed and got his slave boy to handle it. No. So he, you know, to his credit, he got immobilized by a lot of people. My bad.

Sorry. Sorry to apologize to a guy named Elias Unger. I'm sorry, ghost of Mr. Unger. So, you know, the situation was the fish screens were all clogged with debris from the rainstorm, right? So just the image of clogged fish screens is a very funny one to me. The spillway was basically inoperable, right? Cool.

He assembled a group of men to make a last-ditch effort to save the dam. And they set about trying to unclog the spillway. And I got to add shovels to start putting dirt on top of the dam, hopefully to buy them some time. So a literal last-ditch effort. Yeah. So, Unger sent John Park, who was an engineer associated with the club, to go down, to go Warren Towns downstream of the dam's imminent failure.

But the thing was, they had Warren Towns downstream of the dam's imminent failure a few times before, so no one took it seriously. Well, that sucks to suck. Yeah. And it had been a number of false alarms. So, you know. I like that the response is we're just going to ignore it rather than, oh, maybe this time they're right.

Maybe. And we just got lucky all those other times. This dam that cried wolf, famous parable. There may be something mitigating the authority's response here. John Park himself did not wind up telling the town authorities about the situation personally. He actually wound up sending a man to go do it for him, I guess maybe he had less authority. I don't know. So, around 1.30 p.m. that day, the workers gave up trying to repair the dam because it

was too dangerous to go on, right? All right. And in the meantime, from just the amount of rain which had fallen that day, Johnstown itself was already completely inundated, right? Some streets were 10 feet underwater already. So, even if warnings had been heeded, evacuation was close to impossible, right? Hope y'all can float, right? Yeah.

Even that doesn't help you for what's coming. Yeah, boy. A bunch of fish. Yeah. Stop it. Stop it. I don't disrespect you like this. Overtopping.

Man, they've built that dam really poorly if all of that shit's happening to it at once. And I think the main problem is that it just stops, you know? Yeah. It's going to float around the side. No, luckily there's a giant pane of glass right there. Yeah. This is a... These are various ways a dam can fail.

But, um... Contact groin? What? Contact groin. On the bottom left. Sea fidget abutment. Contact groin. Oh, yeah.

Contact groin. That's right here. Huh. Yeah. I also like the one that just says rodent activity, like any of it. What kind of activity? Any. Fuck shit up.

Beavers are fuckers. That is true. I believe that. I just like the idea of like this, like a crack team of beaver spies that sees a dam and is like, ah, competition, we must undermine this. Yeah. So, beaver industrial espionage. There's lots of ways an earthen dam can fail.

But one of the worst is overtopping. That's when dam... Is that when stuff goes over the top? That's when the water goes over the top. Oh. Right. So, you know, one of the things... Some dams are designed to be overtopped.

I guess those would be weirs, not dams. You know, but once water starts overtopping an earthen dam, it causes erosion, right? So, it starts taking the dirt on the top of the dam with it, right? So, you have a cross-section that's full of water now. Now, as the cross-sectional area of the eroded portion increases, more water flows through. That water flows faster. It erodes more quickly, right? This is sort of a...

This is a vicious cycle, right? So, once it starts overtopping, you cannot stop it. It's gone at that point. It's just a matter of time, right? This is why overtopping is so dangerous and why you never want it to happen. So, at 2.55 pm, the South Fork Dam overtopped, right? 3.84 billion gallons of water suddenly had nothing holding it back, right? It was off to the races.

Yeah, carrying a bunch of rich boy fish. Yeah. Cue the William Tell overture here. I don't have a drop, so I'm just going to do it with my mouth. I have to find a recording that doesn't get us a copyright strike, too. All right. I can do you the news if that helps. So, right here, this is about where the South Fork Dam was, right?

See the town of St. Michael here and Sidman here? Those weren't there at the time. Those were part of the reservoir. So, the dam breaks, right? And this wall of water and debris starts heading down a river to the town of South Fork. South Fork had received some warning. It was also built on high ground, so it escaped comparatively unscathed. 20 to 30 buildings were destroyed.

Four people were killed in South Fork, right? Next was, the next obstacle it had was the kind of viaduct, which is over here, right? So, this is, this was a, you know, your strong single span heavily built arch bridge, right? This is built way back. Archers love staying up. Yeah, famously. This was built way back in 1833 for the Alligator Portage Railroad. You know, this is a nicely proportioned, well-decorated, very heavy bridge, right?

