The Bangladesh Hail Storm of 1986 | Episode 75

When you think of clouds and dangerous behaviors, you immediately think of getting zap by lightning or maybe tossed into another county by a tornado, But you never think of cloud's going to repeatedly punch it in the brain harder than Mike Tyson Yellow and Welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn why telling people the body is made up of eighty percent water is actually just misquoting a war crime. You learn about the time that it rained every single day for two million years in a row. And you'll see how a simple cloud can make you look like people tested baseball bats on you, and why you should basically wear a helmet everywhere, all the time. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you'd also learn why everyone was so afraid of Canadians during World War Two. You'd hear the abbreviated history of British evil, including the single greatest act of geographical terrorism of all time. You'd learn why the word moisture makes people want to peel off their own faces. You'd also learn about a European mountain goddess who filled the lake with partially decomposed skeletons, and you'd get to hear an actual spinoff prequel disaster spun off from today's main tail. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Water is kind of important, and we really love the stuff. And they say that about fifty five to sixty percent of the human body is made of water. You've probably heard that before, and you've probably heard that number go as high as ninety percent. And if that were somehow true, you would pretty much just be a soft, gelatinous mess. But I guess that statistic fluctuates depending on who's telling it, and it really doesn't matter anything that high, and we'd all look like the meal from RoboCop. If you remember what happened to him, and ambulances would have to carry wet facts instead of gurneys. So where did that statistic come from? Anyways? Well, you're going to be sorry that you asked. Back during World War Two, the Imperial Japanese Army was not great. I mean, no one was great. And I'm saying that as a Canadian boom. If you haven't heard about Canadian behavior during World War two, maybe consider becoming a Patreon supporter. But back to the question, where did we get that body moisture statistic. Well, parts of the Japanese military included a scientific dark operations community. They ran human biological warfare experimentation trials at a little slice of hell on Earth called Unit seven thirty one. I could probably spend the next two hours just listing off secret medical atrocities, but the highlights include things like dissecting living conscious people, putting different types of blood into noncompatible bodies, and seeing how long people could survive without certain organs. Which ones you ask, Well, I guess it depends on which test group you got lumped into. One area of human experimentation they did was on hydration. They basically took prisoners, living people and weighed them. Then dehydrated them and then reweighed their corpses. So I'm afraid whenever you hear someone innocently spouting off about how the human body is mostly water, well that is the source material. You're welcome, but I took no pleasure in telling you any of that. But on topic, we are the only planet in the Solar System that we know of that has liquid water and life at least partially made of the stuff. We're also the only planet in the Solar System that has an oxygen rich atmosphere, which means we're the only planet in the Solar System that has fire. Just let that sink in for a second. Fire cannot exist anywhere else. It's all ours and I find that completely fascinating. But I can also hear you, oh my god, is this a what like a mind fire or a boat explosion episode? I mean, please, can you just pick a lane? I don't know where we're going with all this. Well, first, calm down, we are already well on our way. I'm simply taking a bit of a wild swing on the intro, you know, just really setting it up. Okay, So where were we? Oh? All right? Think of our planet as a kind of a rocky mud that got built up over time as each new splack and kaplow added a few pounds here, a few pounds there of just stuff from the stars. And if you think about it that way, it's really fascinating. It really helps you understand why we've only got so much iron or gold or even water to go around. We've got what we got and we're just not making anymore. And there are two theories on how we got to be such a great planet for surfing. The Earth was formed with molecules for water already baked in, or they rode here on meteors and just accumulated over time by the cupful over billions of years. And I'm fairly certain it was most likely a power combo of both, and filling the oceans took an incalculably long time. The stuff that comes out of your tap is said to be about four and a half billion years old. I mean, how crazy is that You're not drinking four and a half billion year old commet water exactly. I mean a lot has changed in the last four and a half billion years. For example, we have a breathable atmosphere now, and lakes and