The Cleveland Balloonfest Disaster of 1986 | Episode 67

Balloons often represent happiness, but if you've ever had to explain to a crying child why their balloon flew away and won't be coming back, you know that balloons are monsters. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic and bizarre, some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn the origin of the phrase it seemed like a good idea at the time. We learn why Cleveland is referred to as the Mistake by the Lake, and we will see what is probably the most amount of damage one could possibly hope to achieve with balloons. And if you were choosing to listen to this on Patreon, you would also hear for the first time ever too. Count them two entire minisodes within this regular episode, the first being on the Cuyahoga River Fire of nineteen sixty nine and a second one on the Cleveland Tents and Beer Night disaster of nineteen seventy four. We also looked at the horrible history of promotions and publicity stunts that backfire catastrophically, and we learned why you never fire guns in the air. This is not the show that 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, shoe the kids out of the room, put on the headphones and safety glasses, and let's beg in. Pack a comfortable pair of walking shoes, maybe a light waterproof jacket, and your satellite enabled personal GPS location beacon. We are heading to Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland birthplace to the world's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, Late night Woo Whoop Woop, Guy Arsenio Hall, and pasta magnate chef Boyard. Some consider Cleveland to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It's walkable and outdoorsy. It's got an entire culinary scene based on heavy carbs. It was the first city in the world to be lit by electricity. It's got all kinds of weird claims and things about it you would never expect. Cleveland was home to the world's first rock concert featuring Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers. It's got more than its fair share of arts and sports and culture and music. Oh and a lake, a great lake, Lake Erie, shallowest and warmest of all the North American great lakes. And every time I type it, I always type it like Erie, like woo Erie. It's actually short for Ariel Honan, which was how the Iroquois who used to call it home used to call it. It's also home to the Lake Erie sturgeon, the gizzard shad, the possum shrimp, and Bessie, the Lake Erie monster. They call her Bessie or Knockoff NeSSI, or South Bay Bessie, or the Great Snake of Lake Erie. Story is back in seventeen ninety three white people sailed into Lake Erie and celebrated its natural beauty by blasting it with rifles from a boat. Herds, fish, trees, rocks, everything, really, until an aquatic doghead on a snake body lifted from the water before them, but before it could utter a word of complaint. Trigger happy Jacques and his buddies unleashed on holy hell on this thing, trying to paint it with musket balls. However, Bessie just splashed away, escaped with its life, and lived happily ever after. Literally, this is the most amazing fact about inland semonster is that once they've actually been seen, they become immortal and an entire cottage industry rises up around them. Cryptozoologists believe that they are actually surviving relatives of the plesiosaur family. Plesiosaurs are kind of like underwater brontosaurces, with a diraffneck and a cartoonishly elongated snakehead made out of teeth. Now, with rare exception of Lochness in Scotland and random lakes across North America, every other plesiosaur died about sixty six million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. If you want to learn more about why they disappeared, keep your ears open for my chick Saloo meteor disaster of sixty million BCE episode. Considering the Great Lakes were only formed thousands of years ago, the conclusion here is that Bessie, frozen in ice for sixty six million years, was just eventually melted over the Midwest and forped into future Lake Erie. Lake, Ontario had its own Seamon for a minute back in the early nineteen hundreds called Torontosaurus, but it turned out to be just a bunch of tires, and the witnesses turned out to be just a bunch of drunks. But we're not here for monsters, you know, let me rephrase that these are not the monsters for whom we are here. For those of you who are not from the Ohio area, you might not know that one of the largest newspapers in Cleveland is called the Plane Dealer. It's been calling play by play on Cleveland's comings and goings since eighteen forty two. And here are two things about the Plane Dealer. First, no spoiler, but it was about this very story that the Cleveland Plaine Dealer coined the phrase. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And second, Cleveland used to be spelled with an a like clea ve Land, but the Plane Dealer kind of ran out of space in its mast head on the paper and shortened it to cle ve Land and it just kind of stuck, Which is really weird when you find out a place is living under its own nickname, and nicknames are kind of a problem with Cleveland. You got Sea Town, the Cleave Forest City, North Coast, the Comeback City, Bomb City because of some violence it went through in the seventies, and Plum City because of a tourist campaign that they held back in the eighties, saying that New York City was a big apple, but Cleveland was a plum of a town. Sadly, most people outside of Cleveland know it as the Mistake on the Lake. Yakov Smirnov was a famous Russian comic back in the eighties, and he once said, in every country they make fun of a city. In the US, you make fun of Cleveland, and in Russia we make fun of Cleveland. It all started back in the sixties and seventies. It was like Murphy's Law had gone wild, and everything that could go bad just decided it would. The economic problems, political problems, racial problems, and environmental problems. Environmental problems, you ask. If you were listening to this on Patreon, you would have just heard a full minisot covering the long history of the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames, the resulting jokes and inferiority complex left clevelanders and what some called civic despare well. That and the loss of industry and bad governance. You know, then you've got your Cleveland Browns. Their stadium is nicknamed the Factory of Sadness, and you don't have to have a full bowel to take a crap on their ownership or managers, or coaches or their draft picks. Anyway. They've been psychologically damaging the town for years too, and by the nineteen seventies, Cleveland became the first major American city since the Great Depression to default on its loans. About one and four residents moved elsewhere. But that's only one part of Cleveland. You also got your major cultural institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Playhouse Square, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There are certainly no shortage of things to do and see in Cleveland. Don't let the nicknames for you. There's nothing to be afraid of. In fact, tangent alert. Did you know that the three most common fears are fear of public speaking, fear of heights, and fear of spiders. My wife has two varying degrees experienced all three, but because fears can take any form, she has also been afraid of balloons. Well, not balloon so much as the unexpected explosive popping sound that goes along with them. For some with actual globophobia real fear balloons, their fear can be so overwhelming that even just seeing a video of a balloon can freak them out. For others, even just the texture or smell of a balloon could set them off. The first real balloons were made by Michael Faraday back in eighteen twenty four for use in experiments with hydrogen. So these were basically hydrogenated gas bags. Not really all that playful if you want a playful around this time, and before then, people used to inflate big bladders and animal intestines. They just tie them up all shut. And now you've got a thing to play with. Wee. And if I have laid the bread crumbs properly by now you should guess that today's story it's going to take place in Cleveland, and it's going to involve balloons, lots and lots and lots of balloons. Let's get into it now. As some of you know, I have for a long time worked in marketing, mostly graphic design, but as I got older, I did a lot of strategic plansmanship including helping charities achieve their funding goals for the year. I've been able to do this for a handful of really worthwhile charitable causes, including the Make a Wish Foundation and the United Way. If you've never heard of them, the United Way brings people in different organizations together to try to tackle community issues. And yes, all kinds of charities are all kinds of garbage, but the United Way is highly rated for legitimacy, so yes, they do good work a lot of the time. What we look to do is create a campaign or event that resonates with people, something that connects with them emotionally and inspires them. What we really want to do is show them just how much good that they can do with just a couple of dollars. You can learn more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo. Sorry about that. When you are trying to create a campaign, if you are clever enough, you will try to generate a little something called earned media. In these scenarios, the last thing that you want to be doing is spending what budget you have trying to get eyes onto your cause. Earned media is where you do something pressworthy enough that you don't need to worry about paying for press attention, because they just hand the exposure over for free, and that will absolutely not be a problem in today's story. In nineteen eighty six, the United Way of Greater Cleveland was looking for an extremely big way to do a couple of things. They wanted to raise awareness and money to help meet their annual funding goals, but they also wanted to focus some positive attention on Cleveland. They wanted to pull off a stunt so big that the entire world would know about it. When it comes to planning an event or promotion, a lot of people, let's call them lazy. They like to take something that has already proved successful somewhere else and just copy paste and enlarge. If I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me what a good world record they could break to do that was, I'd probably have about fifteen dollars. What the United Way decided on was to attack the world record for the greatest number of balloons released simultaneously. Nine months earlier, Disneyland and Anaheim had celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by releasing about one point two million balloons over the park, and the idea was so simple. All they had to do was gather twenty five hundred people on public square to inflate one point five million helium balloons and then launched the entire mass into the sky to the tearful applause of the nation. They had spent six months preparing for this. Organizers, the