The Norwegian Cheese Fire Disaster of 2013 | Episode 103

You might think the worst thing that she's can do is cause indigestion or elevated cholesterol, or maybe the need to punch more holes in your belt, maybe even the occasional fart sneaks out. Well, today you will learn, as it turns out, we have all catastrophically underestimated it this whole time. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, czar and non inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we will be busy visiting a postcard perfect country that is ridiculously beautiful from top to bottom, but on a map looks vaguely testicular and chewed. You will walk through the history of cheese before sampling a platter of the most nauseating varieties available anywhere in the world. And not to spoil anything, but today's story is been a spiral into a kind of three four episode of flame fueled claustrophobia. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear the short story of how a spiky Asian football turned my stomach inside out, you would learn how we have been pre programmed by invisible senses that tell us everything from how many fingers we have to how much vomit you might need to project, and you will hear the story of the gigantic wheel of cheese that haunted the White House for years. 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, shoe the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. When you think of people dying from food, you typically imagine someone choking to death successfully on a hot dog. I'm trying to think, what are the dumbest edibles someone's died from on this show. Molasses, coconut water, thousand proof whiskey, sewer putting grasshoppers. We have talked about quite a few on this show, and admittedly we are using a pretty broad definition of edible, But for today's purposes, we are going to discuss and otherwise perfectly benign color indulgence savored around the world. Cheese, globally, about one in four either don't have it or can't have it, but billions and billions of others are all cheese. Cheese has been a staple of the human diet for at least eight thousand years that we know of. Archaeologists and historians have found evidence of early cheeses everywhere, from Sumeria to Egyptian tombs to ancient Greece and China. The incredible thing about cheese is that it has multiple overlapping points of origin, so no one can agree exactly where cheese happened first. It might have been in Europe, but maybe Central Asia, maybe the Middle East, or the Mediterranean, or even the Sahara region of Africa. See way back in the day, people used to store milk and containers, same as now, except instead of jugs, they made pouches from the stomachs of animals, as one does, and it didn't bother anyone that an old, dead stomach might still be just a smidge slimy with the kind of enzymes that would help curdle milk into cheese. Maybe pleasant isn't the word, but what they got was a tasty surprise with a consistency somewhere between modern feta and the kind of kurds that you put on poutine, which is weird to say in that those are two very different consistencies and with regional differences depending if you preferred milk from goats or cows. For example, this same happy accident repeated itself around the world with varying results. Cheese, as it seems, was inevitable. And if you asked me what I wanted for my last meal before hitting the electric chair, that I would probably have to think about. But if you asked me what I wanted to die from eating, it's probably going to be cheese, something Guda, maybe a Yarlsberg or a nice spicy Havardi. It's just another one of a long line of questions we ask ourselves on the show. They're really kind of hard to answer because as much as I love cheese, I don't really want to die having to hold my stomach together, and not everyone loves cheese. When we think about the grossest foods in the world, you know, rotten things or fishy things, or when people come up with unusual uses for unusual organs, we almost never think about cheese. But there are cheeses that easily crown any list of gastric barfables, and many times I've wondered why anyone had the idea to take a delicious and savory treat and just decide, you know, I think that this would be better if it was aggressively rotting or even bug ridden. Epoiss from France is supposed to taste great, but I'm never gonna know because it's smells like a crime scene. Episoase, assuming I'm pronouncing it correctly, is a sticky and rihine coated cheese with a fairly runny consistency and aroma described as corpse like. It smells like something lost a fight with time. It smells so bad you're not even allowed to bring this stuff on public transit in parts of France, and it's not even their worst offering. France makes another rank fromage called view Boulogne, which I believe translates into baloney farts. I haven't taken French in a long time, and if I am correct there, it's kind of a strange thing because it smells sits somewhere inside of a five way Venn diagram between sulfur cabbage, unwashed feet, a funky barnyard and wet meat. It is famously called the smelliest cheese on earth according to science. Not ones to go unchallenged over the channel. In England they make a wheel of stink called the Stinking Bishop and this thing it's washed in fermented pear juice and smells like gym socks and roadkill. This washing process encourages the same kind of bacterial growth that's responsible for human