The Niagara Schoellkopf Power Station Disaster of 1957 | Episode 88

You know how when you have a good idea you get a slight bulb over your head. Well, what if every time you had a bad idea, a million cubic feet of rock collapsed on you. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and an inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn why early visitors to Niagara Falls regularly defecated themselves with shock. We'll see what happens when you effectively run an industrial rock tumblr for two hundred and sixty two eight hundred hours non stuff. And we'll see just how bad of a day at work needs to be for you to parkour your way out of the building. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear about the hodgepodge of brutalized bones and missing appendages that have sailed over the falls. You'd hear about the increasingly ill conceived and sketchy reasons that people have tried their luck over the falls on purpose. You would hear about the hodgepodge of bones and missing appendages to be found beneath the falls. You would hear the tale of two waterways, widely described as quote inhospitable to human survival, and you would learn of the only unintentional sub aquatic river trolley in the world. 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 headphone and safety glasses, and let's begin. Niagara Falls has a way of humbling you the moment that mist hits you in the face. French aristocrat an early American superfan, Alexis to Topeville, said, Niagara Falls makes one of the grandest impressions the natural world can make upon the mind. The first part of that impression, before you actually see it, you're going to hear it. Imagine the kind of deep, continuous roar that you can feel in your chest. Back in the day, this was something they say that you could hear fifty kilometers or thirty miles away. Did you know that when you hear water, whether it's flapping against a shore or cascading off of a mountain. What you're hearing is actually the collective cacophony of trillions of droplets of water, all making tiny little splash noises, but all at the same time time. Imagine you're an early European explorer making your way through the forests of Agieerra, and eventually you come to a clearing and you see a cloud of mist rising a mile or more into the air above the trees, before you finally lay your eyes on a breath taking expanse of raging water cascading into an abyss. In sixteen seventy eight, French priest Father Luis Hennepin became the first European to write about visiting the falls, and in sixteen seventy eight the falls were pristine and being able to clearly hear the sound of three thousand tons of water crashing every second was overwhelming. Father Henepin described it as a prodigious cadence of water which falls down in a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel. It sounds like it made quite the impression, and you can understand why he stood there defecating with shock and awe. Every single explorer, all of them, they all did it, and you can look it up. They all stood there, penciless, just porky pig in it, rendered completely agog by the staggering scale of it all. And it's important to understand that even today, with the entire area already being completely developed and commercialized, the fall still has a way of shocking and surprising and leaving you feeling tiny. And it's done this for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples would have discovered it themselves in Awe and settled near it at least twelve thousand years ago. The Ottawadarans were the first to put steaks in the area, but they got themselves kicked out during the beaver Wars of the early sixteen hundreds. After that, everyone from the Seneca to the Mississaugas to the Mohawk, Oneida Cayuga all called the area home and believed that the falls had a divine origin. They believed that the land, the water, and the sky held spirits, and the falls were the most powerful among them. Obviously, the constant rising mist was seen as the spirit's breath rising into the sky and back then. If you don't know the story, twelve thousand years ago was around the time of the end of the last Ice Age. Yes, the mammoths and squirrels and acorns and all of it, it's all true. So to what do we owe this miracle of nature? Well, remember the glaciers if you're flipping through your rolodex of famous glaciations. The last time Earth froze its dome, the last major North American one was called the Wisconsin Glaciation. It was during the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch. This is a time in Earth's history that ran between seventy five thousand and ten thousand years ago where the ice kept chasing people around and a lot of our strange landscape got scraped into existence. And that includes the whole Great Lakes region, including the massive mystery lake that you've never heard of, Lake Tonawanda. And there's a lot that you wouldn't recognize about the Great Lakes twelve thousand years ago. Twelve thousand years ago, the Great Lakes were things like Lake Duluth and Algonquin and Iroquois. It's kind of like a band that kept the name after changing out every member the Great Lakes are basically the Leonard skinnerd of North American geology. Lake Erie was still there, so that's good, and we'll come back to that. So what you think of as Niagara Falls started so to speak, near current day Lewiston, New York. That's about eleven kilometers or seven miles from its current position, near all the