city of Cleveland, and a local radio station all worked to raise funds and gather volunteers. You ever do a thing like book club when you were in school, where you get people to pledge money for every book that you read. Well, they did the same kind of thing here, but for balloon making and children sold sponsorships, getting people to pledge fifty cents for every balloon that they made, and managed to raise and they managed to raise about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars, which was almost half the cost of the entire event. The city partnered with a company called Balloon Art out of Los Angeles to handle the real heavy lifting, and they knew this was going to be a headache for some locals. Roads would have to be closed and detours were planned to keep the city moving. The city, the Cleveland Police, and the fire department all signed off. They even had to clear everything with the Federal Aviation Administration just to be sure that they didn't interfere with air traffic. Thousands of volunteers gathered downtown on the big day to begin inflating the balloons. A rectangular structure the size of a city block had been set up to hold the balloons on the southwest quadrant of Cleveland's Public Square, the first public square anywhere in the world that knew the glow of electric light. If you've never been, just try to picture a grassy square in front of a futuristic Taco bell looking building from the Demolition Man movie, and across from the terminal tower. It's hard to describe the site of this many balloons. Just imagine a constant pouring of tiny colored balloons raising up into the air and joining into a mass held together by a net measuring two hundred and fifty feet by one hundred and fifty feet. One lady there that day accidentally let go of a handful of balloons, and they took her watch with them, And that is not a timepiece she was ever going to see again. See. The netting was three stories high, and it was made out of a single piece of woven mesh material. They actually contracted out the netting to a company in California that made cargo netting for the Space Shuttle program, and inside the structure, twenty five hundred volunteers, mostly high school students, spent hours filling the balloons with helium before letting them float up into the massive net above. As the number of balloons grew, the excitement among the crowd grew as well. Imagine looking up at a colorful web of balloons big enough to hold something like three hundred Dodge caravans. Helium lines had been run throughout the area with spigots and nozzles that each of the volunteers used to quickly inflate the balloons, and one of them described the preparations as like an assembly line. It was non stop. They figured that they could probably get these kids to do two to three balloons a minute, and many of these kids were seen trying to tie these balloons off with bandages on almost every finger because their hands grew numb and bled throughout the day. Organizers thought that this activity would be so magical that clevel youth would be drawn into lives of philanthropy and volunteering, which is really the kind of thing you only say if you've never actually done a day's hard work in your life. No one knows what the bandage budget was, and volunteers received a free T shirt in lieu of cash, and organizers did want them working fast and not to be dicky, but instead, because there was a seventy percent chance of rain that day, they found themselves racing against the clock. Event officials cheered volunteers on, telling them that they would be part of a history making event and that the whole world would know them, and they weren't wrong. It's hard to describe in a pig wall made of hundreds of thousands of balloons all netted together, with random strays floating up from volunteers seated in its shadow, and the stretch goal had been to fill two million balloons, but as the day went on and the weather started looking a little iffy, they decided not to risk it. The news had predicted that they would face a northerly wind and even joked that once the balloons were all gone, they'd beat Canada's problem. It was just before two pm and they had managed to fill about one point five million balloons and the decision was made to release them early a countdown began, starting somewhere around six or five, and when it reached zero, spectators and news cameras were rewarded for their patient anticipation as the net holding the balloons was finally released. The date was September twenty seventh, nineteen eighty six. About one point five million helium filled balloons swarmed the terminal tower and blotted out the sky over Public Square. The site was unimaginable, a living cloud of balloons, morphing and contorting as it floated its way up in a way and creating something that at the same time was beautiful and colorful but utterly alien. It looked like a swarm of sension rubber. It looked like cgi air was speckled with orbs, dancing and mingling. As far as I could see, it was truly a majestic display of awe and color. They believe that one million, four hundred and twenty nine thousand, six hundred and forty three balloons were sent off, earning their event a place in the hollowed pages of the Guinness Book of World Records. Balloonfest nineteen eighty six was a clear and resounding success. Congratulations clevelanders on absolutely nailing this. Now, let me explain why there was no balloon fest in nineteen eighty seven. Most people have no idea what happens when you release a balloon. They