Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 95: Caving Disasters

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

i would simply not go in the cave it's Devon: https://twitter.com/Devon_OnEarth Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Welcome to, uh, welcome to, well, there's your problem. The only podcast, the only podcast with three redundant recording systems. Oh, we were going the whole time. God damn it, dude. The thing is, right? It's, it's called a margin of safety, right? And our margin of safety is three because that's the number of, uh, things that have to fail for us to lose another episode.

Yes. I mean, we've only lost software. Softwares I have open recording myself on right now is three. We, I, we've only completely lost one episode, I think. I don't even think we completely lost that one. The thing is, the thing is, the one that we lost was like four hours long. And the process of re-recording it like consecutively was so traumatic to all of us that we decided to never, ever risk that ever again.

Right. Yes. I'm writing down everything I'm saying. Uh, I, God, I don't even remember. Anyway, well, there's your problem. This is a podcast about engineering disasters with slides that is itself an engineering disaster. I am Justin Rosniak.

My pronouns are he and him. Oh, I'm Alice Caldwell Kelly. My pronouns are she, her. Yay, Liam. I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And we have a guest. We have a guest.

Shit. I got rid of my fucking Abbey recording. So funny. So horrific work. Oh, for fuck's sake. Well, hi, it's me, Devon. I'm here. They finally got me.

We finally got you. My, my, my co-hosts from, from Kill James Bond and the YouTube zone. And I've, I've brought you on here, Dev, to talk about something that we all hate and fear and it's something that I've started referring to with like, uh, sort of as a countable noun. I've started calling it the caves, not just not caves, generally. No, the caves. Like it's a biome.

Yeah. The caves. Yes. Um, not going to the caves, not look at the caves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

We're going to talk about the caves and some problems that you can experience in a cave. Yes. There are many of them, most of which can be avoided by not going in the cave in the first place. I hate to, to, to, to dub on you. If you're a dead guy listening to this from beyond the grave. But if you went in a cave for spelunking or whatever and you died, that's on you. I'm sorry.

That's on you. Oh, they hate the, they hate spelunking cave people. I probably shouldn't call them cave people. Cave people is like more like, cave people are in the, uh, in the Geico commercials. Cave cave. They did based on it. Oh, don't. Okay.

But, but cave is like hate being called spelunkers. I've discovered this in the course of my research. They think it, they think it implies like a kind of amateurishness. I'm not the one going in there and dying. No, I'm not the one wedged. I'm not the sandwich filling in between two massive pieces of rock as we see here. What do you do for fun? I go and intentionally wedge myself between two large racks.

And I turn it into some sort of marshmallow like substance. Yeah, yeah, I have to wear this cover all so that the super gross, like thiccetropic mud doesn't get on me. What's the marshmallow spread on? The mud's a big problem for me. I die. It's a massive issue. Marshmallow fluff.

Yeah. No, that's what you turn it into. Yeah. It's also the inside of your lungs look like, you know, I get 50,000 different diseases from inhaling shit that man was never meant to inhale. We came out of the caves. Do not go back in the cave. Go back in the caves.

It's like we came out of the trees. Oh, yeah. I'm not a pot. No, you can go in trees. You're you're a baby, but you can go in trees. I haven't gone in trees much as an adult because I'm pretty fat. But once I lose all this, that doesn't stop them. Yeah, you can run 26 miles an hour and climb trees.

You're fucked. Yeah, absolutely. But first, we have to do the goddamn nose. Happened again. Stop fucking tagging us at this. Yeah, there was the bridge that carries Forbes Avenue and Pittsburgh above Frick Park. I want to say it's called.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, have you never listened to Frick Park market by Mac Miller for us? No, it's stupid. Let's stop naming shit after Henry Khloé Frick, dumbest named industrial barren. Yeah, but the thing about Pittsburgh is the bridge did is it collapsed this. Oh, yeah, you can see that here. Yes, Pittsburgh is Pittsburgh's yinz love putting your buses at like a weird angle because they fell into a hole.

Yes, you love doing it. Oh, you also love having a mediocre baseball team and your quarterbacks are rapist. I mean, it's the NFL. How much does that narrow it down? Do you try to find a quarterback that's normal? You're going to be looking hard. Yeah, my pronouns are made them. Thanks. Touchdown, Tom.

Sorry, Dev. I completely forgot to do it at the start. I think the thing about Tom Brady is that he's too normal, if anything, he's gone, he's blasted right back out the other side. He's that dude is is is absolutely if he wasn't, you know, his his crew path, if he hadn't joined, hadn't been drafted in the NFL, was to become a stock trader. Oh, my God.

I had a male internship while he was at Michigan. He's this that dude would be American Psycho, too, if he were not playing football. He's friends with Trump, but not in a political way. Yeah. Yeah. I had this locker room. I was at his locker when he was on the Patriots and he played coy about it. And it was like, it's like a let's go Brandon shit. It's just like just own up to it, you fucking pussies.

So this bridge collapsed. And the thing about this bridge collapsing, as many, many people have discovered and tagged us in, is that somebody a couple of years ago noticed that one of the big like supports of it years ago now. Four years ago, like an 18. Yeah. One of one of the metal supports of this had just rusted completely away. They opened that they opened a ticket for it, too. Yeah, they opened a three one one ticket, which I imagine

probably wouldn't do very much. Three one one is more for like really trivial stuff that also doesn't get addressed. This this is this is it's interesting. I don't understand exactly what precipitated this collapse because that repair that was posted on Twitter, you could see. All right. So so this bridge, it's you know, it's flat, right? There's sort of a valley underneath it, right? And then there's a pair of angled supports

like this, right? And then sort of the girders back to John Matten. I've I've missed the John Matten thing. Yeah, right. And this is the east support here. Now, these these girders that are on an angle, they have big cross braces, right? Because there's like a pair of foundations. And then there's I think there might be two cross braces, actually. The one that was closest to the Northeast Foundation, this girder

had completely rotted away. Now, the cross bracing is not the most important structural member here because all it's sort of doing is holding the bridge together. It's not bearing a huge significant load. So what what the what the repair was, they put some kind of galvanized steel like rod through the column here. And then they took two long galvanized steel rods. And I guess they probably tied it back in somewhere over here.

And that that repair looked pretty gnarly. It looked it looks bad. It looks ugly, but it would probably work, which is why it's it's weird that the whole thing has just just fell down. You know, when clearly this bridge was somehow being monitored, right? They were aware there was a structural defect here, but no one thought it was this bad. What's really funny is the ticket that this guy filed.

I hope someone's keeping an eye on the underside of the Forbes Avenue bridge. One of the big X beams is rusted through entirely after the bridge collapsed. The stasis of that ticket changed to closed, which I find very funny. Is just like, yep, no longer an issue, because the bridge has been destroyed. Yeah, we do not need to worry about this anymore. This is fine. It's been fixed actually by time. The other fun one is I went through I went through pendants records

on this bridge as to if it's considered structurally deficient. The the substructure, which is everything below the deck, I believe, was actually rated as six, which is satisfactory. Well, the deck was rated as poor and the superstructure was rated as poor. So that that's kind of weird. But I guess. But the other thing is it has not yet been updated to zero,

which is their status for a bridge collapsed. There's a lot of stuff in queue. You know, I hate using service now. The other thing that's funny is that this happened the same day that Biden was in town to talk about Build Back Besser, the infrastructure bill. Yeah, which which is my theory as to how it fell down is that he had to knock it down himself. Yeah, absolutely. Joe Biden was jumping up and down on the bridge, turn off the lights

and then give that canned line about like we can light up this auditorium together. We can bridge Frick Park. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a little bus stop sign here on this pole that's attached to the bridge. Yeah, it sure did. And the buses there. Yeah. Someone pulled the cord right before the bridge collapsed and was like, I'm more than they bargained for.

I I don't know. We don't actually know what happened yet. But like far be it from me to to speculate wildly for common for comedy purposes about why this happened. Only I'm only going to note that a few days before four days ago, in fact, Joe Biden tweeted, when we move stuff faster through ports, when bridges don't have weight restrictions, when there's less traffic on our roads, that's how we resolve supply chain problems

and get goods to people quicker and cheaper. And the bipartisan infrastructure law is helping make it happen. Well, because the trucking industry has been lobbying for higher weight restrictions for a long time. And there's there's actually some debate over whether that could be achieved. You know, this bridge had a 26 ton weight limit, which is well below. If you have like an unrestricted bridge, what that actually means is you have an 80,000 pound or 40 ton limit.

So this was not handling any large trucks, I would assume. But of course, the other fun thing about weight restrictions is they're almost completely unenforced, you know, because except on like interstates, you know, no one's no one's pulling you over to weigh the truck if you're making a local delivery. It's like, sure, just shove anything you want there. And all these trailers only have two axles. So like there's there there's just an absurd amount of extra road damage

that's occurring from overloaded semis everywhere. And there's no no policy to fix this in any way. There is one thing and we're coming back to enforcement here. If you're wondering how a bridge can collapse, that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has like judged to be satisfactory. Part of the reason might be that four point three billion dollars of their budget was just straight up given to the state police. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That was all the act 83 funding that was supposed to go to public transit in Philly and Pittsburgh. We are for those of you unfamiliar with Pennsylvania politics, it sucks here. Right. A lot of a lot of the state is not within the grasp of Philadelphia in Pittsburgh, and those counties are allowed to vote. And when they do, they vote for dumb shit. And I'm allowed to shame the world, Paul, because I'm from there. So shut the hell up.

