Welcome, blah blah, Welcome to the second hour of the show. I'm your host, Mandy callin here until three pm.
Zach figures in for.
Anthony Rodriguez, and as we do once a month, we bring one of my favorite guests on. He is our futurist, Thomas Fry. All he does is think about the future, and normally he comes on, we talk about cool stuff that's going to be happening in education or with medicine or technology or some like and by the time I leave,
I'm like excited for the future. And this weekend Thomas sends me an article and he's like, Hey, you ever thought about the whole bunch of different creative ways we could all die and destroy the country?
No?
I had not, Thomas, thanks a lot. But now he's on to talk about a story. We'll call it a not a prediction. It's not like your nostra damas, Thomas, but you have it. It's called the Canyon Fairy Disaster. How a single event can reshape a nation. It's kind of a speculative story of what could happen.
Correct, right right.
This is all about the Kenyon Fairy Dam up in western Montana, which has the potential. See the Missouri Mississippi river system in the US is the second longest river system in the world other than the Nile And if something happened to this river system, it could literally cut
our country in half. And that's I grew up in South Dakota, and I grew up on close to the river, and I spent my childhood driving around fields with a John Deer tractor thinking about things like this, and so that's where this came from.
Well, a lot of people don't realize, right there's a lot of cities and towns that have been built along the river beds because it's very fertile land. You have farming communities there, but lots of cities have come up around the rivers across the country because of shipping lanes and stuff like that.
So tell people about.
The Canyon Ferry disaster potential in your estimation. Let's start with let's just set the tail right now. It's May of some future year. We're at the end of the snow melt things. I mean, we're at the beginning of the snow melt. Things are starting to move along, And what do you think is going to happen or could happen.
Yeah.
The way I tell the story is that this is a potential disaster that the dams have all filled up along the Missouri River and also on the Mississippi, and terrorists decide to actually plant bombs in the Canyon Ferry Dam, which is in a very remote area of Montana, way up in the mountains, and then at the worst possible time, at midnight, then an explosion goes off in terras Edama Park and that starts the water rolling, and it starts going from western Montana, cutting through all the little towns
and cities along the way.
But then it picks up speed as.
It goes, and it picks up more water because there's water already in the river, and so that's it has this cumulative effect. And so this turns into this giant wall of water cutting through all the way through Montana. And then the first major dam that it would wipe out would be the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, and then it would go on to the Garrison Reservoir in North Dakota and then wipe out.
The Owahee Reservoir in South Dakota.
And there's a series of small hydroelectric dams along the way that it would also wipe out and then the first major city that it would hit, it would hit Omaha, and then Kansas City, and then Saint Louis and then Memphis, and then go all the way down to New Orleans, and so it wipes out four state capitals along the way,
and in the process it's swall of water. And this is an event that would unfold over a period of ten to twelve days, a really long, grolling period of time where we would probably send news crews out and they'd have helicopters flying over the front edge of the wall of water coming down the river and people would be evacuated. But it would just destroy all the bridges, all of the dams and literally cut the country in half. As many millions of people would loose their homes in the process.
And the thing that got me because how much water are we talking about here? I mean, like, are we talking a billions of gallons of water that would be gathered up as it hit each reservoir in each dam. I mean, cause I don't think when you think about it in terms of when you look at when there is a big flood event in along one of these rivers, because they happen every so often, they have one hundred
year flood or a fifty year flood or whatever. And you see how much of the floodplain is actually inhabited, their houses in the floodplain. Point, there are also state capitals, there are also major cities.
And a flood is a.
Slightly different kind of recovery because unlike a tornado, which may tear up some of the infrastructure, a flood can take out all of the infrastructure, the roads, the bridges, the everything. And then what happens to the water that I mean, does it eventually go down because it runs out of that stored water? What happens in the endgame of this.
Yeah, eventually we'll drain out through the Mississippi River. But it's a long drawn out process, and it just destroys so many houses and so many bridges and so many communities along the way. And the fact that the country is cut in half, it just separates cities in half. So there's no way of driving back and forth there. We can truck anything back and forth. The only way
we can process to start flying. And so when you when you think about that, all the bridges are gone, and so then we'd have to suddenly start figuring out, well, how do we build a bridge across this thing? And these are wide bodies of water. These rivers are huge.
And they'd be what four times as wide if this happened.