think they just keep floating up until they reach an altitude where they explode and disintegrate and burn up in the atmosphere or something. Now, under normal circumstances, helium balloons will stay afloat until they're totally deflated. When it's warm, the molecules in the gas expand to become more excitable, But in the cold, they's low and they contract. On this day, shortly after the balloons were released, they met up with that cold front, which caused them to shrink and droop. Now add the promised rain and they began to drop like latex rocks. Now, how to describe what happened next? Webster's defines chaos as a state of utter confusion or disorder, or a total lack of organization or order. Well, the balloons initially carried north, but immediately turned heel, returned towards the city, and returned back to Earth like malfunctioning drones. You ever see a video of a family trying to empty and urn on a windy day and get pasty with it, like nine to eleven survivors. Yeah, it is something like that. Driver's visibility became immediately and severely impaired, sending them swerving out of the way of lockt in balloons with no idea what was happening around them. The entire north side erupted in collisions. There was a ten car collision on the shoreway alone. There is in our to be made that it would be better to drive into a nice, solid tree than a billowy pile of balloons, but I wasn't there. Emergency responders were immediately dispatched, but struggled to navigate through the chaos. The balloons even closed down the bert Lakefront Airport as a swarm of them smothered the runways. And try to picture what it would look like if one hundred thousand balloons were sitting on a lake in your imagination would be visual insanity. Now imagine if even half of the one and a half million balloons did the same. But along the southern coast of Lake Erie, and not just the lake. Balloons were clogging up waterways across northeast Ohio, and not just lakes and rivers, boat engines and propellers too, and we will come back to that. Even as far away as Medina County, where Louis Nawakowski's Arabian horses stood grazing in her pasture, there was no escape from this onslaught. Just for fun, because I like horses, I'm going to tell you that the Arabian breed is over five thousand years old and is known as the oldest breed and first domesticated breed of horse. They're also one of the most easily recognizable because they've got those kind of chiseled features that give horse enthusiasts all the fields. But here's the thing about horses. Horses don't know about balloons. As far as they knew, reality was falling apart in colorful orbs and raining down on them. They tripped balls, they spooked, and they've bolted and gave themselves permanent injuries while trying to flee. And yes, as predicted, balloons started washing up on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. And balloons are not overly biodegradable. They represent an opportunity for area descendants to enjoy for decades and decades to come or shell out of pocket for the time consuming expense of cleaning them all up. As promotional stunts go, there is a reason that you don't hear companies like Hershey saying okay, now on the count of three, all five million people in attendance will throw their Hershey's wrappers into the Grand Canyon. From an environmental point of view, balloon Fest was practically a war crime. In the aftermath of the disaster, countless animals were killed from eating pop balloons, and not just animals. Over time, pieces of balloon they never disappear. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually turn into microplastics so fish can enjoy them too. Oh and they did not know this at the time, But balloons aren't poisonous per se, but they're commonly made with carcinogenic chemicals which you can later actually inhale while you're blowing them up. Oh and I feel like I was forgetting something this whole time. There's one more thing about the lake. Do you like stories about people going out and then coming home to their families. The day before balloon Fest, Raymond Broderick and Bernard Saltzer had gone out fishing in a sixteen foot boat, but they never came back the next day. They're realative. Scott worried and called the coastguard and a search and rescue helicopter was dispatched and found their boat, but they weren't in the boat. You know what was in the boat balloons. They actually had to call off the search as about a million balloons descended on the area, turning the search for broad or consults her into history's hardest game of Where's Waldo? They said the balloons, which were every color of the spectrum and about the size of a human head, made the search utterly impossible, and after a few days of trying, they had to call it quits. So you're minding your own business outside when a balloon floats past your face and it pops, and it wraps itself around your head trying to suffocate you, would you know what to do. Balloons are lovely, but they're also the leading cause of choking deaths in children in the United States. Of all the things that children choke on, not including food, almost forty percent of them are balloons. Don't ask why. Just children love chewing and sucking on balloon un until they get sucked into their windpipe, preventing air from flowing in and out of their lungs. Accidents involving balloons happen in a few ways. Some children suck balloons into their mouths while they're trying to inflate them, and pieces of broken balloon are easily sucked into