The Dave Matthews Poop Bus Disaster of 2004 | Episode 108

You've probably heard that during an accident, time slows, but the truth is it's just an illusion. Your brain flips into high alert and processes visual information in way higher detail, which makes the experience feel longer. Of all the episodes and stories we have shared on this show before, this is the one story you would absolutely not want to appreciate in high detail slow mo. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll find out how cholera and typhoid laced fartwater led to the complete reinvention of one of the world's cleverest and most innovative cities. You will find out why crapping on music could technically be considered a kind of self care. And although you are missing the context now, I am going to advise you at some point to potentially remove your fingernails, and you might surprise yourself by agreeing. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would hear the beloved tale of a potentially made up cow that got the jimmy legs and vaporized an entire city. You would visit the most literally and purposely vomit inducing statue ever erected, if you would learn the fascinating history of transportation based toilets. 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. Getting pooped on by a bird is an incredibly random and unlikely thing to have happen, So rare and random that our brains almost require us to create some kind of meaning around it. The idea that catching bird blop is lucky probably comes from ancient Rome and or Greece, believed that birds carried messages from the gods, and in general that rare and unpleasant events were seen as positive omens. I mean, on the one hand, finding a four leaf clover won't give you pink eye, but it is a rare and improbable thing to do, So we tell ourselves that such a fine means good luck, which is no different than the right place, wrong time logistics of becoming a bird, toilet, and all of this has become part of our shared cultural experience. Speaking of shared cultural experiences, have you ever crapped on a band before? I make my way through life with the philosophy that no one thing can be all things to all people. It basically means that not everything is for everyone. And I can't think of anything that might be clearer proof of that than art. Art is one of the few things you can experience in this life where two people can look at the exact same thing, where one finds beauty but the other one chokes down a burp. That's not a flaw in the artwork or even in the audience. It's just the nature of art. What you see is filtered through who you are. For example, a painting can make you want to cry, where a song can make you want to break stuff. It's all just experience. It's not a problem that can be solved. There's no right or wrong answers. So the idea that any piece of art should or could be universally appreciated is pretty unrealistic. Take for example, Canada's own Nickelback. Somehow we have collectively agreed, without any formal vote, that Nickelback is objectively bad, even though millions and millions know every word to every song the around. This kind of thing always reminds me that people have said that McDonald's may sell a billion burgers a year, but that does not necessarily make them good. In fact, a lot of people attribute that dig to Roy Krock himself, who was the founder of McDonald's. In Nickelback's case, maybe they're just too polished or corporate, or even too popular for people to abide, and at that point it becomes less about who they are and more about what they do. The truth is, popularity doesn't make something good, and mockery doesn't make it bad. Disliking Nickelback it's not even a hot take anymore. People just decided, Yeah, that's the one we're gonna dunk on and moved on. Take the Dave Matthews band. You may not know them. They don't put out dance remixes, they don't dress up like Kiss or Daft Punk or Elton John, and they don't law at the spotlight for your attention. But in spite of their low key approach, they are extremely successful and deeply loved by their fans. I could probably spend the whole day listing bands that reached enormous success that you've probably never heard of. And although you may be all, I've never heard of Dale Mayhew, I promise you by the end of this episode, I'm not saying they're going to become your favorite new band, but I will say you will never forget them. Dave Matthews is one of the most commercially successful, multi platinum, Grammy Award winning top grossing touring bands in modern American music. These guys have seven consecutive studio albums that debuted at number one, which I think might actually be a kind of record. The Dave Matthews Band quietly sells out stadiums and tops charts and is still a cultural blind spot in most people's world. And if you've ever heard someone drunkenly scream that some band sucks, well three things. First, the complaint tells you way more about the complainer than the complaine. Second, never confuse loud opinions with universal ones. Third, even if your favorite music is beatless, screeching noise that irritates the ears. I am more than comfortable enough in my own skin to be happy for you, and not everyone will. People seem genuinely threatened by anything that doesn't appear on their Spotify list. It's that real caveman us versus them mentality that separates people into ones like me and ones not like me. You can chalk the whole thing up to a primitive human urge called identity protection. People want to see themselves as smart with good taste, but once they find out they're