Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 76: The Halifax Explosion

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

in fact we did no stan rogers references just to piss the listeners off buy Joe's book: https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-Military-Sci-Fi-Liberty-ebook/dp/B095FPCNR2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=5KXNFNSE3KIS&dchild=1&keywords=the+prisoners+dilemma+joe+kassabian&qid=1626737245&sprefix=the+prisoners+di%2Caps%2C263&sr=8-1 listen to Joe's podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-798629330 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

I'm eating a pizza with potato chips. Oh, I didn't start recording locally. Did it come with potato chips on it? Yeah. Do you put that on or is that? No, no, no, it's it's like, um. I don't know. I was so hungry and so deranged from fasting all day that I was like, the first thing on the menu, literally, like, I was like,

what's the worst thing I can eat right now? Pizza hut. What's the first thing on pizza has many so I don't have to scroll. And this is a roast dinner pizza. So it has gravy instead of sauce. It has potato chips on it. It has stuffing and mushrooms. Interesting.

We need to shut down Turf Island. It's not good. I'll be honest with you. It's not good. If I was religious, I would have just left the church off the existence of that pizza. I'm sorry, you are smooth brained, Joe. It's fine.

I think that's just what a TV is. It's getting your wrinkles smoothed out via high velocity explosion. Speaking of high velocity explosions. Well, you're welcome. Welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters and fighting turfs with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him. I'm Alice Cordwell Kelly. I'm the person who's eating the worst pizza ever devised by man right now. My pronouns are she and her. I'm still a little jealous of it. It's like, you think these are going to be like potato slices and then you bite into them and they're just like, oh, no, these are just chips. OK, yeah. Oh, all right.

Hi, yeah, Liam. My name is Liam Anderson. I am the person that's been all day today screaming at you on Twitter. Also, if you're a Turf, I will happily change your pronoun to was and were. And we have a guest. My name is Joe Cassavian. I am the host of the lines up by Donkeys podcast along with Liam. Nowadays, my pronouns are he and him.

Oh, also, I have a book coming out called The Prisoner Dilemma. Oh, shit, this one's this episode coming out one day. Well, it came out on July 20th. Please go by it because I enjoyed yesterday. Yeah, go by that. Go by Hooligans of Kandahar, which is also great. Absolutely by fucking Hooligans. I have to say something.

Was and were are not pronouns. They're verbs. These are jokes. These are jokes. No, Liam keeps the things that are not jokes do strictly actionable threats to fight people. I have a nice time. See, I'm learning.

All right. Excuse me, fuck. I think I'm pregnant. Great. Proud of you. Speaking of high velocity explosions, what do you see on the screen in front of you as a large bloom of smoke? Well, and not much else because to my knowledge, this is the only photo

of this incident happening in real time. Hits the top break. Oh, yeah. I'm glad someone got the photographic evidence of the first fat ass vape cloud over here. They found my mixtape at honor. Today, we're going to talk about one of the largest explosions ever to have occurred.

Certainly, one of the largest non nuclear explosions. Oh, yeah. But I mean, man made ones. Obviously, there's pretty big natural explosions. I mean, this is not very large compared to like, I don't know, a supernova, right? But yeah, they were where are we on like the volcano scale? Like in terms of stuff that has happened on earth. That's a good question.

I don't know. I mean, this is this is about a 2.9 kiloton explosion. Uh, I would guess most volcanoes are much larger than that. But I don't know many things about volcanoes. Some of them don't explode at all. Anyway, today, we're going to talk about the Halifax explosion. Which was an explosion in Halifax. Well, really?

Yes. Like the excitement. I really love when they put the details of the story in the title like that. Yes. I want I want you to know, listener, that I haven't eaten or drunk anything for about 18 hours, I've had a horrendous toothache this whole time. And then immediately, the second the sun went down, like astronomical sunset happened. I slammed a large amount of ibuprofen root beer and then a horrible, horrible pizza.

So I am not firing on all sevens. Have you described to the listener what the pizza you're eating is? I think so, I think so. Yeah, I we have to impose a impose a blockade on Turf Island. Yeah, 100 percent. I want to meet the person who came up with that pizza. Just out of your mind on a Sunday roast dinner on a pizza. First of all, how dare you?

Hmm. How how do you dare? It sounds like a really fucked up version of the Wawa Gabbler. I was thinking that. Yeah, what the fuck is it? No one could gobble this. What is it? God knows it's a third Thanksgiving dinner on a roll, Joe. Yes.

So at least on a roll, that's like that's like a sandwich. That's fine on a pizza. No, the range. Yeah, I could do them. I could do a sandwich. I can't do that on a pizza. You can't put gravy on pizza. Well, somebody did.

But before before we talk about either the pizza or the the subject of the podcast, the Halifax explosion, equally banned disasters. We have to we have to talk about the goddamn news. Ah, fuck, that's a short one. Yeah, this is a short one. Um, we can just hold on. I can I can give you I can give you like a James Bond one in the back. Squeeze it.

How's that? Oh, very nice. Um, all right, I had to do this one because it's funny. A weirdo yacht designer has designed a real life snow piercer, but significantly worse. Yes, your designer, a real job. That's not a job. Yacht designer is definitely like one of the more fake jobs out there because all you had to do is design like a extremely expensive thing and then sit around and

wait for a buyer. And yeah, you have to like make a child's drawing of a boat. Yeah, it's something that's on the resume of someone who eventually tries to put a laser on the moon. Yeah, exactly. We could put a laser on the moon. We already have one in space. Given how expensive yachts are, you probably only need to sell one or two of them and

you're set for life. But you can design like 50 of them and none of them get built. We can't like break into, though, because you've got to figure like MBS already has like a yacht guy, right? Like he's not going to switch yacht guys in midstream. Yeah, there's not there's not a huge market for yacht guys. Yeah, I think you all need to get a home run once or twice in your set. If we're doing this based on commission.

You have like an RV commercial, like, you know, Dale's yachts and it's, you know, exit 188. What am I going to do with all these yachts? Miami's a weird town. This is from Architectural Digest, the G train billed as the world's first private luxury locomotive. Oh, no. Please note, it's a train, not a locomotive has 14 glass and closed cars that can digitally

project a host of visuals. Plans for the 1300 foot train include a primary suite at the front, followed by 18 guest rooms with the screen on the door that tell you what's in them and also advertise to you. Yes, a grand reception hall with space for art exhibitions, live music and movie screenings. Fold down wings, great Al fresco terraces for social events. And what speed? Mm hmm. You got to think, you know, it's probably not a good idea if there's any line

side obstacles. Yeah. Well, like any bugs in the air, bugs, birds are going to hate this shit. I'm thinking a telephone pole. Yeah, it's weight reduction at the end of the day. It's all weight reduction, baby. Or a train on the adjacent track. Do you imagine like an Excella that's just stuck behind like a CSX train and it has wings

like an unreal tournament to just brush it aside? I'm thinking more like this thing's gone 50 miles an hour down down the main line. There's a bunch of people sitting on the terrace projecting at the side and it gets cheered off by the garbage train. Now, my question, my sort of railroad historical question is how fast were trains going before we like last enclosed passenger carriages? Because we used to just have open wagons, right? So like, I don't know.

Well, until a couple years ago when some folks ruined it, you could sit on the back terrace if you had a private railroad car and he had a business car like it has a little back open area, right? You could sit out on that on the Northeast Corridor doing 100 miles an hour. But I think, oh, yeah, I think some private car owners got drunk and ruined it for everyone. I don't know what they did. Or do I need to train is definitely a move that I can support. Because like at least like you're just going in a straight line.

