The Niagara Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster of 1957 | Episode 90 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
You know how when you have a good idea you
get a slight bulb over your head. Well, what if
every time you had a bad idea, a million cubic
feet of rock collapsed on you. Hello, and welcome to

(00:28):
Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover
some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and an inspiring, but
largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history
and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn why
early visitors to Niagara Falls regularly defecated themselves with shock.

(00:52):
We'll see what happens when you effectively run an industrial
rock tumblr for two hundred and sixty two eight hundred
hours non stuff. And we'll see just how bad of
a day at work needs to be for you to
parkour your way out of the building. And if you
were listening on Patreon, you would hear about the hodgepodge

(01:12):
of brutalized bones and missing appendages that have sailed over
the falls. You'd hear about the increasingly ill conceived and
sketchy reasons that people have tried their luck over the
falls on purpose. You would hear about the hodgepodge of
bones and missing appendages to be found beneath the falls.
You would hear the tale of two waterways, widely described

(01:33):
as quote inhospitable to human survival, and you would learn
of the only unintentional sub aquatic river trolley in the world.
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

(01:55):
is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids
out of the room, put on your headphone and safety glasses,
and let's begin. Niagara Falls has a way of humbling
you the moment that mist hits you in the face.
French aristocrat an early American superfan, Alexis to Topeville, said,

(02:18):
Niagara Falls makes one of the grandest impressions the natural
world can make upon the mind. The first part of
that impression, before you actually see it, you're going to
hear it. Imagine the kind of deep, continuous roar that
you can feel in your chest. Back in the day,
this was something they say that you could hear fifty

(02:40):
kilometers or thirty miles away. Did you know that when
you hear water, whether it's flapping against a shore or
cascading off of a mountain. What you're hearing is actually
the collective cacophony of trillions of droplets of water, all
making tiny little splash noises, but all at the same
time time. Imagine you're an early European explorer making your

(03:04):
way through the forests of Agieerra, and eventually you come
to a clearing and you see a cloud of mist
rising a mile or more into the air above the trees,
before you finally lay your eyes on a breath taking
expanse of raging water cascading into an abyss. In sixteen
seventy eight, French priest Father Luis Hennepin became the first

(03:26):
European to write about visiting the falls, and in sixteen
seventy eight the falls were pristine and being able to
clearly hear the sound of three thousand tons of water
crashing every second was overwhelming. Father Henepin described it as
a prodigious cadence of water which falls down in a
surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not

(03:51):
afford its parallel. It sounds like it made quite the impression,
and you can understand why he stood there defecating with
shock and awe. Every single explorer, all of them, they
all did it, and you can look it up. They
all stood there, penciless, just porky pig in it, rendered
completely agog by the staggering scale of it all. And

(04:12):
it's important to understand that even today, with the entire
area already being completely developed and commercialized, the fall still
has a way of shocking and surprising and leaving you
feeling tiny. And it's done this for thousands of years.
Indigenous peoples would have discovered it themselves in Awe and

(04:32):
settled near it at least twelve thousand years ago. The
Ottawadarans were the first to put steaks in the area,
but they got themselves kicked out during the beaver Wars
of the early sixteen hundreds. After that, everyone from the
Seneca to the Mississaugas to the Mohawk, Oneida Cayuga all

(04:52):
called the area home and believed that the falls had
a divine origin. They believed that the land, the water,
and the sky held spirits, and the falls were the
most powerful among them. Obviously, the constant rising mist was
seen as the spirit's breath rising into the sky and
back then. If you don't know the story, twelve thousand

(05:15):
years ago was around the time of the end of
the last Ice Age. Yes, the mammoths and squirrels and
acorns and all of it, it's all true. So to
what do we owe this miracle of nature? Well, remember
the glaciers if you're flipping through your rolodex of famous glaciations.

(05:37):
The last time Earth froze its dome, the last major
North American one was called the Wisconsin Glaciation. It was
during the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch. This is
a time in Earth's history that ran between seventy five
thousand and ten thousand years ago where the ice kept
chasing people around and a lot of our strange landscape

(05:57):
got scraped into existence. And that includes the whole Great
Lakes region, including the massive mystery lake that you've never
heard of, Lake Tonawanda. And there's a lot that you
wouldn't recognize about the Great Lakes twelve thousand years ago.
Twelve thousand years ago, the Great Lakes were things like
Lake Duluth and Algonquin and Iroquois. It's kind of like

(06:20):
a band that kept the name after changing out every
member the Great Lakes are basically the Leonard skinnerd of
North American geology. Lake Erie was still there, so that's good,
and we'll come back to that. So what you think
of as Niagara Falls started so to speak, near current
day Lewiston, New York. That's about eleven kilometers or seven