They'd be even wider the Mississippian some places like a mile wide, isn't it.
It's even wider than that a lot of places. It gets to be quite quite a huge body of water. So then we would essentially have to start over. But the key question is is can this be prevented and is there some stoftgap measures that can be implemented that would make.
It so that this couldn't happen?
Like what.
Well, as an example, you're you're probably aware of the runaway truck ram that semi issues on the interstate. If they get out of control, they just go up these runaway truck ramps. Well, the same thing could be done with the rivers, and that they could actually be split and so that half of the river would go off into this other area of fields and things.
So that would actually reduce the alarm of water going down the river.
So you would just have a essentially a fake island periodically down these rivers. Would it just be every miles or how many miles where you would just have what a big concrete barrier that would redirect water if it came far enough out of the banks.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how this would be designed, but a lot of times the river goes around the corner. So if going around the corner you just make one route so goes straight and the other route continues down the normal path, that that could actually drain off a huge amount of water just allowing it to go off straight. And I'm not sure. I'm not a water engineer. I don't know how to design things like this, but it would it's logical that that would be a good option.
The problem is is that water always finds its way back to the lowest point.
You know.
That is I lived in a cabin in Florida where we had floods on a regular basis that came Our house was on fifteen feet stilts, and I got very very good at understanding flood patterns because regardless of where you redirect that water, as soon as it can, it's going to rejoin that river just from the natural topography.
So I think you would have to maybe have a sort of.
A false reservoir prepared almost where you had earth and dams, and I'm just wandering.
Environmentalists would never let that happen. We're screwing, Thomas. Why did you tell me this?
Why do I know this? Now?
I got a lot of question I got a lot of questions from our text line, and some of them are very very good. If Damn number one is blown, wouldn't you drain all the reservoirs below it in anticipation of the water from Damn number one?
So it wouldn't be a cumulative effect, but a big slug of water coming down.
Absolutely, you drain all the water out and it's still won't hold it though.
Because it's coming down so fast.
Yeah, it's coming down so fast, And this is cumulative effect.
You can't you can't drain an entire reservoir.
Like that just in a single day, right, And so it reaches the first dam in four Peck, Montana in less than a day.
And uh, and that's a huge body of water there.
Well, I want to we haven't even touched on what happens after all these dams blow. But I have a couple of questions. These two kind of go hand in hand. Mandy Illinois farm boy again, isn't he worried about giving terrorists another scenario to you consider? And I'm going to add it with this question, Mandy, has there ever been captured information from terrorists which you have constructed such a plan that from dating?
Yeah, great question.
I've been told that anything that I can think of, the terrorists have already thought of. This is just one example, probably one of the worst examples that could be somebody can implement. But there's also dams in the Ukraine, there's dams in California.
Literally all over.
The world, we've built dams and similar situations like this could happen, and virtually any of them. So I really think that we need to create systems where this can't happen, to fortify the dams, to create monitoring systems so that nothing.
Can go wrong.
And I'm not sure what the right solution is, but I'm in favor of making people aware that this is a possibility and actually coming up with the right.
Plan so that can happen.
So, first of all, someone says Thomas Fryes diabolical. Yes, he is a crafty man, but let me talk about what happens after.
Okay, let's just assume this has happened.
Now we've already sort of covered a little bit, although I don't think people would understand the scale of the destruction, meaning the floodwaters would take out thousands and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and destroy a huge swath of the economy while cutting the country in half. In terms of land travel, you would either have to take a ferry or fly to get over this water mass.
And then we haven't even talked about the fact that these reservoirs and dams provide drinking water two hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. So what happens in the immediate aftermath and then what happens in the long term aftermath of this.
Yeah, it's it's a massive recovery effort. Well, the first thing is to make sure everybody's evacuated. The tricky part will be the small towns real close to where the Canyon Ferry dam is.
Uh So, so those people will have very little notice.
The other ones might have a day or several days notice, and so their evacuation time stretches out so.
That they can plan for this.
But as this is going along, and I've been speculating that there will be helicopters flying on the front edge of the bank of water coming down the river, and uh, they're they're they're actually alerting people as they go to make sure that there's no stragglers left behind. But then they can they can everybody gets out of the way. So the death count I think would be relatively low, but the old all destruction amount is relatively high.
