The 4D Sicilian Tetraology of Terror of 1693 | Episode 55

For all those people who say Doomsday is a podcast unlike any other. To them, I say this is going to be an episode unlike any other. Also, there's an off chance this episode may result in thousands of dollars and images and home repairs. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories most Dangerous four D interactive Experience. Together you're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and onspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, I proudly bring you the world premiere of a pivotal moment in the history of podcasting, the first ever fully experiential four D active podcast retelling an apocalyptic historical series of events. And it's all natural. You're gonna want to grab a hat of paper. There will be a small shopping list. This is not the show that 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 all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin here at the Doomsday Podcast. We have always strived to bring you tales of woe from throughout history and make them feel alive and in the present. Well, that has never been more true than in this one of a kind episode. What it may lack in rich historical detail, it will more than make up for with the satisfaction of actual participation. Before we begin to make the experience feel more four dimensional, I'm going to give you a short list of items you will to participate fully, all right, Gutch pencils, you will need, a wheelbarrow, a clothes dryer, several pairs of shoes or boots, buckets of dirt, sand, or soil, probably one hundred pounds of each, a strong fan, ten pounds of baking soda, eight to ten liters of white vinegar, a waterbed bladder, probably a hose, definitely a mop, one axe or machete, but for the sake of convenience, a large kitchen knife would probably do. One four by four or off road appropriate vehicle, and one set of gloves. You could pause the podcast and we'll wait while you run around and grab everything you need. If you're listening on a stereo system with big speakers, lay the speakers flat on the floor. Reduce your trouble, and increase your base, and crank this as loud as you can now. Just seven hundred speaker, Ah, the sixteen hundreds Shakespeare, which trials, Moon maps, civil wars and all that plague. So long ago white people were still coughing and sneezing all over the New World, and Newton had just figured out gravity. The year is sixteen ninety three, and as ages go, it was a real mixed bag. But if you were stuck back then, trying to decide where to spend a few days, you could do a lot worse than Italy. Bella Italia, picturesque cities with a mix of Renaissance, Baroque and Medieval architecture, marketplaces and public squares busting with activity, Sprawling countrysides with rolling hills of vineyards and olive groves, fishing villages and seaside towns with cobble streets offering scenic views of the Mediterranean, exceptional beaches, charming villages, and an abundance of ancient ruins and archaeological sites. We're going to be visiting Sicily, to be exact, in Sicily, they say, Unasanto Chisura apologize for the pronunciation, but it basically translates to a saint doesn't sweat. It's referring to statues and answering questions. It basically just means keep your mouth shut. Ah. But Sicily is so much more than just a breeding ground for rumors and mafia characters. If you picture itly on a map is a misshaping boot kicking a misshapen ball. We are talking all about the ball. Sicily is unique. Back in the day, it used to be more autonomous than the rest of Italy. It's got fingerprints from the Greeks, Arabs, Phoenicians, the Normans, Romans, Moors, British and French all over it. So yeah, Sicilians think of themselves as Sicilians first and Italian second. It's kind its own culture and traditions and dialects. But if you remember, this is not a tourism podcast, it's a disaster podcast. So how about a little local disaster history. Well, Southern Italy has been rocked by powerful earthquakes throughout its entire history, with notable knockers back in eleven sixty nine, fifty forty two and sixteen twenty four. They call it latera ballerina, the dancing Land, and it sits on at least a half dozen faults, and some of them pretty major. Deep beneath its uncalculable heritage and beauty. The African continental plate meets the European plate and they slowly slide past each other as the African plates subducts beneath the European plate, which builds stress. And then we just wait, So, okay, why are we here in sixteen ninety three. Well, I don't want to spoil anything, but some people call what I'm about to tell you an apocalypse. You be the judge, and let's begin. The date is January the ninth, sixteen ninety three, and it bears we're here just in time to bear witness to one such earthquake, a six point three magnitude shaker centered in Valdinotto, about halfway up the coast. It created panic throughout the entire island. Six point three is no small earthquake today, a six point three would create moderate to severe dam buildings, but in sixteen ninety three, buildings collapsed across most of the region, especially in Augusta, where almost half of all homes were completely destroyed. And of course the other half were damaged, to say the least. Damage and death were widespread, and most people spent the next few nights outside nervously waiting for aftershocks. Others just slept on ships in the harbor. Now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, very little was known about how earthquakes happened. But in the sixteen hundreds