(06:43):
miles from its current position, near all the tourist traps
and the hotels and what not. It started as a
simple river and it's been eroding backwards all of this time,
and it's going to continue to do so for the
next fifty thousand years. Now back to lake Tonawanda. I
don't think you'd call it a great lake necessarily, but
it used to cover up a good chunk of upper

(07:05):
state New York. When the glacier started melting at the
end of the Last Ice Age, lake Tonawanda started draining
into the very earliest version of what we would call
the Niagara River. It had a bit of trouble trying
to navigate around the Niagara Escarpment, which is this massive
limestone cliff that stretches from New York all the way

(07:26):
to Wisconsin. So it just poured over it, and all
that water wanted to pour from present day Lake Erie
into Lake Ontario, and all it had to do was
carve its way slowly through all of the softer rock
on the way. And it's been eroding towards Lake Erie
at about three feet a year. And it'll be time
to buy some prime tourist real estate there in about

(07:48):
fifty thousand years, like we said. But in the meantime,
all this erosion leaves us today with the Niagara Gorge
and of course the falls. In order to extend the
lease on all the hotels and tourist attractions in the area,
they actually limit the amount of water that makes its
way to the falls to slow that erosion and help

(08:09):
preserve the falls as we see them today. If you've
never actually seen it, the Nag River is big. It
stretches about a mile or one point six kilometers wide
across certain parts, and as all that water approaches the
edge of the falls, it splits around Goat Island. It's
an island that separates the American and the Canadian side

(08:29):
of the falls. They call it that stupidly enough, because
in seventeen eighty a farmer used to keep goats there,
and after a particularly harsh winter, all but one of
them died, which is why I have always called it
Dead Goat Island. Anyway, about ten percent of the river
flows over the Bridal Veil Falls on the American side

(08:50):
of the island, and the rest absolutely thunders over the
Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. The American side is
about nine hundred and fifty feet across and about ninety
feet from the lip to the rocks below. The Canadian side,
on the other hand, is curved like a horseshoe where
they gave it the name, and it's almost three times

(09:11):
as wide, about twenty seven hundred feet across, and it
drops more than one hundred and sixty feet. About fourteen
million people visit the falls every year. That's about two
million Dodge caravans filled with people driving back to back,
and it can certainly feel that way if you've ever
visited the area during the high season. And they're not

(09:33):
even the tallest waterfall in the world, but it is
the combination of the height with and its raw volume
of water that makes it one of the greatest. Its
beauty inspired poets and honeymooners, and its raw fury practically
dared people to challenge it on everything from barrels to
tight ropes to jet skis. And then there are the

(09:55):
industrialists who just see dollar signs everywhere they look. I'm
going to tell my pay preons more about people flying
over the falls on purpose or otherwise, but right now
we're going to focus on those industrialists. By nineteen eighteen,
there was a change in the misty air above Niagara Falls,
a change that smelled like rail oil and cigar smoke

(10:18):
and mustache wax. Now there are people who will tell
you that the Niagara Falls of old was killed with
the arrival of the carnival rides and the sawmills. But
for my money, nothing spoils a landscape quite like the greedy,
undivided attention of developers and industrialists. Over the next few decades,

(10:39):
power stations began springing up on both sides of the river.
Electricity was still in its infancy, you know, still just
a fad, like the internet or the automobile. It was
mostly just good for novelties like telegraphs and the occasional
light bulb show. But some men are visionaries and they
saw potential, and by eighteen seventy five, when you peered

(11:02):
into the gorge below the falls, you might see a
few dozen smaller waterfalls gushing out of the side of
the gorge, all willy nilly, each somehow supplying or helping
a mill or factory above them, helping to spin some
cog or flywheel or googog. Because this was a point
of time where the whole world seemed to be powered
by booth belts and shafts, literally driving machines running right

(11:25):
off a wheel. So they dig canals off the river
to bring water to these wheels and then just return
it to the river later. And just a note, I
would not have recommended sipping from a cup of that water.
The first power plant was the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power
and Manufacturing Company Plant, which was finished in eighteen seventy five,

(11:47):
and it wasn't a power plant in the traditional sense.
If you wanted traditional electric power as we know it,
you had to wait another twenty years till they finished.
The Edward Dean Adams power Plant was built all the
way back in eighteen ninety five, and it was the
brainchild of industrial pinup boys Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and

(12:09):
George Forbes, yeah, the magazine guy. And the plant was
named after a man so wealthy, he took up actually
collecting money as a hobby. And it wasn't just the
first of its kind built in the area, it was
the first in the world. In this version, falling water
spun turbines. Turbines power generators, and the faster that the

