The San Luis Obispo Fire Tornado of 1926 | Episode 38

California divides a lot of people. I mean, I've always enjoyed it myself. But on the other hand, you have to wear sunscreen at Christmas. On a clear day, you can see for mile. The state Bird is a modified seven forty seven water bomber. And you ever hear someone ask why California has so many lawyers and New York has so much garbage. It was because New York got to choose first. But forget all that. We're going to stop beating up on California. It's not all homeless issues and Jetsky exhaust, you know, honestly, we're just being jealous. It has unparalleled beauty and as a non resident, I love it even LA. But we're not heading to LA today. We're taking a trip north up the Pacific coast to one of those idyllic little coastal towns with none of the glitz and smog and the light layer of sweat that covers most of southern California as states go. California has no shortage of stunning coast line, and we're going to blow by most of it. We're going to take the I five north to the one twenty six in Santa Clarita. Then we'll head west to the one oh one in Santa Barbara and follow that all the way up the coast to our final destination, beautiful little San Luis Obispo. It's a quiet, little college town. It's tucked in between the central coast shore and green rolling mountains to the east. Go cal Poly. You may not know it, but a lot of people do. More than four and a half million of them visit every year. It's known for its social equality and pedestrian friendliness, safe streets, low crime rate, historic architecture, vineyards, it's smoking laws, and it's gum wall. It's not what you think. It's actually a five foot high by seventy foot long gum lined alley. It's not for everybody. Every town in California has a farmer's market, and theirs is said to be the best, which is really saying something. And back in two thousand and eight, Oprah Winfrey herself descended from on High and declared San Luis Obispo the happiest town in all the land of America. But this wasn't always a case. The town was founded back in seventeen seventy two by a group of exhausted Spanish missionaries trying to find their way to Santa Cruz. I don't know what they said when they got to Plymouth Rock, but when they got to San Luis Obispo, they said something like is that drinkable water? And the rest was history. The name San Luis is Spanish for Saint Louis, and Obispo means bishop. That's right, the town was named after a thirteenth century bishop from Toulouse, France. So what makes him so interesting? Well, he died in twelve ninety seven, and yet somehow, later that same year he lay his presumably magical zombie hands on a stillborn infant and resurrected it. Remember, just a few episodes ago, we talked about a river that was named after a sassy priest who got slow roasted to death in a kind of Panini style cage. The Spanish called the surrounding area Valley de los Osos because osos means bears, and bears were proving more difficult to remove from the land than in the original inhabitants. The Lososos Valley sprawled west of the ocean. It channeled warm, fast moving winds inland, and the locals called them, that's right, the Osos winds. But you know what, we'll come back to them later. Before long, and throughout the entire eighteen hundreds, people began calling it the Barrio del Tigre or Tiger Town. No actual tigers to be had, but it had become a lawless hotspot for stagecoach robbers and early American spree killers. It was a place without a postcard, but a pretty good place to catch a bullet or an arrow or a knife. But the whole thing got gentrified in the nineteen hundreds as the search for oil in southern California became everything. Well number four in the Pico Canyon Oa Field blue in eighteen seventy six. It was the first commercial oil well. When it blew, it was like a starter pistol had gone off, and everyone from millionaire tycoons to unbathed prospectors fanned out across the country to try and make their fortunes. They used to call it black gold, and you could just find small pools of this stuff on the ground where it's seeped up from below, and sure enough, California's population quadrupled. Today, the well is listed on the National Register of Historic places. By nineteen oh three, California was the largest oil producing state in the country. Downtown Los Angeles, Venice Beach, Huntington Beach, Long Beach, and Santa Fe all sat in the shadow of oil towers. A network of steel and pipes, rows and oil derecks threatened to forest everything as far as the eye could see in the search for more oil. You could find them around palm trees, on beaches, even graveyards, and they were about as noisy as they were ugly. Southern California began to feel more and more like something between Blade Runner and the Borg homeworld, if that helps. And oil production was not the safest line of work. One driller tapped into a pocket of oil and natural gas that blew and left a crater big enough to swallow the entire drilling platform above. Another driller had been working machinery without having it properly blocked, and was pulled into an engine sprat with best way to describe one is a large, overly toothy industrial gear. The best way to describe how he died is not to Now, it's one thing to bathe and sing and dance in the stuff, but it's another to store and move it around. A will