body odor. This is the stuff that they use as a biological weapon in Wallace and Grommet. However, there are worse. Probably the second worst cheese that I know of is Milbenkas from Germany. The smell is described like a mix of old leather and damp hay and fermenting grain, all stored in an ammonia soaked barn. And that is the good news. The bad news is that it's made out of bugs. Without really getting into it, it contains live cheese mites that burrow and digest the cheese and then turn it into ready whip all over the rind as PLoP. And obviously you eat the cheese with the bugs. So what could possibly be worse? You ask, Well, that I believe has to be Kazu Marzo from Italy. What is the worst non fecal thing that you can think of finding inside a block of cheese? Just take a second, really think about it. And was your answer by chance? Maggots? Because if it was maggots, gold star, because this contains live, living maggots. And even if you pick it up and throw it as hard as you can, you now have the aroma of Kazu Marzoo on your hand. And this is an aroma described as wet and sour and biting, an eye wateringly confrontational, and it is so bad it is considered illegal across huge parts of the European Union. It's another one of these awful cheeses that is purposely infested with living fly larvae that digestive from within and are still moving around while you are chewing on them. And that's all bad news. However, on the plus side, the good news is we will not be anywhere even close to old socks and a barn smelling cheeses to offend the senses. Today, leave your barf bags at home and pack your fjording boots, a viking helmet if you got one, and your favorite fon du fork. For today we are flying off to beautiful and rugged and other worldly Norway. Norway is a place so beautiful I should have told you to bring eyeball cleaner. Norway is snuggled up with Sweden and Finland at Europe's northern edge, all tucked up in the Subarctic and facing Russia to the east. Some people, let's call them weirdos, describe this trio of Scandinavian countries as having an ill formed Jackson Pollock kind of a penis shape, where Sweden is the penis and Norway and Finland are vaguely testicular. And I don't even know if that was meant as praise or to put them down, but I think if you look at it on a map, you're just going to describe it as a mess. It's a long country, about seventeen hundred and fifty kilometers or about eleven hundred miles of wrinkly, folding inlets and jagged bays stretching along the North Atlantic. The coastline is stretched out and rugged. It's kind of like what a Q tip might look like after being run over by four hundred trucks. If your face looked this rugged, they'd hospitalize you Norway as a kingdom began as a loose array of Viking Age settlements that unified into a medieval realm that became world famous for traveling the seas and planting axes in people's faces. Now today, between the tourists and financial stuff and their natural oil and gas supply, Norway has become the second richest country in Europe, behind Luxembourg. But Norway is more than just alpine peaks and glaciers and fat wallets and deep coastal fjords. It's also famous for world class cities like Oslo and Bergen, which blends steel and glass with green spaces and museums and restaurants and cafes that all look like they were ripped right out of Scandinavian design catalogs, and yet travel only minutes outside of an urban center and you can find yourself petting a reindeer in a pine forest or standing by a lake where someone's grandfather once fished. If you define natural as land that hasn't been built up with cities or towns or roads, then about ninety seven to ninety eight percent of Norway is picture perfect, postcard ready natural Nordic paradise it's got northern lights and the midnight sun and nature everywhere. It's no wonder that storytellers use it to depict mythical lands like Asgard and Valhalla. Now, how do I describe the people? Just generalizing off the Norwegians that I knew growing up, They're pretty reserved, little deadpan, and not huge on small talk. Others describe them as trusting and well prepared, but maybe a little cold. You could live in much worse places. In Norway, it wouldn't be unusual to see a baby in a stroller napping outside a cafe in the cold. For one, because of the perceived health benefits, but two because babies are annoying, and most importantly, because no one's going to steal a baby. In other parts of the world, you can't leave an Amazon package on your doorstep for more than an hour without porch pirates fist fighting over it. But not in Norway. And even if you did steal one, their police would rather talk to you than shoot you. And their criminals are put to work in dormitories instead of the kind of prisons that you or I think of, And they do it this way because they recognize that these are people, and they have to rejoin society one day, and they just would rather have them happy with a sense of routine and belonging, then bitter and trained to turn toothbrushes into knives. And that's why their recidivism rate is below one in five, where in the UK or North America it sits closer to fifty to seventy percent. They place their trust in people until you don't deserve it, and I mean you are allowed to hike or camp or forage or ski almost anywhere, whether it's private land or not, as long as you don't disturb or damage anything. They have chosen to be pretty low