(12:31):
turbine spun, the more electricity shot out the other end.
And that's a pretty simplistic explanation for something that revolutionized
the world as we know it. But this is not
an engineering podcast. The Adams power Plant not only created
and delivered AC current and lit light bulbs, It lit
lightbulbs as far as Buffalo, New York. And that was

(12:52):
twenty six miles or forty two kilometers away. And so
you know, until that first day, the very idea, idea
of sending electricity to a light bulb twenty six miles
away was previously thought of as impossible. Yet here we were,
and it did not go unnoticed. Reporters descended on Niagara
to witness and record this miracle of the age for

(13:15):
their breathless readers around the world. I mean, it's like
if you found out the Great Pyramid of Giza was
set up right beside a place where they invented teleportation,
like right there, and I feel like you'd have to
be well, we should probably go see this. Niagara Falls
became a minor point of global historical significance, and the

(13:36):
Tourism board had champagne with every meal. For the next
ten years. A kind of techno strategic one upsmanship convention
was held up and down the river as plants of
all sizes were added into the mix, and by the
nineteen fifties there were at least ten named hydroelectric power
stations running along the Niagara River, five on the US

(13:58):
side and five on the Canadian side, But our interest
to day lies with one plant and one plant only.
The undisputed king of electric generation was the Sholkoff Power Station.
Sholkoff Well, yes, you're right, that is a South German name,
if you remember from our recent Johnstown episode. Industrial towns

(14:21):
in the eighteen hundreds came with all kinds of mills
and chemical works and old timey foundries. Well in the
Niagara region of southern Ontario and upstate New York. Jacob
Friedrich Sholkoff owned or had a finger in pretty much
all of it. His portrait makes them look like a
kind of a sad, Colonel Sanders. But if it's easier
for you, you can just picture the monopoly man. And

(14:44):
I'm not saying that the entire Scholkoff family were wealthy
or influential. But in the short time since emigrating to
North America, one of them became mayor of Niagara Falls,
and they named a field at Cornell University after another,
so you tell me. And with their fingers already in
everything else in town, they turned their eye to power generation,

(15:06):
and hence, between eighteen eighty one and nineteen twenty four,
the Shulkoff Power Station was constructed right into the side
of the river on the American side of the Falls,
literally right into the rocky face of the gorge between
Goat Island and the Rainbow Bridge, just so it said,
though the Rainbow Bridge wouldn't actually be finished until nineteen

(15:27):
forty one. The Sholkov station had a fortress like appearance.
It had arched windows and massive walls, about one hundred
feet tall and sprawling between four hundred and five hundred
feet across the wall as it grew. See, the thing
was built in three phases, and by the time Station
Sea was complete in nineteen twenty four, Shulkoff had become

(15:48):
the largest hydroelectric power station on the planet. Each station
housed multiple turbines, generating over three hundred thousand horse power
at its peak. Some people described it as a massive
stone and steel cathedral of electricity embedded in the cliff
face like an industrial temple, harnessing the fury of the
falls with both brute force and architectural dignity. By nineteen

(16:13):
fifty six, it was generating about three hundred and sixty
megawatts of power that was more than enough to power
everything from light bulbs to steel mills, to electrocutions and hospitals.
And it did this steadily, converting water into energy for decades.
And then what happened. Well, our story takes place on

(16:34):
June seventh, nineteen fifty six. It was just another normal
day at Sholkov. The morning shift were arriving and settling
into their routine, and that day began early, well before
six in the morning, and as the sun rose over
the gorge, grandiose shafts of brilliant natural light fell across
the plant, glinting off all the polished brass fittings on

(16:57):
the control boards. From the tall cathedral light wind windows,
workers made their way into the plant from a set
of elevators dug out of the gorge itself. The air
inside was thick with the drony, endless low thrum of
turbines and a blend of machine oil, damp concrete, and
ozone from the high voltage equipment. You think it would

(17:17):
be boiling in there, but the people who worked there
say that the stone walls always retained dampness from the
river and that kept it cool year round. Forty men
worked the plant as part of the morning shift, and
everyone with their own purpose. Some monitor gages for pressure fluctuations.
Most were engineers who tightened bolts or replaced uses, or

(17:39):
greased the enormous moving parts of the generators. These were
massive machines, and they never slept. The size of them
is hard to describe. They aren't engines or machines. They're
more like systems of turbines and draft tubes and spiral casings.
The shaft assembly alone dwarfed anybody who stepped inside. That's
how big these things were. They have a kind of

(18:01):
an oversized industrial seashell field, if that makes any sense. Again,
not an engineering podcast, So let me see if I
can explain or describe this real quick. Water from the
Niagara River was funneled down steep pipes called penstock, and
from there it rushes through mass of turbines that kind
of looked like sideways water wheels, which would spin with

