The USS Enterprise Explosion of 1969 | Episode 92

Today, we will be spending the day on board a whole bunch of ships sharing a long and storied heritage. Sadly, we’re going to spend most of our time on the one that crew members called “The Mobile Chernobyl” .

On today’s episode: we’ll see what it feels like to survive something that peeled through six inch steel plates like taffy; in our safety segment, you’ll hear the first use of the term “enriddlement”; and before we’re done we’ll boldly go where Starships sometimes explode.

And if you were listening on Patreon, you would learn about a 2-million ton aircraft carrier made out of ice; you would hear the story of the early kamikaze pilot who caused hands down the most bizarre death in Australian Naval history; and you would learn how close we came to building the most unfathomably irresponsible and apocalyptic doomsday weapon ever conceived.

I’ve wanted to do this episode for some time, and there is a very special surprise for Star Trek fans closer to the end, but not before we explore the lives and fates of every vessel over a span of about 500 years to carry the name Enterprise. No big whoop.

If you find yourself asking, Star Trek? Why not Star Wars. Well, for one, the only “disasters” in Star Wars were the repeated explosions of the Death Star, but those were actually “acts of terrorism” – at least from the point of view of the victims of the explosions. The Death Stars were attacked in 1977 and 1983 in the same way the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City were attacked in 1993 and 2001. Both were ultimately destroyed by a small ragtag force of self-appointed rebels, each seeing themselves in a David role against an evil Goliath, each claiming victory by blowing up the bad guy’s biggest piece of real estate, and both in a strategic aerial attack. So to recap, Star Wars always inevitably leads to offensive mixed metaphors that upset people unnecessarily.


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Today, we'll be spending the day on board a whole
bunch of ships sharing a long and storied heritage. Sadly
for us, we're going to spend most of our time
on the one that crew members called the mobile Chernobyl. Hello,

(00:31):
and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're
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,
we'll see what it feels like to survive something that

(00:53):
peeled through six inch steel plates like taffy. In our
safety segment, you'll hear the first use of the term
in riddlement. And before we're done, we'll boldly go where
starships sometimes explode. And if you were listening on Patreon,
you would learn about a two million ton aircraft carrier
made out of ice. You would hear the story of

(01:14):
the early Kamakazi pilot who caused hands down, the most
bizarre death in Australian naval history, and you would learn
how close we came to building the most unfathomably irresponsible
and apocalyptic doomsday weapon ever conceived. This is not the
show you play around kids, or while eating, or even

(01:35):
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.

(01:56):
The name Enterprise carries with it a long and story
worried legacy. It is a name steeped with honour and
rich with a profound tradition of exploration and a history
of technological superiority. A name with nearly unparalleled heritage, a
name that has echoed over two and a half centuries

(02:17):
of naval history. And we have a lot to cover,
so we're going to jump right in. The first ship
to bear the name was a Continental Navy sloop or schooner.
The Americans, how do I say this, permanently borrowed it
from the British During the Revolutionary War back in seventeen
seventy five, she was captured by Revolutionary War hero Slash,

(02:40):
George Washington's favorite military tactician, Slash, America's worst remembered betrail
artist Benedicte Arnold, just outside Lake Champlain and renamed Enterprise.
She was originally called George. She sat low in the water.
Her hull was narrow and slightly flared at the beam,
with the sameingle tall mast with sails rigged front to back.

(03:03):
Her rigging gave her a compact, almost crouched look like
it didn't trust you. The twelve four pounder cannons and
ten swivel guns on deck backed that up. And she
wasn't huge like I said. She was roughly the same
with as a two lane road and about four and
a half dodged caravans. Long had only seventy tons. She

(03:24):
was lean, highly maneuverable, and ready to go. She was
built for speed, not for collecting beauty pageant trophies. She
wasn't long like we said, and neither was her service record.
By seventeen seventy seven, she was done. Literally. The most
commonly held belief is she was burned or scuttled to

(03:45):
prevent being recaptured by the British during the Battle of
macaias others say she was just decommissioned and returned to
civilian use. Either way, not a very auspicious start to
a line of vessels that would go on to bear
the news over the next two hundred and fifty years.
The next vessel to carry the name was a continental

(04:06):
frigate launched in seventeen seventy six, and she was a
full dodge caravan, longer than the sloop and had two
square ragged masks, displacing one hundred and twenty five tons
of water. This was a step up almost twice as
big this enterprise, the seventeen ninety nine Enterprise, was a

(04:26):
true ocean going warship capable of long distance patrol missions.
She was part of a fleet of American vessels that
engaged the British at the Battle of Valcore Island in
seventeen seventy six, and she saw some pretty fairly intense
close quarters combat. Just so it's noted, they were participating

(04:47):
in the very first, honest to goodness American naval battle
in history, and even though they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned,
they managed to stall a British invasion that would have
se split the colonies and changed the outcome of the
war and the history of America altogether. So no bigie,

(05:07):
just the whole reason why Americans didn't refer to the
recent Fourth of July Holiday is just Friday. Their little
fleet held them off long enough so that they had
to retreat for the winter, and this gave the Continental
Army time to refortify and learned to punch their opponent's
hearts out, which they did later at Saratoga in seventeen
seventy seven. So is this why we see the seventeen

(05:32):
seventy six Enterprise on the back of the US ten
cent piece. Nope. After that battle, most of the fleet
looked like it had been worked over by beavers and
were burned or scuttled, So they tipped their absurdly large
seventeen hundred style fur lined hats and bid the second
Enterprise up a bye, but not for long. In seventeen

(05:54):
ninety nine, the United States was a thing now they'd
won their independence and to help keith it but a
new Enterprise was built. This Enterprise was still small by
frigate standards, but she had a sleek, narrow hull with
a low profile, which made her hard to hit in
open combat. She had a reputation for being fast and

(06:15):
maneuverable from her time in the War against France and
the First Barbary War and the War of eighteen twelve.
She also fought and captured the British ship HMS Boxer
after a hard fought close range battle in eighteen thirteen.
What made that battle so interesting was that both captains
were killed. The public was so moved by this that

(06:38):
the captains were buried side by side, both with full
military honors, in Portland, Maine. She went on to serve
as an anti piracy patrol boat, protecting shipping lanes. After that,
she was one of the ships that fought the pirates
of the Caribbean until she finally ran aground and wrecked
on Little Currosau Island. She had served with distinction, kicking

(07:01):
a lot of ass during her twenty four years at sea,
and that is more than twice as long as most
wooden warships of the era even physically held together. This,
of course, meant that the name was up for grabs again,
and the third vessel to carry the name, Enterprise, was
a little different. She set sail in eighteen thirty one,