And it was now facing down a wave of water with a flow rate greater than the entire Mississippi River Delta. Uh-oh. Yeah. Millions of tons of water and debris slammed into this bridge at about 40 miles an hour, and it held for seven minutes. Archers fucking love staying up. They love it, man. That's a heroic seven minutes.

I will give the bridge that. About to say, yeah. Now, the thing is, once it, because it held back this enormous wave of water, it sort of acted like another dam, right? Oh boy. Yeah. Oops. This, this wave of water, which had been slowly like dissipating now had renewed strength,

renewed hydraulic head. Yeah, you've made the war some mad. Yes. Exactly. You've angered the flood. You have angered the flood. So, so suddenly we've gone from, you know, a 70 foot wall of water down to, I don't know, maybe a 20 foot wall of water.

Now we're back up to a 70 foot fault wall of water, right? Yeah. It moves to its second form. Yes. Big, angry wave too. Continues on its 14 mile path of total and complete obliteration, right? So, its next step is here, mineral point, right? Mineral point was a small town.

It was about one mile downstream of the viaduct. It had about 30 houses along one street. And it was, it was, it was wiped from this plane of existence. Just total obliteration. Nothing remained. No structures, no foundations, no topsoil. The entire valley there was stripped clean down to bedrock. Jesus.

Oh, you can start over real nice. I guess. Yeah. Assuming you've repopulated the area and so on. And it makes getting cold out all the east here. Got to continue down the river, down to the town of East Kanima, right? Now, witnesses at high ground on East Kanima describe the approaching torrent as looking like a flood and more like an enormous moving hill bearing down on the town with like buildings

and shit. Yeah. Carrying all this shit like Katamari. Yeah. So, there was the railroad follows the river here, right? Up to a bad south fork and then it turns north. There was a railroad engineer named John Hess. He was taking a train out of East Kanima when he spotted the oncoming tide of trees, buildings,

animals and people, right? And he threw the locomotive into reverse and just went full speed backwards through East Kanima, blowing the whistle the whole time. Yeah, I understand. I understand the whole. I put it in R. Yeah. Put it in R.

Alerting a lot of people to make for high ground. You know that the flood caught up with him, but somehow he managed to survive. And I'm filing an incident report and I will be taking my seven and a half overtime. He used his gigantic work environment. Used his two gigantic balls as flotation devices. So, there were two major industries in East Kanima, right? Sort of linked together. There was the Cambria Ironworks and the adjacent Gattier Wireworks.

What do you think their specialty was? Wire and wire. A specific type of wire. Len. They don't make a lot of wire, do they? No. Like copper wire? No.

I was thinking it was too early for that. Yeah. What are telegraph poles made of? Barbed wire. Oh, Jesus. That's not so good. So, all this barbed wire is now picked up and entangled into this massive wave of debris barreling towards downtown Johnstown at 40 miles an hour.

That's bad. Yep. So, this deluge, this tidal wave comes down into Johnstown proper. It's about 57 minutes after the dam broke, right? It swept through the town destroying all but the most heavily built structures. So, it sort of came through down here past this ironworks. It sort of flowed through downtown, but most of it went into what's called the Stone Bridge, right? The Stone Bridge was a relatively new structure in 1889.

It carried the Pennsylvania railroad across the County Ma River, right? And a whole bunch of debris piled up against it sort of formed a temporary dam which caught fire. Oh, great. Yes. Just a bunch of burning cows and people and barbed wire and houses and shit. Yes. Yeah.

This is the worst yard sale I've ever been to. Getting called out from the fire department and I got to go put out the flooded barbed wire fire. I think the fire department's probably been destroyed by this point. Yeah. So, now, unlike the other viaduct, this one held, right? That's incredible. But the flood water is still pouring in.

So, what it does is it turns around and starts flowing up the Stony Creek River. Again, the water is mad and now it has changed direction in order to come after more victims. Yes. So, it flows all the way up the Stony Creek River until gravity eventually gets a hold of it. And then it comes back down. Shuffa fucks everything again. Whoops.

It smashes back into the Stone Bridge, right? Are the people of Johnstown not entitled to a fucking break? A breather, maybe? Yeah. As opposed to being caught in the world's shittiest game of water pinball. So, possibly the only game of water pinball. So, at this point, like a lot of downtown Johnstown just got completely destroyed just through the motion of the water as well as outer suburbs.

You know, it came in, it all this debris got slammed up against the Stone Bridge, which again, somehow held. The fire here burned for three days. You know, it's entirely full of trees, parts of houses, barbed wire, road cars, livestock. Just stuff. Yeah. Visceral. Yes.

