The Seveso Disaster of 1976 | Episode 62

We're going back to Italy, but it'll be hard to enjoy all the flavors and sights with your eyes and your tongue swelling out of your head. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and conspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn all about Russia's almost cartoonish fascination with murder, will learn the best way to get that full body boil look, and we'll learn all the ways your cleaning products can make you make not think so good. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. You may not like your government. Not everyone does, and as relationships go, your relationship with your government can feel very one sided. It's a rare occasion when your government takes the time to try to want to pretend to even like you, and historically it's always been a good idea to keep those thoughts and feelings to yourself. Governments have many tools to deal with their adversaries, diplomacy, negotiation, economic sanctions, and of course, the timeless classic murder. The history of governments murdering the unpopular is a long story and a testament to the length that they will go to eliminate threats to their power. In ancient Greece, hemlock was the secret ingredient to winning arguments. It's a flowering plant somehow related to the care at family, and people have used it for its sedative effects forever, you know, to help calm you down. Like all the way down by the Middle Ages, royalty could choose from a whole host of various toxins and poisons to make sure that they had the last word in any argument, and things like arsenic and deadly night shade and strychnine became household names. Lead, which we've covered before, was an unintentionally successful way to go, not because people really understood how dangerous it was, but because they used it to make a lot of cook wear and for storing food and drinks, and you can look back on our previous episodes to find out all about how lead again make you not think so good? Then shuffle off this mortal coil. In the Renaissance era, cyanide, wolf, spain, and antimony joined the list of things you might find mixed into your food. People weren't really choosy about symptoms back then. I mean, whether you vomited yourself lifeless, or simply had your lungs turned off. It was all just a means to an end. But as governments continued to craft the art of international poisoning to new heights, no one did it quite like Russia. In the mid fifteen hundreds, Ivan the Terrible you've heard of this guy? Well, he had an erratic and violent temper, and he vented it frequently by poisoning anyone who upset him, up to and including his own son. Why well, the list of reasons he might surrender his own child to the ground was so vast that it really kind of boiled down to parenting can be hard, and Ivan the Terrible was a terrible parent. The early sixteen hundreds saw the Romanov dynasty take power, but not for very long. Too many power struggles led to a SNeW of poisoned dinners and other more manual unlivings. One of the more memorable was the death of Peter the Third. The story was that his wife, Catherine the Great, had him assassin by having him smothered by a mattress. And I imagine somebody smothering me with a mattress and telling me that even if I live, that no one would ever believe me, because it's just such a weird way to go. But a rumored autopsy claimed that he actually died of an apoplectic stroke brought on by a severe attack of hemoroidal colic. At the time, this read like an insult or an accusation, or something out of a comedy, and it actually became a popular euphemism for assassination. Also, Catherine the Great may have been a terrible wife. The claim that Catherine the Great of Russia engaged in sexual activity with a horse is a well known and persistent story, but there is no actual, credible historical evidence to support it. Catherine may have murdered her husband, or she may have just cheated on him with a horse using a specially designed custom pulley system, and that's the end of that sentence, and hopefully no kids listen to the Patreon version, Hey kids. By the hundreds, rulers grew tired of getting their own hands sturdy, so we introduce the secret police. And I don't mean like, oh, I can't believe I'm getting pulled over by a Dodge Caravan kind of undercover cop. More like, hey, my bush, it tastes like dying, you know that kind of secret police activity. In eighteen eighty one, saw Alexander the Second was out for a ride in his old timey Jalopee when a bug struck his windshield. Of course, cars could only do about twelve miles per hour back then, so no harm was done, not like the bomb that immediately followed. Former Russian Prime Minister Sergey yu La Vigita understood the assignment. When he took the job, he was wearing a bulletproof vest, and the first word of his new will became, bury me where I am assassinated. Leon Trotsky fell victim to a pickaxe dipped in cyanide, which had to be the least subtle poisoning of all