(07:23):
and she was almost fifty percent larger than her predecessors.
She was still a big old schooner, but she wasn't
intended for trading cannibals. Like her predecessors. She was mainly
used for patrolling and escorting vessels on diplomatic missions across
the West Indies, the Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, and

(07:44):
even Africa. That said, she also fought pirates and even
took on slave ships. So yeah, she saw a thing
or two for nineteen years until she wrecked off the
coast of Chile. Her legacy wasn't to help right the
history like her forebears, but she did her part to
keep on the right side of it. The fourth official

(08:07):
US naval vessel to carry the name Enterprise was launched
in eighteen seventy seven. This beast was six hundred percent
bigger than the last guy, and her size was not
the only difference. See she was built at a time
when the wooden age of shipbuilding was just starting to
be eclipsed by iron hulls. This was a screw sloop

(08:30):
of war. It's also called a steam corvette. She still
was a wooden hulled, fully rigged vessel with a sharp
bow and a long balanced hull, but beneath her traditional
sails and rigging lay a steam engine with a single
screw propeller, so she was good to go in most
any kind of a situation. Speaking of you know how

(08:52):
some innovations seem more sensible than others. Well, what if
I told you Britain in Canada put there as together
during World War two and came up with a plan
to build a massive aircraft carrier out of ice and
wood pull basically an enormous and reportedly unsinkable battle fortress.
Welcome to Project Habit Cook. Haba Cook was a biblical

(09:17):
prophet who spoke of great and unbelievable wonders, And they
thought a vessel this huge could eat torpedoes all day
and host a squadron of planes on top. I should
point out their best and brightest minds were willing to
entertain any kind of concept at this point, and Winston
Churchill himself was a big fan of the plan. He

(09:38):
could imagine a whole fleet of these things. So sixty
foot long prototype was secretly built in nineteen forty three
on the shores of Lake Patricia in Jasper National Park
in Alberta, Canada. If you were from Jasper, you might
be excited or confused to learn about this. The proposed
ship would actually be made of pie crete, which is

(10:01):
a kind of an ice but it's infused with woodpulp,
so it makes it really really strong and shatter resistant
and kind of slow to melt too. And amazingly, when
they test floated this thing, it held together. Now they
just had to scale it up and make a two
million ton version of it over two thousand feet long.

(10:22):
Engineers don't like to use words like impossible, but here
they were, how are you going to build something that big?
I mean, how do you even keep something that big refrigerated?
And most importantly, what happens when the first bomb hits
it and it shatters into eleven trillion pieces. Project Havocuk
was quietly shelved and the prototype well, they just kind

(10:44):
of left it to melt in Lake Patricia. The fourth
Enterprise never saw combat and spent half of her life
as a training ship for naval officers. She mostly just
conducted oceanographic and coastal star which were vital for future
naval and merchant navigation, but not terribly exciting. Hell, this

(11:07):
was one of the vessels that would have made an
appearance during our Unimac Lighthouse disaster episode, and it's probably
entirely because of her modified role as a ship of
peace and discovery that kept her unperforated and afloat for
thirty years until she was finally decommissioned in nineteen oh
nine and sold for scrap in nineteen ten. And thirty

(11:29):
years yep, that was a record for Enterprises. The fifth
official US naval vessel to bear the name launched in
nineteen oh nine as a lighthouse tender for the US
Lighthouse Service. Again you remember those guys. Yep. She was
basically a kick ass looking motor boat, not quite as
large as the last Enterprise, and she tended to lighthouses

(11:51):
and boys and kept remote coastal outposts supplied so they
didn't have to go crazy and eat each other. And
she did this right up until war. World War one
broke out. All kinds of non military and civilian vessels
found themselves drafted into service. Her new role was conducting
patrols looking for German subs and convoy escort duty. She

(12:14):
was also the first of her name to be built
out of steel instead of wood. She was the first
Enterprise to serve during the comparative hell of a more
modern mechanized war, even if it only was in a
support role, and ships named Enterprise had come a long
way from trading canniballs on Lake Champlain. After the war,

(12:35):
she went back to her previous duties, but closer to
Hawaii hot chot Chaw until she was eventually decommissioned in
nineteen thirty and scrapped. The sixth in the line of
USS enterprises launched in nineteen thirty six. And she wasn't
just a ship. The CV six USS Enterprise was a

(12:57):
Mother Yorktown class aircraft carrier. This thing was more than
four times the size of anything that came before, and
she weighed almost twenty thousand tons. She was twenty nine thousand,
nine hundred percent larger than the fifth. In nineteen sixty nine,

(13:17):
no navy on Earth came close to matching the military
might of the United States at sea. The US owned
and operated twenty three commissioned aircraft carriers, while the rest
of the world combined had nine. And these were state
of the art supercarriers armed with the most advanced aircraft
of the Cold War era. They were practically floating air bases,

(13:41):
and they were the backbone of American military authority around
the world. And they didn't just patrol the oceans, they
kind of owned them. Imagine if America had just a
bunch of regular old destroyers and warships, and then one
day Germany or Russia pulls up off their shore with
about the size of a shop helpping mall. America didn't

(14:02):
need access to foreign soil to dola war on its enemies.
They were the soil. This made them unchallenged and dominant.
And these ships had names that reverberated throughout history, the
USS Forestall, the Yorktown, the Intrepid, but none captured the
imagination more than enterprise. While everything before could maybe hold

(14:26):
a few hundred men and some deck guns, this ship
carried around three thousand sailors and an air wing of
maybe another fifteen hundred, so around forty six hundred men
in total, everyone from nuclear engineers to cooks to the
on ship barber. They worked eight and slept in the
ship's fast mayse of below deck compartments, and most of

(14:49):
those on board were barely out of their teens. Now,
aircraft carrier does what it says right there in the name,
and this one could carry about one hundred full sized planes.
And did she do anything else that we might know
her for? Well, I'll say this as quick as possible.
She helped sink three Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle

(15:11):
of Midway in June of nineteen forty two. After the
Battle of Guadalcanal in nineteen forty three, she was the
last operational US carrier in the Pacific. From there she
went on to something called the Great marianas Turkey Shoe
during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. She was part
of the largest naval battle in history at the Battle

(15:33):
of La Tay Gulf in nineteen forty four. By the
Battle of Okinawa in nineteen forty five, this ship was
one of the used Lady. She had taken more than
twenty direct hits from bombs, torpedoes and even kamakazis, and
they called her the ship that couldn't die. Speaking of kamakazis,

(15:54):
can I tell you the unbelievable story of the very
first one. Welcome to the Age, Australia Kamakazi incident of
nineteen forty four. Remember a while back we talked about
a battle at Leide Gulf. Well, guess who else was there?
The Australian Navy hi Mates a heavy cruiser called HMAS.