trees and the hydrological cycle that replenishes fresh water through a never ending cycle of evaporation and precipitation. You know, rain, And we've had rain for a long time too. I first appeared on Earth about four billion years ago, and I'm sure it came in all kinds of crazy forms, which of course brings me to a super interesting point in Earth's history. About two hundred and thirty two million years ago, we had a little something called the Carnean pluvial event. This is way back when we still had that one giant supercontinent, Pangaea. On the northwestern corner of the supercontinent, which is basically modern day Western Canada, sat the Wrangelia large igneous province, and it blew up. It went full Yellowstone, but just on a much larger scale, and injected an unspeakable amount of CO two into the atmosphere. And that was the final piece of the puzzle. Began the rain. Oh, it started to rain. Okay, let me tell you this. On the Hawaiian island of Maui, it rained NonStop for three hundred and thirty one days in a row, starting in nineteen thirty nine and ending in nineteen forty. It was the longest rain in recorded human history. And that's adorable because during the Carnean pluvial event, it rained every day without pause for two million years. It rained NonStop for seven hundred and thirty million, five hundred thousand days in a row. And when it finally did stop, the face of the entire earth had been permanently changed. The taps turned off, and the earth slowly settled down, and our water cycles started to take shape. Water circulating from puddle to steam to cloud to rain, just not every day, and I find that astonishing. But this is not the Carnial pluvial event of two hundred and thirty two million years ago. Episode. No, today, we will not be spending our time in the pre Cambrian primeval wastelands of Gowanland. No. Today, we are heading somewhere equally as unexpected, but at least one hundred thousand times nicer. Today we are making our very first trip to the South Asian country of Bangladesh. Most North Americans don't know much about Bangladesh, but it is a surprisingly beautiful part of the world. Sitting just tucked up in India's northeast corner on the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is known as the land of Rivers. There are parts of Bangladesh that people describe as an actual paradise on earth, from the bustling, rickshaw filled streets of Dhaka to the lush green forests of the South. Bangladesh is home to a culture that stretches back for thousands of years. It's home to the world's largest mangrove forests and the world's largest natural beach. It's got ancient mosques and temples, and its home to the Bengal Tigers, not the baseball team. I mean, legit, Miyamiao tigers. Actually, tigers don't meow. The largest cat that actually does meow and still purrs like a house cat is a cheetah. How great is that? Anyways, if you look at it on the map, you're gonna notice something weird. See, India looks vaguely like an upside down triangle, or I guess I could have called it a pyramid. But basically a land mass that narrows to the south, and it has got Pakistan on its west and Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Tibet, and Bangladesh sitting to its north. Then it's east. What's that you say, everything you know about Bangladesh could fit onto a business card with room to spare. Not a problem with me. I can certainly help with that. But first, let's take a little step backwards and get a little blood on our shoes. The British East India Trading Company swooped into India back in sixteen oh eight. They were hungry for silk and cotton dye, tea, opium, but what they really enjoyed were guns, not that they were shopping for them. They brought their own and they were immediately all, hey, you ever see how guns work, and forced them to empty their shelves of exotic goods to send back to England for pennies on the rupee. But the people still needed to eat and stuff, so they doubled down by forcing them to replace their own goods with British imports, but at a massive markup. You've heard me say they brought guns, right. Well. Things went on that way for a long time, long enough for the locals to basically go broke, and between taxing people to death and starving them to death or just machine gunning them into mighty heaps, the locals were all, I'm not too sure about these guys. But by the time they got kind of lippy about it, Britain decided that they were being too emotional to govern themselves and just took over all together. And that's when things got really bad. Fast forward to nineteen forty six and Britain announced it was packing up and leave in India. See World War two was all kinds of expensive, and England had cut a few costs, you know, trimmed some of their side projects and as a result, for reasons known only to our bloodthirsty patreons, as a parting gift. Set in quotes for emphasis because I'm using the term wrong. When they did leave India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were split into separate countries. Without going through the whole org chart that made this possible, We're only