The Soviet Union collapsed on December 26th, 1991. The previous decades had been spent modernizing the previously agrarian economy of Russia at a furious pace. I have always been interested into what exactly went on in the Soviet Union at the same time that our parents were growing up. Some of our grandparents may remember the Cold War at its height, when it was widely believed that the world could enter into nuclear war at any moment.

Compared to the United States of America, the average Soviet Citizen had a very low impact on the environment. An emphasis was placed on wasting as little as possible. This practice extended to the shelves of the Soviet grocery stores. For example, on the rare examples that mayonaise was available on the shelves, the containers were extremely small. In the Soviet thinking, it made more sense to provide small serving sizes of condiments while not putting any preservatives in them. The hope was for it to be consumed quickly, before it spoiled.

On the other hand, Soviet Industry had almost no regulations. The government’s primary objective was generating income and resources for the state, placing the health of its citizens and the environment at the bottom of the priority list. This is why post-Soviet cities seem so dreary and polluted, because they often continued whatever industry thrived during the Soviet era.

For example, the cities of Dzerzhinsk and Norilsk are notorious for their severe issues with pollution. In World War 2, the state decided that Dzerzhinsk would be the site for chemical weapons production, focusing on arsenic-based weapons, mustard gas, and phosgene gas. This led to the city becoming the leader in chemical production in the nation, which led to an array of chemical contamination – including our old friend dioxin, which is found in high concentration in some areas of the water supply. Norilsk, on the other hand, serves as a center for the extraction and processing of nickel, which is used in electroplating and in the production of stainless steal. Both of these cities have abhorrent air quality, as most of their infrastructure is still from Soviet Times.

The topic of the Aral Sea drying up has been briefly touched upon in a previous blog, but there lies yet another danger to human life in the drying sea. That danger is Vozrozhdeniya Island. This island was used as a research facility for the development of obscene chemical weapons, including smallpox, anthrax, and, because nobody ever stopped to ask if they should, the plague. Due to the drying sea, the island is no longer an island, but rather a part of the mainland. Now, the site can be disturbed by anybody with a car, which can potentially have devastating effects. For example, in 1971, a researcher was accidentally infected with smallpox. When she returned to town, 10 people were infected, of which, 3 died.

The final issue we’ll take a look at has to do with natural gas extraction. Today, Russia is Europe’s only petrostate (with Ukraine potentially becoming a second petrostate if they survive the war). One area selected for exploitation became known as the Darvaza gas crater. In the 1970’s, a failed drilling expedition led to this field collapsing, and Soviet engineers decided to set it on fire to burn off the methane leaking into the atmosphere. This didn’t exactly go to plan, and the crater still burns today. The area itself is relatively benign, as long as you don’t fall inside of it.

And so ends this blog. I hope all of you have learned something from this series of posts, even if the only takeway is that Gavin Maxson is a holder of useless information about old things. I’ll take it as a compliment!

The immediate aftermath of the Johnstown Flood was a horrifying sight of death and destruction. The flood waters that tore through the valley leading to Johnstown destroyed any infrastructure they came across, including the Conemaugh Viaduct, which provided rail access to Pittsburgh from Central Pennsylvania. The town of Johnstown itself resembled the city of Hiroshima after the atomic blast. Thousands of lives were snuffed out, picked up by the water and piled against the Stone Bridge. This bridge actually survived the flood, and served as the focal point for the next disaster to be suffered by the town: fire.

In a cruelly ironic twist, the town destroyed by a flood would almost immediately afterwards be consumed by fire. An estimated 30 acres of debris was piled behind Stone Bridge, a hellish amalgamation of rolling stock, barbed wire, buildings, bodies, and flammable liquids such as kerosene. This mass soon caught fire, and burned relentlessly.

For the town, the most immediate need was the restoration of order to the town and the removal of the dead.  In the latter case, several temporary morgues were set up and staffed by professional undertakers who did their best to identify and properly dispose of the many bodies in the area. In the former case, the townsfolk often took the law into their own hands. Looters and other criminals were often hung or shot without a fair trial, as the suffering town simply did not have enough time to properly institute justice. In the coming months, Johnstown would soon become a focal point for one of the first large relief efforts in America.