(16:15):
Australia became one of the first Allied ships deliberately struck
by a suicidal aircraft attack, and Kamakazi weren't really a
thing yet, So imagine everyone's surprise when a Japanese zero
that's a fighter jet for you, non military buffs. Well,
the pilot of this zero decided they were going to
deliberately crash into the ship, and when they hit, their

(16:38):
body was hurled through the air, you know, pin wheeling
and rag dolling until you remember Newton's first law of motion,
an object emotion stays emotion unless acted upon by an
external force. Well, Emil de Cheneau, commander of the entire
Australian Task Force, was on board that day, standing at
attention watching the attack till the pilot's flailing corpse impacted

(17:02):
him directly. I was gonna describe it like he speared
the guy like something out of an old Wu Tang movie,
you know, striking with both fists outstretched and a roar
in his throat, oh and flying about two hundred miles
per hour. Debris and fire from the impact of his
plane did wound and kill several other crew members, but
the commanding Admiral being spear tackled into the afterlife in

(17:25):
the flailing limbs of his enemy is the most bizarre
thing I've ever heard. The ship survived and kept fighting,
and rear Admiral des Cheneaux became the only flag officer
in naval history killed by an airborne body. By the
end of the war, she had sunk seventy one ships
and shot down over nine hundred aircraft. She left as

(17:50):
the most decorated ship in all of World War II.
They say she was the heart of the Pacific Fleet
during the darkest days the US Navy ever faced. She
was finally decommissioned after the war. I mean she had
been blown up twenty times by now, So where do
you possibly go from there? Well, this is honestly a

(18:11):
little embarrassing, a bit like transitioning from an ice cream
cart to an RV. The seventh vessel to carry the
name Enterprise, she was more of a floating city. The
name Enterprise was a vessel in name only. Compared to
her direct predecessor, she was almost forty percent longer and

(18:32):
almost three hundred and fifty percent bigger overall, and she
held more than double the crew of the last one
meet the CBN sixty five USS Enterprise eight point zero
the longest warship ever built. At the time, they called
her Big E and she launched in nineteen sixty And

(18:54):
when you ask most people who their favorite captain of
the Enterprise was, it takes a very spece secial kind
of nerd to say Captain Kent Lee. Under his leadership,
the Enterprise supported air operations in the Gulf of Tonkin
and served as flagship when North Korea captured the USS
Pueblo in nineteen sixty eight, just the year before. According

(19:16):
to everyone, Captain Lee was decisive and principal and felt
a deep commitment to both his crew and the Navy.
As ships go, Enterprise was so big and so complex
it had no peers. They really wanted to build a
whole bunch of these, but no one has pockets that deep,

(19:37):
So Enterprise remained one of a kind and became her
own distinct aircraft carrier class. Enterprise class. It's a little
like being your own postal code. And it wasn't just
all that booty that made her unique. She was the
world's first combat ready nuclear powered aircraft carrier. And she

(19:57):
didn't just have one or three, but eight Westinghouse A
two W nuclear reactors on board. She had two nuclear
reactors for each propeller shaft, and this whole setup put
out about three hundred thousand horsepower. So imagine a ship
the size of a neighborhood doing thirty knots, which is
about thirty five miles or about fifty five kilometers, and

(20:21):
she could do this for twenty years before refueling. Now,
when I try to think of the weirdest engineering concepts
of all time, I usually start with the military. They've
been trying to jam nuclear power into every kind of
vessel that you can imagine, And one stands out for
is absolutely reckless abandon for any rational environmental and ethical

(20:44):
or moral or humane consideration, for its utterly catastrophic environmental potential,
and the hubristic, barbaric insanity of even conceiving such a
thing on paper. And I'm going to tell you all
about it. It was the slam or Project Pluto, and
for those who know about this, it is widely considered

(21:06):
the most bizarre and terrifying an impractical nuclear powered device
ever seriously developed. So what was it? All? Right? Try
to imagine a nuclear powered ramjet propelled cruise missile designed
to fly about thirty seven hundred kilometers or twenty three
hundred miles per hour at tree top level, zigzagging across

(21:29):
the country, spewing an unbroken field of highly radioactive exhaust
gases from its unshielded nuclear reactor. It's basically history's most
lethal and irresponsible crop duster. Its low altitude, flight path
and speed mean it basically devastates every forest and building,
in person and dog and fish that it passes. Ouh,

(21:52):
And the constant shock waves coming off this thing because
of the speed, would shatter windows and injure everyone and
everything on along the way. But wait, it gets better.
It doesn't just forever irradiate whatever it flies over. It
carries multiple nuclear bombs in its payload, and each one
of them they can just drop them anywhere along the way,

(22:14):
just deploy them over whatever targets they like. But wait,
it gets even better. After you drop all your bombs.
This thing it's still a nuclear powered cruise missile, which
means it can fly basically forever, just circling the globe infinitely,
turning an entire latitude of the Earth into an inhospitable

(22:37):
band of a radiated post apocalyptic abandoned with every fresh pass.
But if the entire forty fifth parallel became the Chernobyl
exclusion zone, so you see what I mean. It was
intended to be used as America's ultimate you dead hand weapon.
If America was ever destroyed by an enemy nation, the

(22:58):
SLAM could just go go on to poison the rest
of civilization as a parting gift, and because of its
ridiculous speed and low altitude, this would make it damn
near impossible to shoot down. The only way this hypersonic
apocalypse ends is with a self destruct order, and without
that it just goes on forever, almost because on a

(23:19):
long enough timeline, the craft would eventually lose structural integrity
and disintegrate, scattering unspeakably radioactive debris, including but not limited
to the reactor core, across the landscape at four times
the speed of sound like YACHTSI dice. So yeah, dumber
than a tank, dumber than a snowmobile or a submarine

(23:39):
or a satellite of all the things with a nuclear
heart ever devised. The SLAM nuclear fertilizer multiple warhead cruise
missile is by every measure, the worst life on board.
Enterprise was dictated by nearly round the clock launches and
landings and fuelings and ordnance and training schedules. This was

(24:02):
a floating twenty four hour city where rising before dawn
loses all meaning sailors and airmen work in shifts that
bleed across day and night. This place ran on cafeteria, coffee,
and jet fuel, launching more than one hundred flights per day,
and it is run by thousands of people, each with
their own roller duty, each like a cog in a

(24:23):
machine the size of several city blocks, all designed to
deliver war anywhere in the world. Let me just grab
a clipboard off the bulkhead here and see where we're going. Well, okay,
we just left Pearl Harbor and we are on our
way to Vietnam. Don't forget your travel points card. This
is our fourth trip and sadly, we won't be doing

