Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (12 page)

Evacuate!
British leaders decided to evacuate as many soldiers as possible. They put out a call to all English citizens for private vessels—and more than 700 responded. On the night of May 26, an armada of 200 destroyers, along with the 700 fishing boats, yachts, barges, sloops, and private ships of every kind, poured across the English Channel. Those “little boats of Dunkirk,” as they were later called, motored up to the shoreline, loaded soldiers aboard, and ferried them to the waiting destroyers. This went on for nine days, all amidst the din (and danger) of artillery fire from land and strafing bullets and bombs from Luftwaffe airplanes. When it was over, an astounding 338,226 soldiers had been carried safely back to England. The evacuation of Dunkirk was hailed as a “miracle,” proved to be a huge morale-booster for the British, and may have thwarted the German invasion of Britain.

Trapped!
Minutes before midnight on November 10, 1979, an axle on a 106-car freight train in Mississauga, just outside Toronto, broke, derailing 23 cars. Their cargo: explosive and toxic chemicals. The derailment immediately caused several propane tanker cars to explode and spilled the contents of several more—caustic soda, styrene, and toluene—onto the tracks. The fire from the
propane tanks ignited vapors from the chemicals, causing a massive explosion with a fireball nearly 5,000 feet high. (People 50 miles away saw it.) Among the derailed cars, officials found a tanker carrying 81 tons of chlorine. And it was leaking. If it blew up, it could create a cloud of chlorine gas that could wipe out the entire city.

Evacuate!
The entire city—including six nursing homes and three large hospitals—would have to be evacuated. Thousands of police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, bus drivers, and other volunteers worked around the clock driving people to makeshift evacuation centers outside of town. When it was over, more than 218,000 people were moved in less than 48 hours, and not a single life was lost. Until the much less successful post-Hurricane Katrina operation, it was the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history. (It took five days to get the site under control and, thankfully, the chlorine tank never blew.)

Trapped!
On the morning of January 24, 1909, the RMS
Republic
, a 570-foot luxury ocean liner, was heading from New York toward the Mediterranean with 742 passengers and crew aboard. At the same time, the SS
Florida
, a smaller ship, was headed
into
New York with more than 800 Italian immigrants aboard. In deep fog about 50 miles off Nantucket, Massachusetts, the two ships collided, killing three people on each ship. The
Republic
lost all power and was taking on water; the
Florida
was seriously damaged but still had power and wasn’t sinking. Luckily for all involved, the
Republic
had a wireless radio onboard, and the operator sent out a distress signal. (It was the first time in history that a wireless had been used for a large disaster.) Another luxury liner in the area, the
Baltic
, got the signal and set out for the scene.

Evacuate!
The
Florida
quickly came about and was able to get alongside the sinking
Republic
, a feat in itself, considering the condition of both ships and the fact that they were in thick fog. Over the next several hours, everyone on the
Republic
was evacuated. When the
Baltic
arrived twelve hours later, they did it again, transferring passengers and crew from both ships—more than
1,500 people. And in eight-foot swells. It took eight hours, but they managed both evacuations without a single injury or death. The
Republic
went down while the rescue was still under way; the
Baltic
and the
Florida
made it safely back to New York.

Extra:
The
Republic
was part of the White Star Line fleet and in its day called “unsinkable.” Three years later, another White Star “unsinkable” went down in the North Atlantic: the
Titanic
.

Extra Extra:
Among the items purported to have been on the
Republic
when she went down: $265,000 in cash belonging to the U.S. Navy; several hundred thousand dollars in silver ingots; passengers’ jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and a secret five-ton shipment of American Gold Eagle coins straight from the mint and meant for the Czar of Russia. The ship was located in 1981. Two salvage trips have so far found no treasure�� but future trips are planned, so stay tuned.

Trapped!
You’ve heard of this town’s more famous neighbor: Chernobyl, the city of 14,000 located about 10 miles southeast of the infamous nuclear power plant that experienced a massive meltdown on April 26, 1986. (See page 404.) Pripyat was much closer to the plant, just two miles away, and it was the home of nearly 50,000 people. Even worse, the prevailing winds at the time of the accident shifted, blowing the radiation straight into Pripyat. Within hours the entire city was contaminated with radioactive fallout. The people in the city were told nothing. The next day, 1,100 buses arrived from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, about 70 miles away, but the drivers had to wait for an official order to do anything.

Evacuate!
The order didn’t come until midnight. When it finally did, those buses left with every man, woman, and child from every home, nursing home, and hospital—all 50,000 people—and in less than three hours the city was completely empty. Despite all the waiting and unnecessary exposure to radiation, the evacuation was an extraordinary success and without question saved many lives.

Extra:
Today there is still an “exclusion zone” with a radius of about nine miles around the plant where people are not allowed to live. The city of Pripyat still stands outside the zone, but more than two decades later, it’s still a ghost town.

 

Honoree:
The 2009 Taste Festival in Hobart, Australia

Notable Achievement:
Providing live entertainment for the festival’s restroom users

True Story:
In a bid to make the festival—which celebrates fine food and wine—as memorable as possible, every public restroom had its own poet, minstrel, singer, juggler, etc. Each performer was given two duties: to keep spirits high, and to hand out soap and towels to patrons. “This adds an extra dimension that people will appreciate,” said Hobart mayor Rob Valentine.

