The Dusseldorf Airport Disaster of 1996 | Episode 80

Do like fire but hate airports, Well, have we got the episode for you. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most dramatic, bizarre, and onspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll be pulling off the front of our skulls and spending some time fingering our limbic systems. We'll learn why not all fire rescue services are created equal, and we will find out how hot it needs to be for your skin to melt off. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you'd hear why calling German stoic clock watching robots is considered so flattering. You'd find out if you would be considered an idiot, a moron, or an imbecile back in the day, and you would learn how Dusseldorf compares to Hiroshima. This is not the show you play around kids, sor 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. What's the last thing you want to see at an airport a three and a half kilometer parade of screaming kids and bickering families. Maybe your pilot head down on the bar asleep while the destination board keeps flipping to delay the drug sniffing dog that runs right up to you on its hind legs and puts its paws on your shoulders. There are a lot of things not to enjoy about the airport. It's the reason seasoned travelers always look a little salty, and I myself once had to run the entire boarding pass to security gauntlet twice because they did not realize that brad is short for Bradley. Now for a brand new traveler spreading their wings for the first time and boldly journeying forth to see the larger world. Yeah, the airport sucks. Getting mugged at knife point at your final destination won't be any fun either, But it's your time spent at the airport that's really going to stick in your craw And speaking of airports, pack your stretchest later hosen for all the alt, beer and sausage at every turn, a pair of your best walking shoes for all that medieval cobblestone. Oh, and a good watch. See we are heading to Germany, where five minutes early is on time, on time is late, and five minutes late is verboten. If you use all the imagination you have, Germany kind of looks like a human head facing west. It's been called the most west looking head shaped country of all time. It's also been compared to a Mayan glyph. But for the purposes of situating ourselves today, we will be spending our time in the North Rhine Westphalia area of Germany. There are sixteen states across Germany, and this is the one tucked up in the northwest, ordering Belgium and the Netherlands. To be more specific, we are going to be spending our time in Dusseldorf, a vibrant city in western Germany, world renowned for its blend of modern amenities and rich cultural history stretching all the way back to medieval times. Whether you prefer a vibrant art scene or historical sites, or festive techno and non techno music related celebrations, you can find it all if you leave the airport, that is which we will not be doing today, So all of that is moot. Welcome to flugoffin Dusseldorf or Dusololf Airport for all of those non dual Lingo users. We are here on a bustling Thursday morning and the building is humming with the mostly orchestrated chaos of humanity streaming through its sleek and modern terminals. If you ever wondered why they make these buildings so sleek and modern looking, it's not entirely for that positive first impression. There's this whole science behind it. Easy to navigate, open layouts, reduce congestion. It's called people flow, and it helps people hal ass through security, baggage claim and the boarding area is quicker. And today there are thousands of families, business people, backpackers all lining up, filling up every check encounter, while others find themselves rushing from gate to gate looking to catch their next flight. Like all things in Germany, it's quite orderly and efficient. And while all this happens in the terminal, behind the scenes, in the back rooms and the guts of the building, cargo handlers handle everything from mail to the human remains. You think this is just where your suitcase goes before it gets drop kicked into an early African departure. But it's all quite organized and on the level. I mean, global supply chains depend on this. But for the most part, to the average shoe or auto normal Verbrauer, to the German ear, all that they care about today is air traffic control. I mean, getting wanded inappropriately is up there. But for the most part, getting to where you need to be is all anyone cares about. And those people in the towers are the ones responsible for keeping things moving. They are the conductors of the sky. And every ten minutes a plane lifts into the air while another arrives to replace it, and all of it under the watchful eye of the controllers in the tower. Did you know they actually have a motto, It's we guide you home. Kind of nice and really, air traffic controllers are more like choreographers, in this case, keeping Germany connected to over two hundred ports a call across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America. In fact, Dusseldorf Airport is one of the twenty largest airports in all of Europe. It handles about twenty five million passengers a year. That's like seventy thousand people a day or ten thousand seven passenger three row Dodge caravans with or without the stowaway seating. That is some good look and traffic right there now as a nube. If you were having two arrivals, that's on the ground level, And if you were heading to departures, you just need to head to the elevated roadway upstairs, or the escalators, or the elevators, or just even the stairs. It all connects pretty seamlessly. Now, I don't mind telling you if you're not familiar with air travel, arrivals is an area of heightened joy and emotionality. Everyone there is ready to reunite with family and friends, or maybe just a stranger with your name misspelled on a handwritten card. This is an area where personal connections are made and rekindled. You may almost say we're two hearts become one. The worst thing that happens at arrivals is maybe the occasional