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Evening/early morning!

I ended up having time to get the Factorio video put together on time, though the real life matters are still going to be biting at me a bit. Though speaking of biting some of the Halloween videos are already being worked on. I'm hoping to have the big adventure game video out for Halloween itself and a lot of cool stuff is already completed for it but I can never be sure with big projects. I'll keep you all updated.

For now I have a Factorio copy to give out! To enter post the stupidest pollution or factory accident you know of in the comments and the best will be decided early next week. Winner can pick between a Steam or GOG copy.

Thanks as always for your support!

Comments

Anonymous

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 where 21 people died to slow moving molasses and 150 were injured

Anonymous

Great video as always! As for stupid factory incidents, I always think of that time when an industrial silo of molasses burst in 1919 boston and caused a flood of liquid sugar syrup that ended up killing 19 people and caused the city to smell faintly of syrup for decades following...

Samuel Albert Mell

*shrug* I'll go for the low hanging fruit and say "Chernobyl".

TheGriff

Goiania accident where some unsecured uranium in an abandoned radiography machine was stolen by some people in a favel contaminating an entire neighborhood and killing a few people

Anonymous

The one that comes to mind so where a bunch of girls got locked up in a... I’m pretty sure It was a sweatshop and a fire has started and they couldn’t get out because they had locked up the building. Safety regulations were wack

Anonymous

This may be stretching a bit but there was a paper mill, bowater I believe it was called, that got blamed for a 99 car pile up due to the steam from the smoke stacks getting blown across the highway.

Anonymous

The obvious answer is, of course, the Great Molasses Flood. In Boston back in 1919 there was a distilling company that produced ethanol for various purposes using molasses; to do this they had a number of very large storage vats near the harbor they kept the molasses in so it could be transported and then processed later. Around mid-January, there was an unusually hot day, much hotter than the previous several, and this likely caused one of the vats to rupture, flooding over two million gallons of molasses out into the streets of Boston. All over the city people heard some horrible explosion and lots of rumbling, only to be greeted by a wave of molasses that was twenty-five feet high at its tallest barreling down several blocks and smashing a number of nearby buildings to bits. When all was said and done several city blocks were covered in a viscous mass of molasses that was waist-deep, with over a hundred injured and twenty dead. It took several weeks to clean up the majority of the molasses, but for a long time after that, the residents of Boston found that a number of objects around the city were perpetually sticky.

Anonymous

That time when Mr. Lindt, founder of the Swiss chocolate manufacturer, died when one of his fondant boilers exploded. Or in other words, "death by chocolate!"

Anonymous

I think this barely counts but the Pantai Remis landslide comes to mind. Basically a water wall collapsed and destroyed a mine in spectacular fashion. It was caught on camera and is on YouTube, breathtaking amount of damage to watch.

Anonymous

Does radiation count? The dumbest one I can think of was the Goiânia Accident: Some scrappers in Brazil broke into an abandoned hospital and ended up taking apart a radiotherapy device, then cracked open the capsule that had the actual radioactive stuff in it and took a few grains out with a screwdriver. They then decided the capsule with the obviously glowing sand inside was safe to sell to a scrapyard. Then the guy who owned the scrapyard found it, immediately thought it was cool, and showed it to a bunch of his friends and family. After a while of taking some more radioactive sand out and showing the capsule, and after a few of them got sick with radiation sickness, he then sold it to *another * scrapyard. Except by then his wife made the connection that everyone she knew only started getting sick when the capsule was brought around, so she ended up grabbing it from the other scrapyard and taking it to a hospital to get it checked out. Only THEN did people start knowing that some radioactive material was spread around.

Anonymous

Gonna have to mention the 1875 Dublin Whiskey Fire. 5000 barrels of whiskey caught fire, resulting in them bursting and spreading the fire further, while also resulting in 6 inches of whiskey that stretched across 400m of street. 8 people were killed but the cause of death was not from burns or smoke inhalation, but rather from alcohol poisoning as people took the to the streets to drink the whisky that had covered the road. Probably the only disaster in which the cause of death was drank to death.

