All Episodes

May 5, 2017 38 mins

A section of Interstate 85 caught fire and fell to pieces and within days a sinkhole emerged in Interstate 20. The city and media proposed several official explanations, but Ben, Matt and Noel can’t help but wonder if there’s more to the story behind Atlanta’s collapse.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,

(00:24):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name isn't all they call him? And Ben, you
are you? And that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. The stuff we're exploring in this episode
is near and dear to us, both figuratively and physically.
We're talking about a recent event in our own fair

(00:45):
metropolis of Atlanta wherein it looked as if the city
was falling apart, and to a degree, to a very
small degree, that was true, absolutely, And we covered this
just slightly. We touched it in our New York Live
episode just to give some context with that material, but
we're really going to get into depth into it today.

(01:06):
Oh that's right. So first, let's talk about infrastructure. Infrastructure
is one of those, um one of those chronic problems
that the US has because it's not, you know, particularly
juicy news item. It's kind of dry. People aren't really
having passionate arguments pre flint people aren't really having passionate

(01:27):
arguments that make it into the national zeitgeist regarding you know, water,
cleanliness and stuff. So if we define infrastructure in the
most general terms, this describes all of the physical and
social structures or facilities needed to make not just a city,
but any society or a business run. So we're not

(01:48):
just talking about roads or power supply grids, or sewage
or water treatment and so on. We're also talking about
the groups of professionals that create, maintain, and ideally expand
these structures to fit the needs of growing systems or communities.
And that last part is pretty important, and these two
categories cannot exist without the other. If you've got a

(02:08):
bunch of top notch professionals that are like really good
at what they do, but they don't have anything to
work on, that's pointless. If you have really great roads
and facilities but no professionals to house them and to
run them, then what are you doing? Right? Yeah, they're
They're reliant on each other. And it's no secret that
the US infrastructure is in dire straits, not not The

(02:31):
band is that a band? Yeah? I do the what
is it? Money for Nothing? Kiss It Kicks? I thought
it was checks like che mix. I always thought it
was chicks. For free, your money for nothing, and you're
I like the idea of it being a checks mix.
So I just want to live in a society where
our only currency is chex mix. I think that could happen.

(02:53):
I feel like we've earned that. Like people, I like
the little mini rye breads and checks mix. I think
those are the best. They sell those by themselves. They
might you're welcome checks. So the infrastructures in dire straits, right, Yes,
So this little outfit called the American Society of Civil
Engineers or ask SEU. Their most recent infrastructure report card

(03:17):
that they put out UM told a pretty depressing story
about the state of affairs. According to their analyzes, there
has not been a significant amount of improvement in the
United States of America's transportation, water, energy, education, or waste

(03:37):
management programs since the last report card was released in UM.
And overall, they gave the good old USA a D plus.
I guess that's better than a D minus or just
a hard d uh. And this all breaks down get
it actually wrote in the yikes into several uh different categories,

(04:02):
which include you got your railways, your bridges, your ports, um,
and then you've got solid waste which was received a
C and the bridges and ports both received c pluses respectively.
Then we have energy, hazardous, waste, parks and wreck favorite
show of mine, uh, schools wastewater, and each of those

(04:25):
received another D plus. So there was also rating for aviation, dams,
drinking water inland, waterways, levees, and roads, all of which
received a D. And of course, no surprise here, public transit, uh,
the the eternal runt of the litter got a D minus. Overall,
that's a D plus score and overall that's a bad, bad,

(04:49):
bad bad thing. Yeah, this is really bad, especially since
it just came out this year and the last time
that report was issued was in and you may have
seen if you watch it the John Oliver episode on
infrastructure last week tonight. Yeah yeah, last week tonight, and
he focused on that report card, and uh, you'd think

(05:09):
you'd think there'd be a little improvement. Again, it's not.
You know, it's not as exciting because people would like
like their news stories to be so. Unfortunately, Atlanta is
no exception to this trend towards stagnation and decrepitude. This
came to a very public and very dangerous head earlier
this year. And it concerns the roads. So there are

(05:33):
five interstates that are important to this story that we're
going to talk about. There's I seventy five and eighty five,
which are closely linked when you're inside the like inside
the city itself, I twenty and I two eighty five.
Twenty runs east to west, so it just goes horizontally
across the city if you're looking at it from above.