You can't just like weave off the road like most people do in a DUI. You know, I actually drive a train basso when I'm drunk. It puts me in the zone, you know, well, I would like to think that someone's going to going to hack the glass displays and just display goats on every car. That'd be funny. I'm thinking I'm thinking that, you know, they have to tow it somewhere dead in tow and in train forces from like, I don't know, two boxcars full of newsprint. Just crush it.

The price tag on this thing, a mere three hundred and fifty million dollars. And that's just to like get the train itself. How do you like operate it? Where are you supposed to like presumably you have to find several things that don't exist, such as someone who's qualified to drive it, basically the entire railroad network, railroads, which will allow it to run on their network, which is none. Yeah, which is also none.

You know, you you you you this is clearly done by someone who has no idea how trains work, which I think is very funny. And he did build a yacht. I mean, like several yachts, perhaps more than one. Because, you know, nobody ever talks about the yacht to train pipeline. For good reason. Well, I'm I'm just thinking, you know, the the the rails are not nearly as permissive of private vehicles as the ocean is.

No, that's why frame is good. Yeah, as someone that lives in Hawaii, I can I can confirm that. Yeah, because occasionally I can see a fucking yacht that's the size of a fucking military ship just put on by. But there's no trains here. So, you know, hmm, that's a damn shame. We have to get a nationalized yachts or nationalized yachts that day. There are several places you can go on your luxury train,

which you couldn't in a yacht like, I don't know. Monkton. No, I didn't bring. Yeah, you could go to Kansas City. You could go to Omaha. Yeah, you could go to Omaha. Yeah, you could go to Minot. You could go to the Great Slave Lake.

That's what it's called. Don't get mad at us. That does not sound like a lake I would like to visit. You could go to Castares in Scotland. You go to Mexico City. Oh, to be fair, Mexico City is nice as hell. But you could go there in this giant suicide train. Yes, side my ass up. All right. Yeah.

So anyway, the GoFundMe for us to buy and buy our snow piercer and then go snow pierce somewhere will be in the description. We can't call it the snow piercer because there's not going to be fucking snow to pierce. No, well, I think I part of this part of the snow piercer is it creates the snow, I guess. You just take some snow machines, put them on a roof, put them on a terrace. It was like an artificial ski mountain. Yeah, it's like one of those trains with snowplows on my bed in reverse.

Yes. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. You sound so grim, man. I don't know. I've actually been feeling pretty good today. I don't know why I feel grim. We did just talk about the apocalypse train. This is true.

I don't know. You have like melancholic Polish jeans. That'll do it. Do you ever? OK, so I thought we'd start with a simple question. What is Halifax? Oh, the best war city in the world, baby. Probably the place in Canada where someone grew up and they were told that it was the meth capital of Canada. I mean, that's that's that's true of every city.

Yeah, every city if every city is the meth capital, no city is the meth capital. Yeah, you're going to wonder what the actual meth capital is. Quebec, at this point, I don't want to know because it'll it'll ruin the I'm going to say I'm going to say like Windsor, because it's close to where I'm from. Yeah, it's Windsor. It's close enough to Detroit to be mentioned. Sudbury of the world. No, of Canada, Alice.

Oh, of Canada, I see. OK, we can narrow that one down a bit more than I assume that the city that has the most meth will be like a statistical will be statistical noise from the city that actually is. It's actually Edmonton. That is not surprising. Edmonton has the highest level of meth in its wastewater when tested. That's a good state.

That's yeah, you have to smoke a lot of meth to get over that your hockey team is the oilers. It could just be one guy smoking a lot of meth, though. I mean, yeah, I mean, when there's a will, there is a way. Sometimes you really just got to pull yourself up by your boots, traps and smoke and the entire city's water supply. I will. I will say that Halifax in Montreal, highest levels of cannabis use. That also not shocking.

That seems about right. Yeah, you got to do something to forget that you've been in Halifax, a city which I like. Yes, OK, so Halifax was founded in 1749. Named for George Montague, Dunk. Lord Halifax, I'm going to assume the second Earl of Halifax. Oh, is that even a Lord? The second Earl of Dunk. Yes, he invented the Bosco.

Yes. Well, before basketball was invented, he invented Dunk. This guy was on Twitter. In Ted Cruz's replies, it is on the east coast of Nova Scotia, right around here in this inset, right? Halifax is on one side of the harbor and Dartmouth is on the other side of the harbor, right? Why is it ever? It's very calm waters, it has naturally not very variable tides, very deep waters, very good for, you know, docks and port facilities, right?

You know, that's sort of why the history of Halifax is sort of the history of its port and the port has traditionally prospered mostly in times of conflict, right? And, you know, it's today, of course, it's home of many important sites and tourist attractions like the Halifax Citadel and Pizza Corner and the Trailer Park Boys Bar and that Canada 150 sign they had. That's a good point. Well, that might have been Nams Island, yeah. You know, it's one of those places I think most people really only experience

from when they're taking a transatlantic flight and it shows up on the little map, right? And you sort of look at it and you're like, hmm, I'm never going to go there. Of course, Liam and I have been there twice, but yeah. Yeah, because you love going to places where no one goes. Yes, that's our schtick. For some reason, that's your whole thing. That's what we do. We're very happy about it.

It's like you're going to come to Scotland sooner or later and you're not going to go to Glasgow, you're not going to go to Edinburgh, you're not even going to go to Aberdeen. You're going to go to Dundee. Yes, I'd love to go to Dundee. Well, God, I ever knew this. No, you wouldn't. No, it's touristy, man.

They got the lock point. Yeah. We're going to go see the River Ness and go ride Nessie. Fight me a dinosaur. Yeah, I'm going to find and kill God and Nessie. Yeah, what's the purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom, Mr. Anderson, I'm going to find and kill God. OK, so is that like business or like recreation? He's just the protagonist in the Japanese RPG now.

Oh, so Halifax became the capital of Nova Scotia after the British came in. They fucked up the First Nation there called the Meek Mac, right? And the Brits shortly afterwards built the Halifax Citadel, which is the big fort there, stands on top of the big hill to this day to defend against both the First Nations and the French, right? We love going out of that bank right across the street. Yes, they point the cannon at hourly. They do they do do a noon cannon shot today,

which is aimed directly at the Scotiabank building. Yes, load the cannon. So I pretty soon became the North American like station, like the main the main naval base for the Royal Navy. But with the final defeat of the French around 1760, it became less important English. Yeah, until around the American Revolution, when loyalist refugees flooded into the city again, it became a major staging point for naval attacks on the 13 colonies.

Yeah, didn't go as well as they should have done because of noted pirates, John Paul Jones. Yes, do you mean American hero, John Paul Jones? Well, if he was so much for an American hero, why didn't he sell his service to the Russians immediately afterwards? Because it's an entrepreneur, you know, like the spirit of America. The spirits mostly slaves. Yeah, it's pretty much entirely slaves after the American Revolution

and then later the War of 1812. Again, Halifax becomes less important as a naval port. The Royal Navy actually moves down to Bermuda in 1818, but it does become a little bit more important as a trade port. Now, this changed once again in 1867, when Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick unified into British Canada, right? Much to the chagrin of Halifax merchants

who were making a lot of money, mostly trading with Boston and New York, right? So things had shaken out differently. This could have been in like the 51st state. Honestly, yeah. It wasn't from a lack of trying. We invaded Canada during the War of 1812 and got stomped and will burn York again. It is it is kind of funny when you if you go to the Halifax Citadel, they have a whole bunch of, you know, Canadian patriotic

displays there showing how they kicked the Americans asses. You know, I was kind of like, oh, well, OK, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. It's like trying to like trying to travel the world, trying to collect every museum about how somebody beat the Americans in a war. I think it's Saint John New Brunswick that has there's a church there that has the Colonial Massachusetts, like ceremonial pike, and they won't give it back. And if you go if you go to the Citadel of Quebec City,

I mean, what they have that they won't give back. It may be a captured gun from the War of 1812. They refuse to give it back to us. Spoils of war. Yes. Oh, you want your pointy stick back? It's the curse. The haves will never be a good hockey team. Shut up because of the because of that. It will go from the pike.