(24:46):
any shopping or touristy stuff during our visit. We've been
helping bomb the place since the end of nineteen sixty five,
but we've got to cover about five thousand nautical miles first,
so we're going to be doing some of opirational readiness
inspections and battle drills, you know, standard deck drills and
ordnance loading procedures. Because the captain is quite insistent on

(25:09):
battle readiness drills, and our story takes place January fourteenth,
nineteen sixty nine. Enterprise was sailing under comb skies about
seventy miles or one hundred and ten kilometers southwest of
Pearl Harbor. Flight deck operations had been underway since before
the sun broke over the Pacific, preparing for an eight

(25:30):
thirty launch. Flight ops usually ran from before dawn till
well after dusk, a small rainbow of duty staff preparing
aircraft for the day's first sorties. Yellow shirts guided jets
into position, Green shirts ready to launch catapults, while purple
shirts or grapes handled the refueling. And then there were
the crash crews and the medics that stood by for

(25:52):
any ugliness. They mostly just wore Hawaiian shirts. Below decks,
red shirts booth bombs, rockets, and mississ from windowless steel
compartments deep in the ship's belly to elevators that rose
to the hangar and flight decks. This won't mean much
if you didn't grow up building model planes and bottles,
but the Enterprise held all kinds of fighter aircraft in

(26:15):
a massive, multi level hangar deck below the flight deck
and they were all just elevatored up as needed. F
four Phantoms, A seven Corsairs, RA five CE Vigilantes. They
even had a refueler tanker and one of those E
two A Hawkeyes with the massive circular radar dome mounted
on top like a UFO or a spinning pancake. It's

(26:37):
an early warning aircraft. These would be the final battle
drills on the last day of the operational Readiness inspections.
Phantom twos, to be exact, were being armed and hooked
up to Hoffers. The HELLSA Hoffer you ask well. See,
these fighter aircraft were designed to max out on their payload,
so every pound saved could mean one pound of explosives.

(27:00):
So to save weight, these jets didn't come with their
own onboard system for starting their own engines. They needed
to be connected to a portable jet starter unit or
a huffer that blows hot compressed air into the jet
engines to spin them up to a speed where fuel
can be introduced and then ignition. A little like old cars,
they need a little hanging to get them going. Now,

(27:22):
one of the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs in
the Navy was installing ordinance on the flight deck of
an aircraft carrier. This was red shirt work. So imagine
working inches from jets racing past you with all the
noise and exhaust, and meanwhile you're juggling live bombs, missiles
and rockets on a pitching carrier deck on one of

(27:43):
the most dangerous workplaces on Earth. Oh and the temperatures
on the flight deck easily reach into the high nineties
under the afternoon sun. They say you could feel it
through the soles of your boots, and the jet exhaust
only made it worse. It's a high stress, high tempo
job that relies on hand signals and calm nerves or nts.

(28:04):
Teams fueled up phantoms and corsairs and rolled bomb carts
across the hot steel deck, and that deck was almost
seventy dodge caravans long. Each of those bombs being loaded
will leave behind a fifty foot crater and dead people
for another two hundred and fifty feet of blast radius.
Each Phantom was loaded with four Mk thirty two Zuni rockets,

(28:27):
two external wing tanks of JP five fuel, and six
Mk eighty two five hundred pound bombs. Now, the Zuni
rockets aren't quite as powerful as all that. They're only
about six feet long and maybe five inches in diameter,
and they only carry about twenty pounds of explosive. They
were good for blowing up people and vehicles out in

(28:47):
the open, and radar stations and surface to air missile
installations and just other planes while they're still parked on
the ground. Think of it kind of like the thing
that blew up the Death Star. But that's a different franchise.
We're spending our day to day with Fighter Squadron VF
ninety six, also known as the Fighting Falcons. The F

(29:08):
four J Phantom twos have a muscular, broad shouldered look
with twin engines and a long nose and angular engine intakes.
It wasn't a light or a nimble dog fighter. It
was no frills. It was all function, and it was
built tough enough to withstand the stresses of regular carrier
launches and landings. If the new Doomsday Command Center and

(29:30):
mobile studio try to carry your landing, I firmly believe
it would explode. It was just after eight hundred and
several aircraft were now fully fueled, armed and ready to launch.
Carryer decks are dangerous places like I said, so we'll
keep out of the way. Here by phantom number one
thirteen on the port quarter of the flight deck, just

(29:51):
outside the landing area jetsovin Park knows to tail and
tight formation on the deck. There's no shade on the ocean,
and man is it hot eight thirty And those huffer
units only make things worse. There's one hooked up to
one thirteen right now. They were gas turbine powered and
the exhaust blasting out of them get hit up to

(30:11):
six hundred degrees fahrenheit or three point fifteen celsius. Our
huffer was seated on the starboard side of one thirteen
and thankfully pointing away from us. Instead, it was venting
exhaust only a few feet from the starboard wing of
nearby aircraft six twelve, and that wing was currently home

(30:31):
to a pod of four Zooni rockets and were not
the first to notice. A few deckands already mentioned it
to nearby ordnance chiefs and other personnel. But a flight
deck is a busy and noisy place, So I'm going
to suggest that we all take several steps backwards, because
by eight nineteen, one of six twelve rockets quietly cooked

(30:54):
off and then exploded. The detonation ripped straight up through
the heart of the launch area. Shrapnel ruptured everything across
multiple levels of the ship, including the fuselages and the
fuel tanks of the rest of VF ninety six. Flames
engulfed the forward section of the flight line, and an

(31:15):
orange fireball, indubated by smoke enveloped the apt flight deck,
while survivors ran from a rain of airplane parts, hot metal,
and flames. Now JP five, or Jet Propellent five, is
a kerosene based jet fuel used primarily by the US Navy,
and it has a strong, hard to ignore petroleum odor.

(31:38):
And we know this because it is currently gushing by
our feet. The plane bursts into an inferno, and a
minute later, three more Zuni rockets on board one oh
five cooked off, detonated, and added to the horror. Each
blast sent shockwaves through the hull. Hatches were blown inward,
catwalks buckled, and sailors nearest the impact were thrown back

(32:01):
by the force of the blasts. Some found themselves flying overboard.
Fifteen aircraft had been immediately destroyed. Fire was everywhere on
the deck, in the catwalks, and pouring down into the hangar. Bay.
It poured in through holes punched in by the explosions,
which acted like a drain for all of that flaming

(32:22):
fuel to get into the lower decks. Pressurized foam cannons,
CO two lines and seawater hoses were dragged across the
flight deck, but they'd been ripped to pieces by flying shrapnel.
Fire spread from plane to plane, and at one point
eight thousand pound bomb detonated beneath and tossed a jet

(32:43):
pirouetting through the air like it was a toy. Debris
and shrapnel rained down across multiple levels of the ship,
and the men fought to keep their footing as the
deck buckled beneath them. On the plus side, the fact
that their boots were melting kind of gave them mild
spider powers. The temperature exceeded twelve hundred degrees fahrenheit or

(33:04):
six hundred and fifty celsius. Crews dropped whatever they were
doing and focused entirely on this. Others were on fire
and more focused on that. Enterprises damage control teams fought
to prevent the fires from spreading through the ship's interior,
and everyone knew this is the kind of thing that

(33:24):
could easily doom a ship, and no one has made
a point about fire meeting up with nuclear reactors. Yet.
They sealed off compartments and activated sprinklers and used fog
foam to beat back the flames as best they could
while fire continued to pour in through bomb holes. The
wounded moved feebly across the deck, while others lay eerily still.