Until 1889, all of America’s efforts were on expanding westward, staking lands and setting up homesteads as fast as the government would allow. Following the Johnstown Flood, the nation’s efforts reversed, and all eyes were on fulfilling a truly awe-inspiring order for humanitarian aid. Almost immediately, trains from Pittsburgh were dispatched with food and clothes. The Governor of Pennsylvania at the time, James Beaver (a familiar name to us here at Penn State), mobilized the Pennsylvania Militia to provide support. Thousands of workmen from the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work rebuilding the track damaged by the flood, which was rebuilt in just over 2-weeks. Prefabricated homes used by homesteaders were shipped to Johnstown to provide shelter for residents (the tale of the mail-order home in the early 20th century is an interesting rabbit hole to get into). The American Red Cross, led by Clara Barton, brought thousands of volunteers to assist in relief efforts.

When all was said and done, the community of Johnstown was affected forever. over 2,200 people had perished in the flood, and almost half a billion dollars in property had been damaged. Much of the blame for the disaster rested solely on the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which caused the disaster by not maintaining their dam correctly. Unfortunately, this was still 19th-century America, and the shrewd members of the club – the Carnegies and the Fricks, took many steps to avoid paying money in damages caused by the flood.  Today, the former clubhouse stands as a museum, as a constant reminder of the death and destruction brought about by the club’s owners.

Today, if you were to travel to the town of South Fork, Pennsylvania, you’d be probably be quite unimpressed. The town, home to under a thousand people, once housed a weapon so destructive that it killed more than twice as many people as live in the town. The source of this destruction was the South Fork Dam, an earthen dam that now exists as a hill in an empty field.

The dam was initially built in the mid nineteenth-century as a solution to provide water for one of the many canals in Pennsylvania. The reservoir contained by the dam, named Lake Conemaugh, provided millions of gallons of water for the surrounding area, including the town of Johnstown (the home of UPJ), just downstream. Eventually, railroads began surpassing the canals in Pennsylvania, and the construction of the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona meant that the advantages of canals were rendered increasingly moot by locomotives. Thus, the dam and lake were abandoned by the commonwealth. Enterprising investors, lead by Henry Clay Frick (the primary antagonist of any stories involving humane working conditions) bought the area, and turned the lake into a fishing and hunting club – a private playground for prominent rich Pennsylvanians. Despite the wealth of the investors, the penny-pinching involved in the maintenance of the dam was criminal. The top of the dam was widened to make room for a road, and steel pipes used for reservoir control were removed and sold for scrap. Whenever there were heavy rains, gangs of workmen would pile mud, straw, and sandbags against the wall of the dam in a furious attempt to shore it up.

On May 31st, 1899, a severe spring storm struck the area. The lake behind the dam quickly began cresting over the top of the structure. Despite furious attempts to save the structure, it collapsed, sending almost 4 billion gallons of water crashing through the valley. The destruction wrought on the towns downstream caused 2,208 deaths. Within hours of the breach, the massive torrent of water left untold amounts of destruction in its wake. Railroad bridges were destroyed, and houses were picked up by the water and propelled at high speed, akin to kinetic projectiles. When the torrent finished, the town caught on fire, creating a horrifying hellscape for the already scarred survivors.

• To Be Continued

The Pennsylvania Truss: A specific type of bridge design involving curved trusses and long spans, ideal for the wide rivers of Western Pennsylvania.

I am proud to come from a state that is home to such bridge design. In my area alone, there are several famous examples of bridges sporting Pennsylvania Trusses. Unfortunately, many of these bridges were dropped into the Monongahela River over a decade ago, and have since been replaced by utilitarian and concrete bridges, much to the horror of local historians. Today, we’ll look at a few of my favorites, and try to find out what went wrong.

The Charleroi-Monessen Bridge

The Charleroi-Monessen Bridge was constructed in 1908 as a toll bridge to serve traffic connecting the cities of Monessen and Charleroi, as the name suggests. At the time, the two cities were local powerhouses in steelmaking and glassmaking, respectively. Thus, there was a large demand for a river crossing. The bridge was constructed out of several large spans, held together by pins and bolts at their junctions. The steel grating of the bridge was infamous in the community for the poor conditions it produced during the winter, as well as for the ability to see straight down to the river through it. The bridge was particularly famous because of how beautiful it was. Painted a brilliant teal, the bridge was an inviting sight to look at on the river, and I remember marveling at the massive spans driving over the bridge as a small child. Unfortunately, the bridge was closed in 2009 due to severe structural deficiency.  Specifically, the bank holding a portal for the bridge was beginning to slump. This possibly caused a chain reaction that ended up bending a structural component of the bridge. The bridge was soon imploded and replaced by a brand new, much more boring highway bridge.