drama. In North America, when we talk about disaster preparedness, we think about nailing wood over windows and hoarding last minute cases of water, and of course keeping a shotgun ready as a door prize for looters. But in Norway it never comes to that. Citizens just keep extra food and waters and radios on hand. Their understanding is that things can always go wrong and systems can fail, and that with just a little non panicky preparedness ahead of time, that's okay. This is a place where people say that there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. I admire them immensely. They prepare accordingly, and they do it without making a big deal out of it. They just don't get emotional about the kinds of things that North Americans do. And like I said, some people would find that kind of an attitude cold or off putting, but honestly it's not. It's calming and it's reassuring. They just seem to be stable and controlled. It's the whole reason that EMTs and ambulance crews are taught that they're not supposed to yell and run with their bags over their heads, screaming, oh my God when they get to an accident scene, because calm people make for calm people. Speaking of people, I've always said that the worst way to meet them is in traffic. However, that is exactly what we are going to be doing today. Our story takes place on the chilly evening of January seventeenth, twenty thirteen, in the far north of the country. We have to get here by road, and Norway's Northern Highway system looks simple enough, but it's super not. It's actually one of the more weather beaten and geographically and logistically crazy road networks in Europe. It whisks around mountains and valleys, and it's supported by ferries and tunnels and bridges which serve the population which is pretty sparse and spread out. And it does all this in spite of the insane geography and while coping with sometimes brutal weather. And on the list of the most important roads sits the E six. It's considered Norway's vehicular spine. It runs north to south through the entire country, connecting towns and military bases and ports and border crossings. It even crosses the Arctic Circle. Risk of A eight twenty seven is a short connector road that links the to the rest of the coastal road network. And that is where we are going to drive today. And I'm gonna probably say a lot of words that are supposed to sound Norwegian, so mark this spot in the recording. This is my pre apology. Rix Fay twenty seven runs through Norway's Nordland. It connects coastal communities in the north with a ferry terminal in the south, and except for that brief ferry interruption, the whole thing is winding mountain roads that trace the ocean and fiords in all of it, and it's how the locals reach every amenity they might possibly need. Now. Of course, driving in the mountains can be as difficult as it is beautiful. Not a lot of vehicles have the traction control to climb up and down an actual mountain. But luckily for us, the Romans came up with a solution. They had the idea of cutting paths through mountains. This was about twenty three hundred years ago, before explosives or geology or ventilation. They literally used hammers and chisels. Roman engineer Vitruvius famously warned about corrupted air and dangerous vapors that were found underground, but the excavators themselves were only really concerned about rock falls and collapses. There weren't a lot of safety standards on the birth of subterranean civil engineering. Of course, back then, a lot of the workers were slaves or convicts, and written records from the time referred to them as forgettables. If a tunnel collapsed mid construction, laborers were mushed into unemployment and the tunnel was abandoned, and then they just kind of moved down a bit and start over. Norwegian engineers definitely took a page out of their book, and they have dug over a thousand road tunnels across the nation to connect it scattered and spaced out towns. Ricks VII twenty seven runs through several of them, including Stettin tunnelin Piese Fjordin and Tomars Fjordan. You remember what I said about pronunciations, Actually wait forget that. Look. I think that we are approaching the Bradley Tunnel at Teasfjord now. And for the record, just so it is said, unlike in Rome, nobody died in its construction. It's hard to imagine just how difficult it was to cut through three point six kilometers or two point two miles of high grade metamorphic in crystalline bedrock. You can check out our last episode on Kaprun for comparison to give you a better sense of just how long that is. If Dodge caravans were trap bumper to bumper in this thing, it would be seven hundred and seventeen Dodge caravans long. The tunnel was boor drilled, so it had a rough texture of bare stone walls rather than polished concrete, and the mountain ridge that it passes through is called stor Fielat in case I haven't mispronounced enough things by now. Engineers blasted and cut their way through Storefielet and open the Bradley Tunnel to the public in nineteen ninety two, and that's where we will be heading today. It may not be the longest tunnel on this route, but it is an important one. I mean they all are. Without them, every truck driver would have to climb a steep, icy grade up a rockfall prone slope, ferrying their cargo on their backs before loading it into an awaiting vehicle on the other side. My dad used to say that when you're on a nice drive, you