The Battersea Funfair Disaster of 1972 | Episode 51

There's an old saying that life is like a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs, but it's ultimately up to you whether to enjoy the ride or die screaming yourself senseless. Hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some 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 settle a long standing misconception about who parties harder American versus British teens. Edition, we'll see how a Jankee theme park ride can give you a Jenkie spine, and we'll see what happens when you put degenerates in charge of public safety. This is not the show you play around your kids, or while eating or in a 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. Pack your rein hat, your infrared fog goggles, and your passport. We are heading back to jolly old England, London, to be exact. So we're going to fly into Heathrow, not literally into Heathrow. There have been six different air disasters at Heathrow, but we are not here for an air disaster, at least not that kind. Let's just grab some duty free crumpets, Catchalaori and head back over to the Thames. I know it feels like we've barely sobered up from our last visit here, but we're back Trivia. Note though we haven't actually been here in one hundred and six years since our Silvertown Explosion of nineteen seventeen episode. And like I already said, we're visiting the Thames again, which is never a good thing on this show. I don't think I've ever used the word in a sentence without all the other words evoking some kind of unhygienic horror. But no, it's not that kind of episode. Either nothing's going to explode on you or poison you or choke you out. We'll be spending our time at a rather famous stretch of the river called the south Bank the Spoohoo. It's all right, it's literally what it sounds like. It's the south Bank of the river front, stretching from the Westminster Bridge in the west all the way to the Blackfriars Bridge in the east. And if as a tourist you like stuff and things, you are in luck. The area has no end of attractions to pour your wallet into, including but not limited to, the London Aquarium, the London High you know, the Big Carouse, Health, a London Dungeon which is actually a man which is actually a wax museum of torture and horror and not a sex club. And if you're under performance, it's also got the British Film Institute, the Royal Festival Hall and to the National Theater, a little something for everyone. Before that used to just be wharves and industrial buildings. It was a place for dueling and bear fighting and going all the way back to medieval times. Before that it was a marsh and back in the Victorian era if you'd walked across the feces choke semipermeable surface of the Thames from here and you'd find yourself on the north bank of Westminster City. And no, there won't be any feces in this episode either. We're just here to have some good old and I mean old world fashioned fun. But first, you like theme parks. Now, when North Americans think of the words Europe and theme park, they think of Paris, Disneyland or euro wally World or whatever. We assume Europe aped our creation and did it smaller, worse than a foreign language. And it's probably a bit of our attitude of American exceptionalism showing. So let's figure this out. What is the oldest theme park in America? You all know it, so let's all just show it out together. Lake Compounds in Bristol, Connecticut. If you've never been, it's famous for its rides, its concerts, and cotton candy, you know, the whole shebang. It's even got its own water park, and of course the lake from which it took its name. Actually, they named it after a Native American chieftain named John Compound, who traded the land to white settlers in sixteen eighty four and was either cut to pieces by his own people for it, or drowned in the lake while riding a big bronze cauldron or something. History is weird. Either way, he died and the park through open its gates in eighteen forty six. You're probably more familiar with names like Six Flags or Cedar Point. Those both opened in eighteen seventy. And America, well, the Amusement Park Guild of America's headquarters has these large brown letters spelling out Taller, Faster, Funner in Latin. It's all on this marble Roman arch above their vaulted entrance. Canada didn't get a theme park till nineteen ten. But weren't we talking about Europe? Yeah? So when did they make their first themed amusement hamlet? Well, it can be found in Denmark, just outside Copenhagen, and they call it Bachen, which sounds like, oh God, a war character, but it really just means the hill. And I lied about something there. The Amusement Park Guild filled their etchings with copper, not bronze. And when I said Backen was the oldest in Europe, what I meant was the world. So guess when it opened. I'll give you a hand. It was within the last thousand years. Was that wrong? Now? Backen opened in fifteen eighty three. It's been in continuous operation for over four hundred and forty years. For reference, Ben Franklin didn't discover electric kiting until seventeen fifty two. I mean, this was a long ass time ago. He barely recognized spoken English in fifteen eighty three. Year and wrap some mice to put on that American ego, because I'm about to bruise it just a little bit more. And I'm sorry. The United States has four hundred and seventy five amusement and theme parks peppered from sea to shining sea. And it sounds amazing when I say it like that. By the math, America is three thousand, nine hundred and thirty