going to stare at a guy named Lord Lewis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas mount Batten, the last Royal Viceroy of India. Yep, same guy. He did a fairly poor job. And now when you look at a map, Bangladesh sits in a shroud of Indian territory on three sides, cutting it off from all of its neighbors, and it was technically owned by Pakistan, and why em Like I said, they did a fairly poor job all around. And how did Lord Mountbatten die? How he got blown up on a boat by the Ira at the age of seventy nine. It took almost the same amount of time twenty five years for the Bengals to finally gain their independence from Pakistan. Bangladesh was originally called East Bengal. And when I said, what I actually should have said was they were both predominantly Muslim, so England just figured scirt just make it one country, even though they don't even touch And then obviously we all know about how Bengal revenge squads have been murdering their way across the UK ever since. No. Oh, well, that's because the Bengal people had the option, motive, and opportunity, but instead of sharpening their axes and packing an overnight bag, they chose to adopt an attitude of friendship towards all, malice towards none. They consciously try to stay out of the kind of political nonsense that other major superpowers love, which is great because I don't love taking you places where people have been actively beaten with their own severed limbs, and today they say, whether you're taking in the vibrant markets, loading up on rich Bengali cuisine, or even cruising along one of its many tranquil rivers, Bangladesh offers adventure, discovery, warmth, and an authentic connection to the people and its history, which is great. But why have we come to Bangladesh? Well, not to get fat and happy off Bengali food or to take a flaming tire or rubber bullet to the head. See, they've been having a few problems as of late, but that doesn't play into our story, and we'll come back to that later. We're actually here for the weather. Bangladesh is in part of the world that gets pretty warm, and it doesn't have the kind of wall the wall air conditioning that keeps foreigners from swinging in the streets. And I'll stop you right there. We're not here for any kind of heat related injuries or fire, tornadoes or anything like that. Now you wish. We are going to be visiting the remote and rural district of Gopoalganj. It's kind of a Pacman shaped district in south central Bangladesh. The kids, I'll call it the GP and it's most famous for birthing Bagabandhu shik Mujibar Ramen, the father of Bangladesh. They speak bush Puri urdu Hindi and they also speak English, so we'll get by just fine. And I always start these things by saying, what a beautiful sunny day it is? And maybe it was if we'd gotten here just a little bit earlier. But the sky over go Balgajh and the neighboring district of Parajpur's mood was changing. Clouds were rolling in from nowhere, and it was starting to become a little dark and ominous out. It was the middle of the afternoon. And our story takes place on April fourteenth, nineteen eighty six. I don't like taking you places on poor weather days, but A that's not true, and b everyone knew from the weather that they should be expecting rain and it could get heavy at times. And actually, see, unless you are brand new to the show, in which case welcome, you should be well aware that something untowards is about to happen. And sure enough, the clouds gathered high above. They began to morphintryransform into billowy pillowy masses, sort of like the kind of thing that formed over New York City and Ghostbusters. It was a storm and as the storm rolled in, the people of gopal Gan shared smiles and a few laughs as they took shelter where they could to wade out the rain, knowing they were probably going to get soaked anyways, Well they wish see what they got wasn't rain. That is to say, when what they got first arrived, it pinged off the ground like little bullets. Remember when we were all laughing and clapping and learning about our hydrological cycle, Remember how water evaporates in clouds and it turns into rain and then rinse and repeat. Well, it turns out it can do a lot more than that. With the exception of certain abysmally dry desert spots around the globe, everywhere else knows rain. But in places where it's too cold to rain, like the Arctic or the Antarctic or Buffalo, New York, moisture in clouds freezes and falls as flakes of snow. And we've done snow shows before. You got your little snow, oh your fat snow, your wet snow, big, small, you name it, and check this out. The biggest snowflake ever recorded was an unimaginable fifteen inches around and eight inches thick. I mean that sounds big for a cake, and generally we all take it for granted that things that big are not supposed to fall from the sky, except sometimes they do. My top three ish list for biggest things falling from the sky go meteors, then planes, then birds with hail collecting the Pewterer metal for coming in fourth, and an honorable mention to those rare times when an airplane empties its toilets and it