The Bangladesh Hail Storm of 1986 | Episode 77 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When you think of clouds and dangerous behaviors, you immediately
think of getting zap by lightning or maybe tossed into
another county by a tornado, But you never think of
cloud's going to repeatedly punch it in the brain harder
than Mike Tyson Yellow and Welcome to Doomsday Histories Most

(00:29):
Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of
the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard
of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around
the world. On today's episode, you'll learn why telling people
the body is made up of eighty percent water is
actually just misquoting a war crime. You learn about the

(00:52):
time that it rained every single day for two million
years in a row. And you'll see how a simple
cloud can make you look like people tested baseball bats
on you, and why you should basically wear a helmet everywhere,
all the time. And if you were listening to this
on Patreon, you'd also learn why everyone was so afraid
of Canadians during World War Two. You'd hear the abbreviated

(01:15):
history of British evil, including the single greatest act of
geographical terrorism of all time. You'd learn why the word
moisture makes people want to peel off their own faces.
You'd also learn about a European mountain goddess who filled
the lake with partially decomposed skeletons, and you'd get to
hear an actual spinoff prequel disaster spun off from today's

(01:35):
main tail. This is not the show you play around kids,
or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as
long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged
and learn something that could potentially save your life, our
work is done. So with all that said, shoot the
kids out of the room, put on your headphones and
safety glasses, and let's begin. Water is kind of important,

(02:00):
and we really love the stuff. And they say that
about fifty five to sixty percent of the human body
is made of water. You've probably heard that before, and
you've probably heard that number go as high as ninety percent.
And if that were somehow true, you would pretty much
just be a soft, gelatinous mess. But I guess that

(02:20):
statistic fluctuates depending on who's telling it, and it really
doesn't matter anything that high, and we'd all look like
the meal from RoboCop. If you remember what happened to him,
and ambulances would have to carry wet facts instead of gurneys.
So where did that statistic come from? Anyways? Well, you're
going to be sorry that you asked. Back during World

(02:40):
War Two, the Imperial Japanese Army was not great. I mean,
no one was great. And I'm saying that as a
Canadian boom. If you haven't heard about Canadian behavior during
World War two, maybe consider becoming a Patreon supporter. But
back to the question, where did we get that body

(03:01):
moisture statistic. Well, parts of the Japanese military included a
scientific dark operations community. They ran human biological warfare experimentation
trials at a little slice of hell on Earth called
Unit seven thirty one. I could probably spend the next
two hours just listing off secret medical atrocities, but the

(03:22):
highlights include things like dissecting living conscious people, putting different
types of blood into noncompatible bodies, and seeing how long
people could survive without certain organs. Which ones you ask, Well,
I guess it depends on which test group you got
lumped into. One area of human experimentation they did was
on hydration. They basically took prisoners, living people and weighed them.

(03:47):
Then dehydrated them and then reweighed their corpses. So I'm
afraid whenever you hear someone innocently spouting off about how
the human body is mostly water, well that is the
source material. You're welcome, but I took no pleasure in
telling you any of that. But on topic, we are

(04:09):
the only planet in the Solar System that we know
of that has liquid water and life at least partially
made of the stuff. We're also the only planet in
the Solar System that has an oxygen rich atmosphere, which
means we're the only planet in the Solar System that
has fire. Just let that sink in for a second.
Fire cannot exist anywhere else. It's all ours and I

(04:31):
find that completely fascinating. But I can also hear you,
oh my god, is this a what like a mind
fire or a boat explosion episode? I mean, please, can
you just pick a lane? I don't know where we're
going with all this. Well, first, calm down, we are
already well on our way. I'm simply taking a bit
of a wild swing on the intro, you know, just

(04:52):
really setting it up. Okay, So where were we? Oh?
All right? Think of our planet as a kind of
a rocky mud that got built up over time as
each new splack and kaplow added a few pounds here,
a few pounds there of just stuff from the stars.
And if you think about it that way, it's really fascinating.
It really helps you understand why we've only got so

(05:14):
much iron or gold or even water to go around.
We've got what we got and we're just not making anymore.
And there are two theories on how we got to
be such a great planet for surfing. The Earth was
formed with molecules for water already baked in, or they
rode here on meteors and just accumulated over time by
the cupful over billions of years. And I'm fairly certain