at Lakewood produced a lake of oil larger than Union Oil's entire first year's worth of drilling. Oil plant workers were able to contain it by building dikes and dams all around it. But the Union Oil Company needed to find a solution, so they found a site to build a three hundred and thirty two acre oil storage facility near the county Airport just outside San Luis Obispo. These would become the largest reinforced concus free oil reservoirs the world had ever seen. It would have tanks large enough to store oil from the nearby San Joaquin Valley and Santa Maria Valley oil fields, and then pipeline it about one point three miles or two kilometers to tankers parked offshore. Six hundred men were hired to build the tank farm, and remember this is nineteen ten. No bulldozers, no industrial tools, just men and horse teams. Each tank pit needed eighty thousand cubic yards of earth removed. That's about one hundred and fifty thousand Dodge caravans worth, and each tank would then require over a million feet of lumber and eighteen thousand barrels of cement. Just to construct. I'm sorry, but it was too tough to make the conversion from woodfeet to dodge caravan. Also, you might hear oil tank and reservoirs used interchangeably in this tail. Six primary tanks ranged in capacity from seven hundred and fifty thousand to one point three million barrels each. Sitting in rows to the north and east were another nineteen tanks that each held fifty five thousand barrels. There was also a heater building and a pumphouse, and the whole area became known as Tank City. It's at about two and a half miles or four kilometers south of the town city center, and it deserved its name. At the time, it was the largest oil tank farm on the planet. By nineteen twenty, production had increased twentyfold. New fields are being discovered constantly, Huntington Beach in nineteen twenty, Long Beach and Santa Fe Springs in twenty one, Domingus and twenty three in Inglewood in twenty four. If you've ever spent any time in southern California, you can still find oil wells churning away all over the place, even in downtown LA. Sometimes they're just pumping beside a bus stop. Others are hidden from public view inside fake buildings. But we're not here for all that. We're here to explore a frighteningly wacky ass or wackly frightening ass weather situation you've never heard of. But doesn't California just photocopy their weather reports from one day to the next, well more often than not. Yes, it does seem that way, but not on this trip. Early in the morning of April seventh, nineteen twenty six, San Luis, Obispo woke to the rumblings of an early morning storm. It had been raining since the night before, and the first lightning hadn't been seen un till about quarter after seven in the morning, followed by the not so far off rumble of thunder. The storm wasn't no big whoop, but within twenty minutes it quickly intensified, the wind grew, and it caught everyone's attention, but not as much as the intense bolt of lightning that discharged from the sky. It landed just a few miles so the town, and first came the thunder, but then came something else. And let me say this first, the chances of any given place being hit by a bolt of lightning are about the same as winning the power of all lottery. Sorry, but vanishingly small. It's so predictable that for the most part, people chalk it up to bad luck or lack thereof. If lightning struck someone muggy to Grandma, it would be considered incredibly unlikely but lucky. If it hit the grandma, that would seem unspeakably unlucky and awful. Now, remind me what we store just south of town. Yeah, only a moment after the terrible rumble of thunder came an ear splitting, nearly shattering explosion that must have had people reaching for their bedpans. What they heard was so powerful and violent it rocked and swayed buildings to their foundations. Plate glass windows from local storefronts and homes shattered. Hundreds rushed into the streets, thinking that somehow this must be all San Andrea's fault, see what I did there? But no, the lightning had landed a dead bull's eye among the massive Union oil tank farm. Remember what we said, They had tanks that could hold three quarters of a million barrels of oil. The lightning struck and detonated not one, not two, but three of these tanks at the same time. They exploded simultaneously, and an equivalent of about forty five million Dodge caravans worth of oil burst into flames. And to be absolutely sure that no one went back to sleep, fifteen minutes later, they were rocked by a second massive explosion. A company inspector said that he saw a second bolt of lightning, but most other people said that the initial explosion had thrown so much flaming oil and debris onto the fourth tank it was only a matter of time. Even if the people working at the tank farm could believe what they saw, which I assure you they could not. They were powerless to stop it. The fire raged around twenty five hundred degrees fahrenheit or thirteen seventy celsius, and that was hot enough to melt cast iron. Millions of barrels of oil went up in flames, reaching nearly one thousand feet in the air. The fire was visible over twenty five miles or forty kilometers away. Remember how I said the wind would become a thing. Well, because meteorology was barely a thing back then, they didn't know they were