Yes, that's right. The curse of the pike. The the intercolonial railroad reached Halifax in 1853. But there weren't a lot of the port facilities are kind of underdeveloped at that point. And the railroad took a sort of indirect and northerly route out of Halifax. And as a result, once Canada unified, a lot of goods bound for Canada sort of bypassed Halifax and either went to Montreal, but only in the summer because Montreal's port used to freeze over.

Or they'd go by a way of Portland, Maine or Boston, right? And really, the only thing supporting the economy was the big Royal Navy presence. You know, in the Civil War, they traded with both the Union and the Confederacy. They played both sides. So you always come out on top. Exactly. I too have played Far Cry 2. The yeah, there's there's definitely class split. You know, the the merchant class like the Confederacy and normal people

were were were more more on the Union side. They are regular regular Britain ship, too. Yes, they they wound up providing shelter for the CSS Tallahassee, which went raiding up the coast of on the up the east coast and then sought shelter and refueling in Halifax and then a bunch of Union ships blockaded the harbor and then they they managed to just slip out under cover of darkness. God damn Canadians. I like how Naval Warfare at one time was easy enough.

There's just like you leave earlier than the other guy. You just dip out the back door to the words out the back mean anything to you. So not a very bad promotion of Canada's only major ice free mainland port sort of hindered the Haligonian economy. Is that really the dead man is really Haligonian? Yes. Wow, that's like that's awful. I mean, by the by this point, why don't just go to like Dunkish, you know? Yeah, so throughout the 19th century, they have an incredibly heavily fortified

harbor with very few facilities for moving goods and, you know, from from ships and back. You know, it was mostly just a naval port, right? It didn't have the modern facilities they necessary to compete nor the economic base to build out those facilities. And federal support was not forthcoming. It's kind of came to a head like with the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, right? Halifax became a major base of operations for recovery of the dead from the Titanic, right? Mostly those floating in the water and the port facilities were completely

overwhelmed by a bunch of rich people who had come to Halifax to recover the bodies of their loved ones and it, you know, crowded up all the rail network, right? Because, of course, all these people were rich and came in private railroad cars. Snowpiercer. Yes, exactly. Now, the end of the line is actually, correct me if I'm mistaken, Ross, but it's in Halifax, right? The end of the line. Everybody off on the Dunk Station. Yeah. Well, the end of the street, this is Dunk Street.

By by 1912, the end of the line was up at Sydney. Oh, right. And then they moved it back. Mm hmm. Thank you. But, you know, shortly after this is when major improvements to the Halifax Harbor started to be implemented and it was just in time because, of course, of something called World War One, right? Listen to Joe show. Lions led by Donkeys to learn more about World War One and all the idiot commanders in it.

Yeah, we're going to do a three thousand part series about the World War One, where I just slowly slip into a bit of alcoholic depression one episode for each battle of the Asonzo. That's right. So this is a this is a view of the Halifax Harbor and its rail yards, or at least some of them, you know, before the before the instant we're going to talk about, you can see this relatively small rail yard, fairly constricted.

There's like one track coming down from the north. It's really some pull to. Yeah. And it's there's not a there's not a huge amount of facilities, right? Despite the fact that this is again, I cannot stress enough, the only year round ice free harbor in Atlantic Canada at this point. They just are like, nah, fuck it. Send it to Montreal or send it through America. So what did Halifax even do to be so like maligned that everybody was like,

yeah, no, fuck you dunk curse. Yeah, it was the dunk curse constantly getting dunked on. I like I like the little Halifax Municipal Archives logo on the bottom left where they clearly like paid a lot of money for someone to write Halifax in a in a cool font. You want to remove the crossbars from the A's. Yes. So OK, so World War One, what happened is a guy shot another guy and everyone got real mad about it, right?

And they started fighting each other. Yeah. Yeah. Gavrila, the princeps did nothing wrong. The Austro-Hungarian Empire racist against subs. He was not wrong about that one. So except early on, America didn't care. They started to care later for reasons we'll talk about in a moment. We had to make the world safer democracy.

Yes. Had to get really into like uniforms with like long wound putties, you know. How big can our hats be and still fit in the trench? Most Canadian exports, you know, for the war effort still went through Montreal or Portland or Boston until something happened. Right. Hmm. That something was called unrestricted submarine warfare. Oh, submarine, a future episode, I feel.

Yes. Well, Joe already did an episode on lions about being a German U-boat guy. It turns out not good. Not good. When did you do that, Joe? I think that was it was 2020. I was I was joking to the effect that you had been in like the Kriegsmarine there. Oh, okay. No comment on my on my trip to Argentina post.

OK, so in sort of there are some like customs of naval warfare with regard to opening fire on unarmed merchant ships, right? Yeah, so gentlemanly ship. Yeah, exactly. Dating back to the 16th century. Again, these are these these are customs, you know, they're not like strictly enforced. I, you know, they're they're more like guidelines, right? Just like norms in a democracy and nothing happens when you break them.

To be fair, they really only applied in like two white people are fighting one another. Thank you about being like a live pirate who's like Henry Avery does not represent us. So, you know, there's something called a privateer, right? And these were sort of like pirates operating under state sanction, right? So, you know, a contractor, we call those a contractor now. Yeah, exactly. Water pirates. You could just say John Paul Jones, really. Yeah, it's a guy.

He's got a boat. He's got a crew. He's got some guns, right? You know, and depending, you know, if a country was at war with another one, that country might issue something called a letter of mark to the privateers, right? That authorizes them to attack and capture enemy vessels subject to certain rules, right? And, you know, you could your privateer ranges from someone who actively goes out and hunts, you know, other vessels to capture to like just an ordinary merchant vessel that happens to have some armament on it.

And in the course of their regular trips, they might just decide, hey, let's try and get that guy, right? It's a shame the only people that can have that job currently live off the coast of Somalia. Yeah. Well, give it another few decades for like civil society to collapse. And I predict a bright future for all of us in the fast boats. Oh, yeah. Climate pirates. Oh, yeah.

I love to like sail around the Denver Islands. So the rules were called prize rules, right? And, you know, if you a privateer captured an enemy vessel, you would gain legal possession of that vessel and its cargo subject to a prize court, which would determine, you know, whether the ship was legally seized. And if so, what portion of the value of the ship should be awarded to you or the crew or whatever, right? OK.

You know, all kinds of things could affect the case of a privateer negatively. One of the penalties was, you know, I guess you might call it unnecessary roughness, right? Rough, roughing the past 50 yards. The referee comes out of the ocean like a dugong. If you're a privateer and you want to capture a vessel, your ideal one was like, you sort of fire a single warning shot, right? The target boat, heave two, right? It stopped. And then, you know, you have a boarding party.

You go in, you tell the crew, look, we're in charge now. And they're like, all right, whatever. And then, you know, you capture the crew, you bring them back to port. You capture the boat. You have your extra crew, your prize crew goes on that boat and sort of sails it to where you want to go. And then. And then this is it was easier when there was impressive because none of those guys wanted to be there in the first place.

Exactly, right? And this this was a fairly frequent outcome, right? You know, your cargo is not worth dying for. And it's in the privateer's interest to capture a vessel which isn't full of holes from cannonballs, right? So it's not worth dying for. It's also not worth killing for. Yes, it's just some rich guy stuff.