missing bank, or some light traffic, or maybe a pigeon plops on you at kurbside. But you'll notice the subtle shift in the atmosphere as you move from the relatively calm welcoming a rivals hall to the more vibrant, nervous energy of the departure area. Now, airports are kind of infamously big. There are like eighteen thousand people working there right now, which sounds insane, but you have no idea how many jobs happen behind the scenes at an airport. You've got meteorologists, wildlife management, the chaplain, the guy who works the flight information display system, mechanics, ground support, the lady at the duty free shop, caterers, safety officers, the jet bridge operators. They even have people pulling rubber and debris from the runways. Hundreds of random, seemingly disconnected jobs, but all very important to operations. And one of those jobs, the one making us do a little dosey dough on the road to Terminal A, is road maintenance. You ever live on a street where they put down a traffic counter, you know, little black box on the side of the road with some wire sticking out of it, and then you drive over it to see how much maintenance money your street deserves. If you put one of those on the road leading to Terminal A, well, it's gonna explode. The amount of traffic on approaching lanes and ramps is pretty constant, and as such results in constant wear and tear. So roadwork becomes a constant priority at an airport. You never really think about it, but vehicle traffic creates vibrations and pressure and all that weakens the pavement, and then it rains and the water seeps into cracks, and then it expands when it gets cold, and then it softens and deforms when it can swarm. Run enough cars over that and you get maintenance expenses or maybe even a sinkhole episode. You know what an expansion joint is, Well, I'll explain it in a way that makes you all like h. Of course, an expansion joint A lot of times you'll see them on roads connecting to bridges, and they kind of look like a toothless zipper that connects the two sections of roadway. They put them on roads and bridges where concrete expands and contracts from warming and cooling. Like we said, well, expansion joints are there to absorb all that extra little movement so that roads can last longer. Anyway, that was just a long way of saying that there was roadwork going on fixing one of the expansion joints on the elevated access road leading to Terminal A. It was the first item on the repair crewise to do list after lunch. Little hammering here, little welding there. It's like I said, there's a constant choreography of activity at the airport. Story takes place April the eleventh, nineteen ninety six. Now on this day, parked outside arrivals at Terminal A sat a taxi driver just waiting outside the crowded arrivals area like a predator waiting to swoop. And I don't mean like the free candy in van kind of way. And I don't mean like in that movie where all those soldiers went into the jungle and then almost nobody made it back to the chopper in the end. No, I mean cappies live hand the mouth, so of everyone there, they are probably the most on guard, just continuously scanning their environment for any potential sign of affair. You sit and stare at the same scene day after day, and you're probably going to notice anything out of the ordinary. And this cab driver was in fact the first to notice something out of the ordinary. Something seemed to be dripping from the overhead ramp into the arrivals area. It seemed almost wet, but it wasn't water, and it also maybe kind of glowed. He wasn't sure what he was seeing, but he thought it might be sparks, so he told someone. Now, there's no one single story or point of view at an airport. There are thousands of them. And around the same time, some of those points of view began pointing towards something being off. And before I tell you what that was, I would like you to remove the front of your skull. Now, the limbic system, also known as the palaeomammalian cortex, sits deep inside your brain, so you're gonna have to push some stuff aside to get at it. I shouldn't have to tell you to wash your hands before handling your own brain. Oh and also you're going to need a mirror. Now everything you see is going to be reversed, which is kind of hard to process. I mean, you ever tried cutting your own hair in a mirror before. We are looking for a part of the brain immediately beneath the medial temporal lobe of the cerebellum, primarily in the forebrain. And why are we going to all this trouble because different parts of the brain do different jobs, and this delicious mess that we're handling is responsible for our sense of smell and memory and emotions, and smell is the strongest or the most emotionally powerful sense that we have, and it lives in the limbic system. A single whiff can transport you back to a specific moment or place with a kind of vivid clarity that you don't get from any of your other senses. Smell can connect us to the past, to people, places, and sometimes to danger. Smoke is one of those things that your body realizes before your brain even does, and it's impossible to ignore. You have a real primal reaction, so your brain goes an autopilot and it searches for context. And in this case, what started for the people in Terminal A as a simple whiff in the air became a sharp and unmistakable recognition and a moment of urgent shock to the senses. A wisp of smoke was seen pouring from an air duct over a gallery of duty free shite at the east end of the first floor, over a flower shop, to be specific. In fact, some people standing at the Luftanza counter asked about it, thinking maybe there was a fire, but the staff of Liutanza saw the smoke kind of gave it a moment's thought and then just figured it was probably a prank. They thought maybe somebody was setting off a smoke bomb, because as we all know, before nine to eleven, you could still just set off smoke bombs at airports. Well, whatever the source, smoke was on the menu, and quickly it was seen crawling along the ceiling building into clouds. A man at the air France check