time if true. There have been many attempted and successful assassinations under the watch of Russian authorities. But the incident that caught my eye was the attempt to assassination of Ukrainian activist Victor Yushenko during his presidential election campaign in late two thousand and four. What made it so interesting wasn't the use of a nuclear isotope or a toxic tea sweetener. It was the use of dioxin, and once it was in them, it severely disfigured his face and it left him with a laundry list of health problems. The hell are dioxins, you ask? Well. Dioxins refer to a group or a family of toxic chemicals produced as byproducts from chemical manufacturing. It's also created by burning wood or waste or coal. And the problem is these chemicals are known as persistent organic pollutants. They're sturdy, and they're highly resistant to breaking down in the environment, and once they're in the environment, they can persist for years. Under a microscope, dioxin looks like little crystalline needles, and once in the environment, it attaches itself to soil and dust particles, and it's invisible to the naked eye. You can eat or inhale them, or absorb them straight through the skin. They generally like to build up in fatty tissues, which is a problem see dioxins. Bio accumulate up the food chain, like when a small aquatic bottom feeder ingests environmental poisons. Then they get eaten and up the food chain. It all goes building and accumulating and bigger and bigger hosts until you find yourself eating a tunamelt and mercury sandwich. Dioxins screw up your endocrine system, your immune system, and not that you'd be using it, but your reproductive system as well, leading to everything from cancers to birth defects. So dioxin pretty awful stuff, and we're going to loop back to that. Let us leave the cloak and dagger kill or Be killed world of Russian politics and head south to the more temperate shores of Italy. Ah Bela, Italia specifically, Saveso is a small town in northern Italy in the Lombardi region. It may not be as famous or well known as some of Italy's more touristy destinations, but Saveso is known for lush greenery, parks and gardens, and surrounded by a beautiful landscape of forests, hills, and Lakes, Savesa is a great place to relax and just take a break from the crowds. But that said, if you were starving for a mall or a laser tag center, Miland is only twenty kilometers or twelve miles away, and we're not here for the world class cuisine or the sprawling vistas or the charming ambiance. We'll be spending our time at an industrial plant and I can already picture long time listeners straightening their safety glasses. Historically, Savesa was dedicated to Catholicism and woodworking for furniture building, but after World War Two, large scale chemical companies showed up with their own ideas. The plant will be visiting was owned by Industry Chimiche Meda Societa a Zionaria, which goes by Ikemesa for short, which you've never heard of, And this was owned by gaval Dan, which you've also never heard of, which itself was owned by Hoffman Laroche or the Roche Group or Roche for short, which you may have heard of. Roche is a Swiss pharmaceutical and biotechnological juggernaut. It's one of the largest and most influential pharmaceutical companies in the world. It owns and operates research and manufacturing facilities in more than one hundred countries around the planet. So what do they make here at the Maid of Plant skin cream owner pills. No, nothing that you want to rub on your face or put in your mouth. Two four five tri chlorophenol. It's an ingredient in herbicides and fungicides. It's been used in the production of other chemicals like dyes and pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals, but it's become less and less popular over the years because it's so damn toxic. Immediated exposure can result in skin, eye, respiratory, and digestive tract irritation, and it only gets worse from there. Fun fact, dioxins like trichlorophenol are so toxic to well everything. It became one of the primary ingredients in a agent orange and if you're too young to have heard of it, Asian orange was a military strength herbicide used by the US Army during the Vietnam War. The idea was it would defoliate forests and jungles, which killed off food supplies along with any really good place to hide. And yeah, it killed a lot of stuff, including enemy and friendly combatants. It led to immunotoxicity, endocrine disruption, and increased risks of cancers, especially soft tissue sarcomas, and certain types of lymphomas. The Vietnamese government claimed that hundreds and thousands of people died as a result of agent orange exposure, and if I actually read you the list of diseases caused by exposure to this kind of chemical, it would take me three minutes. In the nineteen eighties, US veterans filed a class action lawsuit against Doo Chemical, Monsanto, and dozens of other chemical companies you'll remember now as the people who brought you napalm, the