should just let aggressive people pass so you're not on their schedule and you don't have to feel forced or rushed. But I'm afraid that's not an option here. We are on a winding two lane mountain road, so passings out of the question, and who would even want to I mean, we are on one of the most beautiful roads in the world, and sure we're stuck behind a truck and yeah, it's taking its sweetme, but hey, do you smell that? No, don't worry, it's not a trick. No one's going to be throwing up from the stank coming off of that truck. No, not even close. That truck ahead of us. It's hauling something sweet. You ever hear of brunost It's a fudgy, sweet, caramel brown block of boiled whey and milk and cream. It's basically a cheese that's one third fat and one third sugar. Add a little salt and you have everything that humans crave in one sweet package. Our brains and bodies evolve to think of sugar as fast energy, and fat is long term fuel, and salt is essential to our survival. Go back far enough, and each of these is rare and valuable and life saving. And if you found some, your brain would release dopamine to tell you get more if you can. It's why you can know something is unhealthy but still want it intensely, because our brains still treat fat and sugar like they're really hard to find and something you don't waste, even though they've literally never been more available than today. When you overeat, someone might say, hey, that's just you lacking willpower, But it's really just your brain flexing the kind of hard coded neurobiology that kept your ancestors alive while so many others died. Some describe brunos as Norway's most uniquely Norwegian food, and, considering most of their other national treats involved pickled fish, I'm good with it, and who wants to be stuck behind a pickled fish truck? The truck we're following is a semi trailer freight truck towing a second covered trailer loaded with factory wrapped palettes of brunost, about twenty seven tons of it. That's about fifty four thousand pounds of cheese. For North American listeners, that's the equivalent of about one point one seven million individually wrapped slices of cheese. So we're cruising along doing about eighty kilometers or fifty miles per hour, heading in from the north, heading southward towards Kyotstick, traffic is light, and sometime around eight thirty we creep up behind the heavy truck as the road funnels into the tunnel mouth at Bratley, and I just want to confirm that's brat Lee with a T, not a D, not just saying my name over and over. As we enter the world outside fades in the rearview mirror as we transition from day to artificial light. We make it about one hundred and fifty meters or five hundred feet from the south entrance when we noticed a faint shimmer of light ahead of us. And it's not from approaching headlights, and it's not from brake lights. It seems like it's coming from somewhere around the back of the truck in front of us, from the rear wheels of the trailer. Whether the driver can feel it or smell something, we don't know. But his braklights are on and he's slowing to us. Stop. Hazzard's come on, and he climbs out to investigate. And although we can't really see what he's seeing, his face is telling us everything. He looks shocked. And now it's easier to see him because the rear wheels of his trailer are glowing orange. And now they're smoking, and now there's fire. Well, that's not great. This isn't a mechanic podcast, but in very rare situations, when the wheelbaring's on a truck tire overheat enough they can ignite. It's not likely to ever happen, but it is still happening right in front of us, right now, and I think the driver's trying to uncouple the burning trailer from the cab. Can't really tell from back here. Oh yep, and yeah, he's got it. The trailer drops and he's back in the cab and Boffy goes. Everyone say bye. He's not sticking around to see how this turns out. And I don't think he's running away to go enjoy the rest of his evening in Italy. There's no emergency phone in the tunnel here and no cell service, so this was his only way to tell the outside world. Thomas Amtson was another driver in the tunnel, and he thought maybe it was his own car starting to smoke, and in a light panic, he tried to turn around, but nope. Instead he crashed headfirst into the wall of the tunnel before finally making his escape and just in time. The fire may have started as a mechanical issue, but as it spread to the cargo in the trailer. I'm going to tell you something counterintuitive here. You know, how if I tell you a lightning bolt can be more than five times hotter than the surface of the sun, how your brain says, no, that can't be true. Well, when those flames grew to the point that the trailer itself was now burning and the cover contents had started to flame along with it. And here's the thing that made no sense. The cheese began to soften, obviously, and melted away and then exploded into flames. As it turns out, when you heat sugar, you caramelize it, and when you overheat caramelized sugar and concentrated milk fat, it becomes more accelerant than food. This cheese did not simply melt, It burned intensely. So let's break it down. Milk fat is an energy dense hydrocarbon, which means once it's heated to the point of ignition, it doesn't really explode or flash over or anything dramatic. It just burns steadily like cooking oil. It feeds the fire like fuel, and then there's the sugar. When