The Donora Webster Bridge

The story of the Donora-Webster bridge is much more macabre in my opinion. Constructed in 1906 mere miles from the town of Monessen, the bridge linked the towns of Donora and Webster, two small towns most known for being the epicenter of the Donora Smog of 1948 in which at least 21 people died. Over time, the town deteriorated, and its Pennsylvania Truss bridge fell apart along with it. The particularly interesting part of this bridge was how large it was, with its main span stretching 515 feet over the river. It was also known for its strange entrance, which was built as a ramp rather than a natural entrance from street level. When this bridge was closed in 2009, the reason was for “extreme deterioration.” What was exactly meant by this is not known. but the bridge was quite rusty. When this bridge was dropped into the river, it was not replaced. This means that the towns of Donora and Webster are now, and probably forever will be, split apart.

Forest Fires are some of the most terrifying natural disasters. In the wet and cool middle Atlantic, forest fires have never really been of real concern. On the West Coast, however, people live in mortal fear of a wildfire being sparked by any number of common occurrences. The concept of why fires are started is commonly a large talking point around the summer months of the year. The most probable cause of the uptick of catastrophic wildfires is climate change, spurred along by the “all fire is bad” attitude of the United States Forest Service causing a lack of support of controlled burning. However, not all catastrophic fires have occurred in the 21st century. Today, we’ll look at the fire that started it all: The Great Fire of 1910.

The picturesque landscape of the Pacific Northwest, with millions of acres of virgin forest, draws the awe of many. In the early 20th century, the lack of industrialization in the area meant that the towns were small. Many of the industries revolved around logging and mining. These industries were served by railways that would through the pristine woodland, hugging mountainsides on colossal wooded trestles and tunnels. These railways were serviced by coal-fired trains, and the embers emitted posed an extreme hazard to dry forests. Normally, at any one point, there would have been several fires burning that were known about. It could have been homesteaders clearing land, the previously mentioned locomotive-related fires, or fires caused by natural means. Nobody knows the true cause of the Great Fire.

On August 19th, there were several thousand fires burning in Idaho and Montana. Suddenly, on the 20th, a wind storm turned the woodland into an inferno. The vortex created by the fires was said to have ripped trees by their roots, and tore buildings from their foundations.

Over two days, at least 87 people lost their lives. The majority of these were firefighters. There were numerous tales of heroism from this inferno, chief among which being the story of Ranger Ed Pulaski, who saved his troop of forty men by herding them into an abandoned mine. In the aftermath, the United States Forest Service was greatly expanded. The famous fire towers that tower high above the forest were constructed with this newfound budget. The stories of forest rangers such as Ed Pulaski were immortalized in local folklore, and the combined effort of the federal government, local firefighters, and the United States Army helped to extinguish the fire. Nobody exactly knows what was going through the minds of the firefighters that perished in the blaze, but their commitment to their fellow man is something to be commended.

In our collective consciousness, the Second World War is almost unimaginable today. Many of those that fought in the conflict are now no longer with us, and their stories of conflict and crimes of the largest scale seen in history leave this world with them. The problems on our mind today involve those of climate change and environmental deterioration, two concepts understandably far from the minds of a civilian or soldier during World War 2. Over the span of 6 years, the entire world’s resources were pressed into the unending demand of killing our fellow man, and the environment surely suffered as a result. In today’s blog, I’d like to take a quick look at some areas of the world that were damaged by the largest conflict in human history.

The Wake Island Rail

The story of the Battle of Wake Island will forever remain my favorite story of triumph over impossible odds, even if the battle eventually ended in a Japanese victory. After the Japanese expelled the American Garrison, the decisive defeat of Japan at the Battle of Midway meant that the garrison on the small island was isolated and left to wither on the vine while American Forces battled elsewhere in the Pacific. An unfortunate casualty of this isolation (besides the prisoners that suffered on the island), was the Wake Island Rail. A small, flightless bird, this species was eliminated from the Earth by desperately hungry soldiers.

Unexploded Ordnance 

In any conflict, it is inevitable that some things meant to explode simply do not. Usually, these come in the form of bombs or artillery shells, millions of which litter European cities and former battlefields. A much more devious form of weapons were anti-personnel mines, scattered across vast stretches of a battlefield to control the enemy. Since these items are designed to explode when tampered with, they remain a constant threat in the deserts of North Africa to this day.

Pesticides

Mosquitos have been the enemy of humanity for hundreds of years, carrying dangerous diseases such as malaria. The use of the insecticide DDT, Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, saved the lives of thousands of soldiers by eliminating mosquitos. Unfortunately, it also indiscriminately killed most animals it touched, including Bald Eagles.