I'm just I'm just struggling to imagine a place of the politics of which suck. It's so depressing. And it's so foreign to me. We are going to do is everything north of Bucks County gets raised to the goddamn ashes. And in his place, we put Liam Topia, a safe spot for, I don't know, Jews and Alice and Roz and Dev, I guess, if you want to hop the hop the ocean. Yeah. And we'll have buses and trains that don't fucking break.

And we'll just run no bridges. That's clearly the solution here. Yeah. What you want to do? What you want to do is if you want to cross Frick Park, you've got to repel down 150 feet, walk across the ravine and then like recline the other 150 feet back. Everyone in Pittsburgh has calves, the size of cantaloupes. We replaced all the infrastructure with bouldering.

You just have those little handholds everywhere. I have a headline to read you when we're done the segment of the goddamn news because I've been staring at it for five minutes. And if I don't talk about it, I'm going to be apoplectic even more than I am now. I think we can do it now. This was a single segment news thing because this just destroyed our mentions. All right. The other thing I wanted to say was, you know, there's there's a lot of money in the Penn Dodd budget, even for, you know,

stuff in like the Allegheny County area. And they're spending it largely on highway expansion as opposed to repairing the stuff they already got. It's it's it's wild. I mean, you can drive across the whole Commonwealth and you'll go out to rural middle of nowhere and they have this brand new six lane highway for no apparent reason that no one uses. And you get in the cities. We use it.

And you get into the Pittsburgh. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking more of like around I-80 and some of the statements around I-99 or whatever they're calling it. Yeah. Yeah. And these are like not very heavily used highways. State College gets a lot more funding than I think it should. I-80 is a truck road and they want to keep it to just keep through traffic moving because that's basically straight out of New York, straight through Pennsylvania. But there's there's you go into the urban areas and there's just littered

with these ancient bridges, which have no no schedule for repair or basic maintenance or even inspection. And this is the potholes on Broad Street. Yeah. This this is just what's the thing that's been driving you insane? I'm going to read you a political headline. All right. Off. And Suicide Hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff raising ethical questions. Oh, I know this is more for Trash Future.

But as someone who has struggled with suicidal ideation in the past and you can you can edit this out, you don't have to. It's public knowledge. But like, I've tried to kill myself before. I'm like, yeah, I can't fucking imagine. Like, I know, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a drift of all data. But like if you like whoever signed off on this should absolutely have a nice time.

Like you don't need to as a society or as a people like. Pray on these people and they're absolutely low as fuck. You should have at some point. I understand that capitalism has no has no morals. Like at some point, like a literal, like. Angel and devil should appear on your shoulder and the devil. Instead of what you get is instead of that, what you get is clippy going. It looks like you're trying to kill yourself.

Would you like to purchase some products? Just a hyperlink to an exit bag. Oh, Jesus. We can put on. Because the rest of us hate and are terrified by this subject. Alice is taking the lead on this podcast. Yeah, I wrote that. I wrote the slides, which is why I'm Justin today.

Justin, you're me for this one. So I thought I would ask, I thought I'd begin with the question, which is what is the caves? And you see sort of an answer here is when there's a terrifying existential void, when there's a hole in the world that should there should not be. And these these come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. We're mostly going to be talking about a specific

we're going to be talking about land caves, the most part, but there's sea caves. There's weird, like Hawaiian, like half land caves. There's there's a shitload of different like ways Earth can get like holes in it. But what we're specifically going to be talking about are mostly going to be limestone caves. Next slide, please, because I got to do some geology for you. Hell, yes. Yeah, this is my ship, baby.

All right. So you envision me with my elbow patches on my jacket for this one. Yes. Ross actually has a jacket with elbow patches. So yeah, I don't I'm not cool. So how is how is a cave formed? There's several different ways. One of the ways is that like you get a you get a void in a rock formation that's as old as the rock is itself, because it's been, you know,

it's it's like a lava tube or like plate tectonics have like shifted a thing up to create a void, all kinds of other weird shit like this. You can get like erosion from glaciers, you can get erosion from the sea. But mostly most caves in general are what we call solution or caves where the carbonic acid and groundwater acts on a caustic rock formation. This is mostly like limestone can also be gypsum, shit like that. Any kind of like soft, porous rock and it just dissolves bits of it.

And it's like this kind of sweet spot, right? Where it like chalk, for instance, isn't very good at creating caves because it's too porous, water just goes straight through it. Limestone is good because it will go through in certain areas, dissolve bits of the limestone and fracture and create holes and create tubes. Right. Yes. And this takes maybe 100,000 years to create like something wide enough that a person can plausibly fit into.

And into or fit into like a pretzel. Well, I mean, listen, if you liquefy a person, you can fit them down a straw. But it's Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's true. Like you're not wrong. I mean, I can't disagree. It's not it's just not a good solution to the problem. That's true.

Well, it's a solution to the problem of getting them down the thing. But like, anyway, you've become the solution. Yeah. Look at the locations of the blocks. That's a class. Absolutely. Like smoothie. So you can see here. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

One of my favorite cave facts, very, very old cave in in the Appalachian Bountains in Virginia. No, yeah, that's when the oldest caves are. Oh, yeah, there's very old caves in there. What one of them is called natural tunnel because it's just a creek that over time managed to carve a tunnel straight through a mountain. And it was big enough and old enough

that when surveyors came through to run the railroad, they're just like, oh, there's a tunnel already here. Let's use it. So now Norfolk Southern runs trains through the cave. Yeah, you can get the cave's train. Reduce, reuse, recycle, Roz. Oh, no, it's only freight trains on there. You can't take the train through.

The most carbon friendly tunnel is the one that's already built. Exactly. So we can see here a sort of a diagram of a set of caves. And these are like there's different kinds of more and less porous limestone, right? The number and the location of fractures dictates the, you know, the shape that a cave is going to take on. And they can form all sorts of weird cave, weird shapes.

But the important thing to notice that there's a water table, right? So like groundwater penetrates down into a limestone formation, hits the water table and enters the free attic zone. Oh, I like the sound of that. Holy shit. I don't like the sound of the free attic zone. I would not like to be in the free attic zone. I would not like to be.

It's like, it's like, why do we even have like, you know, how we name the deep ocean when there's like, whatever the, the app, the abyssal layer logic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't we even do that? They'll go in the fucking ocean either. Like, I know I come off as this big tough guy and like, in terms of people, I am, but in terms of nature, fuck no, absolutely not, man.

We can see it also, like if it gets deep enough down, it enters the bath of free attic zone, like you never want to be a bath. Yeah, I don't, I don't ever want compound words, basically. It's why I hate the German so much. So the oil just means water is hell. I thought the other reasons to hate the Germans. That's a joke. OK, I see.

So this, this is sort of zigzag formation happens because the water boils down and then it's sort of if you like, it wants to go back up in a road somewhere else to move its way onto the next fracture and then go on like that. Over time on like a geological scale, a cave will get flatter. And that's state four that you see here, where it's just totally flattened out and it's reached sort of parity with the water table. But that'd be a natural tunnel right there. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But what happens is because you have these zigzags, water gets trapped because like it's it's eroding on like a geological time scale. What you end up with is sort of like if you think of like a U-bend in like plumbing, where it's like it's underwater and so there's like air, one side, water, air, that that exists in a cave. And it's called a sump and it's dangerous as hell. And that's that's something that we're going to come back to. Yeah, my major problem with your cave is that since it has to be formed

through, you know, the water's action, liquid order, like melting its way through the earth in a way, it means they're all wet all the time. Yes. Yes. And that sucks. Me too, Devin. Hell, yeah. They're wet all the time. They're cold all the time.

There's a shitload of like fauna down there that have adapted to no light. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Also, the other thing that I want to emphasize is that caves like widen and weaken and change course and collapse and infill all the fucking time. Like it's a sort of it's not a static system that you just, you know, you have before cave cave. It's something that evolves into your sort of your state for your ideal water

table cave. I wonder if that's why there's so many show caves in the Appalachians, because they're so old that you can possibly put like a walking path through something like Loray or Mammoth Caves or something like that. Supposedly, but like sometimes, I mean, there's show caves in like in the like the peak districts and shit, too. Like it just kind of, but yeah, no. So it's it's something that's like moving in extremely slow motion

relative to us, if you like. It's like just to like sort of reinforce the horror of this, that this is like an ecosystem that is changing. It's just changing around you while you're inside it on like a scale of, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Next slide, please, because I actually have I actually have another train in cave fact. Do it.

I read I read this somewhere. I'm not sure if it's true, but I believe when they were digging out a part of the subway in Naples, they discovered a lava tube that ran roughly parallel to the intended alignment and they were just like, well, this is already here. And they just diverted the subway like 50 feet to the left work. Yeah. Didn't have to build a tunnel because it was already there.

