The Kaprun Funicular Disaster of 2000 | Episode 102

If you think the worst thing that can happen while skiing is trying not to scream while the ski patrol figures out why your leg’s bending that way, we have a lot to teach you about skiing. Spoiler: mountains can cook and kill people. Don’t say this podcast doesn’t teach you things.

On today’s episode: you will learn why Frankenstein was more graceful on stolen corpse feet than you are in snowboots; you’ll learn why diagonal tunnels basically act as nature’s secret logistical flamethrowers; and we’ll see how a $40 appliance permanently derailed a $30-million-a-year alpine operation and changed European history.

And if you were listening on Patreon… you would hear about the industrial accident that unearthed the entire history of humanity in Western Europe; you would hear about all the terrible things that happened to the last King of England to die in battle before and after he actually died (spoiler: most of the injuries were after); and if you don’t know the story, we’ll tell you how Dionysus gave Damocles PTSD.

This is one of those bad day at work/bad holiday episodes where everything that could have helped along the way was too expensive, and the one thing that was supposed to help someone was so cheap, it killed almost everybody. We’re going to learn a lot about just how weird and active fire can be. Most people picture fire like this: Flames burn, heat rises, you step back. That’s fine, if it’s burning in a free and open space. You have no chance of being suffocated by it, and it’s easy to play keep away with. In an open-air fire, heat rises and disperses, oxygen flows in from every which way, and the smoke just carries away on the breeze. In today’s fire, not so much. We will be facing less of a camp fire and more of a blow torch.

This episode also marks our return to the European Alps, where we will discover an entirely different way of being afraid of mountains, so that’s fun! And as long as we’re learning to be afraid of new things, we’re also going to look at how everything around us, from the things we sit on to the clothes we wear, all break down into vaporized toxins that will absolutely make for not so good think before shutting you off for good. This is also an episode that extends our philosophy that any “vehicle” could double as a coffin, and funicular is a vehicle we’ve never explored before.


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