He's on that boat. Yeah, this is this is this is a mugging, essentially, basically. Yeah. But if there was a battle and then you won, you then were sort of obliged to ensure the safety of the surviving crew once the battle was over. And once you once you got back to shore, there'd be a prize court to sort of take testimony from the surviving crew to determine if and to what extent the prize was to be awarded to the privateer.

Obviously, this is not always, you know, going to go exactly swimmingly, right? And, you know, these these prize rules also apply to naval vessels. If you're an actually a formal naval vessel, the the captain could claim a prize just as well as privateer. Oh, yeah, this was a way to like make your name as a Royal Navy officer was to to capture particularly other warships was the prestigious thing. Yes, because then you could just refit those, which means you end up with like these weird combinations of names.

So you'll have like HMS like Duke de Leon, because it was like a French ship and they couldn't be bothered to repaint it. Although you'll go through the effort to seize it by force, like new paint job. Fuck that shit. Fuck that. Yeah. Well, I'm going to send a guy down on a Boson's chair. Absolutely not. No. We have an HMS triumphant. I don't give a shit.

We all have to learn these three words of French now. They they they just they just they just crudely paint HMS next to the existing name. What do you want, Captain? Look, look, I put HMS that way. They know it's ours. Leave me alone. I'm getting drunk. So privateering was mostly over by the end of the American Civil War, but some of the customs remained, right?

Some including, you know, that it's kind of, you know, it's kind of bad form to just sink a merchant vessel and murder all its crew, right? You know, and this sort of evolves into cruiser rules by there's something called cruiser rules by like, yeah, surface raiders. Yeah, back in the back in the early days of the First World War, when you just had a couple of like German German, like cruisers just like wandering around the South Atlantic, knocking over colliers and stuff.

Yeah. But, you know, the rules were sort of like, OK, unarmed vessel can't be attacked without warning, can be fired on, only if it resists boarding, if it's boarded, can only be destroyed after ensuring safety of the crew, blah, blah, blah, blah. That usually means taking them aboard the attacking ship rather than, you know, sticking them in the lifeboats, right? And it's interesting, these persisted on surface ships a lot longer than they did on submarines.

Like, even towards the lay them door, you'd still see like, when when surface raiders, especially German ones were a thing, they would just fully like roll up on on like a merchant ship with a big banner strung across the front of the bridge, saying, don't send an SOS or we'll shoot at you. Like in like English, French, German. We know. But how would they know?

Well, they detect the radio signal going out, I think. Well, yeah, it wouldn't have had radio. They would have had to have done a flare or something like that. I'm I've jumped ahead here. I'm thinking World War Two. Yeah, there was there was naval radios, even during the Russo-Japanese war, but they were not effective very often. They had everyone's always let us send some asshole up the ladder

with flags and shit. They got to they got to send a guy out in a little steam launch and he's trying to run away from the battleship. Stop shooting me as he's trying to get the the flags up. They'd have to send out a runner, but in this case, it's just a guy you shave naked and make swim really fast. Right. Oil him up. They can't catch him if he's slick.

So around this time, the Germans were developing submarines, you know, undersea boats, right? And they have submarines have difficulty with cruiser rules, right? They barely have enough room for their own crew, right? Let alone a captured merchant crew. So, you know, at the outbreak of World War One, U-boat captains tried to sort of follow cruiser rules, but it was tedious and complicated.

You know, the first vessel sunk by a U-boat, which was a collier called SS Giltra, proceeded as follows. Step one, U-17 surfaces near the Giltra, which is just off the coast of Norway and it stops them, right? A boarding party, a party searches the boarding party. A boarding party searches the vessel for contraband. Once they were satisfied, step two, once they were satisfied that the Giltra was in fact shipping

supplies for the war effort, U-17's captain ordered the crew of the Giltra into the lifeboats. Step three was the boarding party then scuttles the Giltra. They didn't actually fire on it. Step four, the U-boat towed all the lifeboats to shore. That's nice. So this process is slow and cumbersome and leaves the U-boat on the surface for a long time where it's vulnerable.

And then it was complicated further when the British introduced something called the Q-boat, right? Which is a vessel that appears to be a merchant ship. But when the U-boat surfaces to say, hey, you're being boarded, the Q-boat has big guns that pop up and then shoot the U-boat, right? It's such a fun cartoonish idea. You like literally have like guns concealed behind false walls

and stuff that you just drop over the side. You run up the flag really quickly. Just kind of like hope for the best. Don't forget that part. Otherwise it's illegal. And the Q-boats worked okay, you know, but the main thing they did was provoke the Germans into saying, all right, we're going to ignore cruiser rules.

So you get unrestricted submarine warfare where the U-boats just roll up on anyone and blow them up at any time for no real reason and then leave, right? That's great. You know, including stuff like the Lusitania, for instance, so that of course provoked America to join the war, right? And it forced the British into doing something they really didn't want to do, which was invest resources into

heavily armed transatlantic merchant convoys. Naval officers of this period right through to the Second World War hated convoys, not least because for like simple careerism reasons, you think it's beneath you, right? You like you've trained your entire career to go out and do the like swashbuckling thing, right? On as ideally as big a ship as possible and instead now you're stuck on a terrible small ship with awful sea

keeping that like pitches up and down all over the place. And you're just like kind of like hanging out with the merchant marine and it doesn't make you feel very cool. Yeah, exactly. You're just sort of like, all right, we're gonna we're doing it. We're doing we're going to go back and forth across the ocean. We're going to be real bored.

Yeah, it's it's like you want to be a naval officer and instead you're a truck driver. God damn it. I wanted to go get blown up and here I am doing something safe. Fuck this. If you're lucky, you can do both. Yeah, it's right.

Oxid convoys. You should you can get. Yeah, safely blown up like LAPD. Yes. Yes. So one of the things this does really increases the importance of Halifax as a transatlantic port due to its inland deep water Bedford Basin, right?

The Bedford Basin is this right here, right? So, you know, basically the U boats couldn't get in there because there was a nice U boat net across the harbor. Also, I don't think there was that much room for them to go in underwater, right? And, you know, the channel is very heavily defended and you have a like limited period of time that you can be submerged at this point, a pretty strictly limited period.

Yeah. It's like getting in destroying ships and getting back out again isn't really so viable. And so you could assemble all the convoys in the basin and then send them out, you know, and you could be pretty well sure there were no U boats right nearby because you would see them. So, the result of this is Halifax becomes not only a

convoy, sort of marshaling point, all neutral ships who are required to stop at Halifax for inspection as well. So, let's introduce our characters. Okay, Dramatis Bessone. Yes. This is the SS Mont Blanc, right? Which is something called, it's a tramp steamer, right? Which means it doesn't follow a regular schedule.

Sort of rolls up into port and says, hey, what cargo do you got? Okay, we'll take that somewhere, right? Yeah. Tramp is English for hobo here. That'll do it, yeah. I thought we were just calling it a mean name. That does make the name at the stern of the boat, the stamp,

correct? Yes. Yes, Joe, I believe it does. He was 320 feet long. All of them tall girls, man. Yeah. 44 foot beam, 15 foot draft. Yeah, drop dirty to me.

Thick. Thick. Thicker than a snicker, man. Had a coal-fired triple expansion steam engine. Pretty standard at the time. Looks like two masts. And all right. So she left New York Harbor December 1st for Halifax to join

a convoy bound for Europe. Now, at New York. It feels like the opening line to a song. At New York, she was loaded with TNT, Pickrick acid. Shit, okay. Pickrick acid, which is an explosive, which spontaneously detonates with shock, right? You need that.

