Original subtitles

Imagine a drilling accident so catastrophic

it unleashes a literal hell on earth.

The crew is in an all-out panic now.

They've opened up a 230-foot wide crater.

They're nauseous from the fumes.

What do you do in this situation?

There's no valve you can turn to shut off the gas flow.

Or transporting a nuclear bomb and losing it.

They are for hours unaccounted for

and that's a very dangerous situation.

United States forces spring into action,

which prompts a massive search.

How about a cockpit crisis that really sucks?

13 minutes into the flight,

there's a massive explosion.

The captain has been sucked out of the window

and is hanging on for dear life.

The blood spattered

across the fuselage showing the desperate position

he was in.

These are the disasters so mind boggling

they are truly unbelievable.

What began as a routine dig

turned into one of the most jaw-dropping

drilling accidents in history,

a mistake that ignited a fiery phenomenon

still burning to this day.

The story begins in 1971 in Turkmenistan,

which is at that point still part of the USSR.

A team of Soviet engineers is on hand to look for oil.

Trying to find oil costs a ton of money,

and the Soviets are really banking on this.

They need a big win.

They need to find a big cache of oil

to make this all pay off.

They find this rural spot in the Turkmenistani desert

and they begin drilling and they get nothing.

There's no oil.

So they're bringing drills that can go even deeper

into the Earth and again, there is nothing.

Suddenly, the ground begins to shake

and crumble all around them.

The men abandon their oil rigs

and run for dear life

and as they look behind them,

they see the ground giving way

and their equipment being swallowed up

and this giant, massive crater opens in the ground

right in front of their eyes.

What the team didn't realize

while they were looking for and drilling for oil was

that they had accidentally tapped into

a huge natural gas reservoir.

Sounds like they hit the jackpot, right?

Not exactly.

Instead of oil, they get a geyser of toxic methane

and there's no way to stop it.

The crew is in an all-out panic now.

They've opened up a 230-foot wide crater.

They're nauseous from the fumes.

What do you do in this situation?

There's no valve you can turn and shut off the gas flow.

To make matters worse,

villagers downwind of this episode are

experiencing all kinds of health problems

due to the methane gas.

And engineers now start to scramble

to find a way to turn this thing off.

The geologists are looking for a solution

and what they come up with is,

hey, let's just burn it off.

We'll burn the methane

and convert it to much less toxic CO2.

And then after a few days,

everything just goes back to normal.

Burning off the methane turns out to be

an absolutely terrible idea.

They massively underestimate

the size of this gas reservoir

and the thing burns and burns and burns.

It burns for hours, it burns for weeks,

for months and then years.

This raging inferno even earns

a nickname among locals,

the Gates of Hell.

When Turkmenistan gains its independence

after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

the officials there don't really have

the wherewithal to deal with this problem,

and so they basically just try to ignore it

and let the thing burn.

You'd think it would eventually burn itself out.

Not even close.

Over a half century later,

the fire is still going strong.

It's wild if you think about this,

a 230-foot wide hole spewing out flames,

shooting flames up to 50 feet in the air.

It's 1,500 degrees inside of this hole.

It literally looks like the gates of Hell have

opened up and are ready to just come up and consume you.

Even though it's not methane and it's carbon dioxide,

there's a constant stream of greenhouse gases emanating

from this one spot in Turkmenistan.

While government officials in Turkmenistan

continue to look for a way to close the Gates of Hell,

they might want to leave it open just a crack.

Turkmenistan realizes

we lost a lot of money by burning off all this gas

that we otherwise could have captured,

but this is pretty awesome looking,

so today, the Gates of Hell have actually become

Turkmenistan's number one tourist attraction.

In London, a different kind of hell

once descended on the city for days,

leaving devastation in its wake.

London has had problems with pollution

since the 1200s.

Even the word smog was created to describe

the coal burning, fireplace burning air of London.

And when it gets really bad,

they have a special term for it

and it's called a pea souper.

But in December of 1952,

smoggy London is about to experience

a pea souper on an apocalyptic level.

The morning of December 5th,

Londoners awakened to a crisp, clear, yet very cold sky

and as a result, they heat their homes

as they did at that time.

And then on top of that, a fog starts moving in

to the city and as it does,

people are still burning wood and coal in their fireplaces

and the smoke is combining with that fog.