in the minority on some band, for example, it seems to genuinely threaten that view. And so if five hundred million people like something that you don't, the obvious explanation is that they're wrong. My wife desperately hates jazz. There's something about her brain that just is not rewarded by wild improvisation. To her, listening to jazz is an endurance of one wrong note after another until she starts throwing things. But she doesn't just hate the genre just to feed her ego. In this case, she's not looking to create an identity around not liking it, you know, find a community of like minded individuals and hop up on a pedestal. She just would rather listen to something else, anything else. Really, she genuinely tried. And for the most part, when people fart on bands or genres, they're doing it to feed their egos and to help create some kind of identity for themselves that makes them feel like they belong. But mostly they do it just to show off how impressive their tastes are. People started doing it back when music was just people hitting rocks together and they never stopped. But back to the Dave Matthews Band. I would love to share with you the fascinating story of the formation of the Dave Matthews Band, if there was such a thing. But there's no fistfights, sort of biting the heads off baths, or dramatic breakups or overnight fame. In this case, it will be with calm indifference that I describe the Dave Matthews Band as having a path to success reminiscent of the slow accumulation of finances through careful investing over time. They were never trendy, they were never industry darlings. They're just a rock band and that plays like a jazz group and performs like a jam band. If you're not familiar, jam bands are ones that play live with a kind of a let's see where this goes attitude. They're like a group project where no one ever actually talked about how to end it. Think acoustic driven rock with layers of jazz, folk, funk, even a bit of world music woven in. And instead of just guitars and drums, they use instruments and phrasing that you might not typically hear in standard rock bands. You might hear a violin or a saxophone, or a harpsichord or whatever. Everything about it is lucy goosey, and it is precisely their absence of drama that makes the events of today's story such an unbelievable contrast of expectations. Dave Matthews was born in Johannesburg, South Africa during the apartheid, which was a fairly dark and his parents weren't exactly down with it, so they pulled up stakes, moved him to the UK and finally to the US. And because he is such a famously private person, that's it. No school records, no childhood stories, all of it has been purged from living memory. All we know about the man is that he finally settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, which would become the backdrop for everything that followed. And he didn't have a background in music. He never had ambitions of chasing fame. But what he did do was quietly write songs while working as a bartender at a club called Tracks. And this wouldn't even be a story today if he had not gotten over his shyness to perform. In fact, he went around music in kind of a weird way. Instead of getting a rock star haircut and forming a band around it, he recruited local musicians that he admired. Roy Moore played the sacks, Carter Bufford played the drums, and Boyd Tinsley played the violin. He basically built the band backwards and chose people with kind of unusual backgrounds for a rock band. And let me describe their sound like this. If you listen to their biggest hits, which are arguably Crash into Me and ants marching, they have this kind of folksy nineties saxophone and violin and strummy guitar alt rock vibe about them that you would not see becoming associated with one of the most disturbing incidents we have yet described on this show. Again, I apologize I cannot seem to help myself with the foreshadowing here and our story begins August the eighth, two thousand and four. Pack your favorite deep dish pizza, friendly stretch pants, your favorite guide to North American architecture, and a course of intravenous antibiotics just in case things go a different way. For today, we are flying off to Chai Town, the windy city Chicago. You know, it's not really that windy there. They started calling it that to make fun of the politicians of yore that blew a lot of hot air, and no one ever forgot. And don't get me wrong, it is windy there. It sits next to Lake Michigan, which creates strong winds. But it's not even the windiest city in the country, believe it or not. That is Amarillo, Texas. Hey, Texas, I mean, go figure. Anyway, it was a hot, bright, sunny summer day in downtown Chicago, and I would call it busy, But to call Chicago busy is actually doing a disservice to the word. It's crowded and in the late summer like this, the air is warm and thick, and while you're trying to get around, you become aware that they are home to the second worst traffic in America, only behind New York City. Chicago decided to try to be as organized and grid like as possible when it was originally coming to be, which today makes it one of the more easy cities for outsiders to navigate. Well, actually it didn't really start that way, but thanks to the Great Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy one, which treated the city like a magic eraser, Chicago got to do a do over, and Chicago two point zero was built with orderliness top of mind. When the smoke cleared and the rubble was removed, Chicago was rebuilt quicker than anyone could imagine. And this