(05:53):
Then you've got seventy and eighty five, which run north
to south, cut it vertically again from a of and
I eighty five in particular connects the Atlanta metropolitan area
with Montgomery, Alabama. You've got Charlotte, North Carolina, and if
you go all the way up on that interstate, you
can almost get to Richmond, Virginia. Um let's see then. Oh,

(06:15):
also I eighty five carries and estimated four hundred thousand
vehicles per day. That's across the entire highway. And then
the last one is two eighty five, which is it's
not a circle, but for this let's say it's a
circle uh loop that goes around the city as a bypass.
So if you're driving south heading to almost Richmond, Virginia,
I hope there's a town named Wilmos Richard when when

(06:38):
you go through the city, if you want to avoid
city traffic, you can hop on two eighty five and
drive around the town. But eight five twenty. They all
have their problems. None of them are particularly amazing. But
every road is gonna have issues, especially this much traffic.

(07:01):
Every road has its thorn. There we go, and I
think that was worth it, or a giant hole in
the middle of it. Yeah, yeah, okay. Thorn is an
acronym that somehow implies pothole. Alright, Nolan, I had a
meeting about it. So so what happened in particular with
these with these inner states, Well, there were a series

(07:25):
of incidents of unfortunate events, a series of unfortunate events,
the first of which when as follows, on Thursday March
of this year, UM an area underneath an overpass bridge
of Interstate five UM near the Georgia Department of Transportations
armor Yard, which is very close where eighty five cross

(07:46):
over Piedmont Road to any in Lanterns. A t aliens
in the in the area UM caused a section of
the northbound lanes to completely collapse, and there was a
catastrophic amount of damage to the adjacent southbound lanes. This
was an honest to god conflagration. In total, there ten

(08:06):
lanes of raised highway that were affected, and this is
three feet of highway in either direction. Even the president,
the current president, said something about it. It was a
huge deal at the time. You may remember this from
your news if you're in the US, and without doing

(08:28):
a Trump voice, we can just read the quote. You
just imagine any president saying this from the Roosevelt Room.
That was something the whole world was watching that one
our brave firefighters battled forty ft flames, which was incredible.
What was the reason for those flames? It was something
underneath that was very combustible. Those flames were amazing. They

(08:50):
were amazing. The President is right. I personally drove past
them on my commute home, as we mentioned before, and uh,
I got a video of it, and I think we'll
you have it on Facebook. I might post it on
our YouTube just for funzies. Yeah, who knows, do so?
Uh that that would be good. If you haven't seen
that yet on our social media, you can check it out.
That's not the only thing that happened on Monday of

(09:12):
April seventeenth, we had another incident. I'm surprised he called
the flames amazing and not tremendous. Amazing seems like the
wrong choice of words. Amazing has implies there were good. Yeah,
it's up such a positive connotation. Tremendous would at least
just mean they were large and in charge. Yeah, there
was another little little doozy of an incident that took

(09:33):
place on the seventeenth, which was Monday. UM, a section
of my twenty's the road that I've frequent pretty often
going between here and my hometown of Augusta, Georgia, UM
basically buckled from underneath because I believe a gas leak
took place. We'll get to that a second, but yeah,
and the AP described it as such. Quote the pavement

(09:57):
rose to nearly the height of a full grown man
and split into several pieces. The official report was that
an underground gas leak caused the buckling UM, but a
spokeswoman for the local one of the local gas companies,
Atlantic Gaslight, said while a contractor for the utility was
working in the area and no natural gas was released,

(10:17):
so would you say they're gas lighting us? And I mean,
you know what, how does that even happen, Like I
can understand maybe if there was a pressurized a high
high pressure release of material that could cause it. It
must it must be because it could also be something
small in in the gas um mix or in the

(10:39):
density of the gas that's exploiting an already shoddy UH
pipe system, or something you need to repair because it's
a big it's a big hill and apparently popped up
fast enough that a motorcyclist was injured on like got
evil kneviled unintentionally, a non consensual kinnevil. And this we

(11:01):
have a statement from the Georgia Department of Transportation, and
they went out of their way to say, like, this
is not normal. They said, this is not an occurrence
that happens every day. This is an extenuating circumstance of
some things that happened when some work was being done.
So this does not indicate that we have a widespread
crumbling infrastructure. Man, that sentence structure is so strange to me.