people thought that they were caused by the movements of underground wind and gas and fire. Others thought it was comets, others thought it was God, and others believed in subterranean dirt demons. Well, we can skip by all that, and let's just take a quick minute to take in some of the fascinating history of earthquake scale development. The initial step in determining earthquake magnitudes empirically came in nineteen thirty one, when the Japanese seismologists Kiu Wadati showed that the maximum amplitude of an earthquake's seismic waves diminished with this. Nineteen seventies was the preferred magnitude scale, but it demonstrably underestimated the energy release of great quakes like the nineteen sixties. To really represent conditions where the surface waves are predominant, and that is how earthquakes are made. Even back in the sixteen nineties, some people believed that the Earth's crust was actually composed of these kind of tectonic plates which could generate earthquakes when they collided or slipped past each other, all riding around on a magma corps. But that was obvious heresy and they were stone to death for it, So don't worry about a thing. If records from sixteen nineties Italy were easier to come by, this entire episode could have been just about this one incident. But it brings me no small amount of ill place pleasure to tell you that this was just the warm up two days later, just long enough for even the most nervous to finally calm themselves enough to start putting breakables back on high shelves. Around PM that night, right around Italian dinner time, the cutlery and the plates began to dance. Now to set this scene, please take a moment to load all those shoes and boots into your dryer. If you want a little extra authenticity, you're going to want to throw a handful of dirt and small rocks in there with them, and you can just use tumble dry. There's no real need to heat anything here. I want you to hit start and hug your dryer, keep your face in, your teeth clear, and hold on. The thing about nighttime earthquakes, especially back in a time when candlelight was as good as you got, one of two things would happen. Drum roll. Would you rather find yourself plunged into darkness and have to free yourself from the ruins of your home completely blind, or you can see just fine because when the candles fell, they ignited your home around you, making visibility not so bad, but making your escape more of a timed event. Well, this follow up earthquake was estimated to be as high as seven point nine in magnitude and six point three to a seven point nine. That's a big step up. And because we can never just take bad news at face value on this program, I'll quickly elaborate. When you hear people talk about measurement scales for earthquakes, you have to remember the most teeth rattlingly awesome thing about them is that their log arrhythmic lagagua. Well, that's all right, It just means that a seven point nine earthquake would be about forty times bigger and two hundred and fifty times more powerful than a six point three. It can be difficult to process mentally, but thankfully I already explained all of this just a minute ago. Now, imagine riding out an earthquake powerful enough to destroy thousands of homes and lives, only to face another one two days later that was two hundred and fifty times more powerful. The epicenter of the earthquake was pretty close to the coast these act position remains unknown, but the worst shaking was felt in towns like Bushemi, Floridia, Malilli, Okola, and Sortino, which wasn't great because the buildings in these places had been standing for hundreds of years since the medieval ages, and quake mitigation in architecture wasn't a thing yet, nothing around here had been designed with shaking your mind. And you know what the worst part was. That wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the quake lasted for four minutes. So for this section, you're going to need a vehicle and a stop watch, but you can just use the app on your phone if you'd like. I'm going to ask you to find an area you would consider off road, like a rocky beach, or a forest after a fire, or anywhere that looks like they test missiles closest to you. Just set your timer for four minutes and drive as hard as you can over the terrain. This will probably feel like one and a half hours, but I guarantee you will have a strong appreciation for what these people went through. When it comes to length of an earthquake, think of it like a fight. You get hit it, sometimes harder than others, and it generally never lasts longer than a few seconds to a few minutes at worst. When I was younger, the best thing about fights was if you've found yourself in one, people were going to step in and break it up after a few seconds. Now today you every wanted to be standing around in a circle recording it and yelling world star, and the fight goes on and lasts as long as it does. So with that in mind, imagine I came to your home on a Monday and I punched you in the face pretty hard, and then I came back during dinner on Wednesday and punched you two hundred and fifty times harder and wouldn't stop for a full four minutes. The Avola fault runs roughly north south, just off the Italian shore, and it slipped by two meters or about six feet. Imagine the earth beneath your feet suddenly rising six feet. At least seventy cities, towns, and villages were devastated or destroyed, as far apart as Messina, Palermo and Malta. The bell of Santa Agatta, the patroed saint of Sicily, began to ring by itself, which brought the curious out of