The next morning, conditions continue to worsen.

The entire city is enveloped in smog.

It's so thick that you can't see your feet.

Double-decker bus drivers can't see a thing.

So as these buses are crawling through the streets,

people are walking alongside the bus with lanterns.

Members of parliament return home

black in the face as if they had been working

in the coal mines of Wales.

Londoners collapse in the streets,

automobiles collide.

A passenger train steamrolls

over a group of railway workers,

killing two men.

By the third and by the fourth day, it's getting worse.

People are wondering, how long is this going to go on?

When is this going to end?

Is it going to end?

But Mother Nature isn't letting up,

thanks to a rare and stubborn weather phenomenon.

What they're experiencing is actually an anticyclone

and this is a very calm, stable air mass

that has almost no winds in it.

Picture it like a lid on a pot.

With no wind to clear things out,

smoke and pollution build up

and as it gets colder outside,

people continue to burn more coal.

So anything that's being poured out of the chimneys

to heat a freezing population is

staying in the streets of that freezing population.

After five days of these unrelenting conditions,

low pressure with higher winds finally moves

into the area,

pushing this high pressure and this anticyclone outta here,

giving Londoners the relief that they need.

But unfortunately, the damage is already done.

The initial death toll of the Great Smog of London is

around 4,000 people.

But as historians continue to study this event,

estimates have shown that it might be

nearer to 12,000 people dying.

In the aftermath, officials do their part

to ensure this won't happen again.

In 1956, a Clean Air act is passed

by the British government

and it prohibits burning of coal in domestic residences.

They now have to transfer their energy resources

to cleaner-burning things like oil and like natural gases.

So, the old days of deadly London smog are gone forever.

The Great Smog of London is

far from the only unbelievable air disaster in history.

One of the first things they tell you to do

on an airplane is to fasten your seatbelt,

but for one crew member,

ignoring that instruction nearly ends in catastrophe.

At 7:30 AM a flight takes off from Birmingham, England

to Malaga, Spain.

There are about 81 people on board

and they're all tourists that are gonna be

making their way down to sunny Spain

to sun themselves on the beaches.

Once the plane hits cruising altitude,

the autopilot is engaged.

So Captain Tim Lancaster sits back,

loosens his seatbelt and unbuckles his shoulder harness.

The flight's cruising along.

Everything's going just fine,

and about 13 minutes into the flight.

There's a massive explosion.

Suddenly.

The cockpit door is ripped from its hinges.

There's no flames, there's no smoke,

but there's a rushing wind.

Through the open cockpit doorway,

passengers witness a terrifying scene.

The windshield in front of the captain's chair is

completely gone,

so the crew is being blasted with winds

of 400 miles per hour

and craziest of all,

the captain's chair is empty.

The captain has been sucked out of the window

and is hanging on for dear life

while 400 mile an hour winds are just blasting his body,

so much so that his clothes are torn apart.

The only reason the captain is

not sucked out of the window completely is

because his feet are caught on the control panel.

And this fast-thinking steward named Nigel Ogden

grabs a hold of Captain Lancaster's legs.

He's now stuck

and plastered to the aircraft.

The temperature is nearly negative 30 degrees Celsius

and he is literally hanging on for dear life.

But there's an even bigger problem.

When the captain's body hits the controls on the way out,

he disengages the autopilot.

With the autopilot off, the aircraft now goes into a dive.

Fighting the blasting, freezing winds,

copilot Alistair Atchison is able to pull up

and regain control of the plane.

However, with all the screaming and the pandemonium

in the cockpit,

nobody can hear any response from any of the towers.

Atchison has no clue

where he's going to put this aircraft down.

Things are going from bad to worse.

Ogden, who's holding onto the captain,

his hand becomes frostbitten.

He calls for help

and another steward enters the cockpit

and grabs a hold of the captain.

During the transfer,

the captain slips even further out of the window.

And now is being held onto only by his ankles.

Then there's a miracle.

Atchison hears directions

and he finds out that he can go back towards Southampton,

which is about 70 miles south of London,

and land the aircraft there.

With no windshield and Captain Lancaster dangling

from the front of the plane,

Atchison is able to safely land,

ending Lancaster's unbelievable 20-minute ride.