(05:36):
it was most likely a power combo of both, and
filling the oceans took an incalculably long time. The stuff
that comes out of your tap is said to be
about four and a half billion years old. I mean,
how crazy is that You're not drinking four and a
half billion year old commet water exactly. I mean a
lot has changed in the last four and a half

(05:56):
billion years. For example, we have a breathable atmosphere now,
and lakes and trees and the hydrological cycle that replenishes
fresh water through a never ending cycle of evaporation and precipitation.
You know, rain, And we've had rain for a long
time too. I first appeared on Earth about four billion
years ago, and I'm sure it came in all kinds

(06:18):
of crazy forms, which of course brings me to a
super interesting point in Earth's history. About two hundred and
thirty two million years ago, we had a little something
called the Carnean pluvial event. This is way back when
we still had that one giant supercontinent, Pangaea. On the

(06:39):
northwestern corner of the supercontinent, which is basically modern day
Western Canada, sat the Wrangelia large igneous province, and it
blew up. It went full Yellowstone, but just on a
much larger scale, and injected an unspeakable amount of CO
two into the atmosphere. And that was the final piece
of the puzzle. Began the rain. Oh, it started to rain. Okay,

(07:04):
let me tell you this. On the Hawaiian island of Maui,
it rained NonStop for three hundred and thirty one days
in a row, starting in nineteen thirty nine and ending
in nineteen forty. It was the longest rain in recorded
human history. And that's adorable because during the Carnean pluvial event,
it rained every day without pause for two million years.

(07:29):
It rained NonStop for seven hundred and thirty million, five
hundred thousand days in a row. And when it finally
did stop, the face of the entire earth had been
permanently changed. The taps turned off, and the earth slowly
settled down, and our water cycles started to take shape.
Water circulating from puddle to steam to cloud to rain,

(07:51):
just not every day, and I find that astonishing. But
this is not the Carnial pluvial event of two hundred
and thirty two million years ago. Episode. No, today, we
will not be spending our time in the pre Cambrian
primeval wastelands of Gowanland. No. Today, we are heading somewhere
equally as unexpected, but at least one hundred thousand times nicer.

(08:13):
Today we are making our very first trip to the
South Asian country of Bangladesh. Most North Americans don't know
much about Bangladesh, but it is a surprisingly beautiful part
of the world. Sitting just tucked up in India's northeast
corner on the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is known as
the land of Rivers. There are parts of Bangladesh that

(08:35):
people describe as an actual paradise on earth, from the bustling,
rickshaw filled streets of Dhaka to the lush green forests
of the South. Bangladesh is home to a culture that
stretches back for thousands of years. It's home to the
world's largest mangrove forests and the world's largest natural beach.
It's got ancient mosques and temples, and its home to

(08:58):
the Bengal Tigers, not the baseball team. I mean, legit,
Miyamiao tigers. Actually, tigers don't meow. The largest cat that
actually does meow and still purrs like a house cat
is a cheetah. How great is that? Anyways, if you
look at it on the map, you're gonna notice something weird. See,
India looks vaguely like an upside down triangle, or I

(09:21):
guess I could have called it a pyramid. But basically
a land mass that narrows to the south, and it
has got Pakistan on its west and Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Tibet,
and Bangladesh sitting to its north. Then it's east. What's
that you say, everything you know about Bangladesh could fit
onto a business card with room to spare. Not a
problem with me. I can certainly help with that. But first,

(09:42):
let's take a little step backwards and get a little
blood on our shoes. The British East India Trading Company
swooped into India back in sixteen oh eight. They were
hungry for silk and cotton dye, tea, opium, but what
they really enjoyed were guns, not that they were shopping
for them. They brought their own and they were immediately all, hey,

(10:04):
you ever see how guns work, and forced them to
empty their shelves of exotic goods to send back to
England for pennies on the rupee. But the people still
needed to eat and stuff, so they doubled down by
forcing them to replace their own goods with British imports,
but at a massive markup. You've heard me say they
brought guns, right. Well. Things went on that way for

(10:25):
a long time, long enough for the locals to basically
go broke, and between taxing people to death and starving
them to death or just machine gunning them into mighty heaps,
the locals were all, I'm not too sure about these guys.
But by the time they got kind of lippy about it,
Britain decided that they were being too emotional to govern
themselves and just took over all together. And that's when

(10:49):
things got really bad. Fast forward to nineteen forty six
and Britain announced it was packing up and leave in India.
See World War two was all kinds of expensive, and
England had cut a few costs, you know, trimmed some
of their side projects and as a result, for reasons
known only to our bloodthirsty patreons, as a parting gift.