Sunken Ships

Ships fully loaded for combat contain a lot of fuel, and if they are sunk this substance will often leak into the environment. Paradoxically, it is oftentimes illegal and unethical to clean up these sunken ships, as they are considered war graves (think of digging up the body of someone who died in combat). It is estimated that the wreck of the USS Arizona, sunk during Pearl Harbor, leaks over 2 gallons of bunker oil per day.

The last blog? Already? I had so much that I wanted to talk about, yet it seems that this blog has reached its end. We sure have experienced a lot together. Throughout the lifespan of this passion blog, it has been a pleasure to explore the world with you all. However, I’ve noticed that I have spent all of my time discussing the darkest and dreariest of topics. People losing their homes, environments being destroyed, and landscapes being irreparably damaged. As the seasons change, a lot of us are currently back at home with our loved ones, and what better way to celebrate than with some feel-good stories of environmental success?

Let’s first look at an interesting location: Spectacle Island located in Boston, Massachusetts. Named as such because of its original shape resembling a pair of spectacles (us modern people would call them glasses). The island was a disgusting place for most of its lifetime. In fact, the city of Boston dumped trash on the island for over a century. Despite the history of the island, if you were to go there now, you would only see a beautiful park space on an island that does not really resemble a pair of glasses anymore. Why is this? What happened? To any readers from Boston, I’m sure the term Big Dig has many connotation to you. The Big Dig was a large construction project that rerouted Interstate 93 to underneath of Boston. The city needed to do something with the soil, and dumped all of it on Spectacle Island, turning it into a beautiful park.

If you were to look at the continent of Africa from space, you’d see what appears to be a distinct border where the desert of the Sahara begins and the lush jungles of Equatorial Africa begin.  At this border lies what is known as the Great Green Wall. When reading stories about post colonial Africa, it is often disheartening to learn of the vast corruption undertaken by various government entities during this period. A shining example of multinational success was  the Great Green Wall. In order to contain the deserts of the Sahara from expanding south, eleven African nations came together to plant millions of acres of trees, acting as both a carbon sink and a natural buffer for the Sahara Desert.

Finally, let’s end this blog by taking a look at one of my favorite projects: the restoration of the Aral Sea. During Soviet times, the water that once fed this stunning lake was rerouted in order to support agriculture programs. By preventing the water from replenishing the sea, the Soviets essentially doomed the lake to destruction, By 2014, the sea had almost disappeared. Thankfully, the nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have been working tirelessly to restore the sea.  Concrete dams have rerouted water back into the sea, and the body of water is slowly recovering to this  day.

As the semester winds down, I’ve noticed that I haven’t talked a lot about good environmental stories. I have two blogs left, and I’d like to squeeze out one more story of greed, mismanagement, and hilarity relative to the other disasters I’ve covered in this blog.

Nauru is a small Pacific Island in Micronesia. The island itself isn’t much to look at, but it has the natural beauty of an island paradise. If you were to look any closer, you’d notice many strange things. First of all, there are many pillars dotting island, acting as a sort of natural monolith that interrupts the island scenery. Abandoned mining and aggregate-loading infrastructure, showing signs of a past economy based on mining. The next question is, what is there to mind on this small, oval-shaped island? The answer still shocks me to this day.

Bird poop.

Yes, you’ve read right. At one point in history, bird poop (called guano from here on out), was mined across the Pacific for its phosphorus, which fed the growing stomachs of an industrializing world via fertilizer. Interestingly enough, guano had presented a get-rich quick scheme for nations, funding wars, naval arms races, and infrastructure projects across South America, as well as driving American foreign policy in the late 1800’s. The idea of mining guano may seem strange, but it makes sense with the geography. If you were to try to run around State College to sell bird poop at the market, you would go bankrupt quickly. However, in the ocean, birds don’t have many places to roost, allowing small islands to become packed with hundreds of feet of the stuff.

That left Nauru, a small island that a passing plane or ship would hardly notice, to briefly become the second wealthiest nation in the world with regards to GDP.  The Nauruan Government decided to invest this money into a fund designed as a piggybank for when the guano eventually ran out. This was a respectable initiative, and would lead Nauru to prosper into the 21st century, despite the environmental damage caused by the mining.

That’s not actually what happened. Nauru became the owner of a lavish airline, buying Boeing jumbo jets. These jumbo jets could transport the government leaders to Nauruan hotels owned by the government across Southeast Asia. The government blew the money on a variety of strange and unnecessary “business” ventures, laving the fund completely sapped.  With over half of the land destroyed by strip mining, no domestic food production, and the tourism industry ruined by guano, Nauru continues to suffer to this day.