Some entire atmospheric railway. Yeah. Looking like the dang loop in there. Yeah, I was about to say. I mean, this is a painting made shortly after the disaster called Detailed the Great Panama Valley Disaster Flood and Fire at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Subtitled Hundreds Roasted Alive at Railroad Bridge. Jesus.

You don't get evocative language like roasted alive anymore. No. This is true. Reject of eternity in praise to tradition. Yeah. I like all the women's swimming because I would be doing that. I'd be swimming. Yeah.

I like the I also like the woman on the bottom left who is just on a horse fucking tearing ass out of there. Yeah. I don't want to go to the fire flood. Yeah. I think I just like the share zone. You can leave if you're fast enough. Just walk out.

Yeah. Get on your horse and just fucking go leave town. So, um, you know, it's difficult to convey like the scale of this disaster through even the photographs that were around at the time. Uh, this is the main street. Um, you can see, uh, it's about piled up to the first story of buildings with just, you know, lumber matchsticks, matchsticks. Yeah.

I'm sure most of this caught fire at some point. Also still full of like barbed wire. Yes. It's all full of barbed wire. Telegraph poles, Telegraph cables. Um, I'm sure it was people. People, forces,

horses, cows, bull, railroad cars, railroad cars. Bits of bridge. Bits of topsoil. This is the stone bridge after a couple of weeks of debris removal.

Strong ass bridge. Yes. Arches love to stay up. Yeah. Yes. Um, you know, when, when all this debris came in, it was a pile. 70 feet high, covering 30 acres. Jesus.

All full of barbed wire. Yeah. Yeah. That's bad. Um, and removal of this debris was very slow. Um, but they eventually figured out how to speed it up. Uh, when a man named dynamite bill Flynn. Oh yeah.

Found the guy. Yeah. We found it. We found a dynamite guy. We had a crew of 900 people who just blew it all up. Just a fucking easy Pete from fall out New Vegas. Yeah. And he is going to dynamite this barbed wire into atoms.

Yes. Uh, this was not a super duper survivable flood. One of the ways you could do it though, uh, was to be lucky enough to be in a structure that remained intact as it was carried away. So this is the John Schultz house. Um, It's not supposed to look like that. Probably not.

Not supposed to look like that. This was skewered by a huge tree and then uprooted by the flood, moved off its foundations on Main Street and then floated a couple blocks down to Union Street and then got deposited on its side. There were, there were six people in there, including the owner, Mr. Schultz. All of them survived. Just throwing up out the side of your window door. Like I, I always wanted to live in a bouncy castle.

I tell you, what about John Schultz though? Guy knew how to build a fucking house. I was about to say, yeah, it's a pretty, pretty well built house. Does not skimp on the siding at any point. Mm hmm. Another, another railroad car just sitting over here. Um, Yeah.

So much involved wire. There's some accounts of people, you know, just being, just being, if you got passed, you know, one of the tricks was not getting stuck in the debris pile at the stone bridge. If you somehow got passed that a lot of times people, Yeah, swept clear. Yeah. You get swept clear. You actually had a little better chance of surviving.

There are folks downstreams with like poles trying to fish people out of the river. I like that you call it a trick like you're going to get the Prima strategy guide for surviving the Johnstown floods. Well, it's not like this didn't happen again. Oh boy. Maybe, maybe we can do at least two more episodes on Johnstown floods. Oh boy. So,

you know, here's, here's sort of the downtown area shortly after the flood. This is taken from the funicular, which is still there. I think it's the only funicular in the United States you can drive your car on. Yeah. You can see most of the downtown is not just vacant land. It's not even like a bombs gone off. It's more random than that. It's much more random.

Yeah. I mean, it's all luck of the draw. Yeah. Doing a very complicated exercise in like fluid dynamics to work out who's house gets fucking uprooted. Yes. So, All right. Now, the official death toll from this incident was 2,209 people.

Later revised to 2,208 people because one guy who was reported missing turned out he just managed to extricate himself from the giant pile at the stone bridge and just walked out of the valley and never look back. Understandable. You can leave. And they found him living in, they found him living in Massachusetts like 20 years later. At the top of a massive hill. Yeah. I have the highest house in the state. This was the worst man made disaster in American history until Bush did 9 11.

And it was the worst disaster of any kind in America until the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Huh. Bodies were found as far downstream as Cincinnati. Fuck, fuck, fuck. And as late as 1911. Yo, they just fishing out a skeleton. Yeah. Oh, hey, that's Steve.