Hell yeah. Oh, that's sick. Putting your subway in a lava tube. That's fucking metal as hell. I love that. It's great until a volcano erupts. So with that in mind, I've presented a little, a little sort of mini presentation for you called,

well, there's your problem presents ways you can die in a cave. Yes. Yeah. This is beautiful slide work. I wanted to talk about you on that. Thank you. Thank you. I had I had very little to do this afternoon.

So I was just I was fucking around and Photoshopped with this. So the biggest hazards in caving and we're not mentioning this sort of like more out there things like, I don't know, like a raid on gas or you get some kind of like mud lung disease or something. Your caving partner gets cave madness and shoots you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, that's a classic in a cave. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Never let your caving partner bring a gun down with them. Make sure only you have the gun. That's right. Yeah, yeah, that way, if you like, let your partner out of your site and then you hear a voice from the caves claiming to be your partner, but your partner is right there next to you. That's not him. Then you can shoot both of them and escape to the surface.

But instead of that, we're talking about the like big three, the things that are going to kill you if you get in the cave. So thing number one, the classic thing, you go into your cave. You you hear a voice that's whispering in a distance and it sounds so nice. It sounds so alluring. You just it's not quiet. If only you could get a little closer, go a little deeper.

The thing about the thing that the thing no one tells you about caves is the beguiling mysterious lights. Oh, that's the major problem. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because you don't want to find yourself being beguiled in general. If you're being beguiled, you've kind of already lost on this one. Absolutely, it sounds like a scenario and a batch of gathering. Don't go in caves.

Yeah, when you go into the cave and you see a hole that's exactly the outline of your body, just fill it with concrete. A medium. I was waiting to see how long it would take us to get to that. I very nearly did it like right at the top of the episode. Waited it to. So because we know caves have water in them and that water behaves in unexpected ways,

you can start up drown in a cave very, very easily. You're the first one to die. Sorry, bud. Yeah, I just I picked this at random. But I don't think you did because you're the last to die. I'm actually fairly buoyant here. Your your lamp is like above water. You're fine. It's actually probably the exact face you'd have as you drown to death.

I do like that the background looks like the back of a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Yeah, absolutely. First page of Google results for Vector Cave Free, seeing me through this one. Yeah, I mean, we're talking here about caving, but there's also cave diving, which is its own separate discipline that you have to be do not do that special kind of insane to do. But like, whether that's like a passage that you think should not have water in it that suddenly does or whether it's that you're trying to progress

through one of these sumps, one of these like flooded tunnels by like freediving it, which is pretty common. Cavers do that all the time. You just there's like maybe a rope that's strung through and you just like pull your way through it. It's like two, three meters long and you just, you know, kind of hope you don't run out of air before then. Why are you doing that?

Yeah, or you're doing some kind of cave, cave diving shit. You can drown very easily in a cave. Next slide, please. Second possibility. What else is in caves? Yeah, I just it's it's realistic that I would just go down after being bunt. Yeah, I mean, you've got the helmet on for that's not doing shit. To be honest, straight to horny jail.

I go to double against hell in this case. Yes. Like there's rocks in caves, but also I also include falling off of stuff in this. That's also a very common way for cavers to die because you have to like maybe like single line, like abseil down passages. And if you if you're the thing like holding you to that rope fails, you just fall off and you die. Yeah, there's a lot of verticality in total dark and it's all slippery.

So yes, very easy to just take a little tumble. Or perhaps a long tumble, depending. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe you hit some like more rocks on the way down. Imagine that scene of Homer Simpson falling down the canyon, but it's pitch black. Absolutely. And it's muddy and it's wet, too. And then finally, what happens if you're in the caves and you can't leave the caves? And the answer is straight up you get hypothermia

or you die of thirst or exposure. Madness, cave madness, because caves are caves are really cold and they're wet. Like if there's a water in there, it might be like one or two degrees. If you're just like immersed in that, that's that's a good way to get hypothermia. If you get like stuck in a cave because you're like injured or you're just physically wedged in there, you can you can just die of that. You can die of like cardiac arrest off of that shit. Or if you even if you get lost back in the sort of the older days,

as you can just be sort of like wandering around in circles until you just die. I still get lost in the cave. You can still get lost in the cave. But the thing the thing that really made a difference was the introduction of dry suits and like sort of synthetic materials and stuff. Because prior to that, if you're doing this shit, wearing like I don't know, like wool or whatever. Yeah, you're not good.

Not good, not good. And we have a fourth option. Oh, we'd have another way you may die in a game in a cave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Right down. Yeah.

Hey, this shit. Hey, this shit. Digging straight down is not a not a good idea. Don't do that. Well, we'll we'll see about that. Sure, we'll get into it. So so now that we've established the hazards of the caves next slide, please. What are the benefits?

What are the benefits of the cave? There are not benefits of the cave. Diamond. Beguiling lights. Beguiling lights, baby. You could be the first man ever to cast light upon some of these places. That's that's genuinely my answer. It's like, well, why do you why why enter the caves?

You don't want to take something out of them because that's not caving. That's mining. That's a whole different thing. That's a that's a noble proletarian profession. If you're caving for the sake of caving, you want to see some beguiling lights. You want to see some interesting rock formations, maybe you want to be the first person to like explore an unexplored ecosystem. You're just a freak.

You're a fucking freak. You don't understand that you shouldn't go to caves. You're a fucking nasty piss freak. And yeah, you've heard the whispering. Oh, normally I have to pay for this, Alice. And Jesus, I've written in a little definition here, sort of back of the envelope thing, which is caving is when you simply wish to bet your existence against the caves.

Yeah, he's going to win that one. Yeah. Every time he does. 100% success rate. Actually, I can definitely I can definitely win against the cave simply by getting a fleet of concrete trucks. They just become part of the cave. Like the cave just absorbs the concrete into its like cave system.

And now it's like a cave with some concrete. I'm talking about a lot of concrete. That's all that is a lot of concrete. I'm talking about building a ready mix plant at the cave. I can't wait till we open an engineering firm. Yeah, it's just filling all the caves. That's our mission in life. Yeah.

In all the caves, you want to make every bridge more rigid. Absolutely. So I thought we would take a brief tour through say three or four caving disasters, if you will, and caving disasters are like for us, relatively low stakes, like you're talking about maybe at most half a dozen people dying in this episode. But I think this is outweighed by this sort of nightmarishness of it. And I think the joy of this episode for me is the fact that the audience, Justin, Dev, Liam too, to an extent, I am going to badly upset all of you with some true stories.

There's a couple of times I've started reading about a caving disaster and I realize what's going to happen about a quarter of the way through and I just close the tab. I'm like, I don't need this in my life. No, exactly. I have no desire to. Man came from the holes. Do not go back in the hole. I'm not going in no hole.

No, like, I know, man, again, again, stay out, stay out of the deep sea. There's nothing there for you. I saw the hole that was made for me and I called in Fizzuno Brothers Concrete and I tracked in the truck. That was an extreme way to do a hysterectomy, but you do love that. So our first guy that we have to talk about is an American. And I mentioned that because I think it's very important to understanding the sort of the context of this. We're talking about a guy called Floyd Collins.

Oh, shit me. Fuck me. I know Floyd. I'm aware of Floyd. I know Floyd. I'm good. I know. This is Floyd,

seen here inside the caves. Seeing all live. Absolutely. So, there's this place in Kentucky called Mammoth Cave. It's like a show cave. It's big enough. You can walk in. You can walk out.

They do like concerts there now. But like back in the 19th century, people used to like sign their names in the rock and shit. Very, very popular. And like with the rise of tourism in the United States it became a tourist attraction in Kentucky. The thing about this, right, is that cave systems are very complex. There's usually a shitload of entrances, which means that everybody else in like rural Kentucky around Mammoth Cave just has like a hole on their property somewhere that like leads to a cave. And most people being normal or normal-ish are content to leave well enough alone.

Normal Godfair in Kentuckians are like content to leave well enough alone. Just a normal mountain man, very normal type of person. Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the classic guys, especially in Kentucky. The thing is that during the 1920s, there was this thing called the Depression and the sort of pre-depression. And this led to one of my favorite named phenomena ever, the Kentucky Cave Wars. Yes.

Because people used to like come and like try and see Mammoth Cave, right? And all of these guys now had to become hustlers. They had to be on their grind set. They had to become entrepreneurs because like there was no money in farming. There was no money in anything. And so the only thing you could do was if there was a bus full of like city people going to Mammoth Cave, you just leapt on the side when Mammoth Cave is closed, come to mind, it's better anyway. And hope some of them did.

You like poked around for more caves. You like sabotage the news of other caves. It was really like, this is sort of like Ancaps shit, like every man a cave and a cave for every man. And so the thing is Floyd Collins died. This is a spoiler, but he did die. I think perhaps the most American way. He had a very American death in that he died attempting to gin up customers for his roadside attraction. And his roadside attraction was a hole.