(11:09):
Set in quotes for emphasis because I'm using the term wrong.
When they did leave India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were split
into separate countries. Without going through the whole org chart
that made this possible, We're only going to stare at
a guy named Lord Lewis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas mount Batten,
the last Royal Viceroy of India. Yep, same guy. He

(11:32):
did a fairly poor job. And now when you look
at a map, Bangladesh sits in a shroud of Indian
territory on three sides, cutting it off from all of
its neighbors, and it was technically owned by Pakistan, and
why em Like I said, they did a fairly poor
job all around. And how did Lord Mountbatten die? How

(11:52):
he got blown up on a boat by the Ira
at the age of seventy nine. It took almost the
same amount of time twenty five years for the Bengals
to finally gain their independence from Pakistan. Bangladesh was originally
called East Bengal. And when I said, what I actually
should have said was they were both predominantly Muslim, so

(12:13):
England just figured scirt just make it one country, even
though they don't even touch And then obviously we all
know about how Bengal revenge squads have been murdering their
way across the UK ever since. No. Oh, well, that's
because the Bengal people had the option, motive, and opportunity,
but instead of sharpening their axes and packing an overnight bag,

(12:35):
they chose to adopt an attitude of friendship towards all,
malice towards none. They consciously try to stay out of
the kind of political nonsense that other major superpowers love,
which is great because I don't love taking you places
where people have been actively beaten with their own severed limbs,
and today they say, whether you're taking in the vibrant markets,

(12:57):
loading up on rich Bengali cuisine, or even cruising along
one of its many tranquil rivers, Bangladesh offers adventure, discovery, warmth,
and an authentic connection to the people and its history,
which is great. But why have we come to Bangladesh? Well,
not to get fat and happy off Bengali food or
to take a flaming tire or rubber bullet to the head. See,

(13:20):
they've been having a few problems as of late, but
that doesn't play into our story, and we'll come back
to that later. We're actually here for the weather. Bangladesh
is in part of the world that gets pretty warm,
and it doesn't have the kind of wall the wall
air conditioning that keeps foreigners from swinging in the streets.
And I'll stop you right there. We're not here for
any kind of heat related injuries or fire, tornadoes or

(13:42):
anything like that. Now you wish. We are going to
be visiting the remote and rural district of Gopoalganj. It's
kind of a Pacman shaped district in south central Bangladesh.
The kids, I'll call it the GP and it's most
famous for birthing Bagabandhu shik Mujibar Ramen, the father of Bangladesh.
They speak bush Puri urdu Hindi and they also speak English,

(14:06):
so we'll get by just fine. And I always start
these things by saying, what a beautiful sunny day it is?
And maybe it was if we'd gotten here just a
little bit earlier. But the sky over go Balgajh and
the neighboring district of Parajpur's mood was changing. Clouds were
rolling in from nowhere, and it was starting to become
a little dark and ominous out. It was the middle

(14:27):
of the afternoon. And our story takes place on April fourteenth,
nineteen eighty six. I don't like taking you places on
poor weather days, but A that's not true, and b
everyone knew from the weather that they should be expecting
rain and it could get heavy at times. And actually, see,
unless you are brand new to the show, in which

(14:50):
case welcome, you should be well aware that something untowards
is about to happen. And sure enough, the clouds gathered
high above. They began to morphintryransform into billowy pillowy masses,
sort of like the kind of thing that formed over
New York City and Ghostbusters. It was a storm and
as the storm rolled in, the people of gopal Gan

(15:10):
shared smiles and a few laughs as they took shelter
where they could to wade out the rain, knowing they
were probably going to get soaked anyways, Well they wish
see what they got wasn't rain. That is to say,
when what they got first arrived, it pinged off the
ground like little bullets. Remember when we were all laughing
and clapping and learning about our hydrological cycle, Remember how

(15:33):
water evaporates in clouds and it turns into rain and
then rinse and repeat. Well, it turns out it can
do a lot more than that. With the exception of
certain abysmally dry desert spots around the globe, everywhere else
knows rain. But in places where it's too cold to rain,
like the Arctic or the Antarctic or Buffalo, New York,
moisture in clouds freezes and falls as flakes of snow.