freezes into a blue missile and blows up someone's house. When it rains, moisture collects around dust particles in the air, anything small and solid that it can cling to. It just kind of acts like a nucleus for something larger, and each of those little droplets then floats around the cloud, collecting more and more moisture, like if you ever spray bottled a snowball to thicken it up, and like you would think, at some point, it's just too heavy to stay a lot and it falls to Earth. If you were looking at it from the side that day with your special mutant weather radar eyeballs, what you would have seen was the rain come in from the left, and there was a cold front that custed in from the right. And you ever really look at a cloud, I mean, I tell that as a joke with every nuclear episode. You know that one looks like a horse, and that one looks like a tree, and that one looks like a mushroom black You think they look pretty stable, but they're all slowly warping because of the different winds way up there. And if we could actually see wind patterns, we'd probably freak out. I actually got to view a three dimensional model of the airflow from this day over go Balganj and what I saw I would describe as not visually calming. Clouds are chaotic with winds blowing every which way, including up and we called those winds up drafts, and heavy updrafts usually doing thunderstorms carry wind, dirt, dust, rain hats, whatever, just straight up rain droplets form around dust or whatever, like we said, and then they whip sky high enough to freeze in the atmosphere, and then additional moisture keeps freezing on it until it grows to the point where it's too heavy for the updrafts to support it. It's like it's at a buffet, and it just keeps going up for more, and it keeps getting picked up, and the cycle repeats until it's completely overstated it's welcome, and finally it falls. And on this day, according to the available data, rain and moisture was arriving over Gobalganj about thirteen to fifteen thousand feet in the air, but it was cycling in updrafts as high as thirty thousand feet. I mean, that's where planes live. If you trace the actual course of the developing hail through the clouds, how do I even explain this? Do you know what an ampersand looks like? If you pick up a hailstone and bite into it like an onion, you'd actually see how the layers of frozen moisture built up around the center, kind of like an onion. Everyone loves a nice refreshing rain, just pointing your face skyward and letting it wash away your worry and discomfort. You feel it in your soul. It's healing until that one time that you point your look skyward and feel like you're being blasted in the face with frozen paintballs. Hail hurts than the bigger the hail the more it hurts. Hail is more common along mountain ranges, and this part of the world is very, very mountainous, and so people were familiar with it. But this whole thing didn't slowly ramp up. It just kind of started, and people caught outside were defenseless. The sounds of the hailstones I was gonna say careening in two, but I really mean explode against well, the sound of it impacting roofs made of corrugated tin sheets was deafening and relentless, like an entire crew of furiously paced drummers. And I haven't even described the hail. These weren't little almond sized pellets. These weren't even golf ball sized. These were massive chunks of ice, some as big as grapefruit. They pummeled the ground with a four that was nothing short of apocalyptic, And those pieces weighed a kilo. That's two point two pounds. That's as heavy as a cabbage or a small laptop. You ever throw two pounds in the air and just try to catch it with your head, well, since you're still with us, I have to assume that you haven't. Well, that's how heavy the sudden hail was, and those caught outside had no chance. The hailstorm practically carpeted the entire area, which was all mixed development of homes and farms. Now, imagine you're a farmer. Imagine working for an entire season to grow a beautiful crop and all that work, and the next thing you know, a black cloud blows in and annihilates everything in minutes. Lush fields and orchards were starting to look like the kind of place you test munitions and grenades. Trees were not only stripped bare, and not talking about leaves, I'm talking about branches. Some had even been uprooted by the power of the storm. Because it's not just hail. You got to remember, this is a storm, wind, lightning, smoky apparitions of cloud monsters, you name it. Trees were being decimated like the trees of battlefields, areas whittled down by gunfired into tattered sticks, and buildings too relentlessly pulverized. In most of the world, homes are made at the convenience of available materials, which means not everybody sought shelter in the brick version of the Three Little Pigs House. And I don't mean to say that people live in thatched boxes made of straw. Not really. In fact, most homes in the area were built from stone or concrete or mortar, which makes them very strong in principle, but they were never designed with longevity in