it caramelizes, it produces gases that help sustain combustion. And it's one thing to have a fire, it's quite another to have more than two dozen tons of weirdly and unexpectedly flammable goo to endlessly feed it. Emergency surfaces were alerted almost immediately and arrived quickly and close the tunnel to traffic. The southern portal to the tunnel barfed smoke and toxic fumes. It would have stung the eyes and smelt thick and sweet and nauseating, like burnt sugar mixed with burning fat and melting truck parts. The melting cheese flowed and dripped and spread everywhere, poling and feeding the flames and resisting any efforts to extinguish it. Firefighters were overcome by the incredible heat and the dense smoke, and they weren't able to get water or foam onto it in that confined space. And again, fire in a confined space has nowhere to radiate all that heat except right back in on itself. And the fire reached peak ceiling layer temperatures as high as thirteen hundred fifty degrees celsius or twenty four hundred sixty degrees fahrenheit. That is warmer than lava. It wasn't the kind of heat that would vaporize your arm off if you held it in front of the tunnel entrance, but it was hot enough to melt the pubes and eyebrows off of anyone trying to enter it. So it was agreed they were going to stop trying to suppress it and just contain it and let it burn, which it did for the next five days. You heard me correctly. It burned and smoldered for five days from January the twenty third all the way to January twenty seventh before it was finally brought under control. And obviously this was a fire that became a local media sensation. The people called it Brunost, Brannan and Norwegians found the humor in Brnost being revealed as a hazardous material, and every day morning show hosts greeted viewers and explained that, yes, the cheese was still burning. The tunnel became known as the site of the world's largest fond due and there was a mix of embarrassment and pride in their national cheese, turning a tunnel into a week long industrial fire and closing an important roadway. It burned itself out as the combustible material was exhausted and the tunnel slowly shed its furnace like heat, and by the morning of January the twenty seventh it was finally safe enough to approach. Cruise manually extinguished any remaining hotspots, and no one who participated in the inspections or the cleanup ever touched brunos ever again. So you just learned about this ridiculous Norwegian cheese disaster and you think, well, this is a pretty easy episode. All I really need to know is how to do a tight three point turn and just nope out of their Well first, you're not wrong, but b we're not done yet. So you run out and track down a bunch of brunos of your own, and you've eaten your fill to the point where you think your tunnel's going to stop all traffic for a week. Would you know what to do with the rest of it? Well, this is supposed to be our safety segment, admittedly, so let's get into it and see how it goes. Brnosed and cheeses in general have no anesthetic properties. Cheese is organic and moist and nutrient dense, which makes it an excellent medium for bacterial growth. You can't even pack a wound with the stuff because it would trap contaminants and the fat would interfere with clotting, which complicates everything. Other than its ability to keep you filled with calories, It's bad at pretty much everything else. In an emergency. Cheese is almost completely useless, and we now know that certain kinds can burn, so technically, at very worst, you could use it to signal for help, but you would probably be better burning firewood or oil, or cloth or hair. It's probably as helpful as burning your cell phone, but it is quite a bit better than nothing at all. So let's just take the rest of this safety segment to speculate on what would have happened to that driver if he had tried to save the day by eating the cheese, a little like Rick moranis drinking that bat of beer and whizzing out the brewery fire in the nineteen eighty three film Classic Strange Brew. So here's what happens if you eat too much cheese. Well, first, digesting a lot of anything diverts blood flow for digestion, which makes you sleepy and not make things so good. All that high fat and complete lack of fiber will bring on constipation and shut everything down except for the esophageal sphincter, which relaxes and brings on heartburn. And don't even get me started on the cholesterol. You definitely bloat, and the high salt intake would spike your blood pressure and make whatever poops you could take as hard as a rock, and some cheeses contain tyramine, which can trigger migraines. And then there's the farts. Beyond a certain point, even the most dairy tolerant people can experience gas or cramps or even dirrhea. You'd be lucky if you just developed advanced coronary artery disease about halfway through and died like a hero. But it is more likely that your stomach would simply become massively overdistended and as the pressure inside your stomach would cut off its own blood supply. So this would result in the tissues dying from a schemia, and then necrosis sets in, and if you were somehow still going for it, your stomach would perforate and rupture. So to recap, people can pop like balloons. And if you were in an emergency and your only available survival equipment was cheese, it was great knowing you. So what happened? Well, When it was