The blood spattered across the fuselage

showing the desperate position he was in.

Captain Lancaster is being treated

for two broken ankles,

broken ribs and frostbite.

He's alive

and after five months,

Captain Lancaster goes back to piloting airplanes.

You gotta give it to Captain Lancaster, he's a brave man.

Flailing thousands of feet in the sky is

a frightening thought,

but at least this captain had his crew to help him.

The same can't be said for one woman

who goes on the most unexpected

and terrifying ride of her life.

It's 2007 and a woman named Ewa Wisnierska,

she's a Polish-born paraglider

who competes with the German national team.

It's right before the world championships

in Eastern Australia

and she and the team have gone there early to train

in the very location that the competition is

taking place later that year.

It's a clear day and the winds are favorable,

so she decides to suit up and go for a test flight.

She's flying along,

she's somewhere between 14 and 18,000 feet high.

Then she sees some clouds,

which is weird because the forecast didn't have

any storms in it.

She sort of avoids the first one

and sort of tries to thread the needle between two of them.

And then she sees another cloud heading straight for her.

Ewa doesn't realize it,

but this is what's known as a cumulonimbus cloud

and it's bad news.

Inside cumulonimbus clouds,

we have incredibly high winds.

There's lightning, there's hail.

This is a bad thing to be inside,

especially if you're a paraglider.

Ewa is sucked in and sucked up

at a rate of approximately 130 feet a second.

She's now in this darkening, ice cold vortex

that keeps pushing her upward.

She's surrounded by peals of lightning and roars of thunder.

She's being pelted with hail

and Ewa cannot stop rising.

Within minutes, Ewa is

at an incredible 32,000 feet.

Higher than the peak of Mount Everest.

At an altitude of 32,000 feet,

there is not much oxygen.

The atmosphere is very thin.

The temperature drops, it's around minus 60 degrees.

Ewa can't breathe.

She has no warmth layer.

She's getting beaten up and then suddenly, she passes out.

So here she is being pelted by hail the size of oranges,

she's likely freezing to death.

She's unconscious and totally out of control.

Her chances for survival look really slim to none.

But something remarkable pushes the odds

in Ewa's favor.

As she's being battered around,

a change in the wind drops her to about 22,000 feet,

providing more oxygen so Ewa actually wakes up.

Unfortunately, Ewa has a new problem.

As quickly as she shot up into the atmosphere,

she's now headed down to Earth like a comet.

She falls about 10,000 feet

and then miraculously, out of nowhere,

the chute opens again.

Freezing, weak and barely conscious,

Ewa maneuvers her glider safely to the ground

40 miles from her launch site.

She's incredibly bruised

from being struck by massive balls of hail.

She's got frostbite,

but not only does she make a complete recovery,

but just weeks later,

she's back up in the paraglider again.

Ewa's near-death journey remains

the highest paraglider flight ever documented

and one of the most miraculous escapes from disaster

in any sport.

Guess that's one way to make it into the record books.

The reign of King Louis XVI

and his queen, Marie Antoinette,

famously ends in ruin,

a revolution and death by guillotine.

But that may not be surprising considering

the unbelievable way their marriage starts.

In the year 1770, France and Austria are

constantly at each other's throats all the time,

but a plan is devised to create an alliance

by marrying off Louis XV's 15-year-old grandson

to the 14-year-old Archduchess of Austria.

Trying to explain to the people of the country

that we're gonna bring in someone from Austria

to be your future queen is

a little bit of a hard sell.

So the concept is,

let's make this a big celebration.

We will show everyone that this is

really something to get excited about.

To seal the deal, they pull out all the stops,

including something most Parisians

have never seen before.

Fireworks.

At this point in history,

fireworks are usually reserved for royals and their guests,

so this will be the first time

that the masses will get to see

fireworks outside the palace.

The royal court hires

the very best of the best to put the show on.

They're known as the Ruggieri brothers

and they are the personal pyrotechnics experts

to the French king.

So as the Ruggieri brothers are preparing this display,

the people of Paris are packed into the square.

This is like a sardine situation.

Everybody is just shoulder to shoulder.

The Ruggieri brothers light the fuse,

and as the show begins,

throngs of spectators marvel at the display.

Then the wind changes.