Anonymous

2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse, not because the collapse was funny. Cause it fucking wasn't, but the article "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK" by Matthew Yglesias is REALLY funny!

Anonymous

Read about the Bhopal Disaster if you wanna be super depressed.

Invictus_Cordis

the MIC (Methyl Isocyanate) gas leak in Bhopal and the absolute cluster fuck surrounding the clean up operation.

DarthBorker

I was almost a year sober from Factorio until your video...

Anonymous

I have a pollution story I like to call the 2017-2020 gypsy mafia incidents, where the mafia kept burning random trash throught Romania. Incident sort of ended since they have had to deal with multiple samurai sword duels with other clans and have since found better economical endeavors. This could make for a good eastern european Yakuza game

Anonymous

When it comes to stupid pollution "Ballonfest 86" takes the cake in my book. It sounds cute, but everything that has a Wikipedia article with a section called "consequences" has done something wrong. And this was stupid frim inception to completion.

Magicide

I worked at a plastic production plant that produced white pellets that looked similar but had different chemical makeup. There was an incident where a bunch of pellets ended up in the nearby river and was reported in the media. So first the company denied it came from them despite being the only industrial source within miles and the only one making plastic pellets. Next inside the company both plastics teams insisted it was the other one that had the uncontrolled release despite no evidence one way or another. Once they had sample to test and could confirm which section the plastic came from, that section chief then adamantly refused to believe that it could have come from his section despite the chemistry being irrefutable. He made such a fuss that the company leadership backed down despite the overwhelming evidence. Ultimately the company paid some trivial fine for polluting the river and life went on. It was so stupid because if at any point people had acted like adults and accepted responsibility, they could have made changes to prevent further issues in the future. Instead everyone acted like children to avoid any blame and nothing positive was learned from the experience.

Anonymous

My favorite dumb pollution story goes to the gates of hell. In 1971, Soviet geologists at Karakum in Turkmenistan were drilling for oil when they ran into a natural gas pocket. The pocket collapsed, causing the massive equipment and the scientists to sink into several enormous craters. The craters began expelling enough methane to kill the local wildlife en masse to the point where the scientists thought the only solution to save the local ecosystem was to burn the methane out. They severely underestimated how much natural gas was actually down there and to this day, the crater continues to burn methane and other toxic gases with no end in sight, earning it the nickname "The Gates of Hell."

Matkingos

Times Beach Missouri had to be abandoned because the town was saturated with dioxin, aka. Agent Orange. The story goes like this: A chemical company (NEPACCO) in Verona Missouri was making dioxin but figured out a new way to make more for less. The issue was that the stills that made the chemical had a bunch of oily residue that had to be incinerated. The only nearby incineration plant was in Louisiana, so the company decided to subcontract the disposal to save costs to IPC. IPC didn't know anything about dioxin disposal so they decided to subcontract AGAIN to a local hick idiot Russel Bliss. Bliss collected almost 20 thousand gallons of this oil dioxin waste. The issue is that Russel was a renaissance retard of sorts. He was the proprietor of a horse farm, and horses kick up a lot of dust. For some reason, Russel decided to spray the oily dioxin concoction on the dirt, and he found that it definitely stopped dust from being kicked up. Word spread and the Times Beach government decided to contract Russel to spray his oily miracle fluid across ALL OF THE TOWNS DIRT ROADS, this amounted to almost 160 thousand gallons of toxic waste sprayed in total. This was in 1972, almost a decade later an EPA report was leaked and the town was summarily evacuated and abandoned to make way for an EPA superfund site. Missouri is filled with these kinda stories, but this one is the most stupid. Man sprays defoliant oil to stop dust from kicking up.