finally safe to re enter the tunnel, engineers discovered that almost the first kilometer had been badly damaged. The walls had burned, and the foam insulation and any electrical equipment and wiring had vaporized. It had been so hot for so long they needed to test the rock itself to make sure it was even still structurally sound. The bill for the repairs came out to about forty million kroner that's about four million dollars US, and you can only imagine how difficult cleaning and decontaminating the scene was really. Fixing the place up would take the better part of the next two years, but traffic was finally allowed back in about a month or so. Investigators and officials declared that there had been no foul play. The wheel bearings on the trailer had simply failed or seized, heated and then ignited the cargo. Just another crazy story of a worn out tire assembly turning a National Mountain tunnel road into a cheesy blowtorch and forever changing the way people thought about road safety. Wait another Yes, there were other smaller tunnel incidents in Norway and abroad over the years, but there are two others that I want to bring up quickly. That same year, just ten months later, there was another Norwegian tunnel disaster that was just as unexpected and a little more aggressive. Oslo and Bergen are on opposite sides of the country. The good Wanga Tunnel sits about two thirds of the way to Bergen. To get from one to the other, you're going to pass through as many as sixty road tunnels. That's actually one hundred and eighty if you took the train, and that sounds like a lot, but Norway has over nine hundred of them to choose from. The good Wanga Tunnel sits about two thirds of the way to Bergen. It bypasses a steep avalanche happy mountain called Encurlia in the highlands in the ne Royfjord region. Compared to Bradley, Goodwanga was busier, it faced six times as much traffic and it was actually the sixth longest tunnel in the country. And on this same stretch of road lays the Layerdll Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel on the planet at twenty four and a half kilometers or fifteen point two miles long. It connects one of Norway's most isolated unesco Worthy Fjord valleys to the country's main East West Highway, and the mountain it passes through is also beautiful and long, being trapped under millions of pounds of rock, but also trapped in the endless monotony as eleven point four kilometers or seven point one miles of identical tunnel scenery slowly ticking by can eat away at your psychological well being. I'm certain of it. It's also long enough that if something happened to your vehicle, you have a problem with a capital P. If you had a bathroom emergency halfway through, you are going to need to get your car detailed. And what if that bathroom emergency was a heart attack? The sheer distance makes tunnels like this dangerous, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The date of this story is August the fifth, twenty thirteen. Traffic was moving steadily through the tunnel until about shortly after noon. And stop me if this sounds familiar. This time a truck had been traveling in the tunnel when smoke started pouring into the cab. The driver did not care for that and jumped out. As smoke and sparks appeared. Combustible oils had leaked and ignited on an already overheating engine, and before long the truck was enveloped in a coating of flames. The tunnel was closed and ventilation systems were activated, but eleven point four kilometers is a long ass tunnel. You see the issue. The confined space quickly filled with choking, dense smoke as the vehicle incinerated way too quickly to be cleanly pulled out by the ventilation system, and again, in the dark and unable to see, drivers abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. The thing is at his one hundred meter world record pace. It would have taken Usain Bolt eighteen minutes to run that distance. Some didn't think that they would make it from the smoke and hid in emergency shelter niches cut right into the tunnel, while others took their chances on foot and ran towards the light, at least while they could see it. Visibility deteriorated quickly as everything disappeared as the smoke filled all the available space. No one was actually trapped by the fire, but many were overwhelmed by inhalation. Emergency workers faced the heat and the toxic atmosphere and within half an hour were able to reach the flaming vehicle and begin spraying the hell out of it, and by the time the fire was finally wrestled under control, more than sixty people needed to be transported to hospital with some fairly severe smoke injuries, but again and thankfully, no one died, so to keep score, it's Norwegians two people eating mountains zero. In the aftermath, authorities examined both of the Norwegian incidents and recommended focusing on new ventilation strategies and new ways for tunnel people to communicate with the outside world, and just a general overview to look at how evacuations work or don't work with new eyes. There have been thousands of tunnel fires throughout history since the Romans first started scratching holes through mountains. Most really don't amount to much. Across European history, There's maybe been a dozen major tunnels emergencies, and then Norway has two of them in the same year. The goal of this show is to make you feel more safe, not more afraid, but you might get the impression that mountains