in asked them to radio the fire department to come and check it out, but they used Waki talkies there and their Waki talkies did not connect to the emergency system. I'll tell you that nine to one one in Germany is one one two for fire in medical or one one zero for police, and both of those numbers can be freely dialed from any phone. Even a cell phone without an active simcard will'll make that call, but not walkie talkies. So by now it's about three point thirty in the afternoon when members of the airport fire department begin arriving at the scene, and the first thing they noticed was, yeah, the smell was this particular odor in the air, but they couldn't quite figure out what was creating it. You have a smell burning wires, well, it was kind of a mechanical smell like that. So their first thought was it was probably coming from the motors on the automatic doors to the building, because this kind of thing had actually happened before, So they just told the staff to call for an electrician. But that wasn't it. Within a few minutes, a saleswoman from that flower shop we mentioned who was all, I don't want to tell you how to do your job. Well, she pointed out that smoke was now visibly pouring from the air conditioning and the ductwork above her shop, and not just that, but sparks appeared to be falling from the ceiling. And that's it. If you're familiar with the nineteen eighty six hit movie Aliens, there is a point in the film where the cast are trying to locate Aliens when it occurred to them that they should probably check the drop ceiling, and as if on que, the ceiling above Terminal A began to glow, and at three point fifty eight PM, the entire ceiling of the terminal burst into sheets of bright, rolling flames, and with it came a dense cloud of black, choking smoke. Burning embers started raining down, igniting everything, and the fire expanded dramatically. The seriousness of this situation was immediate and obvious, and pants throughout the terminal engaged with peces as would be passengers start that wet pant trot away from the flames, and the fire crew on the scene immediately called for backup. You know when you hear about a two alarm fire on the news, Well, that's what that means when first responders call for backup. When I was young, I thought that meant how many people had called nine one one, like it's an eleven alarm fire, because eleven people called nine one one. To recap, We're ten minutes into this thing. All the airport fire staff and equipment are on the scene. People have already panicked their way out of the building, but no alarms are going off, and the general announcements are still arguing about whether you should be parking in the red or the white zones. There's nothing about the fire, at least not at first, and I strongly believe that I am not adequately describing the chaos at four six Finally, a general call for evacuation came overhead, which then fought to be heard over the roar of the fire and the screaming of the people. The announcements were in German, French and English, which was helpful. The thing is, and this is a minor point, the message was directing people directly towards the fire, which was less so. Just imagine hearing that firefighters were forced to use megaphones to shout people away from the fire in spite of the message. By the time they had evacuated the first floor of Terminal A, there were still more than two thousand people on levels two through five and in the connected parking garage. The terminal complex at Dusseldorf Airport houses three terminals A, B and C, three concourses, all contained in a single gigantic building. The terminal building had one hundred and forty two check encounters for crying out loud. You could have fit almost three thousand dodged carabins in this thing, and that is not even including all of the attached parking and auxiliary buildings like hotels and the corporate airline offices. It even had two skytrain stations in it. My point is it's big. So when I tell you that until those announcements, with no fire alarm going off, there were plenty of people in parts of the airport had no idea what was going down, you have to take my word for it. However, slowly word was starting to spread and AH started turning more into AH. The problem is fire works faster than people, and within minutes this fire had engulfed huge sections of the terminal. Turns out there's a lot of flammable stuff at an airport, and now you are going to learn something about fire services. Do you ever wonder why they call it that services instead of department, Well, it's because there's lots of them. And this is going to sound crazy, but even with a terminal full of firefighters arriving by the minute, no one knew how to handle the fire. These were airport firefighters. They weren't trained for this kind of thing. And I was going to make a joke about how it's a little like when someone asks for a doctor midflight and an ornithologist pipes up. But I don't want a joke about firefighters. I'm not knocking any branch of fire services. I thank them very much for what they do. But these guys right now had been trained and equipped to put out planes gushing thousands of gallons of fuel while blaming passengers run in every direction, only making things worse. See in a house fire, you say, eek, look there's fire, we should go. But a plane fire experience is so different. It's going to feel like you're in your house and then your house gets thrown around by wind or mechanical failure, and then it gets slapped against the ground, and then sometimes it rolls over before it finally explodes into flames. I mean, you see what I mean. People tend to dismiss or play down airport fire surfaces because they get called on so rarely, but when they do. Wow, you think any fire services on an oil rig wants to tackle a plane fire. I mean, you think anyone on a fire truck in Germany wants to tackle an oil rig fire. No, fire is a specialty and services are trained to handle their specific areas of need. Airport fire services weren't even trained to handle indoor fires. That's why they called for backup, and