tourist traps and the hotels and what not. It started as a simple river and it's been eroding backwards all of this time, and it's going to continue to do so for the next fifty thousand years. Now back to lake Tonawanda. I don't think you'd call it a great lake necessarily, but it used to cover up a good chunk of upper state New York. When the glacier started melting at the end of the Last Ice Age, lake Tonawanda started draining into the very earliest version of what we would call the Niagara River. It had a bit of trouble trying to navigate around the Niagara Escarpment, which is this massive limestone cliff that stretches from New York all the way to Wisconsin. So it just poured over it, and all that water wanted to pour from present day Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, and all it had to do was carve its way slowly through all of the softer rock on the way. And it's been eroding towards Lake Erie at about three feet a year. And it'll be time to buy some prime tourist real estate there in about fifty thousand years, like we said. But in the meantime, all this erosion leaves us today with the Niagara Gorge and of course the falls. In order to extend the lease on all the hotels and tourist attractions in the area, they actually limit the amount of water that makes its way to the falls to slow that erosion and help preserve the falls as we see them today. If you've never actually seen it, the Nag River is big. It stretches about a mile or one point six kilometers wide across certain parts, and as all that water approaches the edge of the falls, it splits around Goat Island. It's an island that separates the American and the Canadian side of the falls. They call it that stupidly enough, because in seventeen eighty a farmer used to keep goats there, and after a particularly harsh winter, all but one of them died, which is why I have always called it Dead Goat Island. Anyway, about ten percent of the river flows over the Bridal Veil Falls on the American side of the island, and the rest absolutely thunders over the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. The American side is about nine hundred and fifty feet across and about ninety feet from the lip to the rocks below. The Canadian side, on the other hand, is curved like a horseshoe where they gave it the name, and it's almost three times as wide, about twenty seven hundred feet across, and it drops more than one hundred and sixty feet. About fourteen million people visit the falls every year. That's about two million Dodge caravans filled with people driving back to back, and it can certainly feel that way if you've ever visited the area during the high season. And they're not even the tallest waterfall in the world, but it is the combination of the height with and its raw volume of water that makes it one of the greatest. Its beauty inspired poets and honeymooners, and its raw fury practically dared people to challenge it on everything from barrels to tight ropes to jet skis. And then there are the industrialists who just see dollar signs everywhere they look. I'm going to tell my pay preons more about people flying over the falls on purpose or otherwise, but right now we're going to focus on those industrialists. By nineteen eighteen, there was a change in the misty air above Niagara Falls, a change that smelled like rail oil and cigar smoke and mustache wax. Now there are people who will tell you that the Niagara Falls of old was killed with the arrival of the carnival rides and the sawmills. But for my money, nothing spoils a landscape quite like the greedy, undivided attention of developers and industrialists. Over the next few decades, power stations began springing up on both sides of the river. Electricity was still in its infancy, you know, still just a fad, like the internet or the automobile. It was mostly just good for novelties like telegraphs and the occasional light bulb show. But some men are visionaries and they saw potential, and by eighteen seventy five, when you peered into the gorge below the falls, you might see a few dozen smaller waterfalls gushing out of the side of the gorge, all willy nilly, each somehow supplying or helping a mill or factory above them, helping to spin some cog or flywheel or googog. Because this was a point of time where the whole world seemed to be powered by booth belts and shafts, literally driving machines running right off a wheel. So they dig canals off the river to bring water to these wheels and then just return it to the river later. And just a note, I would not have recommended sipping from a cup of that water. The first power plant was the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company Plant, which was finished in eighteen seventy five, and it wasn't a power plant in the traditional sense. If you wanted traditional electric power as we know it, you had to wait another twenty years till they finished. The Edward Dean Adams power Plant was built all the way back in eighteen ninety five, and it was the brainchild of industrial pinup boys Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and George Forbes, yeah, the magazine guy. And the plant was named after a man so wealthy, he took up actually collecting money as a hobby. And it wasn't just the first of its kind built in the area, it was the first in the world. In this version, falling water spun turbines. Turbines power generators, and the faster that the turbine spun, the more electricity shot out the other end. And that's