The Night Someone Silenced a 31-Year-Old Warning

The Night Someone Silenced a 31-Year-Old Warning

A burned strip of paper, a locked archive left untouched, and a single handwritten letter dated March 1988 that warned a city of risk to its water supply - who would come at night to erase thirty-one years of evidence? What exactly was in those twenty-nine pages, and why did someone burn only the left margins and leave every alarm untouched?

In this episode, we follow the discovery made at 5:52 a.m. on April 9, 2019, when a fifteen-year-old paperboy smelled smoke in a campus basement corridor and found archival documents partially burned in an open box. We trace the papers back to Clifford Banes, the March 1988 letter he mailed to his brother, the subsequent donation to Aldenmoor University, and the clerical mix-up that put researchers on the same trail - but who returned to burn the records?

Person: Clifford Banes Date: March 1988 Event: Partial burning of archival documents discovered April 9, 2019 Location: Whitfield Library sub-level, Aldenmoor University Case: Falsified load tolerance specifications on the Dunmore water treatment project

- 5:52 a.m. on April 9, 2019: a fifteen-year-old delivery boy smelled smoke in a basement corridor. - 29 pages were found with a clean two-inch burned strip along the left margin inside an open box on a metal cart. - The March 1988 letter named the subcontractor, the supervisor, a date, and a meeting room number related to the falsified specifications. - Clifford Banes worked on the Dunmore water treatment project from 1987 through 1989 and warned the falsified specs risked about 40,000 residents' water supply. - The Banes collection of nine boxes was donated to Aldenmoor University in 2016 and catalogued in the Whitfield Library sub-level.

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