plus tunnels plus vehicles can equal danger. And I'm sorry if I've triggered any new fears. There's no such thing as a fear of tunnels specifically, but claustrophobia is the fear of confined spaces. Plythrophobia is the fear of being trapped, and agoraphobia is the fear of being in situations where escape is off the table. So I suppose, with apologies, all of those are now on the table. That said, there was one more tale I wanted to share with you today to make sure that you have everything you need to really cement whatever impression that you are creating around tunnel safety. And I'd feel remiss if I didn't. This is the story of an incident that also involved a tunnel and food and another shoddy vehicle, but this tail will have a fairly grimmer outcome. For this we head south to Western Europe's tallest peak, sitting at four thousand, eight hundred eight meters or fifteen thousand, seven hundred and seventy four feet, right on the border between Chamonie and France and Courmejor in Italy. We are visiting the Mont Blanc Tunnel. When it was open in nineteen sixty five, it connected northern Italy to the rest of Western Europe, and four thousands of drivers every day it represented a safe and convenient way to connect to the rest of the continent. Until the morning of March the twenty fourth, nineteen ninety nine. On this morning, a tractor trailer entered the French side of the eleven and a half kilometer or seven point two mile long tunnel carrying about eighteen thousand pounds of margarine and te twenty four thousand pounds of flour. Just about half way through, the driver of the truck noticed that oncoming cars were flashing their headlights, and at first he was all heat maard, But behind him he realized that the engine of his truck had overheated and was rapidly barfing smoke. He stopped to investigate, and yes, it was very quickly on fire. And these things happened, but not to trucks carrying three tons of margarine and four tons of flour. The fire got out of hand way too quickly for us to waste time making baking jokes, and the driver found himself running the rest of the way to Italy. Because of the weather at the time, air was being pulled in through the Italian side of the tunnel, which meant that all of the smoke was being forced out of the French side. The tunnel was only twenty two feet or seven meters wide, so trucks weren't able to urn around, and with all the smoke, they were not going to be able to organize a backward SIME convoy back to France, so anyone trapped in their vehicles became bathed in the most incredible smoke. It was jet black and thick and oily, which is weird for smoke, and it clung to everything, like the inside of your lungs. It was also rich in carbon monoxide and other vapors, deadly enough to incapacitate people in their tracks, and not even just people. Imagine being trapped in your vehicle, shutting all your vents and windows, too afraid to open the door, and then your car shuts off. Smoke is not oxygen, and combustion needs oxygen to run. It's why they make such poor subaquatic vehicles. And do you have any idea how bad the breathing conditions have to be to shut off a car. The tunnel was shut down as soon as the authorities were aware, but ten cars and eighteen tractor trailers were already inside and no one was going to survive the six kilometer sprint back to France. Fire Fighters from both countries arrived quickly, but the French fire fighters became trapped by abandoned vehicles just as their own engine started to conk out, and they were still two and a half kilometers or one and a half miles from the scene. The same thing happened for the Italian fire fighters. They made it to within about three hundred meters or a thousand feet from the truck before there engine died, and they had to find shelter from the smoke in a refuge built off the tunnel. Now Here is the thing about margarine and flower. Margarine burns hotter and faster and way more errannically than your typical wood fire. Once the fat in the margarine liquefies, it tends to flare up and creates the kind of flames that roll across surfaces. As the heat built, the margin melted and ran along the tunnel floor, where it ignited into a flaming river, igniting other vehicles as it moved. At this same time, the flower was being released in the air as dust, and when that flower dust hit opened flame, it flashed over, creating massive walls of fire that made things somehow worse. Dense black smoke and toxic gas filled the tunnel right down to the roadway, people were able to find shelter in those refuge shelters I described, but the fire doors were only rated for two hours. The fire burned for fifty three hours. In total, thirty nine people would die that day. Twenty nine were found still in their vehicles, reduced to mostly bone and ash. The other ten were found in the refuges or some distance down the tunnel, clearly trying to outrun death. The furthest that anyone made it was less than four hundred meters or about thirteen hundred feet. Compared to our original adorable tale of cheesy campfire goodness, this mont Blanc was a slaughter tube. And yes we were able to keep the bloodshed at bay for almost this entire episode. But nah, tunnel fires all start with vehicles, but they could care less about the details. They all respond the same way. They trap smoke and anyone unlucky enough to be there at the time, and then they make it possible for the smoke to move faster than the