(15:56):
And we've done snow shows before. You got your little snow,
oh your fat snow, your wet snow, big, small, you
name it, and check this out. The biggest snowflake ever
recorded was an unimaginable fifteen inches around and eight inches thick.
I mean that sounds big for a cake, and generally
we all take it for granted that things that big

(16:17):
are not supposed to fall from the sky, except sometimes
they do. My top three ish list for biggest things
falling from the sky go meteors, then planes, then birds
with hail collecting the Pewterer metal for coming in fourth,
and an honorable mention to those rare times when an
airplane empties its toilets and it freezes into a blue
missile and blows up someone's house. When it rains, moisture

(16:41):
collects around dust particles in the air, anything small and
solid that it can cling to. It just kind of
acts like a nucleus for something larger, and each of
those little droplets then floats around the cloud, collecting more
and more moisture, like if you ever spray bottled a
snowball to thicken it up, and like you would think,
at some point, it's just too heavy to stay a
lot and it falls to Earth. If you were looking

(17:02):
at it from the side that day with your special
mutant weather radar eyeballs, what you would have seen was
the rain come in from the left, and there was
a cold front that custed in from the right. And
you ever really look at a cloud, I mean, I
tell that as a joke with every nuclear episode. You
know that one looks like a horse, and that one
looks like a tree, and that one looks like a
mushroom black You think they look pretty stable, but they're

(17:25):
all slowly warping because of the different winds way up there.
And if we could actually see wind patterns, we'd probably
freak out. I actually got to view a three dimensional
model of the airflow from this day over go Balganj
and what I saw I would describe as not visually calming.
Clouds are chaotic with winds blowing every which way, including

(17:46):
up and we called those winds up drafts, and heavy
updrafts usually doing thunderstorms carry wind, dirt, dust, rain hats, whatever,
just straight up rain droplets form around dust or whatever,
like we said, and then they whip sky high enough
to freeze in the atmosphere, and then additional moisture keeps
freezing on it until it grows to the point where

(18:07):
it's too heavy for the updrafts to support it. It's
like it's at a buffet, and it just keeps going up
for more, and it keeps getting picked up, and the
cycle repeats until it's completely overstated it's welcome, and finally
it falls. And on this day, according to the available data,
rain and moisture was arriving over Gobalganj about thirteen to
fifteen thousand feet in the air, but it was cycling

(18:30):
in updrafts as high as thirty thousand feet. I mean,
that's where planes live. If you trace the actual course
of the developing hail through the clouds, how do I
even explain this? Do you know what an ampersand looks like?
If you pick up a hailstone and bite into it
like an onion, you'd actually see how the layers of
frozen moisture built up around the center, kind of like

(18:52):
an onion. Everyone loves a nice refreshing rain, just pointing
your face skyward and letting it wash away your worry
and discomfort. You feel it in your soul. It's healing
until that one time that you point your look skyward
and feel like you're being blasted in the face with
frozen paintballs. Hail hurts than the bigger the hail the

(19:14):
more it hurts. Hail is more common along mountain ranges,
and this part of the world is very, very mountainous,
and so people were familiar with it. But this whole
thing didn't slowly ramp up. It just kind of started,
and people caught outside were defenseless. The sounds of the
hailstones I was gonna say careening in two, but I

(19:35):
really mean explode against well, the sound of it impacting
roofs made of corrugated tin sheets was deafening and relentless,
like an entire crew of furiously paced drummers. And I
haven't even described the hail. These weren't little almond sized pellets.
These weren't even golf ball sized. These were massive chunks

(19:55):
of ice, some as big as grapefruit. They pummeled the
ground with a four that was nothing short of apocalyptic,
And those pieces weighed a kilo. That's two point two pounds.
That's as heavy as a cabbage or a small laptop.
You ever throw two pounds in the air and just
try to catch it with your head, well, since you're

(20:16):
still with us, I have to assume that you haven't. Well,
that's how heavy the sudden hail was, and those caught
outside had no chance. The hailstorm practically carpeted the entire area,
which was all mixed development of homes and farms. Now,
imagine you're a farmer. Imagine working for an entire season
to grow a beautiful crop and all that work, and

(20:39):
the next thing you know, a black cloud blows in
and annihilates everything in minutes. Lush fields and orchards were
starting to look like the kind of place you test
munitions and grenades. Trees were not only stripped bare, and
not talking about leaves, I'm talking about branches. Some had
even been uprooted by the power of the storm. Because
it's not just hail. You got to remember, this is