within slapping distance of the storm before it hit and This storm had traveled all the way from Hawaii just to visit, and as it arrived along the coast, it intensified. The winds picked up from a good walking speed to a sustained gale of forty mile or sixty kilometers an hour, whipping in from the southeast. The storm finally died out after about three hours, but and this is kind of a big butt, it had done all the damage it really needed to. The wind continued well into the next day. And there's nothing fire loves more. Maybe you remember our Tokoa fire flood episode. When heat from the surface of an oil fire in a container reaches down to the lowest layers, all the moisture from the rain water and the fire hoses superheats. You ever do the oil and water trick? You know that they don't mix well. Right. The oil covers the water layer under its weight until the water expands into steam and it pushes everything out of its way with explosive force. The reason boilovers are so dramatic is because when all that boil is thrown into the air, it does two things. It mixes with oxygen, which makes it more flammable, and instead of just a flat surface. You have multiplied the amount of surface area by about a couple of million. Mixing all that new surface with oxygen creates a whole complicated universe of flammability, rocketing up and outwards in every direction. Picture a video of someone deep frying the turkey the wrong way. It's nothing you want to be anywhere near. And after seventeen hours, all four of the tanks had had enough and boiled over, creating a spillover and a flaming aerial three dimensional obstacle course for union employees. Gentlemen, as we age, our hair can become thin and begin to disappear. But I promise you if a two pay sized glorp of flaming oil landed on your head, you would no longer care. Flaming liquids braid and spewed through the air, and you had to keep your eyes on the sky the entire time. Flaming oil thrown high above would drop through the thick layer of dense black smoke with very little warning, incinerating everything it touched. Plant employees struggled to build firewalls to contain the evergrowing lake of toxic fire. But you know what they say about ten foot walls. Yeah, the fire brought a twelve foot ladder. Eventually the spill would ignite a fifth tank, and all but one of the first row of adjoining tanks members from the fifth drifted over to the six. And you're probably thinking that sounds pretty catastrophic. We already had a damaging storm and a flaming oil tank disaster, So go ahead ask me how it gets worse. All right, I'll tell you. We've talked before about how warm and cool air behave together. Hot air wants to rise and cool air wants to drop out of the sky, and when they're doing that together, bad things can happen. In fact, see our recent episode on the Dallas Fort Worth microburst for reference. If the residents of San Luis Obese weren't ready for the sight of a torrential fire, thick black smoke, and death raining from above, they certainly were not prepared for the strangest meteorological phenomenon ever noted in connection with fire. The fire burned out of control and caused a drastic rise in ground temperatures. This made the air above it warmer and more buoyant. It rose up in columns or updrafts, and more air was drawn in from all sides to replace it. Between the ample available fire and the gale of hot air blowing in from the side at just the right angle, it gave it all a spinning momentum. Thousands could not believe their eyes and gasped in horror as swirls formed into funnel shaped clouds, growing from the fire and gathering strength. Until you thought I was going to say a tornado was born, Well, yes and no. Our tornado is generally only visible and apparent because it draws up the dirt and dust and debris. But the vortex forming here was drawing in heat and oil and fire and smoke. Imagine how you would feel if you were threatened by a tornado and then burst into flames. What they witnessed that day was the birth of a fire tornado or fire nato if you like. They're not exactly the same as tornadoes, but you care. I mean, they don't actually connect from the ground all the way to the base of a cloud like you're used to, but they do share a lot of frightening similarities. They rotate between one hundred and three hundred miles per hour, and they can travel in any direction. They're about three hundred to four hundred feet tall, twenty to fifty feet wide, and they can have temperatures about two thousand degrees fahrenheit or eleven hundred celsius. But that's not all. Your traditional tornado likes to destroy homes and throw a debris. Fire tornadoes like to do the same thing, but they fling it randomly at high speed in any given direction. On fire, it's the same job a water sprinkler does, but with fire. Traditional tornadoes leave a path of physical destructions, and fire tornadoes leave a trail of pure, flaming chaos. And this chaos would last for five days. Witnesses say they're more frightening than a wildfire or a tornado by themselves, and I believe them. They are the Reese's peanut buttercups of nature's scariest creations. You open your door and you see a fire tornado, and you may just stand there staring. Your jaw's gonna loosen, and you might even have to do that kind of door version of a double take, where you close it and you open it