a pretty simplistic explanation for something that revolutionized the world as we know it. But this is not an engineering podcast. The Adams power Plant not only created and delivered AC current and lit light bulbs, It lit lightbulbs as far as Buffalo, New York. And that was twenty six miles or forty two kilometers away. And so you know, until that first day, the very idea, idea of sending electricity to a light bulb twenty six miles away was previously thought of as impossible. Yet here we were, and it did not go unnoticed. Reporters descended on Niagara to witness and record this miracle of the age for their breathless readers around the world. I mean, it's like if you found out the Great Pyramid of Giza was set up right beside a place where they invented teleportation, like right there, and I feel like you'd have to be well, we should probably go see this. Niagara Falls became a minor point of global historical significance, and the Tourism board had champagne with every meal. For the next ten years. A kind of techno strategic one upsmanship convention was held up and down the river as plants of all sizes were added into the mix, and by the nineteen fifties there were at least ten named hydroelectric power stations running along the Niagara River, five on the US side and five on the Canadian side, But our interest to day lies with one plant and one plant only. The undisputed king of electric generation was the Sholkoff Power Station. Sholkoff Well, yes, you're right, that is a South German name, if you remember from our recent Johnstown episode. Industrial towns in the eighteen hundreds came with all kinds of mills and chemical works and old timey foundries. Well in the Niagara region of southern Ontario and upstate New York. Jacob Friedrich Sholkoff owned or had a finger in pretty much all of it. His portrait makes them look like a kind of a sad, Colonel Sanders. But if it's easier for you, you can just picture the monopoly man. And I'm not saying that the entire Scholkoff family were wealthy or influential. But in the short time since emigrating to North America, one of them became mayor of Niagara Falls, and they named a field at Cornell University after another, so you tell me. And with their fingers already in everything else in town, they turned their eye to power generation, and hence, between eighteen eighty one and nineteen twenty four, the Shulkoff Power Station was constructed right into the side of the river on the American side of the Falls, literally right into the rocky face of the gorge between Goat Island and the Rainbow Bridge, just so it said, though the Rainbow Bridge wouldn't actually be finished until nineteen forty one. The Sholkov station had a fortress like appearance. It had arched windows and massive walls, about one hundred feet tall and sprawling between four hundred and five hundred feet across the wall as it grew. See, the thing was built in three phases, and by the time Station Sea was complete in nineteen twenty four, Shulkoff had become the largest hydroelectric power station on the planet. Each station housed multiple turbines, generating over three hundred thousand horse power at its peak. Some people described it as a massive stone and steel cathedral of electricity embedded in the cliff face like an industrial temple, harnessing the fury of the falls with both brute force and architectural dignity. By nineteen fifty six, it was generating about three hundred and sixty megawatts of power that was more than enough to power everything from light bulbs to steel mills, to electrocutions and hospitals. And it did this steadily, converting water into energy for decades. And then what happened. Well, our story takes place on June seventh, nineteen fifty six. It was just another normal day at Sholkov. The morning shift were arriving and settling into their routine, and that day began early, well before six in the morning, and as the sun rose over the gorge, grandiose shafts of brilliant natural light fell across the plant, glinting off all the polished brass fittings on the control boards. From the tall cathedral light wind windows, workers made their way into the plant from a set of elevators dug out of the gorge itself. The air inside was thick with the drony, endless low thrum of turbines and a blend of machine oil, damp concrete, and ozone from the high voltage equipment. You think it would be boiling in there, but the people who worked there say that the stone walls always retained dampness from the river and that kept it cool year round. Forty men worked the plant as part of the morning shift, and everyone with their own purpose. Some monitor gages for pressure fluctuations. Most were engineers who tightened bolts or replaced uses, or greased the enormous moving parts of the generators. These were massive machines, and they never slept. The size of them is hard to describe. They aren't engines or machines. They're more like systems of turbines and draft tubes and spiral casings. The shaft assembly alone dwarfed anybody who stepped inside. That's how big these things were. They have a kind of an oversized industrial seashell field, if that makes any sense. Again, not an engineering podcast, So let me see if I can explain or describe this real quick. Water from the Niagara River was funneled down steep pipes called penstock, and from there it rushes through mass of turbines that kind of looked like sideways water wheels, which would spin with incredible force about one hundred and