entire Olympic sized swimming pools of napalm in nineteen eighty four. They actually agreed to pay damages. Not a lot of damages, but it was a landmark case, especially considering that these people were fighting against the consequences of government sanctioned chemical warfare. So back to a schema, we're gonna visit Building three. Building three is home to the kind of chemical production reactors that they use to create nucleophilic reactions and tetrachlorobenzene to produce tri chlorophenol. With the what does what now? I know and it's okay. Don't even ask me how I'm pronouncing this stuff. Just understand there's no test here. If somehow by the end of this episode you couldn't remember whether it was bi chlorophenol or tri chlorophenol, I'm telling you that's okay. Now here's the thing. Because of the work life balance culture shared by ninety seven percent of the world's countries, Italians find themselves entitled to thirty two days of paid vacation a year. It's the law. In North America. People get so little time off that we say things like tgif, which just means thank God it's Friday, so at least you can enjoy the weekend. And before my mental health got the better of me, I used to say tgiama, which stands for thank God it's almost Monday again. But I have found no fortune and no reward in burning myself out emotionally, physically, and psychologically while working every day for years on end with no real way to recharge any of those parts of me. Of all the things that I will not miss on my deathbed, working to pay bills has to be the top of that list, and my current neighbors. Would I be happier if I lived in Italy? Well, someone go ahead and rent me an Italian villa for a year and I'll let you know. But back to Saveso. Italian labor laws were so specific they prohibited the production of chemical compounds over the weekend, So once quitting time hit, all operations were shut down, whether they were finished or not. And once the plant whistle blew, it was all a courus of a ebitdair cheese and the sound of Italian sports cars peeling out at the parking lot. Everything could wait till Monday. Course, in reality, it couldn't even wait till Saturday evening. When they had shut everything down, there was an unfinished batch of chemicals in one of the mixing reactors. The final step in the process had been to distill any ettling glycol from the mixture, and they figured they could leave it till Monday and just pick up where they left off. Six and a half hours after the reactor finished its run, the temperature in the reactor vessel unexpectedly began to rise like an unattended soufflet, and this resulted in a pressure increase in the reactor. It squeezed, and it squeezed until a safety valve on a vent pipe blue like something out of a cartoon, but exactly as planned. The valve was designed to fail under too much pressure and so that all of the over pressurized contents could escape out a vent in the factory roof before it became an explosion hazard. And to the lay person, this looked like a giant cloud of reddish brown gas, extremely toxic dioxen gas to be exact. And this cloud was fart barfing all over Saveyso it carried on the wind and it covered not only Saveso, but it moved southwards towards Belond, covering parts of Meida Desio, Sesano and Maderno. But there were no obvious signs of danger and there was no panic. People saw the cloud blowing around before settling on the ground with the same curiosity and lack of concern that people showed before our Los Alface's campsite disaster. I know we've talked about this before. I have warned you about the blinding effects of normalcy bias. It's a thing where people tend to underestimate the likelihood of a disaster. You think, just because you've always been spared something bad happening, that things will continue to function as they always have. Your brain will tell you something won't happen just because it hasn't happened before, and I think that's what was happening here. See, for the locals, this wasn't the first time some funky waft of who knows what escaped from the plant. The plant had been in business since nineteen forty five, and residents were kind of used to the occasional but accidental pollutant leek, and they always did their best to ignore it. The date today was July the tenth, nineteen seventy six. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon. People were tending their gardens and children were playing in the streets. But today was different. When no one realized at the time was that thirty seven thousand people had just been exposed to a fairly heavy dose of diox and gas or tetrachlorodibenzo dioxin or TCDD for short. Yeah, the same key ingredient they used an agent orange. The people had just been sprayed with a potential war crime or a chemical weapon a minimum, and it did not take long for symptoms to emerge. Grasses and plants across the area withered and died. But once animals and birds began dropping, people's jaws began dropping. Come Monday, when workers and management returned to the plant, the factory managers didn't know what had happened. I mean, they found out, but they had no idea what actually happened, and they had no idea what kind of chemicals had even been involved. And the staff were trying to quote prevent the dissectoralization of the crisis. It's their words, not mine, and in English it just means that they didn't want anyone else to find out what had happened either. Basically, they wanted to focus on this as a technical problem and kind of ignore the bigger issue. They did, however, advise locals to stop eating their livestock and vegetables, but only out of an abundance of caution. They really needed to tell them to slaughter the rest of their livestock to prevent dioxin from polluting the food chain, but they just weren't there yet, not even close. By Tuesday, locals had been showing up at hospital with skin burns and severe rashes that turned into chloracne. You've probably never heard of it, and I'm going to give you a second to guess what it does, all right, if you guess that chloracne was a horrible skin condition where the face and armpits and groin begin to stretch and swell and distort and erupt into a patchwork of oils and cysts excuse me, puss filled oils and cysts that can last for years. Gold Star. They tend to coat everything from the chest up, and if you're curious, they're small, yellowish or dark brown and can be raised or pitted either way. And yeah, we already covered the long term effects of exposure, but to recap it's all bad. The doctors, of course, had no idea what caused it because the company still hadn't disclosed the issue. So you're listening to a podcast about people being unintentionally poisoned, and you're quietly wondering to yourself, if you've ever maybe accidentally or unintentionally poisoned yourself, would you know what to do? Well, get ready to have your eyes pulled wide open and maybe melted a little. I have been wanting to cover this as a safety segment for a long while. When I say accidental poisoning. I'm not talking about grabbing the wrong prescription bottle. I am talking about the unintentional mixture of simple household cleaners that by themselves make our homes clean and fresh smelling, but combined with another seemingly innocent or innocuous product could lead to the need for an online willkit generator and serve sponsor promo here remember COVID. Yeah, saw some weird stuff back then, and a lot of people created their own filtration headgear and other people using pool cleaner and tree root dissolver as cures and what a time. But one thing always stuck out to my mind. It was the number of people, you know, well intentioned people who were so scared about germs sneaking into their homes that they created their own germ killing super cleaners by mixing commonly found household cleaners. When I was a kid, we'd take a cup to the pot machine and fill it with a little bit of every drink available, and we called it swamp water, and it never did us any harm. But when it comes to mixing household cleaners together, we call that coffin filler. I'll show you what I mean. Let's begin baking soda and vinegar are both great and cheaper alternatives to regular household cleaning products on their own, but baking soda is a base and vinegar is an ascidid. Put these together and what you get is mostly water. Yes, that was the gentlest underhanded pitch over the plate that you're going to get here. It is about to escalate quickly. Hydrogen peroxide in vinegar again, yeah, great in isolation, but mix them together and you get parasitic acid. They use it as an antimicrobial agent for medical sterilizations. Of course, the problem with parasitic acid is that it can become corrosive like corrosive enough to dissolve metals, and there is no skin anywhere on my body stronger than even the weakest metal, and its fumes are no better for you. Ammonia and bleach, now we're getting into it. They're not that much fun in isolation, but together the fumes will kill you. And of course the problem is ammonia and bleach are found as ingredients in lots of different cleaning products, so you really have to check your labels before using them together. Vinegar and bleach, well, you put these together, and the acid in the vinegar will release a toxic cloud of chlorine gas that will burn your eyes and lungs. Just go ahead and ask all those soldiers from World War One. Rubbing alcohol and bleach will make chloroform cool? No, not cool. TVs and movies have done a terrible job teaching you about chloroform. I promise you it is not some fast acting knockout agent that efficiently renders someone unconscious with the lightest whiff off a napkin. Every time you see someone using it in a movie, just remember they're actually just smothering them with a rag while giving them liver, kidney, and thyroid cancer. Chloroform is carcinogenic. Same with bleach and mildew stain remover. Same with bleach and toilet bowl cleaner, Same with bleach and oven cleaner. What