Unfortunately for those that lived in the plains, there were several factors that were stacking against them. First of all, the Great Plains are an extremely dry place. The previous 40 years had been relatively wet, which kept dust down and crops watered. Every year that was cool and rainy was another stroke of luck for the region. At some point, this luck would run out and the climate would return to normal. Second, the farmers had been employing extensive farming methods for the past several decades. The fields were plowed deeper than they were before, allowed by the development of powerful crawler tractors. At the end of the year, farmers would often set fire to their harvested field, a practice called “burning the stubble.” In order to squeeze even more acreage of farmland out of the plains, farmers often plowed gigantic plots with no grass buffers between them. All of these practices destroyed the land by removing the deep-rooted prairie grasses which held the land to the Earth. If there wasn’t any rain, the soil would be liable to be picked up by the wind and carried off as dust. The Great Plains were transformed into a time bomb. As soon as the weather didn’t favor the farmers, there would be devastation for thousands upon thousands of square miles.

On April 14th, 1935, farmers woke up to go to church, as it was a Sunday. Many noticed a large black cloud on the horizon. Was this rain? It was getting quite dry there, dryer than they’d ever seen. Rather than travelling over them, the cloud enveloped them. It was dust. This was called Black Sunday, a reference to the fact that day turned to night because of the dust. The Dust Bowl had begun years prior, but this event was its apex. Machinery was buried underneath of dust, animals were choked to death, and entire harvests were carried away. The warm climate of the Great Plains had returned with a vengeance. Most farmers could not weather the storms. With the Great Depression occurring in parallel, many had no choice but to flee.

Those that fled tended to file their way towards urban area. One such group, migrants from Oklahoma, were nicknamed “Okies.” Such groups often fostered racial tension, as they pushed other races out of factory and field work on the West Coast. The Dust Bowl didn’t cause the abandonment of a single town. It instead emptied large swaths of the Great Plains of homesteaders and farmers, the children and grandchildren of the starry-eyed settlers of the late 1800’s. However, the Dust Bowl had a happy ending. Eventually, it subsided. By the 1940’s, the Great Plains were again needed to supply the war effort. President Roosevelt enacted several policies to prevent a similar catastrophe. His administration taught farmers sustainable farming techniques and planted hundreds of millions trees using a similar organization used to build our very own Osmond Lab. Due to billions of dollars of government effort, we have not seen a dust bowl event since the 1930’s. Unfortunately, with the effects of climate change, we may see it again one day in our lifetimes.

Technological advancement is supposed to bring great bounties to a society. Technology can raise wages, decrease labor, and lower prices. What happens when heralding new technology causes immense destruction? These stories surround us. We’ve all heard of the Hiroshimas, the Chernobyls, and the Johnstowns in our world. However, all of those incidents were confined to one general area, and can be pinpointed to one cause – war, mismanagement, or corruption. We have always proven ourselves capable of wrestling for the control of nature itself. What happens when this goes wrong? The Dust Bowl was a series of droughts and severe dust storms in the 1930’s that were caused by vast environmental mismanagement.

The story of the Oregon Trail and the (heavily romanticized) stories of settlers travelling to the west of our nation to start anew fill elementary school social studies books and folk songs. The construction of the transcontinental railroad allowed the industrialization of the west, as well as the industrial killing and displacement of American Indians and extinction of native species. By 1900, modern society, with its positives and negatives, had reached all of the United States. Prospective farmers were in awe of the cool, flat, and fertile land that lay ahead of them in the Great Plains. One of the main reason this land had not been touched in the past was because of the difficulty of the land itself. The calm nature of Great Plains landscapes can be deceiving.  The flat land of the prairie allowed devastating tornadoes to touch down. The thick grasses that anchored the soil in the ground could not be penetrated by plows, and there was no infrastructure to support any sort of farming. The invention of the internal combustion engine changed all of that. These new farmers didn’t come with horses and mules. They came with the finest in American Engineering: Allis-Chalmers, Case, McCormick Deering, Holt, John Deere, and International Harvester.

The advent of disc plows allowed even the smallest scale farming operations to own the equivalent of hundreds of horses, and the tractors  only needed gasoline and oil.  This allowed millions of acres to be cultivated and used for wheat production. The demands for wheat during World War I as well as the collapse of Russia, a leading producer, allowed prices to skyrocket. As more and more land was plowed, the prairie grasses that held the soil to the Earth were destroyed. Farmers burned their fields to prevent weeds. All of this was done using brand new equipment bought on fresh lines of credit for the bank. It doesn’t require a historian to see what’s coming. For America as well as its farmers, a truly dark storm was brewing on the horizon.

(TO BE CONTINUED)