And suddenly these rockets start being blown.

Right into the crowd.

And so a stampede ensues.

People begin to panic and rush to get away

from the explosions.

The problem is that they are so tightly packed

into the square and the exits are so narrow,

they can't get out.

During this melee,

some of the fireworks then hit

the actual wooden structure that they're being fired off of

and this causes a huge fire,

which causes more people to panic.

Hundreds are crushed by the panicked crowd

and others who managed to get out of the square are

pushed into the Seine, river where they drown.

The official death toll is 133,

which is enough to make it

the deadliest fireworks incident in history.

But more recent estimates have

put that death toll at about 3,000.

As the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette plays out

and goes terribly,

they make a lot of mistakes along the way,

but always in the back of everyone's mind in France is

the way this marriage started.

By the time we reached the year 1793,

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette will actually be

executed by guillotine

exactly where that fireworks show took place

all those years ago.

If you think fleeing an out of control fire

while fighting an angry mob sounds bad,

try adding one more wrinkle,

deadly predators.

It's 1902 on the Caribbean island of Martinique.

At the time, this territory is

heavily controlled and influenced by the French

and the main city on Martinique, Saint-Pierre,

is considered a sort of mini Paris.

Saint-Pierre is also drop dead gorgeous,

right on a sandy beach

with the mass of Mount Pelée rising up in the background.

At this point, there's only been

a couple of small eruptions since the 1700s,

so people in the area don't really consider it a threat,

But that sense of security begins

to unravel in 1902,

when Mount Pelée starts to act up

and the signs are hard to ignore.

On the night of May 2nd,

there is a small eruption

and people in Saint-Pierre start seeing

some pretty strange sights,

dead birds covered in ash,

scores of dead fish belly up in the harbor.

Then on May 3rd,

eruptions begin raining ash on the town.

The vibrations are so intense,

they trigger a mudslide that kills 150 people.

Conditions are worsening,

the fumes are getting bad,

and everybody's starting to realize

maybe it's time to get off the island.

These violent tremors are

not just panicking the local population,

they're also panicking another local,

the deadly poisonous Martinique lancehead snake.

These are pit vipers

that can grow up to six feet long,

with venomous fangs and a feisty disposition.

These fiercely territorial snakes have been driven

into the streets filled with panicking and fleeing

residents and tourists.

It's a toxic combination.

The snakes are joined

by swarms of biting yellow ants

and large black centipedes

all mingling with the terrified people

and lashing out at anyone who gets too close.

Even the military is called in

and the soldiers, they try to shoot the snakes,

but it's ineffective.

In all, 50 people die from snake bites.

Perhaps those victims are the lucky ones

because this Armageddon is just getting started.

On May 8th at 8:00 AM, Mount Pelée blows.

This is like an avalanche

of sheer billowing hot sulfur smoke that travels

at 200 miles an hour

and it's 1,300 degrees.

It basically obliterates everything in its path.

There is no time to escape.

People who don't die from burns are suffocated

as the heat sucks the air out from their lungs.

In a city of nearly 30,000 people,

there is just one survivor.

It's like a biblical disaster come to life.

Is there anything worse than being

covered in snakes and piping-hot volcanic gas?

How about centuries of raw sewage?

Many of our greatest engineering marvels are

achieved by testing the limits

of what's been tried before.

But in the case of one famous 20th century engineer,

his thirst for innovation takes things a bridge too far.

So in between the city of Tacoma, Washington

and the Kitsap Peninsula is

the Tacoma Narrow Strait,

but without a bridge,

the only way to get to the peninsula is by boat.

By the 1930s, government officials in Tacoma are

dreaming of a bridge,

but this is a big dream.

They need a way to cover 7,000 feet,

so this is no small proposition.

To pull this off,

they turn to engineer Leon Moisseiff,

who's just finished the revolutionary

Golden Gate Bridge.

When you look at the Golden Gate Bridge,

you may not appreciate that it's

actually a very subtle piece of engineering.

It looks like it's big and metal and rigid,

but there's actually a lot of give to it.

Literally, it can move as it needs to so things don't break.

Moisseiff's secret weapon is flexibility,

but his new design pushes that concept to the edge.