(11:23):
Some things that happened while some work was being done.
That's that's like a shady answer I would give when
I don't want to talk about something. Are you saying
you don't trust the official report I'm saying, I'm saying
that a lot of people don't uh, and this this
is these are the two biggest incidents. But also earlier

(11:44):
in the same day, there was a huge chemical spill downtown.
So yeah, this is this just really fast to jump
on this. Okay, So we talked about eight five, and
so if you're going through the city, if you're trucker,
let's say you've got a lot of things, let's say
hazardous chemicals loaded up on your your rig. Uh, generally

(12:07):
it is illegal for you to go directly through this
city using that depending on the cargo. Yeah, unless well
it's usually it's for all trucks unless you have business
business within the loop. Like, if you have business inside
the loop, you can go through. If not, you have
to use to eight five. Um. And apparently this truck
did not have business and was doing he was not

(12:29):
on the correct highway. Yeah, and he met one of
our signature insane drivers. Yeah. Yeah, an SUV driver that
stopped in the middle of the highway. And then just
it looks if you you can find video of this crash,
it looks as though this driver is trying to do
a U turn on a one Way Highway, but then
just kind of gives up halfway through. There's no there's

(12:51):
no follow through. I mean, it's a it's a bizarre
clip because the person, like you say, sort of swings
wide as though they're going to flip it around, but
then just kind of chills sideways and it's like broadsided
by this truck that then jack knives and flips over, spilling.
It's uh, it's a hazardous payload. Yeah, it's a very

(13:14):
strange thing. And this is a town with our numerous
accidents that happen every day, but these three events stuck out,
both for their proximity, the extreme nature of the incidents,
and of course because jet fuel and steel beam jokes aside,

(13:35):
how does a concrete bridge burn? We'll get into the
official story after a word from our sponsors. We're back
yes to further discuss the carnage facing off fair Town.

(13:55):
We didn't even mention there was that same weak ish
Around the same time, they was a big fire on
Beauford Highway, which is our um wonderful stretch of delicious
food choices the world. It's fantastic, and that the fire
was actually really close to my house. That's right. And
it was also which is also pretty close to where
the main original issue was the fire to the bridge.

(14:19):
The fire to the bridge. The point being is maybe
you're acting yourself, listeners, what is the point being a gentlemen?
What is the point of being? Well, that's that's different.
But it's like, Okay, you live in a city, things
like this happen. Yeah, and you might be asking yourself though,

(14:41):
what what's the point of all this talk? And you know,
you're in a city. Cities burn, things happen, infrastructure breaks down.
This is true, but it's when we start getting into
the official explanation of this business things start to feel
a little murkier. Yeah, and we also have memories of Sherman,

(15:02):
So you know, we're all a little nervous about fire.
The way I was going to say it is, this
is not the first time a land has had a fire. Um.
So this fire, this modern fire, broke out on a
Thursday afternoon and like the hinter lands of rush hour
towards the end. And it was in an area, this
under a bridge where all sorts of shady stuff happens,
in an area that was used to store construction materials

(15:25):
and equipment, and the flames and the smoke rose higher
and higher in the air, and authorities at the time
said they're not sure how it started. The Georgia Department
of Transportation or you know, like this guy's g DOT,
which I think is cool. It sounds like an MC name.
They had been storing these coils of this plastic conduit

(15:46):
that's used in fiber optic networks beneath the bridge, but
they insisted they were not flammable. This stuff is specifically
known as HDPE, an acronym meaning high density polyethylene um.
Their pipes they feel more like cables, you know, They're
not the kind of lead pipe you're thinking of. Uh.
The conduits are used in traffic management cabling fiber optic