people. The most dangerous thing wasn't the fire, and I'd argue it's not even really the smoke. It was the distance to safety and breathable air. Survival in a strict situation like this has way less to do about strength and speed or what actually goes wrong than by where you are when it does, and modern tunnel safety has less to do with firefighting and more with prevention and maintenance, and most importantly, informing drivers what to do in an emergence. See France killed thirty nine people while Norway killed zero. The disasters at Bradley and good Vanga and mont Blanc each shocked Europeans and led to safety reforms and changes that keep millions safe today. In so many of our disasters, the difference between life and death is knowing where your nearest exit is. But today's disasters are some of the only that we've ever covered where that exit might be miles away. We generally don't fear tunnels, We're just not afraid of them. But when you are in a tunnel, you surrender all control to it. It wants to flood with lava or bees, well what are you going to do about it? To my way of thinking, tunnels are really no different than large crowds or schools of sharks. If you were in one and something went wrong, you are now just along for the ride with no control. Were the circumstances, and the fact remains a fire in a mountain tunnel does not have to be dramatic, it just has to start. This episode came by request from listener Carrie Anne a while ago, and I was very happy to be able to bring it to life for all of you. In fact, I believe that the next five episodes in a row have come by request from listeners. Just like you. You've probably never tried brunos to yourself, but one of my best friends in public school was from Norway and we regularly used to steal it from his dad. And I don't know to what degree this resulted in the divorce of his parents, but Eric, I am sorry. Now. I don't know what your relationship with cheese is like, but I love the stuff. I don't care if it's from the UK or Scandinavia or India or where it comes from, as long as it came out of a cow or a goat and it never airbnb't larva or aged inside a skull or whatever. I'm just not into emotionally demanding cheeses. And I'm not saying I grew up with posters of cheese wheels all over my bedroom I'm just not saying that I didn't. Literally, the worst thing I've ever seen it do is cause my old friend Lawrence to fart so hard he ended up in the hospital. It's okay, though, he was fine. And yeah, I've burned my mouth pretty badly on flaming cheese pizza before, but this is something else, and it was my sincere pleasure to be able to bring this to you. I love introducing you, guys to things you previously wouldn't expect could possibly hurt you in any way, you know, like popcns can explode or your pubes are flammable. We learn a lot on this show, and I feel like there's an awful lot more to learn still, and I'm glad we get to do it together. And if you agree, and you enjoy the show and you are comfortab be able to open your wallet without staring into an eleven and a half kilometer deep void of nothing but ghosts and moths or maybe even flames burning the hell out of your hand, why not consider becoming a supporter of the show over at patreon dot com slash funeral kazoo all the ad free episodes and extra content and behind the scenes stuff. And safety stuff you could possibly ask for. I always make this pitch to say that donations from people like you are the only reason I've been able to do this show as often as i have because it's true, and I always worry that I say, hey, why not help on Patreon and people are like, hey, I'm not a cheerleader, and I'm like, hey, the majority of supporters just sign up, make a small monthly donation, and then, like the colon's in our Unorthodox safety segment, they just close up and I don't hear from them again. And that is cool, because support of any kind is still support, and failing all of that, you could always just visit, buy me a coffee, dot slash Doomsday, and show your support with a one time donation. I also just want to throw out there that this will be the year that the Patreon site will finally have a store, but I'm not getting into that quite yet. I want to share my heartfelt shout out to Tyler Hackman, Ulonda Taylor Amber who I'm calling patients, Scott Montroy, Kenny Jones, Gartensbergen, Captain Kimberly Pound, Eric Savitski, and Ron Bauman of the Tortuga twins. I told you I'd get you anyway again. There is no show without you, guys, and I appreciate you all so much and for everyone. You are free to reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire 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 a review and tell your friends. I do always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. However, if you can can spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making antonation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CAA On the next episode, I have had a special place in my heart for Australia since I was a kid. One part Admiring one part fearful and as an outsider, we all know how the native insects and reptiles and snakes and plants and sharks all want you dead. But on the next episode, we are going to discuss the one thing that visitors don't worry nearly enough about that'll raise your eyebrows and then burn them off. It's the Black Saturday bushfires of two thousand and nine. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.