The bridge that he proposes would be

the third longest bridge in the country,

yet he's imagining something much narrower,

almost half as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Despite the daring design,

the bridge takes just two years to build.

And on July 1st, 1940,

amidst massive fanfare,

the bridge opens to the public.

The celebration, however, is short-lived

when a big flaw shows there's such a thing as too flexible.

This bridge is long and narrow,

and when the winds pick up,

it begins to sway and roll.

And almost as soon as it opens,

it gets its nickname, Galloping Gertie.

Then on one November morning,

the winds give Galloping Gertie its most violent ride yet.

On the morning of November 7th, 1940,

the winds are pretty strong over Galloping Gertie.

And so as people are driving across the bridge,

they're actually seeing it shift

noticeably from left to right.

As winds spike to nearly 45 miles an hour,

Gertie is quickly becoming a galloping disaster.

The whole surface of the bridge is

going 45 degrees to 45 degrees,

bending and turning like gift ribbon.

Cars are being thrown and slapped around.

Drivers don't know totally what to do.

Do they keep going?

Do they turn around?

Around 11:00 AM,

onlookers witness Gertie's tragic final gallop.

This becomes one of the most

mind-blowing engineering disasters of all time,

but the footage becomes notorious in its own right.

Perhaps not surprisingly,

investigators blame it on excessive flexibility.

Engineers learn from this lesson

and they build bridges that don't have

the same flexibility going forward.

A new bridge is built 10 years later to cross the Strait,

and it still stands today.

Bad engineering can set you up for a disastrous fall,

whether you're over a raging body of water

or something far, far worse.

It's July, 1184 in Germany,

a time when nobles and leaders of the Catholic Church are

constantly battling each other over control

over key pieces of territory.

A nobleman and an archbishop are

having one of these land disputes,

so they ask the king to intervene.

King Henrich convenes a conference of himself,

the two men in dispute,

and a pool of nobles and colleagues

to settle this issue once and for all.

For this meeting, the king chooses a neutral site,

St. Peter's Monastery in the town of Herford.

St. Peter's Monastery and church is

originally built for a couple dozen or so monks

to worship and to study.

But today, over 100 nobles pour into this tiny room

for the conference.

Right from the jump,

the two sides begin bickering and arguing

and insulting each other.

And as they do, some of the nobles begin to notice

that the wooden floorboards beneath their feet

begin to creak.

However, everyone is too distracted

to pay much attention to it.

The king is doing his best to mediate this debate,

but things aren't going so well.

So, he grabs one of the noblemen

and they go off into a corner to try to settle this thing.

Meanwhile, the creaks and the cracks

of the wooden floor are getting louder,

and then it all opens up.

Dozens of men fall through the floor

into a rude and disgusting surprise below,

because beneath this monastery is no basement.

It's a giant cesspool.

Before the days of modern plumbing,

human excrement had to go somewhere

and so they would create these giant holes.

And so this church had

its own cesspool under the floor.

The noblemen are sent into shock.

In this era, very few people know how to swim,

so they are literally drowning in human waste.

Even those who can swim face another deadly peril.

One thing about cesspools is

that they always have toxic methane gas,

and this methane can make a person pass out in seconds,

which is what many of the men began to do.

Perhaps the luckiest man in the room is King Heinrich,

who happened to be standing in a corner on a piece of stone.

So when the floor gave way,

he was able to reach up and grab onto an iron fitting

of a window until he could be rescued.

Unfortunately, most of the men

gathered for this disastrous meeting aren't as fortunate.

More than 60 noblemen perish in the sea of holy excrement.

This has to go down

as one of the most tragic and disgusting events

in the medieval period.

The event is chronicled in German history

as the Herford Latrine Fall,

which doesn't quite capture the calamity

of drowning in a massive pit of monk waste.

When you think of great balloon disasters,

you might visualize something fiery and terrifying

like the Hindenburg.

You certainly wouldn't think of a battalion

of innocent birthday balloons

bringing a city to its knees.

It's 1986 and there's a feeling

that Cleveland really needs to remake its image.

It's gone through really difficult economic times,

and it's often the butt of the joke

that calls them the Mistake on the Lake.

In attempt to try to rebrand their image,

Cleveland's United Way chapter decides

they're gonna try to break

a sort of odd world record

by being the city that releases

the most amount of balloons at the exact same time

into the air.