(33:48):
Others were below decks in compartments that turned into lethal traps.
When the fire and smoke rushed in up in the
carrier bridge, the captain ordered the ship turned into the wind.
He wanted to use it to blow smoke and flames
away from choking out the bridge and the flight operation center.
As burning fuel poured deeper into the ship, ladders and

(34:08):
decks and bulkheads became too hot to touch, and at
eight twenty two another one of the five hundred pound
bombs detonated, which put an eight x seven foot hole
directly underneath it. The blast ruptured hoses and eight firefighting
equipment foam dispensers, basically everything they needed to fight the blaze,
oh and ear drums. Shortly after, two more Mk eighty

(34:32):
two bombs detonated back to back, which ignited a bomb
rack holding three more five hundred pound bombs, sending lethal
fragments frisbeeing across the decks. It wasn't just flaming hot shrapnel.
Flaming hot m and cannon shells had also been cooking
off in all directions, perforating sailors and fire hoses. Bravery

(34:55):
was on display everywhere. One officer thoughtlessly threw himself onto
a burning man to help extinguish the flames. Other less
fortunate sailors were disintegrated entirely by the actual explosions themselves,
of which I have now lost count To all appearances,
the enterprise was at war with itself. Sailors dragged the

(35:17):
wounded to relative safety and tried to continue the fight.
Oh but I should mention all of this was happening
right next to a fully loaded KA thirty five fuel
tanker plane, which just happened to be carrying six thousand
gallons of jet fuel at the time, and the results

(35:37):
of that disappearing left an eighteen x twenty two foot
jagged hole and a colossal fireball up to one hundred
and fifty to two hundred and fifty feet in diameter.
The blast peeled through deck plates, six inches thick like
they were taffy, and the deck below that, and the

(35:58):
deck below that the gas and gulf, multiple aircraft and
entire damage control teams. In an instant, Men ran as
fire seemed to rain from every direction, waving their arms
over their heads, trying not to burst into flames. As
more fuel tanks ignited and more warheads exploded. Everywhere was chaos,

(36:18):
and in spite of it, sailors just kept rushing forward
to pick up a hose and keep fighting the blazes.
Many of the crew got to the very careful work
of rolling the bombs off the deck, plunking them into
the ocean so that they couldn't make anything worse. Even
planes were pushed overboard, and it was about this time
that the destroyer USS rogers sidled up close to them

(36:39):
and started springing or down with their deck hoses, which
certainly was appreciated. Medical teams triaged and treated burn and
blast victims by flashlight on charred decks in the hangar
and sick bay. Injuries ranged from serious burns and smoke
inhalation to broken bones and lacerations and shrapnel wounds. So

(37:00):
you find yourself stunned by an explosion, and it turns
out one of your hands has been cut off by
a piece of shrapnel, so you pick it up with
your other hand, and now that one gets removed, And
all of this right before a wave of burning fuel
crashes over your head like you're the coach of a
football team. Would you know what to do? Well, let's

(37:21):
quickly review personal safety aboard a carrier and see what
we can do about not getting you immediately killed. First, stop,
drop and roll and roll and roll and roll as
much as you need, using your body to smother any
flames that may be calling you daddy. The ignition point
of various clothes and uniforms changes, but cotton fabric can

(37:42):
burst into flames at seven hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheiter
four hundred celsius. But if your clothes have been exposed
to any kind of fuel vapors, that could drop as
lowest four hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheiter two hundred and
fifty celsius. The point of stopping is because running only
feeds flames. The pin dropping is because this only works
while laying down flat, and it also protects your airways

(38:05):
from flames. Just make sure you don't roll over any
puddles of fuel JP five like we were talking about,
can burn hot enough to light steel on fires. So
if you're already ankled deep in the stuff, it's time
to climb to a higher deck or a catwalk or
an awaiting helicopter would be great. Anywhere above the fuel
line is where you want to be. And the last

(38:25):
thing about stop, drop and roll, don't accidentally roll overboard.
When I said roll and roll and roll, it's more
customary to roll back and forth to smother the flames,
not nus straight line. Your speed should be deliberate and continuous,
just fast enough to smother the flames, but controlled enough
to stay in contact with the ground and cover all

(38:46):
the burning areas. And on this flight deck though, you're
gonna want to do this as far from any open
flames as possible, and not for the obvious reasons of
you know, already being on fire, but because metal surfaces
could be hundreds of degrees, causing anything from additional burns
to the rapid stripping away of layers of your skin
and muscles like a fruit roll up, if you get

(39:08):
the reference. Now we're delivering this safety segment on the flaming,
exploding deck of an aircraft carrier. And I've heard shrapnel
described as nature's surprise gift bag. It gets into it everywhere,
and if it's getting into you, we're not triaging or
removing it here on deck. First thing we're doing is hiding.

(39:28):
We're putting as many surfaces as we can between us
and the source of this new in riddlement. Next, don't panic.
You want to apply pressure to the wound and get
the hell out of there. Anytime you're taken flack or shrapnel,
you're gonna treat it like you're being sniped at by
an unseen enemy, because you are. And if you found

(39:49):
you've become host to shrapnel, there's always room for more.
Keep that pressure on it to control bleeding, and find
as much cover as you can. Unless the shrapnel is
blocking your airway or it's too big to fit through
a hatch, just leave it. You ever heard the term
catastrophic bleeding. Removing it could dislodge clots or expose open

(40:10):
severed blood vessels. Just understand, you pull a thing out
of you and you might find yourself on a clock.
And I can't tell you how long it's going to last, So,
like I keep saying, keep pressure on the wound. If
it's bleeding and life threatening, you know, I'm going to
tell you to apply a tourniquet two to three inches
above the wound, but making sure that it's between the
wound and your heart, if that makes sense. The trick

(40:33):
here is to stem the bleeding without killing the limb.
Not too loose, but not too tight. And if your
wound is somewhere weird like your neck, or you're growin
where trying to tie it off is awkward, or we'll
just straight up strangle you, pack that wound with whatever
is clean and keep the pressure on. And ironically, there's
a version of this situation where a real pro just

(40:55):
grabs a piece of flaming debris and cat arises and
seals their own wound right there and then. But my
advice on shrapnel is always going to be you don't
know what you don't know, so just don't touch, look
with your eyes. The good news is you're on a
military aircraft, they can probably toss you a morphine autoinjector
for the pain. And you surely know I'm going to

(41:16):
tell you always know where your nearest hatch is. Every
second counts, and at absolute worst, if you're cut off
from escape, you can go straight over the side, but
if you do, hold your nose, try to go and
feed first, cross your ankles, and tighten your butt. Salt
water obviously burns a lot less than jet fuel, but
it can also irrigate your colon if you're not careful.