(18:23):
incredible force about one hundred and eighty rotations a minute.
The turbines were directly connected to a generator, and inside
each of those generators is a giant magnet surrounded by
coils of copper wire, and as the turbine spins the magnet,
it creates a magnetic field, which, when that passes by
the wires, generates electricity. There's no test here. Don't even

(18:47):
worry about it. Just think of it like one of
those emergency hand crank radios, but big enough to power
a city. Station A was completed back in eighteen eighty
one and put out four and a half maya wats
of power. Station B generated a much healthier twenty five
megawatts of power. Station C, on the other hand, fully

(19:09):
completed by nineteen twenty four, Well, this thing put out
as staggering two hundred and sixty eight point five megawatts
of power. It was about three times larger than Station B,
and almost twelve times as large as a Over three
hundred people worked across the plant in shifts, engineers, technicians, mechanics, cleaners,

(19:30):
you'd name it, and everyone there knew they were doing
something important. Countless homes and businesses and industries suckled from
their electric teat every day, and it could be a dirty, tiring,
and dangerous job. No one much talked about the danger,
but the men knew it was there. I mean, how

(19:51):
could you not. You're working with roaring water, with spinning
shafts and giant dynamos and electricity flying everywhere. And it
wasn't lost on any of them that they did all
of this while perched precariously off the side of a cliff.
The men were skilled and focused, and they respected the danger,

(20:11):
but all of that just became part of the background.
On this day, a junior maintenance worker, Alvin Scholz, was
inspecting some equipment when he noticed something about the west
wall behind the turbines. He looked more closely and was
taken aback. Now it's no secret that everything in these
power plants was wet. The plant itself sat on a

(20:33):
narrow shelf of dolomite limestone right by the river's edge,
and there had been whispers that station. See, even though
it was the newest of the three buildings and only
thirty years old, than that was starting to show its age.
You know, cracks, a little light shifting the foundation water
where it didn't belong. Now, moist air plus warm machinery

(20:56):
makes for a perfect environment for steam and condensation and
allus of drippiness. But what I'm about to describe that's different.
Water was leaking through the stone. Seeping would be one thing,
but this was leaking. Here's the thing. Of course, the
plant had been carved into the side of a river
gorge and was exposed to constant mist and seepage and

(21:18):
humidity twenty four hours a day. And add to that,
every winter freeze thaw cycles in the surrounding rock would
take their toll, not to mention all the wear and
tear from the plant itself. I imagine that having some effect
over time vibrations from the massive spinning turbines they would
have transferred into the floors and walls and foundations for

(21:39):
thirty years. I mean, I'd crack in leek if I'd
been vibrating for two hundred and sixty two eight hundred
hours non stop. That's right, thirty years no breaks. But
back to Alvin, he wasn't panicked. In fact, he called
over an electrician, Richard Sanders. He just wanted a second
set of eyes. And there had been murmurs around the

(22:01):
plant of people hearing unusual cracking sounds, and they were
used to the water. They just didn't relish the idea
of any new leaks. So to Sanders, this whole thing
seemed mildly urgent. He was saying, how it seemed like
the water was under pressure. When small cracks began to
appear in real time in the rear wall right in

(22:24):
front of them, and with them more water. Something was
definitely happening in Station C. So they radio top side
to the foreman, Samuel Booker, just to loop him in
and get his thoughts. Booker was a surface foreman for
the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, meaning literally a foreman who

(22:45):
was up top on the actual surface world. He was
responsible for supervising the operations and the condition of the
plant below from the gorge rim and coordinate with the workers.
He peered over the side of the gorge and quickly
realized something very serious was happening. He saw water, I
mean no small amount of water appearing from behind the

(23:07):
retaining wall that supported the power station, and it began
blasting out of the rock in sections as powerful as
a fire hose, And at that same moment, the ground
beneath his feet began vibrating. He radioed for help and
instructed the workers to evacuate non essential areas of the plant.
By the time the wall started to visibly deform, no

(23:27):
small amount of urine appeared in his pants, and he
was screaming into his radio to get out of there.
Now inside the generator hall, workers began shouting to others
to shut down the generators and leave, while cracks appeared
to widen significantly all around them. Large sections of the
floor and wall began to visibly shift and buckle. The

(23:49):
priority in a plant too loud to support a PA
system was to make sure that everyone knew what was
going on across the plant. The second priority was to
disengage the electrical systems. If water breached the building and
the power was still live, anyone inside could be electrocuted.
The water was surging in increasing volume, now slashing from

(24:09):
the west to the east wall, as the floor continued
to shift. One worker described grabbing another by the collar
who had frozen in place. They said it sounded like
a dam was breaking behind them. The rockbed and the
rear support wall were failing, and the roof line and
the wall seams began to buckle as cracks now formed
in the concrete walkways and pavement above the plant. The