Anonymous

Being from Texas, here is one with a mystery! On April 17, 2013, an ammonium nitrate explosion occurred at the West Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, eighteen miles (29 km) north of Waco, while emergency services personnel were responding to a fire at the facility. Fifteen people were killed, more than 160 were injured, and more than 150 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Investigators confirmed that ammonium nitrate was the material that exploded. Investigators blamed stocks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer stored in a bin inside a seed and fertilizer building on the property for the explosion but failed to identify what started the actual fire that led to the explosion. The ATF announced on May 11, 2016, that the fire that led to the explosion was intentionally set. However, they declined to comment about any possible suspects, though a reward of $50,000 for information leading to an arrest has been offered. No suspects have been caught to date.

Dizzy Li Wizzy

This happened many years ago when I was a recruit in basic training while I was in the army. For our outfield training, we had to setup camp at the base of a hill, and we had a latrine point where we did our business some distance away at a point higher up but far away on the slope of the hill. On our last day, there was heavy rain the day before, and our platoon officer was really pissed at us for not burying our shit (literally) before we returned to base, so he got us crawling through the mud as punishment. Thing was, the rain before had swept the shit and piss from the latrine point down the slope and mingled with mud we were then crawling through, and we were literally covered in our own collective shit and piss from the five days we were there. The smell never really left my uniform, and not only did we have to contend with being covered in shit, the ride back was equally unpleasant because of the smell. Literally the shittiest I've ever been. Dunno if that would count as a pollution story, but it's definitely my stupidest

Seed of Power

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire 13 times due to industrial pollution during the mid 20th century. I think its pretty stupid that it took the 13th go around to do something about it.

Nameless Guardsman

My friend once polluted the largest lake on the map and broke his poor low end machine. Got a new fancy one though so it worked out.

Anonymous

In 1921 the BASF in Germany was producing fertilizer among other things. Back then due to some false analyses the factory was sure that ammonium nitrate wouldn't explode if mixed with another chemical compound as long as it was 50/50 (which as it turns out was wrong). Since there were giant piles of the mixture hardened by the contact with the water in the air they needed to be removed to continue production. In the beginning, they used pickaxes to do the job, but then someone had the idea of just using explosives to clear the mixture. That, however, caused the whole factory to explode as well as 80% of the surrounding city.

Anonymous

Not really an accident, but the town of Asbest in Russia probably qualifies. It has, I think, the world's largest open asbestos mine right next to the town. The UN is doing a study on asbestos poisoning there because so many people are exposed there. Many of them know it's bad for you, but don't do anything about it.

Anonymous

Not really a factory, but during the chernobyl nuclear disaster, they wanted samples of the melted power plant core. Wikipedia puts it best: "Unyielding to a drill, the mass is quite dense, but it is able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle with armor-piercing rounds." In it's most famous long-exposure photo, you can actually see the muzzle flashes of the "sample extraction unit" as orange lines.

Anonymous

The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, basically a factory producing black strap molasses in giant vats, had a pressurized explosion which ruptured a 2.3million gallon tank of hot molasses, apparently a wave 25ft tall of the boiling black syrup went through town killing 21 and injuring nearly 150 people. The collapse of the tank is said to have mimicked a mid level earthquake.

Anonymous

Not factories, per se, but I work on ships, and I get to hear an awful lot of stories about people fucking up on them. For example, the Exxon Valdez? The captain wasn't even on the bridge when they crashed- he was in his cabin. He'd told the mate on watch that he was going to be asleep, and to "wake him up if anything important came up."

Anonymous

And the mate in question was paying more attention to flirting with the (thoroughly disinterested) wing watch than doing his job... while transiting a very tricky pass in Alaska. As a result, when said watch called out a warning that they were on course to run aground, he thought she was joking with him, and didn't react in time to save the vessel.

Anonymous

I am partial to mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Basically, the town had used an abandoned strip mine as a landfill and then lit it on fire in order to get rid the trash. The fire was started in 1962 and is still burning today, causing smoke to come out of the ground in the area. As a funny addition, the town tried to inform he former mine owners of the fire and pretend they didn't know how it started.