(41:40):
You just survived a carrier explosion, and the last thing
you want to do is drown while trying to choke
down your reverse prolapsed colon. Many of the burn victims
would endure grueling treatment and long recoveries. The ones unbroken
expanse of the flight deck was now ruptured by giant

(42:01):
holes blown straight through six inch thick plate armor like
it was melted plastic, and it looked like melted plastic
where it had punched through. Portions of the stern steel
structure were peeled back and twisted from the explosions. The
aft section of the deck was ripped wide open. When

(42:22):
I said it looked like the US Navy was attacking itself,
it appears both sides fought very hard. The fire was
brought under control after forty minutes, and it was finally
dead by lunch eighteen different explosions had perforated the deck.
Eight F fours, six A sevens, and one unfortunately completely

(42:44):
filled Eka three B tanker had been destroyed. Many of
those who died had been killed by the secondary explosions
as they rushed to fight the fire. As many as
three hundred and forty crewmen had been injured, most with
severe burns, blast injuries, and smoke inhalation. Twenty nine ordnance crewmen, firefighters,

(43:06):
and flight deck personnel had served their final shift. So
what happened, well, I can say for sure. The Huffer
technician was the first to die. The pilot aboard that
exploding F four was a very very close second. Most
others died fighting the fire or were caught up in

(43:28):
it before they could even help. Others found themselves trapped
below decks and died there. Within minutes of the first explosion,
Enterprise's flight deck was replaced with smoke and fire and
bending steel and burning. Aircraft Men braved the searing geat
to rescue shipmates in spite of the flames and the
smoke from the occasional missile or bullet or other projectile

(43:51):
whizzing by. Sailors had been blasted and burned and dazed.
But instead of evacuating, they grabbed a hose and they
got to work. Deep black smoke billowed and could be
seen for miles. And fortunately, ninety six percent of the
crew and eighty six percent of the air wing personnel
on board had some formal firefighter training. Life below deck

(44:15):
had been a different kind of terrifying. All your hearing
are explosions that absolutely rock throughout the ship. The lights
are out, hatches are jammed, Smoke is everywhere, and it
is at least thirty degrees hotter from your point of view.
All you know is that the flight readiness inspection cannot
be going that well. The men below decks made an

(44:38):
executive decision and flooded the AMMO magazines with seawater. This
was no doubt a difficult and expensive and irreversible decision,
but it most likely saved the entire ship. If the
fires have been able to spread further into the ship's
magazines or the reactor compartments, this would have been a much, much,

(45:00):
much longer episode. As it was, the steel structure of
the ship had been warped, the deck elevators were toasted,
and fifteen aircraft had been reduced to smoldering parts. The
USS Enterprise limped back to Hawaii under escort and spent
fifty one days in the shop like my car. And
she left with a bill for one hundred and twenty

(45:22):
six million dollars. And you might be thinking, well, that's
not so bad. That's closer to a billion today. And
while she was on her way, the Coastguard and Navy
searched more than a quarter million miles of ocean, but
they found nothing and no one to save, likely thanks
to the USS Bainbridge that had already rescued a number
of sailors who had been blown overboard. The USS Rogers

(45:46):
was also praised for her aggressive gumption helping fight the
deck fire. And when all was said and done, the
inevitable Board of Inquiry produced a kind of a Shit
Happens report. Sailors admitted they knew how dangerous the huffer
heating units could be, but the investigators found that safe
distances between huffers and armed explosives were either not followed

(46:08):
or just not understood. A junior airman apprentice tried to
call attention to the situation early on, but investigator said
he was either misunderstood, not hurt at all due to
the noise, and they determined it was most likely at
that point too late to have changed anything anyways. Other
carriers in the fleet had had near misses with Huffer

(46:30):
exhaust before, but none of those had turned lethal, thankfully,
which is surprising because the investigation also pointed out just
how badly Zuni rockets did in the heat, and while
different ships had developed different workarounds for the problem to
make things safer, they'd never really been shared or discussed,
and nothing had ever turned into a fleet white policy

(46:52):
that could have prevented the accident. The rest of the
report revolved around recommended preventive actions for the future, mostly
increase in training. They recommended more foam hoses and portable
extinguishers and expanding fire suppression systems on flight decks. Case
in point, and this would have been great, but afterwards

(47:12):
they developed a flight deck washed down sprinkler system. This
thing would unleash a deluge of water and foam spreading
across the flight deck at the push of a button.
Flight crews, deck crews, ordnance handlers, and support teams were
trained up on jet blast hazards, the heat limits of
different weapons, and to know when to respond to a

(47:33):
fire and when to just get out of there. This
was the guidance that we still enforce today. They also
improved protective clothing and breathing apparatus for firefighters, and developed
new emergency response protocols for different scenarios. And they didn't
just write it all down, They preached and practiced it. Oh,

(47:55):
and huffers would be redesigned so that the exhaust vents
pointed upwards. In the end, there were no criminal charges.
Responsibility was a group effort, so blame fell on the
chain of command and their institutional practices. Let me say
the waffle house was more prepared for a tornado than

(48:16):
the U. S. Navy had been for this kind of accident.
Various people received procedural knocks on their records, but that
was all. Captain Lee was praised for his calm and
effective command of the situation. Damage control. Readiness was his
middle name. Actually it was Liston, but the point remains.