eighty rotations a minute. The turbines were directly connected to a generator, and inside each of those generators is a giant magnet surrounded by coils of copper wire, and as the turbine spins the magnet, it creates a magnetic field, which, when that passes by the wires, generates electricity. There's no test here. Don't even worry about it. Just think of it like one of those emergency hand crank radios, but big enough to power a city. Station A was completed back in eighteen eighty one and put out four and a half maya wats of power. Station B generated a much healthier twenty five megawatts of power. Station C, on the other hand, fully completed by nineteen twenty four, Well, this thing put out as staggering two hundred and sixty eight point five megawatts of power. It was about three times larger than Station B, and almost twelve times as large as a Over three hundred people worked across the plant in shifts, engineers, technicians, mechanics, cleaners, you'd name it, and everyone there knew they were doing something important. Countless homes and businesses and industries suckled from their electric teat every day, and it could be a dirty, tiring, and dangerous job. No one much talked about the danger, but the men knew it was there. I mean, how could you not. You're working with roaring water, with spinning shafts and giant dynamos and electricity flying everywhere. And it wasn't lost on any of them that they did all of this while perched precariously off the side of a cliff. The men were skilled and focused, and they respected the danger, but all of that just became part of the background. On this day, a junior maintenance worker, Alvin Scholz, was inspecting some equipment when he noticed something about the west wall behind the turbines. He looked more closely and was taken aback. Now it's no secret that everything in these power plants was wet. The plant itself sat on a narrow shelf of dolomite limestone right by the river's edge, and there had been whispers that station. See, even though it was the newest of the three buildings and only thirty years old, than that was starting to show its age. You know, cracks, a little light shifting the foundation water where it didn't belong. Now, moist air plus warm machinery makes for a perfect environment for steam and condensation and allus of drippiness. But what I'm about to describe that's different. Water was leaking through the stone. Seeping would be one thing, but this was leaking. Here's the thing. Of course, the plant had been carved into the side of a river gorge and was exposed to constant mist and seepage and humidity twenty four hours a day. And add to that, every winter freeze thaw cycles in the surrounding rock would take their toll, not to mention all the wear and tear from the plant itself. I imagine that having some effect over time vibrations from the massive spinning turbines they would have transferred into the floors and walls and foundations for thirty years. I mean, I'd crack in leek if I'd been vibrating for two hundred and sixty two eight hundred hours non stop. That's right, thirty years no breaks. But back to Alvin, he wasn't panicked. In fact, he called over an electrician, Richard Sanders. He just wanted a second set of eyes. And there had been murmurs around the plant of people hearing unusual cracking sounds, and they were used to the water. They just didn't relish the idea of any new leaks. So to Sanders, this whole thing seemed mildly urgent. He was saying, how it seemed like the water was under pressure. When small cracks began to appear in real time in the rear wall right in front of them, and with them more water. Something was definitely happening in Station C. So they radio top side to the foreman, Samuel Booker, just to loop him in and get his thoughts. Booker was a surface foreman for the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, meaning literally a foreman who was up top on the actual surface world. He was responsible for supervising the operations and the condition of the plant below from the gorge rim and coordinate with the workers. He peered over the side of the gorge and quickly realized something very serious was happening. He saw water, I mean no small amount of water appearing from behind the retaining wall that supported the power station, and it began blasting out of the rock in sections as powerful as a fire hose, And at that same moment, the ground beneath his feet began vibrating. He radioed for help and instructed the workers to evacuate non essential areas of the plant. By the time the wall started to visibly deform, no small amount of urine appeared in his pants, and he was screaming into his radio to get out of there. Now inside the generator hall, workers began shouting to others to shut down the generators and leave, while cracks appeared to widen significantly all around them. Large sections of the floor and wall began to visibly shift and buckle. The priority in a plant too loud to support a PA system was to make sure that everyone knew what was going on across the plant. The second priority was to disengage the electrical systems. If water breached the building and the power was still live, anyone inside could be electrocuted. The water was surging in increasing volume, now slashing from the west to the east wall, as the floor continued to shift. One worker described grabbing another by the collar who had frozen in place. They said it sounded like a dam was breaking behind them. The rockbed and