their homes before they collapse, saving their lives. When the tremors began in a town of Malali, a priest rang the church bells and Malally was miraculously spared while being surrounded by absolute devastation. And these events are still celebrated to this day. So did God save those people? Well, in the history of this show, no deity has ever shown up to help, not once. Remember our Brescia church explosion episode. Well, as we established there, it would be difficult to believe that God did not actively and specifically hate medieval churches. I'm not entering into a religious or philosophical argument here. What I do believe is that those church bells were effectively the first kind of fire alarms, and people with fire alarms are one hundred times more likely to survive a fire. So if the Lord helps those who help themselves, this is how I think that works. A man named Vincentius Bona Judas lived to tell the tale. He declared it was in the country impossible to keep upon one's legs, or in one place on the dancing earth. Nay, those that lay across the ground were tossed from side to side as if on a rolling billow. And if you're wondering what a billow is, it just means cloudlike. Although records from four hundred years ago aren't the easiest to come by, there were many heroic tales of survivors who worked tirelessly to rescue their fellow man, which is really nice to hear. Some things just never change. Homes and buildings already weakened from the previous quake didn't stand a chance. Quakes generally, as a rule of thumb, get weaker the further you are from the point of origin. But this was felt in an area the size of Delaware, about twenty two hundred square miles, or fifty six hundred square kilometers, thousands were made homeless, and infrastructure and heritage sites got their historical teeth kicked. In King Amadeus the second of Sicily, I've been standing on a balcony that collapsed, but he managed to not get his card punched. But remember those billowing clouds. Yeah, maybe they were billowy because as as ninety three thousand former residents were ascending to them all at once, playing harps, if you follow my meaning. And yes, I suppose some percentage would have been dragged off to hell, but I am not here to judge. So this is awful and awfully exciting so far, and I am not normally this excited to tell you about how people die. But this is a special episode, and everything you've heard so far is only the beginning. That's right. Part two. Have you ever heard of Mount Etna. It's really, really close by. It's right on the eastern coast of Sicily, and it's the biggest mountain on Earth south of the Alps. It's also the biggest volcano in Europe, and it's one of the more active volcanoes on the planet. And from where we're standing, you just need to turn a little. Actually, never mind, it's right there where all that smoke and flame is coming from. The Mount Etna had awoken, and if I am seeing correct, yes, it is choosing violence this morning. So grab your baking soda and your vinegar and turn your furnace as high as it will go. You'll need to find a large enough vessel like a sink or an old cupboard and pour the baking soda inside. Yeah, it takes a while. That's a lot of baking soda. Now I want you to pour the vinegar in and get ready. Welcome to the eruption of Mount Etna. After twenty four years of silence, the earthquakes had increased the stress on the faults, helping trigger an eruption. And not just any old eruption. This eruption will stand out as one of the most destructive in its recorded history. It lasted for several months, but most of the action was front ended into the first two weeks. Well, hey, that's when we are. The eruption was classified as a plenty in eruption that is the most explosive type of volcanic eruption, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index rating of four. The Veei is just a scale that measures the explosiveness and magnitude of volcanic eruptions, and a VEI four eruption is rather colorlessly classified as quote a significant event that can have regional or even global impacts. If you think of a child's drawing of a volcano with a mushroom cloud on top, this is where that comes from. This kind of blast releases a ridiculous amount of ash and gas and other adjecta that carries on the wind over hundreds of miles. The eruption column reached at least a dozen miles or more, and all that ash fall berries, agriculture, blasts, infrastructure, and of course ash is so fine that it gets into the really really deep parts of your lungs, where it draws all of the moisture from the tissues and basically turns into cement. The eruption generated powerful explosions, extensive lava flows, and pyroclastic flows. Remember those fast moving currents of hot ash, gas and volcanic materials from our second ever episode that wiped out all those poor suffering people coated in snakes and spiders and centipedes. These floes traveled down the flanks of the volcano and engulfed everything in their path. Things like towns and villages Catania, Syracuse, and villages in the surrounding area were destroyed or severely damaged. The destruction was best described as widespread and thorough. The seventy nine AD eruption amount Vesuvius, the Buried Pompeii and Herculaneum that was also classified as a VEI four, so as Mount Saint Helen's when it blew its top in nineteen eighty. It is estimated that as many as twenty thousand people lost their lives from Mount Etna alone. Now imagine a historic earthquake slash volcano tag team powerful enough to kill tens of thousands is sitting right there. So