up again, and you're always expecting to see something different. Well, if you've listened long enough, you know disbelief is not a survival tactic, so would you know what to do? Fire tornadoes can be created from any size fire, given the right conditions are present, and assuming that you're not hallucinating, what should you do well? Step one I. If you're in a wildfire zone, you're probably already under advice to evacuate, so just do it. You ever hear the phrase when in doubt, get out. A regular tornado can destroy your home and injure or unlive anyone in it by brute force. Fire tornadoes generally don't get that powerful, but okay, they have the option of destroying your home by flinging fiery debris from a distance or just suffocating you with its blistering heat. In a regular tornado, the best advice is to move to the basement against the corner of the house closest to the tornado's path and cover yourself off with any kind of padding immediately available. And if you don't have a basement, you want to be in the center most part of your home, you know, like a hallway, just wherever is furthest from the windows or external walls. With a fire tornado, the best advice is the exact opposite, give your home one last look and book it. It's weird, it looks like a tornado, but you want to obey wildfire rules. Get out as far away from it as you can. Step two. Once you're out, you're gonna see some stuff flying embers and debris and smoke everywhere, all of which brings their own hazards. So technically step one Bee is to grab a wet rag or shirt and cover up your mouth and nose with it to protect your airways from the kind of particulates that your lungs hate. And remember the laws of thermodynamics. Hot, gross, poison air rises while cooler, cleaner air descends. Just remember to be cool about it. The lower you stay, the less heat and smoke you need to absorb. And once you're outside, you can literally play keep away with a fire tornado until it dissipates. But and this is another big butt, there is still the risk of getting stewered by a flaming fence post, so keep your eyes to the sky, keep your head on a swivel, and protect it with your arms. Step three. If you are able to hunker down in a fireproof brick building until it's over, even a body of water could potentially protect you, but never in a car. And you probably always wondered why we say that. Well, here's why. You think of a car as kind of like a protective shield. A tornado thinks of a car as something heavy that it picks up out of curiosity, lifts into the sky until it hits cooler air, and then it is thrust heavily back down into the ground by a powerful downdraft. Lift slam, repeat, lift, slam, repeat until your vehicle and everyone inside it is unrecognizable. This really isn't a step, just more something to remember. Tornadoes of any kind, even the weak ones, are strong as hell, So ideally you want to be able to latch onto something secured tightly to the ground. Actually, ideally you don't want to be doing any of this, But all my safety segments offer the kind of advice that's better to know and not need than to need and not know. Step four. Wait it out. Remember this fire. Tornadoes are a bit like double ended candles. They're powerful, but they're short lived. If you can get to a spot safe enough, just wait for the sound of debris and wins, some crashing and howling and screaming to down, and here's a hot tip. And I say this because it's not obvious and so many people do this. Everything around you after a fire related disaster will be hot to the touch. You'd be surprised at the number of people who will run up after any fire related incident, grab some debris and throw it over their heads with their palm prints melted onto it. Don't be that guy. Don't panic. If you keep your wits about you, you can live to run again. Welcome back. I know this story has a lot of and then this happened, and then this happened, and we're already talking about fire tornadoes. But this is the second most then, this siest thing that you'll hear in this story. What's worse than a fire tornado? Two? Seven, try hundreds. The heat and the wind above the flaming tanks whirled violently and spun off into hundreds of flaming vortices. They rose up and just strolled away. The nearby town of Edna and the surrounding villages near the fire had to be abandoned. And about this time, a whirlwind devoured the roof of the sixth Reservoir. It lifted it and shredded it and flung the contents everywhere. If you're keeping score at home, twenty out of the twenty five tanks were now on fire. An army of three thousand men had been brought in from Fullerton in Anaheim to help corral, if not defeat, this blaze while avoiding the spinning towers of flame pirouetting across the fields. Of course, imagine your job was to repel the biggest medieval siege weapon in history. There wasn't much they could do about it because of the heat, you know that, and the boiling oil showering from the sky. Several workers had barely escaped with their lives as boiling, flaming oil showered from the sky. Entire groves of citrus trees and about twenty farmhouses were magic erased away. Entire groves of citrus trees and about twenty farmhouses were magic erased as a burning flood of oil passed through. Several men were reported missing during the night and feared dead, but everyone assumed they had