(21:01):
a storm, wind, lightning, smoky apparitions of cloud monsters, you
name it. Trees were being decimated like the trees of battlefields,
areas whittled down by gunfired into tattered sticks, and buildings
too relentlessly pulverized. In most of the world, homes are

(21:21):
made at the convenience of available materials, which means not
everybody sought shelter in the brick version of the Three
Little Pigs House. And I don't mean to say that
people live in thatched boxes made of straw. Not really.
In fact, most homes in the area were built from
stone or concrete or mortar, which makes them very strong
in principle, but they were never designed with longevity in mind.

(21:45):
They basically exist in a kind of perpetual state of upkeep.
When all that weight started raining down, some of those
homes and buildings had trouble keeping up. In this part
of the world, building collapses can happen. They don't really
have strong building codes, so they don't have the kind
of enforcement to do anything with them. Anyways, and when
all that weight started raining down, some of those homes

(22:07):
and buildings had trouble keeping up. The bombardment was quick
and fierce and powerful, powerful enough to topple or even
flatten structures. And all of this only turned up the chaos,
which I forgot to mention there was chaos. I mentioned
how they spoke all these different languages, but the sound
of panic screaming requires no translation. The chances of running

(22:29):
for shelter without getting hit were pretty much zero. Blood
was everywhere. People were hit so hard they thought they
would pass out from the pain, and some did, and
not just the people. The remains of livestock late everywhere.
Take a grapefruit sized one kilo chunk of ice and
drop it from the height of a cloud. It's gonna
fall somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and fifty

(22:51):
meters per second, which is a stunning two hundred and
five miles or three hundred and thirty kilometers an hour. Now,
mind you, I am not saying being that these things
were falling at almost a third the speed of sound.
There are a lot of variables that affect falling objects
that just make sure that's not the case. It's most
of the reason that they do scientific speed tests in vacuums.

(23:13):
A normal size hailstone, the kind that knocks leaves off
trees and maybe maybe puts a crack in your windshield,
falls closer to one hundred kilometers or sixty miles an hour.
But the speed that something misses you with is less
important than the force that it hits you with. We're
going to measure the impact of these things in newtons,
and there are so many variables at play. Like I said,

(23:36):
there's the angle of approach, wind resistance, impact coverage, how
quickly the object stops after impact. There's all kinds of things.
And the best thing that we can say is that
the force of the impact here could have been as
low as twelve thousand newtons, but as high as one
hundred and twenty thousand, and in saying that, it's pretty
irrelevant because the human skull will fracture anywhere around three

(23:58):
or four thousand newtons. So as much as I want
to tell you that a cow had a cartoonishly clean
hole blown through it, the reality is it would have
looked more like someone had taken a baseball bat to
a birthday cake. If the equivalent of someone throwing a
masonry brick at your head, which should be more than
adequate to kill you, an umbrella or a newspaper would

(24:19):
offer no protection whatsoever. I mean, a riot shield might
not even work. Phone and power lines were shredded, and
more than seven hundred car windshields were destroyed. Doctors would
call the injuries catastrophic, and funeral home directors would prescribe
closed casket services. And not quite half an hour after
it began, it stopped. It just petered out and disappeared.

(24:44):
In the aftermath, it became immediately clear just how disastrous
this had actually been livestock had been killed, homes had
been destroyed, people's livelihoods had been wiped out. Family members
had been lost and needed to be grieved. None of
this was clean or pleasant or easy time permitting. People

(25:05):
also needed to cope with the trauma of watching so
many buildings and creatures and people killed terribly before their
unblinking eyes. The survivors were left to pick up the
pieces and start to figure out the overwhelming task of
rebuilding their lives, and many had been left with life
changing injuries. Imagine how much more awkward it would be

(25:25):
if I were trying to continue this show after getting
my lower job blown off. Ninety two people had been
killed this day. No one knows how many people were
injured and just carried their injuries home. According to the
World Meteorological Organization, what fell long Gopelganj were the heaviest
hailstones ever recorded. The largest intact tailstone found had a

(25:49):
diameter of twenty four centimeters or nine and a half inches.
So you're minding your own business, just giving some iffy
looking cloud some sich. When the cloud decides to try
and blast the eye out of your head with a
frozen projectile, will you know what to do. The human