(16:09):
wire networks. So the fire rises right, all all Bain style,
and the police and the firefighters cut off traffic officially.
And despite the fact that is during rush hour, the
heavily trafficked interstate, not only are there no fatalities, but

(16:30):
there are no injuries. The entire city walks off without
a scratch. Yeah, except for the bridge itself. And you
can see video of commuters driving through heavy black smoke
where the visibility is zero. But they were just going
for it and somehow, like Ben said, yeah, still nobody
got hurt. It's it seems so improbable, but it's also great, right, Yeah.

(16:55):
So that's that's the first thing, the complete lack of fatality,
injury or accident that set people's weird weird ometer off,
you know, that tip the needle a little. The next day,
three people were arrested, Basil lb Sophia Brower, and Barry Thomas.
The Deputy insurance commissioner, a guy named Jay Florence said

(17:17):
Basil Lby faced the charge of criminal damage to property,
while Uh, Sophia and Barry were charged with criminal trespassing.
They think that these three people were together under the
bridge when the fire started, and the lab set the fire.
And he didn't say why this guy would start the fire? Really,

(17:37):
um say how in the beginning that they have a theory.
But there's one part of this is a little bit
of Gallas humor. One part of the original police investigation
said that the three people who are as far as
we know, homeless, met to discuss the consumption and smoking
of crack, which I love because it sounds like they're

(17:58):
holding a meeting like to make plans to smoke crack later. Yeah, allegedly,
but you know, some of some of the story like
is evolving because the Sophia and Barry are a couple
and they were questioned for some like seven hours by
by the authorities. I don't know exactly which authorities, but
they were a question for like seven hours, and then

(18:20):
those authorities realized that these two were actually witnesses, probably
to this guy. But the whole thing, like, it's like,
ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to meet me today.
We'd like to thank Sophia for the lovely box of donuts,
and uh, we have a motion on the floor from
the previous meeting to discuss the consumption of crack cocaine.

(18:43):
It just sounds very not to be heartless, but it
does sound. It's it's very weird way to describe it.
So the current guess is that lab burned down a
piece of an inner state by putting a chair in
a shopping cart and setting the chair on fire and
then pushing a sofa onto it or something, which was

(19:06):
so weird. Yeah, that's that's the official explanation. Again, there's
a lot of damage. Why don't people believe this story?
Here's where it gets crazy. There are plenty of problems
with the official narrative. So of course there's the angle
of you know, he set this fire in a shopping
car with a chair, But then there are many folks

(19:27):
around that believe that it was just the consumption of
the drugs that caused the fire. And of course crack
is a dangerous drug to you physically, but smoking it
certainly doesn't produce enough heat to burn a bridge, or
really even cause a sustained amount of heat such that
it might catch flammable materials on fire. It seems like

(19:50):
it has to be deliberate, yeah, because you don't think
about your people using a lighter of some sort. And
once the drug is consumed, I guess even if somebody
through the paraphernalia or the pipe somewhere, the odds of
it combusting something else so pretty low. So just in
fact about the bridge, because we talked already about eight

(20:11):
five itself, the bridge is built in eighty four. They
rebuilt it nine so what they're you know, they also
are regularly inspecting it and in theory there repairing it
when needs to be. But here's what's important. The road surface,
what we would call the deck of the bridge is

(20:34):
eight point five inches thick reinforced concrete, and they've had,
like I think now, they're about two fifty thousand vehicles
driving on it per day. In two if the bridge
is still around, it will be almost three thousand and

(20:54):
the other Some of the other problems with the official
story are that people seem incredulous about it, because it's
strange to think that three of the most vulnerable people
in our society would be quickly and publicly, you know,
condemned as the people behind it. And I'm not saying

(21:15):
these folks are saints, but I am saying there's a
thing that happens sometimes in criminal investigations, and this this
happened with serial killers too, like Henry Lee, Lucas Uh
and Oddest Tool. I believe we're thought to have killed,
you know, fifty something people because it turns out that