I'm just saying gin up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing is right. More of a bourbon country. He was attempting to bourbon up this cave that he called Sand Cave. The thing about Sand Cave is that it isn't really a cave. Like we've been, I went to all this trouble to explain like limestone caves in the beginning.

So I can tell you that Sand Cave is not really one of those. What it is, is this sort of like collection of like limestone matrices held together by gravel. Oh, that's not stable. Don't mind that. Wildly unstable. But the thing is it was two or three miles closer to the road than any of the other caves. And so therefore you could maybe get some more money out of it. That's money, baby.

A million dollars. A kind of a cave. Get in the fucking cave. Die. It'll be fun. It'll be cool. Tell your family. Harvesting corpses for blood.

Yes. A fucking postcard. I died at the cave. I died in the fucking hole in the ground. You gotta get better at harvesting bodies. The thing is Floyd actually likes exploring caves. There's a story about him like playing church hymns on stalagmites. Like a xylophone.

That's kind of cool. Just playing like nearer my god today on a cave. And he explored a lot of caves and Sand Cave was this sort of like joint business venture like he went in with two or three other guys. And the idea was that like if they, you know, if he was able to explore this and make it seem like a viable tourist attraction, then he would share in the profits. Right. So he goes into Sand Cave, which is this incredibly unstable sort of shifting thing of like very

slippery limestone held together by like loose rock and scree and shit. He gets pretty far in. He's got 120 feet in. And it's really difficult going. He's like really properly like quite talented to get that far. And then he realizes it's a bit too much for him. He kind of like moves back out. His lantern's going out and he's like, okay, I got to get out of the Sand Cave.

And at this point, at this point, he knocks over his only lantern. Cause the thing, the thing about this is that, you know, nobody was telling you to bring multiple light sources. You could just have like one lantern who was going to stop you. So now Floyd Collins exists in total darkness, like one of those like weird fish or whatever. Stop it. Right. And they can fuck right off too.

He's, he's, he's having. Yeah. Think about all the fish in the caves. Shut the hell up. He's not having a good day. And then a large, a large boulder, the size of a small boulder falls on his ankle, trapping him in a small shaft. I like that.

Would hate for that to happen personally. Yeah. So it's easy to avoid. It would never happen to me. Don't go in the cave. This is like a 26 pound boulder. And like one of his arms is pinned under him along with both of his legs. So he can't like move it anyway.

Even if there's anyone to move it to die like a pretzel man. It's just 26 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. But like there's no, there's no way to move it. It's cheap. Cheap death. 26 pounds.

He's sort of like, he's, he's horizontal on his back, right? And the only way down into him is like an almost vertical thing, like a right angle. I like that. But the thing is right, Floyd Collins, he's, he's, he's a cave explorer. He's a cave guy. And so when he's, you know, he's not home from the caves, everybody just goes, ah, it's Floyd. He's probably out in the caves.

I'd be incredibly safe right now. Yes. And so it takes a couple of days before anyone's like, has anyone seen Floyd? Um, he was going in that cave. Maybe we should go in the cave. And it's an, it's incredibly difficult to even get to him. And then when you do get to him, you have to like, first of all, fit in this vertical shaft upside down to reach him.

Um, fuck no. Say there. Sorry, Floyd. The thing about Floyd, right, is that he's not really injured. Like he's fine. He's, he's, he's able to talk. I think it's his like brother who comes in first. Uh, and he like, like feeds him some coffee and, uh, one curious detail.

I noted eight sausage sandwiches. Um, he's been hungry. He's down there for a while. It's been 10 days. That's true. That's true. He needs his sausages. So he's just sausage.

Do we don't specify whatever you imagine in 1920s Kentucky sausage to be. Uh, oh. It's actually probably pepperoni. He's just eating pepperals. Yeah. Good for him, man. Pepperals. Delicious.

So he's able to like talk to rescues. They, they bring him, uh, like they run an electric wire down. They bring him a light bulb to wear around his neck for some warmth. Um, and they bring him some like blankets and shit, but they can't really like get anything to him. And also the process of getting to him is so fucking harrowing. The cave is so frightening because it keeps shifting around. You're getting like pebbles dropped on you while you're walking and shit.

Uh, that like anytime they try and pay anybody to like go in and give him shit, what they tend to do is they go in, find like a wedge in the wall, like stick whatever they were meant to give him in there and then go. Yep. Gave it to him. Their offerings for the case gods at the case door. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. And so naturally the most American thing to do with a stuck man in a cave trying to popularize a roadside attraction is to make him the roadside attraction. And that is grim. And so this, this sort of like tent city springs up around the mouth of sand cave as various people try and figure out what the fuck to do about this guy. Um, there's like the local firefighter left, Hannah tries to pull him out with a rope and almost takes his foot off.

Oh my God. Wait savings. That that doesn't work. I'd be like, take the foot. Like if you want to, if you want to harrowing, if you want to harrowing detail, that's what Floyd says. He says, yeah, I don't care. Get me out even if I take, take my foot off.

They start pulling on the rope and he starts screaming so badly. His brother cuts the rope off of them. So like, come on, bro. Yeah. Some like some miners offer to try and like drill a shaft in next to him to get him out, but they don't like nobody wants to do that. They try and like prop it up a little bit. They try and use machines, but those like flood the fucking cave with diesel fumes.

Um, what, what does happen is that one journalist called Skeets Miller, cause you could just be named that in the 1920s. Who was, who was like a real man that he was like five seven and like 90 pounds. He's like able to crawl in there. Uh, and like by this point, Floyd is kind of delirious and, uh, Skeets Miller just fucking interviews him. He's like, Hey man, how's it going? Um, not good.

I'll be honest with you. Not great. Mostly delirious hallucinating about angels. Uh, for some reason the angels are like bringing him food because he's that hungry. I check myself seven times. He's gone in there to do a wellness check on his boy. Hey man, you feeling all right? Ah, yeah.

And then so the National Guard shows up and then they try and take control of it. I'm sure that went well. Well, all the National Guard do is string up a couple of tarps to stop the, uh, to stop water getting into the cave, which coincidentally stops the melt water that Floyd has been drinking. Well, there you go. I, I, I'm looking at this and I'm like the only people who could possibly help here are the coal miners and no one wants the coal miners to do shit.

Some of the Kentuckians suggest like chasing off the National Guard with varmint rifles. That's a good idea. They eventually decide not to do this. You also get like revivalist preachers showing up. They're definitely not going to help. You get people like hustling the attendees and like the people trying to help for like donations to the like cave rescue fund that they're just pocketing and dollars. You've got like, you've got 1920s airplanes.

They're ready to take negatives of press photos back to New York and Chicago. But it's like an absolute circus. And my favorite detail about this is that people also start hoaxing. So like some people start going, wait a second, there's not even a guy in that cave at all. And someone fakes a telegram from Floyd Collins. That's like, yeah, I'm actually alive and well in Chicago, send money. Floyd Collins alive in Serbia. Yes.

They actually did a fucking crime against humanity. The Bosnia-Kroak conflict. This is like the biggest. When you said hoaxing there, Alice, my first thought was people realize, oh shit, I could make a bunch of money and fame and fortune by getting myself stuck in a cave. And then they go fake getting stuck in a cave. And then get stuck in a cave. Yeah.

This was the biggest American news story between World War One and World War Two after like the Lindberg kidnapping. Like Congress barely got anything done. What else is new? Because they were all paying attention to the fucking like telegraphed reports of this shit. So they finally bore a shaft down next to him and they finally work their way in and they find that he is, you know, obviously dead. He has died of thirst. And yeah. National Guard.

The National Guard just leave. Well, boys. Our work here is done. Now, I have some extremely depressing and extremely American details about this because like the Collins family didn't really make any money off of this. After the National Guard leaves, there's reports of like the old guy who owns the land. This is on erecting a sign on the highway that says 200 yards away. The body of Floyd Collins is imprisoned and charging 50 cents to look at the hole. His brother.

His brother. Don't make money, Alice. His brother is seen scouring the rescue site for glass bottles to sell. That's fucking how desperate this shit is. And then the depression. What eventually what eventually happens is they like they exhumed him out of the shaft and the guy who owns the cave for like some thousand dollars pays his family for the right to exhibit him in a glass coffin in the cave. Jesus Christ. It gets worse because after a couple of years of this his body is stolen and they try.

They tried to like transport his body to the nearby river, but it gets hung up in some bushes. So they just leave it there. This is the worst shit I've ever. My understanding of the Floyd Collins thing ends when he died. I didn't know any about this fucking slideshow shit. And then as a perfect sort of like the aristocrats punchline, he finally gets buried under the epitaph. Greatest cave explorer ever known. I just mean.

No disrespect to Floyd Collins. I like cave explorers who don't get captured. This is the National Guard's fault. This is entirely on the guard. It's the Kentucky National Guard's fault. Absolutely. So I mean Floyd Collins. That's that's that's death number one.

Now we got to skip ahead a bit to a far worse place than a, you know, a shifting cave made of gravel. And I'm talking here about England. Yeah. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right?

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It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. There's a cave in Derbyshire called the devil's us. No, it isn't. No, it is. They renamed it peak cavern for a bit to try and spare Queen Victoria from embarrassment. Anyway, there's this philosophy student called Neil Moss, who is out exploring the devil's us. And the thing about philosophy students turn to.