(48:38):
His emphasis on training and leadership saved countless lives that day,
and his discipline had come at no small cost. It
was forged in his mind from the lessons learned from
sister ships who had suffered devastating fires. Before her, there
was a fired aboard the US s Laity in nineteen
fifty three that killed thirty two men, a fire aboard

(49:01):
the USS Bennington in nineteen fifty four killed one hundred
and three, a fire aboard the USS Ariscani in nineteen
sixty six killed forty four, and a fire aboard the
USS Forestal in nineteen sixty seven quite famously killed one
hundred and thirty four and nearly killed another one hundred
and sixty one, but that's a different story. Captain Lee

(49:25):
went on to serve as Vice Admiral of the Navy
and leader of the Naval Air System's Command. This is
another in a very long line of bad Day at
Work episodes where another routine day suddenly became an unimaginable nightmare. Amazingly,
by March the first of nineteen sixty nine, less than

(49:46):
two months after the disaster, USS Enterprise was patched up
and able to get under way and rejoin the fleet
in Vietnam. Each of the names of the dead is
now engraved on plaques and trips mutes, honoring their sacrifice
in service to their ship and country. For the survivors,
many carried physical and emotional scars for the rest of

(50:09):
their lives. Some were tormented by memories of shipmates they
couldn't save. Others found themselves shell shook by being in
such close quarters with that many explosions. But over time
these men found support in each other, unloading painful memories
only the men there could truly understand. One survivor said,

(50:32):
as awful as it was, the fire forged bonds that
have lasted a lifetime. Their preparedness and heroism kept a
terrible situation from becoming an even larger catastrophe that might
have sunk the ship or a radiated part of the Pacific.
The Navy didn't hide from this tragedy or simply chalk

(50:52):
it up to bad luck. It investigated, it learned, and
it implemented changes so that those lives lost could save
us in the future. It is often said that every
procedure in the Navy's safety manuals is hard earned, wisdom
gained from sacrifice and written in blood. In the more
than fifty years since, no US carriers has suffered anything

(51:17):
close to what happened here today. Enterprize itself went on
to serve for over fifty years, having served in everything
from the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis to
the Gulf Wars and even post nine to eleven operations,
and that made her the longest serving aircraft carrier in
US history. Some called her the Gray Ghost because of

(51:41):
her perceived unkillability, but after fifty years of service and radioactivity,
others called her the mobile Chernobyl, and she was decommissioned
in twenty seventeen and handled with tongs. But and this
is no spoiler, we are not done with the name Enterprise.

(52:02):
It is quite possible that the most popular use of
the name Enterprise was set in the far flung future,
hundreds of years from now. I don't know how old
you are, but if you were watching TV back in
nineteen sixty six, he may have come across a little
action packed space based soap opera called star Trek. In

(52:24):
the early nineteen sixties, a man named Jean Roddenberry developed
the concept for a scientific fictional series set in the
future where humanity explored the stars as a member of
a confederation of light minded planets, flying around space and
using a naval like command structure called star Fleet. Roddenberry

(52:46):
had been a pilot back in World War Two. He
flew eighty nine combat missions for the Air Force before
becoming a commercial pilot, and then a police officer, and
then a screenwriter. And he wanted his starship to have
a name that evoked the spirit of exploration, and chose
Enterprise specifically because of its rich naval history. He said

(53:09):
the name had quote a feeling of continuity of ships
that had explored before, of duty and daring. He saw
it as the namesake of centuries of exploration and defense,
but just set in space by the time humanity started
catching up with his vision. The first of America's Space
Shuttle orbiters, which was constructed for testing but never actually

(53:32):
got to fly into space sadly, was originally supposed to
be named the Space Shuttle Constitution in honor of the
USS bi centennial, but in nineteen seventy six NASA found
themselves surprised by a massive letter writing campaign by fans
of the show. They were able to persuade then President
Gerald Ford into renaming it Enterprise instead. Roddenberry's first ship,

(53:58):
the original USA Enterprise NCC one seven zero one, was
a Constitution class starship launched in twenty two forty five
and was famously captained by James T. Kirk. That was
until twenty two eighty five. Long story short, she found
herself being boarded by Klingon forces under the command of

(54:20):
an otherwise delightful man named Kruge. Actually, I have to
take a step backwards. Kirk's best friend Spock had just
died of radiation poisoning, and they had fired his body
in a torpedo into space, where it gently came to
rest on a patch of ferns on a super contested
mystery planet called Genesis, which is its own story. And

(54:42):
it turns out Spock didn't die after all, so they
did the only thing they could. They stole the ship,
which had also just gotten its teeth kicked in by
a genetically engineered superhuman named Khan Noonian Singh, who was
mad because he had been left to die on a
place planet full of earworms by Kirk and vowed a

(55:03):
deep and heartfelt revenge that nearly killed them all. Anyways,
the point being fast forward a little bit, and now
Kirk's son, who he had just met for the first time,
got stabbed by the same Klingons who were now pouring
onto his ship. Now, when it came to handling intruders,

(55:23):
Kirk was normally known for negotiating or even just tricking
them into leaving. He once successively out argued a killer
floating robots that humans were garbage to the point where
it control all deleted itself. Every now and then he
would threaten someone, but by twenty two eighty five he
was too old for this. So they snuck out the

(55:45):
back door while the Klingons were beaming in from the front,
and left them so that they could have a conversation
with Enterprise's computer about the self destruct sequence. A mass
of explosion tore through the Enterprise, erupting outward from the
saucer section, which began disintegrating in a brilliant fireball that

(56:08):
burned as it fell into the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. Now,
one may have argued that she did blow up real good,
but with enough buffering and hammering, we could maybe make
something out of this. But all of that went out
the window when the planet itself finally exploded. Kirk had

(56:28):
given up everything, his command, his ship. He gave up
everything to save the lives of his friends and crew.
But they weren't done. From there, they carjacked a klingon
bird of Prey and slingshot it around the Sun to
travel back in time, all to abduct some whales just
to show up some malevolent alien tube from the future.

(56:52):
When all of that was done, instead of beheading Kurt
and court martialing his headless torso, they gave him the
keys to a brand new u u SS Enterprise NCC
one seven one A that booted around the galaxy until
twenty two ninety three, when she was decommissioned and converted
for mothball storage. She was replaced by the Enterprise B,

(57:17):
on which Kirk was almost immediately killed during its maiden
voyage by a kind of benevolent space ribbon. But don't worry,
he didn't really die. He was sent to a magical
horse pasture to cook breakfast, while the B went on
toodling around the galaxy without so much as loosening a
tooth for decades until she was finally retired and replaced

(57:40):
by the Enterprise C, which launched in twenty three thirty two. Now,
the thing about the Enterprise C is, after having screwed
up the timeline, she was shoved backwards, face first through
a portal in space into an alternate reality in hopes
that she would be destroyed and everyone on board would
die at the Battle of Narendra three in twenty three

(58:03):
forty four, And it was, and they did. This was
followed by a lull where no doubt they were beginning
to wonder about ships named Enterprise getting up to weird,
weird stuff. But by twenty three sixty three, the Enterprise
D was launched a Galaxy class starship. She was famously

(58:25):
captained by Jean Luc Picard, and she had a fairly
memorable run, you know, saving reality, falling in love, having
hollow neck adventures, that kind of stuff, until twenty three
seventy one, when she went on to visit a planet
called Veridian three. You know who else was visiting Veridian

(58:46):
three that day? Remember that space ribbon that killed Kirk Yep,
same one. You know who else? Two Klingon sisters, and
one mad scientist who used Enterprise's engineer as a kind
of an eyeball walkie talkie to help torpedo their warp
core right through their own shields. It was a busy afternoon.