(21:37):
the authorities were taking unsolved homicides and penning them on
these guys for favors. And it's completely possible that if
there's someone who has a drug addiction, someone who's very vulnerable,
doesn't have assets for like a lawyer or family to
help them out, it's very possible that the authorities would say, hey,

(21:57):
do you want to uh make this easy? You're on yourself.
We'll give you a better a better deal. We'll put
you up in a nicer place. It's it's possible. The
whole idea of closing the case early has I've heard
that spoken allowed many times, just from people I speak

(22:18):
with around the office and near my house. And this
leads us to theories that have spread in the wake
of it. I don't know what did you guys read
any ubers lifts? Shortly after this seccurred, Yeah, I did
actually UM. On the way to the airport going to
New York for the live show that we did, my
uber driver had some pretty interesting things to say about

(22:43):
the motivation behind this. He felt as though this gentleman
was being scapegoaded and that it would require a whole
lot more firepower shall we say, to bring down this
uh infrastructure, than than what one man, even with a
dumpster fire and shall we call it, could have could
have provided. UM. And his theory was that, you know,

(23:07):
in in Atlanta, we have a public transit system in quotes,
it's not very good. It doesn't take you very far. Uh,
it's a little bit outdated and We've been hearing for
years that they were going to invest a little more
money into it. Maybe um make the routes go a
little farther. They can make a little more sense to

(23:29):
use on a regular basis. So I think Writer's Ship
for call it Marta is down. And the idea is
if you, if you, if you're the government and you
want to increase riders ship and cut down on traffic,
maybe you just blow up a main artery in and
out of your own city. That was his theory. Anyway,
it's such a casual superavility. I love it. I love it.

(23:50):
It's like I want to be a Bond villain, but
I don't want to do like a whole world thing.
So just part of the interstate. Let's see how it
goes on. I had it just really quick. I had
an uber driver who thought it was somehow connected to
the new Brave Stadium that's up seventy five, the other
artery that splits off right there, and you know, let's

(24:12):
not let's not forget that. Right after you get past
where this fire was started. If you're going north, you
get to Buckhead, which is like the hoity toity banker
area of the you know, the very expensive area of Atlanta.
Uh And it's also where if you keep going up
that way, you'll you'll get to some of the nicer neighborhoods,

(24:35):
the suburban areas, you know. I don't know. They felt
like somehow this was punishing those people. Okay, that's strange.
So quick facts about MARTA. MARTA is one of the
only public transit systems that does not receive federal funding,
and the expansion of MARTA has been stymied by tensions

(24:56):
between county surrounding Atlanta too, So they're frankly, for a
time there there was racism that prevented the expansion of
this system to other places. But then also there's the
question of who's going to pay for it, right, and

(25:17):
this means that well, there's no way around it, guys.
Wridership from MARTA did increase dramatically, so most immediately, a
most immediate and sustained until this day. Right now, you
can't park in a lot of these I was about
to say, my roommate Frank takes MARTA every day because
he works downtown, UH and that is one of the

(25:39):
few places you can get to down where the courthouse
and a lot of the government buildings are, and you
can also get to a little town called Decatur where
he also works. He does real estate title work, so
he's either indicator or downtown. And he used to drive
every day to the Marta station and park and then
take the train, but now it's impost stable to get

(26:00):
a parking spot, so he just like walks, you know,
to two and a half miles every single day now
because it's just like there's no way to park unless
you get there like at seven in the morning. Yeah,
I remember him telling me about that there's there's this
other thing, this idea that focusing on the homeless is
a diversion of scapegoer, as you said, and that the
Georgia Department of Transportation g DOT should shoulder the blame

(26:21):
for storying these materials. But of course they insist that
these were not combustible. And then we see that different
different authorities or officials are saying different things about the fire,
like that you have a fire chief saying that this
material certainly contributed to the high temperatures that were needed

(26:42):
to collapse the bridge. But then of course the people
at Georgia Department of Transportation are saying no, no, no, no no, no,
not flammable, and the fire chief is apparently not accustomed
to talking about fire and how fireworks. I'm just saying, uh,
these these are the main alternative explanations proliferating through the city.