I have never met a philosophy student who wasn't doing completely depraved things at all times. The thing about Neil is that he's a big guy. He's like a YouTube channel. Yeah, he's like over six feet. Like he's thin, but he's a tall guy and he's like broad. Actually, I was thinking of classics majors, not philosophy. Classics majors are the most depraved people in the world. Much worse, much worse.

I like to mix my cocaine with PCP. Just a feel sometimes. Speaking in tongues with the tongue is Latin. Oh, my God. Enter this large cavern, right? And there's a there's a like an uncharted. There's your first mistake. Yeah, absolutely with beguiling lights and such.

And so there's this small passageway there. And he thinks, OK, well, like of my party of cave is I'll like go in first, see what's what. And then if, you know, if I if it's too, it's too bad. I'll like take this flexible ladder down with me. And then they can pull me out if I if I get stuck, right? Where he gets stuck is the thing because this the shaft, it doesn't really go anywhere. And also it's like 18 inches wide. They try to pull him out in the ladder breaks.

They try to pull him out with a rope and the rope breaks. And he's just he's too heavy for them to pull out, right? And unfortunately, he then then does 18 inches. Thanks. No, I don't do that. I mean, this is this is helpfully described to me in an article as about the width of a front loading washing machine. So stepcaver. Stepcaver.

I always want reminded here of like cats, because you can see cats go through impossibly small spaces all the time. And it turns out human beings are not cats. No, we're about as big as we appear to be. Well, but then but then Neil Moss does something accordion body. He does something totally relatable under the circumstances. He panics and that's that's not a good time to have a panic attack because in the course of him doing that, he manages to wedge himself partially into a sort of like a corkscrew turn in this passage and just get himself stuck even more. So another problem with caves, right, is airflow. I didn't really mention this in like ways to die in a cave thing, because I couldn't think of a like fun way to depict it.

And also I was running out of hosts. But like in that one, yeah, I would simply not go in the cave. So yeah, absolutely. So like you can get like foul air is what cave is called it, which can mean anything. It could mean like right on it can mean like any kind of like off gas thing or whatever. But in this case, what it is is Neil Neil's blocking the shaft where the air is coming from and he's breathing out carbon dioxide. So the oxygen levels going down carbon dioxide levels going up and he's breathing a lot because he's scared. Ah, yes.

Yes. So as much as his friends are trying to get him out as he's getting more stuck, they're getting like weaker because there's less oxygen in the air. And eventually they get to the point where they just have to like fucking leave and like book it for help. Also, another detail about this is that because he's down there getting hypoxic as shit and getting carbon dioxide poisoning, the longer he's in there, the less rational he is. But he's like he's calmer, which is maybe a good thing, I guess. But like at one point he's like, yeah, you guys should just like go out for drinks. I'm fine actually.

I actually like the ultimate death of a philosophy student is becoming less rational. I actually prefer it in the cave. It belongs down here. This is my hole. It's actually cool being in the cave. You guys fuck right off. No, do you want to stay out of here? You want to take this cave from me?

They're trying to drag him out and he's just like slapping their hands or everything like, no, no, no. I love the cave. The cave loves me. They don't call to you. Now, I mean, one thing is that like Derbyshire in the 50s would be a pretty decent place to get stuck in a cave because this was a time when there was still a shitload of mining in England. So like of all of the like like aid efforts, the national coal board sends like their rescue teams down. There's like a shitload of like fire engines. Every like cave in the UK comes down and they're still not able to do shit.

Like they're working in shifts because the air is so bad. They're like bringing in oxygen canisters and it's still not really like enough. Like at this point, there's like an RAF doctor who is like waist deep in mud who is just like listening to his breathing. So at this point, all of these guys are sort of out of ideas and they put out this sort of like circular asking for a very small cave with in their words, unlimited physical courage. We need a little guy. We need a birthday boy to head on down into this game. Get him out of that. I mean, I'm jockey.

And what what they get is at the Irish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What they get is an 18 year old typist called June Bailey, who is like five foot nothing. And they send her into this cave and on the way in, they tell him, OK, take this hammer. Right. If you can't get him out, just break both of his collar bones and see if that helps us to pull him out. He's drunk. Fuck it.

Take this hammer. If he doesn't want to come out, bash him on and ask him again. He's like, no, fuck you. I want to stay in the cave. I want to stay in the cave. Frank. The struggling lights call to me. Oh, it was gasping for that made for me.

Even this isn't enough because nobody can get enough oxygen. Like there's not really like self-contained breathing apparatus they can fit in there. And so eventually, like this, this RAF doctor is like with a stethoscope, waist deep in mud. Just hears him stop breathing. And it's as far as I know, it's the first time in English legal history that a coroner has certified like that a doctor has certified death on a patient. He doesn't see. And the fun thing about this is he's still down there. He's still in the hole.

He's still in the hole. Because they did suggest trying to bring him out, but his family were like, yeah, no, one of you might get stuck also. And that that's not worth it to us. So just like fucking just pour some cement in there. And so that's, that's. You're up. Yeah. Baby.

Back up. We back up the cement truck. One of those back here. Back that thing up. Beep. Beep. For some concrete overalls. Yeah.

Um, yeah. That sounds like the most afraid sex thing I've ever heard. Fill in the rest of the cave too while you're at it. Yeah. Honestly, there's nothing of value in there. Yeah. It's it's still a pretty popular cave to like go in. Like you can go to.

Just step around the corpse like Everest. Yeah. It's like buried. So like, I think there's a plaque, but like, yeah. Um, he's, he's, he's still there. It lies. Bozo. He loves the game.

Dummy. So for some reason, for some reason, caving is like a particularly English psychosis. Uh, next slide please. Because now we're moving forward a bit, but we're still in England. We're in Yorkshire. Uh, in, in, uh, the 1960s. I hate that. In a place called Mosdale Caverns, which this is.

Yes, my name. This shit looks so wet, but not even just wet. This shit looks so slimy. It's wet. It's wet. It's creepy and wet. Me too, Alice. The pussy wide open.

The thing is right. Like for some reason, like a caving at this point in the sixties stopped being like a hobbyist thing done by guys called like Reginald and starts being the preserve of university caving clubs, speliological societies. Uh, this is mostly like a Northern like technical university thing. And it's a weirdly macho thing too. Like leads university, uh, in particular is like very famous for like doing these caving functions.

And so 10, 10 guys, we're actually eight guys, two girls go into Mosdale Caverns, which is this huge, only like partially explored cave system. Uh, and what they're actually going down there to do is to fucking dynamite some rocks out of the way, because that was just the thing you could do. You could just buy dynamite over the counter in the sixties. I guess. Yeah. You could do, yeah.

You could do it in Chimokin too before they took it away from us. Yeah. It used to be quarter stick of dynamite. They used to be, you know, you go there, you pick up some like cocaine based cough medicine and some dynamite. It's a normal thing. You could just buy it. Yeah.

Yeah. You have to sign little things saying you're not Irish and you're going to use it to blow up some caves and then you just get your, you get your dynamite. So I had down of a shops. You want anything? It's like a little bit of dynamite. If not dynamite. Yeah.

We bet dynamite. So, so there's the two girls see Mostail Caverns and they're like, ah, that's, this is a bit much for me. Actually. And there's kind of a vibe about this in the group too. Like, so they go, okay, well, can we do something easier instead? And two of the guys like agree to go and like chaperone them. And if the effect is kind of like gay much.

I mean, it's like, you want to fucking like go off and do something easy and so something tough like this. Slur and be alive that be dead and I don't know, be a human pretzel. At this point, at this point, there are like, there's a little bit of like spots, spots of rain falling like drizzle, I guess you'd say. So the, the two, the two guys and the two girls go and explore like an easy cave. And they, they have a nice time. They come out, they come out of the cave and it's raining a bit more, but that's no big

deal. They walk back across the mall to a farmhouse where they camped out. And by this point, it's raining quite kind of a lot more. So Mostail Caverns, the bit that the, the other six guys went into is like quite difficult aside from being creepy and wet. Cave is name features as they go through them. And so these are all names. Like death or glory falls or like knee breaker or whatever.

Christ. They've dived through one something. They get to a bit called the farm marathon, which is like sandwiched between two, two like precipices of rock and it's 900 feet that you just have to like crawl on your stomach the whole time. So as. So far. Yeah.

900 feet. Fuck off. We are begging you to stop going in the holes. Stop going and stop. You know, if you want to go crawl 900 feet, you can do it on the sidewalk next to your house. It's like two blocks. But no, you're weird, but you know, at least you won't die in a cave. Because I'll never be brought over by some guy on a gator.

Because what happens is that as they're crawling through, they hear these sort of weird noises and then all of a sudden it's getting a little bit wetter and then a little bit wetter than that. And you can't turn around. Like even if you even if you wanted to, you just have to kind of like crawl faster. No, I get this straight. You have to like go all the way to the end and then come back to get out. No.