you run to the sea to escape and die face first into mud. That's right, welcomed apart. Three. If you stare too long at the volcano, you might not have noticed the horrific magic tricks setting itself up right behind you. Fans in the Mediterranean couldn't help but notice that the sea was slurping backwards. The water quickly disappeared along about two hundred and thirty kilometers or one hundred and forty miles off the coast. To give you a better visual, that's the distance between Ithaca, New York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In places like Augusta, the entire harbor went dry, which famously damaged a lot of ships, or damaged a lot of famous ships. In this case, these weren't just any old fishing boats. A fleet of hundreds of warships belonging to the Knights of Malta and the Order of Saint John were damaged. I think of these as the kind of huge battle boats powered by hundreds of sunburned oarsmen rowing into battle while the lido deck officer keeps time with a bull whip and a word of advice. Always assume that everything we talk about in this episode was damaged. Now pause the podcast, connect your host to your sink, and fill up that waterbed bladder. Don't worry, we'll wait. Now that that's done, you're going to want to take the machete or the axe and give the bladder a good whack. You've got to be careful that the thing doesn't bounce that blade right back at you. But if people used to puncture these things with car keys, I think your job should be fairly simple. When the earthquake rattled the vault lines running off shore, they also rose about six feet, which had the same effect as tilting a bathtub, and all that displaced water began to race inland. But that's not all, all that whatnot, and Hoopla proved to be too much for the rest of the coastal shelf. The uplifting of the ocean floor was dangerous enough. The whole thing had been destabilized, and the coastal shelf collapsed, creating an underwater oceanic landslide. Across the Atlantic. Facing America from Africa's western coast sit the Canary Islands. La Palma is one of them, and beneath the water surrounding La Palma is a large shelf of a fractured volcano. One day, it is foretold that it will collapse and send a mega tsunami all the way to the American shores. And this is pretty much what happened here, as part of the shelf below collapsed in a landslide that effectively doubled the tsunami's energy. So you pull your face from the mud with your vision all messed up, and you say, I'm seeing double four tsunamis that's right, a double tsunami. The ocean originally began flowing back to a smattering of polite applause, followed by booze, then screams, followed by lots of cardio. The sea came back with a thundering roar, and depending on where you were situated at the moment, it rose between eight and twenty six feet, and all that water washed inland as much as a mile or one and a half kilometers. This is not the kind of thing that you were going to outrun on foot, and sadly, in the sixteen hundreds feet were all they had. Remaining. Records of the damages are sketchy, but we know that buildings were destroyed and people were killed, and Katania was hit especially hard, with almost two thirds of the entire population drowned and washed away. So you jostled around like you're in one of those old electric tabletop football games. Then you ran from a volcano. Then you had to run from the sea. And obviously the safest thing to do in a tsunami situation is to make for higher ground. But what happens when that higher ground makes for you? Given the way this episode is going. Of course, it's going to come for you. That's right. Who Part four? Imagine running inland to escape the sea, only to find the land rushing up to meet you. The underwater shelf wasn't the only thing that destabilized. The earthquake had triggered large landslides that tore through the villages at Noro, Antica and Sartino, to name just a few. Now we all pushed our wheelbarrows filled with the remainder of the soil and rocks to the top of our stairs, and at the count of three, we'll all give that a hoist while we tell you more three two one. If you hadn't seen videos of a landslide before, they are easily in the top ten, probably top five of the most aggressive things our world can do to us. There is a very famous video of an Italian landslide that's sent a rock the size of a house slamming through a villa on a vineyard. I'll post a video of it. It just points out how a landslide in this part of the world can be extraordinary. Not far from Cassaro, two absolutely massive rocks shook loose from the walls of a river valley. They collapsed and effectively blocked the valley on one side, and the river eventually flooded and became a beautiful but unexpected lake three miles or five kilometers around. And it was more than just the hillsides coming unglued in the plains and valleys across Lentini. The earth ripped and tore open. Gashes in the surface ran up to sixteen hundred feet long and they were over six feet wide. And from those tears at deep rumbling, followed by eruptions of sand and water. Welcome to part five, the weirdest thing that happened. Now, for this part of the interaction, you're going to want to sit in front of your fan turned on as high as it will go, and now cup handfuls of sand and hold them in front of the fan. Oh my god, Ah, Now have you ever heard of sand volcanoes? The is a sand volcano? You ask all that earthquake can do. Shaking caused all the water saturated sand in the area to lose its strength and start to behave more like a fluid, which was then