died, but when daylight came they were found alive. Eight were treated for burns and other injuries. All hope for an organized fire response was pretty much trash plows and steam shovels were used to wall the flood and keep the two highways closest to the tank farm from being closed. A call was put out for every available ocean going oil tanker to steam into port to remove the remaining oil before it was gone too. There was a horrifying display of bubbling oil and smoke and fire. And we haven't even mentioned the smell. Semi volatile organic compounds found in crude oil give it an oily, tarlike smell, but light that up and you get yourself a sharp and whiting, acrid smell that really irritates the eyes and LUNs. Two more of the flaming tanks overflowed, smothering fifty acres under a blanket of impenetrable goo and flame. Flaming river of oil made its way all the way to the sea, with the idea of pumping the oil onto steamers taken way too long. Eventually some took the clue and just started forcing the stuff into the ocean. Horticulturalists said that the fertility of the land was permanently destroyed by crude oil, and just to make sure the fire had as much fuel and accelerant as possible. It also fed on four of the ten thousand barrel tanks of gasoline and kerosene, not to mention the administration and support buildings. Headlines blared things like millions lost as great tongues of fire and clouds of smoke from seething cauldron of destruction. Union Oil wanted locals to clear out, but Ah and Fred Sieber's father and son fifty and twenty five, who lived at a ranch just a quarter a mile or about a half a kilometer away, and the story has it one of the tornadoes heads to their cottage, lifts it up, and carries it one hundred and fifty feet away before dropping it in a field. The house was destroyed and both men who had been in it at the time were also killed. EH's younger daughter, Doris, had been outside too, and she'd been picked up by the tornado and throned, but not killed. Still, she survived to ride in a tornado made a fire. She had to be moved to Los Angeles for treatment. At that same time, a Union employee was chased down by one of about twenty different funnels he saw in his rear view mirror. The roar had scared him so bad that he jumped in his car and just booked it, and in his rear view mirror he saw a flaming chicken coop flying behind him. A half dozen union employees working in a nearby warehouse barely escaped with their lives as a fire tornado turned their work site into burning scraps. Another house only a quarter mile away was thoroughly dismantled and torched, including their outhouses and orchards. The fire nato through a flaming sixteen foot long two by four through the side of a pumphouse, but none of the tornadoes traveled more than three miles or about five kilometers away from the oil fire. Okay, it's a tornado made a fire that no longer needs to be connected to or fed by the original fire, and it just wanders the countryside all by itself, just setting all kinds of other fires indiscriminately. I mean, I'm glad they can't travel farther, but that's really cold comfort for the locals. So what the hell happened? We always say that most disasters are a confluence of contributing factors all common together. In this case, though, it was a matter of lightning needing to discharge from a cloud to the ground and in order to maintain equilibrium, and man putting a twenty five pack of petroleum bombs right where it wanted to be only years earlier. So who the hell knew? Maybe if oil hadn't been necessary to human civilization, Maybe if man had never discovered oil in the first place. Maybe if man had discovered oil later, so meteorology could have advanced to the point where a tank farm might have been planned for a place less prone to storms. Or maybe firefighting technology could have made a real difference. A lot of men did a lot of brave, hard work building dikes and dams to stem the flooding and try to contain the damage as much as they could. But we're not done yet. If you were worried at all that I would not be able to make this story weirder, still, let me dispel you of that notion right now. The next part of our story takes us about two hundred miles or three hundred and twenty kilometers away to Brea, California. It sits in northern Orange County and what you'd think of as suburban Los Angeles today, and we're visiting Stuart, but it's not a person. Stuart is the name of a fifty five acre oil tank farm that happens to be named after Union Oil's founder, Lyman Stuart. It was similar but smaller than the original Obispo tank farm. Stuart contained twenty five reservoirs or tanks containing fifty five thousand barrels worth of oil and three one thousand gallon kerosene and gasoline tanks. Three years earlier, lightning struck the area and it created a fire that took a week to put out. And here we go. The morning after the Union Oil tank farm explosion in San Luis, Obispo, see W. McKinley had been driving east beside the Stuart tank Farm mine in his own business about nine am in the morning, just humming along when he was blinded by a bolt of lightning. He was shocked to see two massive pillars of flame firing straight up from the tank farm, and a shockwave washed over them, powerful enough to flick him off the road. It was felt all over northern Orange County, so to be clear, unexpected