A skeleton covered in like barbed wire. That's like, we've even flicked the sum on this bit of Pennsylvania by accident. Yes. 1600 homes were destroyed. Four square miles of Johnstown were leveled. There was about $17 million in property damage all told, which is about $497 million in today's dollars. Now, recovery efforts started really quickly. A lot of folks who are, you know, local industrialists who may have been involved in a certain club started, but trying to really pool resources as quickly as possible for, you know,

Maybe genuine concern, but also, you know, let's try and cover our asses here a bit, right? Are you suggesting that this disaster has some kind of a class character? Oh boy. Wait, wait, wait till we get to that. So, you know, the Pennsylvania Railroad Restored Service to Pittsburgh in two days. Relief workers started streaming in. Most of those relief workers were morticians. Yeah.

Well, at least there's a lot of wood around. This is true. Yeah. Now, here's the part we're all waiting for. What happened to the guys at the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club? Oh, they got feel bad medals. Yeah. Nothing, nothing happened to them.

That's cool. Of course. You know, they convened the Pittsburgh Relief Committee to send aid to Johnstown, but also retained the law office of Knox and Reed. And both Knox and Reed were members of the club. That's convenient. To fend off all the lawsuits. They managed to successfully argue that the dam breaking was not due to their negligence, but was an act of God. Oh, yes.

A mysterious act of God's love. Yes. I love force majeure. It's such a good doctrine to have. Now, one of the interesting things is though they won all their court cases or their court cases were dismissed. So they never had to pay out a cent. This was one of the incidents which sort of caused the concept of strict liability to come into force. Which is that, yeah, even if it was an act of God, you're still responsible.

So, yeah, there were no legal repercussions for anyone as a result of this. Excuse me. Just none at all. Cool. But there was one positive outcome, which is that, you know, at least flood control measures were designed for Johnstown, right? Nothing bad ever happened again. Well, after a major flood in the 1930s, those flood control measures were actually put in place. Oh, God.

Yeah. So, you know, and as a result of those flood control measures, Johnstown would only be destroyed by a flood from a dam break one more time in 1977. The same dam? No, it was a different dam. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. So, you know, it's, these people can't get a break. So I'm learning.

Yeah. So, I thought we'd conclude with a poem by a poet from Johnstown, Isaac Reed. This is another view of the debris field, short of the Stone Bridge. You can see the mills just beyond the Stone Bridge are working fine. So, many thousand human lives, butchered husbands, slaughtered wives, mangled daughters, bleeding sons, hosts of martyred little ones. Worse than Herod's awful crime, sent to heaven before their time, lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned, darlings lost but never found. All the horrors that hell could wish such was the price that was paid for fish. And then the fish fucking escaped anyway.

Just a guy in a like a top coat and tails trying to fish upstream from this and being like, oh, this sucks. All I get is barbed wire. Yeah. So. Bunch of corpses. Yeah, barbed wire corpses. Yeah. So, that's the Johnstown flood of 1889.

One interesting thing is the Stone Bridge has become sort of a symbol for the city of Johnstown's resilience because it's still there. Arches love staying up. Arches love staying up. They love it. The favorite shit to do. They just finished a fancy gamer lighting project on it. RG Bridge. RG Bridge.

RG Bridge. So, I guess the moral of the story is. Arches. Yeah. Build stone arch bridges. Also, don't be a barbed wire factor near a river. Build an arch dam. You just put the arch on its side.

That works too. Don't live downstream of a dam owned by a fishing and hunting club, which is extremely negligent. Do not live under capitalism. That's a good one. It will kill you for the benefit of rich dudes and they will never face any consequences. Well, when you think about it, it did hurt the hunting and fishing club because. That is true. They will face one consequence.

Yeah, they didn't have a reservoir anymore. They had to shut it down shortly afterwards. Yeah. I think it operated for one more season. Or one out. Yeah. Were you still hunting, I guess? Real.

Yeah, they still had hunting. I mean, the real victims here are the Carnegie's and the Henry Clay Fricks and the, you know, the, you know, it's because of, you know, we have to really feel sorry for the people who would be billionaires if inflation were bigger back then. Yeah. There's a lot of libraries, though, which makes up for it. Obviously. Only because he was forced to.