(27:05):
But each has this problem and its own set of
problems rather and there isn't at this point any proof
of a complicated conspiratorial cover up, although I do have
I do have one. O can I tell you guys
about it after an ad break? So there is even

(27:35):
this is a micro cosmic example right on a on
a micro level. Uh, this event in Atlanta is terrible,
but it's it's great that no one got injured somehow,
you know, even though that's pretty curious, it's great. But
there is a larger conspiracy afoot. And just like infrastructure,

(27:57):
it's not necessarily a sexy thing or a captivating thing,
but it is real and it is important, and it
is this state, federal and local governments and politicians continue
to ignore burgeoning infrastructure problems. These people, in a very

(28:17):
real way, are conspiring to make these things problems for
future generations. So I like bridges. I like driving on bridges,
says somebody, But I hate paying taxes. Why shouldn't pay
taxes for somebody else's bridge and to save a couple
of bucks. Too often what happens is that this money

(28:41):
just disappears or gets used for something else, or is
seen as wasteful spending by you know, various various communities.
But the problem is that's calling an investment a waste
of money. And I don't know if that's fair to say.
But we do know without specific action that there will

(29:03):
be a that without specific steps, this problem will worsen
and continue to worsen. There are people out there in
the US doing great work out there every day repairing roads.
There's some other weird, uh secret society of people in
Atlanta who go around and just put metal plates willy

(29:25):
nilly on the asphalt. I hope there's city employees, but
it might be like a toyin be tile thing. I
don't know. If you could talk to them and ask
him to at least add at least one more inch
to the height of those that would be really great.
So we we know people are working on this, but
it's something that has to be continually addressed, and we're

(29:48):
we'd like to conclude this stuff with some of the
statements regarding the future of of the interstate here well.
As of May first, the g COOT has said that
it's expecting to open on MA that's just before a
Memorial Day on the n they're hoping for this. That

(30:11):
would put the project three weeks ahead of its official schedule,
which is honestly surprising to me after seeing what happened
to the highway, I thought it would take a lot
longer than that. So kudos to everybody has been working
on it, and even two people who believe there is
a conspiracy at play. Even that is suspicious, you know,
like there were also earlier reports that there have been

(30:34):
a terrorist attack that was covered up. That one, by
the way, we don't think that would work, ladies and gentlemen,
because I can't remember who brought this up. But the
thing with terrorist attacks when those things occur, is that
the people who have done it want everyone to know
they did it. They want the credit. So that's that's

(30:56):
probably not in play here. There's a large the thing
that will hopefully be good news. The current administration is
has been talking for some time about passing a large
infrastructure bill. They have not at the time of recording,
to our knowledge, past it because one of the big
things that there trying to figure out is how to

(31:19):
pay for it. Would it be a gas tax? When
they just raise the price of gas? So this the
situation might change, and and surveys find Survey says that
over two thirds of Americans support spending more on roads, bridges,
and transit, but it's very half and half when it

(31:41):
comes to how to pay for it. You know, when
the bill comes due and we'd like to hear from you,
what are the roads and bridges and water treatment plants
like in your neck of the woods. Do we do
an episode on Flint, Michigan. We did? We did, so
this I think is the same in roughly the same category,

(32:05):
except without I don't know, do you do you guys
think this is an accident or there's something more play?
Is Martha really a secret super villain? Okay, so just
a couple of things I I wish and I don't
wish that were true, but I can imagine that being true.
I just see like a table with a big M
and it's awkward, but they all have to sit around

(32:25):
the ms orange and blue. There's Hydra and then there's Marta. Yeah,
just just from experience, it, experiencing the fire very close
to it and and seeing it from far away early
on when it was starting. I cannot I mean, I can't.
I can't say for certain, but it definitely seemed like