lightning fell out of the sky, targeting oil storage tanks in two different towns. I tried to do the math on the probabilities, but ended up with odds somewhere near one in half a quadrillion of two oil tank farms being destroyed by lightning in as many days. That said, it was all second verse same as the first in Poor Brea. Flaming debris and oil was splashed for miles in every direction, some landing and neighboring townships. The scene was an almost identical nightmare. Because so many resources had already been sent up the coast to San Luis Obispo, the response to the fire and Brea was less. They had to send a telegraph signal to Los Angeles to request backup backup firefighters. Another difference between the San Luis Obispo and Brea response was when the townsfolk evacuated, they got it in their heads that their houses would be lost of fire. Sure, but they could save their furniture by just dragging it into the streets. I don't know. At least they got one last look at their stuff when they left. Same as in Obispo, fear over boilovers created a huge rush to pump out the remaining tanks and save whatever they could. Millions of barrels of oil burned for five days, and all the local population could do was watch and cough and maybe throw up a little from the petrochemicals. By the time the smoke had cleared, they were left with about two hundred and forty five million dollars in damages. The Stuart tank Farm had suffered about eighty million. By the time all of the fires had been burned out, three of the tanks had been saved, and no one had been killed. I mean burned terribly, yes, but killed no. A week after the dual disasters, The Times reported that about five percent of all the oil stored on the entire Pacific coast had been lost at the time, that was about eight million barrelsworth. Within a decade, the tank farm at San Luis Obispo was rebuilt, and it continued operating for another fifty years. That stopped in the eighties, and by the nineties all evidence of its existence had been removed. The tanks, the heater building, the pumphouse all gone. All that was left was the disaster. You couldn't see. The nine hundred plus acres that flooded soaked up more than enough petroleum and hydrocarbons to put them on a list beside Love Canal, and not just the land. At the time, union managers said that they'd rather dump oil into the ocean than let the fire have it, so that's exactly what they did. Today, the land has more of an ongoing construction site feel to it. It's being reinvigorated and turned into a mixed use wild lands. But if you dry by now, the only indication that this was ever the site of the most epic construction projects of the early nineteen hundreds and the worst environmental disaster to ever hit California's central coast are mounds of dirt. Case closed or maybe not. Guess what happened only a few years ago. Lightning struck the same spot again, and it set a wildfire across the same area again. The randomness of lightning still created multiple disasters in the same zip code over the years. The only reason this story didn't include a then this happened between reconstruction and the eventual closure of the tank farm was pure random chance. When you think of oil related disasters, you mostly think of pipeline spills and drunken tanker crashes. But after today you'll know better. History has hidden away some much splashier stories forgotten to time. If you're still not sure why the world has such a boner for oil, it's not just for planes and trains and automobiles. Oil makes everything it could be refined into, paraffin, wax, lubricating oils, vasaline anesthetics, refrigerants, explosives, paint, rubber, cleaners, hair, tonic, paper processing, medicine, candles, soaps, dyes, cleaning products and probably more than that. Even our need for it means disasters related to it seem inevitable. The San Luis Obispo fire tornado was not the first and certainly not the last. Just three years earlier around the world, in Tokyo, a Great Canto earthquake was followed by a tsunami, leading to the creation of a fire tornado that killed tens of thousands and destroyed forty five percent of Tokyo. If you think we're not doing an episode on that, so here's why. Fire tonadoes are a little like big feet. They generally live in the countryside, in the wilderness area where most people won't come into contact with them, but with the introduction of cell cameras in every pocket, the chances of catching solid evidence and YouTube gold increases. Dramatically, so, dear listener, what's the weirdest thing that You've ever seen? On fire? You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, at Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us 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. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday, or you can check out a Patreon at Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Metic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of canadianolunteers 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 five different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot ca. On the next episode, I Hate to see a Horse injured during a race, and you'll hate to see everybody but the horses getting hurt in this race. It's the Happy Valley Racecourse disaster of nineteen eighteen. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.