Authors: Dan Lewis
Now I Know (4 page)
No one is certain what lies in the pit, and the mystery will likely go unsolved for many decades. Currently, Oak Island is privately owned, making further exploration of the Money Pit contingent on the whim of its owners, who have shown little interest in allowing for future, dangerous expeditions.
BONUS FACT
Where’s the most likely place to find buried pirate’s treasure? Long Island, New York. William Kidd, a Scottish sailor executed for piracy in 1701, is widely believed to have buried some of his loot, with the intention of using it as leverage if he were ever brought to trial: This tactic obviously failed. We know for certain that he buried some treasure on Gardiners Island, a small island off the north coast of Long Island, as the treasure was unearthed and used as evidence against him at his trial.
THE LARGEST MAN-MADE ACCIDENTAL EXPLOSION
On December 6, 1917, an explosion ravaged Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing 2,000 people and injuring 9,000 others. But this mass disaster was not triggered by natural events. The explosion was, entirely, man-made.
Just before 8:45
A.M.
on that day, the SS
Imo
, an empty Norwegian passenger and freight ship, and France’s SS
Mont Blanc
, collided. The
Mont Blanc
, a cargo ship, was loaded with munitions aimed at supporting French efforts in World War I. The
Mont Blanc
caught fire, and although its crew safely made it to shore, the language barrier—the crew spoke French, while the native Halifax residents spoke English—probably prevented any warnings from being heeded. Twenty minutes later, before hundreds of onlookers, the
Mont Blanc
’s payload caught fire, and the ship exploded.
The explosion’s intensity was roughly one-seventh to one-fifth that of the atomic bomb that struck Hiroshima. The
Mont Blanc
itself was instantly vaporized; a fire plume shot up more than a mile in the air. Roughly one square mile around the blast area was destroyed and rendered uninhabitable; structural damage to buildings was recorded as far away as ten miles from the epicenter of the explosion. An earthquake-like shake was recorded seventy-five miles away, and the explosion could be heard more than 100 miles north and 200 miles west of the blast. The blast was so powerful that a half-ton piece of the ship’s anchor mast shot through the skies, landing more than two miles from the blast site. (The fragment is now part of a monument placed roughly near its landing spot.)
The aftereffects were also considerable. The explosion set off a tsunami that struck the waterfront with sixty-foot-high waves. It also caused a black, sooty “rainfall” for ten minutes after the blast, covering survivors in debris. The Canadian military lost one of its key buildings, the Royal Naval College of Canada, destroyed in the explosion.
The catastrophe is widely considered the worst man-made accidental explosion in history, when factoring in not just the size of the blast but also the number of causalities, the radius of the damage, and the loss of property. The death toll was so immense that more Nova Scotians died in the explosion than in World War I.
It might have been worse, too, but for intervention from the south. People from the Boston chapter of the Red Cross and Massachusetts’s public safety officials traveled to the scene almost immediately after the disaster. Nova Scotia has been thanking Boston since, selecting an evergreen tree each winter and sending it to the city. In recent years, Boston uses the gift from Halifax on Boston Common as the city’s official Christmas tree.
BONUS FACT
As noted earlier, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was roughly five to seven times as powerful as the blast from the Halifax explosion. We know this in part because, for decades after the Halifax disaster, North American media outlets used the event as a yardstick for measuring other bombs, underscoring the event’s significance. For example, when
Time
magazine reported the bombing of Hiroshima, it explicitly stated that the bomb was seven times stronger than the event that caused carnage in Halifax, three-and-a-half decades prior.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN LOTS OF WATER MEETS LOTS OF SALT
Lake Peigneur is located in Louisiana, 125 to 150 miles west of New Orleans. If you’d visited it thirty-five years ago or so, you would have found a freshwater lake that, at its deepest, was only about ten feet, well stocked with lots of fish appropriate for the environment. And if you were there on November 20, 1980, you would have seen a 150-foot-high oil derrick disappear into a lake barely deep enough to sink a sailboat.
