The Frank Rockslide Disaster of 1903 | Episode 64

Do you ever wish you could just take all your worries and bury them away? While 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 traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll see what the loudest way possible to wake up is. We'll learn how rocks can actually work better than scissors, and we will learn the three most powerful ways to eradicate evidence of well anything. 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. Grab your steamer trunk, pack up all your digging utensils, and hitch up your wagon because for today's story, we are heading on an adventure. We're heading out west all the way to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, or just the Rockies for short. Yes, welcome to Canada, land of my birth and the place that I keep most of my stuff. I hope you survived the experience. That wasn't a spoiler. I just meant because the Rockies are one of the most dramatic mountain vistas in the world. Just imagine panoramic, sweeping views of grasslands and wildflowers and those big Western skies and of course the mountains. The Canadian Rockies are known for all their glacial effects like lakes and waterfalls, where on the other hand, the American Rockies are more known for their colorful desert landscapes and incredible and unique rock formations. Now, as far as staring at something with your mouth hanging open goes to me, they're equally beautiful, but just very different. The Canadian Rockies offer beautiful and breathtaking views of rugged, snow capped peaks, deep sprawling valleys, and glacially fed, crystal clear, emerald colored waters. The Rockies as a whole stretch all the way from New Mexico to basically the top of British Columbia. You will find mountains that continue up through the Yukon and into Alaska, of course, but those are different ranges. It's all arbitrary. But mountain ranges are made up of multiple different mountains, and sometimes ranges are made up of multiple different ranges where some count and some don't. Like I said, it's kind of arbitrary. The native peoples to the area, I believe the Cree noted how singular and rock like each of the mountains looked at a distance and called them the Asanwati or rocky mountains. Then the Europeans came by and they were all, Yep, that works, and it's stuck. The rockies create a natural border between the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. Yeah, that's right. We have provinces about a third of all the countries on the planet do about two thirds of countries. They don't subdivide their territory into anything. And thirteen countries have states. And I made up a handy anagram to help you remember them. Big Mama, Big Brazil, India and Germany, Mama, Mexico, Australia, Malaysia, Micronesia, and Austria. There now you will never have to forget, and you're welcome. Now. The United States is kind of set up like a deformed periodic table of elements, where Canada is a little more organized. The first six provinces from left to right, set flush like dominoes, and after that you're into the maritime provinces, where they all talk funny and they love fish, and they are probably the nicest of us. In fact, in school, the anagram they teach for provinces is basmock, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, and then the western nova Scotia, New Brunswick, we Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. They're more jumbled, but they're there. So according to that handy anagram, Alberta's neighbor to the west is British Columbia. It's a land of forests and mountains and of course the ocean, and directly to their east lays Saskatchewan, a land of unparalleled and singular flatness. The rich soil and vast grasslands of the Prairies made them perfect for growing wheat and raising cattle. It was pretty much the whole reason for Canada's raging obsession with western rail expansion. When it came time to name Canada's most western province, They originally wanted to name it after the mighty Columbia River, it is the largest river in the entire Pacific Northwest. But Queen Victoria, she's the one that I always think of as wearing that lacy des well Queen Dorag she thought that people would confuse it with the country of Columbia and added British to make it distinct, which you could raise an eyebrow. But not too long ago, there was this story going around that the Salzburg Airport in Austria had an actual booth set up to offer rebooking services and psychological counseling for people who arrived there, not knowing the difference between Austria and Australia. So as for the etymology of Alberta as a name for my Canadian listeners, we all know the words. Alberta was named after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria by her husband John Campbell, the ninth Duke of Argyle, who served as the Governor General of Canada from eighteen seventy eight two. Yep, that's right, eighteen eighty three. They actually called it the District of Alberta back then, and before then it was pretty much treated like suburban Northwest territories. And I got to go hiking there once in Alberta, not the Northwest Territories. An old friend took me to Canonessa's Country, which is part of the Alberta Rockies, which is an unforgettable place to see as you lay dying on a trail. See. We climbed a little something called Mount Indefatigable, which by definition means relentless or tireless. But I'm not from out there, and I relent it pretty hard. We arrived at a plateau with a beautiful blue glacial lake, and I took a moment to try to wheeze my lungs inside out when someone came down the trail saying that there was a bear up ahead, and I volunteered to act as a toboggan for anyone looking to leave the quickest way possible that did not require the continued use of my legs. And you know what, one day, I'd really like to return