Disaster!
Apparently Roku Live TV has a DISASTER CHANNEL and half the time it’s showing episodes from my “Mayday” YouTube channel that I love so much (the one about the airline disasters).
Anyway, today I caught the end of an episode about a 1985 accident involving a British Airways plane. There was a fire on it before it even took off and the big question surrounding the whole thing was that while the fire was major, it was not major enough to cause as many casualties as there were. So why were there so many casualties?
The documentary went into a very interesting discussion about human psychology, human factors, and the effect of panic when trying to exit a plane in an emergency. Helen Muir, basically the expert on airplane and airplane passenger human factors and psychology, talked about how they tried to reenact everyone getting off the plane to try and determine why so many died. This reenactment resulted in some major changes to plane cabins (track lighting to find exits in the dark/smoke, wider entryways to help prevent bottlenecking at exits) to make them safer.
I highly recommend watching this.
Badding Break
It’s summer, so for whatever reason, that means I’m back into watching my aviation documentaries.
It’s a tradition, yo.
Anyway, today I watched a video about the 1986 mid-air collision of Aeromexico Flight 498 and a small aircraft over California, and I was immediately reminded of the similarities between its story and the mid-air collision depicted in (*looks it up*) season 2 of Breaking Bad. The one where the air traffic controller is distressed over the loss of his daughter and makes an error, causing two planes to collide and the debris to fall on Walter White’s town.
Like…watch the documentary. If you remember the scenario in Breaking Bad, they are freakishly similar. The actual air traffic controller’s name was Walter White.
Believe it or not, though, it sounds like the creator of Breaking Bad didn’t know about this incident. I don’t know if I completely buy it. I notice in my own life that there are a lot of things I think of or create seemingly out of the blue and then later, upon reflection, realize how many little bits and pieces are actually derivatives of things I’ve seen in the past.
So maybe that’s it. It’s almost too big of a coincidence to NOT be that.
Explore Disaster!
Apparently “this data is shared in order for individuals (Calgarians and visitors), businesses, and organizations to understand and prepare for potential disaster risks in the city.”
All cities should have something like this publicly available, really. It’s super interesting and informative. Also:
A nice little summary. I’m surprised the risk for critical infrastructure failure/disruption isn’t higher in the winter than the summer. I guess we’re more prepared for winter. Or maybe this is based heavily on last summer’s heat dome when our power grid was about to fail due to all the electricity used for cooling.
Disasters
Uh oh, I found a YouTube channel called “Mega Disasters” and now I’m hooked.
I like learning about past human disasters. I suppose it’s a morbid curiosity that a lot of people have (hence channels like these) – almost like a guilty pleasure kind of thing.
I think one of the biggest disasters that has stuck with me ever since I first learned about it is the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City. Until the World Trade Center towers fell in 2001, the collapse was the deadliest structural collapse in US history.
I originally learned about it from my Advanced Fiction class in 2013, actually. Someone in the class wrote a story from the perspective of someone involved in the incident, and it sounded so incredibly horrific and terrible that I had to look it up and read about it.
The Mega Disasters channel has a video on it, but here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of a longer documentary on it. It’s terrifying but really interesting as well.
If you watch it, be prepared to never feel safe in a building again.
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad, ma–oh, wait.
Odd dream last night:
I am with this group of people, including my dad. We are at his space shuttle launch, and we’re going into space. There is this lady with a little girl about 5 years old. Suddenly, as we’re getting on the shuttle, I am no longer with the group. Instead, my mom and I are in the car with the sunroof open, driving on this road in between the launch site and the ocean. I seem to be hearing my dad’s voice from off somewhere, as well as the voices of the little girl and the mother. The little girl is asking her mother for some crackers just as the shuttle launches. I am watching this from inside the car and I notice that the lift-off was a little shaky. I am thinking that they are going to crash. They go over the car in a circle, and crash into the ocean on the other side with flames and explosions. My mom goes, “what happened?” and I say, “Didn’t you see it? The shuttle was lined up with the towers and it lifted off and crashed.” Then I was back in my dorm room. Almost nobody was there–they had all died int he shuttle crash. I kept thinking that the shuttle had just crash-landed in the water and that no one was really hurt and that we should just go back and get the survivors.
WTF? Freud would have a field day.
If there’s a space shuttle crash in the near future, I totally called it.
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