Texaco, an American petroleum company (since acquired by Chevron), was drilling in Lake Peigneur, hoping to find oil roughly 1,400 feet (430 meters) below the water’s surface. We’re not entirely sure what happened that day—when 150-foot structures disappear into ten feet of water, there will always be more questions than answers—but more likely than not, the Texaco engineers made a small mistake. Their 14-inch (.35 meter) drill bit was off the mark and went a bit sideways. Normally, that would not be a big deal—it would just mean that the rig was not going to find any oil. But Lake Peigneur wasn’t sitting on an oil reserve—or, at least, not
only
on an oil reserve. About 1,400 feet below the surface of Lake Peigneur was the third level of a salt mine operated by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company. And the hole the oil rig created let the lake’s water right into the mine’s ceiling.
If you’ve ever added salt to water, you know that the two mix very well—the salt dissolves, and pretty quickly. And if you’re operating a large-scale salt mine, it is a very, very bad thing to have an entire lake—2.5 billion gallons of water, in this case—start flowing in through a crack in a ceiling. This is especially true in the above case, because the salt mine in question (and pragmatically, this makes sense for most salt mines) used salt pillars to support the ceilings against the weight of the levels above. When the water comes rushing in, everything collapses. Everything—including 150-foot oil rigs.
Within minutes, a whirlpool formed at the surface of Lake Peigneur as the water drained into the mine. The whirlpool began sucking everything in the lake into its ever-increasing vortex. Down went the drilling rig and its platform; a dozen boats, many of which were barges carrying things such as trucks; and, perhaps most incredibly, sixty-five acres of land, including an entire island. Delcambre Canal, which before that day was the lake’s outlet (ultimately) to the Gulf of Mexico, reversed course, bringing saltwater from the Gulf into the lake. For a few days, the reversed water flow created a 150-foot waterfall—easily the tallest in Louisiana at the time. When the bottom finally finished falling out of Lake Peigneur, the sixty-year-old salt mine was gone, and the once-shallow freshwater lake was now a saltwater basin with a maximum depth of 200 feet.
Amazingly, the death toll from the Lake Peigneur disaster was zero. The fifty-five salt mine workers and all the people on the rig and in boats managed to evacuate in time.
BONUS FACT
Salt and oil have a long history. Edwin Drake, credited with being the first American to successfully drill for oil (at the time to be used for lamps, as whale oil had become expensive), was hired to explore the area beneath Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1858. But looking for oil dozens of feet below the surface was a new challenge (and a speculative one at that—whether oil could be found and extracted at the depth were both unknown). Drake had decided to simply copy the well-established methods of drilling for salt and apply that idea to oil exploration. He also added a cast-iron pipe to allow him to drill through bedrock without water seeping into the drilling area. With this innovation, the salt-drilling method became the standard for early oil rigs.
WHY IT TAKES A DAM TO MAKE BRITAIN HAPPY
Tea drinking is a cultural touchstone of Great Britain and has been for centuries. Over the years, the traditional stovetop teakettle has fallen from favor, with the electric kettle—which plugs into the wall and heats up much more quickly—taking its place. In general, the electric kettle has few downsides relative to its predecessor.
Unless there’s something important on TV.
On July 4, 1990, England and Germany confronted one another in the semifinals of the FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial soccer tournament. The winner would face off against Argentina in the finals; the loser went to the consolation/third-place match against host Italy. At the end of regulation and extra-time, the two countries were tied, 1–1. The match went to a penalty kick shootout, and England’s fans sat on the edges of their seats watching.
Germany prevailed, disappointing millions of British. And many sought solace—a bit of it, at least—in a fresh cup of tea. So they took to the electric kettles, turning on approximately a million of them, all within a few minutes of each other. Suddenly, the British National Grid—the electricity network—was being asked to provide a massive amount of power, all on a moment’s notice.
This phenomenon, called a “TV pickup,” is unique to the United Kingdom. More than 2,500 megawatts of additional power may be needed—that’s roughly the equivalent of firing up three nuclear power plants, to capacity, immediately. And, according to the BBC, to time the need properly, an engineer at the National Grid Control Centre is assigned to watch TV. Some of the most popular shows, such as the soap opera
EastEnders
(and of course, soccer matches) do not end at a specific time, as the BBC at times fails to adhere to its schedule.