You got to have that. It's also loaded with gun cotton and on deck. They had several barrels of a high octane fuel known as Benzol and that's a coal tar product consisting mostly of benzene and Tulene or toluene. I don't know how to pronounce that. It's used as like a high octane sort of anti-knock compound, right?

Like all of the anti-knock compounds. It's extremely nasty. Just tetraethyl lead was the other big one, right? Oh, yeah. This one gave you that one makes you dumb. This one gives you cancer. Now mix them together. Let's have a party.

So she arrived in Halifax December 5th, right? And usually ships carrying dangerous goods like this were not actually allowed in the Halifax Harbor. But of course, there's a war on dammit. So they were going to let the ship into the basin or they were supposed to because it showed up late, the submarine nets were raised for the night and no one was allowed to enter out of the harbor.

So Mont Blanc dropped anchor and waited until 7 30 a.m. the following morning to head into the Bedford Basin, right? Hmm. Shows up after curfew and has to like wait to get let in. Yeah, exactly. Here's our other character. Note on the side here, it says Belgian relief to let you know it's it's not carrying any anything illegal.

Yeah. So the SS emo, right? Chartered by yeah. I was a huge fan of it in the mid 2000s. So yes, SS take you back Sunday. Yeah, it's emo with an eye. Oh, that's I know it's exotic. Yeah, exactly.

So this was a neutral ship intended to bring humanitarian supplies to Belgium, right? Chartered by the Belgian Relief Commission and it was traveling likely story. It was traveling empty to New York Harbor, right? To pick up the supplies and then come back. You know, this is a long and narrow ship, 430 feet long, 45 foot beam, 30 foot draft, including a keel because it has

four masts, right? It was a former whaling supply ship and it had some issues when it traveled empty, right? Oh boy. Because it rode pretty high in the water, so the rudder was almost out of the water and she was equipped with a single right hand propeller, right? So, you know, a lot of ships have two propellers.

This one had one propeller mounted in the middle. And as a result, there was some transverse thrust from this. So while underway, she always veered to port and while in reverse, she swung starboard, right? Okay, it's like a Jeep. Yeah, yeah. You get the keys to this thing and the guy's like, yeah, it's got this thing.

So like when you go over like 30, it's gonna start to like go left a little bit. She arrived December 3rd for inspection, given clearance to leave the base in December 5th, but there was a load of coal for the trip to New York City that arrived late, you know, for fuel, right? So she waited until 7.30 AM the following morning when the submarine nets were raised to leave the basin.

All right. All right. For want of a nail. Yes. So in order to make up for the delay in leaving Halifax, the SSEmos pilot, William Hayes, tried a novel innovative technique, right? Which was speeding.

Halifax drift. Yes. Oh, yes, actually. Your ship might be strong, but not as strong as family. Okay. So let's let's establish our geography here. Over here is the basin. Over here is the entrance to the harbor, right?

The submarine net went from George's Island to Pier 21, right? That was the part that moved. The rest of it, I believe, was just a static submarine net that couldn't be raised or lowered, right? It's so funny to me to like barricade a submarine out with it like a metal net. Did you stay away? Hey, hey, talking to it, the submersible town.

The rabbit-proof fence, yes. You run the U-boat into it and it just makes this horrible noise and you're just like, well, never mind, but in reverse. Now there's some rules for the harbor, which are right-hand traffic. Okay. All ships pass port-to-port is what they said. And you have a five-knot speed limit. So the SS Emo was outbound, passing under what's sort of like

the current location of this bridge here, the A Murray-McKay Bridge, adjacent to a neighborhood called Richmond, right? Which is right around here. And this is a location in the harbor called the Narrows, right? It's called that because it's very narrow. Very good. Yes, a lot of descriptive names in this episode. Okay, there's this, the Emo is heading out.

She's, of course, speeding and additionally drifting to port, right? I need to switch to another color here. Um, I will put the Emo in green, right? Speeding, drifting to port, just vaguely. Not very well controllable because again, the rudder is way up out of the water. She was less than ideal.

Yes. And there was a bunch of other traffic in the harbor because they just opened the net, right? So the first thing that happened is SS Emo passes another Tramp Steamer, the SS Clara, which was just straight up being piloted on the wrong side of the harp, right? Everybody's so good at this. Fuck it, right?

Can we discount that? Everybody is just trashed right now. Got to deal with being in Halifax somehow. They have to pass on the starboard, right? And then after that, they came across the tugboat Stella Maris, right? What was the good name for a ship? On the correct side of the harbor, right?

But only just barely. So, of course, they have to keep going around the other side, right? So now, now they're entirely on the wrong side of the harbor and also speeding, right? You think maybe you might want to like slow down? No, no, we got to get out. We good.

I had to take my morning poop. Well, in fairness, it's a ship. You can do that on the move. Everyone knows sea captains are well known for just dropping loads in their pants. What a sea captains and I have a carbon. IBS. So, so in the meantime, the Mont Blanc was plotting down the

harbor, you know, sort of a reasonable pace on the right side of the ship stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, the pilot Francis Mackley had really wanted a guard ship going to the ship's dangerous cargo, but the harbor didn't give him one, right? You know, this channel full of boats that kind of can't turn

and are speeding on the wrong side of the lane. Just go ahead and take this atom bomb down that way and protect it. It's about three quarters of a mile away. Mackley spotted the SS Emo, right, buried down on them at high speed and this is high, high speed for a ship, right? Over five knots. Yeah, over five knots.

It's making wake, which is like barbaric to do in a harbor. Traveling at the speed of smell. Yes. And appeared to be attempting to pass them on the starboard side, right? So for those of you with visuals here, the Emo is in green. The Mont Blanc is in yellow here. Okay.

So Mackley on the Mont Blanc sounded the ship's whistle to indicate that he had the right of way, right? Honk. The Emo sounded back with two whistles to indicate they weren't going to give way. It's so great that you have a specific whistle code for that. Just like, no, no. Fuck you.

How many how many how many hunks was that? Fuck him, hit the triple honk. Now, in fairness, they probably couldn't have steered. Steered to starboard if they had tried or at least not quickly enough. So Mackley was like, all right, all right, I'm going to try. I'm going to try and go further starboard, right? So he wants to go this.

He's gone this way. Or excuse me, this incident happened further back here. All right. So and in the meantime, of course, we have the Emo, which is still sort of bearing to port, right? Okay. Both ships cut their engines. They're still whistling back and forth at each other, right?

Honk. Increasingly angry whistling. Yeah, honk. Angry honking intensifies. So at some point they're like, they're very close to each other. Mackley orders hard port, right? He orders hard port and the ships actually. Miss each other, right?

Oh, good. I was on the next episode. Yeah, I was on the next episode. So it looked like they had missed each other and they were drifting very, very slowly at this point. When the pilot of the Emo or the captain, we're not quite sure. Suddenly ordered reverse thrust on the engines, right? Oh, no, I didn't.

So, you know, they, and as a result, the Emo went backwards and, of course, pitched starboard right into the Mont Blanc. And about one knot, which is like not fast. That's like that is a single donk. Yeah. And it cost just a little bit of superficial damage and it knocked over a couple barrels, which meant all that Benzalé, the Benzal, however it's pronounced.

Benzalé? I don't know. You guys have never been to Benzalé Bay? It's a wonderful, inclusive resort. It's filled out all over the deck. It's built into the hold. It's built over the side of the ship, right? And as the Emo disengaged, scraping its bow along the side of the

Mont Blanc, some sparks ignited the Benzal. Wow. Yeah. This is about 845 a.m., right? Well, at least you wouldn't be, at least if you had missed your alarm. It's about a size. But you probably heard the ships, you know, screaming at each other with whistles.

