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A Dairy Disaster. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leeb. And this is Ghost Town.

So I want you to take a look at this photo that I sent you and give me your impressions.

What are you seeing?

It looks like bricks of gold melting. That's what it looks like. It looks like bricks of gold melting.

That's what it looks like. It looks like bricks of gold melting and some fire.

Yeah, that's what it looks like.

Just going to have the photo.

It looks pretty intense, I would say.

Well, what this photo is is documentation of Madison, Wisconsin's Great Butter and Fire Flood. I'm not joking, that's what it is. It's a huge flood, torrential flood and giant butter and dairy related fire. So in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early 90s, there was an eight-day fire that broke out in this giant dairy storage facility.

The result was a nauseating event of pooling dairy, melted cheese, burned cranberries, and a torrential flood of molten dairy products that tormented and traumatized the city for years to come.

A meltdown, literally. Only in Wisconsin,

today we're talking about the Great Butter Fire and Flood of 1991. So a very, very, very short

economics lesson to begin, get a little context. In the late 70s and early 80s and into the 90s,

the U.S. government purchased excess quantities of cheese and butter in efforts to keep dairy prices stable and high.

This is called price support in economics.

Because the government went hard on the cheese and butter buying, farmers responded by increasing their production of milk and butterfat by 30%.

...