seven percent the size of the UK. That is just shy of forty times as big the UK as a whole would fit comfortably inside Oregon with room to spare. So England wears a four and a half shoe while America wears a size thirteen and a half triple wide boot. No argument here, We get it, and I'll let you pause here to bask in it. And now I'm going to rip off a band aid. There are currently a whopping five hundred and twenty three amusement parks in the UK, twelve opened in the last year alone, and that is in a space one fortieth the size. Sorry about that, And also we're not visiting some medieval renfare. Here we are visiting England in the year nineteen seventy two, fifty years ago. A lot has changed in that time. Back then, roller coasters were designed by human engineers who were calculating stresses and structural integrity ratios by hand with their human brains. And when you saw an inspection sticker, you probably side eyed it the way you do when you see a sticker at a subplace, letting you know that their employees wash their hands after every customer. Really, if you've never been on a traditional wooden roller coaster, only on a more modern steel coaster, I want to say you're missing out, but that's not quite right. I want to say you're in for a treat, but that's not it either. Let's just say that older wooden roller coasters feel considerably jankier. Steel coasters are built on a framework at steel beams and supports, and it's all designed to maximize rigidity to support the thing. You get your adrenaline through a smooth but acrobatic rides full of twists and loops and turns. Everything built in the last thirty years or so competes on distance and speed and acceleration and deceleration all that exhilarating and scary stuff that gets the heart pumping. Wooden coasters, on the other hand, they create adrenaline through the fear of injury, like the fear of sliding out from under your lap bar and flying to your death, or the fear of fracturing a handful of ri observed, maybe your shoulder or collar bone or back. They don't need loops and thrills to make memories because they leave marks. Wooden coasters are constructed using wooden beams and supports, and these conflicts and shift over time, which creates a bit of an uneven and bumpy, jarring, if not scarring experience. Long story short, you and everyone else aboard look like you're riding in a shopping cart down the slope of a rock quarry. If you remember the old Bugs, Bunny and Witch cartoons, where the witch had a constant supply of hairpins flying out of her everywhere she went, and that's how I think about wooden roller coasters, but with bolts instead of hairpins. But enough about all that. Think of the park in your town. It could be anything from a gazebo to a swing set and a dirt lot batters park was a large, two hundred acre Victorian style park with a riverside promenade, a lake forest at Green's Gardens, a zoo, a gallery, music venues, sports facilities and rides. And if not for all that it was large enough to park almost eighty five thousand Dodge caravans edge to edge. Either way, people described it as an oasis of tranquility, natural beauty and recreation. It opened in eighteen fifty three at Battersea in the London borough of Wandsworth, and you know, that makes it older than Disney, and a lot of people don't go so far as to say that Disney stole their idea, but they do point out that Battersea's funfair design used architectural facades and elements to make visitors feel like they were in another world. Visitors could step back in time to a fantastical medieval England and ride through Dragon Mountain. They could attend the races on Monte Carlo, or go on a cruise around the world where they could take a Mississippi style showboat. Or they could even ride or rocket ship to the moon. Doesn't that all kind of sound familiar? Well back during World War one and two, additional attractions were added, like anti aircraft guns and barrage balloons and bomb shelters, and you're not going to get that kind of experience at Disney. The Funfare was added later, and it brought all the toys, roller coasters, swings, roundabouts, a haunted mirror maze, fun house, a boating pool complete with its own island and lighthouse, an absolutely massive centrifugal ride of walls so large it even had overhead viewing platforms. If you've seen one of these before, pictured the same thing, but about twice as large and about five times as tall. There were plane rides, one of those spinning barrel rides that I called trola hurls, and something called a flying car ride where you could try to drive a car in a loop of vertical loop, and you're not going to find that kind of entertainment anymore. It even had a water flame ride, and of course the beer gardens. By far the most popular ride at Battersea was the Big Dipper. It was a fantastical dipping machine designed to let riders experience an old Witches trial. I'm only kidding. The Big Dipper was a roller coaster soaring fifty feet in the air and offering riders a better view of London than practically anywhere else. Every ride offered a mix of anxiety and excitement as every rumble and clank reverberated through your body. You sat seated, unable to control anything as you're pulled higher and higher with no end in sight. That's just the practicality of roller coaster design that you can't see over the top until you're starting to ark over it, and as gravity takes hold, the weight of the cars and passengers pull you faster and faster. It's more than an act of entertainment, it's an emotional test. Young British thrill