by the time the Dusldorf City Fire Brigade pulled up not even ten minutes later, fire and smoke was already visible from the doors, and officers were already calling for even more help. No one had had to tackle anything this big in a long time. I forgot to mention it was hard to see all the smoke and confusion, but by this point, very early on, the fire had taken an interest in Terminal B. Yeah, two fire engines, a ladder truck, a water tanker, and a command vehicle were not going to cut it, especially since, as you may have noticed, I have not mentioned any kind of automatic sprinkler system. And you know those standpipes that you see on large buildings, they're like two headed hydrants sticking out of the wall for fire departments to hook up to. You probably never gave them much thought. Most people have just always called them Siamese connections, but especially since it or maybe racist, so people started calling them why connectors. Anyways, who cares what you call them. The point is that they were there, but they just kind of made a sad party whistle sound. They'd never been used, they'd never been tested, and they weren't even connected to the city's water supply, so they might as well have just not been there. By four thirty six, the smoke pouring out of the scene was unmistakable, and flights were being canceled and diverted, which caused insane chaos at neighboring airports. And watching the smoke had been a group of people on the roof of the parking lot garage. They'd just been hanging out watching planes take off, you know, as you do. That was until they saw the smoke pouring out of the terminal, so they skid daddled by elevator. And what do I always tell you about elevators and fires, Well, here's an example of why. Sadly, when the elevators opened, they opened directly into the fire area of the first level. And I say sadly because the elevators immediately filled with a thick, toxic, acrid black smoke that obstructed the optical door sensors, meaning that doors just stayed open until everybody was dead. They had all suffocated. The smoke was blinding, it was impenetrable, and it filled every available space. Because it's a lot like fire, you know, fire wants to eat, and this fire spread its hunger far and wide. The smoke and flames tore throughout the entire first level before starting to eat its way upstairs through the unprotected open stairwells and escalaters and air ducks in the ceiling to the mezzanine level. The mezzanine level overlooked the first level and was basically filled with carrier lounges. They're kind of like a self service salon. You get yourself some special VIP access and now you got yourself a place to grab some food, charge some appliances, maybe catch some TV. And passengers had been happily lazing about the Air France lounge waiting for word of a flight, not of a fire, and they didn't get either because a the fire and b the public addresses were turned down or off in the lounges. These are the kinds of places so you can picture with lots of comfortable leather chairs and high top tables, you know, the kind of stylish and ergonomic furniture that people call contemporary chic. Well, once the smoke began entering through the air conditioning system into the lounge, they became trippables. Nine people found themselves trapped inside the Air France lounge. They just they couldn't find the exits. And it is at this point that I would like to make a radical suggestion for the future of indoor fire safety. You know those red glowing exit signs they put above doors, you know, near the ceiling where the smoke goes. I am suggesting putting another set at ground level for people on their bellies who cannot see the top signs anymore. I had this dick of a cat named Gary, and one day Gary ran away from home. So I made signs saying Gary come home with this picture, and I hung them all around my neighborhood at the eye level of a cat. And Gary came home. That's all I'm saying. So, while firemen bravely fought this inferno that had completely engulfed the first level, a second team of firemen were trying to save people from the lounges on the second floor. The thick smoke and high temperatures made it difficult, obviously to find people or the lounge for that matter. They didn't know where the lounge was. They didn't even have a map of the airport, just wasn't available. At one point a local cartographer offered to create one for them, but they told them to kick rocks. Numerous and hasty panicked phone calls were made from inside the lounge. The last one was at four nineteen. All but one of the people in the lounge suffocated. The safety exit was less than twenty five feet away from the lounge exit, but no one could find either, except for one French businessman who couldn't find it either. But he wasn't having it. He was able to bash out a window with a chair and he dropped about two and a half times his body height to the sweet, horrible freedom below, and you would think, oh, his poor legs, But no, he had been found with serious head injuries, meaning he either pin wheeled out the building and landed that way, or he purposefully superman flew out the window, and you might think, wow, the human survival instinct is incredible. Of course, it's also possible that the fumes wrecked his brain and he thought he might have been Superman. The fire was clearly burning up some pretty chemically complex construction materials. So you're at the airport. You've made it through customs and security, but now you're all, hmm, what is that scent? Is that melamine resin? Well? Would you know what to do? Most people fear fire, It's only logical, but smoke is objectively worse because although you can see it, and if you can see it, you can avoid it. What about the things that you can't see or smell. The thing you don't think about in a fire is that everything that's been manufactured is manufactured with chemicals, and when things burn, all of those little chemicals off gas, even in tiny little squirts, but they are chemicals. The paint on your walls, your carpet, hardwood flooring, your clothes, anything made of plastic, your