time they went with the grid pattern, like we said, implementing everything from stricter building codes to wider streets, and started the shift to building with brick and stone and eventually steel instead of wood and hay. But of all thing Chicago is famous for, its bridges are famous not because they're the biggest or the oldest. They're famous because they move. Let me try to explain when Chicago was transforming from a muddy frontier town into a world class city, the river that held its name became a problem up to this point. In the eighteen hundreds, Chicago sat strategically right at the continental divide that separated the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, and foregoing a long story about a lot of digging and to keep things moving without bogging down in a lot of engineering speak, diggity diggity dig and what started as a hike through the woods with a canoe on your head became an easy, breezy trip through the Illinois and Michigan Canals, and for the first time in history, Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes in general became physically connected to the Gulf of Mexico. So understandably that made Chicago kind of a big deal and a major national transportation hub. Problem was the city wouldn't have a proper sewage treatment system for another eighty years, so for a long time, anything that discharged from all the stockyards or factories or human buttocks went straight into the river for all those years, where all of it would flow north into Lake Michigan. In the modern age, people panic if e. Coli levels at the beach rise after a heavy rain. Okay, in the eighteen hundreds, waterways were treated like open sewers. Think of the chocolate bar in the pool scene from Caddyshack, but also think of that Chocolate river from Willy Wonka. Another way of saying that was the people of Chicago raised a glass and jumped on the cholera and typhoid census train. Booty duke in the water led to terrible pandemics in eighteen thirty two, eighteen forty nine. That was the really big one, eighteen fifty four and eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen forty nine alone, about three percent of the population died from cholera, and we have no idea how many died from typhoid. The people who normally count that kind of thing died typhoid kill slowly. Death can come from septic shock or organ failure or intestinal rupture, and it can take weeks. Now, with cholera not so much. Imagine or don't that you had diarrhea so bad that you rapid fired all the moisture from your body leaven behind a husk. With the consistency of homemade paper pulp, the Chicago River became described as a thick, slow moving industrial slurry. The only upside was that when people from London visited. It made them feel less homesick, but everyone else hated it. Now, because impossible problems require impossible solutions, let me tell you what they did about it. Their solution was to pull off one of the wildest civil engineering projects in North American history. They dug out a massive sloping canal system southwest of the city that created a new flow path from north to south, and they effectively reversed the direction of the Chicago River. They reshaped their own landscape. No more flowing into Lake Michigan, it now flowed permanently down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Before this point, man had diverted rivers before, and they'd built canals and locks and dams and things like that to control the way water flowed. But this what happened here was unpressed, c ented, and disease rates plunged. Of course, for the residents of cities downstream, like Saint Louis, for example, it was as if Chicago had declared biological war on them. Eventually, a proper sewage system would be installed and solve all of this. So, yeah, the Chicago River was a bit of a big deal. And now that it wasn't trying to kill people. The area really took off. By the end of the century, it had ballooned from thirty thousand to one point seven million people, That is fifty five hundred percent growth. Chicago grew faster than almost anywhere in history, and all those new residents required a lot of new addresses and with them, new roads. Before the nineteen hundreds, a good chunk of the landscape was poorly drained swamp. So for the city, known for pulling off the most impressive and difficult public's works projects possible, they raised entire areas of the city as much as fourteen feet now. Like I said before, Chicago was laid out like a grid. Of course, they weren't going to be paving over the river, so that grid was going to have a few flaws through it. On any good day, the river was filled with schooners and barges and boats, and if they installed a bridge somewhere, someone's getting screwed. A bridge too low would block river traffic, but a bridge tall enough for it to pass under would have to be horse killingly steep. At first, they experimented with horizontally rotating swing bridges, but they were kind of like slow, awkward scissors, and they could easily clobber a master or two, so they pivoted to lift bridges. The next thing you know, they had become the movable bridge capital of the world with one of the most coordinated bridge systems ever built. They're technically called bascule bridges French for seesaw. They lift up from one end like an arm being pulled by a massive counterweight. They're surprisingly efficient and quicker than you'd think. They basically figured out the least disruptive solution for river and street traffic. One of the early designers was a man named Joseph Strauss, who was later