the rear support wall were failing, and the roof line and the wall seams began to buckle as cracks now formed in the concrete walkways and pavement above the plant. The men stared in horror as the back of the structure began to buckle, while the booker screened on the radio for them to run inside. The cracks in the wall widened and multiplied until a high pressure stream of water broke through, ripping through the rock wall like a fire hose. Some ran for the elevator, but no power d There was a chaotic effort to keep trying to shut down the turbines, but shutting down a machine the size of a small house is a multi step process that they did not have time for. Some were powered down, others were still spinning and groaning under load as the floor began to go. Richard Draper was the longtime maintenance foreman at the plant. His crew had been feverishly stacking sandbags at the base of the wall to stop the incoming water. They were trying to keep it away from the generators. But once that wall started to bulge, Draper now found himself yelling at his men to run. The sound of heavy cracking reverberated up and down the main generator hall like thunder. One worker later described it like standing on the deck of a ship that had just hit a reef. It was the final straw that destroyed any illusion that this was still manageable. The men ran for ladders and catwalks, and as they ran, as the floor buckled, they found themselves leaping and pirouetting over and around it. Now parkourp was originally created in France around the beginning of the century. Then it got popular in the nineteen eighties and finally became part of the public consciousness in the early two thousands. So what the men did that day some people call second or independent genesis or multiple discovery. They describe it as the art of moving through an environment with speed and grace, using only the abilities of the human body. And although our guys were doing it by the skin of their teeth and fingernails, they were definitely parcoring. So you're having one of those days, your building's getting weird, and the quickest route to the parking lot seems to require a leap over your desk, pushing yourself off a pillar with both feet, and a tucked backflip out of a window. Would you know what to do? One minute you're in your office or a hotel or your apartment, when suddenly there's an earthquake or an explosion, and you feel like you have vertigo, but the floor is actually moving. It's a little late to teach you how to design a better building, but maybe I can teach you how to leap out of one. Park is all about getting from point A to point B as efficiently as possible, which is a long way of saying as acrobatically as possible. It's all about knowing what's around you, choosing the best path, and moving without hesitation. First step they can maybe stretch step one B, Well, you already know the words. Stay calm. That's right. Your muscles and brain are kind of need all the oxygen they can get, so while you're stretching, take a couple of deep breaths. Obviously, it would be great if you could just calmly lock up behind you and walk out the front door. But for the purposes of this exercise, your home was caught in a landslide and it is now teetering off of a cliff. Sometimes the obvious path isn't the safest one. The key to a successful but unexpected evacuation is to know all of your exits. And I don't just mean doors, because sometimes they're not an option. And I don't mean crawling out through the vents because that is a lot slower, and TV and movies have done a terrible job of teaching you what it would actually be like to crawl through a human sized industrial vent. In a real situation where everything goes pear shaped, you're going to be specifically looking at windows and escape routes where maybe a wall used to be. Let's start with the windows. Every window offers the potential for escape, but sometimes you step comfortably onto a fire escape. Sometimes you drop three stories into a dumpster. If the floor starts cracking or beams start collapsing, you're going to need to move like it matters, and everything you do is going to be with purpose. The floor disappears, you are going to need to jump over it, not like a spaz but again with purpose. Whether it's a standing long jump or you have a chance to run at it as you're flying through the air. Remember you want to land on the balls of your feet and soften your knees to absorb some of the force. I'm going to teach you a preferred way to stick the landing in just minute space permitting. You could also choose to tuck the landing into a forward somersault to help distribute the impact. There will be obstacles in your way. Collapsing buildings kind of have a way of doing that to you. However, once you are aware and have practiced the tenants of parkour, nothing should slow you down. You want to always stay in motion, always moving, and every time you approach anything in your way, either want to jump or step up, depending on what you can get away with. Plant both hands on the top and swing your opposite leg over and now just keep moving. It's called vaulting, and you can practice the technique by knocking over a dresser or a vending machine or whatever. If the ceilings and the walls break and they start to expose, bars or pipes, those can be incredibly helpful and you can use them to swing through an area. Don't use them like the uneven parallel bars at the Olympics. You are just trying to cross a gap or some