curtains, pet food bowls, blankets, light shades, your radio, your phone, your shoes. Every single thing contributes to a toxic environment that will kill you. Certain toxics overwhelm your body's ability to function and yet just shut off. They call it rapid incapacitation. Carbrominoxide's pretty popular. It comes out of a lot of things, and its only role in your body is to block oxygen from doing its job. CO two just quietly hijacks your hemoglobin, which usually takes oxygen around your body. But because it's now taken up that space, it makes them less effective at you, making think so good hydrogen cyanides even worse. It makes your cells use for oxygen need make not so good, also effectively suffocating you from the inside out. And maybe you make notts think so good. Then weakness than dizziness, and at high concentrations, unconsciousness or cardiac arrest can all be yours in less than a minute. But people are not afraid of smoke the way that I feel they should be. So let me say that smoke does to people what you think bug spray is supposed to do to bugs, incapacitate them in seconds, leaving no time for escape, and they immediately die. Those are just the suffeken gases, while most people are really only aware of irritant gases, gases like nitrogen oxide and hydrochloric acid, which sound really, really bad and can irritate your respiratory tract so bad that you bark yourself half to death while your lungs filled with fluids. Now, depending on your situation, you might hear all this and think, well, beats going back to work on Tuesday. And to those people, I would say, do you really want to miss Brenda's birthday on Wednesday? They've already ordered a slab cake and we've got conference room one booked for noon, and I don't want to be rude, So what can I do? Okay, excellent. In a toxic smoke situation, things escalate quickly. First, you're going to be replacing feelings of panic and urgency with confusion and disorientation as the health bar on your brain takes up, beating as breathing goes. Imagine coughing fits and gasping for air like a fish while the heat and the toxins take their But instead of just sitting there thinking well, I mean that's some, let's go for a walk. Well, maybe a walk, maybe a crawl. You ever play the floor as lava as a kid, It's the same idea here, except it's in three dimensions where instead of the floor being lava air everything above your hips is poison. So maybe you crawl, maybe you roll, maybe a crab walk under the smoke, because smoke rises and the cleanest air is closest to the floor. I also advise using anything at hand to cover your nose and mouth. The wetter the better. It'll help filter out your tints, but it's not going to save you from invisible killers like CO two. So get a move on, and once you're out, if your exposure has left you with any of those symptoms that we already talked about. You want to get yourself checked out, Please trust me, this stuff is in you now. While you are sprint crawling your way to safety, imagine you found someone less vertical. The safety part of my brain tells you, if you find someone who's going to slow you down and get you killed, you have to just wrap their id and crab walk over them. Of course, if you've been listening to the show more than a week, you know I'm unlikely and good conscience gonna leave someone behind to suffocate and burn. So I'm gonna shush you out of the room because I need you to be safe. That is my absolute priority. Out you go now while I'm here. My protocol is I yell your name one time. If you don't answer, I grab you by your wrist or your foot, or I just tie your hair to one of my belt loops and I drag you with me. And then once we're safe, then I'm gonna check your pulse and you're breathing. And if that person weren't breathing, this is the time to start CBR because every second does count. But unless you are prepared to become a biological ventilator machine for the rest of your day. You're gonna wanna urge others to call nine to one one. It's very safe to say that anybody who has been knocked unconscious after smoke exposure has a lot of CO two in their blood which they need to get out or they're never gonna recover. See it's one thing to use CBR to try to keep their brain oxygenated this way, but in a hospital setting, not a parking lot, they are going to be able to supply the kind of high flow oxygen in a way that would hyperventilate you flat. They might need anything from bronchodilators to open up the airways all the way up to mechanical ventilation to keep them here with us. And in a worst case scenario, they might even use a pressurized hyperbaric chamber filled with pure oxygen to help clear the body of CO two even faster. And that's not including all of the various toxins that we've talked about swimming around in their bloodstream, something like hydroxycobalamine, which is a chemical that binds to cyanide, so you just piss it out later. I mean, it's not going to be a very good sipping urine, but it will help save their life. But I always like to say that choking to death and tasting your own urine are never mandatory, because prevention is the best cure. If you ask the people of Los Angeles if they woke up thinking, I wonder if I'll be surrounded by flames later today, they'd probably say, hey, why don't you just take the one ten north over to the ten east and get out of here. No, no one plans to get caught in a fire, but a little preparedness can save your life. Smoke detectors, even a cheap battery powered one, is your first and most important line of defense. A fire extinguisher is a close runner up, And if you ever actually have to use one, remember the pass method. You just pull the pin, aim load, squeeze the handle, and just sweep from side to side like you're airbrushing an old van. And you only really want to use it if the fire is small and you have a clear escape path. You are not going to stick around to take action selfies against a ceiling fire. And you got to remember that extinguishers don't last forever. Escaping is way more important than fighting. To save your property. In fact, if you are looking