 

Honoree:
Roger Robinson, an American mountaineer

Notable Achievement:
Inventing a go-anywhere toilet that you can take to the top of the world

True Story:
As more adventurers than ever before ascend to the planet’s highest peaks, garbage and, uh, human-generated pollutants are becoming a serious problem. With that in mind, Robinson conceived of the “Clean Mountain Can” in 2000. It consists of a plastic bucket and lid along with a gas-impervious bag that neutralizes foul odors. It’s 11 inches tall, weighs 2.4 pounds, comes with straps that attach it to a backpack, and is completely leakproof. Capacity: 1.86 gallons, which covers 10 to 14 uses.

 

Honoree:
Dawa Steven Sherpa, a Nepalese mountaineer

Notable Achievement:
Taking Robinson’s Clean Mountain Can (see previous entry) to the top of the world

True Story:
In May 2008, 25-year-old Dawa led an “eco-expedition” up Mt. Everest to bring awareness to the impact of climate change in the Himalayas. At the same time, he wanted to put Robinson’s portable toilet to the ultimate test. How did the CMC do? By all accounts, very well. Dawa’s 18-member team was able
to pack out 143 pounds of their own “personal” waste, keeping it from contaminating Everest.

Bonus:
Dawa’s team carried out a lot more than #2. They also hauled down “2,100 pounds of garbage, including cans, gas canisters, kitchen waste, tents, parts of an Italian helicopter that crashed 35 years ago, and the remains of a British climber who died in 1972.”

 

Honoree:
Yasmin Mughal, from Sweden

Notable Achievement:
Successfully potty-training her pet parrot
True Story:
“I noticed that every time I took Emil out of his cage, he had to do a poo,” said Mughal. One problem: The parrot kept doing it on the furniture. “So I placed him on the toilet and told him to make a poo, which he actually did!” Now Emil knows that if he wants to get out of his cage and play, he must first go to the loo. (No word on whether she taught the bird to flush.)

 

Honoree:
Steve Oswald, a Michigan merchant

Notable Achievement:
Cleaning his town’s filthy public restrooms…for a price

True Story:
August is the busiest time of year for the popular tourist destination of Saugatuck, a culture and arts mecca on the shores of Lake Michigan. But in 2008, Oswald received several complaints from out-of-towners about the state of the city’s dirty restrooms. After looking at them, Oswald agreed: “I wouldn’t have sat down there, either.” He tried notifying the city council, but no one called him back. So he took matters into his own hands and cleaned up a few of the worst loos near his business himself. Then he sent a cleaning bill to the city for $156.94. The mayor thanked Oswald for his civic-mindedness, but refused to pay, saying it might set the “wrong precedent.” That didn’t surprise Oswald. He only sent the bill “as a matter of principle.” He just wants the town to stop grossing out its most important economic stimulators—tourists. (The city council promised to hire more cleaners.)
Bonus:
As a token of appreciation (and in lieu of payment), the mayor presented Oswald with Saugatuck’s first ever “Golden Plunger Award” (a plunger spray-painted gold). “I will display this proudly in my window as a symbol that one person can make a difference,” said Oswald at the ceremony.

In the summer of 1950, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear scientist named Enrico Fermi paid a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. One afternoon he and some other physicists took a break from the project they were working on and went to lunch. Reports of flying saucer sightings had been in the news recently, and as the men walked, they chatted about the sightings.

The scientists all agreed that the UFO sightings in question were spurious. Nevertheless, it prompted Fermi to ask Edward Teller, one of the other physicists present, what he thought the odds were that a real alien spacecraft would be spotted in the next ten years. Teller thought the odds were about 1 in 100,000. Fermi disagreed: He thought the chances were 1 in 10, or 10 percent. As the conversation moved on to other topics, Fermi suddenly interjected, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?”

Fermi was talking about aliens. Given that there are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, many of which are billions of years older than the sun, the odds seemed pretty high to Fermi that there must be advanced extraterrestrial life somewhere out there. Fermi’s query, or the “Fermi Paradox,” as it has become known, may have gotten a lot of laughs that day at lunch, but it’s a serious question, and people still ask it today. If the aliens really are out there, why are they so hard to find? And if they haven’t visited Earth, why not?

Part of the problem is at our end: If you want to find evidence of alien life in outer space, you have to look for it, and we haven’t been looking very hard or for very long. The galaxy is a big place,
and we know nothing about the extraterrestrials we’re looking for. That makes them much harder to find.

Programs to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETIs, as they’re called) date back only to 1960, and such programs as there are have been sporadic and very limited in scope. Most are privately funded, because using public money to search for space aliens is pretty controversial. Funding for NASA’s last SETI program, for example, was cut in the early 1990s after politicians ridiculed it as “The Great Martian Chase.”

But could the aliens also be to blame? Here are four possible reasons that have been tossed around over the years:

1. We haven’t been noticed yet.
With billions upon billions of planets scattered all across the universe, it’s possible that no one has visited us because no one realizes we’re here.

2. We’ve been noticed…but we haven’t attracted any interest.
We may not be advanced enough or unique enough to interest a civilization that’s millions of years ahead of us. When was the last time you hiked a mile uphill to get a better look at some moss growing in a crack in the pavement, or waved at a ladybug to see if it would wave back? We may be so inferior to the aliens that they hardly take notice of us, even though they know we’re here.

3. The trip to Earth is too expensive.
It’s possible the aliens haven’t landed here for the same reason that we canceled the last three Apollo moon landings and have no firm plans to travel to Mars anytime soon, even though we have the technology to do it. Maybe the aliens, like us, have limited funds and higher priorities.

4. They’re already here—we just don’t know it.
Who can say for sure they
haven’t
landed? If they’re sophisticated enough to travel across one or more galaxies to get here, they’re probably sophisticated enough to study us, perhaps even live among us, without attracting our attention—which, if true, raises another interesting question:
Why
don’t they want to attract our attention?