seekers loved the big dippers, steep drops and dark tunnel section and this was proven out by the long ass line excuse me, the long ass queues that stretched on and on the date of our story is May the thirtieth, nineteen seventy two. It was a warm and sunny spring day, a Tuesday, and it schools in the UK had just broken up for the half turn, which is kind of like our March break, and that meant that every kid in London was all fancy a day at the park. Brov you have to remember. London nineteen seventy two was still coming off the psychedelic wave. Half the people there could have been half gooned out on blatter acid and looking to bash someone to death with the giant porcelain penis. But we're not here for hooligans and all that. We're here for the fun. The sound of a coaster topping an incline, followed by the rise of excited screens, light wafting pop music, and the laughter of crowds, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs and laggerberps hanging in the air. Battersea Park was packed. The Big Dipper was almost fifty years old, but people simply didn't care. Today we all know the chunk, chunk, chunk of a chain that pulls a coaster to the top of that first drop, But what the kids in line that day would have heard would have been more of a creaking rope sound yep rope, the same ideas the change riven coasters, but instead a gripping device under the car holds tight as the weight is smoothly winched upwards. He thought I was going to say a gang of workers have to manually haul them up every time. Well, it's nineteen seventy two, not eighteen seventy two. But you're not wrong, and you do have to remember the further back in time you go. The more roller coasters felt kind of like the thing you'd have built in your own backyard. Another funny thing about older wooden coasters. Modern day coasters rely on computer controlled systems that precisely control the coaster speed using magnetic in friction brakes. But on the Big Dipper, however, showing its age, the brakes were operated manually. Literally, a brakeman would stand among the riders, generally in the middle of the car, using a large lever to slow them down when maneuvering bends and approaching the end of the ride. Holding this job would have to make you the most or east nauseous person in London. And if you think this guy gets hereditaried. And this is the story of the headless Brakeman of Battersea, No, it's a great name, and that might have actually been better, but you won't have to wigh long to find out. It was around two thirty in the afternoon on that beautiful Choose day and the ride was filled to capacity thirty one riders mostly youth, no anarchists, no penis statues. As the ride began its climb of the first incline, just as it reached the first peak, the haulage rope unexpectedly slackened. Passenger has experienced that moment of perceived weightlessness you get when climbing turns into falling, and the entire train began going backwards down the track, gaining speed as it went. The people on line thought that this was hilarious. Even people on the ride thought this must be some kind of prank or something. Of course, if you'd turned your head ever so slightly to confirm with the brakeman, you would have seen an expression of utterly despondent, gaping mouth terror. One little girl named Caroline was a passenger. She said, as soon as we started shooting backwards, everything went into slow motion. I turned around, and I saw the brakeman desperately trying to put on the brake, but who wasn't working. The train continued at game speed. It did this for almost one hundred feet before the first car, well, the last car of a backwards moving coaster. Okay, before the back carriage, rounded that first corner at faster than it had ever gone before, and what happened next turned laughter into screams. In the tradition of all great rail disasters, the angular momentum was too much to keep the wheels on the track, and the coaster blasted through a barrier wall. It was really just wood importing lining around corner of the ride to create the dark tunnel, but the visual of a car full of screaming people bursting through it would have conjured the same energy as people in nineteen seventy two would have had watching the t Rex screaming in front of the Jurassic Park banner? Did I neglect to mention that they fell forty feet to the ground below. That's right, passengers were thrown from the ride. Some found themselves hanging upside down, pinned over railings or the walkway area, crumpled on, landing at the feet of the crowds waiting below, which again screaming. The scene quickly turned into chaos as reality started to click for people. You know, I do not like stories where children are hurt, So just try to imagine watching as children are thrown around like dolls, gathering all kinds of impact injuries, followed by another two cars. Yeah, the second and third carriages followed the first, each crashing down in order. Once everything had stopped moving, riders had to assess how many teeth they'd eaten and how many broken bones they'd collected. Some were too unconscious and they'd have to do it later. Others were too distracted by the crushing weight of the wreckage pressing down on them. The passengers in the middle car, I think, had it the worse. They landed on the first car, which, once planted into the ground, was quite immovable, and then they got sandwich by another car from behind. Each car crashed into the preceding car basically as hard as they could, feel like somebody swung at you with a twelve hundred pound hammer. Onlookers