(24:31):
men stared in horror as the back of the structure
began to buckle, while the booker screened on the radio
for them to run inside. The cracks in the wall
widened and multiplied until a high pressure stream of water
broke through, ripping through the rock wall like a fire hose.
Some ran for the elevator, but no power d There
was a chaotic effort to keep trying to shut down

(24:53):
the turbines, but shutting down a machine the size of
a small house is a multi step process that they
did not have time for. Some were powered down, others
were still spinning and groaning under load as the floor
began to go. Richard Draper was the longtime maintenance foreman
at the plant. His crew had been feverishly stacking sandbags

(25:14):
at the base of the wall to stop the incoming water.
They were trying to keep it away from the generators.
But once that wall started to bulge, Draper now found
himself yelling at his men to run. The sound of
heavy cracking reverberated up and down the main generator hall
like thunder. One worker later described it like standing on
the deck of a ship that had just hit a reef.

(25:37):
It was the final straw that destroyed any illusion that
this was still manageable. The men ran for ladders and catwalks,
and as they ran, as the floor buckled, they found
themselves leaping and pirouetting over and around it. Now parkourp
was originally created in France around the beginning of the century.

(25:57):
Then it got popular in the nineteen eighties and finally
became part of the public consciousness in the early two thousands.
So what the men did that day some people call
second or independent genesis or multiple discovery. They describe it
as the art of moving through an environment with speed
and grace, using only the abilities of the human body.

(26:18):
And although our guys were doing it by the skin
of their teeth and fingernails, they were definitely parcoring. So
you're having one of those days, your building's getting weird,
and the quickest route to the parking lot seems to
require a leap over your desk, pushing yourself off a
pillar with both feet, and a tucked backflip out of
a window. Would you know what to do? One minute

(26:42):
you're in your office or a hotel or your apartment,
when suddenly there's an earthquake or an explosion, and you
feel like you have vertigo, but the floor is actually moving.
It's a little late to teach you how to design
a better building, but maybe I can teach you how
to leap out of one. Park is all about getting
from point A to point B as efficiently as possible,

(27:05):
which is a long way of saying as acrobatically as possible.
It's all about knowing what's around you, choosing the best path,
and moving without hesitation. First step they can maybe stretch
step one B, Well, you already know the words. Stay calm.
That's right. Your muscles and brain are kind of need

(27:26):
all the oxygen they can get, so while you're stretching,
take a couple of deep breaths. Obviously, it would be
great if you could just calmly lock up behind you
and walk out the front door. But for the purposes
of this exercise, your home was caught in a landslide
and it is now teetering off of a cliff. Sometimes
the obvious path isn't the safest one. The key to

(27:46):
a successful but unexpected evacuation is to know all of
your exits. And I don't just mean doors, because sometimes
they're not an option. And I don't mean crawling out
through the vents because that is a lot slower, and
TV and movies have done a terrible job of teaching
you what it would actually be like to crawl through
a human sized industrial vent. In a real situation where

(28:10):
everything goes pear shaped, you're going to be specifically looking
at windows and escape routes where maybe a wall used
to be. Let's start with the windows. Every window offers
the potential for escape, but sometimes you step comfortably onto
a fire escape. Sometimes you drop three stories into a dumpster.
If the floor starts cracking or beams start collapsing, you're

(28:32):
going to need to move like it matters, and everything
you do is going to be with purpose. The floor disappears,
you are going to need to jump over it, not
like a spaz but again with purpose. Whether it's a
standing long jump or you have a chance to run
at it as you're flying through the air. Remember you
want to land on the balls of your feet and

(28:53):
soften your knees to absorb some of the force. I'm
going to teach you a preferred way to stick the
landing in just minute space permitting. You could also choose
to tuck the landing into a forward somersault to help
distribute the impact. There will be obstacles in your way.
Collapsing buildings kind of have a way of doing that
to you. However, once you are aware and have practiced

(29:16):
the tenants of parkour, nothing should slow you down. You
want to always stay in motion, always moving, and every
time you approach anything in your way, either want to
jump or step up, depending on what you can get
away with. Plant both hands on the top and swing
your opposite leg over and now just keep moving. It's
called vaulting, and you can practice the technique by knocking

(29:38):
over a dresser or a vending machine or whatever. If
the ceilings and the walls break and they start to expose,
bars or pipes, those can be incredibly helpful and you
can use them to swing through an area. Don't use
them like the uneven parallel bars at the Olympics. You
are just trying to cross a gap or some other hazard.
There are no points for style here. If you have