other hazard. There are no points for style here. If you have wall problems and you need to be on the other side of one, you're going to run up the wall a bit to get a little momentum, Plant one foot and push off so you can grab the edge and pull yourself up and over. If you slip and fall, tuck and roll diagonally across your back shoulder to hip, not head to bomb like when you are a kid. A good precision landing will help absorb impact, prevent injury, and keep you moving. Of course, the key is not to learn as you go, but rather to practice these moves ahead of time, rewind, and attempt as you need. Okay, well, now that you're a proficient, almost expert at parkour, you have the tools to move where others freeze. You've got the tools to help you vault over fallen furniture, to leap cracks in the floor, to climb through shattered windows, and to roll out of danger instead of being crushed by it. And no need to wait for rescue when you are the rescue. Windows were popping out of their frames at this point, and even the sinks and toilets were cracking themselves apart from the pressure. The men ran for their lives, slipping across wet floors and dodging debris as walls collapsed around them. Water and stone was falling into the forebay. The machinery groaned and twisted. Electrical panel started sparking, and the lights flickered and then cut out. Thick mist and dust filled the air as they scrambled towards the only reliable exit, a steep set of service stairs leading up the cliff to safety. One worker broke his leg when a floorplate collapsed, but it didn't matter. Somebody grabbed him and dragged him to safety, no questions asked, and as the men arrived breathlessly topside, Hooker grabbed them by the arms and counted heads Back inside the building, the generators began to tilt and wrench from their mounts. It was an impossible sight, and it was impossibly loud, almost loud enough to drown out the low, groaning sound like metal under stress, coming from the stone itself. Right before a deafening crack echoed through the gorge. A section of rock measuring four hundred feet long two hundred feet high and twenty feet thick, broke loose from the top of the cliff. The entire southern portion two thirds about two hundred and sixty feet of the power station was torn from the gorge wall and swallowed by the water below. The plant burst into bright orange flames and collapsed inward, transforming into a growing avalanche of stone and steel and mud. Rocks and masonry burst into the air, splitting into thousands of pieces, which pelted the river like shrapnel. Debris was thrown as far as Canada when it hit the rocks in the water below. Whatever concrete remained was pulverized, and the gargantuam machinery blew itself apart and lay there, twisted into garbage. All that remained was a cloud of billowing white smoke and the rebounding echo of the crash, dancing between the sides of the gorge until it finally died away, and then silence. Half the station was gone, and all but one of the workers escaped with their lives. You remember Richard Draper. He'd served as the maintenance froman of the plant for twelve years and no further after shouting for his coworkers to evacuate. Some claimed to have seen him crushed flat by falling debris, but it was so smoky and dusty there was no way to be sure, and the truth was it was entirely more likely that a jetlike burst of water from a high pressure pipe blew him out of window as the plant collapsed. Either way, his badly decomposed corpse was fished out of the Niagara River two months later. He'd spent some time in the lower rapids before circling the Niagara whirlpool for a while. There were two other men who left the building, not under their own power, kind of like Draper, well not exactly like Draper. They found themselves blown from the building and trapped at the bottom of the gorge, and they were plucked to safety by one of the maid of the Mist fairies. So what happened, Well, according to one witness, there was a roar as loud as a jet. And I say that because everybody, to a person said that, except for one guy, who more colorfully described it as sounding more like one thousand lions screaming. At the same time, everything in the plants seemed to short circuit, water and flame shot everywhere. A wall started to break up, crumbling little by little, and then entire sections of the sholkof plant crashed down into the water. They estimated that one hundred and twenty thousand tons or a million cubic feet of rock fell that day. Imagine being stuck inside a building when the walls start separating and cracking and windows are popping out from their frames, and parts of the gor which walls start raining down above your head. I mean, imagine testing the unexpected absorbency of your pants. And with that, three hundred and sixty thousand kilowatts of power capacity was gone, and pretty much everything around them ground to a halt, at least until the Ontario Hydroelectric Commission was able to ramp up their production and share their output to fill the gap. Some claim this was the most destructive rock fall in history, while others, like the professors of seismology at Canisius College, claimed that there had been a minor earthquake that caused the entire disaster, and yes, the ground did shake, but no one believed them or listened or cared. Unlike a lot of our disasters, this one didn't begin with an explosion or screaming. It began with a slow creeping sound. It began as a trickle of water