for a late New Year's resolution, why not get into the habit of figuring out your exits when you enter a new place. I know, I know you want to spend January fighting with yourself about that ten pounds you want to lose, But why not just improve your life by being a little more observant. It's a lot easier. And let me ask you this. They used to always tell people to do fire drills in their house, but have you ever tried escaping your home with your eyes closed or while crawling? I'm good with fire drills. They definitely have purpose. They only really prioritize getting you from point A to point B. They care about the why, but they don't care about the how. And I say, how is kind of important practice something like that, and you're cutting down on any confusion in an actual situation. And two things on that, we need to keep every listener as safe as we can and Brenda slab Cake ain't can eat itself now. Every time we talk about fire on this show, and specifically smoke related to fire, the one thing I always try to impart is how hot it is. TV and movies have done a terrible job by teaching you that dripping off your shirt and running into a burning building to save a cat is perfectly acceptable. Except smoke, depending on proximity to the original flame and the source materials and ventilation, et cetera, et cetera, can easily pass one thousand degrees or over eighteen hundred fahrenheit. And in the Dussldorf airport there were all kinds of enclosed spaces for smoke to collect and then retain more heat and then drive up that thermometer. In more open spaces, smoke doesn't usually top three hundred degrees or five hundred and seventy fahrenheit, which is still stupidly hot, I would care to remind you. I will also remind you that human skin does not melt like plastic or wax. It thermally degrades as the proteins in your skinlycolagen start to fall apart around seventy celsius or one hundred and sixty fahrenheit. Get that closer to two hundred celsius or four hundred fahrenheit, and it can burst into flames. By now, the smoke alone had damaged about two thirds of the second and third levels of terminal A, but it was already spreading into the fourth level. Many victims found themselves trapped in areas where emergency exits were poorly marked or inaccessible, or they didn't exist. Before long, there would be about one hundred vehicles and about seven hundred personnel from twelve different rescue services, and half of those were firefighters. Teams of paramedics were lined outside the terminal to treat people for smoke injuries and burns. Rescue teams managed to pull two thousand people to safety. That is incredible, and some of those had been basically dragged out wearing the firefighters breathing equipment on the edge of death. At one point three police officers found themselves trapped in the terminal by flames. They couldn't get out. They tried unwindowing their way out of there with an axe, but the smoke left them so weak they couldn't really swing it. There really wasn't anything they could do, so they just lay down, struck a memorable pose, and waited to die. But at the last second, a group of firefighters in protective gear appeared from nowhere and dragged them through the smoke and the flames to safety, which was no small feet. You have to remember, and it's kind of hard to picture, but the entire first level of the terminal was going up in flames all around them and everything in there, the carpeting, the wall, treatments, the rubber conveyor belts, frequent flyer points, everything, all converting into fumes of the most toxic variety. When I said we would be burning down an airport together in this episode, I meant it. But thanks to the unbelievably difficult and dangerous work the responders, the fire was finally declared quote under control at seven twenty. That was just three hours and forty nine minutes after the first call. It took about one thousand firefighters to get it to that point, and it was finally declared dead by nine point thirty. That's a hard number of people to picture doing anything, let alone spring hoses into the mouth of an inferno. When the smoke cleared, eight were found dead in the lounge, seven were found in the elevators. Another victim, a soldier from Britain, had died in the bathroom. That was six French, two ue Italians and seven Germans killed. The last victim, an elderly woman she'd initially escaped the fire. She'd been rescued, but she died two weeks later from smoke inhalation. As many as eighty eight people had smoke or burn injuries, but several hundred more were treated on the scene for lesser injuries. Most of the people killed appeared to have asphyxiated, but some of the victims did burn to death. In total, seventeen people died. So what happened, Well, in order man stared at birds, then icarus flew too close to the sun on wings made of wax. And if you know that story, that is actually the original disaster metaphor. By the way, then the Wright brothers made Kitty Hawk the seventh most interesting place to visit in North Carolina, according to Trip Adviser. Then ninety three years later, the Dortmund Welding Company were doing a little welding around an expansion joint on the ramp to the elevated access road above Terminal A Well, actually they hired subcontractors to do that for them, and part of the work meant using blowtorches to cut and weld materials between it and the arrival hall suspended ceiling. There was nothing but an unprotected void, and unbeknownst to them, as they had been welding, droplets of molten metal had been falling onto a three inch thick layer of highly flammable polystyrene insulation, which created a massive amount of gases and increased temperatures in that void. Polystyrene insulation looks like packing foam and it offers excellent thermal resistance, but on the downside, it's highly flammable, and in this case, its installation may have been illegal, So that was a thing Dortmund neglected to inform the fire brigade what they were going to be doing that day, or to post a guard beneath the welding site for safety, which maybe it sounds like a lot, but either