(30:01):
wall problems and you need to be on the other
side of one, you're going to run up the wall
a bit to get a little momentum, Plant one foot
and push off so you can grab the edge and
pull yourself up and over. If you slip and fall,
tuck and roll diagonally across your back shoulder to hip,
not head to bomb like when you are a kid.
A good precision landing will help absorb impact, prevent injury,

(30:23):
and keep you moving. Of course, the key is not
to learn as you go, but rather to practice these
moves ahead of time, rewind, and attempt as you need. Okay, well,
now that you're a proficient, almost expert at parkour, you
have the tools to move where others freeze. You've got
the tools to help you vault over fallen furniture, to

(30:45):
leap cracks in the floor, to climb through shattered windows,
and to roll out of danger instead of being crushed
by it. And no need to wait for rescue when
you are the rescue. Windows were popping out of their
frames at this point, and even the sinks and toilets
were cracking themselves apart from the pressure. The men ran

(31:07):
for their lives, slipping across wet floors and dodging debris
as walls collapsed around them. Water and stone was falling
into the forebay. The machinery groaned and twisted. Electrical panel
started sparking, and the lights flickered and then cut out.
Thick mist and dust filled the air as they scrambled
towards the only reliable exit, a steep set of service

(31:29):
stairs leading up the cliff to safety. One worker broke
his leg when a floorplate collapsed, but it didn't matter.
Somebody grabbed him and dragged him to safety, no questions asked,
and as the men arrived breathlessly topside, Hooker grabbed them
by the arms and counted heads Back inside the building,
the generators began to tilt and wrench from their mounts.

(31:50):
It was an impossible sight, and it was impossibly loud,
almost loud enough to drown out the low, groaning sound
like metal under stress, coming from the stone itself. Right
before a deafening crack echoed through the gorge. A section
of rock measuring four hundred feet long two hundred feet
high and twenty feet thick, broke loose from the top

(32:13):
of the cliff. The entire southern portion two thirds about
two hundred and sixty feet of the power station was
torn from the gorge wall and swallowed by the water below.
The plant burst into bright orange flames and collapsed inward,
transforming into a growing avalanche of stone and steel and mud.

(32:34):
Rocks and masonry burst into the air, splitting into thousands
of pieces, which pelted the river like shrapnel. Debris was
thrown as far as Canada when it hit the rocks
in the water below. Whatever concrete remained was pulverized, and
the gargantuam machinery blew itself apart and lay there, twisted
into garbage. All that remained was a cloud of billowing

(32:57):
white smoke and the rebounding echo of the crash, dancing
between the sides of the gorge until it finally died away,
and then silence. Half the station was gone, and all
but one of the workers escaped with their lives. You
remember Richard Draper. He'd served as the maintenance froman of

(33:18):
the plant for twelve years and no further after shouting
for his coworkers to evacuate. Some claimed to have seen
him crushed flat by falling debris, but it was so
smoky and dusty there was no way to be sure,
and the truth was it was entirely more likely that
a jetlike burst of water from a high pressure pipe

(33:38):
blew him out of window as the plant collapsed. Either way,
his badly decomposed corpse was fished out of the Niagara
River two months later. He'd spent some time in the
lower rapids before circling the Niagara whirlpool for a while.
There were two other men who left the building, not
under their own power, kind of like Draper, well not

(34:00):
exactly like Draper. They found themselves blown from the building
and trapped at the bottom of the gorge, and they
were plucked to safety by one of the maid of
the Mist fairies. So what happened, Well, according to one witness,
there was a roar as loud as a jet. And

(34:21):
I say that because everybody, to a person said that,
except for one guy, who more colorfully described it as
sounding more like one thousand lions screaming. At the same time,
everything in the plants seemed to short circuit, water and
flame shot everywhere. A wall started to break up, crumbling
little by little, and then entire sections of the sholkof

(34:41):
plant crashed down into the water. They estimated that one
hundred and twenty thousand tons or a million cubic feet
of rock fell that day. Imagine being stuck inside a
building when the walls start separating and cracking and windows
are popping out from their frames, and parts of the
gor which walls start raining down above your head. I mean,

(35:03):
imagine testing the unexpected absorbency of your pants. And with that,
three hundred and sixty thousand kilowatts of power capacity was gone,
and pretty much everything around them ground to a halt,
at least until the Ontario Hydroelectric Commission was able to
ramp up their production and share their output to fill
the gap. Some claim this was the most destructive rock

(35:28):
fall in history, while others, like the professors of seismology
at Canisius College, claimed that there had been a minor
earthquake that caused the entire disaster, and yes, the ground
did shake, but no one believed them or listened or cared.
Unlike a lot of our disasters, this one didn't begin
with an explosion or screaming. It began with a slow