about lysol products, Well, I actually worked on lysol for many years, and here's what I can tell you. Just don't use them with bleach. Bleach can oxidize the benzyl chlorophenol that you find in lysol disinfectant sprays and can release a wild display of irritating and toxic compounds. And yeah, I feel like I could just stop here and just say, don't mix anything with bleach. But let's continue. What would you say if I said, keep your eye on your dish soap. Many dish detergents use ammonia to boost cleaning power, but ammonia plus bleach equals a not so fun way to get out of dinner plans. And as long as we're in the sink, let's talk about drain cleaners. You pour them down the sink and hope for the best, and sometimes you have to get more to finish the job. But if you accidentally mix different kinds of drain cleaners, they can result in the release of chlorine gas, which will kill you and can even result in a build up of fumes that can result in an explosion, which will kill your plumbing and probably blow off your face and legs. A good friend of mine nearly died this way. Glass cleaners like windex also contain ammonia, and ammonia plus bleach equals funeral arrangements. And here's one you didn't see coming. Let me guess bleach and pesticides. Now, pesticides and water. Certain pesticides when combined with water can create deadly phosphene gas. I mean, it's got deadly right there in the name. I told my wife this because I suspect that she would empty an entire can into a sink if she saw a spider or anything roughly spider shaped. But she assured me that she would be more likely to simply throw the can. And I believe her. I have seen her empty entire cans of bug spray on something and then throw the can. I have actually seen her throw her cell phone at a spider before without a second thought. For the sake of making this dead simple, here is a blanket solution. Do not mix any cleaners of any kind for any reason. They may neutralize each other, or they might voltron into the kind of lung melting potion that you might read about in a list of war crimes. You need to get into the habit of reading the labels on household cleaners and keep them away from children and pets. I can't believe I nearly forgot to say that. Always try to clean and well ventilated areas to clear any fumes. And if you do find a strange odor, just get the hell out leave immediately, call poison control or the authorities. And if you use bleach to clean as your cleaning product of choice. Just use bleach, and just only use bleach. Many hospitals now just use vinegar to disinfect instead of bleach, just to take the issue off the table, just saying. I'm also just saying that about one hundred thousand people die every year from accidental household poisonings, and we'll never know how many millions more just barely survive. Whether it's a glass cleaner, dishwasher, detergent, toilet cleaner, floor cleaner, wood cleaner, or whatever. Combining cleaning products can result in clean white tiles or a clean white tunnel alight before you, with all of your dead relatives waving you into it. The factory was still mum at this point, but the locals, the media, and the pundits were all using their best guestsmanship and all came to the same conclusion. Yeah, this pretty much seemed like dioxin poisoning, and two weeks later the company agreed, and in that time panic did begin to set. In decades before the Internet, in communities like SAVESO word a mouth travels fast, and when people learned, people wanted answers. Eventually it came down to senior company chemists who convinced the locals to evacuate the area, and by July twenty sixth the Lombardi regional authorities stepped in and stepped up. They had determined that the sleek had affected an area of eighteen square kilometers or seven square miles. The army had been called in. They sealed off the whole area with a twelve foot high wire fence. And you want to get back in, now, that's cool. Just get a note from the government, which raises the question, so when do we get back in? Stunned silence. It was at this point that the authorities realized they had no idea doc since as a chemical group weren't really fully understood in nineteen seventy six, and the cloud of escape gas contained an estimated six tons of sodium hydroxide, athylene glancol, sodium trichlorophenate, and an estimated fifty ten to thirty kilograms of TCDD dioxin. And it turns out a single kilogram of the stuff could kill fifty thousand people, and its half life in the environment is sixty to eighty years. Even among the scientific community, they couldn't necessarily tell you which dioxins were deadly and which were not, and how long either remained that way? Were they going to have to seal off saveyso forever. Well, well, that was a tough admission to have to make, and it's a tough thing to have to hear. No home, no job. No one wanted food or furniture or religious advice from SAVESO after this. Now, imagine being told all this and also being told that you have