Yeah. Right there. I'm all right without, you know what? Yeah. So this is simply a situation in which the passage that you're in turns into an underground river. And like, obviously all of these guys die and they die relatively quickly at least like you just drown, which is better than like being stuck there for like, you know, two weeks

or whatever. But nobody actually knows this. And so as it's like pouring down, like one of the one of the other group has to like run two miles across the water, like get help and pretty much every cave who like, again, everybody knows everybody in this community. They're all like fucking having to dig their way through. They're having to like get fire engines to pump water out. They're having to make dams to try and like hold the water back because the storm isn't

stopping. And the dam is like constantly on the edge of failing. So they're having to like use like people as like flood breaks in places just to try and try and get in after them. And of course, you know, the points of this, all of this huge effort is to discover the thing that they already know, which is that like they're all dead anyway. Like one of them has made it slightly further in pursuit of like the last bit of air, but they're still like wedged up in there.

And yeah, once again, I believe this is another case where it's like it's too difficult to get them out. So they're just still there on the caves closed. And the lesson, I guess, from this is don't go in a cave, but in particular, don't go in a cave when it's going to rain. Yes. Sound logic. Yeah, that would seem to be logical to me.

So I'm not going to go in a cave when it's fucking bone dry. You can't get me into a goddamn cave. Not going in that cave. It's a bad idea. Have I checked the fucking weather forecast and it's looking like it's going to be a bit drizzly? Absolutely the fuck not. Because it all flows down.

And the result is the fact that the caves are made by water flowing down them. You know for a fact that if you're in a cave water has flown down it before. In the wet cave. Don't go in a cave. I have. I have a final nightmare for you. And I've saved the worst for last year. Thank you.

My pleasure. My pleasure. And it's called nutty putty cave. Oh, shit. I know. Yep. I'm just going to point out. This is the original name for silly putty.

Hey, well, you try to score that nutty putty. Oh, I'm aroused. So this is anyway. We're in Utah. Because it doesn't deserve to exist. We should be clear on that. Yeah. Utahns are crazy.

And so this is nutty putty cave is unusual because it's what you would call a hypergenic cave. And actually, like as we have seen with fatal results in Mostail, caves are formed by water coming down. This is a cave formed by superheated water coming up and eroding the limestone like that. And so what I have a question about this diagram. Yes.

Yeah, I'm listening about to this. Is this plan or section? That is like you can see from the like North thing on there. This is a top down view. That's plan. Right. Okay. I don't know if you think it's a section, but no.

I was also confused by like the entrance being so far below if it were, you know, section. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These names. Not great. I'm not happy with these. Not happy with the birth canal specifically, but the order canal followed by vein alley.

Not happy. Yeah. I don't know. I could hang out in the big room probably. I do. Yeah. The big room sounds like a decent hang. Yeah.

Above it is just crack. What's been cut off by. Yeah. So, so the thing about a hypergenic cave is typically these are even more awkward and more twisty than like, um, than a solution or cave. And it's, it's named after this, this form of silly pasty because it's lined with this really soft, boozy clay. I don't like that.

It's impossible to get a grip on it. It's some of it you can disturb with sound. Like if you yell, the clay starts moving. Um, which is very fun to think about. I don't like that. And nothing. Disagree. Like it's sort of known to be dangerous that have been closed for years.

Um, because two Boy Scouts separately had got trapped in there. And at one point it had taken 14 hours to rescue one of them. Um, and to give you a sort of an insight into, into the way that cave is think the area where that happened is now just named scout trap. Um, Hey Boy Scouts do all kinds of stupid things all the time, but that the thing is the scout leaders enabled them by saying, we're going on a caving camping trip. And I remember things of fun and safe and exciting activity.

And then they fucking die. It happens constantly. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. My parents tried to make me go on one. And I was like, no, I don't, I don't, I don't want anything to do with this organization.

And that's why you're alive today. Five years because you would have died in a cave. I would have died in the cave. Yeah. You have died in a cave and it would have been named like a scout cavern. I don't fucks with this. Exactly. They would have died in a cave.

And like 20 years later, your spirit looks back at it to find they've named where you dip shit alley. And they're like, come on, worse than that. They would have named something in scouting after me like a caving merit badge. Right. I didn't want this shit. I want nothing to do with your dumb quasi military organization. So, so they, they reopened the cave after years.

Like at some point in the state of Utah decides, yeah, it's probably safe. It's probably fine. And six months after it's reopened, this medical student called John Edward Jones goes in and, and, and, and John Jones is trying to get to the birth canal as we all are fucking Utah name, John Jones. Yes. He's, he's trying to get to the, to the birth canal, but he gets lost. And instead of going into the birth canal, he goes into something called Ed's push.

Right. The thing about the thing about it's push. Yeah. The thing about Ed's push is that it doesn't go anywhere. And it like, it drops off very precipitously. So he goes in head first and then the thing just takes a sharp turn downwards. And because it's like, again, it's this clay that, you know, there's no traction on that. He just kind of like slides straight in up to the ankles.

Oops. I mean, like that. The detail, the detail that sticks with me in this one is that like he, he's, he's fine so long as he's like exhaling, but then as soon as he like inhales and his chest puffs up again, he gets stuck again. Absolute nightmare. So his, his, his, I think it's his brother again, because guys, we go in caving with their brothers, get, go and get help.

Right. And after 19 hours of this poor motherfucker hanging upside down. Nope. Nope. They finally managed to get a rope around his ankles. Right. And what they do is they loop it around this, this piece of rock here. You can see it, the sort of diagonal piece.

They loop it around there. Anchor it into, into the rock a bunch of times and the idea is they run that cable out into like a broader area and then get as many people as they can like pulling on it. Right. And this works. This works very well. They like, they pull and they pull and they pull and like he comes out like inch by inch until he's like at sort of like chest height.

Like he's able to like make eye contact and like talk to people. He's not having a great time. I'll be honest. The thing is he, at this point, he wants, he wants to not be in the cave anymore. Yes. Oh yeah. It doesn't think about fucking cave. Isn't it?

They want to be in the cave and then very suddenly and very quickly they all want to be in the cave. It's like, I'm sorry. You have made this determination for yourself. What happens when you get what you want? So, so happy you got what you wanted. So again, I'm going to draw your attention to this sort of diagonal piece of rock here that the rope is looped around before it hits its first anchor.

Yes. Dipshit's Boulder. Dipshit's Boulder. That fails. That just cracks and snaps off at pulls one of the anchors back off and he goes back in a fucking hole. Right. Why did they loop it around that to begin with?

I guess that was the only part of him they could reach because like you got to come in at this like sort of like a bleak angle, like a 45 degree angle, I guess. Yeah. Like by the time he goes back in. You'd have to get a second line to pull him further out after that. Yeah, I assume you're just doing like Shibari on him at that point. At that point, you should have put the second line on to begin with. So I mean, by the time they drop him in for the second time, all they can really see of

him is like his feet. So and the thing is right, you can you can you can die of something called harness hang syndrome. It's it's particularly it's something that's going to happen if you're like hanging outside down for a long period because it gets like more and more effort to circulate blood through your body and like breathe. And so I'm just I'm just going to sort of really convey the horror here. My guy dies eight hours later.

That is not great. I mean, that's not like that. They managed to like run a phone down to him. He manages to talk to his wife, which I mean, better than nothing. But also that's the last thing you fucking need. He's stuck in a game. You don't talk to your own chain as well. Let's say I'm kind of busy right now.

I get out, you know, yeah. They're like, hey, we've got we've got your wife on the line. He's like, cut the rope. I had a well where a fall harness for when I worked on high rises back in the day. And one of the one of the things that was explained to me is like, OK, yeah, if you fall, this will arrest your fall. But also, it'll be a sudden shock.

And also, if you're hanging from this for more than like 45 minutes, you'll probably be sterile. Yeah, I imagine upside down. You know, that's also pretty bad. But you retain your fertility until until you die. This is also like because all of these guys are Mormons, obviously. This is also still portrayed a little bit in like Mormon devotional literature, like a guy fucking like crawls down there

and they like pray together. And I guess one of them sings like if I could hide a cola or whatever. Anyway, they they fucking like cemented him in as well. He's he's still in there. And the cave is closed, which is probably just as well, because this guy is probably haunting the shit out of it. No, he's gone to Mormon. Yeah, that's the thing.

Yeah. Yeah. When when you die in a cave, your soul can't get out of there. So you do haunt the cave. That's the major problem. Ancient Egyptian cosmology, your like car is unable to like progress out of the. Yeah. What if your soul was just stuck in the same position your body was in for eternity? Oh, you get to Mormon heaven and this guy is like doing a handstand.

