An area of original.

I was born with a special gift.

The ability to mentally transform any situation into the worst case scenario.

In my own brain.

My therapist calls my gift catastrophizing.

And that's why I'm uniquely qualified to scrutinize and analyze history's greatest disasters.

And find out who's to blame.

They say history repeats itself.

Not on my watch.

My name is Rebecca Delgado-Smith and I am the alarmist.

Hey everyone.

Thanks to tuning into the alarmist, a comedy podcast where we talk about history's greatest tragedies

and figure out who's to blame.

Today we're discussing sea worlds telecom the Orca murders.

Here's what you need to know.

On a cold November day in 1983 off the east coast of Iceland,

a two-year-old male Orca was wrestled from his family pod and out of the ocean.

For his first year in captivity, he was held at an Icelandic aquarium

where he could either cruise slowly in circles or lie still on the surface.

Finally, the young whale was sent to the rundown sea land of the Pacific just outside Victoria

on British Columbia's Vancouver Island and given the name Telecom,

a word from the Chinook language meaning friend.

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