But now after the event, you've now you don't have fresh water for hundreds of thousands of people, because there's nothing worse than being in a flood and not having water. Which sounds counterintuitive, but I've had this happen to me where you don't have any water to drink. You got water everywhere, but you don't have any water to drink. So that becomes a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions instantly in terms of people having access to water that will not kill.
Them right right, They'll have to be a massive effort undertaken to just truck water into all these communities around the river.
And also there's some filtration.
Systems that will work where they can just take the river water and filter it in a way that it's actually clean enough to drink, so having things like that ready.
To go will be really important. And then it's a matter of.
Getting food and transportation because a lot of people will lose their cars and their transportation along the way, and families can get cut in half as well, so.
Half are on one side of the river and half are on the other.
And then the airlines will have to try to pick up the slack, and they're not prepared for the amount of travel that will happen over.
The coming days.
It will be a staggering number of people that will want to just go across the river to beat up with the rest of their family or their friends or whoever.
Well this to me, and I've always thought an EMP is the most terrifying possibility. I think EMPs are really from a strategic standpoint. But my goodness, it would be far easier to pull this off than it would to try and get an EMP to blow up at the right place to take out our electricity grid. So thanks Thomas for the stuff that nightmares are made of. This is I guess it's yet another thing. I do feel like our electrical grid in this country is very, very fragile.
I feel like now I feel like our damn system is very, very fragile, and it's nerve wracking because we all take all of this stuff for granted. Right in my lifetime, I have never had to worry about not being able to get fresh water ever. I mean maybe on a temporary basis when I'm flooded, but I've never been able. I've never had to worry about not having
power for a year. But the reality is is these are the kind of things that we have to worry about and plan for because if I'm a bad actor, those are the things I'm going after because they create the biggest amount of havoc and long term damage in the shortest amount of time.
Yeah, I was. I was stranded in Hurricane Helene and we were without power for eleven days, which just seemed like an interminable amount of time. And then getting gasoline to put into a generator, you had to wait in line for two to three hours at gas stations to get the gasoline. Now, that'll be small potatoes compared to what happens on a disaster like this, because people will
try to buy generators wherever they can. There's not enough generators to be found on the planet for the number of people that would need them, and then the gasoline would would be gone.
And also the number of hydroelectric plants.
That would be destroyed along the way would also be staggering. So this is a permanent loss or a loss until they can be recovered, which is my guess is probably six to twelve months before.
Anything can get started up in the power area again.
So yeah, the number of issues that you have to deal with suddenly becomes just staggering.
This is honestly the most terrifying scenario I can possibly think of.
So thanks a.
Lot, Thomas, because I already often don't sleep well because of my EMP fear, and now we know we have a text. Who said, Thomas, or how is this compared to the Teton River dam failure in the mid seventies.
I don't know about that one.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one, but that that one didn't go all the way through at least to my knowledge, it didn't affect any other dams. But there's a lot of dams that could blow out and and actually wipe out.
A huge community.
And it can be on the East coast and West coast to be up in Canada, can beed in South America in Asia.
This is this is just one example.
It's probably one of the more staggering examples, but it's one that I'm familiar with, so that's why I wrote about it.
Well, you did a good job. The story is terrifying.
It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, but it's it's something we just we have to think about this stuff. And here's the thing, this is not an exciting thing to think about. What do we do if a bland a dam blows up? But it could be so destructive. Just look at what they're dealing with in North Carolina with a minor flood in compared to this, right, I mean,
they can't even get back on their feet now. So if you think the government is overwhelmed now by those kind of disasters, they would be absolutely put under by something like this.
So thanks for that, Thomas. Good to talk to you, my friend.
Try and find something positive, upbeat and awesome to talk about next week if you are next month, that we could.
Okay, we'll do all right. That's Thomas Friar.
Everybody.
You can find him at futuristspeaker dot com if you'd like to find out more information. All right, So, Yeah, I didn't know you needed that in your life, didja. When we get back, I have so much stuff on the blog that's related to the Trump Zelenski blow up that I have to talk about it again, even though I wasn't.
But when we get back.
From this segment, I want to talk about a couple things local.
Remember when I talked about the zoo.
And I steam plant and debacle That's what I'm gonna call it, because it's already it's already headed to debacle territory and lots of people jumping in to race for various offices. We'll talk about some of that stuff right after this