mind. They basically exist in a kind of perpetual state of upkeep. When all that weight started raining down, some of those homes and buildings had trouble keeping up. In this part of the world, building collapses can happen. They don't really have strong building codes, so they don't have the kind of enforcement to do anything with them. Anyways, and when all that weight started raining down, some of those homes and buildings had trouble keeping up. The bombardment was quick and fierce and powerful, powerful enough to topple or even flatten structures. And all of this only turned up the chaos, which I forgot to mention there was chaos. I mentioned how they spoke all these different languages, but the sound of panic screaming requires no translation. The chances of running for shelter without getting hit were pretty much zero. Blood was everywhere. People were hit so hard they thought they would pass out from the pain, and some did, and not just the people. The remains of livestock late everywhere. Take a grapefruit sized one kilo chunk of ice and drop it from the height of a cloud. It's gonna fall somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and fifty meters per second, which is a stunning two hundred and five miles or three hundred and thirty kilometers an hour. Now, mind you, I am not saying being that these things were falling at almost a third the speed of sound. There are a lot of variables that affect falling objects that just make sure that's not the case. It's most of the reason that they do scientific speed tests in vacuums. A normal size hailstone, the kind that knocks leaves off trees and maybe maybe puts a crack in your windshield, falls closer to one hundred kilometers or sixty miles an hour. But the speed that something misses you with is less important than the force that it hits you with. We're going to measure the impact of these things in newtons, and there are so many variables at play. Like I said, there's the angle of approach, wind resistance, impact coverage, how quickly the object stops after impact. There's all kinds of things. And the best thing that we can say is that the force of the impact here could have been as low as twelve thousand newtons, but as high as one hundred and twenty thousand, and in saying that, it's pretty irrelevant because the human skull will fracture anywhere around three or four thousand newtons. So as much as I want to tell you that a cow had a cartoonishly clean hole blown through it, the reality is it would have looked more like someone had taken a baseball bat to a birthday cake. If the equivalent of someone throwing a masonry brick at your head, which should be more than adequate to kill you, an umbrella or a newspaper would offer no protection whatsoever. I mean, a riot shield might not even work. Phone and power lines were shredded, and more than seven hundred car windshields were destroyed. Doctors would call the injuries catastrophic, and funeral home directors would prescribe closed casket services. And not quite half an hour after it began, it stopped. It just petered out and disappeared. In the aftermath, it became immediately clear just how disastrous this had actually been livestock had been killed, homes had been destroyed, people's livelihoods had been wiped out. Family members had been lost and needed to be grieved. None of this was clean or pleasant or easy time permitting. People also needed to cope with the trauma of watching so many buildings and creatures and people killed terribly before their unblinking eyes. The survivors were left to pick up the pieces and start to figure out the overwhelming task of rebuilding their lives, and many had been left with life changing injuries. Imagine how much more awkward it would be if I were trying to continue this show after getting my lower job blown off. Ninety two people had been killed this day. No one knows how many people were injured and just carried their injuries home. According to the World Meteorological Organization, what fell long Gopelganj were the heaviest hailstones ever recorded. The largest intact tailstone found had a diameter of twenty four centimeters or nine and a half inches. So you're minding your own business, just giving some iffy looking cloud some sich. When the cloud decides to try and blast the eye out of your head with a frozen projectile, will you know what to do. The human skull is designed to protect the brain, but your head is not some hairy crash helmet. It can only take so much force. Dropping ice from a height like that can punch through a windshield, let alone your skull. And I'm going to tell you right now, those injuries can be catastrophic. And people do tend to downplay injuries when we hear about them because those people lived, but not all of them wanted to. You have to understand just how horrific a permanent, lifelong injury can be. Taking an ice block to the dome at speed from a height would likely cause severe skull fracturing and no small amount of trauma for the brain itself. Contusions, concussions, seizures, stroke, coma, nerve damage, even a brain hemorrhage. So I am here today to tell you