True. Yeah. You just like put a pillow over your head and you just like, Mondays, am I right? Yeah. A guy who wakes up with a headache and he just like hears that. He's just like, oh, just kill me. So the captain of the Mont Blanc immediately gave the order to abandon

ship because he was like, this thing's going to blow up, right? They tried to relay this information to the crew of the Emo, but they couldn't hear them, right? They just straight up couldn't hear them. That's a problem. What? What? What?

Have you tried hitting the honks again? We have a honk for abandon ship. Meanwhile, sailors on the nearby ships and residents of Halifax and Dartmouth had heard all the ship's whistles and they all knew what that meant. And so they gathered on the deck of ships or at their windows or on their porches or whatever to watch two boats crash into each other. Yeah, a free, a free piece of street theater. Yes.

So SS Mont Blanc was, you know, they abandoned ship very pretty quickly. It drifted out of the main channel, right? Beached itself at pier six, which is right where the big Irving shipyard is today. Well, is that, is that considered successful for ghostwriting a ship that's about to explode? I don't know if you're ghostwriting. If you've abandoned it completely, you'd have to be like standing on it.

Attempted ghostwriting. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. Okay. So, so, so here, here's our situation, right? I noticed this area of devastation and area of total destruction, which I appreciate a lot.

I think that's that's muscle. Yes. Um, so the tugboat mentioned earlier, the Stella Maris immediately responded to the fire, right? And the captain realized pretty quickly. Uh, I don't think our puny fire hose is going to do anything, right? So, um, after consulting with some folks who came over in small boats from a pair of nearby Royal Navy ships, they agreed to pull the Mont Blanc

away from pier six because they don't want pier six to catch fire, right? That would be bad. So they tied a rope to it, but the rope was too small. So the captain of the Stella Maris asked for a new and bigger rope, right? It was 904 AM when he asked for the rope. And then the Mont Blanc blew up. Oh, yeah. So the force of the explosion was said to be so incredible that it exposed

the bottom of the harbor to the air, right? Jesus straight up tsunami swept over the neighborhood of Richmond. Um, anyone who was at their windows was immediately blinded as the shock wave shattered the glass and you know, shoved glass into their eyes. Some of them got even worse injuries than that, right? Hmm, uh, white heart shot, white hot shards of metal rain down on Halifax and Dartmouth. Um, the SS emo was actually shoved by the force of the wave on

to land on the Dartmouth side. Um, fuck the shock wave also overturned coal stoves throughout the city and spark tires of fires throughout Halifax. Um, the Mont Blancs forward 90 millimeter gun landed up here, uh, which is about two mile or excuse me, three miles north of the explosion site. I think that's three miles. Um, the gun had a maximum effective range of greater than the gun

if it had been fired. Yes. The anchor landed two miles south down here. Fuck that. The tugboat, the Stella Maris was also shoved clean across the harbors. Yeah, those poor fucks. It killed the insiders liquefied.

Yeah. Killed 21 of its crew of 26. Uh, the railroad yard was destroyed. The train station at North Street was destroyed. One telegraph worker at the station stayed behind while the ship was on fire, uh, to, uh, telegraph down the line. Hold up the train. Ammunition ship of fire in Harbor, making for pier six and

we'll explode. Uh, guess this will be my last message. Goodbye boys. Jesus man. He went like a poster. Yeah. They rewarded that guy with Canada's highest honor, a heritage minute. Just plopping a beaver right down in his head.

Yeah. I did stop a bunch of passenger trains from coming in. Also, this guy's info Paul. Jesus. Yeah. Mm hmm. Same thing. Same thing.

Um, so yeah, you had, you had parts, places that were, you know, just, just annihilated, right? The whole, whole neighborhood of Richmond was just flattened. Um, this blast was equivalent to 2.9 kilotons or TNT or about one fifth of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Jesus makes you think about how fucking bad Hiroshima was. I mean, it burned people into the concrete. So like not good.

Yeah. This one had a bunch of water. So I just boiled people. I mean, is it better or is it, is it functionally worse? That's worse. Going by the Liam fear index. That's worse. Yes.

The scientific based racing system of how much it shits me up. Yeah. Just describe to Liam how bad things sound like they'll hurt. He screams, then you measure them in the screen. It's like one of those pain shots, like one out of 10, like, you know, it scares you a little bit. It scares you a lot worse to terror. You can imagine it's progressively more afraid.

Liam faces. Thanks, regular. Ross, you there? Yes. Oh. You're just giving a moment of silence for the guy who went out posting. Yes, exactly. Logging on to tell, to tell your friends online that your shit's going to explode.

Yeah. Going to die LOL. What's LOL and Morse code? Right. So, you know, this, this is just an astounding amount of devastation just instantly. You know, it residents and first responders, you know, they came out immediately trying

to locate any victims and rescue them. Anyone with a vehicle drove the wounded to the military hospital and they admitted about 1400 people that day. On the plus side, they did find out what what LOL is in Morse code. That's an embarrassing final transmission. You know, some firefighters had responded to the blaze immediately in apparently Canada's first motorized fire engine, the Patricia. I'll never catch on.

Yeah. Never catch on. And so a good chunk of the city's firefighters were killed in the explosion immediately. Oh, Texas City. Why does this always happen? Because of right near the explosion, Joe. Yeah.

I mean, didn't you say that like 21 out of 26 is like the tug group? Yeah. What happened to the other five of them? They're in the front side of the tug. Yeah, exactly. They got a hell of a ride. This tug comes with explosive shielding. Just watching their friends get churned a marinara five inches away from them.

Well, like explosions are fucking weird, man. There was one guy I read about this who survived this because he got blown into one of the holds of the ship he was on. And like that, that was it was enough to like lift him off his feet and carry him into the hold, which was enough to like save his life. It'll do it. One guy just asking his incinerated buddy hot enough for you. I forgot that everyone this was happening to was Canadian to just to add

that sort of air of like, unreality to it. Everybody apologizing as they get vaporized by the shock wave. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, bud. Yeah, a lot of solemnly logging on to my telegraph station to send the final message and going out for a rip. Are you a bud?

So there's a lot of panic that the explosion was a German bomb. A lot of people thought there'd be more bombs, but the bombs didn't happen. Right. So this was an enormous scene of utter demons, utter devastation and and you know, to add insult to injury. The next day there was 16 inches of snow, just a huge blizzard, right? Of course. Fuck Canada, man.

Yeah, remind you that you're still in Canada, not the front. Exactly. So, you know, a lot of some of the train lines had to be suspended. The telegraph lines went down. They couldn't really search for survivors so effectively. You know, so the exact number of victims is unknown. The Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book named 1782 victims, 9,000 people injured, 1630 homes destroyed, another 12,000 damaged, roughly 6,000 people

left homeless and far more with insufficient shelter. Right. And again, this for me like one not impact. It's like a single like bonk. You can't say I'm moving my finger very, very slowly to indicate that. Indicate. Donk. Donk.

With this one life hack, you can turn this Canadian suburb into passion dell overnight. So, you know, but the day of like there was a huge relief effort where, you know, the cities everywhere sent like just train loads of relief workers into the city. I think particularly Boston, right? They just they managed to get trains there the same day, which is something you can try to get the pike back.

Yeah. Now's our chance, boys. There was a community of Meek Mag, the first nations, right? Close to the explosion and during the rebuilding efforts, you know, that they sort of tried to make them go away. Oh, boy. Listen, it wouldn't be there wouldn't be, you know, 20th century history. If we didn't get some genocide in there.