(59:08):
The Enterprise got off a lucky shot that blew them
up instead, but with the warp corp going crazy and
budget allowing. They evacuated everyone to the saucer section of
the ship and detached it like a lifeboat, and it
is supposed to do that. I don't remember if anyone
had done it in about eight years, but it protected

(59:28):
the crew while the rest of the ship exploded for
maybe a minute. When the resulting shockwave hit them, it
hit them hard and the saucer section crashed onto the
planet's surface. People would have had their organs displaced as
their legs and hips were shoved up into their torsos
and abdomens, or their legs would have knotted behind their

(59:48):
heads while they defecated organs from the impact. The last
we heard, damage reports were coming in from all over
the ship and casualty reports were still being compiled, but
it was never followed up on. I hate to say it,
but the death toll from the USS Enterprise Arridian three
disaster of twenty three seventy one was covered up by

(01:00:12):
Starfleet looking Forward. Literally, the only mention of the fate
of the Enterprise E was from a klingon outcast raised
by Belarusians on Earth, who said, whatever happened to it,
it wasn't his fault. All we know is it was
decommissioned in twenty three seventy two, and the Enterprise F

(01:00:33):
launched in twenty three eighty six, and as far as
we know, it is still boldly floating out there today.
You know, as episodes go, this was a fun one,
and it was one that I had wanted to do

(01:00:53):
for a long time, and not because I'm some secret
trekkie who's quietly ashamed to ever discuss it publicly, so
he chooses to discuss it occasionally on the Internet. I
just really love the idea of comparing and contrasting a
real life disaster against its fictional counterparts, in this case,

(01:01:14):
three enterprises across two different universes, from the wooden deck
of a Continental Navy sloop to the flight deck of
the world's largest aircraft carrier to the bridge of a
Galaxy class starship. The repeated use of the name is
no accident, and her legacy, all the way from the
age of wind and sail through the nuclear age, is

(01:01:35):
already guaranteed. With the ninth and future USS Enterprise CVN
eighty under construction as we speak, she will be the
third Gerald R. Ford class supercarrier. She's about twenty percent
bigger than the last enterprise, and she is scheduled for
launch in the early twenty thirties, and we wish her well.

(01:01:59):
The only thing I couldn't figure out was whether Gene
Roddenberry took any inspiration for his utterly disposable red shirts
from the Ordnance handlers on board his namesake vessel. It's
no secret red shirts don't do well. In fact, red
shirts were up to five times more likely to die
than Gold and Blue crew members across the original run

(01:02:21):
of his show. He murdered about thirty two red uniformed
crew members on an off screen. If you want to
help keep you your favorite podcaster from dying off screen,
did you know the best way to help is just
to share the show? I'm serious. The more the show grows,
the more likely we will eventually find a business tycoon

(01:02:43):
who will put me in their will. Failing that, there's
always buy me a coffee. Dot com slash doomsday. It's
a fine way to say, hey, here's a digital clink
in your cup for all the laughs and vomit. And
if you think any episodes a little early with no
sponsor interruptions and ridiculously interesting material, in each new episode

(01:03:05):
is worth it. You can find out more at patreon
dot com, slash funeral Kazoo. And now I want to
offer a quick but extremely heartfelt shutout to Lucas, Megan Ryder,
Dana Crumb, Autumn, and Kevin Laar, Monica Rameikita. I hope
I pronounced that correctly, and Francisco I's aguier. I also

(01:03:26):
hope I pronounced that correctly. And I'm going to tell
you something. When I see a new person join and
their last name looks like a typo, I love it.
I love it. I love finding a new supporter from
a part of the world that I know so little about,
and by virtue can't wait to visit on the show.
So Monica and Francisco specifically, thank you. That was fun.

(01:03:48):
And I just want to take a minute here to
say how much I appreciate the people that support this show.
And yeah, obviously I have said a million times there
is no show without the support, but in this case,
support is not even a strong enough term to describe
what has happened. You have gone above and beyond. If

(01:04:09):
you're not on my Patreon, you don't get access to
a lot of my personal life. So you probably don't
know that I was in the hospital twice in the
last week. So I apologize for the slow pace of
these episodes. And how do I even say this? My
listeners chipped in to help buy a new mobile studio
and command center for the show. They helped me sort

(01:04:30):
out a minor medical emergency behind the scenes. They helped
encourage me in ways that I always tried to do
for them as well. It's really reciprocated. I mean, you
grow up to make a show where you get to
kill people every episode and you feel pretty good about it,
and then you meet your listeners and they kind of
become your heroes. So it's difficult for me to say

(01:04:52):
thank you without sounding like Kirk trying to finish his
way through Spock's eulogy. If you'd like to reach out
to me for any reason, you can get me through
Twitter or Instagram or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you
can fire me an email to doomsdaypodat gmail dot com.
Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one,

(01:05:15):
and while you're there, please leave us a review and
tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners,
new and old, for their support and encouragement. And I
want to clarify now. When I say old I don't
mean old timer's. I mean people who were able to
support the show, even for a short time. It matters,
it counts, and I appreciate what you did, and I

(01:05:36):
always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic.
Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers
offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath
of disasters and crises. And I'm going to say something
here that I've never really said about this before. I
know it sounds like I'm reading a script, and it
is I wrote it. I don't have any affiliation with

(01:05:59):
Global Medic. I've never even spoken with them. The whole
reason that I have spent the last five years pitching
on their behalf to raise money to help people around
the world is because it felt like the right thing
to do. It's as simple as that. They are often
the first and sometimes the only team that get critical
interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date

(01:06:22):
they have helped over six million people across eighty nine
different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic
dot CAA Oh God, here we go on the next episode.
So you're minding your own business. You're sitting in your squalid,
little nineteenth century hovel when you look out the window

(01:06:45):
and you see a rumbling, brewing wave of liquid that
smells strangely alcoholic and kool aidmns through your wall and
pickles you dead ladies and gentlemen. On the next episode,
we are doing another our first in podcast broadcast history.
It's the two four Beer and Whiskey flood disaster drinking

(01:07:09):
game of eighteen fourteen to eighteen seventy five. We'll talk soon.
Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.