That's all. Yeah. I'm thinking like the soul is physically stuck in there because they concreted it over. Yeah, you do. Your soul does get out, but you do resemble a nice Billy Pretzel. I could go for a nice Billy Pretzel right now, man. Anyway, I I personally like thinking about this and I don't find it at all horrifying to like be confronted

with a brief moment of false hope and then go back in the upside down tomb hole. Oh, you love thinking about it. I got to listen to this two more times in order to edit it properly. You could do the one pass if you're feeling really great. No, no editing, no editing. Well, that's what you do. Why are you lying about the start and just go with it? That's that's that's my little like my little curated selection

of horrifying cave deaths. Thank you. But this wouldn't be an episode of. Thanks so much. If we didn't take the opportunity to rip on Elon Musk. Yes. Oh, yes, absolutely. We do. Do we remember the time when some some Thai children, a Thai football team

went into a cave and then were trapped by rising waters like Mostail, except they didn't drown and they were just stuck on a little shelf. I'm still very confused as to how they got in there in the first place because it sounded like they needed some pretty technical cave diving to get them out. So I was there an easier passage to get in that happened to be more flooded or I don't know what happened there. I think I think it's like it's one of those things that you can crawl through. But yeah, once once it's like one way in, but like you can crawl through it,

but you can't fucking swim back out. So they they they it was like, hey, let's bring all the kids into the confined space. This would be a grand old time. Yes. Yeah. The Boy Scout Association spiritually wasn't it as well. Yeah, it was like kids football team. Yeah. So like Elon Musk's like suggestion here,

which led to him calling a cave diver a pedophile was to use was to use this thing. This is Elon's child submarine. Right. Yeah. And the idea was you would you would float this thing through, install the child, float it back out. Um, well, one of the one of the things here was that like this was a the the route they determined in was incredibly confined. Right. Yes.

And also this piece of equipment was designed based on drawings, which were obviously not perfectly to scale because it's a fucking cave. Right. It's totally rigid. It's totally rigid. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't bend rigid fucking. Yeah, titanium fucking dildo.

Like what? We tried to put a tie kid in this like the end of gravity's rainbow. I wouldn't even be able to get the kid in. What would happen is you'd bring it in. It would get wedged in the small opening and then you'd have no way in anymore. That's that's that's exactly what the guy that Elon Musk called a pedophile said. Like Elon Musk was insistent this would work. It would not.

But they ended up having to do was teach every one of those kids from first principles how to cave dive. Like some of them couldn't fucking swim and they had to teach them how to scuba dive through a cave to get out. But, you know, what if instead of that, we just put them in the sex dildo? And I think the sex dildo was a viable strategy if they just tried it. He's calling the tie diving instead, cave diving guy, a pedo guy.

He's the one who wants to put kids in a sex dildo. But one of those late late war Japanese suicide torpedoes that are banned. Yes, you know, it's a welcome tale, but like the thing is right. Elon Musk is a fucking idiot. But even if he weren't, even if he were as small as he pretends to be. Yeah, but even if you like if you were like a sex guy and you're like, actually, this guy's super smart and he's the reason we're all going to live on Mars, right?

He'd still be fucking wrong about this. And I feel like this is sort of a broader point in that all of our examples. We've seen that like the kind of like rescue attempts that you do only make things worse unless you have this very specific set of skills. And even then, like you might just, you know, sometimes it's just a guy going, hey, do you mind breaking this guy's collar bones with a hammer? Yeah, it's like it's not something you can really take your way out of because it's so fucking counterintuitive, I guess.

I mean, you know, I think on this program, we we definitely do make fun of, you know, people who have so called expertise a lot of the time. Oh, certainly, which we had a whole episode on how the field of traffic engineering, for instance, is wrong at first principles. But I think I think if you have a cave diving rescue, right, I'm not going to suddenly assume that I know more about cave diving than, you know, I mean, you're wrong about first principles in that the first principle should be do not go in the cave.

But other than that, like once you're in the fucking cave, I kind of defer to your expertise. And I kind of I do kind of admire the way that it does end up being like people rescuing their own. I read an account of a successful cave rescue in Britain. I was the longest one to date where the guy I think like broke his leg like in a really awkward place. And like it was easy enough to stabilize, but he was like in horrible pain

and they had to like drag him out a bunch of like awkward passageways. And he's like he talks about like panicking, right? And then at the end, he's like being handed from person to person through the last bit, and he recognized every person. And he's like getting little like words of encouragement. And he's like, well, I started to feel like I was going to be OK at that point. Also, I was on a lot of morphine. And I just.

Yeah, it works. Let's go. So I appreciate that. So, I mean, what how can you avoid being killed in the caves? Is my question for us to my final sort of slide here. What can we what can we is every day? You know, what can we as problematics do not to die in a cave? I have a very simple and easy solution to that.

In the game, don't don't don't go in the cave. Yeah, my first guess. Do not go in the cave. Don't go in the cave. I'll go in the cave and say, even if it seems beguiling, even if you want to like play, if I could hide to call up on a fucking stalactite, don't do that shit. Yeah. Even if your your brother, your friend,

maybe has gone into the cave and you've sat waiting at the entrance and then they've come back out and then the next day, they've come back out again and there's two of them. And they're telling you that they're the real one. That's just two brothers. Don't worry about it. Now you have an extra brother. Don't don't question it too much.

We'll say, really, you really, really want to go in the cave. What you can do is you can drive down I-81 in Virginia and you'll see advertisements for all these caves you go in. They're completely safe because they have like pathways and like railings. And you'll see them for hundreds of miles. So if you're on any one, don't worry, you won't miss it. That's actually that's actually a benefit of Floyd Collins's death because part of the like rampant commercialisms effect

was that the federal government decided, oh, hey, maybe we should probably make this like a national park so you can't just go and say that. Oh, yes. Like my national park is because Floyd Collins got his shit stuck in there. Or like, all right, we need to absolutely more closely regulate dudes in caves. You can probably go to a national park cave. You can probably go to a show cave.

I wouldn't. I wouldn't risk it. There's nothing in a cave worth seeing that you can't see. Certainly, you might find up tempted to go further in the cave. Yes, unregulated cave. Yeah, absolutely. We at WTYP cannot insist enough. Don't go in. No, no, no, no, no, no, you want to go deep underground,

be an adult and become a coal miner. That's right. Do something good for the world. Do something good for the world. Come a coal miner, maybe. Yeah, there's no union of cave workers of America. Why? Because they add nothing to society. It's true.

The thing about the union of cave works, America, is there's two of everyone in there and the guy in lights. Yeah, the cave people. Yeah. What happens if the two of them go in and a third one comes out? We should do a shirt that's United Cave Workers of America. America's wettest union. Yeah.

Oh, it's just the image of a man wedged tightly between two rocks. Yeah, that's a pretzel bow upside down. It's just corks for 50 cents. It's a tracing of the fucking Nasi Parsi slide. Absolutely. Well, we have a segment. On this podcast, which we call Safety Thirds. Kind of this whole episode was a safety third.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is like Safety 16 for whatever people who did not live to tell of it. Hello to all of you, especially my favorite, my fellow anarchist, Liam. Hello, Moji. Oh, please forgive that this is longer than single page. So hopefully you'll understand why this is in unfold. During my high school years, I was in the army cadets.

Yes. Yes. This is this is my hole is made for me. Oh, concrete. I fully support filling the combined cadet force with concrete. I think we should do that. We should build like the fucking Chernobyl sarcophagus over every school cadet like or whatever. Alice can explain more.

But in brief, this Britain's child soldier army. Yeah. And somewhere within the barracks, there's a wish granter. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it, getting to do cool shit like a paintball assault course, long hikes through the Scottish Highlands. Sunrise and sunsets over mountains of slate and Heather and crying at five a.m. as I try and eat cold corned beef hash in a winter storm. Says to do sarcasm on that last one. It's it's it's only water.

It's character building. Now we're doing that was what they told me about the Boy Scouts. But it turns out building character involves getting stuck in a cave. Well, I had my character build. Oh, you can build a character by going into a whole second character. Oh, yeah. Second guy. You can march all the cadets into the cave so we can double their strength. That's our strategy of building this army is through an eldritch

horrors of various kinds. Yeah, a lot of it requires that you do not ask questions about where the second guy. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think this is weird. Haven't you seen the Clone Wars? Yeah, it was actually a clone trooper for a couple of years in school. Congrats to your twin daughters on graduating cadets school twins.

They did it again. It's past its there were dangers and injuries, of course. The girl who burnt her hand on a freshly spent casing. I broke my kneecap by slipping down a slope straight onto a rock. I find it so funny that you could get like genuine sort of like army disabling injuries while being 14 and crucially not in the army. I love Britain. It's so normal. That was while wearing a full Bergen webbing and weapon.

The iron sights jabbing into our eyes. The first time we fired a weapon. It's all in itself. But this safety third is about none of those trivial things. This safety third is about something far, far worse. Allow me to introduce Elmer Fudd, who will be dramatic persona standing in for a fellow cadet during this particular incident. Fudd wasn't his actual nickname, which I won't be saying because it's to identifying

though he was called that regularly. Apparently it's some kind of Scottish insult. Mm hmm. Yeah. Opposite Mr. Fudd is Daffy Duck. He will be playing the role of our commanding officer. You may note from the beret and shoulder boards that Daffy is a fucking green green lead captain. I mean, like the sort of the adult instructors,

the officer corps of the cadets are so fucking funny because it's just your teacher from school who has been given a ludicrously inflated rank. Our officer commanding was a colonel, right? I mean, that's equivalent to a Navy captain. Like we literally had a colonel who was like overseeing an attachment of like maybe a hundred, like, you know, fucking 12 to 18 year olds. You may also note that he is very unhappy with Elmer Fudd. God, imagine being a fucking Marine cadet instructor.