And they decide to call it Balloonfest '86.

In order to kick off the city's

United Way charity campaign,

volunteers blew up one and a half million

helium-filled balloons.

After more than six months of preparation,

excited Clevelanders are ready to make history.

Nearly 100,000 people come out

to this large square in Cleveland,

and you have people watching from rooftops

and from balconies,

it's a show.

As the massive net is released,

a plume of 1.5 million balloons rises into the sky.

It was beautiful.

It looked like confetti going up.

It's an amazing sight.

Everyone is just blown away by what they're witnessing.

But suddenly, the winds begin to pick up.

Things really quickly take a turn for the worst

because the wind starts taking these balloons

to all different places

that they don't really want them going.

And then on top of that, it starts raining,

which starts bringing all the balloons back down again.

This is a problem because the organizers had

actually planned to fill the balloons

with different amounts of helium

so that they would come back to the ground

at different times.

That would make cleanup easier.

It wouldn't all happen at once,

but now it's all happening at once.

The balloons begin littering the ground.

Soon the Burke Lakefront airport is forced to close

and the damage is not even close to being done.

The night before the launching of these balloons,

two fishermen on Lake Erie get lost,

so a rescue effort was underway,

but due to the hundreds of thousands of balloons

that are literally just covering Lake Erie,

it becomes to next to impossible to find these fishermen.

The Coast Guard suspends the search

and sadly, both men's bodies are recovered weeks later.

The families of the missing fishermen are outraged.

Later, the families will sue

the United Way for $3.2 million.

Weeks after this disaster,

balloons are found on beaches as far away as Ontario.

Just imagine how this was bad for the wildlife in the area.

You can't have birds and fish chowing down on latex,

and it's just a massive disaster.

Amazingly, organizers actually do get credit

for breaking this Guinness World Record.

But given what we know about the environmental hit,

this doesn't seem like a record

anybody's rushing to break.

Thousands of rogue balloons is certainly cause for alarm,

but at least none of them were

filled with weapons-grade plutonium.

It's the height of the Cold War.

And on this morning, an American B-52 bomber is

flying over the Mediterranean near Spain

and it's running low on fuel.

The pilot lines up behind a tanker plane

for mid-air refueling.

But the B-52 is coming in too hot.

He's approaching the tanker with too much speed

and they're getting dangerously close to one another.

Ordinarily, you'd hear the boom operator command

that B-52 aircraft to slow down

and that command would be

breakaway, breakaway, breakaway.

But for some reason on that day,

they didn't hear that command.

The tanker explodes, it bursts into flames.

Both aircraft are destroyed and they both crash.

Seven airmen are killed.

But there are unbelievable ramifications of this crash

that are about to threaten the lives of millions.

That B-52 on that day was

carrying four thermonuclear weapons.

As the aircraft tears apart,

the four bombs are ejected.

They're now in free fall above the coast of Spain,

each of which over 100 times more powerful

than the bomb detonated over Hiroshima.

Luckily, nuclear weapons are designed not to go off

unless you really, really want them to.

If the safety is still on, so to speak,

it's not going to set off the nuke.

Even though no mushroom clouds appear

over the Spanish coast,

that doesn't mean disaster is averted.

They are for hours unaccounted for,

and that's a very dangerous situation.

United States forces spring into action

and scramble to search for these

with utmost importance.

Amazingly, within 24 hours,

they discover three of the four bombs.

They're near a fishing village called Palomares.

Now this doesn't set off a nuclear explosion,

but it does spew radioactive plutonium into the air,

which has irradiated large chunks of the Spanish coastline.

There's also a fourth bomb still missing.

Thus enters a fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts.

He claims to the United States Navy

that he saw the fourth bomb splash down

somewhere in the Mediterranean,

which prompts yet another massive search.

Time is of the essence in this search,

and that's because it's the height of the Cold War.

So it could be that the Soviets are out there

'cause they would love nothing more

than to get their hands on a B28 F1 thermonuclear weapon

and compare it to the technology that they have developed.

With Francisco's help,

about 30 Navy ships begin combing the area

looking for this fourth bomb.

They find it about 80 days later.

Now, according to maritime salvage tradition and law,

Francisco should be accorded

1% of the bomb's value for helping to find it.