remembered for a little something called the Golden gate Bridge. These bridges became one of the city's defining features, and because of them, the Chicago River remains alive and busy even today. But rather than pooh caked barges hauling factory goods, river travel has become the domain of pleasure seekers. Sightseeing boats, including the well known architectural tours, glide slowly up and down the river, carrying visitors from around the world to see the city from a unique, almost venicelike vantage point, including the underside of the bridges that make at all possible. Chicago has about three hundred bridges in total, everything from highway overpasses to pedestrian and rail bridges. About forty five of them are movable bridges, and that is more than any other city in the world. Perhaps one of the most famous is the Kinsey Street Bridge. It was Chicago's first bridge, after all. Back in its youth, it began as a simple wooden foot bridge over the north branch of the River in eighteen thirty two. It was basically just planks. You couldn't even drive a wagon across it. By eighteen fifty two it had evolved into Chicago's first railroad bridge. By eighteen seventy nine it had beefed up into its first all steel railroad bridge and the first of its kind in the country, and by the early nineteen hundreds it had become the longest and heaviest lifting bridge in the world. It's supported by a rigid lattice of piccag iron and steel and rivets and beams. So she's no beauty prize winner, but in today's story that won't be an issue. Today's story takes place August the eighth, two thousand and four. What else can I tell you about that time? Olympics fans were psyched that the Athens Games were only five days away. There was the US led ward in Iraq. It was getting a little uglier by the day. The Mars rover was trying to tell us that the red planet had water on it. Oh, and the Dave Matthews band was in town for a to night run at the Alpine Valley Music Theater. The venue was outside the city, and by outside I mean ninety minutes away. And during this time, the band had multiple tour buses running between Chicago and Alpine Valley, and on this day, just after one pm, one of those buses was traveling eastbound across the Kinsey Street Bridge. It was one of those standard commercial tour buses or motor coaches I guess you'd call it, that was used primarily for transporting the crew. There weren't any band members on it at the time. The band had already played their first night and they were relaxing at their hotel with a gun to their heads. The band could not have possibly told you what their tour buses were up to. Well. At approximately one eighteen PM that afternoon. This bus was traveling away from the downtown core across the Kinsey Street Bridge. Like we said, a man from Texas, Hey, Texas, named Stephen wool was behind the wheel. Now, back in the day, in the early eighteen hundreds, a band of wandering minstrels might find themselves upon a horse drawn omnibus. Imagine the open air, a hard wooden seat with minimal comforts, including a horse's ass right at nose level. Kind of thing. You can understand why people developed motor coaches, and they started to become common after World War Two. Nothing crazy, comfortable, but no splinters in the ass, and they were faster. Through the sixties and seventies, they evolved into what we would think of as tour buses, closer to what we see today. Musicians were the ones that really started renovating them and personalizing them. And now they had sleeping space and gear storage and hookah lounges, and by the two thousands these things had basically become luxury apartments on wheels. A Prevost high end tour coach could run maybe a quarter to half a million dollars depending on the base model, and north of a million depending on all the mills and whistles. For most of history, road trips were planned around frequent rest stops, so passengers in need didn't have to freeball duchy into a cup or anything. It became obvious that some kind of basic washroom apparatus was necessary. Basic being the keyword, but a good step up from a whole over the road below, just not by much. Eventually, they settled on a tank system that chemically treated the waste without gassing out the whole vehicle, and the tanks were controllably emptied at a proper drop off facility, that last part being kind of key. Let's get away from toilets and go visit the river. Oh, what's that over there? It's Chicago's Little Lady, who I'm glad you asked. Chicago's Little Lady is a river tour slash charter boat owned and operated by Chicago's First Lady Cruises. They own a small fleet of vessels that travel up and down the Chicago River. They were partnered with the Chicago Architecture Foundation to run their well known architectural tours. Architectural cruises along the Chicago River puts you up close with one of the most visually and historically dense urban corridors in North America, and from a whole unique point of view. What kind of boat was it? You ask? If you can imagine, it was one of those big, squat looking excursion boats, the kind that have fully open air seating on the upper deck. They're the kind of thing that's purely designed for sightseeing and tours than private events. It feels less like a boat and more like a floating lounge with large panoramic windows that wrap the interior. There were about one hundred and twenty people on board that day, families, tourists, couples, all seated in front facing rows, looking upward as the guide calmly narrates the trip, describing the surrounding buildings and the history of