Shadowing Practice: Google Maps Directions That Killed People - Learn English Speaking with Video

In Eastern Russia, Sergei Ustinov and Vladislav Istomin were planning a big trip.

The pair of friends were going to drive all the way from Yakutsk to the port city of Magadan, situated on the Sea of Okhotsk.

Considering this was November 2020, the pair may have been hoping to escape the creeping restlessness brought on by COVID lockdowns,

or perhaps they simply seeking adventure like 18 year olds often do.

Either way, their parents were not pleased when they heard about their plans.

Sergey's mother in particular tried to talk them out of the trip, citing how dangerous a 1900 kilometer route would be.

She wasn't exaggerating.

Sitting in the deep reaches of eastern Siberia, their starting point Yakutsk is the most remote major city on the planet.

It's also the coldest, with temperatures regularly reaching below minus 40, so cold that cars need to be left running all the time or else they simply won't be able to start up.

If you're Canadian like me, the best way to describe Yakutsk is

that it's like one of those towns way up north that's only accessible via winter roads when bodies of water freeze.

Except it's not a town.

It's a city with 300,000 people, all of whom have to take a ferry across the Lina river

if they want to drive out of it before the winter freeze sets in.

This is where Sergei and Vladislav began their journey.

After making their way across the river, they'd have only one road ahead of them that could lead them away from the city, the Kolyma Highway.

To locals, the route bears a nickname.

The Road of Bones.

It was built during the Stalin era by gulag prisoners in the extreme conditions of northeast Siberia.

Historians frequently mention that for roughly every meter of road built, one prisoner would die, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths in total.

With so many bodies and being in such a remote place, the guards overseeing the construction would usually just leave the corpses in the foundation of the road itself,

making the route's nickname an accurate description of what the road was physically built from.

This is a highway Sergei and Vladislav are now pulling onto.

While local customs dictate

that vehicles driving along this incredibly remote route should travel in pairs due to the risk of hypothermia a breakdown could present,

the pair of teenagers didn't follow this advice.

In fact, they hadn't brought any proper winter clothes with them, only opting to wear puffer jackets and sneakers.

They had originally planned their trip using Yandex maps, but they instead decided to use this Russian platform's American equivalent,

Google Maps, which had shown them a shortcut the other platform didn't appear to pick up on.

The Yandex route had followed the Kalima Highway, which first leads north to the town of Usnara, and only then head south down to Magadon,

an indirect trip that would take a day and a half of driving.

Google on the other hand showed a more direct looking route that instead passed through the town of Tomtor,

preventing the need to needlessly drive north and shaved off 170 kilometers and a few hours of driving.

If only they knew.

The route Google showed wasn't as convenient as it may have appeared.

The path that would take them on wasn't part of the maintained federal Kalima Highway.

It was a stretch of the road of bones which had been abandoned for more than a decade.

As the boys began driving down this unmaintained highway in the middle of the taiga forest,

they likely slowly noticed the bumps in the road getting more extreme the further they went.

Their families began to grow alarmed when they failed to check in with them, and after a few days, they contacted the police who would start a missing persons investigation.

It would take a week of searching through abandoned roads and villages when a policeman finally came across an ice-covered Toyota chaser,

50 kilometers away from the nearest currently inhabited settlement.

Inside was the body of Sergei Ustinov, and a barely clinging to life Vladislav Istomin, who was quickly airlifted to a hospital in Yakutsk.

Doctors would find him suffering from acute hypothermia, with severe frostbite on his arms and legs.

He'd tell his rescuers that the pair had struck.. something on the road while driving, leading to the car's radiator being punctured, and ultimately disabling the vehicle.

While they managed to build fires to keep warm, they still weren't properly dressed for an early arctic winter that saw temperatures reach as low as minus 50 degrees celsius,

and the cold would unfortunately lead to Vladislav's friend dying, leaving him alone in the isolation of deep Siberia with almost no supplies,

just a sliver of hope that somebody might eventually find him.

He'd later end up losing both hands and both legs below the knee after spending two months in hospital.

But after a successful crowdfunding campaign, he was luckily able to have custom prosthetics made for him.

Journalists investigating this story would report that some of the cartography Google based their maps on was from the Soviet era, meaning it was decades out of date.

While the Russian authorities decided they likely wouldn't have the basis they needed to pursue legal action against Google, the company would fix the outdated data the same month Vladislav was rescued.

The world of Google Maps directions gone wrong is a a unique kind of digital terror, one where software bugs lead to people dying in real life.

It highlights the total trust we have in often faulty online platforms, but believe it or not, we used to be much more skeptical about being directed by a computer.

Before the internet, people primarily used to rely on paper maps acquired from gas stations to find their way around new places.

If you're old enough, you likely remember a parent having to pull over after getting lost on the road,

and then struggling to unfold a giant sprawling paper map that seemed to cover the entire front half of the car.

These maps actually used to be given away for free, with the map makers still able to turn a profit by selling ad spots to local businesses.

One company producing these tiny folded atlases was called Geosystems.

They'd been making paper maps since 1967, but in 1996 they launched a new venture that would not only skyrocket the company's growth,

but would also forever change the way people navigate in unfamiliar places.

MapQuest.

Everybody who's old enough to remember the 2000s also undoubtedly remembers MapQuest.

Instead of having to plan a route yourself by carefully reading through a paper map, MapQuest allowed you to simply type in a starting point and an ending point,

and the website would plan the optimal route for you.

The problem was, computers and internet access were still relegated to the home in this era, so these directions had to be physically printed out.

If you were traveling with a passenger, they could just read out the directions to you, If you're alone, you'd have to be rifling through the pages yourself,

something one blogger described as the 1990s version of texting and driving.

If you happen to mix up the order of the pages, too bad, now you're lost.

Miss a turn, unless you pull a Yui and go back, you are now lost.

Come up on a blocked road due to construction, your printed directions can't offer an alternative route, and you are now lost.

These are all problems you wouldn't have by simply using paper maps, which led to MapQuest being seen more as a novelty than a reliable navigation tool.

If you're in your early 30s, you may remember one of your parents being enthusiastic about using MapQuest while the other was sort of groan about it, eventually getting a bit of satisfaction out of saying,

I told you so, when the printed directions eventually went wrong.

But these were just the early days.

While MapQuest was spending its time in the spotlight as a primitive rail planning tool

that had essentially remained unchanged since the 90s, Google was working on their own modern alternative that would offer much more functionality.

And in 2007, it would come pre-installed on the first iteration of this century's most important technological innovation.

The iPhone and other smartphones with their built-in GPS systems would provide Google an avenue to deliver the ultimate navigation tool,

one that combined the strong points of both Paper Maps and MapQuest.

Google Maps could account for road closures and missed turns in real time, all while audibly reading out directions to you.

While this sort of functionality was already present in cars by the 2010s in the form of dashboard GPS systems, those often relied on maps that quickly became outdated as your car aged.

Google on the other hand was always updating their maps and they could offer some advanced crowdsourced functionality car GPS systems couldn't,

like estimating traffic levels and warning of upcoming speed traps and road closures.

Before we knew it, online navigation tools had gone from being an unreliable novelty to becoming our primary tool for planning road trips.

Paper maps disappeared from gas stations, and we instead put our complete trust in their online equivalents.

But even if Google Maps and similar platforms seemed like the most reliable choice, they still weren't 100% accurate.

And with so many people relying on these tools to direct them around unfamiliar places, it was only a matter of time until something would go horribly wrong.

It's the afternoon on October 3rd, 2015, and 70-year-old Regina Murmura is getting ready to meet some family for dinner at a pizzeria.

She's a businesswoman living in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, and as her and her husband Francisco get into their car, she proposes using a new app she had downloaded to figure out their route.

Waze, a Google Maps alternative also owned by Google.

She opens the app and begins typing in the restaurant's address, which happened to be on a beachfront avenue in the affluent city of Nidoroy, just across the bay from Rio.

It's unknown whether or not Regina simply made a typo or

if the app mistakenly resolved wrong address

but in any event the route the couple were now following

on ways wasn't exactly directing to any beachfront avenue as a

couple crossed the bridge to nidoroy something began to feel off

they were heading away from the coastline rather than towards it in fact it seemed as

if they were heading away from the city altogether eventually the app instructs them to pull off highway 104

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and onto an unassuming street in the hills and it's here where things go horribly wrong As Francisco is driving,

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the couple hear what sounds like a gunshot.

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Then they hear another one, and then several more.

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Holes start appearing everywhere in the car, and the elderly driver steps on the accelerator in an attempt to get away.

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The streets grow narrower, and they begin twisting and turning wildly, making it impossible for Francisco to figure out where he's going.

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Eventually, he comes up to a dead end.

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Behind him, a group of armed men block his exit.

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He pleads with the gunman to let him and his wife leave, but one of them strikes him in the head with the butt of their gun.

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They fire at the car another four or five times before they finally decide to let the couple leave.

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Francisco immediately drove to the hospital as Regina had been struck in the back by one of the many bullets

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that had passed through the car.

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While they would make it to the emergency room, she unfortunately passed away shortly after arriving.

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They hadn't known it then, but the Waze app had mistakenly directed them into the Caramujo Favela, an informal neighborhood notorious for housing violent drug trafficking groups.

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of the streets in the favela happened to have a very

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similar name to the coastal avenue Regina had intended to travel to.

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Shockingly, it wasn't the first time the Waze app would mistakenly direct unsuspecting drivers into Caramujo,

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with actress Fabiana Carla also being shot at after accidentally turning into the favela just weeks before the death of Regina Murmura.

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Police would eventually hunt down and arrest the leader of the armed group that had been shooting out lost drivers, a man by the name of Rodrigo da Silva Rodriguez.

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He'd get 60 years in prison.

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Waze would issue a statement explaining that while the company was saddened by Regina's murder, they wouldn't change the app's design, as a countless regular people who lived in the Caramujo favela

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also should be able to use online navigation tools to help find their way home.

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This wouldn't be the last death in Brazil, TaiTui map platform direct to users through favelas.

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A year later in December 2016, In 2016, Italian tourist Roberto Bardella was touring around the country on a motorcycle with his cousin,

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using one of the many available online navigation tools to help find his way around.

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After visiting the Chrysler Redeemer statue, the pair began making their way towards the beach.

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It's never been reported which app they were using, but whichever one it was, decided to route the cousins through Moro dos Prozeras, another favela home to armed criminal groups,

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the members of whom assumed that Bardella and his cousin were plainclothes police officers.

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They would kill Roberto, but would leave his cousin alive.

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Three months later, Argentinian tourist Natalia Capetti was shot in the back after Google Maps had directed her through the same favela.

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She would die three weeks later from her injuries.

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You would assume somebody would do something about this, whether it was the Brazilian authorities or the mapping platforms themselves.

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But other than prosecuting the people who had pulled the triggers, nothing would change to fix this ongoing problem.

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And it would only get worse.

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In 2024, a whopping 19 people will be shot after mistakenly entering favelas, whether it was unsuspecting tourists, lost locals, or Uber drivers.

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Google has repeatedly declined to comment on this pattern.

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With all these map platforms being primarily developed here in North America, the concept of risk zones may be a bit of a foreign concept to the people who run them.

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While a lot of effort is put into the things that pose risk to us, like weather warnings, it seems like the more dire dangers

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that exist in other parts of the world are little more

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than an afterthought to the people who call the shots on Google Maps.

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It would be one thing if stuff like this was only happening in Brazil, then Google could point at this being a Brazil problem rather than a Google Maps issue.

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But that's unfortunately not the case.

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It's June 2026, and Pakistani businessman Ali Jamil is busy planning his family's first ever road trip.

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Him, his wife, and two daughters are going to drive from their home in Karachi to the naturally beautiful city of Kedah.

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His father had warned about the potential danger in traveling so close to the Afghan border, but Ali disregarded these fears and to his credit,

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the family did make it perfectly fine to Kedah and they reportedly enjoyed their vacation in the mountains.

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Ali had to choose Google Maps to find his way on the road, with the first leg of the trip mainly sticking to a national highway.

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On the return half though, Google would decide, for whatever reason, to divert Ali off the the highway and onto a smaller road.

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Perhaps the app thought it found a shortcut or maybe it was just a glitch.

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Regardless, this back road would lead Ali and his family through the Dasht area of the Mashtung district.

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Dasht is a Persian word that refers to an arid plain, and that's very much the landscape Ali is now driving through.

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It's a bare and rocky landscape surrounded by tall mountains in the distance,

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but Ali and his family likely wouldn't have been able to see them considering they were driving through this area at night.

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All they would have been able to make out was the immediate stretch of road laying ahead of them.

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At some point, they pull up on a man standing in the road blocking their way.

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Brightly illuminated by the car's headlights, it's obvious he's carrying a gun.

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More men start walking into the light.

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One of them begins to approach the driver's window but Ali steps on the accelerator, prompting the men to start shooting at the car.

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The vehicle would soon stop just a ways ahead of the gunman.

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Ali had been struck.

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He would die shortly after.

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His wife had also been hit five times, but she'd managed to cling on to life and do her best to calm down her daughters, who were luckily both uninjured.

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The authorities wouldn't arrive to rescue them until the following morning.

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The family had to spend the entire night in this dark and barren plain, knowing that the the gunmen may be out looking for them.

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After being brought to the hospital, Ali's wife would thankfully be stabilized and she'd arrange a funeral for her husband at the end of June.

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Ali's murderers would never be identified, and nobody knows what those gunmen were doing in this isolated and barren region so late in the night.

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Once again, Google wouldn't issue any sort of public statement on this case, although it's worth noting that most of the public pressure in this instance was directed towards the Pakistani government.

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Still, Google had taken a family off of a well-traveled highway

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and onto a back road that led through was essentially a conflict zone

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that frequently sees ambushes and militant violence from insurgent groups.

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No matter where the public decides to lay blame here, it's tough to argue against the fact that Ali wouldn't have driven onto that back road had Google not told them to,

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which Which is exactly what happened to all those people in Brazil.

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You could argue that it's up to the person using a navigation app to do their research

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and know where they should and shouldn't go on a road trip.

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But then again, how is someone like Ali supposed to know where every single back road leads to on a 680km journey?

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Maybe he could have pulled over and did some googling about the area he was now being rooted through, but I think it's easy to understand why he may have just went with it.

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I don't know if you've noticed, but drivers on the road have a tendency to just sort of go with the flow.

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you or me obviously, we're both great drivers.

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I remember this video on Reddit a few years ago where

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a line of cars was just kind of mysteriously driving off a highway and into the grasp, seemingly into nowhere.

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I really wanted to find it to show you, but I unfortunately couldn't track it down.

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If you happen to remember it, let me know.

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The point is, people have a tendency to not be very mindful while they're driving.

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They're thinking about work or what they're going to make for dinner

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and they end up not fully paying attention to the things they're doing on the road.

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Like if the slow line of traffic they're following happens to randomly veer into the grass.

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It's not just that we have total trust and navigation tools like Google Maps, but we're simply not always thinking critically when one of them tells us to do something on the road.

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And that can sometimes lead to horrible outcomes.

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Like countless others, Navy veteran Phillip Paxson relied on Google Maps to help direct him on the road

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when he and his family moved states in 2022.

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They had relocated to Hickory, North Carolina.

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In the September of that year, Phillip and his wife Alicia threw a birthday party for one of their daughters at a friend's house.

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At the end of the evening, Alicia took the kids home while Philip decided to stay behind to assist in the clean-up.

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By the time he left, the sky had grown dark and it was pouring rain.

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He begins his drive home on 24th Street, Place, Northeast.

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He likely didn't notice, but at one point, the street turned into a private road, right as he entered a wooded area.

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Seconds later, he experiences a jarring feeling of weightlessness.

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He's falling.

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The next morning, authorities would find a flipped jeep submerged in a creek.

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They'd pull it out, and sadly, Philip was still inside.

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He had accidentally driven off a collapsed bridge, one that had apparently fallen a whole nine years prior.

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With the road and bridge being on private land that was owned by a long-defunded company, There was no clear ownership of the destroyed infrastructure, and thus it was never fixed.

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There were, however, several signs on 24th Street Place Northeast warning that the road ahead was closed.

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Or at least there were in this 2019 Google Maps screenshot.

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Philip either hadn't noticed them, or they had been taken down in the years since these photos were taken.

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While it's unknown whether or not the warning signs were still there, we do know that the barriers that were normally physically blocking the way to the collapsed bridge had been completely removed.

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meaning there was nothing in the way to stop somebody from driving straight into the creek.

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Google Maps hadn't worn Philip either.

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In fact, multiple users had previously complained that the platform was treating the bridge as if it was still intact.

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Google didn't do anything about it though and they continued to direct drivers across a collapsed bridge.

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While most likely either noticed the barriers, the signs, or the fact that a section of the road ahead of them was missing,

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It was only a matter of time before someone drove off the bridge and into the creek.

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Even after Philip died, despite being notified multiple times, Google was still directing drivers across the fallen bridge as late as April 2023,

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a full six months after the fatal accident.

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It would take a lawsuit to actually get them to finally flag the small stretch of road as impassable.

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I think this case perfectly captures the gist behind all these stories.

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While some might say the issues posed by Google Maps in

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dangerous regions of the world remain unaddressed due to some form of discriminatory ignorance, I personally think is much more simple than that.

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These massive platforms simply aren't going to make a change unless they're forced to, whether it's because of legal or regulatory action.

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The fact that Google willingly swapped out those outdated Soviet maps in

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that first case without being forced to is actually a bit of an outlier.

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The problems in every other case I could find, whether they're in this video or not, were either completely ignored or addressed only after a lawsuit was filed.

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Anyways guys, thank you very much for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.

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If you're not already subscribed, you should change that!

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Especially if you enjoy watching immersive dark videos like this.

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Engaging with this upload will teach the algorithm to recommend you more content like this.

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And of course, have a good night.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 225 sentences and 3921 words to shadow. The speech runs for 20:44. The speaker talks fast, about 189 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
navigation noun	/nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/	The theory, practice and technology of charting a course for a road vehicle, ship, aircraft, or spaceship.
avenue noun	/ˈæv.əˌn(j)u/	A broad street, especially one bordered by trees or, in cities laid out in a grid pattern, one that is on a particular side of the city or that runs in a…
cousin noun	/ˈkʌz(ə)n/	Chiefly with a qualifying word: Any relation (especially a distant one) who is not a direct ancestor or descendant but part of a person's extended family; a…
remote adjective	/ɹəˈməʊt̞/	At a distance; disconnected.
creek noun	/ˈkɹiːk/	A small inlet, often saltwater, leading to the sea or to the main channel of a river, especially a river estuary.
stretch verb	/stɹɛt͡ʃ/	To lengthen by pulling.
physically adverb	/ˈfɪz.ɪ.kli/	In a physical manner.
rely verb	/ɹɪˈlaɪ/	To trust; to have confidence in; to depend.
collapse verb	/kəˈlæps/	To break apart and fall down suddenly; to cave in.
northeast noun	/noːˈθɪjst/	The intercardinal compass point halfway between north and east; specifically at a bearing of 45°.
functionality noun		The ability to do a task, performance, or execution; a set of functions that something is able or equipped to perform.
outdated adjective	/aʊtˈdeɪtɪd/	Out of date, old-fashioned, antiquated.
primarily adverb	/ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/	Of a primary or central nature, first and foremost.
rescue verb	/ˈɹɛs.kjuː/	To save from any violence, danger or evil.
bone noun	/boʊn/	A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
drive off verb		To force to leave or go away.
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
pass through verb		To go through, to travel through, to transit or lie across a place or from one place to another.
pull over verb		To come to a stop, and turn off the road (i.e. onto the roadside or hard shoulder).
read out verb	/ˌɹiːd ˈaʊt/	To read something and say the words to inform other people; to call.
calm down verb		To become less excited, intense, or angry.
clean up verb		To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to be · used to rely
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be left · was built · had been abandoned
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who lived · people who had · people who run

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 55 contractions and reduced forms, such as wouldn't, they're, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: northeast /noːˈθɪjst/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, shortly /ˈʃɔɹtli/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, ownership /ˈoʊnɚʃɪp/, vacation /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, accidentally /ˌæk.sɪˈdɛnt(ə)li/, unfamiliar /ˌʌnfəˈmɪli.ə(ɹ)/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like navigation, avenue, cousin.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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