(26:09):
skull is designed to protect the brain, but your head
is not some hairy crash helmet. It can only take
so much force. Dropping ice from a height like that
can punch through a windshield, let alone your skull. And
I'm going to tell you right now, those injuries can
be catastrophic. And people do tend to downplay injuries when
we hear about them because those people lived, but not

(26:32):
all of them wanted to. You have to understand just
how horrific a permanent, lifelong injury can be. Taking an
ice block to the dome at speed from a height
would likely cause severe skull fracturing and no small amount
of trauma for the brain itself. Contusions, concussions, seizures, stroke, coma,
nerve damage, even a brain hemorrhage. So I am here

(26:55):
today to tell you to make sure that you're just
always wearing a helmet when you're outdoors, just as simple
as that. Wait, you don't even own a helmet? Well, okay,
all right, let's work with that. See what we can do.
Imagine yourself outside when the sky darkens. You're caught out
in the open and the closest thing to shelter is
maybe a mailbox that you're not gonna be able to

(27:16):
fit inside. If you found yourself in the open with
no immediate shelter and no helmet, your priority remains protecting
your head. If you can step inside a building, hey,
no problem, You're good, unless it's a skylight store. But
it makes my point that, you know how I always
say that anything could be a weapon, Well, the flip
side of that same coin is that almost anything can

(27:37):
be a shield too, and you're gonna want to find
a shield of any kind. Use your purse, a backpack,
a hubcap, a bag of garbage, literally anything can act
as an impact absorber and potentially save you a trip
to rehab to learn to speak or walk again after
a devastating blow. And even if your options are trash

(27:57):
like all you have is a wicker picnic basket at hand,
Even if it exploded after the first impact, that was
one less impact that you didn't have to eat. You
could always seek protection under a tree, but be aware
they do lose their branches sometimes, and that could be
just as bad. You never really think how heavy a
branch can be a normal look and branch can weigh
hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So let's say you're on

(28:19):
a beach, which is about as wide open and unprotected
as place as you're gonna find. And actually I might
have a solution for the beach. If you were on
a beach, I would probably tell you to enter the
water and then just stay submerged as long as you could.
It's probably one of the more frightening ways to ride
out a hailstorm. And you still have to pop up
for air every now and then without getting whack a

(28:39):
mold and drowned. So what's better, because you get to
keep breathing, is bracing your arms over your head like
a helmet. I myself might consider actually using them like
a reverse mohawk. You let your forearms cover your scalp horizontally.
I mean, there's no real wrong way to do this,
and you're certainly not getting any points for style, and
most people will tell you to just crouch down and
face away from the wind and use your hands to

(29:01):
protect your head and neck. In an actual worst case scenario,
I'd be willing to stick my head in a drain
pipe or a cow's ask to protect it, and I
would just let my body take most of the damage.
And I've certainly seen people ball up and try to
make themselves as small a target as possible. But if
they do it while they're on their sides, they're still vulnerable.
And if you do it with your face buried, leaving

(29:22):
your back to absorb all the blows, there's a chance
you're probably gonna crack a few ribs or maybe even
one of your vertebrae. I imagine the first ice ball
of the kidneys makes you straight and out screaming, right
in time to catch a ball to the face. So
best of luck, and do not be afraid to improvise.
Being caught in traffic adds a different kind of danger.
If you're driving, you're gonna throw on your hazard lights

(29:44):
and pull over to the side of the road as
soon as you can because it's about to get loud
and scary, not much unlike getting shot at absolutely no
matter what your brain tells you, stay inside your vehicle.
It is your best and only protection. Think of it
like Iron Man armor. It's designed to withstand a lot.
Just keep away from the windows and hopefully you don't

(30:05):
have a sunroof. Either way, you should still cover your
head to protect yourself when the glass starts flying. Now
all you have to do is remain calm and wait
for the storm to pass. So what the hail happened
to frighten away evil spirits that caused hail. Primitive tribes
used to shoot arrows at storm clouds, and then Christians

(30:27):
came along and they started ringing church bells to stop them,
which of course led to hundreds of flash fried priests
being spatulated off church walls every year, which you will
remember from our Brescia Church explosion of seventeen sixty nine
episode That was way back. I think that's like number four.
People also fired cannonballs, artillery shells, even fired rockets into