Chicago's architecture. Passengers were seated closely together on the open upper deck, enjoying the weather and the views. Boats deliberately slow down when passing under bridges. As they began to approach the Kinsey Bridge, the boat slowed a little and the guide began to tell of its long history when a shadow fell upon them. Now we described the slow path to fame that Dave Matthew's band endured, but on the day of this story. Stephan Wolf certainly wasn't as famous as the bands he drove around, but he was about to be. Now, normally a bus's toilet tank must be emptied at a proper dumping facility. Like we said, on this day, the bus's septic holding tank was full or pretty much full, so it was going to need to be emptied. And what better time than right after lunch, and Wool had an inspiration that he could really save himself some time. Instead of finding a proper facility, why not just manually release the waste valve while passing over the river and call it a day, maybe take a second lunch. Now. I don't know what he may have been thinking as far as what if someone saw, but whatever it was, it wasn't enough. If he had been trying to think it through. Nothing happened. And then he saw the Kinsey Bridge. As the bus crosses the midpoint of the bridge, Wool opens the valve on the bus's waist tank and I want to take a pause here for dramatic effect, completely unaware that at this exact moment, Chicago's Little Lady was coasting by directly beneath the bridge. Now this tank. This wasn't some little RV toilet tank designed for a family of five. This thing was the size of a large chest freezer, big enough that when it was released, just as the boat was positioned almost perfectly underneath and people were just starting to say, is that the underside of a bus cool The sound of a mechanical latch release and a rush of mostly liquid poured down all at once in a sudden release. And because the Kinsey bridge was an open steel grate design, the waste did not simply hit solid pavement and roll away. Instead, it felt directly through the gaps, with cruel precision, into the shock mouths and unblinking eyes of the unexpecting passengers below. You could not possibly imagine the warm, wet, forceful, and merciless embrace of eight hundred pounds that's about three hundred and sixty kilograms of mostly liquid human waste landing on you with zero notice, and as quickly as the weight of it envelops you, so does the smell. There is nothing in the human experience that could possibly prepare you for this scenario. People are looking at their clothes, their hands, at each other, and there are no better words than simple shock and disbelief. Some people froze completely unable to process, while others desperately swat and swing and try to run away from it. The tour guide quickly stopped talking about decorative terra cotta facades, and their narration was replaced by audible gagging. Before long, the boat continued drifting forward, clearing the bridge and dragging this wholesale nightmare into the sun. I heard it described as a cascading plume of sewage, and the smell was immediately overwhelming. About thirty people or the full front of it, and about sixty more were caught up in the splash zone. Now, the thing about bathing and sewage is physical contact immediately contaminates clothing and skin and hair and literally anything it touches. And you might think, well, hey, ninety out of one hundred and twenty people isn't bad. Well you are forgetting how can tamination works. It wasn't just some cartoonish splash with people wiping their eyes and spitting and saying, eh, you wish. The splashback was aerosolized into droplets that came to rest in people's lungs and all over seats and railings. And anything you might touch. Plus people secondary contact with other people more glisteny and less lucky than you are fighting to get past, you will absolutely ruin your day and everything that you're wearing. Some passengers began to cry or wretch, while others attempted to move away, but space was limited because of the layout of the boat and natural crowding on a busy summer day, all of this was impossible to avoid. People were nauseous and understandably distressed about inhaling bacteria and answering the age old question what if I could taste a smell? So the crew quickly cut the tour short return to doc. So you went to Chicago, hoping to enjoy a little culture in maybe some world famous deep dish pizza. However, instead you find yourself marinating in E. Coli, salmonella, neurovirus, hepatitis, giardia, and cryptosporidium. Would you know what to do? My advice here will be serious, although it may not always sound that way. Obviously, in this scenario, I offer you a hearty congratulations. You are now part of a biohazard event. First step, move upwind and away from the splash area, not touching or stepping in anything reduces your chances of secondary exposures, which will follow you everywhere you go. Contact with your eyes, mouth, or open skin are the biggest risk. So whatever you do, do not wipe your eyes, nose, or mouth with contaminated had hands, and do not even get me started on cuts. You will want to use napkins or cloth or paper or whatever is available to gently remove the bulk of the waste and carefully. Your instinct is going to be too rub and scrub, but this can spread contamination and basically jam it into your skin. So as much as you want to rush, do try not to spit out anything in your mouth immediately. I should have said that right off the bat, and avoid swallowing until you can properly rinse out your mouth. You're gonna want to