(35:52):
creeping sound. It began as a trickle of water seeping
in from behind a wall, which does not seem crazy,
considering the plant was carved into the side of a
gorge where moisture and minor leagues were part of daily life,
but this was obviously different. Onlookers from nearby plants and
tourist areas could see the collapse as the gorge face

(36:12):
itself broke free. They said the plants seemed to disappear
in one big roar of thunder, and the time between
hey did you hear that? And crushed masonry and twisted
steel littering the gorge below was less than five minutes.
Only a skeletal section of the northernmost part of the
plant now remained standing, and it was completely dark. Both

(36:36):
the state and the federal government launched separate investigations. They
didn't lay blame at the feet of anyone in particular.
They didn't even blame the design even though and no
shade here. But there's a reason you don't see a
lot of buildings sticking to the side of river gorges.
It was built up from layers of limestone over soft shale,

(36:57):
and over time, pressurized water found its way into those layers,
which eroded and ate away at the gorge behind the scenes,
dripped by drip, and what drainage systems that they had
installed were just not up to snuff. That's what a
nineteen fifty eight investigation by the Federal Power Commission said.
They blamed a combination of poor geological planning and aging

(37:20):
infrastructure for the disaster. Rock falls and ground movements had
been documented long before the nineteen fifty six collapse, and
maintenance logs noted persistent leaks and bits of wall breaking
off for years. All that moisture and decades of the
heaviest machines in the world both pulling at the wall
while simultaneously vibrating it like crazy, Well it all seemed

(37:44):
inevitable looking back, you know, hindsight. And all the weight
of the building plus the water filled penstocks exerted millions
of pounds of downward force on the gorge's edge, and
workers noticed an increase in cracking and bulging walls, waterly
and shifts in the foundation for weeks leading up to
the crash. Station C was state of the art for

(38:06):
nineteen eighteen, but it was never retrofitted for modern safety.
You know, like reinforcing the expansion joints or adding a
redundant retaining system, so if part of the plant decided
to fall down one day, part of the plant would
fall down, not the whole thing. When all the dust
smoked and mist cleared, they tallied up the damages. The

(38:27):
building cost thirty six million dollars alone, and when you
add everything else into the mix, it shot up to
one hundred million dollars. Throw that in the inflation machine,
and today that is more than two billion. Following the disaster,
a massive effort was made to stabilize the gorge wall
and good luck with that. I don't mean to come

(38:48):
across as cynical, but engineers at Niagara have been through
this before, just twenty two months earlier, less than two
years before, on the same side of the falls, not
far are at all from the site of today's disaster,
there once stood a scenic lookout hanging over the gorge,
and they called it Prospect Point. Was one hundred and

(39:09):
eighty five foot natural platform of dolomite and shale that
stuck out from the American side, and it offered the
greatest views of both falls and the river, which made
it one of the most popular pieces of real estate
in the country. And I said gave, and was all
in the past tense, because not even seven hundred days

(39:31):
before our story, a large crack in the platform grew
and separated, and a massive section one hundred and eighty
five thousand tons of rock broke free from the side
of the gorge and plunged into the river below. And
why well, let's see rain, water, cracks and general erosion.

(39:52):
And that's not even the half of it. On the
Canadian side of the river stood a similar protrusion called
table rock, and this one stuck out in front of
the Canadian side or the Horseshoe Falls, and was also
incredibly popular until general wear and tear and exposure to
the elements caused chunks weighing hundreds of tons to shear off,

(40:14):
falling into the river below. And this happened in eighteen
eighteen and eighteen twenty eight and twenty nine and thirty three,
forty six, eighteen fifty, eighteen seventy six, eighteen ninety seven,
all the way until nineteen thirty five, when they decided
enough was enough and blew the rest off the dynamite.
My point being the circumstances may shock, but no one

(40:37):
should be genuinely surprised when rock falls happen here. Just
think about it. If not for water eroding and destroying rock,
there wouldn't even be a gorge to begin with. Now,
you might think the future of the whole falls based
power generation industry came to an inglorious end, except for
the part where it didn't, and President Dwight Ike Eisenhower

(40:59):
ordered everything immediately rebuilt. He declared it a national priority.
It's the whole reason America never changed to the metric system.
They were too busy rebuilding Niagara, and what they built
became the largest hydro electric project in the world. The
Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant is at least five times
larger than the shol cof They needed to replace all

(41:21):
that lost production capacity, and they finished the new plant
by nineteen sixty one, and they named it after Robert Moses,
chairman of the New York Power Authority and general hydro
electric superfan. Of course, it's hard to forget the shol
Cough plant because here's the thing, it's still there. Most
of the structure had been removed, but a surprising amount