(30:48):
storm clouds, but clouds don't care. Now fast forward to
the more modern age, and people believe that by seating
clouds with silver iodide they speed up the creation of
ice crystals. So if you do this early enough, a
lot of the moisture in the storm clouds will have
already dropped before it gets over a populated area, at
least in principle. I was in Calgary in the nineteen

(31:09):
nineties and they did that one time, and they seated
the clouds too heavily and way too late. And the
clouds vomited everything they had over the suburbs on their
way into the city. The ice broke the branches off
all the trees, which blocked storm drains, and a few
neighborhoods lost all their cars. They just floated away down
the street. We've been throwing crap at clouds for thousands

(31:31):
of years in hopes of keeping them from assaulting us,
But the only thing that really gives people a chance
is the technology to detect hail in real time and
the ability to let every citizen know with enough time
that they need to seek shelter, the same idea as
a tornado siren. There are radar technologies that help forecasters
determine if a cloud will produce hail or ice, or

(31:52):
rain or snow, but the important point is not everywhere.
And obviously better prediction and early warning can help protect
communities and their livestock. But this kind of thing isn't
available in a lot of places because well money, and
because of that, I'm afraid moving into the future, this
is going to remain very much a wrong place, wrong

(32:14):
time kind of disaster and hale. It happens everywhere, especially
in the American Central High plains, they actually call it
hale Alley. Eastern India, Central Europe, Eastern Australia, Argentina, parts
of Central Africa. It's everywhere, and it's more rare in
lower elevations like in the tropics, but not always. In

(32:35):
saying that, it kind of makes Karacho, Kenya a strange
location for the haleiest place on Earth. It is in
the tropics, but it's kind of cheating because it is
at a high elevation and they get fifty days of
hail every year, and one year they had it for
one hundred and thirty two days. At some point in
some of these places, the need for stormproof housing and

(32:57):
infrastructure is gonna feel more and more urgent. But again,
money is always going to dictate how safe we get
to be, so we're just gonna have to wait and
see what happens. As our planet slowly warms over time,
so does the amount of moisture in the air. And
I don't know what it's like where you're listening from,
but you don't have to have lived too many decades
here in Toronto to recognize how much humidity has increased

(33:20):
and how rainfalls are getting heavier and heavier. Same with hail.
Whether models say hail will increase across Australia and Europe
and decrease across East Asia and North America, hooray. Except
the storms that we do get, we're going to be
more intense. Boo, And the hailstorms themselves will also become

(33:41):
larger also, Boo boooooo. Hail causes billions in damages every
year across the US alone. The cause way more destruction
than tornadoes. In April of two thousand and one, there
was a hailstorm in Saint Louis, Missouri that caused nearly
two billion dollars with a DAMA and that was in
one single day. Netting made from polyethylene monofilament is currently

(34:06):
being installed and tested in fruit orchards and car dealerships
across America to actually catch hailstones. But they're not cheap.
It's a dough and expect to see one anytime soon.
You ever see a green roof before, It's a roof
covered with a thick layer of soil and it's coated
in all kinds of vegetation. It's like a having a
second lawn, but a lawn that creates insulation that keeps

(34:29):
your house warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
And it also acts as hail armor. And at some
point you're gonna wonder why everybody doesn't have one. And
those are really interesting solutions for protecting property, But what
about people. I didn't hear a lot of applause for
my wear a helmet everwhere all the time idea, And

(34:49):
I told you how people used to try and throw
fists at clouds in Georgia the country this time, not
the American state. They've got this national anti hail Missile
service that tracks hal with radar and then gats those
clouds with rockets full of silver. I had died to
mess them up, and they claim a ninety percent effectiveness rate,
but there's no data to back it up. I think

(35:12):
it'd be quicker and easier and less loud if we
could just create an app that warns us well maybe soonish.
Right now, South African insurance companies actually send text to
their clients warning about incoming hal giving people a chance
to get their cars and their skulls and their things undercover.
When I heard about this at first, I secretly suspect

(35:33):
that they do it to invalidate future insurance claims because
you were warned, And in fact, I imagine that the
legal copy says that God is angry and there's nothing
we can do about it, and good luck to you all.
End quote. Death by hail is fairly rare in the US.
I think the most people ever killed in a single
storm was eight. Normally, for the most part, people just

(35:55):
get pummeled mercilessly, like in August of nineteen eighty in Orient, Iowa,
forty seven people got stuck on a ferris wheel during
a storm and were seriously injured after the hale cut
the power and then just pummeled them. Now, the statistical
chances of you getting hit and killed by hale is
vanishingly small. The actual number would have so many zeros