So, yeah, that's the story of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Well, part one of the story of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Are we going to do parts two and three? Yeah. We got two more episodes out of this if we want to. So, yeah, stay tuned for future episodes on the Johnstown flood of 1936 and the Johnstown flood of 1977, where we get to complain about taxes. Just a montage of the people of Johnstown and every generation, just like there's a flapper

and then there's a woman in like war uniform and then a woman in a poodle skirt, but they're all getting swept down the same river. Well, I imagine when they established the Johnstown flood museum, they didn't realize they would have to update it so frequently. How can I make this museum fresh and interesting? Oh, I know. As I'm holding this cursed monkey's paw. I mean, other towns in Pennsylvania have opioid problems, but Johnstown still has more classic

problems. Yeah, you know. You know how it gets. Yeah. All right. Well, do a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. People keep saying in the comments that they know who the previous Safety Third was by. It was by an actress.

Yeah, you do not. You do not know. We neither confirm nor deny any of this. We don't reveal the identities of confidential sources on this podcast. This is true. All right. So, anyway, with all the stories coming in of people being affected by the stupidity or callousness of others, I thought I'd share the story of the worst decision I've ever made

and the worst boss I've ever had. Self-safety third. That's rare. Yes. I work as a geological engineer. We're the people who missed the clay layer and caused the Vajant Dam disaster. If you believe my university lecturers, it's all our fault. Well, Justin, you were quite complimentary about them because you think they're like dirt wizards.

Yeah, I was kind of like, well, I sure don't know how the hell that works. Earth sorcerers. You want me to do something with a tensor? I will just look at it dumbfounded. I like that they have a bomb robot for drilling. I appreciate that a lot. Just an auger. The field parts of my job have me accompanying drilling rigs or excavators to supervise works

for insurance and health and safety and to log the soils and rock we dig out. A few years back, I was working for a small company, the sort of friendly paradise where the owner, your boss, and the person you complain about to your boss being abusive are all the same person. Oh, no. I know that feeling. Yeah. The guy running the office was an intensely reasonable guy who would punch the hole in the plasterboard near his desk the last time equipment broke on site.

Yeah, it's Adam Driver from Marriage Store. Yeah, it's bad. I always want a good Kyle moment right there, right? Yeah. I'd been sent down every day. Every day I have to repair a drilling rig. I'd been sent down to London to do night shift works inside in Aldi, right? Cool.

I didn't know they were British. Okay. No, Aldi's German. Aldi's German. No, I'm the person writing the safety third, not Aldi. Yeah, they're Britain. They're British. They're from Britain.

You sound like you're from London. There was some question of contamination beneath the store and we need to get soil samples. We were to core through the concrete floor and drill holes through the dirt below. So everyone knows this is a geological drilling rig. What you do is it drills down, makes sort of a hollow hole, then you pull out core samples, which you can see here along with this bird. Cool bird. Super.

And then you can sort of look at the core samples. I don't know. I wish I knew anything about birds. I don't know anything about birds. Yeah, I always admire bird people because I'm like, that would just be like, oh, that's a lesser spotted warblower or whatever and I'll just be like, oh, that's a pretty bird. Yeah, that's cool. I just like, I just like looking at the bird and I was like, damn, you can fly and I can't.

So you know, you pull out these core samples, you put them in a box and then you can figure out, you know, the sort of condition of the soil or the rock underneath, right? So when we were quoting the work, I pushed to add fume extraction equipment as the rig we were proposing to use would be a tracked window sample rig, which is powered by a diesel and isn't suitable for use in a confined space photo of the type of rig attached. Oh boy, we're getting the kitchen safety thirds again. Get woozy. I was told the store was a large warehouse type building with high ceilings and so therefore

fume extraction wasn't needed. Oh no. Come the day of the works. I was working in the morning in the office in the AM and given the afternoon off to commute down to London from Birmingham, right? I check into a terrible hotel, get a few hours sleep and then head over to the Aldi. I go in to buy food before it closes and notice a problem. The ceiling is low.

The building was not a high warehouse and there's a dropped ceiling that almost touches the tops of the shelves. I called my manager at home and told him about the ceiling and asked for fume extraction. He told me there's no time to get it now and it's not on the quote anyway. Get the job done. Oh boy. Oh no. At that point the drillers arrived and I decided to be stupid.

I asked them if they were willing to get the work done quickly. Now to generalize, drillers always want to get the work done quickly. The greater part of my health and safety duties consist of making sure they wait for me to scan for cables and that they dig the first meter with shovels rather than drilling under power because it's the depth range where you find the most cables and going deeper with shovels is a nightmare. If the drillers aren't stopped, they'll rush ahead with the work anyway, aware that the legal responsibility for any accidents is on us.