seeping in from behind a wall, which does not seem crazy, considering the plant was carved into the side of a gorge where moisture and minor leagues were part of daily life, but this was obviously different. Onlookers from nearby plants and tourist areas could see the collapse as the gorge face itself broke free. They said the plants seemed to disappear in one big roar of thunder, and the time between hey did you hear that? And crushed masonry and twisted steel littering the gorge below was less than five minutes. Only a skeletal section of the northernmost part of the plant now remained standing, and it was completely dark. Both the state and the federal government launched separate investigations. They didn't lay blame at the feet of anyone in particular. They didn't even blame the design even though and no shade here. But there's a reason you don't see a lot of buildings sticking to the side of river gorges. It was built up from layers of limestone over soft shale, and over time, pressurized water found its way into those layers, which eroded and ate away at the gorge behind the scenes, dripped by drip, and what drainage systems that they had installed were just not up to snuff. That's what a nineteen fifty eight investigation by the Federal Power Commission said. They blamed a combination of poor geological planning and aging infrastructure for the disaster. Rock falls and ground movements had been documented long before the nineteen fifty six collapse, and maintenance logs noted persistent leaks and bits of wall breaking off for years. All that moisture and decades of the heaviest machines in the world both pulling at the wall while simultaneously vibrating it like crazy, Well it all seemed inevitable looking back, you know, hindsight. And all the weight of the building plus the water filled penstocks exerted millions of pounds of downward force on the gorge's edge, and workers noticed an increase in cracking and bulging walls, waterly and shifts in the foundation for weeks leading up to the crash. Station C was state of the art for nineteen eighteen, but it was never retrofitted for modern safety. You know, like reinforcing the expansion joints or adding a redundant retaining system, so if part of the plant decided to fall down one day, part of the plant would fall down, not the whole thing. When all the dust smoked and mist cleared, they tallied up the damages. The building cost thirty six million dollars alone, and when you add everything else into the mix, it shot up to one hundred million dollars. Throw that in the inflation machine, and today that is more than two billion. Following the disaster, a massive effort was made to stabilize the gorge wall and good luck with that. I don't mean to come across as cynical, but engineers at Niagara have been through this before, just twenty two months earlier, less than two years before, on the same side of the falls, not far are at all from the site of today's disaster, there once stood a scenic lookout hanging over the gorge, and they called it Prospect Point. Was one hundred and eighty five foot natural platform of dolomite and shale that stuck out from the American side, and it offered the greatest views of both falls and the river, which made it one of the most popular pieces of real estate in the country. And I said gave, and was all in the past tense, because not even seven hundred days before our story, a large crack in the platform grew and separated, and a massive section one hundred and eighty five thousand tons of rock broke free from the side of the gorge and plunged into the river below. And why well, let's see rain, water, cracks and general erosion. And that's not even the half of it. On the Canadian side of the river stood a similar protrusion called table rock, and this one stuck out in front of the Canadian side or the Horseshoe Falls, and was also incredibly popular until general wear and tear and exposure to the elements caused chunks weighing hundreds of tons to shear off, falling into the river below. And this happened in eighteen eighteen and eighteen twenty eight and twenty nine and thirty three, forty six, eighteen fifty, eighteen seventy six, eighteen ninety seven, all the way until nineteen thirty five, when they decided enough was enough and blew the rest off the dynamite. My point being the circumstances may shock, but no one should be genuinely surprised when rock falls happen here. Just think about it. If not for water eroding and destroying rock, there wouldn't even be a gorge to begin with. Now, you might think the future of the whole falls based power generation industry came to an inglorious end, except for the part where it didn't, and President Dwight Ike Eisenhower ordered everything immediately rebuilt. He declared it a national priority. It's the whole reason America never changed to the metric system. They were too busy rebuilding Niagara, and what they built became the largest hydro electric project in the world. The Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant is at least five times larger than the shol cof They needed to replace all that lost production capacity, and they finished the new plant by nineteen sixty one, and they named it after Robert Moses, chairman of the New York Power Authority and general hydro electric superfan. Of course, it's hard to forget the shol Cough plant because here's the thing, it's still there. Most of the structure had been removed, but a surprising amount remains visible today. And not