start by washing your hands with soap and hot water for at least thirty seconds, and use something sharpish to remove anything from under your fingernails. There are an awful lot of people working in the medical field or first responders that listen to this program, which I love. At my point being, I cannot imagine any of them will say what I am about to tell you, and you like you won't hear this anywhere else. But if you've got this much stuff over every interview, I would say, hey, maybe just remove your fingernails if necessary. They are the trojan horse of pathogen transmission. It's for that same reason you don't try to make yourself throw up. You're introducing a whole lot of things into your throat and you will only end up making things worse, unless you're prepared to just throw up from a free standing position with no help from your hands or fingers, in which case, help yourself. If you got anything near your eyes, rinse them without rubbing with clean water or sailine for whole minutes. I don't believe there is such a thing as too clean in this moment. Oh and if you are still clothed, what is wrong with you? Remove everything without slopping it across your face, then bag it, and if you are not going to send it to someone you hate, burn it. Rinse your body thoroughly, then wash it with soap and shampoo, then rinse and repeat as needed until the voices quiet down. And once you are clean enough to travel in public, see a doctor. Do you have any barfing or diarrhea, fever, cramping, just anything out of the ordinary like that. Let the professionals help you, and once they have given you a clean bill of health, it is time to move on. The old You died terribly so led Your freshly shaven head and entirely new wardrobe carry you into the next phase of your life. After releasing the waste, the bus just casually drove away. However, witnesses in nearby buildings reported what they saw and authorities began investigating almost immediately once they arrived back of the dock, tickets were refunded and emergency personnel assess the passengers, transporting most of them to hospitals for testing and precautionary treatment against exposure to bacteria and pathogens additives from the chemical toilet itself, and the boat was just thrown out. I'm only kidding, but it was heavily disinfected. Clothing and cameras and all personal belongings were collected and burned right there on the dock. The investigation quickly traced the source of the waist to the tour bus, and a witness had actually caught the license plate and decided that in this situation, snitches don't get stitches. This led investigators to a different man named Jerry Fitzpatrick, who was a bus driver and barely believed the accusation, let alone the story itself, and luckily for him, video from a nearby Jim captured the whole thing, which showed Wall on board alone, waving the air in front of his nose and lighting a candle. If you know the scene from the original Blues Brothers movie where every law enforcement officer in Illinois came to arrest them, it was a like that. At first, he was all, what's a bus and denied having anything to do with anything, But eventually he pled guilty to a host of charges over the whole thing, everything from reckless conduct to pollution charges. A judge handed down probation plus a fine, plus community service. Also he got fired. As hell, he got to live most of his life before the Internet, so every embarrassing thing that ever happened to him is lost to history, which is exactly why gen Xer's got to grow up with the attitude of what's a bridge. But sadly for Wall, this one moment led to permanent and very public notoriety. Some of the passengers from the crews reported lasting emotional distress from the incident, and I believe them Woll knowingly discharged the tank and ended up pleading guilty to reckless conduct. He received a ten thousand dollars fine, eighteen months of probation, and one hundred and fifty hours of community service. A lot of people on that boat would gladly pay the ten thousand dollars to have just five minutes alone in a locked room with him. Oh and sadly one does not simply get to tour the country in a poop bus and get away unscathed. The Dave Matthews band name was also dragged through the mud, so to speak. But they had not done anything wrong, and it is hard to stay mad at those faces, so the hate slowly evaporated. The members of the band were deeply embarrassed, understandably, and they cooperated fully with the authorities. On the one hand, it's not like they dared him to do it, But on the other hand, their name was now and forever more associated with unexpected dung showers. So first they agreed to pay a two hundred thousand dollars settlement with the affected passengers, assuming only the ninety or so that were immediately affected were paid. That works out to less than twenty five hundred dollars a person for gargling, but water that seems low. The band also donated fifty thousand dollars to environmental organizations, including the Friends of the Chicago River. This incident became an infamous cultural touchstone, mostly because of the sheer absurdity of it. There was just something about one hundred and twenty people taking in a cultured cruise, trying to take in the finer things in life, being treated like they had been trapped in some overly disturbing Japanese toilet themed game show. There was no explosion, no fire, and no sweeping mechanical failure, just gravity and timing and human error. Unsuccessfully tried to calculate the rough odds against this kind of thing happening. We tend to