(41:43):
remains visible today. And not just that it's accessible to
the public. As part of the aptly named shol cof
power Plant Ruined Site slash Niagara Gorge Discovery Center, you
can still see bits of the original wall in a
field of twisted concrete and rusted metal part of it.
Much of the old site is now used as a
maintenance area and an off season boat storage yard for

(42:06):
the Maid of the Miss Tour company. When they were
cleaning up the area, they had to dam and drain
the hydraulic canal that brought water to the site before
they could enter the wreckage, and the police were called
in to retrieve five rusting safes that had been dumped
after being emptied and an array of firearms, reel and
toy that had made their way into the canal. Over

(42:27):
the years after the Sholkoff disaster, cliff based power plants
kind of fell out of favor. The Robert Moses plant
was more of an inland facility, the kind that brought
river water to it by tunnel rather than being right
up by the river. Today, Niagara continues to power millions
of homes and businesses across Canada and the US, but

(42:49):
only because of the lessons learned humans tried to partner
with nature, but nature is fickle. Every now and then
the lion wants to eat a gazaz well and a
twelve thousand year old valley of exposed rock wants to
murder a few humans. This story serves as a reminder
that nature doesn't give a fun about your safety, but

(43:12):
it's also an example of what makes us so resilient.
We tried to build something nature said not today. Instead
of tucking tale and giving up, we learned from our mistakes, analyzed, pivoted,
and tried again. And the water still falls, the lights
are still on, and the world keeps on turning. The

(43:33):
Niagara Sholkough Power Station disaster of nineteen fifty six was
the most expensive hydroelectric disaster in US history at the
time and the deadliest in New York State's history. It
wouldn't hold the title as deadliest in American history forever,
but it does hold the odd distinction as the fastest

(43:54):
most powerful US industrial disaster not caused by an explosion.
And You've had bad days at work, but nothing as
dramatic as this, and it all reminds me that bad
Day at Work was the working name for the podcast
back in the beginning. I myself am still planning on

(44:18):
visiting the falls as soon as I can, but time
is never my friend, and every time I'm there, I'm
always shocked by the number of people casually climbing over
fences or railings to get a better look or snap
a selfie, knowing that as many as thirty people will
take the long vertical swim every year. I was there
in the winter of two thousand and three, right after

(44:41):
a man climbed into the river right by the edge
of the falls, but because of a rare fluke of geography,
he found himself kind of wedged into a spot where
he wasn't immediately swept to his death. Can only imagine
what was going through his mind as he stood there
in his thin ass blue windbreaker, freezing in the water,
getting weak with every passing minute. The saddest thing was

(45:03):
he was there because he couldn't communicate his feelings to people,
and now the ambient roar all around him made it
impossible for him to communicate with his would be rescuers,
and they were able to rescue him. Score one for
the good guys. The majority of people who start down
a road like that but managed to avoid the cruel
finality of suicide. I hear they often claim that they

(45:26):
regret it once they're able to start thinking clearer. And
you could make a pretty penny if you set up
a therapy booth right by the Fall's edge. And I
hate even talking about it, but it happens and it's important,
so we do. And if you ever feel like visiting
the falls, so to speak, well, don't we need to
keep every listener we can. Now, if you don't want

(45:51):
me to have to take on a part time job
as a suicide booth therapist and have to commute all
the way to Niagara every day, why not consider becoming
a supporter of the show. The best way to support
the show is to help to grow it by sharing it.
The best way to keep your favorite host from having
a stress related heart attack, well you could visit buy

(46:12):
me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a
one time donation, and a few of you have done
that recently, been very very generous, and I really really
appreciate you. But if you think Anny episodes a little early,
with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material
in each new episode is worth it. You can find

(46:33):
out more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, and
I'd also like to share a quick but heartfelt shut
out to Janet Spencer, Mark Goodwin, Robert Pender, Tyler Whitfield,
Sam and Victoria Scarf for supporting the show on Patreon. Again,
there is no show without you, guys in particular, so

(46:55):
for those of you who do, please pat yourself on
the back and thank you for all you do. You
can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, on Facebook
as Doomsday Podcast, or fire me an email to Doomsdaypod
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you found this one, and while you're there, please leave
us a review and tell your friends. I always thank

(47:16):
my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. However,
if you can spare the money and had to choose,
I also ask you to consider making a donation to
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

(47:38):
and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to
people in life threatening situations and To date, they have
helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries.
You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA.
On the next episode, the worst thing about a natural

(47:58):
disaster is waiting for it to finally end. And to
best prepare you for our next episode, I would like
you to try to scream for four minutes straight. It's
the Greensburg tornado disaster of two thousand and seven. We'll
talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.

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The Niagara Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster of 1957 | Episode 90

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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 Niagara Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster of 1957 | Episode 90