(36:17):
in front of it you'd get bored listening to it.
But true as that is, any bad thing that can
happen to an American citizen is eight times more likely
to happen in China and India because of the population difference.
In twenty eighteen, the town of Via Carlos Paz in
Argentina was pounded by hale measuring as much as nine
point three inches in size, and there was once a

(36:38):
report in Hyperidade, India of a seven and a half
pound ice ball falling in nineteen thirty nine, so not
as large as what we have today, but certainly gigantic.
Of course, The thing is ice melts and giant hailstones
usually curpload on impact. They're pretty rarely recovered intact, so
it's really hard to say for sure. People love telling

(36:59):
stories of headsize hail, and the fact is it's impossible
to prove or disprove, because it's already melting before you
even laid eyes on the thing. No, the most practical
way to remember or measure a hailstorm is by the facts.
On June ninth, two thousand and six, a South Korean
airliner flew through hail powerful enough to blow the nose

(37:20):
off the plane. Hail battered the wings and stabilizers, and
a piece of the nose took a trip through one
of the engines. The cockpit exploded into warning sirens. You
thought I was just going to say exploded. And they
were able to land safely, but they had to do
two misst approaches because it's really hard to do a
visual landing when your windscreen is completely spider webbed with fractures. Fortunately,

(37:42):
or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. I don't
have any hail versus plane disasters for you today. In
the year since the Bangladesh hailstorm of nineteen eighty six,
Bangladesh has worked hard to improve its disaster preparedness. They
know they can't stop the storms from coming. They want
to be better prepared for what they do. We all do.

(38:04):
But until we all take my helmet advice seriously, this
kind of disaster will continue to surprise and overwhelm us,
destroying our property, maybe changing our rolodex, and generally leaving
it worse than it found us. There is no upside
to hail unless you like free ice in your drink.
And in saying that, though, scientists have found that atmospheric

(38:26):
levels of toxic forever chemicals are now so high that
rain water is basically an unsafe for human consumption. Just
wanted to leave you on a low note. For the
people of Gopalgash, the memory of that terrible day in
nineteen eighty six will always be a reminder of just
how fierce and unforgiving nature can be, and just how

(38:49):
fragile people are in the face of its raw power.
But it also shows how communities, even in the face
of unimaginable tragedy, can come together to rebuild and heal.
The Bangladesh hailstorm of nineteen eighty six secured the record
for the deadliest hailstorm in recorded history. I suggested off

(39:17):
the top that Bangladesh was maybe facing some issues. Well, okay, yes,
there was a mass protest in August against Prime Minister
Sheik Hasina, which left more than ninety people dead as
demonstrators clashed with government supporters. Soldiers and police stormed through
the capital of Dhaka, securing every which way that screaming
people might make their way to the Prime Minister's office.

(39:38):
And at least three hundred people have died since these
protests started in early July. And why all this because
of a government civil service job quota scheme to make
sure that basically the ability to rise above your position
and get ahead in the world sits firmly in the
power of the government and their friends and no one

(39:59):
else else. They didn't want Hassina's head, but they did
want their job. And how did the government respond, Well,
they turned off the Internet. They basically crippled protester communications
the way you might think aliens or a rogue terrorist
organization might and how did so many people die? Well? Gunfire?
And this remains a not very well understood and not

(40:23):
very well discussed ongoing issue. Well, if you live in
a country not currently under siege from its own government,
why not exercise your personal freedoms by considering becoming a supporter.
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(40:46):
I forget to mention, I enjoyed this episode so much,
I'm going to do a spin off Patreon episode about
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(41:08):
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(41:29):
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(41:50):
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I always ask you to consider making a donation to

(42:11):
Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of
Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in
the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first
and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to
people in life threatening situations, and to date they have
helped over three point six million people across seventy seven

(42:33):
different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic
dot CA. The few of you may have already heard
that I just blew up my third car in the
same calendar year, and I got an awful lot of
feedback from people saying it would be extremely on brand
for me to describe some road based vehicular horror. Well,
I live to serve. It's the Lamans racing disaster of

(42:57):
nineteen fifty five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and
thanks for listening.

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The Bangladesh Hail Storm of 1986 | Episode 77

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Bangladesh Hail Storm of 1986 | Episode 77