Yes, exactly. They also they also tried to sort of make the local African African Canadian neighborhood called Africaville. They tried to make that go away as well. Well, I applaud the Canadians for doing this at a time of horrific adversity. I know, right? There's always genocide to be done. If you get enough Canadians around enough spare lumber, they're like,

bet you we could build a residential school of us. You prefer reference. I don't know where the Meek Mag community was. Africaville was right here. You can see coincidentally, they did eventually build a freeway through it. Oh, cool. Of course they did. Why wouldn't they do that, right?

The Canada and America aren't that much different. Yeah, exactly. Our racism just have slightly different flavors. Yours has cheese curds on top. The relief effort, you know, I went on and one legacy of that is I think Halifax started sending Boston Christmas trees every year. Yes. In a really weird gratitude for the aid by the Boston Red Cross and the

Massachusetts Public Safety Committee. Not a plank, though. Still got the plank. Still got the plank. No, that's principle. You can see here, here are some of the temporary tents they had to house the unhoused in like two feet of snow. 102 feet of snow.

That sucks. It's a very low resolution panorama of the harbor, right? Well, you don't need a lot of pixels when there's not a lot of buildings left. Yeah, you do a lot of pixels. Yeah. And then we have the, this is the exposition hall where the last survivor was found. Or maybe it was the last body, I forget which. It was the last body.

They dug a guy, they dug a guy's like skeleton out of there in 1919. Oh, shit. Good Lord. It was a janitor, apparently. He just got like, you know, like, inhumed. And this is a school of some kind that I think was fairly far away from the explosion. Yeah, it also destroyed part of the Canadian Royal Naval College and the part

of the Wikipedia for that has the cheery sentence. Several students and instructors were maimed. Oh, well, the judicial inquiry presided over by Justice Arthur Drysdale found a Mont Blanc at fault, basically saying that given the dangerous cargo, it was the Mont Blanc's responsibility to avoid collision. The local. If you, if you, if you're so, if you're so smart, how come I hit you? Yes.

Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. The community in Halifax had strong anti French attitudes which likely contributed to this finding Mont Blanc's captain. Amy, Ami, I'm a I'm a I think yeah. I'm a little bit dick. The ship. Amy Limadik.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a little bit dick. Yeah. The ship's pilot. Um, Francis McKay, which we talked about earlier and commander F. Evan Wyatt, a command commander commander F. Evan Wyatt was the the Royal Canadian Navy's like guy in charge of the

harbor. Okay. And they were all charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence. But the charges were later dropped. Well, at least they did that much right. And another classic move of like simply abandoning all charges. Yeah, it seems like the same justice first found that the Mont Blanc was at fault in a subsequent civil trial, but on appeal, the Canadian Supreme Court

found that both ships were at fault. No party was ever convicted for any crime or otherwise successfully prosecuted for any actions that precipitated the disaster. Well, you know, sometimes you just go let bygones be bygones and in a way aren't we all like hanging out at an unsafe water line level with a propeller that like. Yeah, you know, which is us to pull. I don't I don't know where I would be on a ship, but I do know for sure

I would have gone out and watch these ships run into one another. But yeah, I would have done that. I would definitely do that. My eyes would have been seared out by fucking flying glass. Yeah, we would have been blinded apart from like if one of us had gone to post. And then we wouldn't then we wouldn't be able to do slides with the podcast anymore. We have to do conventional podcasting.

Oh, God, is that fucking losers? So many people received eye injuries from broken glass that it led to developments in caring for injured eyes and the blind and the founding of the Canadian National Institute of the Blind in 1980 to 1918. Yeah, basically the same. Yeah, yes. Everybody in there just has a deep phobia of ships. Yeah, understandably understandable.

Yes. All right. But the good news was, of course, there was never a huge explosion in Halifax ever again. Good until World War Two. Let's just keep happening. I was going to say that was Halifax built on some sort of burial ground, but it was.

Yes. It was this built on a couple of dispossessed communities. Yes. A barge, I believe, drifted into an ammunition dump and set it on fire. Stop fucking drifting into ammunition things and setting them on fire. How hard is that? Hey, Visa, they heard about the first Halifax drift. They really thought they could hit it out to Halifax.

Too furious. Yes. This time, this time, though, they were prepared and got people the hell out of there. How'd that prepare? They still had another one. Well, yeah, I mean, I weren't prepared enough to stop it from happening in the first place, but.

One of the blind guys is like, what are the odds this could happen again? I think just one guy got killed in this one. Yeah, we need like maiming and blinding numbers here. Exactly. I hadn't rebuilt yet from the first one, so there wasn't much to explode. Exactly, right? Anyway, this was one of the largest explosions in history. The first Halifax explosion, not the second one.

We take radio communications and voice communications for granted. Would have been a lot easier than just honking at each other. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, technology has actually made things better in some ways, though worse than others. Sounds like it's a land of contrasts. Yes. Well, at least we don't have to like sign WTYP and just like do that with the

fucking Morse button. Do it in Morse code. I don't know what that was. That's WTYP. Oh, I see. Beautiful. Beautiful. All right.

Well, we could we send a send a podcast out in form of a transcript in Western Union Telegram. Just circling bits that come out and this is it and labeling it joke. Yes. Strong podcast to follow. Stop. All right. Well, that was the Halifax explosion.

Very good. Very good. Very bad. Very bad. Yeah. Wow. Yes. Do I go to the safety third?

Yeah. Yes. Okay. We have a we have a thing on this podcast that we call safety third. Okay. Here we are. Oh, this is a long one. Yeah.

We got some buses. Nice. Hi gang. Hi. I used to drive for Unitrans. A student run bus service that served the town of Davis, California and the local University of California campus. Despite the student run part of the name.

Unitrans was pretty safe. The most dangerous part of the job was dealing with a click of bus dispatchers and supervisors that saw themselves as morally superior to the drivers despite number one being the same age as us and number two being bad at their jobs. The company politics aside, I would like to share the experience of driving the AEC region three RT. How?

Yes. Is that what that monstrosity is? Yes. I love it. They're in California. Okay. Yeah. Why?

Where else would you put like a route master knockoff other than California? They were originally purchased in the late 1960s and early 1970s have been in and out of service ever since then. Unitrans is now the only bus service that operates the RT in any form, let alone in public service. They were also at nightmare to operate and maintain because nothing built and designed in the 60s was ever meant to make it past the Thatcher era.

Wasn't built to make it through the 60s. Yes. I will now list off the thing that made driving this bus so spicy. Nice. Number one, the cab was tiny. I assume because everyone in from England is some sort of manlet. That's true. Yes.

You couldn't adjust the seat. So if you were over six foot, you couldn't really get your legs comfortably in there. If you were shorter than five foot two, your feet wouldn't reach the pedals. Some of the taller drivers would have to spread their knees beyond the diameter of the steering wheel in a perpetual man spread to avoid bumping into the wheel.

But to be fair, you wouldn't really want to extend your legs all the way because number two, the cab is located right next to the engine, making the floor of the cab, which is made of thin sheet metal and the rest of the cab incredibly hot after an hour or so of operation. I've heard stories of people's souls melting because of the floor heat. Oh, nice. And in California too. Yeah.

Famously a place not known for its heat. The cabs were installed with the dinkiest fans that promise some sort of heat relief, but they are inoperable and probably haven't been operable for 40 years. If the outside temperature got above 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32 degrees Celsius or is predicted to run above that, the buses would not run. Now, Davis is in the Central Valley. So approximately one third of the year from May to September is

whether that's too hot to drive in. If you wanted to train on these buses during the summer, you'd need to get up at the crack of dawn or suffer at the hands of Vulcan himself. Number three, think about how loud idling semi trucks are from 50 feet away. Okay. Now imagine being on top of one while accelerating with no noise insulation.