squeezed from beneath by geological forces until it was blown back to the surface and of everything we've mentioned so far, this is not the deadliest part of our day. But two things. First, the emergence of sand volcanos created even more ground instability, which further damage buildings and structures and the people within. I read one account of people having their faces sanded off by these after an eruption of nearby Mount Pesuvius, but no records of anything like that exist here, and it would barely matter. Casualties would have just been chocked up to earthquake damage. And second, when I said some viewed the whole thing together as an apocalypse, well here's the thing. If my lawn ripped open and puked wet sand high in the air, I would absolutely agree. Again. Four hundred year old historical documents an old timey, handwritten, untranslated scribble is hard to work from, but they mentioned dozens of aftershocks continuing as late as August of sixteen ninety four, and some were said to be as strong as the initial six point three quake. Any one of these natural disasters would quell you with fear all by themselves. The earthquake was one of the most powerful and deadly in recorded Italian history. Same for the eruption of Mount Etna, one of the most destructive eruptions in the history of the volcano, and the landslide, Sonamis and San Volcanoes shared a pretty ugly podium for the bronze. Together, this whole episode had a profound impact on Sicily and the entire surrounding region. Half of Europe would ponyup financial aid and manpower to help with rebuilding, and I believe the other half were at war with each other at the time. And I always feel a certain sadness when I think about historical sites that had to be rebuilt, with much of the unique local art and architecture turned into puzzle pieces. Is rebuilt. Cities like Catania, Noto, Ragusa and Modica took on more of a baroque feel. It was all the fat at the time, elaborate facades, grandiose sculptures, you know that kind of stuff, and the whole area it's kind of famous for it now and there's no better time than right after an apocalypse to rebuild. There were three scenarios for rebuilding. You call it a complete wash, throw up a release sign, and just restart somewhere completely different. You rebuild basically to spec and return everything to its original appearance, or you throw away the original plans and rebuild with more modern plans. Obviously, the benefit of having to rebuild is the chance to make things a little more disaster resistant, which is good. But my heart always feels that ship of theseus is in itself anymore if you've never heard of it. It's a philosophical argument about whether a ship rebuilt over time, plank by plank, is still the same vessel. I always make the argument that if you live in a city, it gradually changes, stores, change, buildings change. Eventually, it's just kind of unrecognizable when you end up saying things like, well, that used to be the library, and that used to be an arcade. Enough times, it's just not really your city anymore. Living in Toronto, half my favorite things have been replaced with condos. There's just no way to convey what's been lost, not here or in sicily. And I'll leave you with this, Just let this sink in the original home of the Toronto maple Leafs today is a grocery store. I realized only after telling the story that the way I told it, it kind of felt like all of this happened in an afternoon. The truth is some of the events overlapped over weeks, but five separate life snuffing misadventures hitting at the same area so quickly is unbelievable. When I told my wife what the story was about, she was half heartedly disappointed to learn that there were no tornadoes to be had. And this reminded me of the idea that if you play a harmonica while playing the guitar, people tend to think of you with some kind of prodigy, but as soon as you had a bass drum to your back or symbols between your knees, here's some kind of musical buffoon. And as much as I love to believe that in some alternate timeline or universe tornadoes were whirling around in the background of this thing trying to get their own attention, the truth is, if there had been anything else in this episode, the whole thing would have bordered on the cartoonish. No one would have believed it. My wife also pointed out that when Opie Cunningham made the Apollo thirteen movie, he left out so many details because the fuller story would have been too unbelievable for audiences. It's still amazing that this all piggybacked on itself so quickly, one thing after another, and that they were all natural disasters, which only points out that unlike all of our other episodes, this was more than a disaster, more than a handful of disasters. This was more than just a series of interrelated awfulness. This was, by definition, our first truly surreal catastrophe. I can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, at Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Don't be shy, I love hearing from you, guys. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one. While you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo or buy meacoffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and the date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Global medic dot CA. On the next episode. We've been a lot of places on this show, space, the ocean, battle fields, we've even been to Kalamazoo. But one place we've never gone is prison. It's the Ohio State Penitentiary disaster of nineteen thirty. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.