Whipped Cream Difficulties

I wanted to break up the disaster stuff a little bit. I planned to do a few more before Halloween, but I was trying to limit myself to one a week.

However, my window for this is rapidly closing, so I wanted to post these.

I’ve been reading a little about the late great Jean Shepherd, and I’ve written before about the 23rd Street fire, so when this popped up, I knew it was going in the feed: Jean Shepherd talks about the 23rd Street fire, and about firefighters.

Bonus #1: an interview with Joe D’Albert, one of the firefighters who was there that day.

Bonus #2: Haven’t had a chance to watch all of this yet, and it is longish, but: the “Fire Engineering” channel talks about 23rd Street.

10,000 firefighters lined Fifth Avenue on October 21, 1966, as ten firetrucks carried ten coffins to separate services at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Firefighters came from as far away as the U.K., Anchorage, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Northeast United States, and a group of 500 firefighters from Boston who had come to pay tribute.

I’m not great about Halloween.

Lawrence, as a SF/fantasy/horror collector and writer, is more familiar with the highways and byways of the genre than I am. The things that tend to horrify me are the ugly realities of existence, so I leave October mostly to him.

But this channel popped up in my YouTube recs, and I thought it might be interesting to highlight these two kind of scary events from the “Fascinating Horror” channel. There are a lot of people I don’t link because I honestly can’t stand their voices, and this guy is right on the edge for me, but I think these have some enough historical value to where I can put up with the narration.

First up: “Disaster on Webb’s Bait Farm”. This one I was unfamiliar with.

On May 27, 1983, there was a massive explosion at a place called Webb’s Bait Farm, near Benton, Tennessee. Eleven people were killed in the blast.

The force of the blast shattered windows in several homes and other structures on nearby properties, which reportedly resulted in some neighbors receiving minor cut wounds. Parts of bodies were hurled through the roofs of the nearby house and carport and as far away as 500 feet (150 m; 170 yd) from the site. Nothing in the barn was left intact; all of the bodies had lost limbs and six were decapitated. Some were stripped by the force of the blast.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen a white mushroom cloud which was estimated to be 600 to 800 feet (180 to 240 m) tall, and the blast was heard and felt in Cleveland over 20 miles (32 km) away.

Now, Webb’s Bait Farm was a place that raised and sold worms for fishing. You’re probably thinking “What could possibly explode with that much force at a bait farm?”

Could it have been…meth?

Spoiler for those of you who didn’t follow the link above: it wasn’t meth.

Bonus #1: this is a disaster I’ve actually heard of (I think I was visiting my grandparents in Cleveland when this happened), but which seems to have been forgotten by many people: “The Beverly Hills Supper Club”.

Bonus #2 and #3: Here are two shorter videos from local news channels about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.

Wikipedia entry. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that this was a combined parade of failure and gaps in oversight, but there also seems to be a strongly held minority opinion that the Mafia actually started the fire.

Bonus #4: a documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) on Beverly Hills.

“Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” I remember watching an episode of “Nova” about building fires. One of the people being interviewed commented that, in the profession, they considered NFPA’s Life Safety Code to be a holy book: every word in it was written in the blood of someone who died or was badly injured.

Today, a SCAT video.

No, this isn’t German. SCAT in this case is “Submarine Classification and Tracking”. According to the YouTube notes, this was a proposed system that involved “a mechanical noisemaker affixed to large magnets which, when it attached to the hull of a moving submarine, generated noise that allowed the sub to be easily tracked“. This was never deployed, since there were…shall we say, practical issues with attaching mechanical noisemakers with magnets to moving submarines.

But we do have this vintage 1960s video:

Bonus: “To Catch a Shadow”, more anti-submarine warfare propaganda, featuring the P-3 Orion.

Back in the day (1960-1961) there was a series that ran on ABC, “The Valiant Years”.

…based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill, directed by Anthony Bushell and John Schlesinger, narrated by Gary Merrill and with extracts from the memoirs voiced by Richard Burton.

Here’s episode 7, “Struggle At Sea”, about the sinking of the Hood and the Bismarck.

Bonus #1: Here’s a time lapse video from “The Operations Room” detailing the hunt for the Bismarck.

Bonus #2: I couldn’t pass this up.