to make sure that you're just always wearing a helmet when you're outdoors, just as simple as that. Wait, you don't even own a helmet? Well, okay, all right, let's work with that. See what we can do. Imagine yourself outside when the sky darkens. You're caught out in the open and the closest thing to shelter is maybe a mailbox that you're not gonna be able to fit inside. If you found yourself in the open with no immediate shelter and no helmet, your priority remains protecting your head. If you can step inside a building, hey, no problem, You're good, unless it's a skylight store. But it makes my point that, you know how I always say that anything could be a weapon, Well, the flip side of that same coin is that almost anything can be a shield too, and you're gonna want to find a shield of any kind. Use your purse, a backpack, a hubcap, a bag of garbage, literally anything can act as an impact absorber and potentially save you a trip to rehab to learn to speak or walk again after a devastating blow. And even if your options are trash like all you have is a wicker picnic basket at hand, Even if it exploded after the first impact, that was one less impact that you didn't have to eat. You could always seek protection under a tree, but be aware they do lose their branches sometimes, and that could be just as bad. You never really think how heavy a branch can be a normal look and branch can weigh hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So let's say you're on a beach, which is about as wide open and unprotected as place as you're gonna find. And actually I might have a solution for the beach. If you were on a beach, I would probably tell you to enter the water and then just stay submerged as long as you could. It's probably one of the more frightening ways to ride out a hailstorm. And you still have to pop up for air every now and then without getting whack a mold and drowned. So what's better, because you get to keep breathing, is bracing your arms over your head like a helmet. I myself might consider actually using them like a reverse mohawk. You let your forearms cover your scalp horizontally. I mean, there's no real wrong way to do this, and you're certainly not getting any points for style, and most people will tell you to just crouch down and face away from the wind and use your hands to protect your head and neck. In an actual worst case scenario, I'd be willing to stick my head in a drain pipe or a cow's ask to protect it, and I would just let my body take most of the damage. And I've certainly seen people ball up and try to make themselves as small a target as possible. But if they do it while they're on their sides, they're still vulnerable. And if you do it with your face buried, leaving your back to absorb all the blows, there's a chance you're probably gonna crack a few ribs or maybe even one of your vertebrae. I imagine the first ice ball of the kidneys makes you straight and out screaming, right in time to catch a ball to the face. So best of luck, and do not be afraid to improvise. Being caught in traffic adds a different kind of danger. If you're driving, you're gonna throw on your hazard lights and pull over to the side of the road as soon as you can because it's about to get loud and scary, not much unlike getting shot at absolutely no matter what your brain tells you, stay inside your vehicle. It is your best and only protection. Think of it like Iron Man armor. It's designed to withstand a lot. Just keep away from the windows and hopefully you don't have a sunroof. Either way, you should still cover your head to protect yourself when the glass starts flying. Now all you have to do is remain calm and wait for the storm to pass. So what the hail happened to frighten away evil spirits that caused hail. Primitive tribes used to shoot arrows at storm clouds, and then Christians came along and they started ringing church bells to stop them, which of course led to hundreds of flash fried priests being spatulated off church walls every year, which you will remember from our Brescia Church explosion of seventeen sixty nine episode That was way back. I think that's like number four. People also fired cannonballs, artillery shells, even fired rockets into storm clouds, but clouds don't care. Now fast forward to the more modern age, and people believe that by seating clouds with silver iodide they speed up the creation of ice crystals. So if you do this early enough, a lot of the moisture in the storm clouds will have already dropped before it gets over a populated area, at least in principle. I was in Calgary in the nineteen nineties and they did that one time, and they seated the clouds too heavily and way too late. And the clouds vomited everything they had over the suburbs on their way into the city. The ice broke the branches off all the trees, which blocked storm drains, and a few neighborhoods lost all their cars. They just floated away down the street. We've been throwing crap at clouds for thousands of years in hopes of keeping them from assaulting us, But the only thing that really gives people a chance is the technology to detect