rushed to help the victims. One young girl I believe named Alison Commerfield, about fifteen years old, managed to escape the last car. And if you could picture a roller coaster, and you can imagine, there's a wooden walkway and a handrail that's always along the track. Every coaster has something like this. It lets people safely actsid the ride if it ever stopped unexpectedly. And like most everyone there, she was emptying her lungs screaming to get off the ride, but she could see that her friend, Liz heg Reeve, had been pinned under debris and she had to help. She held onto the handrail for dear life and tried to pull her friend free. Her arm had been significantly rearranged, so she couldn't do it herself, and onlookers watched horrified as she stepped onto the walkway. It gave way beneath her weight and had sent her screaming forty feet to the ground. And while all this was happening, pop music was playing through the park speakers. We call the result of that mental dissonance. It's the idea of trying to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, like, ah, it's raining children, and this is definitely horrifying, But also I really thought this album was underrated. Meanwhile, in other parts of the park were blissfully unaware and continued on as if nothing had happened. Three people were trapped and pinned in the wreckage. Alive but freaked, Hillary Winter was removed with all but one limb broken, and she would spend her teenage years learning to walk again. Fifteen more were removed and rushed to hospital by breathless rescue personnel. Sadly, three of them, two teenage boys and an eight year old girl, were removed breathless. Two more would die later in hospital. So you're at a theme park and someone got off a ride early but couldn't figure out unaided human flight by themselves, and they landed at your feet. Would you know what to do? Well? First things first, if someone falls from a height in front of you, I'm going to say, go ahead and scream, but don't make a habit out of it, and don't panic. Time might slow down for you, but either way, don't waste it. Tell a non listener to jump on the horn and blowing a call to the emergency services at ready O one one eight nine nine nine eight eight one nine nine nine one one nine seven two five three. This is the English version of nine one one. It used to be nine nine nine. Now. The first thing Traditional Advites wants you, the listener to do is evaluate the scene for any hazards for your own safety. You know, broken glass, power lines, But what they really mean is look up. Is anybody else falling? It's the person at your feet. Somewhere safe enough that you don't even have to think about moving them. Do not risk moving a person who's taken a fall. You don't know what their injuries are. If they've injured their hip, the legs are their back, as soon as you try to move them, you are going to hear about it. But if they've insured their spine or their neck, they might just turn off as soon as you move them. So unless you're one of those weirdos who loves the idea of watching somebody's life slip away while looking deeply in their eyes, don't do it. You need to let people with a union and better lawyers than you handle this. Unless they're in a burning building or surrounded by wolves or something, then do what you got to do. But in a perfect world, here's what I'm going to ask you to do. Yes, there's the triage stuff, and we'll get to that, but first I want to make a real point that I hope you carry with you. Roll up your sleeves and be a bigger, more selfless human than you thought possible. You've got a human life splattered before you. If they're conscious, you know what they're gonna want. Reassurance. They're like, they've likely never been this scared before, so be the kind voice that they need. It might be the last one they ever hear. People may gross you out and you hate them, but if you were in this situation, you know what you might want or need. It's a hand to hold, let them know that help is on the way. Give them a reason to believe that they're going to be okay. My personal rule of thumb for every situation is just to stop and think what would I want someone to do for my child right now? If there is any possibility of a head or a spinal injury, do futs with their head or neck if you have to. You can use your hands to kind of support and stabilize their head until EMTs can get there with a collar and a braceboard, and whatever you do, do not try to madiver those things on your own. If this person fell from a height, it's always possible they lacerated something on impact. In case you never knew the difference. If they laid it on a spike, that's considered an incision. A laceration is a cut that's created by a force or impact that tears the skin. You're welcome, and if this is happening, you're gonna want to apply pressure to the wound with something clean and vaguely absorbent to control the bleeding. The trick is, of course, finding and doing this without killing or paralyzing the victim. It's at this point you are really jonesing to hear a siren approaching. I'm sure if the person is conscious and it's safe to do so, cover them up with a blanket or any available clothing to prevent hypothermia and help them maintain their body temperature. I heard one medic say that you do this so that if things go badly, you can kind of pull the blanket over their face when no one's payingful attention. And I say that just as reminder that people go to hilariously dark places to be able to do these jobs, so don't judge them too harshly. So what