the throat and lungs. In fact, let's climb down a human throat and take a look. What we call your airway is actually called your trachea, and it is protected by this kind of trapdoor of tissue way here at the back of your throat. Every time you swallow, the epiglottis just snapshut over the trachea, and it kind of acts like a traffic cop, you know, keeping food out of the trachea from going down your windpipe and sending it harmlessly down the esophagus into your stomach where it's supposed to go. But every once in a while the epiglottis doesn't close fast enough and an object goes down the wrong pipe. From personal experience, it only partially blocks the trachea, and with enough of a show you can cough it up and live to choke another day. But not with balloons. One girl was chewing on a balloon when she felt and that caused her to sharply inhale, and it drew the whole thing right into her lungs, and from there it stretches out and it molds inside the throat, basically becoming a perfect mask against air and screams. Even just out of the mouth their throat. They can be really hard to remove because they're so smooth and slippery. I don't have to tell you that choking can quickly become a life threatening emergency. It's one of those time sensitive situations where you're going to want someone to be calling emergency services. And this is the point where I say that I wish all my listeners knew how to do CPR and the Heimlich maneuver. But even though this isn't a way to be certified, and we don't have any equipment between us, I'm gonna try to walk you through. You want to start by positioning yourself behind the person who's choking. Now, take your hand, make a fist, and then take the thumb side of your fist and put it between the belly button and rip cage of the person who's choking. Now you're just gonna grab that fist with your other hand so it looks like you're hugging their stomach and pull your fist into yourself, kind of thrusting more upwards than back. And here is a pro tip that they won't tell you on those restaurant choking cards. Every time that you thrust, you want to take a quick second just to check and see if they actually barfed up the cloggible so that you're not just wailing the way on someone. The Heimlick technique absolutely can save a life, but it can also be a good way to injure someone if you're too rough, and especially with children. There's even a special version of the Heimlick for infants that's designed to lower the risk of them being injured. And it's one thing to familiarize yourself with how to do this like this that absolutely can save a life too, But honestly, watch a YouTube video or take a class if you want to be golden. So after each thrust, just check to see if they're breathing yet, And then once they barf it up and they inhale and everyone applauds and takes your photo together, gonna want to seek some medical attention to make sure that the lack of oxygen they went through didn't make them know, make things so good. Now, prevention is always the best medicine. So just don't let your kids play with balloons. Yeah, I know, I know. And if latex or rubber balloon pops, you're gonna have to pick up all the tiny little pieces and toss them. I know, I know. Kids are a lot of work, and I could tell you that mylar balloons are a safer choice. But have you ever seen what happens when a mylar balloon comes in contact with electricity? Oh that's a whole other story. So what the hell happened? Well, someone said this was probably the most damage that one could possibly ever hope to achieve using balloons. So what went wrong here? Well, from the beginning, organizers became so focused on how to make this happen that they never really stopped to ask if they should. There is an old saying that there's no such thing as bad weather, just different kinds of good weather. But from having events experience, I will tell you that's bullshit. Bad weather had been forecast well in advance. They just rolled the dice on it. Anyways, they took their chances, and they hoped for the best, and they got spanked for it. Mike Tyson once said that no plan survives that first fist to the face. Same thing. Here, a charity known for giving people hope, hoped everything would just work out, and they gambled and they lost. And their idea may have been a little evil, but it wasn't a bad idea. That is to say, it wasn't an impossible to execute idea. They simply backed themselves into an execution that they couldn't get back out of. They had spent half a million dollars on these things, and all those balloons were never just going to stay inflated waiting for better weather. If the rain had come down while those balloons were still under that net, they would have been driven down and flooded out from under it. Anyways, as I see it, they simply had no choice but to go with it. So many of our disasters come from a combination of things all coming together to make for the worst possible outcome. And this this is one of those rare occasions where this disaster was everything will go fine as long as this one very specific thing doesn't happen. Except in this case, they just they didn't know. There's a thing I tell my kids when they're starting into something that they have no experience with, where I'll say that they probably know ten percent of what they need to know, and then there's ten percent of things they don't know yet, and then there's eighty percent of things that they don't even know that they don't know. I think the failure of this execution was entirely