could have saved lives and both were mandatory at other airports like Munich only an hour away. For more than two hours, the insulation heated up before it finally flashed over, and that flashover covered the entire terminal ceiling and quickly spread to the terminal second level, complete with an intense build up of thick black smoke. Every firefighter who saw it was all, well, that's not good and had to call for backup, and as such, seven hundred and one firefighters and two hundred and fifteen vehicles from across Dusseldorf and neighboring towns were on the scene. But as get togethers go, this one was thrown together hastily, and there was a distinct lack of cooperation and communication between the different rescue services and the airport. What they didn't realize all that smoke was made up of all kinds of synthetic materials, and of course eleven tons of polystyrene. So when I said the smoke was toxic, I mean your palette might be refined enough to pull melamine resin. Could you pick out and identify carbon monoxide or hydrogen chloride, or hydrogen cyanide, or even just a regular stew of dioxins out of a single whiff? I think not. What I do think is that fire doors would have kept the stairwells free of smoke long enough for people to escape without having to be poisoned. But with no fire doors and no sprinkler systems, the fire was free to spread throughout the entire building. I told my patreons earlier all about stereotypical German fascination with rules, But what I did not tell them was that although there are rules regulating the diameter of German toilet poles, there was no national safety rules for fire protection, which probably explains why so many of the firefighters summoned did not have experience with fires this size or the equipment needed to fight something like this. I believe the German term for something like this is a riisin catastrophe or a schlamazl, but for the sakes of our non German listeners, the response was a cluster file. The inferno destroyed both terminals A and B. When the airport reopened three and a half days later, only Terminal C was in any way inhabitable, so they ended up creating temporary hangars out of tents. Imagine handing your baggage to someone on a tarmac and then catching a plane out of a tent. I mean, it doesn't sound great in bad weather, but it sounds an awful lot more streamlined than the regular process. The resulting investigation identified a few problems, and this may take a minute in order. They blamed the road workers for not taking adequate safety precautions. Their employer did not inform the airport fire brigade about the repair works. And if they had, the fire Brigade would have been required to set up a fire watch. It's literally what it sounds like, but I'll go on. They were not overly psyched about combustible insulation illegally packed into the ceiling either. They were also equally unenthused about the lack of automatic fire suppression or sprinkler systems, or even fire doors. This part of the airport was built in nineteen seventy two, when all that kind of thing wasn't mandatory. And actually, I'm just going to say this real quick, because in my research I came to find that sprinklers were not even mandatory near fuel storage. Then there were the standpipes for water that were connected to the actual water supply. The point of sprinklers isn't actually to piss out a fire and then water damage everything else that you own. I mean, those are certainly huge pluses, but the point of fire suppression systems like sprinklers are to slow things down. They create the time needed to get more people to safety. It's been said that if the terminal had sprinklers or roll down fire doors, the fire could have been contained at level one. There was also a lack of communications between the command staff and the actual firefighters, like we said, which was a problem considering there were people here who were untrained for indoor fire scenarios. The investigators also had design issues with the unprotected vertical openings around stairs and escalators that made the space feel less claustrophobic, but also allowed the fire and smoke to spread to the upper levels. And they had something to say about the fact that seemingly everything inside of the airport was made out of combustible materials that gave off poison gas fumes, and the resulting smoke spread throughout the entire facility, even penetrating all the way down into the subway below the main building. The arriving firefighters did not have a good sense of the building layout, and the PA system almost immediately tried to corral everyone into the flames. There was no procedure for handling a fire inside the terminal building. There was also the fact that the public address wasn't even working in the lounges and no one could find the emergency exits. Oh and the elevators open basically directly into the mouth of a flamethrower. Airport security officials were supposed to turn off the elevators once they knew there was a fire. Most of the victims had died from suffocation or smoke inhalation, including a child and a policeman. If it were for the brave reactions of all the different firefighters and emergency responders, the death toll would have been much higher. Approximately two thousand passengers were saved from the fire. The deaths of seventeen people, hundreds of injuries, and damages of around a billion German marks, which by the math around that time would have been about six hundred million dollars called for a couple of heads to roll. The public prosecutor's office filed a seven hundred page indictment against everyone from the welders, the technical director of the airport, the architect, the building inspectors, and even the supervisors. And if you thought the oj trial was big, this one had twenty six defense attorneys, ninety four wins, witnesses, and an army of press. I dare you, no, I double dare you to guess how it went. Five and a half years later, with the trial finally concluded, all of the defendants were acquitted. According to the verdict, the accident couldn't be conclusively traced to the specific