just that it's accessible to the public. As part of the aptly named shol cof power Plant Ruined Site slash Niagara Gorge Discovery Center, you can still see bits of the original wall in a field of twisted concrete and rusted metal part of it. Much of the old site is now used as a maintenance area and an off season boat storage yard for the Maid of the Miss Tour company. When they were cleaning up the area, they had to dam and drain the hydraulic canal that brought water to the site before they could enter the wreckage, and the police were called in to retrieve five rusting safes that had been dumped after being emptied and an array of firearms, reel and toy that had made their way into the canal. Over the years after the Sholkoff disaster, cliff based power plants kind of fell out of favor. The Robert Moses plant was more of an inland facility, the kind that brought river water to it by tunnel rather than being right up by the river. Today, Niagara continues to power millions of homes and businesses across Canada and the US, but only because of the lessons learned humans tried to partner with nature, but nature is fickle. Every now and then the lion wants to eat a gazaz well and a twelve thousand year old valley of exposed rock wants to murder a few humans. This story serves as a reminder that nature doesn't give a fun about your safety, but it's also an example of what makes us so resilient. We tried to build something nature said not today. Instead of tucking tale and giving up, we learned from our mistakes, analyzed, pivoted, and tried again. And the water still falls, the lights are still on, and the world keeps on turning. The Niagara Sholkough Power Station disaster of nineteen fifty six was the most expensive hydroelectric disaster in US history at the time and the deadliest in New York State's history. It wouldn't hold the title as deadliest in American history forever, but it does hold the odd distinction as the fastest most powerful US industrial disaster not caused by an explosion. And You've had bad days at work, but nothing as dramatic as this, and it all reminds me that bad Day at Work was the working name for the podcast back in the beginning. I myself am still planning on visiting the falls as soon as I can, but time is never my friend, and every time I'm there, I'm always shocked by the number of people casually climbing over fences or railings to get a better look or snap a selfie, knowing that as many as thirty people will take the long vertical swim every year. I was there in the winter of two thousand and three, right after a man climbed into the river right by the edge of the falls, but because of a rare fluke of geography, he found himself kind of wedged into a spot where he wasn't immediately swept to his death. Can only imagine what was going through his mind as he stood there in his thin ass blue windbreaker, freezing in the water, getting weak with every passing minute. The saddest thing was he was there because he couldn't communicate his feelings to people, and now the ambient roar all around him made it impossible for him to communicate with his would be rescuers, and they were able to rescue him. Score one for the good guys. The majority of people who start down a road like that but managed to avoid the cruel finality of suicide. I hear they often claim that they regret it once they're able to start thinking clearer. And you could make a pretty penny if you set up a therapy booth right by the Fall's edge. And I hate even talking about it, but it happens and it's important, so we do. And if you ever feel like visiting the falls, so to speak, well, don't we need to keep every listener we can. Now, if you don't want me to have to take on a part time job as a suicide booth therapist and have to commute all the way to Niagara every day, why not consider becoming a supporter of the show. The best way to support the show is to help to grow it by sharing it. The best way to keep your favorite host from having a stress related heart attack, well you could visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation, and a few of you have done that recently, been very very generous, and I really really appreciate you. But if you think Anny episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it. You can find out more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, and I'd also like to share a quick but heartfelt shut out to Janet Spencer, Mark Goodwin, Robert Pender, Tyler Whitfield, Sam and Victoria Scarf for supporting the show on Patreon. Again, there is no show without you, guys in particular, so for those of you who do, please pat yourself on the back and thank you for all you do. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, on Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire me an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. 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, new and old for their support and encouragement. However, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I also ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They'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 six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode, the worst thing about a natural disaster is waiting for it to finally end. And to best prepare you for our next episode, I would like you to try to scream for four minutes straight. It's the Greensburg tornado disaster of two thousand and seven. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.