hail in real time and the ability to let every citizen know with enough time that they need to seek shelter, the same idea as a tornado siren. There are radar technologies that help forecasters determine if a cloud will produce hail or ice, or rain or snow, but the important point is not everywhere. And obviously better prediction and early warning can help protect communities and their livestock. But this kind of thing isn't available in a lot of places because well money, and because of that, I'm afraid moving into the future, this is going to remain very much a wrong place, wrong time kind of disaster and hale. It happens everywhere, especially in the American Central High plains, they actually call it hale Alley. Eastern India, Central Europe, Eastern Australia, Argentina, parts of Central Africa. It's everywhere, and it's more rare in lower elevations like in the tropics, but not always. In saying that, it kind of makes Karacho, Kenya a strange location for the haleiest place on Earth. It is in the tropics, but it's kind of cheating because it is at a high elevation and they get fifty days of hail every year, and one year they had it for one hundred and thirty two days. At some point in some of these places, the need for stormproof housing and infrastructure is gonna feel more and more urgent. But again, money is always going to dictate how safe we get to be, so we're just gonna have to wait and see what happens. As our planet slowly warms over time, so does the amount of moisture in the air. And I don't know what it's like where you're listening from, but you don't have to have lived too many decades here in Toronto to recognize how much humidity has increased and how rainfalls are getting heavier and heavier. Same with hail. Whether models say hail will increase across Australia and Europe and decrease across East Asia and North America, hooray. Except the storms that we do get, we're going to be more intense. Boo, And the hailstorms themselves will also become larger also, Boo boooooo. Hail causes billions in damages every year across the US alone. The cause way more destruction than tornadoes. In April of two thousand and one, there was a hailstorm in Saint Louis, Missouri that caused nearly two billion dollars with a DAMA and that was in one single day. Netting made from polyethylene monofilament is currently being installed and tested in fruit orchards and car dealerships across America to actually catch hailstones. But they're not cheap. It's a dough and expect to see one anytime soon. You ever see a green roof before, It's a roof covered with a thick layer of soil and it's coated in all kinds of vegetation. It's like a having a second lawn, but a lawn that creates insulation that keeps your house warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And it also acts as hail armor. And at some point you're gonna wonder why everybody doesn't have one. And those are really interesting solutions for protecting property, But what about people. I didn't hear a lot of applause for my wear a helmet everwhere all the time idea, And I told you how people used to try and throw fists at clouds in Georgia the country this time, not the American state. They've got this national anti hail Missile service that tracks hal with radar and then gats those clouds with rockets full of silver. I had died to mess them up, and they claim a ninety percent effectiveness rate, but there's no data to back it up. I think it'd be quicker and easier and less loud if we could just create an app that warns us well maybe soonish. Right now, South African insurance companies actually send text to their clients warning about incoming hal giving people a chance to get their cars and their skulls and their things undercover. When I heard about this at first, I secretly suspect that they do it to invalidate future insurance claims because you were warned, And in fact, I imagine that the legal copy says that God is angry and there's nothing we can do about it, and good luck to you all. End quote. Death by hail is fairly rare in the US. I think the most people ever killed in a single storm was eight. Normally, for the most part, people just get pummeled mercilessly, like in August of nineteen eighty in Orient, Iowa, forty seven people got stuck on a ferris wheel during a storm and were seriously injured after the hale cut the power and then just pummeled them. Now, the statistical chances of you getting hit and killed by hale is vanishingly small. The actual number would have so many zeros in front of it you'd get bored listening to it. But true as that is, any bad thing that can happen to an American citizen is eight times more likely to happen in China and India because of the population difference. In twenty eighteen, the town of Via Carlos Paz in Argentina was pounded by hale measuring as much as nine point three inches in size, and there was once a report in Hyperidade, India of a seven and a half pound ice ball falling in nineteen thirty nine, so not as large as what we have today, but certainly gigantic. Of course, The thing is ice melts and giant hailstones usually curpload on