the hell happened? Well, right off the bat, no one knew, or at least no one had any answers, which really is the only ingredient needed to make the press and public go crazy. Park owners wave their hands and claims that the rides are regularly maintained and inspected by qualified engineers. How many times have we gone to this point? And then I tell you that the owners carried out their own internal investigation at the same time as a full scale public investigation, and somehow they came to different conclusions. By the end of nineteen seventy two, the public investigation was complete and handed off to the Director of Public Prosecutions Henry Powell. You know, an investigation's gone bad where instead of releasing into the public first, they handed off to the fuzz And yeah, when it was public the finding shocked the country. Normally, you could expect a ride to be temporarily put at a service if an inspection termed up a defect, and with Batterseas inspector, it never did. But when investigators from the public inquiry, who were not employed by the park, well, by the time they finished their safety investigation, I want you to try to guess in your head how many defects they found. I'll say this. If it was more than three, that's appalling. If it was more than seven, that's practically criminally negligent. So yell your answers into your listening device of choice, and let's see if you guessed sixty six. The report came back with a total of sixty six defects. You know, the little chain at the front of the line that they lift to let people on the ride. That worked great, but almost every other aspect of the ride was defective, and almost a third of these defects were related to support, you know, the thing that prevents the ride from unintentionally disassembling. Battersea's inspector was a man named Frank Etches. The manslaughter trial of the ride manager, James Hogan and Frank Etches began in Wandsworth Magistrate's Court on the twenty sixth of February nineteen seventy three, my birthday. So where do you even begin to figure out what was specifically a fault here? You're probably thinking the first and most obvious thing the rope. Well here's something I'm going to teach you that you probably never heard before. Rope expires. It's true. The fiber's age and they lose elasticity over time. A rope sitting on a shelf will last about ten years. There's actually kind of a formula about it. Ropes use twice a year will last about seven years. Ropes use monthly last about five years, Ropes use weekly last about one year. But a rope used all day, every day of the year for half a century. I don't I have no idea how often the thing was replaced, but clearly it wasn't enough. Add that the gripping device that gripped the rope had developed a week grip, so the rope was no good and it wasn't even securely connected. Okay, what happened to the brakes? Great question. Let's see, all coasters of this type were built with safety breaks called dogs. The Big Dipper had eight of them, and if a train starts to go backwards down to slope, the dogs connect and stop everything cold. So what happened? Well, out of the eight, the first four were missing, just missing, and of the remaining four, three were defective. They didn't really connect. So really the train only had one working dog, and as as soon as it tried to do the work of all eight, that pretty much exploded. And all this meant that the brakeman might as well have been swinging as ding dong for all the good the brake leaver was doing under all the weight and speed, and how is this even possible? Well, in their investigation they also found out that the roller coaster had found itself on fire just three years earlier. How much. Fire. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of arson damage closed the ride for nearly two months, and in order to get it back to speed, they had to use fifty year old replacement parts from wherever they could find them. And why was it on fire? I mean, yes, the arson, but obviously because it was made of wood and this was not good wood. Remember those structural faults. One of them described quote deplorable, significant rot and excessive algae growth. They discover that one when one of the investigators wiped out on it while he was investigating the walkway that the young girl had fallen through. Guess what else rotting wood does. I mean, it earns, it kills young girls, but it also arps and miss aligns, and this is what caused the derailment which had thrown the passengers out of the ride. But wait, there's more, and for this there is precedent, even if it didn't open for another eight years. There's a very good documentary about a water park in Vernon, New Jersey, called Action Park without getting into its deep, deeply troubling history. They used to call it traction park or class action park, and it killed people, six of them but it injured thousands, and you know why, mostly because of the staff. Well I mean literally mostly because of the rides. But the staff were all drunken teenagers without any kind of training, so it wasn't like people were in good hands. Imagine arriving at the bottom of a water slide, face first and unconscious and the lifeguard on duty starts throwing beer cans at you. Prosecutor Henry Powell determined that the employees working the Big Dipper were just teenage boys without any kind of real training of any sort, and one former employee cracked and testified that the management and employees were both a little too sick puff snort for this kind of work if you follow This led to the discovery of a