wrongdoings of any single defendant. Basically, the case was delayed and eventually abandoned without a verdict identifying those responsible for the disaster. So nothing was learned, and of course there were the three follow up blazes in nineteen ninety seven. I'm just kidding. The Dusal Door Fire Service called for improved disaster prevention and control management, particularly for large public buildings. The airport authorities were pretty enthusiastic about preventing a repeat, let alone a three peat. After the fire terminals A and B were considered completely unusable, well yeah, about a billion dollars worth the damage, we'll do that, and so Terminal A was extensively renovated and Terminal B was basically bulldozed and rebuilt. Terminal A reopened at nineteen ninety eight and B was ready by two thousand and one, and this time the rebuilt terminals were equipped with fire detectors and sprinklers and automatic fire alarms and fire reporting systems and even smoke clearing systems. Vertical dividers were also installed within and between the different levels to slow down the potential spread of fire and smoke. Not bad also thirty six security exits were added. Oh and everything, the insulation, panels, the furniture, all of it were now to be made from non combustible materials. They just updated their regulations. And I don't just mean a Dusseldorf or even just Germany. The response to this disaster didn't just change national safety, it changed international fire safety regulations. So three cheers for safety or prost or zoom wall if you're local. They really thought about how buildings themselves could be better built to help people in an event before human responders are even there, like rethinking everything from how people flow through the building and how to better corral them to the emergency exits, and of course introducing more fire resistant materials into the actual builds of these places. Fire alarm systems with optical smoke and heat detectors also became mandatory. And I'm glad all of this has happened. You have to remember where we started from. How many episodes have we done where fire exits were just painted over or hid and bind plants and acdotally. At least Dusseldorf is now considered to be the safest airport in Europe. It has transformed from an international travel hub and death trap into a model for other airports to emulate and look up to. It also holds a grimmer distinction. The Dusseldorf Airport disaster of nineteen ninety six remains the most catastrophic structural airport fire in history. After our last episode, where we literally lost everything and had to cobble it back together, with my sanity hanging in the balance, I started thinking about Love and Rockets, the band, not the comic book. Back in nineteen ninety five, they were recording a new album when their studio burned down and they lost everything, all their instruments, all their gear, all the recordings. And did they hold hands and just walk into traffic together. No, They've started over from scratch, and they named their new album sweet Fa short for sweet Fill, which is exactly what they had immediately following their disaster. And I know how they felt, And today the album is remembered as a testament to perseverance in the face of adversity. When I'm not at my best, I usually don't feel a very strong sense of resilience or perseverance. But enough of you gave me props for not punching myself to death after my own brush with a recording disaster. So I'd like to say thank you and throw out a reminder to all of you that negative self awareness can lead to self loathing. We've all got flaws and we are all pretty punishable. However, I want you to try to be more aware of your good qualities too. Just try a little positive self awareness for a minute. In more exciting news, I also mentioned giving away the very first book that I used as research when beginning the very first episode of this show. I wanted to find a way to give something special to some lucky listener, and I know exactly how we are going to do this. In the spirit of today's episode, I am going to play seven different fire truck fire alarms from seven different countries, and the first listener to correctly guest them all in order wins. Good luck to you all, and here we go. I hope I didn't make this too easy. Send me a private message at Patreon or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and let me know your answers. And if that was too easy, and you're all, man, I feel bad for this guy. That was too easy. Well why not take pity on that guy and consider becoming a supporter of the show. It would really help me fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really be helping make that dream come true. Now, before I tell you, go Patreon. If you're into it but you're not looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation, And for those of you who do, I deeply appreciate you. I myself think getting episodes a little early without all the sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo quick but heartfelt shut out to Tracy Thomas, Sarah Ecrick, Sorry if I mispronounced that, Jessica McCowan, David moorehead Actual Medieval Knight, Sir Lancelot, Katie Arens, David Mason, doctor s t Ray, and Daniel Rivera for supporting me on Patreon. I would also like to share a very special Happy Birthday to the Great Cheese Fish because your wife loves you very much. Oh and another special shout out to CMS Appliances in Rockfalls, Illinois if your vacuum flows will make it suck at CMS Appliance in Rockfalls, Illinois. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. And I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. However, I also say that if you could spare the money and had to choose, I asked thank 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, it is another That day of Work episode, but in this story, the company in question did everything within their power to find out how many different ways their employees could die. It's the cherrymind disaster of nineteen oh nine. We'll talk soon. Save Icago's off, and thanks for listening.