seated inside that eighty percent, which chalk set up more to ignorance than negligence. Now the courts saw things a little different. The organizers were sued by the wife of one of the fishermen who died for three point two million dollars. And remember those horses that injured themselves, their owner sued for four hundred thousand dollars. So as fundraising events go, this one turned into a massive net loss for the organistation. Like I said, it's a five hundred thousand dollars stunt. And when you give your money to a charitable organization, you always imagine it being used to help people in need, not taken and gambled away into a chance to make more money while also piggybacking a mission to make people stop thinking of Cleveland as a place with burning rivers. To me, using funds to hopefully make funds in a questionable way is just an elongated way of Well, they could have just gone to the casino. And here's another thing about the setting Cleveland's public square. It had seen public stunts go wrong before. The city wanted to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Terminal Tower, so they brought out former Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stapien to drop softballs from the top. Now, mind you, that's fifty two stories tall. The Terminal Tower was the tallest building in Cleveland. And yeah, people were squinting looking for balls. Six of his best players stood waiting to be injured far below as the balls were launched. Well, the first three pitches landed on spectators and the car, breaking bones and windows alight. While one of the balls was actually successfully caught. Of course, the catcher said he has no idea how he caught it. He couldn't see a thing, and it was mostly luck that it came right to him. The man responsible for all this, and by that I mean the guy who originally yelled balloons at their ideation meeting, was a man named George Frasier. In the nineteen eighties. He'd been a Procter and gamble marketing guy, but he left that for a three year stunt as director of Marketing and Communications for the United Waste Services of Cleveland. He called this helium filled nightmare his greatest success and his greatest failure. Literally, no part of this came together like it was supposed to do, and in keeping with Cleveland's long habit of not having things go its way, one observer was quoted as saying, it's actually quite impressive, how badly it to out there are terrorist attacks that are nowhere near as successful as balloon Fest. An actual bulldozer was needed to clear away the debris. The organizers would, however, achieve their goal of making it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest ever mass balloon pollution release. What did I call it? Anyways? However, in light of the disaster that was the Cleveland Bloefest, and in a bit for sanity, in nineteen eighty eight, the category was abolished and Guinness no longer measures balloon releases. The nineteen eighty six Cleveland Balloonfest disaster serves as a sobering reminder of the unforeseen circumstances that can arise from well intentioned promotional stunts. Before the pandemic, I founded and co owned a marketing agency. We provided all kinds of services, but our specialty became experiential. It's a kind of thing where brand puts on a stunt to an event that creates an emotional bond with consumers, who, as a result, leave with a positive impression of the product and increases the likelihood of a conversion to purchase one day when the need arises. You can find my portfolio online. But here's the thing. These kinds of events are fraught with problems, and organizers have to constantly put out fires just to keep failure and panic at bay the entire time. And by the time the pandemic hit I was already completely burned out from the experience. I was left feeling like a face down corpse surrounded by party balloons. Two And if not for that feeling, I would not be doing this show today. If you are a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It would really help 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 be helping keep the show alive. Now, before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but not looking for a whole relationship, I can appreciate that, and you could buy me a coffee at Buy Me a Coffee dot com slash doomsday and for those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place now. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. And now a quick but really heartfelt shout out to Nicholas Rennette, Jessica Kaufman, Ruari Barrett let me know if I did that right, Hydra Korby, Jim landrum Man, U s pat Kearney Warmaster Sparrow, Edward Bartlett, and Amanda Peyton all for helping support me over at Patreon. You can reach out on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. I do love hearing from you, and I'm slow to respond, but I'm all caught up now. I think and if I'm not, please let me know. I deserve scorn and praise and measure. Older episodes could be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank my Patreon listeners old and new for their support and encouragement. However, 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 are 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. On the next episode, we are going to explore another disaster that should not have taken place at ground level, but instead of balloons, we are going to get into something a little more explosive. It's the Enchette fireworks disaster of two thousand. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.