similar accident just the year before, when the train had rolled backwards, and luckily, the only injury sustained was a single shattered arm. James Hogan and Frank Etch's were being tried for manslaughter and their defense was what the hell are you talking about? And as it turns out, that was a pretty good defense. Here's the thing, nothing about the inspection process was very well defined. The rules around this kind of thing were actually a toothless set of voluntary code of practices for some but not all, fairgrounds toothless because of the loophole parade. Also, actual inspections were recommended, but not compulsory. They didn't have any kind of schedule. They just needed to be conducted by a qualified engineer, except they never specified what the hell that meant, and the qualified part was left to the discretion of the owner. Oh and the best part, whatever cursory glance counted as an inspection, was made when the coaster was not in service. Nowhere in any regulation did it even suggest that a park wasn't any way obliged or responsible for testing the actual mechanical operation. They just needed to sign off on something that said looks good. By November of nineteen seventy three, guilt had been determined and the full weight of the English legal system landed on Hogan and Etches. Happily for them, it landed with an unexpected pillowy softness, and I believe even validated their parking before they were set free. Hogan and Etches were acquitted of all charges, and the jury went on to say that it wasn't even Hogan's responsibility to know how to keep a ride safe in the first place. If there had been a slide to the parking lot, they would have been popping champagne halfway down. In the years since the batter Sea disaster, regular maintenance and thorough inspections of rides became standard practice. Park operators performed routine checks, testing and maintenance, and cooperation with the ride manufacturers to keep the rides in peak condition. Training became more comprehensive too, with a heavy emphasis on safety protocols, and today sensors, cameras, and computerized systems continuously monitor ride performance to indicate safety issues. The entire amusement park industry got on board and collaboratively shared safety related information and best practices. Not immediately, though, it took almost two years after the disaster for fairgrounds to be brought under health and safety laws, none of which included actual members of the public before. It wouldn't take long for Funfair's lack of a main attraction to have an effect on ticket sales. After the accident, the Big Dipper was closed and dismantled. Some say the parts were later used on other rides, Others believed it was all buried under The park doesn't matter, though within a year the whole thing closed. Today you wouldn't even know that a funfair once stood on the site. In nineteen eighty five they placed a Buddhist piece pagoda and a statue celebrating dog vivisection on the site. Oh and lots more were at it as the years went by. Today the park is home to a small children zoo and the boating lake, and a bandstand at tennis courts and stuff. But except for the fact that in May of twenty twenty two they planted a tree to commemorate the disastrous fiftieth anniversary, survivors and family had nothing to suggest that anything had ever happened here. London's mayor at the time was Sadi Khan, and he said a memorial serves a number of purposes I know from other memorials I've been involved in. It's a place you can go to reflect, to think, to spend time with others, to commemorate this awful tragedy. But also it's a reminder of the importance of health and safety to make sure that we get things right. And I couldn't have said it better myself. They call what happened that day Britain's forgotten disaster, but not for the families, survivors and witnesses. Those children would be in their sixties by now. Trauma endures, and I'm pretty sure none of them forgot, And to this day it remains the deadliest roller coaster disaster of all time. The Big Dipper disaster doesn't get the credit it deserves for its role in slowly bringing around the change that led to an unknown number of lives saved around the world. That's just what you get when you're a forgotten disaster that happened in London. It's not like amusement park deaths really stopped. In two thousand and eight, a team hopped offense at Six Flags over Georgia to retrieve a hat he lost on the ride. The ride was a suspended coaster, or the riders sit beneath the track and their legs dangle free, and as the team stood up hat nicely in place, the roller coaster looped by and one of the riders kicked his head off. The rider got a leg broken awkwardly for their trouble. And that's the thing about thrill rides. Whether trapped on a ride while the kid in the control booth sleeps one off or another fairgoer punts your head into the children's area. Rides are inherently dangerous, and that's what we love about them, just not so much the details. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Alder episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, find us at Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo or buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Menic 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 Dota. On the next episode, sure Most of our episodes tend to be a little gory, but our next episode is going to be a little more flowery and deadly. It's the Melbourne thunderstorm asthma disaster of twenty sixteen. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.