The risk of hitting a gas main and exploding never seems to worry them. Yeah, because you have to play the cool drill. That's a good point. Yeah, they are pretty cool. I think I might have the mindset to be one of these guys. You just got to get me recording a podcast for like six hours and then I'll just be, yeah, fuck it. I'll do it every hour.

I'll drill it every hour. I was about to say that. Fuck it. Fire it up, yeah. It pays pretty good. So they said they'd try and get the work done before the fumes got too bad. Oh, that's not a good sign. We ended up...

Laser is always digging their bodies out of the hole. We ended up tracking into the star, cutting through the concrete and drilling. Thankfully the drilling went quickly, about 40 minutes per hole because the fumes were spogging the aisle by the end of each hole. Between the shelves... In the Aldi the next day, like, hey, why does everything smell like diesel? Aldi. Yeah, it's Europe.

Don't worry about that. Yeah, it's true. All of Europe smells like diesel. I don't know how you tell the difference. Wait, are you telling me that America doesn't smell like diesel? No, America smells like gasoline. Ah, luxury. Yeah, exactly.

Europe smells like diesel and cigarettes. Yeah. On the other hand, all the lead in there, at least that they used to be, how's she doing all the mass shootings and stuff? We don't have it anymore. Yeah, we got rid of the lead. We have ethanol in the gasoline now. Oh, good.

That doesn't pay a judgement at all. Well, I think at least that gets burned up. I don't know. Potential future episode topic. So anyway, between the shelves and the drop ceiling, these fumes were channeled in around us and refused to dissipate. Over a half hour break, we took in the middle of the works. I finished up, drove back to the hotel, and checked out to get back on the road and working

before noon the next day. It sounds simple, but since then, I've had more training on health and safety, including fumes and confined space work. The first thing they tell you is that you always need measures in place to deal with fumes because the first indication things are going badly is that people pass out. Yep. Yeah. If there's nobody outside the area affected, there's nobody to help those who collapse.

I got very lucky that night. About a year later, I felt that I knew enough to insist on procedures being followed. I was made redundant after one year and 11 months at that company, and they were having new graduates the next day. Oh, that's terrific. Yep. No good deed goes unpunished. That's right.

Don't fuck around with confined spaces and fumes, though. No, that's not a good idea. There's so many maritime accident reports where it's like, yeah, this guy fucking collapsed in there, and then six or seven people went in sequentially to try and save them, and there's a pile of bodies at the foot of the ladder. Yeah, exactly. They tried to re... They tried to reverse engineer one of the egress air supply things that only gets you

one way, got down, realized it only gets you one way, then passed out and died. So... Oh, fuck. Yeah. I like to read maritime incident reports for fun, which is why I'm so fucking normal. Yeah, not a good idea to hotbox diesel. No. No.

Once we develop machines that run on weed, this will be a lot easier. Well, thank you to the Socialist Biden administration who are going to be on this. Of course, yes. Fourth West. We'll soon have a good socialist weed-based technology. Smoking on that shit that killed Joe Biden? Yes. So that was safety third.

Yeah, it was like catastrophically dangerous, but... Congratulations on being alive. Yeah, congratulations on getting away with it. It's a near-miss kind of thing. It didn't happen this time. And therefore never will. Yes. Shouts to Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Yes. Meantime, I want a giant drill on a robot. Oh, that'd be fun. We'll get you one. Thank you. Subscribe to the Patreon so that I can get a giant robot drill. Yes. Also, subscribe to Trash Future.

Also, subscribe to Kill James Bond. Give me all of your money. I need so many surgeries to make me not feel terrible all the time. Yes. Give Alice your money. Give me your money. Give Ross your money. Give Justin your money.

I would like your money as well. Our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. That's right. That's right. I guess we just did the commercials, which are all, give us money. Give us money. Give us money. Give us money.

Because the usual bonus episode coming whenever Ross writes the damn time. Yes, the European Siege Warfare bonus episode coming whenever I write the damn thing. Also, shirts, international shipping, when? Right. Yeah. All right. I'll bug Union Pete. You've got to go to Union Pete.

Yeah. You're welcome. Okay. I'm going to record it at a weird time. Happy birthday. Vladimir. Louis Lenin. I think that's it.

All right. Bye everybody. Yeah. I only have one thing to say, which is in tribute. I'm not listening to you. All right. That's it. We're done.

Bye everybody. Bye. Smell your letters in. Alice, go to bed. All right. We did a broad cast. Ross, write your cathedral episode. I will do that.