there. It's gorgeous and maybe I could drive the Ice Fields parkways, this road that connects Bamf and Jasper, which are both National parks and their own UNESCO World Heritage Sites just based simply off their ridiculous beauty. It is one of the most scenic drives on the planet. But not today. Today, we'll be narrowing down on a small section of the range in Alberta's lower left hand corner. We'll be focusing on the Blairmore Range. It's located in the Crowsnest Pass region, about a two hour drive south of Calgary. It's also about a one hour drive from the strangest UNESCO World Heritage Site that I know. I am about to tell you the very quick story of heads smashed in Buffalo Jump. The Yes, thousands of years ago, hunters disguised themselves as bison or wolves, and then they would corral herds of buffalo towards a cliff where they would charge them and force them to stampede to their death. And as a practice, this went on for about six thousand years. I don't even need to elaborate. I just tell you the facts. Say that it sounds really weird, and everyone nods in agreement. Mm hmm. All right, here's the thing. Where were we, oh, Crowseness Pass? Well, here is the thing about mountain ranges. Historically, they have always been a kind of a non starter for through trap. The Crowsnest Pass was a kind of a natural break through the rockies which allowed river travel running east to west from here on the Alberta side of the pass, the Crowsnest River flows east all the way to the Nelson River and out into Hudson's Bay when it's kind of hard to miss. It is the second biggest bay on Earth, next to the Bay of Bengal, which is part of the Indian Ocean, which is where all of these early European explorers were trying to get to in the first place. Hudson's Bay is so big that hanging off the lower right hand side is James Bay, which is entirely dwarfed by its neighbor, but still counts as the fourth largest bay in the world. Hudson's Bay was named for Henry Hudson, who discovered the bay back in sixteen ten. He and his crew spent a sh winter stuck in the bay, and comes spring when the water's freed, they wanted to find a more direct route between Europe and Asia by sailing over the top of North America. Well the captain did. They were on a search for the fabled Northwest Passage, and the crew were not much in the mood to try to restart it. No, they wanted to go home, and Hudson agreed. But when they found out that Hudson lied about it, they told him to die a drift on a boat, and that's exactly what he did. They set him adrift on a boat in his namesake bay to die with a few supporters so that there would be options once the cannibalism set in, and they were never heard from again. In sixteen seventy, the Hudson's Bay Company was formed, which would over time become the largest and oldest corporation in Canada. It wasn't really incorporated, it was decreed into existence by a royal charter from King Charles the Second of England, and today some of Canada's biggest major cities, even provincial capitals, began their lives as forts or trading posts for the Hudson's Bay Company. You may even recognize the iconic Hudson's Bay point blanket that's all white with a green, red, yellow and a dark blue stripe. They became the New World's first and most popular fashion trend. Actually the first probably would have been beaver hats, but all of those were going back to Europe to feed their intense boner for anything made of this fascinating waterproof new animal. So blankets it is, which when you consider the number of times that we've referenced the evil of germsak blankets given to First Nations tribes, well, they became a symbol of the company and you can still find them on their website today. That's right. The HBC, as we call it for short, is the oldest incorporated joint stock merchandising company in the English speaking world. Where were we right? The Crowsness Pass through the British Columbia side of the pass. The Crowsness flows through the Elk, Coudney and Columbia Rivers and off into the Pacific, and on that side of the pass, British Columbia was known for the occasional gold rush, which turned people into kind of fast moving zombies with dollar signs in their eyes. But believe or not, once something of value was found in the ground, it is not always cake and apple sauce. When gold was discovered in the Fraser Cannon and BC in eighteen fifty eight, it became the starting pistol for the Fraser Cannon War. You thought I was going to say gold rush, But basically what happened was European and American miners flooded into the area and got into it with the Nilaca Pamics people who had lived quite happily there for thousands of years without a problem. And when I say get into it, long story short, French miners, how do I say this, spent a little non consensual special time with the Nilaca pomos woman. And so their warriors started decapitating and collecting miners' heads and then floating them down river, which turned into a starter pistol to empty the rest of that pistol and set off a massacre. And I'm just going to leave it there because it's all pretty awful, but it does drive home the point that mining tends to surround itself with problems. And then Alberta went and found coal. A man named Samuel Wilford Gabo had been prospecting around the crows Nest passed when coal was discovered in the year nineteen hundred. Who was just sitting there, resting beneath their feet, right in the shadow of the Turtle Mountain, A coal seam is basically where you can see coal squeezed between layers of rock. The miners come in and trace it backwards, gathering up all that beautiful black carbon candy along the way. Course, one guy in his bucket can only do so much, so Gabo partnered with a man named Henry L. Frank, and together they founded the Canadian American Coal and Coke Company. Frank had been a prominent early Jewish businessman, living out in the West at a time when that wasn't really a thing yet. He had also been the first mayor of Butte, Montana. Now, commuting wasn't really a thing in nineteen hundred, so mining companies were often forced to create entire towns to house and service all the people needed to run their operations. At the time, this area was nothing but trees and bush, bush and bears, but before long it was all cleared away, setting the stage for the future site of the town of Frank Alberta. We could have found ourselves talking about Gabo Alberta today, but I'm thinking Frank had been brought in specifically for his deep pockets and his business savvy So I just don't think Gabo was winning the naming contest. Now, mining towns are known for their rough living conditions. Comfort was often an afterthought. But Frank was built different. You got your regular amenities, you know, homes and shops, but it also had things like restaurants and a two story schoolhouse. It even had four different hotels. I'm saying Frank was a real place. And the company, which I'm shortened to the CAACCC or the Kakka, was so proud of their creation that they threw an entire gala to celebrate its founding on September tenth, nineteen oh one. Over fourteen hundred people came from neighboring communities just to celebrate. There were speeches and food and events and tours of the mine. They also used it as a way to unveil the future plans for the community of Frank as a whole. There were even a few local celebrities on hand to say a word or two. All gathered again in the shadow of Turtle Mountain. Turtle Mountain sits immediately south of Frank and it will be the real celebrity of today's episode. The name is believed to have come from the Blackfoot, who called the mountain Pakauki, which is said to have meant turtle or turtle like. And yeah, the mountain did have a distinct shape which some said did resemble a turtle at a rounded hump at the top and sloping sides. And this was no slouch. It stood an impressive eight thousand feet all thrust up from the rocky mountains about seventy to eighty million years earlier. Now, Turtle Mountain was made up of limestone folded over weaker deposits of shale and sandstone, which are not the strongest base materials, and over time they k which left this steep overhang of limestone. The Blackfoot Andcutiny peoples refused to set up camp anywhere near it. They called it the mountain that moves, And yeah, the base of Turtle Mountain was surrounded by stone and debris from obvious previous rock falls, which, other than actually falling off, it is the most dangerous thing that a mountain can do to you. I read a book once that isolated all the different ways that you could die in nearby Yellowstone Park. The only chapter I could not get through was one about people playing catch with rock falls. In fact, one of the speeches at the gala that night was from representatives of the Blackfoot community, and I actually have the full transcript here. They said, I wouldn't stand there if I were you. Yep. It was a short speech and the locals didn't care for it. By April of nineteen oh three, the permanent population of frank had reached six hundred people. Of course, these are all newbies, and and nobody gets to live on the West coast for too long without realizing that occasionally it's gonna show off its jelly like demeanor. No one knew Turtle Mountain more intimately than the miners who worked within it, and occasionally they reported feeling grumblings that came within the mountain itself, like an earthquake located entirely within the mountain, and sometimes pressure and shifting rock underground caused timbers that braced the mine shafts to crack or splinter. It was bad enough that geologists had been brought in to try to assess what was going on, but they kind of sounded too much like the Blackfoot, so they got pretty much chased out of town too. They couldn't say how much the shaking and squeezing had to do with the odd rock fall, and how much of that related to cracks that it appeared across the mountain's face. See, the mountain was made of folding layers of bedrock, and some of those stress cracks were over sixty feet deep. And whatever the story, there was no ignoring the fact that strange rumblings and eerie sounds were coming from inside the mountain and it was slowly freaking people out. Our story takes place on the fateful morning of April twenty ninth, nineteen o three, in the early morning predawn hours, around four a m. A freight train had just pulled out of the mine. It was slowly making its way towards town when the crew heard a deafening rumble coming up from behind them and there was something new, something much louder than any train. The engineer didn't waste the time to cut his hand to his ear to investigate. Nope, he immediately kicked the throttle to full steam ahead, and his train crossed a bridge over the Crowsnest River, blaring its horn the entire time, but who could hear? The terrible sound coming out of the mountain became more of a high pressure howl that they said people could hear as far away as Calgary by ten after four in the morning, as townsfolk were being roused out of bed. Nope, that's not it. As townfolks were being shocked into consciousness by the sound and the vibration. A massive sound action of Turtle Mountain, thirty million cubic meters of limestone rock, weighing in at an incredible one hundred and ten million tons, suddenly gave way, broke off the peak, and it slipped down the eastern face of the mountain, all of it sliding off like the top of a layer cake, and all of it plummeting directly towards the town of frank That slab of cake weighed two hundred and twenty billion pounds, And this is the heaviest thing that we have ever discussed on this show. The section of mountain that broke free was one kilometer or thirty three hundred feet wide, half a kilometer or about fourteen hundred feet tall, and one hundred and fifty meters or almost five hundred feet deep. There was a mass of limestone boulders the size of houses thundered down and over the town people who were already awake ran from their homes and stood in silent terror as rocks flew through the air, creating explosions and ricochet damage wherever they landed. Sheer ferocity of it I could not recreate here without completely destroying your sound equipment. Imagine all of that literally washing down a mountain, scraping and rolling across the floor of the valley below, and then sliding up the opposing hill until it finally stopped, like a skateboarder dropping into a halfpipe and coming to a halt on the other side. Imagine everything you own buried under solid rock, well not solid rock, but from your vantage point beneath all of it, you would be way past caring about any distinctions. The papers reported that it completely devastated about ten square miles of the finest and most picturesque section of the Crow's Nest Pass, which was now described as more looking like the ruins of an imperial city under fourteen meters or about forty feet of debris. Homes, cottages, work camps, stables, shops, farms, businesses, people all gone, never to be seen again. Your witnesses said that it took about a h hundred seconds for the slide to reach the opposing hill, which by the math means it was traveling about one hundred and twelve kilometers or seventy miles per hour. Some places were buried as deep as forty five meters or almost one hundred and fifty feet of rock. Just try to picture twenty seven dodge caravans stacked on top of each other. And according to the math of people better at math than I, with that much stone, you could have built a wall from Victoria in British Columbia all the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, three feet wide and eighteen feet tall, and all the Canadians listening just spat out their maple syrup. You know how people say, oh, well they live on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, the path of destruction bore down on the east side of town between the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks and the Crow's Nest River. This is an area where about one hundred people lived, the local cemetery, all of the mine's buildings, the mine's entrance, about two kilometers or one point two miles of roadway, and of course the at or mentioned railroad tracks gone. Newspapers started to pin the rock slide on everything from gas escaping the mine, to an earthquake, to a volcanic eruption, to a mine explosion, and yeah, we'll come back to that. The death toll was estimated to be between seventy and ninety. However, that does not account for hungry hungry hoboes. Because of the transient nature of mining labor, it was believed that there were as many as fifty or more men camping at the base of the mountain looking for work. Twenty three very lucky people survived in cottages on the southeast edge of town that were narrowly spared by the full wrath of the slide, and three of those survivors were very young girls. And by young I mean Gladys Ennis was the youngest, at only fifteen months old. The story was when the slide hit her house, it sent it rolling, and it rolled over three times. I mean, try to imagine how battered you feel after rolling in a car accident. Now try to imagine rolling around in an entire house. The story was she had been thrown free from her house and was found choking on mud outside. Now try to imagine trying to pick up your baby when your arms have been crushed into slap bracelets. The other survivors were Fernie Watkins, who was only three, and Maryan Leech, who was only two. She was reportedly found on a pile of hay, and the story was received like a miracle. However, all of these experiences amalgamated and then boiled down into a pretty solid myth about a girl named Frankie Slide who not only survived the experience but also invented a kind of rock surfing as she rode the wave of boulders that destroyed her family home. Surfing, as we understand it, dates back to about four hundred a d out in Polynesia, but what she had apparently done was a kind of surfing that had never before been seen or ever after. Again, one of the things working against this idea was that she was an infant at the time, and other versions of her story have her found beneath the severed roof of her house or found in the arms of her dead mother. That is to say that there were two arms with a baby in them. Same with Snowball, a cat who reportedly had been seen doing his own kind of parkorep routine, narrowly avoiding the avalanche and surviving to tell the tale. Well, For one, cats don't talk, and secondly, the scale of this rock slide would have been like having fifty five million Dodge caravans driving right at you at the same time. And I know the mind will do weird things in strange circumstances, but watching a baby or a cat riding a boulder as it races by at highway speed doesn't sound right. Native legends about the mountain were more altruistic. They believed that the mountain used to be a guardian spirit that watched over the area. Modern legends had more of a ripped from the headlines vibe. For example, the Union Bank of Canada had a location in frank and a legend grew that the bank had been buried with over half a million dollars in gold, silver and cash still inside. It's about seventeen and a half million dollars today, and the legend of all this buried treasure persisted for years, even though in reality the bank survived the slide and was only demolished on purpose in nineteen eleven. I have always said that explosions are like magic erasers for evidence, which is true, but I believe the top three list in reverse order of best ways to make sure things disappear are number three space lasers, number two explosions, and coming in a number one one hundred million tons of rock. You want something irretrievably removed from the timeline, arranged to have it buried under one hundred million tons of rock. At first, it was believed that as many as sixty men had been buried in the mine itself with no hope of rescue. In reality, there were only twenty miners working the night shift at the time of the disaster. Three had been standing outside, while seventeen had been under grond. There could be no words to describe the sound of the slide as heard from within the mountain, and the men inside discovered that the entrance slash their escape had been utterly and completely blocked, and then water from the Crowsnest River began to dam up and build until it started to find its way in through secondary tunnels. So the men urgently and unsuccessfully tried to dig their way through the blocked entrance until one of the miners suggested that he knew of a seam of coal that reached the surface and working claustrophobic and dark conditions, the men crammed themselves into the snug seam and dug through the coal for hours as the air around them became increasingly toxic. Only three of the seventeen men could even still swing a pickaxe by the time they finally broke through the surface late in the afternoon ah fresh air, except the path to freedom was not lined with applause and flashbolts going off. They were actually chased right back inside by rocks that continued to fall from above, so they we had to start all over and dig a new shaft that broke through somewhere safer, and thirteen hours later, all seventeen men emerged from the mountain safe and sound, except for the three who had been outside at the time. They died immediately. Newspapers at the time began listing the names of those who were known to have died, and that list was thick with the names of children. The Leech family lost four, the Warrington family lost six. The lists read like a who's who of tragic outcomes, but the list was also divided into those who had died immediately and those who had died later from their injuries, and the injuries were almost entirely internal crush injuries and fatal contusions. And we've talked all about the dangers of crush injuries many times in previous episodes, but these were flattenings. But these were flattenings, not the same. James Warrington died from an ill described and overly gruesome thigh injury, while Lester Johnson died from having the contents of his abdomen disay displaced and then replaced by debris. And here's the thing about these deaths. We haven't really covered anything truly gruesome in a while. So here we go. Bowlders in a wash, like in a rock slide, move like a liquid. They move and flow around each other, utterly disintegrating anything they touch, including other rocks. And in the spaces between these rocks live things like homes and trees and people. But those things are quickly and unquestioningly dismantled into pieces and parts. These things live in these spaces the same way that food lives in between your jaws while you chew. So you have a beautiful home with a mountain view which always looks like a landscape painting, but today has suddenly turned into a horror movie. Would you know what to do? Well, let me say, there's really not much you can do to prevent a landslide. You can only really control your reaction to one. And here are a handful of steps that you can take to ready yourself everything except the media training that you will require as a survivor. Landslides can happen anytime across most of the planet, So the first step is to know what, if any, are local sources of your future burial. If you live near bluffs, cliffs, slopes, drainage ways, hills, mountains, or natural erosion valleys, you're gonna need to learn the warning signs, and hey, there's lots to learn. You're gonna want to be aware of any parts of the ground around you that suddenly or unexpectedly get wet, a puddles appearing on your lawn, or even water levels in nearby creeks raising or lowering. If there's something happening underground. The tectonic changes can change the function of underground springs, and it can really help make the surface world wetter and less recognizable. New cracks or bulges on your lawn, under a street, on the sidewalk, anything like that is a really good sign. Then I say, really good sign, But I mean of something awful I'll ask you, is soil retreating from buildings. You know, like if you notice a gap app suddenly appear between a building or a pole or anything that's buried in the ground, if it suddenly finds itself with a little wiggle room around it, that can be a sign that the surrounding soil is being pulled or sliding away. If you're near a house or a building and you notice all the outside stuff like patios or decks start to seem a little drunk, that can be a sign of the same, and not just down the outside. If you notice cracking in your basement or around your door, frames your home maybe ever so slightly shifting as the ground around it begins to move. And that goes for doors and windows that suddenly don't want to cooperate, can't get them open, they also won't shut. All of this can be a sign that you're framing is coming out of plumb. Now. Landslides can take thousands of years to come unhinged. So the thing about all these warning signs is speed. If you notice any one of those, I really honestly wouldn't worry too much. But if the change happens suddenly, or it's not going to stop now we're talking. You ever hear a tree fall, It always starts with just like a lone crack, Then you get another, and then an increasing chorus of cracks before it finally snaps and falls. Well, it's literally the same kind of thing here. In fact, the sounds of cracking trees or rocks knocking or rubbing against each other, or faint rumbling that slowly builds or increases, these are starter pistols to start running out of your home and away from any sloping area around you. You hear any of this, you evacuate immediately. If you can't and you're inside and things start to get really busy, If you follow my meaning, you're gonna want to curl into a ball and protect your head. But if time and your observational and park core skills allow for it, you're gonna wanna throw yourself beside the strongest piece of furniture you own. Not under longtime listeners are screaming triangle of life right now with their hands over their head, making a little triangle. The idea is you can be crushed, and furniture can be crushed, and you can be crushed underneath your furniture. However, furniture can only be crushed so far, so with you beside it, you can survive in the triangular pocket of space that is created between the flattened furniture and the falling debris being supported from beneath. Like the ceiling above you collapses, but the furniture braces the ceiling, so you live in that brace space and you hold on tight until all movement has stopped. And if you had even more time than that, you're gonna want to move to a room where the door could be closed, or a higher floor, or even the roof. These are all safer options to begin. And some people say climb a tree, but I'm gonna tell you right now, A you are not as good at climbing trees as you remember. And B do you really want to get flung off a tree into the next county by the force of a landslide? Do not be my guest. Now. If you're outdoors while this is happening, your whole job is to avoid the landslide area. Getting out of the path of a landslide or a debris flow is your best protection. And like all avalanches, I tell people you're gonna wanna run diagonally or sideways. You can't outrun an avalanche. I say the same thing about bullfights. You can only really get out of its way. Evacuate the area, avoid any flooding, avoid any downpower lines or broken utility pipes or damaged buildings. But obviously, if you have the chance to safely yell out to find out if someone is still trapped inside another building, you could help save a life by phone. I am not asking you to risk your safety when nine to one one is so easy to dial. Also, everything may have stopped, but slopes that attack this way can fall apart repeatedly for hours or days after the first event. If a boulder rolled through your home and now you think it might not be so safe, just don't go in. Do not enter. Let professionals clear your home for re entry. They've got the skills, they've got the tools, and the insurance for the job. Landslides generally happen in places that have some prior history of these things, so that is on you for buying there, unless you had a shit realtor. And again I'm not a lawyer, but you may have a justified strangling on your hands. When the slide had finished and the dust had mostly settled, a man was found laying by one of the hotels in the surviving part of town. And when I say laying, I don't mean to say that that's where he fainted after witnessing the horror. And I don't mean to say that's where he expired after bravely crawling away from the experience. I mean to say he'd been thrown there. And I keep saying a man, when really it was just a leg and most of a human hip. That portion of the victim would have been scissored between two stones and ungraciously flung to this final resting place. The rest of the body was likely reduced to something closer to jam and buried or carried away, as were most of the bodies. But very rarely you might find a foot or a finger or a nose that had been severed between rocks and flung its way into posterity away from the debris field. Fifteen year old Lili and Clark had worked late that night at the town's boarding house. Her father had been one of the men killed outside the mine, while her mother and her six siblings were buried in their home. She was the only member of her family to survive. Twelve men had been staying at a nearby work camp set up by the railroad, and all twelve had been killed, but it could have been a whole lot worse. One hundred and twenty eight more had been scheduled to arrive from British Columbia the day before, but the train never showed and so they were spared. Had they arrived, they would have nearly tripled the death toll. And that right there is a final destination prequel, if there ever was one still. A railroad brakeman named sid Choquette realized that there was a passenger train heading west from Lethbridge on its way to frank It was going to make its way round the mountain and plow head first into an immovable wall of rock covering the tracks. So sid Choquette ran two kilometers or one two point two miles across uneven rock strewn ground, through falling rocks and constant dust, all to stop the train and save those people. By the time he made it, his clothes and his boots were shredded and blood poured from his hands and shins, and he needed a week to recuperate, but it worked. It's not recorded if the engineers were more afraid of the sight of him or of the rock slide. But it worked. The train was stopped, and the Calgary Herald reported that Choquette quote had since gone crazy from the effort. It's almost impossible to understand how difficult what he did was. The paper has described any attempt to cross the field as suicidally difficult, and quote certain death for the obese. The immediate aftermath of the disaster had been chaotic and heart wrenching. Railroad workers used their heavy equipment to clear debris and search for survivors, but rescue efforts were slowed by the unimaginable scale of the destruction. So what what the hell happened? Early on the morning of April thirtieth, the day after the disaster, a special train from Fort McLeod arrived with engineers, geologists, doctors, and even the Northwest Mounted Police to help officiate the peace. And they had to stumble through that same field of rocks, some as small as bricks, others as large as a house, and it took them two hours to cover the distance. Turtle Mountain had this layer of limestone resting on top of softer materials that, after years of erosion, resulted in a top heavy and steep cliff. The easiest way to picture it may be as a kind of a peaked stack of laundry. As the laundry at the bottom of the pile begins to erode, there's less for the top layers to cling to, and the pile collapses. Cracks have been forming along the eastern face of the mountain, which is how geology says, I wouldn't stand there if I were you. And the biggest problem with cracks in the face of a mountain is that they let water flow in. See, you get water in the rock, which remains a liquid until it freezes and then thaws over and over, growing and shrinking and all weakening the stone from within. They had an unusually warm winter followed by warm days and cold nights, and that's exactly what happened. They had had heavy snowfall in March, followed by a warmer than normal April, and the night before the disaster, it was said to be the coldest night of the winter, with the overnight temperatures falling below eighteen degrees celsius or zero fahrenheit. Miners inside the mountain had been reporting that things had begun to feel squeezed down there. Even the coal itself was torsioning and breaking from stresses that were put on the scene like it was mining itself. The snow melting and refreezing weakened the mountain, resulting in expansion of the fissures, causing the limestone to break off under its own weight and avalanche down the mountain. Engineers said the mountain was still lined with fishers, but that it was safer now. But the railroad, on the other hand, said that the town was about to be completely obliterated. So it came down to the premiere of the province, Fred Haltane, who looked back and forth between the two and agreed with the more worried looking faces and ordered Frank evacuated. The amount of material that left and flattened out across the valley floor is it's shocking. It's like it is stunning, and geologists debated forever how it was even possible for the slide to travel as far as it did. First, there was the air cushion theory. This was this idea that there was a layer of air that became trapped between the massive rock and the mountain itself, which could only be compressed so much, and because of that, it allowed the rock to move farther than expected, almost levitating along. They even invented the term debri avalanche to try to describe what had happened here. The other theory that arose was called acoustic fluidization. You ever see people put goo on a speaker and then make it dance, you know, the whole non Antonian fluid mess, like we talked about way back in our Boston malassicre episode. In this case, you get enough rock and stone all moving together and it creates this kind of seismic by a bbrational energy, which reduces friction and causes the debris act more like a fluid than a jumble of solid rocks. The best way to understand what had been happening inside the mountain until the actual release could be helped. If you were a fan of The Simpsons, you may remember an episode where doctors found out that mister Burns was riddled with so many contradictory diseases that they kind of reached this weird balancing point and they were all kept in check and it's the same idea here. They believed that the mountain had been in a strange state of equilibrium for so long that eventually deformations caused by the mining activities disturbed everything and contributed to the slide, But the Canadian American Coal and Coke Company, the Okaka Kaka, they disagreed. In the months that followed, residence of Frank showed an incredible capacity to overcome unimaginable tragedy. With support of volunteers and relief efforts that poured in from across Canada, residents began rebuilding. The railway was repaired within three weeks, and the mine was quickly reopened, and to everyone's amazement, a final survivor had been found alive inside the mountain, Charlie the horse. Charlie survived over a month underground, feeding on bark from support logs, but sadly, rescuers were so over the moon about his miraculous survival that they celebrated by taking him out and cramming him full of oats and booze, and he died. Turtle Mountain still represented a slide risk to Frank, so the provincial government ordered all buildings in the potential impact zone to be moved or destroyed. Canada's government doesn't play. The Imperial Hotel, which had been built there in nineteen oh two and really became the heart of Frank, was moved all the way to Vulcan, Alberta, one hundred kilometers away, and it remains there to this day. In nineteen twenty two, a road construction crew trying to open up more road uncovered a home that had been buried and believed to belong to the out for Clark family. Inside the home, six more bodies were recovered. The need for construction and repair workers doubled the town's population to almost twelve hundred by nineteen oh six. As the years went by, the coal started to dry up, Fluctuating prices and labour strikes and underground accidents all took their toll, and eventually all the mines on the Alberta side of the pass closed after safer, open pit mines opened up in British Columbia. Coal production that Frank peaked in nineteen ten, but the mine itself only remained open until nineteen seventeen. At some point, the cost of extracting coal passed the cost of selling it, and the mine became unprofitable. It happens to the best of them. As for the mountain, the slide really took a chunk out of it, and now two new peaks had appeared, each sitting about twenty one hundred meters tall. In the nineteen seventies, Alberta's government took steps to protect Frank's cea of debris and its public profile as an internationally recognized cemetery, but the closure of the mine resulted in a long standing decline of population, and Frank ceased to be an independent community in nineteen seventy nine. Today Frank is home to about two hundred residents. It was amalgamated into the municipality of Crowsness Pass. Scientists say the next big collapse is a when, not an if. The South peak is considered the most likely to fall. They predict that whatever happens will be smaller than the nineteen oh three slide, and it won't happen anytime soon. But rocks do continue to fall to this day. Ten thousand pounds of rock fell in two thousand and one, but no one cared. In two thousand and three, a rock slide actually covered a section of the track again and this time the freight train made contact, but no one was hurt, but the train. The site became a provincial historical landmark and the province built a roadside turnout to accommodate crowds of curious sight seekers back in nineteen forty one. And yeah, the entire rockfield has been designated as a burial ground. And looking back, of all the disasters that we've covered, only three were so bad that the very ground they took place on became designated as burial grounds, this one being the fourth. They also opened the Frank Slide Interpretive Center. It's kind of an education center, kind of a museum. It helps the curious to learn more about what happened here. And this thing gets one hundred thousand visitors a year. And if you're thinking of visiting and you like a little light sacrilege, you're going to love the Tour de Frank Bouldering Festival. It's held right over the town site again, which is considered a graveyard. And not just that, they also have run the rocks. Remember the story of the brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway that ran all the way across the debris field to save that oncoming train. Well, imagine a professionally set up trail run slash scramble over the same rocks that he did all those years ago. Today, the mountain is continuously studied for any changes in stability, using state of the art monitoring systems to create an early warning system for anyone in the area in the event of another slide. For the most part, the town of Frank has moved on from its disastrous pass, but each spring has the new rains flow down its peaks. Every here and there a small amount of rock falls, just to remind the people that they live in the shadow of the mountain that moves. The Frank Rock slide disaster of nineteen oh three remains one of the most devastating and tragic events in the history of Alberta. People said it was the worst disaster that has ever befallen any community in Western Canada, natural or otherwise. The worst natural disaster or most deadly was the Newfoundland hurricane of seventeen seventy five, which killed four thousand people. Now Alberta will never see a hurricane, but it is no stranger to disaster. They get floods, hel storms, earthquakes, avalanches, tornadoes and of course, landslides. What most people remember about the Frank slide is less about the importance of preparedness and safety and more about our human capacity to come together when it really matters. The town was gone, but only off the map. The people of Frank will never forget. If you've ever lost something close to you, you know that people and even things they stay alive in our memories, towns included. If you are a regular listener to this show, I'm going to ask you to consider becoming a supporter. You 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 this thing going. Now, before I tell you about why Patreon is such a good idea, 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 and just make a one time donation. And for those of you who do, I really appreciate you from a deep place. Now, if you had been listening to this on Patreon, you would have heard us discuss British bands being destroyed by American lawyers. We talked about how I used to write idiot letters to companies and that time that I successfully conned an industrial spring company, also the time that it resulted in my being investigated as a possible threat to Canadian aviation. We looked at the oldest functioning companies in history. We talked about the most powerful earthquake in Canadian history. We spent some time on the Appalachian Trail, hurting ourselves on the Mohusak notch, and we took a look at a town that will be on fire for the next few centuries, which we will do an entire episode on, and what happens when disaster tourism meets shotguns. And I always have to say that I think personally getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com. Slash Funeral Kazoo and a quick but heartfelt shoutout to Oliver Smith, Michael Kalenda, Heather Roberts, Zach Hudson, Sarah Nunez, Daniel Dylon, Mariann Breckinridge, Janelle Ross, Lauren Coarini, James Russo, Alina Yakamenko, Megan Fincher, Aurora Marie, Isabella Rodriguez, Matthew Jenda, Mika Kaufman, and the Great Cheese Fish. Thank you all for helping support me on Patreon. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com and I'll pre apologize because yeah, I'm unfocused and I'm a little mentally ill, and so I'm a little slow to respond. But I love getting your messages. Older episodes can 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. But again I also always say, if you could spare the money and had to chew whose I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations and To date, they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, there is an awful lot of things to hate about driving, and I think that we cover all of them in our next episode. It's the Interstate five dust disaster of nineteen ninety one. We'll talk soon. SAFETYGA goes off and thanks for listening.