To compensate for the tea-driven energy needs, the UK has two on-demand power sources. First, France has provided as much as 600 MW of power at times. And second, there’s the Dinorwig Power Station in North Wales, a hydroelectric plant. Dinorwig, typically, is idle, and therefore produces no electrical output. But when needed, the water stored in the reservoir above it is released, allowing the power station to produce up to 1,800 MW in roughly sixteen seconds (so says Wikipedia). Combined with other at-the-ready power plants, the National Grid has been able to mostly handle the nationwide impromptu tea times.
Television-viewing habits gave the phenomenon its name, but the National Grid has to prepare for other situations—and in one case, more so than at any other time. The World Cup match required an additional 2,800 MW of power, a television-related record. But on August 11, 1999, the grid requirements surged by 3,000 MW. The cause? The first visible solar eclipse in nearly seventy-five years.
BONUS FACT
Turning off power seems like a great way to save energy, but there are exceptions. In 2007, organizers of both the UK’s “Live Earth” concert and the BBC’s “Planet Earth” celebration wanted to get British citizens to participate in what they called the “big switch-off.” Everyone would be encouraged to simultaneously power down to symbolically demonstrate energy conservation needs. The National Grid objected, noting that the “switch-off” may have actually created environmental harm. As reported by the BBC, the experts at the Grid reasoned that “the unpredictability of demand during such an event could mean some people losing their electricity supply and even raise the danger of emitting more carbon dioxide rather than less.”
THE BRITISH BAN ON CLAPPING
The American singer Perry Como, beginning in the 1940s and into the 1960s, hosted one of the first musical variety shows on television. But before he took to the airwaves, he performed as part of a traveling orchestra led by Ted Weems, who himself helped establish the big band genre. Together, Como and the Weems Orchestra recorded nearly two dozen songs in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. One of those songs was “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” recorded on December 9, 1941, just two days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Although those two events—the recording of a song about Texas and an attack on Hawaii—seem entirely unrelated, as it turns out, the song played a role in the war effort. But not in Texas, and, for that matter, not in Hawaii. “Deep in the Heart of Texas” became a song of note in Great Britain.
The song is a simple tune lasting just under two minutes. It contains five stanzas, each featuring a pair of items (“The stars at night are big and bright” and “The prairie sky is wide and high” in the first stanza) that are found “deep in the heart of Texas,” as one could easily guess. However the song isn’t known for its lyrics, but rather, the clapping. Before singing “deep in the heart of Texas” each of the ten times one finds it in the song, Como and the orchestra clapped four times. The evocative clapping became the song’s hallmark, as it invited participation from the audience.
The anthem rose to popularity quickly, even outside of Texas. It topped the charts of the U.S. television and radio program
Your Hit Parade
for five weeks and then went global, gaining traction in the United Kingdom. Bing Crosby covered the song, recording his own version in 1942, which hit number three on the
Billboard
charts. This version earned a lot of radio play on the BBC and became a favorite of factory workers. Many would momentarily stop their jobs to join in—clap clap clap clap—for the two minutes that the song took over the airwaves.
Which is why it became a problem.
In 2008, the
Guardian
newspaper revisited this moment in British history. As the paper noted, the British government did not take kindly to wartime workers taking impromptu breaks due to what they heard on the radio, so it took action. The BBC ruled that “Deep in the Heart of Texas” was not allowed to be broadcast “on programs that might be heard by factory workers, who might neglect their lathes to join in the song’s clapping routine.” The ban was lifted before the war ended.
BONUS FACT
In August 1962, American singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett released the Halloween novelty song “Monster Mash” and found solid success. The song—his only hit—reached the top of the U.S.
Billboard
chart on October 20 of that year. But it took more than a decade to reach similar success in the UK. Why? Because in 1962, the BBC banned the song from the airwaves, claiming it was “too morbid.” When the song was re-released in 1973, the BBC changed its tune, and “Monster Mash” rose to number three on the UK charts.