to abstain from procreation, and then being offered a therapeutic abortion if you had not a lot of people have lost their homes in the last few years, but at least their homes weren't bulldozed and crushed into a metal tube, and they could still have sex or a baby about it. Yeah, the kicks just kept on coming. And at least we can tell you now, I mean I I can tell you Savesso would not be sealed a way forever. A clean up plan began in October of that year. First, all the contaminated animal carcasses were blocked into giant steel containers and topped off with the rubble of demolished homes and buildings, including the IGMESA factory itself. Oh yes, this is not the kind of stuff that you hose down with a face mask on. If you remember from previous contamination episodes, whether it's radioactive or just regular or old toxic contaminated topsoil spends the rest of its life in a steel container buried under a concrete sarcophagus. And I will say, from all my reading on the subject, that barrels of toxic waste had been taken from mac Mesa to be disposed of properly. But reading between the lines, I'm left with the impression that this was absolutely not. In fact, it became lost a TV who even tried to chase it down for whatever reason. It went to France and eventually the military took it back, and Roche swears that all of it was eventually in center. But again that's the beauty of disasters lost to time. Who can say the cleanup operation took over five years, even personal effects and household items were buried away. But the good news is, if there's anything really important in there, the dioxid should become harmless by about the year twenty two seventy six. So what happened, Well, I know we talked an awful lot about chemistry and chemical reactions in this show, but this is not one of those sexy chemistry podcasts, so I'm gonna cover this real quick. Wheneveryone bounced for the weekend. They hadn't got around to removing the ethylene glack hall from the reaction mixture. It was the final step, and when they left the mixture was just churning away around one hundred and fifty eight fahrenheit or three sixteen celsius, but ended up experiencing an exothermic decomposition, a what it began generating its own heat. Between that and an unexpected rise and the surrounding exhaust steam temperature heating the reactor even further, the temperature inside the reactor shot up to around two hundred and thirty fahrenheit or four hundred and forty six degrees celsius. The mixture had been left unattended, like we said, running the whole time, and there wasn't any system in place to automatically cool it, and without anyone there to intervene, this led to a runaway reaction. The plant workers had stopped the process by isolating the steam and turning off the stir in the reactor vessel before they clocked out on Friday, but they didn't know about the additional heating. Also, the factory's safety systems clearly sucked. There was explosion prevention because I mean, who wants to replace a factory but environmental or health protections nap. So how and where do you assign blame in a situation like this, Well, the police tried. Several executives, company officials and managers from MCMESA were arrested and charged with environmental crimes and negligence, but the prosecution was focusing more on corporate responsibility than targeting specific individuals for criminal liability. Five employees were sentenced up to five years in prison, and they appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court in Rome and in the end two out of the five took the blame for not making the public aware. Sooner, Italy introduced new legislation on the handling and storage of dangerous chemicals, like if you're going to make a batch of chemicals, make sure you have time to see it through before you take a month off work. The whole European Union followed suit and it implemented the Saveso Directive in nineteen eighty two, Yeah, named after the disaster, and it became the de facto rule book for handling hazardous substances. It introduced stricter regulations and safety measures to prevent incidents like this from ever happening again. Follow Up testing revealed an excessive increase in deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, diabetes, which I'm not sure how that even correlates here, but here we are anyway, and of course cancer. By June of nineteen seventy eight, the Italian government had plunked one hundred and fifteen billion lira into the problem. And this will sound magnanimous and huge on the part of Roche, but Roche compensated the effective towns and the region, and the Italian state and the citizens all settled out of court, no muss, no fuss. And why probably because it allowed them to settle the affair without having to accept legal responsibility for the accident. A man named Paolo Pelletti had been the director of production at Igmesa, and he'd been able to slide through the courts no problem, and never felt the real state of justice until