(32:47):
a small fire that got out of hand from what
I observed coming from our offices, driving in the direction
of it, where you can see a little bit of
black smoke, and then to driving right past it where
I could feel the obvious you know, past wi be
thousands of degrees because I was very far away and
it singed the hair on my arm. Um, I don't know.
I mean, so you think it's accident. I think in

(33:10):
my head it's not an accident. And I'm not saying
it's an accident. I'm saying it was a small fire
that got out of hand. I see. So maybe they
were just making a fire that like to hang out around.
Maybe that maybe the dude was committing an act of arson,
or someone was, or you know, I can't discount any
of that. All I can say is that people are

(33:31):
questioning whether or not that fire could you know, melt
the beams. Um, I'm pretty sure that it can, because
it wasn't actually melting the concrete and the steel and everything.
It was melting. The connector between the two. I guess
you can think of his giant plates, you know, the sections,
the the parts that connect them up. That's what was melting.

(33:53):
So what about you know, what do you think? You know,
I mean, our government in particular, it's not the most
above board, say, I mean, you know, I believe it
was in decayed ur No, actually it was an East
Point in the city of East Point. Um. There was
a whole scandal where the government was like secretly keeping

(34:17):
everyone's water bill money and like not like that. They're
not you know, giving them the services that they would
do and things like that. Just the local government, the
local government. Yeah, but I just you know, there's a
kind of a culture of corruption in this town. A bit.
I would see any big an obviously, any big time

(34:39):
but you know what, I put it past our local
government to it just it just seems like a bit
of a stretch, like a bit of like a reach
too far. They're gonna, like, you know, blow up the
bridge to increase martyr writership, and not only that, do
such a damn fine job fixing it because they really
are ahead of schedule. You know, Well, it's because they're

(35:00):
spending so much money on it. You know who's paying
for most of it is the US government. Yeah, well
they're interesting, but at the same time, it's like no
one's pocketing that money. Obviously it costs it. Probably the
contractors are well, that's true, but part of it. I mean,
they'll probably get a bonus too for being ahead of schedule.

(35:21):
But I love what you mentioned about corruption because a
little known fact about a county that is partially as
part of Atlanta is that in this is the cab County. Uh,
the sheriff. One of the sheriff's murdered another one over
the election. So we we do have we do have

(35:42):
endemic corruption on on several levels, but we have a
lot of honest people doing honest work. I'm I love
the I love the mad cap aspect of Yes, we
need to increase ridership. What's what's the easiest way to
do it? Should we take out an ad in the paper? No,
how do you feel about bridges? You know, it seems

(36:05):
kind of rude goldberg esque, But we hope that you
have enjoyed this episode. We'd like to hear your take
on this kind of thing. Do you think it was
a an attack that was covered up. Do you think
there's something more to the story. There's this just an
unfortunate accident where everyone in the city got lucky and
was not injured. And most importantly, as something like this

(36:27):
happened in a place near you. And what's a what's
a good way for us to start up another new
deal where we just have a public works association that
goes through and just cleans up all the infrastructure that's
controversial that we need it. Trump's got that unlock. Awesome,
Well let's do it. Yeah, there's there's a plan. We'll
see if it gets past that he proposed months ago.

(36:50):
But that's also controversially. Yeah, that'd be that'd be cool.
Like I propose that we do an non controversial episode
like what titles or the sandwiches? Did you see that
tweet you guys whole Yes, thanks for sending in the

(37:12):
sandwich chart. I appreciated it. I will use it and
frame it. We're heading out today. This ends our episode,
but not our show. We will be back next week
with a special guest appearance from a friend of the show.
Do check it out and between now and the next
time you hear us on the air. Think about how

(37:35):
many times a camera sees your face just just on average,
just you know, muddle it out. There's one looking at
me right now. So if you would like to find
some of our stories that have not made it to
the air here on the podcast for one reason or another,
you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where
we are Conspiracy Stuff and Conspiracy Stuff Show, or you

(37:58):
can just send us an email to conspiracy at how
stuff works dot com. M

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Matt Frederick

Matt Frederick

Ben Bowlin

Ben Bowlin

Noel Brown

Noel Brown

Show Links

RSSStoreAboutLive Shows

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.