impact. They're pretty rarely recovered intact, so it's really hard to say for sure. People love telling stories of headsize hail, and the fact is it's impossible to prove or disprove, because it's already melting before you even laid eyes on the thing. No, the most practical way to remember or measure a hailstorm is by the facts. On June ninth, two thousand and six, a South Korean airliner flew through hail powerful enough to blow the nose off the plane. Hail battered the wings and stabilizers, and a piece of the nose took a trip through one of the engines. The cockpit exploded into warning sirens. You thought I was just going to say exploded. And they were able to land safely, but they had to do two misst approaches because it's really hard to do a visual landing when your windscreen is completely spider webbed with fractures. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. I don't have any hail versus plane disasters for you today. In the year since the Bangladesh hailstorm of nineteen eighty six, Bangladesh has worked hard to improve its disaster preparedness. They know they can't stop the storms from coming. They want to be better prepared for what they do. We all do. But until we all take my helmet advice seriously, this kind of disaster will continue to surprise and overwhelm us, destroying our property, maybe changing our rolodex, and generally leaving it worse than it found us. There is no upside to hail unless you like free ice in your drink. And in saying that, though, scientists have found that atmospheric levels of toxic forever chemicals are now so high that rain water is basically an unsafe for human consumption. Just wanted to leave you on a low note. For the people of Gopalgash, the memory of that terrible day in nineteen eighty six will always be a reminder of just how fierce and unforgiving nature can be, and just how fragile people are in the face of its raw power. But it also shows how communities, even in the face of unimaginable tragedy, can come together to rebuild and heal. The Bangladesh hailstorm of nineteen eighty six secured the record for the deadliest hailstorm in recorded history. I suggested off the top that Bangladesh was maybe facing some issues. Well, okay, yes, there was a mass protest in August against Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, which left more than ninety people dead as demonstrators clashed with government supporters. Soldiers and police stormed through the capital of Dhaka, securing every which way that screaming people might make their way to the Prime Minister's office. And at least three hundred people have died since these protests started in early July. And why all this because of a government civil service job quota scheme to make sure that basically the ability to rise above your position and get ahead in the world sits firmly in the power of the government and their friends and no one else else. They didn't want Hassina's head, but they did want their job. And how did the government respond, Well, they turned off the Internet. They basically crippled protester communications the way you might think aliens or a rogue terrorist organization might and how did so many people die? Well? Gunfire? And this remains a not very well understood and not very well discussed ongoing issue. Well, if you live in a country not currently under siege from its own government, why not exercise your personal freedoms by considering becoming a supporter. It really helped me fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep the show and me alive. And before I forget to mention, I enjoyed this episode so much, I'm going to do a spin off Patreon episode about one man versus a Cloud that I believe you will find most uplifting. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you're into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation. And those of you who do, I appreciate you deeply. I myself think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com, Slash Funeral, Kazoo, Quick but Heartfelt, shut out to Jennes Panell, Jacob Meyer, Mary Lasseter, Just Scott Roadcutter, Hannah Richards and Lanny Toley for supporting me on Patreon, you can reach out on You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook as doomsday Podcast, or you can just fire me an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. I do love hearing from you guys, and I'm fairly well caught up. I just got some barfbags to send out, so if you're waiting, to keep waiting. I always thank all of my listeners, new and old, for their support and their encouragement. But I also asked that if you can spare the money and had to choose, I always 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 and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. The few of you may have already heard that I just blew up my third car in the same calendar year, and I got an awful lot of feedback from people saying it would be extremely on brand for me to describe some road based vehicular horror. Well, I live to serve. It's the Lamans racing disaster of nineteen fifty five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.