imagine bad luck as something dramatic, but it doesn't always arrive as a fire or flood or explosion. Sometimes it's no louder than the idling of a bus. And there are times when probability quietly stacks against you and arrives without warning seconds earlier. The boat wouldn't have been there seconds later, and it would have missed it entirely, but instead the passengers were directly below. This was an almost impossibly specific alignment of timing, location, and circumstance. To call this wildly improbable or deeply unfortunate barely touches it. Everything considered, no one actually died, which is nice, but if forced to judge between the aromas of a relatively benign, recently deceased body and a perfectly alive one covered in fudge brownie, there are no winners, and the judges are also losers. The only winners are us. We didn't have to burn any clothing, we didn't have to get any shots, and we didn't have to pull out any fingernails. This is the most extremely unlikely and powerful example of a wrong place at the wrong time story that we have ever focused on in the history of this show, and for that you are welcome. Today's episode was intended to be another minisode. Okay, well, so much for that. It was also supposed to be bloodless, which it was, but it still managed to be incredibly disturbing and upsetting without it. In fact, I would go so far as to say, if we had dropped eight hundred pounds of blood on people, you would have had an easier time of it. In a way. The silver lining here is that this poop based disaster was at least born from the bowels of the Dave Matthews band. Can you imagine if this had been Guar's to Her Bus. There are way worse bands that could have done this, and the victims could have been on a public school trip, or hospital patients out for air, or an entire nunnery taking in the sites. And I'm not trying to imply that architecture fans deserved any of this, but if this had been an eighties movie, all of this would have taken place around the final scene, and the band would have been playing on the roof of the bus, and the boat would have been full of afeat snobs who hated music. Defeat snobs generally have better luck than this, and I don't think people who paid twenty five dollars just to admire buildings technically really count as a feed snobs in this situation. So if you are feeling good about not having to replace your wardrobe and start regrowing all the hair on your body, and you wanted to find a way to celebrate your good fortune, why not consider helping out the show by joining us at patreon dot com slash Funeral, Kazoo Kazoo. If you haven't heard, this is the place where you are going to find ad free episodes and extra content and behind the scenes stuff, safety stuff, you name it. I really appreciate your consideration on this because the fact is that donations from people like you are the only reason that I've been able to do this show as often as i have. And if you've ever worried that Patreon is just some cult where you're going to have to coombio circle your way through all of my thoughts, it's simply not the case. First, it's not a cult, and b the majority of Patreon supporters sign up to help support something that they love, and then they're all, hey, what's a podcast like the gen xers they are and disappear. And if you're all wed no, you could always just visit buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday and show some support with a one time donation. At this point, I would like to share a quick but heartfelt shoutout too, Gary Adams, Kath, Team Honey Badger, Oleander Salad, and Silky Fox. I see you, guys. Eliza Rose Meredith Bateman, David Kaiser, and William Patton. I would also like to call out Jennifer, who loved hearing her name on the show so much the last time that I warned her I was gonna say it again, and here I go, Jennifer, Jennifer. But wait, there's more. I also would really like to shout out old friend Rob Orton, who specifically let me know that is dog's Freya and Zell would love a shout out, so let me try er a roof. I also also also would like to call out Aaron Valenzuela's mom, who, at seventy eight years young, has become a bit of a fan of the show Comma. Sadly, during cancer treatments, I'm assuming that this is one of those punching yourself in the face to overcome the discomfort of back pain, for example, And I am overjoyed to be able to provide any kind of distraction for you, and to say how oddly but truly honored I am that you chose to listen to little old me to help take your mind off your treatment. I promise I am more thankful than you are for it. And your daughter loves you very, very much. You're both in my thoughts, and I'm sure thousands of listeners from around the globe are also pulling for you. For everyone else, regardless of your personal motivation, you can always reach me at Twitter or Instagram or Facebook as Doomed to a podcast, or simply fire me an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my supporters, new and old, for their support and encouragement. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, I also ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot ca A the next episode, you ever have someone tell you if you have a pain in one part of your body that injuring another part will distract you from the original pain. Hmmmm, well that is the idea behind our next episode, except instead of personal discomfort and pain, we are talking about a commute, and then we're going to talk about pain. It's the Asaka train disaster of twenty sixteen. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.