The declared value

of a B28 F1 thermonuclear free-fall bomb

was $2 billion in 1966.

Technically, Francisco was entitled to $20 million.

That would've made him Spain's newest multimillionaire.

According to Francisco, the military has never paid up,

but of course he does come away with a fantastic nickname,

Paco de la Bomba.

Maritime disasters are usually caused

by something ominous like an iceberg or a violent storm.

But there's one deep sea debacle

that happens simply because a guy just really has to go.

A newly commissioned state-of-the-art submarine,

U-1206, is the pride of the Nazi Navy.

Commanding the submarine on its maiden combat mission is

a very green captain,

27-year-old Karl-Adolf Schlitt.

On this date, Schlitt has U-1206 at 200 feet

patrolling just off of Scotland,

but he's also dealing with the headache of one engine

that's inoperable

and he has engineers who are working

to return that engine to service.

Suddenly, Captain Schlitt finds himself

in need of a bathroom break.

Luckily, this sub has a new, state-of-the-art technology,

an underwater flushing toilet.

It has this complicated system of valves and chambers

that allow the waste to be expelled,

kind of like a torpedo.

It's shot out at pressure.

It's so complicated,

it even has its own engineer

dubbed the toilet officer.

So when Captain Schlitt finished doing his business,

that special toilet officer is

still trying to fix the engine.

Schlitt takes it into his own hands

and decides to undergo

the complex flushing procedure by himself.

He turns a couple knobs, flips a couple levers,

but nothing happens.

He decides to summon the toilet officer.

The toilet officer begins to flush the system,

not realizing that Schlitt had already opened two valves.

This results in the opening of valves out of sequence.

In an instant, sea water and human waste comes

flooding into the chamber at full force.

The battery compartment fills with this sea water,

which reacts with the battery acid to produce chlorine gas,

which has the potential to kill everybody on the submarine.

Captain Schlitt only has one option,

perform an emergency surfacing procedure

and shoot to the to.

When the sub surfaces,

they're immediately spotted by Allied aircraft

and come under heavy fire.

Schlitt has no choice but to scuttle the U-1206

before it falls into enemy hands.

He orders his crew onto lifeboats,

orders the valves open,

and the sub plunges beneath the waves

to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Four of his 50 crewmen die in this procedure.

Captain Schlitt survives the ordeal though,

and lives to 2009.

And his legacy, he'll forever be known

as the captain who lost a ship

due to one fatal toilet flush.

That's one costly bathroom break,

but what about $300 million going down the drain?

It's February of 2022,

and you have the Felicity Ace cargo ship

sailing from Germany to the United States.

It's carrying around 4,000 luxury cars.

We're talking everything from Lamborghinis

to Porsches to Bentleys,

and some of these cars are costing

as much as $400,000 a pop.

So the Felicity Ace is

in the vicinity of an island chain called the Azores

when a massive fire breaks out.

But this is no ordinary fire.

This is a fire fueled by lithium ion batteries

and the 22-man crew cannot control this fire.

Rescue teams do arrive by helicopter

and they do make sure that the crew is safe,

but it takes crews ultimately around two weeks

to put the blaze out.

The structural damage to the ship is so severe,

it can't make the trip to New York on its own.

However, there is still hope

for quite a few of the cars

and their manufacturer says,

"Listen, we don't need to lose all of our inventory.

Let's try to salvage this so this is not a complete loss."

A rescue tugboat arrives from Portugal

and attempts to tow the ship to safety.

As soon as they start to tow this boat,

it begins to list to the right and to the left,

and each time it does,

it takes on more water.

And as it takes on more water,

it becomes harder and harder to move

and eventually, it rolls over on its side.

So all of these people,

the ship's crew and the rescuers,

the tug boat team are watching,

not being able to do anything as the full cargo vessel

full of these expensive cars slowly sinks

to the bottom of the ocean,

10,000 feet down into the sea.

The estimated total loss for these 4,000 cars is

$330 million.

If you ever wanted a free Bentley,

now you know where you can find one.

Whether it's a blazing hell hole in a remote desert,

a fireworks display gone horribly wrong

or one catastrophic flush of the commode,

these are the disasters that are so inconceivable

they are truly unbelievable.