a radical left wing terrorist organization had him shot in the face. You thought I was gonna say mafia, No I was going to make a joke about how much that must have stung. The disaster at Saveso raised awareness about the potential dangers of hazardous chemicals and the importance of effective safety measures, emergency response plans, public awareness, all of it. Obviously, this wasn't the end of industrial disasters. Just five years after Saveso, a Union carbide place in Bopaul, India, suffered its own catastrophic leak. The offender of choice there was methyl isocyanate. It's used to make pesticides, but it's powerful enough to cause acute lung injury and cardiac arrest, which it did like a lot. The big difference here Saveso had a population under fifty thousand, while beau Paul's population was over eight hundred thousand. So yeah, for comparison, the Bopaul disaster was more lethal and injurious than Chernobyl, and India's government indicated that there were almost five hundred and sixty thousand casualties at Bopaul, while no one died at Saveso, at least not immediately or in a way that we could prove in a legal sense. And while Bopaul remains abandoned and unfit to support life. Today, Saveso has been turned into a park and has been banned from any future development of any kind. The Saveso disaster's legacy is shaped by the improvement of both environmental and industrial safety regulations worldwide. This legacy affects the safety of a US all, which makes the event terribly important, even if no one's ever heard of it. The last time we were in Italy, we had a tetrology of terror. It was our very first interactive disastersode, and hundreds of thousands died in every way imaginable. Now today we don't know how many people died from the complications of bioxin poisoning. But it is nice to do a bloodless story every now and then, you know, sometimes there's just enough death. And if I didn't say it before the last episode, it was because I had recorded it but not edit it before Christmas, which, as many of you know, is when I lost my father. One thing I realized after he was gone was how much that he helped people in his life. And I came to realize that this show is me following in that same impulse, just in a much broader way. And all I want to say is this. If you have people in your life that you love, tell them or pull them a little closer and do it because I asked you to. If you are a regular listener, consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare Bucker two, you would really be helping keep me and the show alive. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you're into it but you weren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation, which literally Frederick and Jenny did while I was recording this episode. And to all of those you do and have, I appreciate you from a deep place. Now. If you had been listening to this on Patreon, you would have heard us discuss the cartoonish cloak and dagger world of Russian assassination tactics, the life saving and bowel cleansing properties of Alestra. We discussed whether Katin the Great had sex with horses. We covered how disturbing the little vacation time North America gets compared to well the rest of the planet Really. We discussed the radiance of American super fun sites, including my semi local favorite Canal, and I included a minisode within the episode telling you about the unbelievable Tale of Time Speech Missouri and They're impossibly poisonous road spraying policy. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com, slash Funeral Kazoo, quick but heartfelt shout out to Gary wand, Eric Urn, Brent Mayfield, Jeff Mackee, Sarah Campbell, Ann Chambers, Christine Dresser, Henley David Brooks, Cynthia Engelbreck, Philippe Lebat and Ross Rogers for helping support me on Patreon. Welcome aboard. Everyone is always welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. I do really love hearing from you, but I'm a little touched in the head sometimes, so I'm typically a little slow to respond with Apologies to Nicholas Over, jeffmac Joseph Pattovani, Doug Frasier and David Brooks for the slow response. Yeah, I see you, I'm just slow. A lot happens behind the scenes here. Alan from Pennsylvania wanted some stickers, which happy to oblige, and Julianna from Russell's wanted a barth bag. Absolutely. I also thought to mention that this is episode sixty four, and I just counted backwards. Eight of those sixty four episodes were listener requests. 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. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, I also ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Menic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CAA on the next episode. We have looked at some pretty reckless and irresponsible companies before, but never one that warranted its own entire episode. It's the PG and E toxic wildfire disaster of nineteen ninety six to twenty eighteen. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.