You are now an RT driver. Of course, there was a sliding window next to the engine to help with the noise, but since the heat was so intense after just a short amount of time, it was a choice between your ears or your body's ability to maintain homeostasis. The noise made it difficult to hear radio traffic. And whenever I talked on the radio, I had to shout over the engine like I was taking fire in a war zone.

Yeah, you're just doing the convoy scene from Black Hawk down in a room master in a big double decker bus. Number four, considering the size of the cab, training a new driver for the RT was tricky. The trainer couldn't sit side by side with the driver, nor could they sit in the passenger compartment since it was sealed off from the cab. So this is how we did it. You had a small seat, really just a leather cushion mounted on a

triangular frame that was angled against the cab doorway. And then the trainer sat in the seat while we drove halfway in the bus without any kind of restraints. And yes, we would go onto the city streets like this. I couldn't find any pictures of this maneuver. So I attempted to recreate it via MS paint, C attached. Oh, just hanging out of the door. That's beautiful hanging out the door.

Yeah. That's so the suicide stair thing for the garbageman that we have in the US, but you're going on the highway. Yes. Incredible. I love it. Number five, since the bus was designed to be driven on the wrong side of the road, the passengers entered and exited onto the street rather

than the sidewalk. This necessitated a conductor, a person whose job it was to make sure passengers didn't get hit by cars or fall off. And that last bit is no joke as the old mayor of London, Ken Livingston, estimated that about 12 people a year died from falling off roadmasters, which has essentially the same layout as the Regent. And that was, of course, with conductors on board. Now, this is the reason you fall off a roadmaster is because you have this

platform on the back, right? With the pole. Do you can hop on and hop off the bus at any time? Mm hmm. And he doesn't have to. No one has to operate a door. I like those a lot. I think the 12 fatalities are probably worth it for the convenience.

The good news is that they are back. We have brought those back. Thank God. Yeah. Um, and when you think about how many there were, I mean, 12 people. Yeah. I have to admit, it was kind of cool to just be able to like jump off the back of a bus.

Yeah, exactly. Getting on was tough, but like getting off was fun. Just like shotting yourself off on the way to school. That sounds like fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You never have to never have to yell back door at the driver.

Can you imagine such a world? Yeah. To prevent passengers and conductors from falling off, we strung a loose single half inch diameter chain spanning the entire rear doorway whenever the bus was in motion. Oh, that's terrifying. That's more terrifying than nothing. Have you seen those chains?

Do they used to like rope off like restaurants and stuff? Are you just like they're perfectly at shin level, you know? Yeah, that sounds about right. Safety achieved or so you think after many years of chain only containment, management felt this was too unsafe and added redundancy. A retractable belt located about a foot further inside the bus. Okay. So you don't actually have a rootmaster at this point.

You have like the scene from entrapment to get out of the back of this thing. Exactly, right? Why the fuck would anybody buy this bus? I was like cool, Joe. Yeah, I was hoping there was more than that. No, no, it looks fancy because now we're look like we're from London. You sound like you're from London.

I genuinely am confused as to why they would think buying this is a good idea. I mean, it's not even set up for the correct side of the road. And finally some miscellaneous spice. Nice. Approximately once a week coolant leaks, despite regularly getting repaired for coolant leaks, each replacement part needed to be custom made and or fabricated on site. The lack of handicapped accessibility.

Oh, yeah. If you can't make if you can't like traverse the distance of about like six inches vertically up or down, you're not using this bus. These even have these don't even have like a door other than the rear platform. Huh. Wow. Huh. It seems like a pretty large design flaw.

I that's fine. If you if you can't if you can't negotiate that you don't deserve to be using the bus. I was about to say, yeah. The lack of power steering. Oh, yeah. I've seen these it's like a boat. You know, you've got to like around and round and round steering was huge to is the other thing and combine that with the guy who's barely fitting

behind the fucking steering wheel in the first place. How many people like hit their like elbows doing this? Friction burns on the on the shaft of your deck. The only means of communication between the conductor and the driver was a bell like Hector from Breaking Bad. Sometimes the conductor would get left behind and the only way you'd know was the yawning silence beyond the engine's roar. You didn't give me that I'm in the bus bell ring.

Yeah. Despite all the uncomfortableness, these buses were incredibly fun to drive in sort of the way old sports cars are to drive, or I'd imagine because I'm not a car weirdo. It's like it's like its entire existence was to look aesthetic and be exciting to drive at the expense of everyone's patience, money and safety. And isn't that the most British thing of all? That's right.

It's in place. Don't like it. There isn't the door. Looking aesthetic and being exciting to drive at the expense of everyone else's patience, money and safety sounds more Italian than British to me. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I mean, it could be a British motorcycle. Those things are terrible.

Yeah, that is true. Yeah, I say this as someone who owns a triumph. Land Rover oil leaks, kids. I mean, Land Rovers are kind of cool and don't work. Oh, yeah, I love a Land Rover. I hate the new Defender so much. Anyway, lots of love for all of you, especially Alice, whose bold stances on bridge rigidity is the kind of reality defying confidence.

I wish to emulate as a self conscious trans. Can they try to make the bus more rigid without a fixings? We can only hope hoping I don't get killed by something British. Allison. Yeah, come on. Include school some fucking bus. Beautiful. This is this is another thing that the British could take home.

That was safety third. Shake hands are danger. Our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. It's time for commercials. Give me your commercials. Joe has a book. Joe has two books. Joe has two books.

Joe has a podcast. My new book will be out or will be out on July 20th. It's called The Prisoner's Dilemma. If you like sci-fi, you might enjoy it. Buy it. Also, it's like free if you have Kindle Unlimited, which I know most people already have because ebooks have destroyed the literary world and make it hard to make a living, but I do make money from them.

So please download it on Kindle Unlimited. It'll cost you literally nothing. Very nice. Yeah, Jeff Bezos will give you some money. Yeah, he slides me like a cool one penny for every like fucking 50 page reads or whatever. And it's great. It's good stuff.

It's certainly not an industry that is going to collapse and make us all hopeless. So please read Joe's book to transfer Jeff Bezos's wealth to Joe Kasabian. Yes, that's right. Read Joe's first book, The Hooligans of Kandahar. Yeah, great. Except no imitators of which there are apparently many. That is my favorite 2021 development is that there's random people using like stock footage from like NATO armies in the 80s and then renaming the book like the

Kandahar's of Hooligan and it's just really bad photocopies of my book. One of them was like sideways on the page, which tells me that they literally bought a physical copy of it and then put it in a copy machine like one page at a time or a scanner, which is more work than I put in for the book. All right. Any other commercials? Before we go, I'll put a link to the book in the description. Listen to Lions live by donkeys.

Listen to Kil James Bond. Oh, yes. Listen to Lions live by donkeys. When two of us are on that when Franklin happened when Franklin. I did some work on it recently. Thank you. Yeah. So I don't know.

Also, I suppose we should announce that we now have a manager. So if you've been emailing us now, we have a manager to deal with that. Yeah. Oh, also shirts shirts have international shipping. We emailed about that today, Alice. Yes. No, they do. They do have international shipping.

Yeah, it works. So if you want a shirt and you do not live in the Great Satan, the United Snakes of America cooker, you can buy one of our shirts, which are union made and have designs by by me or by Matlab Chansky on them. You can buy them from the link that will be in the description. Also, the link in the description will include a link to our Patreon page because people have been telling us for the last six months that the link that we put on the description to our Patreon page is not working.

Really? Really? Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, I've been mentioning it a few times, but now I thought the only way to do it was to like embarrass you in the DM. Well, I'll try and fix it. Thank you.

Also look at the email. There's an email. We have an email. Also, we have a P.O. box. You can send us stuff to the P.O. box. Yeah, that's the thing. Thanks for coming on, Joe. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Now we find our dirty laundry. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone.