The Interstate-5 Dustsaster of 1991 | Episode 65

If you got something in your eye, you should rinse it with water or eye drops to try to wash it out. Fair warning, there are not enough over the counter eye drops in the world that would help you with today's story. Hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizar and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn all the ways that your car wants to kill You, will learn which member of the original Thanksgiving Feast ended up with their head on a pike. And we'll find out what happens when you played Rock, Paper scissor bumper Plow. If you were listening to the Sun Patreon, you would also learn learn about landing planes on highways how bizarre the Mandela effect is. We look at the weird, dark origins of Thanksgiving. We found out why trip Advisor and Yelp reviewers hate Plymouth Rock so much. We look into why people suck at driving, and we cover the history of the Cannonball run. 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, show the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. What's your least favorite thing about driving? Me too. You should talk to my wife. Her verbal fury towards her fellow drivers is unparallel. I asked her what her least favorite thing was about driving? Well, and for reference, this is a woman who one time had a spider dropped down web from her rearview mirror, and instead of just pulling over and fistfightings, then she swayed and rocked the car back and forth until it eventually swung out the window, still on its web. But if there's anything she hates more than spiders, it's slow people, people who take forever to make left or right turn, people who don't signal, people who are oblivious to the traffic right behind them. But also, somehow tailgaters didn't have any really strong feelings about fellow motorist cars exploding. But still there's lots to hate about driving this year, According to to research, you know that idealized version of driving that you see in car commercials where you're traveling down a winding road overlooking a pristine, cloudless coast without another driver in sight. Well, it's obvious bulk, and seventy percent of drivers double thumbs down are agreed. They feel that the old idea of the magic of driving is some kind of nineteen under its Kumbaya nonsense, a car is nothing more than an awful way to get from point A to B, and those are just the disenchanted ones. Thirty one percent of drivers, Hey, driving Driving with traffic is widely considered to be the one single human activity most likely to destroy your sanity, and that is coming from psychologists. Obviously, driving can be infuriating. Ninety percent of drivers have seen an act of road rage, and my guess is that other ten percent just weren't paying enough attention to what was going on around them and never clued in as the driver behind them was slipping into a blood wrath. Someone is shot and killed by another driver every sixteen hours, and someone is told to go act themselves every twelve seconds, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the American Psychological Association, and Triple A, the top three reasons people lose it are alcohol, emotional stress, and poor time management. People are late and they need to get somewhere fast, and they do not care about your feelings anymore than you care about theirs, so they try to intimidate you and make you care by dragging you into their sloppy, ill timed drama. Sitting in traffic day after day can really do a number on you physically, emotionally, psychologically, financially. I mean, there's that endless strain on your wallet. There's the car exhaust and the noise pollution, and all of it increases your anxiety, your stress, your blood pressure, even pack and knee pain. Oh my god, what kind of automotive apocalypse are we getting into here? Yeah? I can hear it. Well, we will get there. You may also be asking yourself, are we back in California? I mean, weren't we just there not that long ago? Well? Yes, and yes, and we'll be back again. But today we've returned by request from a very special listener who showed up descending from high above like an angel with an unexpected act of generosity, and I would very very much like to repay her by sharing a story that she already knows all too well, but in a way that she's never heard. So why don't we start with a drive. I know I've said an awful lot about how Americans hate driving, which a doesn't really explain the amount of it that they end up doing, but B is completely explained by the amount they end up doing. I only really have records up until twenty twenty two, but according to Car and Driver, Americans drove almost two hundred and eighty billion miles. Like in March alone, Americans easily lay down twice as much rubber as any other country. Before the Interstate system was introduced, traffic congestion cost billions of dollars, and it led to tens of thousands of deaths and millions of injuries every year. The idea of a highway system connecting all the states seamlessly freed America's veins and arteries, making everything flawless and beautiful at long last, Well for you, Patreon listeners, I am about to share and then dispel a very cool piece of American lore when I said nobody drives like the United States. The US has nearly three million kilometers or one point eight million miles of asphalt. They have the biggest roadway system in the world. It is literally twice as expansive as China or India, and both of those countries have more than four times the population. And part of this system runs through California's San Joaquin Valley. It sits pretty much in the center of the state, tucking between the Sierra Nevadas to the east, the Coast Ranges to the west, the Teya Chappie Mountains to the south, and the Cascade Range to the north. It's long and flats about seven hundred and twenty five kilometers four hundred and fifty miles long and about fifty miles wide, and packed full of small little towns and communities which mostly serve the agricultural industry. Oh yes, the San Jua Kingen Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, so obviously that makes California's agricultural industry the largest in the country. It gets hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. And back in the eighteen hundreds, as the valley was being plowed into farmland for the first time, they needed water, like a lot of water, so they built dams and diversions from nearly every lake and water source available, and they needed it because this part of the country is home to some of the thirstiest crops around Almonds, pistachios, figs, grapes, oranges, wheat, and that's just a little bit of a list of two hundred and fifty different plant crops that they grow there. Of course, it's also home, unsurprisingly to some of California's worst water management problems. California is a state known for water management problems. Tillwy Lake was the biggest lake west of the Mississippi until about one hundred and forty years ago, where nearly every river, stream and creek that fed into Tilarry Lake was pointing somewhere else. And then by eighty years ago it was gone. Everyone stuck in their straw and drank the milkshake until it was all sucked up. You ever read the Grapes of Wrath. A family from Oklahoma loses it all to the Great Depression and the dust storms and joins in with a caravan of families looking for a better life in California. While that power of California is exactly where we are. People called all these refugees. Oakis it didn't really matter where they came from. But here's the thing, things were not better in California. Decades of soil erosion and poor farming practices created dust storms, same as the rest of the country. We just actually talked about this in our very recent Grasshop Apocalypse episode, in case you were wondering how that was pronounced. Native grasses and vegetations stabilize soil, but farmers have to rip all that out and just start turning the soil over for planting. Go a few too many years without enough rain, though, and all that plowed soil starts to erode and blow away. What happened in the San Joaquin Valley wasn't nearly as awful as what people faced on the plains, but to make the point, it didn't need to be. Our story takes place the twenty ninth of November nineteen ninety one, the day after Thanksgiving for non American listeners. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday. It celebrates the story of a feast between fifty two early English pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Did that's right, the same Plymouth of Plymouth rock together with nineteen Wampanoa natives who just called it a rock. It all happened during the autumn of sixteen twenty one. The story goes, the friendly Wampanoac people taught struggling colonists how to survive in the new world. Then everyone got together to celebrate with a feast to give thanks for not starving to death. Another story has it that the governor of Massachusetts Bay at the time, a guy named John Winthrop, declared Thanksgiving as a day to celebrate the slaughter of Piquat men, women, and children during a massacre in Mystic, Connecticut in sixteen thirty seven. But the story continues that Abraham Lincoln himself was all blarf. Nobody wants to hear all that. Just stick with a happy starving turkey dinner story. The part you do not hear about in history class and holiday specials is the part where this same Wampanoag people who saved the pilgrims from death now found themselves at war with their former dinner mats. Maybe it had something to do with the colonists impaling the severed head of the Wampanoag leader on a spike, or maybe how they left it there on display for the next twenty five years. If you think you hate your Thanksgiving guests and cannot wait to see them leave, you don't have to feel that bad. It is a very very old tradition. In time, ninety percent of the Wampa Noak people were wiped out by European diseases. So yeah, I guess it boils down to the idea that it is remembered today as the first Thanksgiving, even if people disagree on the actual date and what actually happened, and no one at the time called it that. That would have been like a soldier calling it World War One like the first one. Now, my Patreon listeners just got a whole thing about the weird backstory of Thanksgiving and we took a quick crap on Plymouth Rock Well, not us Yelp and trip Advisor users, but in a nutshell for the average politically disengaged just trying to get by citizen, Thanksgiving is an occasion to give thanks, to feel thankful. Showing gratitude provides some surprising health benefits. It's linked to emotional wellbeing and improve sleep and even heart health, and we could all use a little more of that in our lives. Case in point, I'm thankful for you my listeners. Now while I'm thinking about it, feel free to drop me a line and let me know. If you hate Thanksgiving more than driving, then yeah, we celebrate Thanksgiving and Canada too, but we hold hours on the second Monday in October instead of the fourth Thursday in November. A because it just adds to the confusion, and B because we're a more northern country so our harvest season ends earlier. It's just on brand. But before we leave the sixteen hundreds, let me tell you that turkeys ran wild across New England back then. There were so many people used to use them as pillows and footrests. So when people ask why turkey, the answer is dead simple. They were cheap and abundant there. I can't imagine that you thought you were going to learn anything about turkeys today. Well you're welcome. Oh wait, some of you think I am about to tell you about how not to burn to death while deep frying a Thanksgiving bird. I mean they're awkward, and they're unwieldy, and they're tricky to goo call the way through, and most people barely handle one more than once, maybe twice, in a year. So my short advice is just dial nine to one and wait, but no, there's no poultry based disaster to be had today. In fact, you may wish it was. No, we are going to talk about something much worse. Did you know that tripaa actually does Thanksgiving travel forecasts? Here is a quote by almost all metrics. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is pretty much the worst day of the year to fly. In twenty nineteen, not twenty twenty. Obviously, twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, it was the single busiest day of the entire year in terms of US passengers based on TSA data. You will always hear comparisons between airports and Dante's different circles of a hell this time of year. But if you really want to get in touch with hidden feelings of frustration and rage, a road trip is the only way to travel. The vast majority of Thanksgiving travelers pack up their car and hit the open road, along with about fifty million other Americans, all doing the same thing, turning the nation's highways and byways into conga lines of head and tail lights. And to celebrate this occasion, we will be spending our time mired in traffic on the I five. The I five Interstate Highway five is said to be the busiest and perhaps the most significant highway on the enti west coast of North America. The I five runs from Canada all the way to Mexico, but California's mostly only think of it for the section the Bisex the San Joaquin Valley. It's said to be one of the better ways to get between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now, I live close to the busiest and most deadly stretch of highway on the planet, but from my point of view, what the I five hexan regular body count, it more than makes up for. With the view, It's no Pacific Coast Highway, but compared to the endless box stores and jacknev tractor trailers of my local highway system, it's easy to be romantic about scenic California highways. The desert landscape in this part of the country is hypnotizing, but the weather was less desirable. The year, like we said, was nineteen ninety one, and the San Joaquin Valley hadn't had had any real rain since nineteen eighty five, and those six years under the California sun made everything a little dry and dusty. Any time ago windy, dry ass fields would fan the horizon with bands of dust, and that's exactly what happened around Coalinga, about one hundred and sixty miles to two hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of San Francisco. On this day, winds have been dusting up to sixty miles or one hundred kilometers an hour, and these high surface went blew through the San Joaquin Valley. The Mohave Desert, even across the La Basin was a little all over the place, and all this wind turned up masses of dust which swept across the valley, and all of this dust made eyesight a grainy and painfully unrewarding endeavor. And around two thirty in the afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere, all of these winds and gusts vultron together into a full power, sustained blast of dirt and dust. There was no warm They created a blinding, silvery white curve of dust, and from a driver's point of view, it was an incredible thing to see then not see, as drivers found themselves plunged into a world of swirling darkness, and by the time they saw brake lights in front of them, it was already too late. Visibility had dropped to zero. Along a one mile or one and a half kloonder stretch of the highway. People couldn't see more than a foot in front of their windshields, and they were engulfed one by one, entering into a world of confusion, speed, and inevitability. Peter Harvey had been driving with his family when visibility bottomed out. They tapped into the car in front of them, which immediately brings that warm rush of anxiety owing that your insurance is about to go up, and all the hassle of exchanging information with someone in a dust storm. When he heard the heavy, intermittent skid of truck tires coming up, quickly they looked back and they saw a big ring completely loaded down with tens of thousands of pounds of pay ails, and it was all bearing right down on them. In a situation like this, if you've got your wits about you, it's always best to just take charge and communicate your needs to keep people safe. But screaming can also motivate people to leave too, which they did. They grabbed their kids and ran to the side of the road. Others were not so fortunate, as the truck flowed through a row of cars in a flurry of car curtains and hang Big Smith had been driving a figure it loaded down with forty seven thousand pounds of the road of paper. When his view went from full color to kind of monochromatic to full of darkness, he managed to pull his rig off the road, which was mostly guesswork as to where that we can be, and he said a little prayer as he waited to get hit. He could hear cars colliding all around him, and as the dusting wren slowed for a second, he could make out some smoke from a fire that was rising up from behind. See yeah, several cars had burst into flames, which glass panic and other cars to penned in by the melee to escape. Vehicles collided, they spun out of control, they rolled, and it tumbled over. It looked like something on a magnet. If you listen to the log truck scene that just listen to the log truck scene from Final Destination. I'm thinking this is what it sounded like. And you might remember from our Kalamazoo pile up episode that once a calamity like this starts, it does not stay. Marriage to just that run lane. The naturally curious and gaki cannot help themselves. Most of the crashes happened in the southbound lanes, and before you know it, there was a twenty car pilot beginning in the northbound lines. And normally you might expect just one giant line of cars and trucks plombing into each other, drawing in new vehicles every few seconds. But on this day, a dust was so bad that the accidents began in clusters. Five different collision groupings began along this stretch of road, So you didn't really want to drive the eleven hours to visit Grandma at Thanksgiving. So you see a giant dust storm on the road and you think, maybe I'll just tuck in there for a bit. Would you know what to do? Investigators have determined that people entering a blinding wall of whatever immediately separate themselves into one of two groups. There are those people who slow down because they can't see, and then there are people who keep their speed up because they don't want to get rammed from behind. Of course, the people from group A get plowed in by Group B, and actually group B also gets plowed in by people from group B. Group b may not be the type of people who say, Lord, take the wheel and just close their eyes, gun the gas and somehow place responsibility in God's hands, but they will get the exact same results, and in this scenario, God is nothing more than a giant child going room room and smashing all his toy cars. If you find yourself driving headfirst into a dirty wall of low visibility, here is my first tip. Avoid it if possible. Well, thanks for listening everyone, No, I'm just kidding. If you found yourself entering serious fog or smoke or even a dust storm, first thing, immediately check all sides of your for other vehicles. Just let yourself know where they are and start slowing down. You're gonna want to pull off the roadway as soon as possible, not as quick as possible. There is a difference, and I mean pull off, not just over. I mean keep pulling over until that you can tell that you've actually left paved portion of a roadway and now you're onto something else. After that, you're gonna want to hunker down, set your emergency brake, and forget the regular break. Because here's where it gets weird. Experts say you should turn your lights off I mean, obviously you want headlights, especially when you can't see anything but your lights, especially high beams or basically every brand new light bulb for the last five years that's made out of some kind of crazy ultra bight led will actually cause glare on fog or dust that makes it much harder to see. And the strange part is other drivers sometimes will see that light and drive to it like a moth to a flame, because they think somehow maybe it's a break in the storm. So, like I said, stay in your vehicle, keep your seat bell fuckled. If anyone hits you from behind, you'll be glad that you did. And now you just sit and wait for the obstruction to blow over or want another car to smash into you, whichever comes first. I believe that you're going to be okay, stay alert, keep your pick under control, and remember the simple phrase pull aside, stay alive. With every passing minute, more and more vehicles entered into the blinding dust cloud, not knowing that they were driving into immovable heaps of burning twisted metal. You couldn't even see flames through the dust, and they probably couldn't hear the sound of cars exploding over the sound of their own screaming. A thirty one year old woman had been traveling in the southbound lanes with her husband and her two young kids. Shortly after being developed by the cloud of blinding dust, they plowed into a jackkneck tractor trailer that had lost control and had now covered several lanes of the interstate. Their car wedged under the tractor trailer, right beside the fuel tank, which ruptured and burst into flames, taking them with it. The young woman suffered from catastrophic third degree burns while trying to save her family from the inferno, while more and more cars continued pounding into the back of the eye. Richard Bruck passed through the dust storm like a slow speed waking nightmare. He said, we passed all kinds of terrible scenes, trucks on fire, cars on fire bodies in the road. He said it looked like warm and he had been to warmth. He stopped his car, which was immediately struck by three other cars and a pickup truck. Then the shadow of a big rig trek or trailer appeared through the dust, and Bruck knew he was dead, But at the last moment the trucker veered off into a ditch, destroying his vehicle but saving the lives of everyone in his path. Visibility was near zero, but according to the California Highway Patrol and witnesses, a lot of trucks and vehicles just continued to barrel through the scene, doing fifty miles for eight eighty kilometers in an hour. It was an eerie scene, with burning cars and trailers smashed in trucks scattered along the highway. Survivors climbed from their vehicles, bloodied and then immediately covered with sand Rick Schachabauer said of his experience, we were running to get away from the freeway, but you couldn't see things. You could only hear things. Cliff Emerson had been driving with his family when they ran into the first dust cloud. They slowed and they managed to get through the entire thing in one piece, only to immediately enter into a second dust cloud. The door number two had been hiding an unloving tractor trailer directly in their path, which they slammed into. He immediately turned his head and witnessed another vehicle also slamming in the truck, which turned the head of that driver a little too much. Within seconds, cars began crashing into them, and before long they were completely trapped inside of their car, which had crumpled around them. But they managed to escape by crawling through a window and ran through the apocalyptic nightmare. Along the way, they did get to see more than a few people who were unlikely to be filling out an insurance clam if you follow my meaning, most of the dead on the road that day had been incinerated in their vehicles. Oh, they also got to see kind of like an art piece. It was this mass of six vehicles which were all burned, but they were all tangled together into a heap. But they couldn't appreciate anything. They were in complete shock. One man was seen clearly having survived falling out of a flaming car, but he was just pacing around on the road, going on about how much he needed to find his briefcase. Dozens of cars and trucks laid in burning, entangled heaps. Some were completely blackened, and some of them were surrounded with pools of melted chrome from bunkers and things. Others exploded. And this is important because it's one thing to survive crashing into a vehicle. It's quite another when a piece of a vehicle, removes an arm or imbeds itself in your torso. There were parts of vehicles and personal possessions laying everywhere. Radio there, hair spray there, hair of jeans, a child shoe, a bottle of dish soap. Roger Vasulke was returning to his home in Lancaster with his two voice when he suddenly couldn't see, became entangled in a moving pilet of six cars and was struck from behind. Repeatedly flying from the dust, and after being spun and pelted with rocks and debris, they found themselves facing the wrong way and surrounded by the sound of crashing metal. He managed to pull off the road without getting clipped, but as he pulled his kids from the car, he witnessed a man and woman leaving their cars, only to be immediately killed by other traffic in a game of rock, paper scissor bumper plow. The man had been struck and his body was thrown into the air and carried away by the storm, while the lady was full body tackled by a wall of flaming car parts that dragged her down a road to spell before full body pinning her into the side of a truck. Another man bravely left his kids in his truck to try to help some one trapped in another car, only to find himself impaled against the trailer hitch on the back of his own truck. Drivers were astounded by how little time they had to react. Again, by the time you saw the brake lights, it was already too late to stop. While without thinking, Fasulki grabbed the couple's daughter and pulled her off the road with his own kids and ran for a ditch. It was the only protection that they could find. And amid the wreckage that day, the Highway Patrol said nine bodies had been found burned beyond recognition, and others were only discovered as cars were pried apart by tow trucks. Mister Fasulke and other surviving traveler and other surviving travelers helped carry the injured, helped to care and other surviving travelers helped to carry the injury to ambulances, ambulances and helicopters. And even after the rescue workers had finally arrived, And even after rescue workers had arrived, cars were still crashing and people were still being killed, they had to peer through the swirling dust. They tried to see the stills. They had to peer through the swirling dust to try to identify still smoldering vehicles. Engineers and rescue workers who'd served who'd served in the Gulf War, Engineers and rescue workers who had served in the Gulf War, who had served in the Gulf Ward devsl who had served in gulf Ford Desert. God damn it, who had served in Gulf Ford Gulf War desert operations said it reminded them of the Highway of Death that got fire bombed. Reminded them of the infamous Highways of Death that got fire bombed by Allied troops. Trucks were a jackknife. Trucks were jackknifed on both sides of the roads. Trucks were jackknife, cars were upside down. Some vehicles looked like they had run into a brick wall and caught fire, and emergency personnel spent hours sifting through flattened and charred vehicles searching for victims. The Highway Patrol closed one hundred mile or one hundred and sixty kilometers stretch of the interstate from Bakersfield all the way to Los Banos as the rescue and clean up continued. One drivers one drive up, just chose to sit in the cab of his smashed up big rig, which had been smashed together with eight other cars, two other trucks, two r v's, and all of it crumpled into a massive heap and sprinkled with glass and car parts. He decided immediately he was more than happy to wait till morning and then trying to get out, to wait till morning and then try to get out. Both a fire truck and an ambulance were involved in Both a fire truck and an ambulance were both were both caught up in collisions while still trying to reach the site. Both an ambulance and a fire truck also were involved in the collisions. Were also involved in the collisions, just trying to get there, just trying to reach, just trying to reach the injured and the injured were and the and the and the injured were eventually taken to a triage area was about a mile east of the freeway. They found an area that had actually been planted the year before, and it managed to get skipped over by most of the dust. But the people they just sat there pale as ghosts and shaking with shock. And when I say pale as ghosts, yes, because they've been scared nearly to death, but also because they'd just survived a car apocalypse and a mass of dust storm. They looked like nine eleven survivors after exiting the dust cloud in New York City. One man was sitting there trying to talk, but words wouldn't come out. It took hours for rescuers to find all the victims in the ongoing dust storm. The most seriously injured, about twenty people in critical condition, were taken to Fresno by helicopter. The less seriously injured were bust for treatment at six different hospitals in Coalinga and Fresno. More than a dozen vehicles had burned down to the metal frames. Others had been smashed in from all sides, but others looked like they'd just been in a simple fender bender. The worst of it lasted about four hours, but about half of all the collisions and all of those that resulted in fatalities, occurred between two twenty three and two twenty nine p m. In just six minutes. At least one hundred and sixty four vehicles were involved. Including eleven tractor trailers, and of the three hundred and forty nine people involved in the collisions, one hundred and fifty one were injured and seventeen died. The Fresno County Coroner's Office released the identities of fifteen of the seventeen victims, who ranged in age from one to seventy years old, but the two other victims were burned beyond recognition. So what the hell happened? Well, the San Joaquin Valley is the dustiest in the fall in autumn, but dusty enough to stop traffic now, not really anything that Dusty's pretty rare, but nineteen ninety one was extraordinarily dusty. On average, the Coalinga area gets about twenty centimeters or seven and a half inches of rain in a year, but in nineteen ninety one, only half a centimeter or about a fifth of an inch, fell between April and December. Turns out, nineteen ninety one was the most severe of the last six in terms of drought, and many fields along the interstate had been plowed, but they remained unplanted because of the drought, and the lack of vegetation left the dry soil unprotected from wind all that plowing just loosened the soil and it made it more available to be kicked up by the winds. And high surface winds were a result of intense upper tropospheric downward motion that transported high momentum air downward where it then splattered out on the surface. You probably need more explanation, but I am very sorry, but this is not a meteorology podcast. We're not going to get into quasi geostrophic processes or mesoscale circulations. If you don't know the difference between geostrophic and agiostrophic wind coming into this story, don't worry about it. There is no test at the end. Simply put, boundary layer mixing associated with solar heating of the Earth's surface generated high surface winds. That's all. Even more simply put, knock knock, who's there an inevitable dust storm? Winter rains hadn't started yet, and the soil conditions were dry than usual, And all those high surface winds were related to larger scale dynamics associated with the jet streak. You've heard of, the jet streams. Just this all powerful wind that decides all of our weather for us. Now, just think what if it had fingers Mike Kaplan is a research professor of meteorology at the Desert Research Institute's Division of Atmospheric Sciences in Reno, Nevada, and wind is kind of his thing. He said, This planet is loaded with places where dust storms naturally develop, places with dry climates, with exposed soils, and not a lot of vegetation, not much, unlike the I five corridor. The area of the highway near Coalinga in the San Joaquin Valley is usually prime farmland, but in nineteen ninety one, a lot of farmers decided just not to bother planning. There was just no reason, which left long stretches of dusty soil right beside the highway without crops to hold down the dust and dirt. He went on to say that the I five disaster was a fairly isolated event. It just happened to hit one of the nation's busiest highways during one of the busiest holiday traffic days of the year. The closest weather station was at the Lamoor Naval Air Station at the time of the disaster. It tracked winds of forty eight miles or seventy eight kilometers per hour, which for comparison seventy four miles or one hundred nineteen kilometers is the starting line for Category one hurricane speeds, which is only one third faster. Fog had led to previous pilops on the same stretch of Interstate five, and there was actually a dust storm just a few days earlier which prompted drivers to just pull over until the wind died down Pisa cake, but not always high winds, dust storms, and fog have caused dozens of deadly accidents over the years up until this disaster. The record holder for worst accident of this kind belonged to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where thirteen people had been killed in an eighty three vehicle pil up on Interstate seventy five in heavy fog that the others were injured. Eight people were killed in a fog related crash involving forty eight vehicles in nineteen eighty eight, and again the next year in a sixty nine vehicle pile up. Back in nineteen seventy eight, seven people were killed and forty seven injured in three fog bound chain reactions on the I five. But nothing compared to a little something called the Great Bakersfield dust Storm, which lasted three full bays. During December of nineteen seventy seven, gale force winds strong enough to demove houses and blast the actual paint off cars pummeled the San Joaquin Valley so hard people thought it was the end of the world. People honestly believed that a nuclear prolomb must have gone off. An unusual low pressure system off the coast collided with the high pressure system over the Rockies, which ended up killing five and coused thirty four million dollars in damages. And this could very easily be its own episode. And that's the thing. Parts of the West ga the United States have been in a persistent trout for nearly ten years. Combo that with grazing cattle, all lots of development, off road vehicles, the lack of vegetation, the lack of planting. Then yeah, dust storms become both more likely and more severe. In July of twenty eleven, a storm hit Tucson that was reportedly one hundred miles or one hundred and sixty kilometers wide, an entire mile or one and a half kilometers high, and had wind gusts that blasted the landscape. Had seventy miles or one hundred and twelve kilometers an hour. Last summer, more than half of the United States was in a moderate or worse drought, while more than twenty percent was in extreme drought. Drought may just be part of a new normal, but government agencies have taken action to try to prevent events like the I five pile up from happening again. Farmers now plant cover crops to help reduce dust. Automated weather stations with visibility monitors have been installed along the the interstate, and when visibility is low, drivers are warned by digital message boards. In fact, I've heard the claim that low