The Outfall Podcast

An undersea cable breaks in the middle of the Atlantic, and the answer to “what happens now?” takes us back to 1866. The Great Eastern is searching for a lost cable with a hook, a winch, and a crew trying to hear one word from Ireland. Then Samanth Subramanian explains why repairing the internet still involves dragging a grapnel across the ocean floor. Full show notes for this FIVE MINUTE SHORT an...

A cable from Argentina comes ashore through a manhole at Myrtle Beach State Park, and it does not stop there. In Part 2 of Where the Internet Comes Ashore, DC BLOX , the company that built the landing station, follows it 470 miles to Atlanta and the data centers waiting at the other end. One building on that route is already too small. Visit the show notes here.  

We found a line on a map that runs nine thousand miles up from Argentina and comes ashore at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We didn't believe it, so we called Samanth Subramanian, who wrote a book about the cables that carry the internet across the ocean floor. Somebody decided the internet should climb out of the sea under a beach full of mini golf and pancake houses. See the show notes.

Somebody decided Pikes Peak would have no apostrophe. Somebody decides what every mountain, creek, and reservoir in America is officially called, and has since 1890. Almost nobody can name the committee, and most years nobody notices it is there. Show Notes. Join us on Instagram. 

A creek beside Clemson outmuscles a river forty five minutes up the road, draining twice the land and carrying close to twice the water. No agency will call that wrong, because no official line between a CREEK and a RIVER exists anywhere in America. The reason the smaller word went to the bigger water is four hundred years old and has almost nothing to do with the water itself. Show Notes.

Two filmmakers spent years inside the East End Wastewater Treatment Facility in Portland, Maine, and came out with a comedy. It has screened at festivals and museums across New England, and it is not on Netflix, not on Hulu, not for rent anywhere. Co-director Alex Wolf Lewis explains why, and the answer draws a line between independent film and the pipes under your city. Also, we have a special ev...

In 1993, Joel Jones got a wildlife biology degree and a dream of working in the woods. He ended up on the night shift at a sewer plant instead. He stayed thirty-two years and retired as CEO. And boy, did he come away with some stories.  Show Notes and Pictures. 

A man flipping through old tax map books finds a piece of land with no parcel number, no taxes paid, and no explanation. The county can't tell him why, so he spends two years of weekends with a compass and a stack of field notes from the 1750s trying to find out. What's still sitting out there in the woods changed the way we think about the ground under our feet. Visit our Show Notes.

For seven years we thought we knew what this show was about. Listening back through 100 episodes proved us wrong. Episode 100 is the story of what we found underneath. Visit our website. 

Season 8 of The Outfall starts with a set of coordinates, a fence line, and a wife who wisely stayed in the car. What comes next is bigger, quieter, and a lot stranger than where it began. New episodes begins in June.  Visit our website.  Join us online. 

A maintenance worker's suspicious 911 call. A toxic chemical banned since the 1970s. And a $2.5 million cleanup that started with one man's $6,000 shortcut. Former Spartanburg Water CEO Sue Schneider takes us inside the crisis. See the Show Notes.

For nearly a century, the Chattooga River has shaped the lives of the people who ran it, fought for it, and tried to keep it wild. In this episode, Jack Wise, Owner of Wildwater and conservationist Buzz Williams share how a once-secret river exploded after Deliverance, reshaped an entire community, and now faces a quieter kind of pressure. Along the way, we hear about a buried rapid, a new species...

In September 2019, thieves broke into Blenheim Palace and stole Maurizio Cattelan's "America"—a fully functional solid gold toilet worth $6 million—in under 5 minutes. But this isn't just a heist story: it's about an artwork that made 100,000 people equal for three minutes at a time, proving that true value can't be stolen. Join us for the wildest art infrastructure crime you've never heard of, wh...

For 400 years, people reported eerie blue lights dancing over marshes, which science often dismissed as folklore. Now, a stunning new paper from Stanford scientists proves the lights were real. The cause is stranger than any ghost story and connects directly to a topic in this season of stories. We explain in five minutes the phenomenon behind these "cool flames" and explore why the last major sig...

In the series finale, we go on set for the chaotic, death-defying filming of Deliverance and find out what really happened during Burt Reynolds's infamous waterfall stunt. Then, we follow Governor Jimmy Carter on his own daring canoe run down Bull Sluice. Finally, we explore how this perfect storm of Hollywood fame and political will converged to save the Chattooga River forever. Link to the Show...

In the 1960s, the Chattooga River was set to disappear. A series of massive dams were planned to turn 50 miles of wild rapids into a staircase of lakes.  Meanwhile, a political battle raged in Washington over the future of America's wildest places, and a South Carolina poet named James Dickey was writing a terrifying novel about a canoe trip that would change everything. Visit the show notes here.

Welcome to the premiere of our new series, Chattooga: The Fight to Keep It Wild. In this first episode, we journey back to a time when the Chattooga's fate seemed sealed. Like most major rivers in the American Southeast, it was destined to be tamed. This episode uncovers the extraordinary and unlikely convergence of events that set the stage for its survival. We trace the story from a campfire con...

When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville in September 2024, Water Resources Director David Melton watched his reservoir fill eight feet overnight and knew they were in trouble. Within hours, all three main transmission lines were gone, leaving 200,000 people without water for what would become a 53-day crisis. In this raw, unfiltered account, David shares the impossible decisions that kept a city alive...

What if the future of water came down to bubbles you’ll never see? Nanobubbles—thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt—are invisible, powerful, and already changing how we treat water, grow food, and even package beverages. In this episode, we trace the surprising journey of nanobubbles from lab accident to global adoption. See the Show Notes.

For over a century, dumping oil overboard was how sailors survived deadly storms. This five-minute episode reveals the science behind this now-banned life-saving technique. See Show Notes.

What if bubbles were secretly running the world? In this episode, we uncover how these tiny spheres are doing everything from helping shrimp fire plasma blasts to scrubbing ocean plastic, with help from a bubble-obsessed scientist and an artist whose photos reveal the hidden math of the universe. See Brad's images here. 

When OpenAI's Sam Altman claimed each ChatGPT query uses just 1/15th of a teaspoon of water, it sparked a heated debate about AI's environmental impact. We brought ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's Gemini into the studio to duke it out, but can a number that small really mask a much bigger problem? Which AI will call out the entire industry, and are you part of the problem too? Show Notes

The dramatic finale of our Table Rock Fire series reveals how South Carolina made history with its first-ever DC-10 aircraft drop and over a million gallons of water falling from the sky during the most intense mountain firefighting operation the state has ever seen. See the Show Notes and Pictures Here.

What started as a 10-acre fire on Table Rock Mountain quickly escalated into one of the largest wildfire responses in South Carolina history. In this episode, we go inside the firefighting operation as it exploded from a manageable incident to a 13,000-acre "complex fire" burning in two locations simultaneously. You'll hear from pilots coordinating massive aerial operations, firefighters watching...

In March 2025, careless teenage hikers ignited what would become the largest mountain wildfire in South Carolina's recorded history. What started as a 10-acre fire on Table Rock Mountain exploded into nearly 16,000 acres, becoming the number one priority fire in the entire United States. In this first episode, we explore how South Carolina actually fights wildfires.... spoiler alert: it's not what...