That's fucking grim. Every year there was a summer camp for our entire unit, a week of fun, hijinks, appalling army billets and more importantly, target practice. Hell yeah, baby. It worked like this. Ten cadets would go prone, be handing handed a magazine of 10 rounds. We'd check the mag was safe, check the range was clear and load on order. We'd wait for the command to fire and begin.

Once we had fired all our rounds, we'd put safeties on, raise a leg. Something. Yeah. Raise a leg or an arm to indicate we were done and maintain control of the weapon. So it never pointed anywhere away from the range. I have been muzzle flags before. And this never fucking works. Oh, my God. Basic. I've had I've had a Lee Enfield pointed at me.

How many people since the fucking 40s can say that? Jesus fucking Christ. Because he turned round holding it was just like, it's like, hmm. Once everyone finished, we'd back away from the range, hand over our magazines and retreat to safety while the next 10 cadets took over. It was a well structured and well coordinated exercise that never had any incidents. Now likely story. Until Fudd.

Oh, no. This wasn't his first time on the range. This wasn't his first time firing a weapon. He was one of the more experienced cadets with about three years experience at this point. For whatever reason, this day, he got nervous. Having taken a long time to fire, he noticed that everyone around him was finished and feeling that pressure. Oh, no. He indicated that he was also finished.

No, no. We got we got the order to stand up. So we did. And as Captain Duffy, Captain Duffy walked along the line to collect magazines. Boom. Now, a Royal Marine is not a person you want to fuck up around. A captain is not a person you want to fuck up around. A three tour Afghan veteran is not a person you want to fuck up around.

And Elmer Fudd had fucked up. He had fucked up bad. In a nervous in his nervousness about being caught with a round that should have been a hundred yards downrange, he had tried to dispose of it discreetly. Which happens by firing it. The most discreet way to use a bullet. Absolutely. I simply go look over there and then chuck it in the opposite direction overhand.

Like a P. O. W. He just tried to dispose of it discreetly like a P. O. W. is scattering dirt down his trousers in a German camp. Through the grace of the angel Gabriel themselves, the bullet missed his foot by a couple inches. And he's luckily lucky only to suffer the wrath of a green lid. I'm amazed he managed to keep himself upright after his weapon was snatched from him and his brain was jellified by the shockwave of Duffy's scream.

I hope that Nate Bethea is on this episode. Unfortunately, no. Sorry, I just get me. Sorry. Yeah. To give a reference, I could still some value if you want. I mean, I'm happy to do that. One. To give a reference point of what this might be like. We're all we've all experienced times when we're so nervous that we just stop thinking, go blank and do something stupid.

I'm slightly sympathetic to what happened that day. He was young, thoughtless and scared that he'd get in trouble by declaring his weapon wasn't clear. If nothing else, it's a learning experience. And he learned that day that the person in charge of a firing range is going to carry a whole lot more that you and those around you are safe rather than how many rounds you fire. Yeah. And therefore you get the like full hairdryer,

which leads us to the next incident. Oh, no. Oh, no, you got a second incident. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Second incident. Alma, come on, Fudd. When we weren't out in the field, we had a small twenty five yard range that would that shot that we shot twenty twos on, right? These are old rifles, World War Two, vintage bolt action, sometimes had some issues.

The officer ran this range was a sergeant. It was a veteran of the Troubles. And I call him an officer. Hmm. It works for a living. I mean, despite all evidence to the contrary, it was about 18 stone, that's two hundred fifty pounds of beef, beer and calloused skin. We shot in the range every week in the evening.

We must have had triple digit numbers of hours of experience. Now, his rifle was not usually too bad when it came to misfiring or jamming. But on this day, it was really acting up after about a minute trying to fire, glaring his rifle, checking and reloading, trying to fire, still nothing. He shots to the sergeant that his weapon isn't working. The sergeant comes over, takes his rifle, flares it, checks the insides, fiddles a bit, hands it back,

saying it should be fixed now. Elmer loads the rifle, drives the fire again, still nothing. And he stands up and says, Sergeant, it's still not working. See? And then to prove his point, he aims the rifle at the sergeant, pulls the trigger. Oh, what are you trying to get? Fucking kill, son. What the fuck are you doing?

In the war, in the war. That is not a good-raped safety. Can't emphasize that enough. That's bad safety. It's going to have fucking headspun clean around my blood, oh, Jesus Christ. Please, no, do not do this. Not a good way to prove your point.

In the words of Liam Anderson, the sergeant rocked his jaw so hard, I thought he died. With a spare hand, with a spare hand, which was the one that wasn't currently boring through a teenager's face. The sergeant caught the rifle before it fell, ripped the bolt back, ejected the round and before the now semi-sentient column of mead

even hit the deck, all while pointing the rifle downrange. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing a move from Assassin's Creed play out in real life. It was fucking beautiful. Fuck me, dude. Fuck me. Thankfully, there were a few of us there to back up what had happened, and there was a quiet

acknowledgment that we would testify at the sergeant's defensive trial. Thankfully, it didn't come to that. I don't know what happened after. Presumably, a quiet word was passed to its parents about why Elmer came home with a black eye and swollen cheek. And it was a great that no complaints would be made, but he would never be allowed near a weapon again.

Yeah. Sometimes when I'm awake at 3 a.m. and I suddenly remember all the cringe shit I did in high school. I come I comfort myself with the double thuds of the stupidest things I've ever seen. The bullet in the gravel makes me feel better about my anxiety and the thought of his collapse

makes me feel better about my intelligence. I hope I can give you and all the listeners some reassurance that we surely could not have been worse than that. I'll say this, I may not have been a great cadet. I mean, I was I was my drill was always terrible. But I never attempted to shoot. It was never.

Congratulations, son, you've reinvented fragging. Oh, my God, just fucking the doors. This is the end of playing over footage of fucking Senebridge. You don't know the things I've seen, man. You aren't there. Yeah. Oh, my God. Folks, gun safety, it's important.

Don't run at anything you don't want to kill. Yeah, and probably don't have most schools have a like paramilitary. Yeah, good idea. In my opinion, that's why the Boy Scouts are unaffiliated with the U.S. public school system as as well. They should be.

Yeah, I hate the goddamn Boy Scouts, man. Fucking terrible. Oh, good news is they're going bankrupt. God damn paramilitaries only we could do that. Exactly. They can't do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges. Clues with love and solidarity to you all.

I assume this is Ian with an E. Nice. Yeah, I think so. I I oh, my God. Actually, speeches, what an incredible. Oh, what a fucking brain strategy. If you'd like thoughtlessly like pointed the rifle at him, like in like the way that happened to me with the guy turns around. Yeah, you actually like muzzle flash.

Like whatever I don't take it to personally. But like a trigger to purposefully point your weapon at the rain. And the trigger I am in a world of shit. Yeah. Fuck me. Oh, my God. Fuck me, dad.

Safety, that's whoo. Oh, God. Our next episode is, of course, on the Boston molasses disaster. Then we have commercials before we go. No, no. Devon, yes, the people want more Devon. Where can they receive more Devon?

I'm on this little podcast that you may not have heard of called kill James Bond. It's it's me and too much more intelligent, successful. Yeah, Abby and cave, Abby. Abby and the Abby that came out of the caves that we just haven't do that. Right. I have a question. So yeah, it's me and Alice and Abby. We have a lovely time.

It's at kill James Bond on Twitter and you can find me directly at Devon underscore on earth. And I also edit 10,000 posts with Hussein and Phoebe, which is at 10 K post pod on Twitter. Oh, yeah, we will link to all of these in the description. Liam commercials. Yes. Hi. I am on two other podcasts. Lions live by Donkeys, which is a military history podcast

with Joe Cassavian. You should go listen to it. And my sweet baby, 10,000 losses, which is a pro labor left to his Philly sports podcast. We just recorded our second bonus episode. This will be out this weekend with Keith Wagner, a friend of the pod and Big Ben Chanel. And crucially, it's the same podcast as 10,000 posts.

We are going to see you rip that thing right off. It went in the cave. The second you made it, it showed up in the 10 K post fucking WhatsApp group being like, can they do this? I got 10,000 and one losses. I thought this was actually two separate things because the Philly sports, Philly professional sports had just registered 10,000 losses when you.

Yeah, no, that's no, yeah, it's the Philly specifically. And they're very nearly at 11,000 losses now. They have the rules. Yeah, we'll do a special Philly's episode when we get to 11,000. And of course, well, those are your problem news is that we are going hopefully have a slightly more consistent release schedule after this. Yes. But we are on it. We are aware of it.

She is she is progressing neatly. My life is not as much in shambles as it was. Absolutely. therapy. Hmm. Oh, God. Everybody fuck off. This has been the episode. That was the episode. Gigi. Bye. Bye.

Good night. Good night. Actually, I can't say good night because I released these episodes at 8 a.m. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. All right.