visibility from wildfire smoke is a more common problem. Well, imagine that the question on everybody's mind, and in dozens of court cases to follow, was whether the storm appeared too quickly for anyone to do anything about it. According to confusing statistics available from the Federal Highway Administration, there are around six million vehicle crashes every year, and about twenty percent of them are weather related. Nearly five thousand people are killed and over four hundred and eighteen thousand people are injured in weather related crashes per year. Weather conditions like fog, rain, snow, and dust present their own sets of challenges for drivers. But according to the numbers of just weather related crashes, fog makes up three percent, snow and ice makes up about forty seven percent, and rain and wet pavement make up about one hundred and sixteen percent of weather related crashes. And it only gets more confusing from there. The one thing that is clear is that dust and sandstorms don't even get a mention. This is the kind of weather related phenomena that people aren't even looking for. Victims and relatives of the deceased filed thirty four individual lawsuits against assorted government agencies, and all but one were settled out of court. It was another case of the state paying millions to settle suits just so long as they never had to acknowledge or accept any legal responsibility. And it's a weird position to be in. In nineteen ninety one, they didn't have any kind of technology to warn people about immediate dangers the moment they crop up, so it's kind of hard to blame the authorities. But as someone who's been alive long enough to see how things really work, I just I couldn't see this ever going any farther than but your honor. The dust storm was an act of God followed by a gavel banging followed by a dismissal. But there's just something so aching and awful about potential future liability that somehow it just makes it better to pay out. It's all pretty salacious. Still, in the end, all that really matters are the seventeen people who lost their lives and the unknown number of people who lost their minds in the dusaster. Authorities described the Interstate five dusaster as the worst highway pile up in California history, and possibly the worst in the nation in terms of dead and injured. But what we know for sure is that this was the single largest multi vehicle pile up in U S history. I'll tell you when I was only a few years old, my mom had been driving on highway for a one here in Ontario. It's again widely recognized as the most dangerous in the world. It was Christmas Eve, and I think I was maybe two, and the same thing happened there. But she drove into a whiteout and dozens and dozens of cars went flying every which way, including ours, and my mom freaked out because I had been thrown out of my seat and she couldn't find me, and that event freaked her out enough that she never drove on a highway ever again. But she's unique, though. Most people just take their trauma and climb back behind the wheel ready for more. We already said that driving is the worst thing that you can do for your mental health as far as regular daily activities go, and when I was in one of my darker phases, I did consider actually giving up driving because I was worried about what would become of me if some apple ever managed to make me actually actively lose my mind. But I am still here and I will be for many years to come. If you are a regular listener, I ask you to consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fill 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 help keep the show and frankly, my brain alive. But before I tell you about Patreon, if you're into it but you're not looking for a whole relationship, you can just visit, buy me a coffee, dot com slash doomsday and make a one time donation. And for those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. All I can say is I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode, it's worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at Patreon dot com, slash Funeral, Kazoo, and now a quick but heartfelt shut out to Charles Jewel, Piper Sinnees. I hope I'm saying that right, Trace redacted, Solis Sagittarius, and Kyla Olkers for helping support me on Patreon. If you just want to chat, you can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can just fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. And it always makes me feel like crap to have to say this, because I do love hearing from you, but I am typically a little slow to respond, and I apologize. 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 if you can spare the money, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global medic Global Metic 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, Medical Linear Accelerator, I hardly knew her, but seriously, if you like the words radiation and catastrophic, have we got an episode for you. It's the Tharek twenty five disaster of nineteen eighty five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.