Almost everyone remembers the same thing about Raccoon City: the last few seconds of it. Sunrise, 1 October 1998, a missile coming down at the foot of the Arklay Mountains, a city of a hundred thousand people turned to ash in minutes. It is the most cinematic image the series has ever produced. It is also the single most misleading one, because it has convinced a generation of players that they watched the city die.
They did not. Raccoon City was finished years before that morning, and the weapon that finished it was not a virus. It was an employment figure. By 1998, roughly thirty per cent of the people living there worked for Umbrella. There is a cold little rule of thumb in urban economics: a firm employing five per cent of a local population has usually already captured more than a third of local manufacturing and mining jobs, and at ten per cent it will, in the researchers’ words, almost certainly shape the local economy and its citizens’ livelihoods. Raccoon City was running at three times the top of that scale. That is not a hard line past which a town is doomed, and this article will not pretend otherwise. But it does mean the balance of power had left the residents long before anything crawled out of the sewers.
There is a second thing worth saying up front, and it is the argument this piece is built on. A company town does not usually die in rubble. It dies in a courtroom, slowly, through property law. That is what makes Raccoon City such an unusual specimen: it is a company town that was physically deleted before the legal machinery that normally dismantles these places ever got a chance to start.
WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY — HOME OF UMBRELLA. The road sign states the ownership relationship out loud. This is not a city that happens to contain a large employer. It is a company’s city.
How dependent does a city have to be before it is already finished
A company town has a reasonably tight definition in urban history: a settlement founded and financed by a single firm, which then exercises near-total control over the community. The interesting question is not the definition, though. It is the threshold. How large does one employer have to loom before a town stops being able to decide anything for itself?
The economist Simon Commander, reviewing a body of empirical work on one-company towns, offers some numbers that run against intuition. You do not need one employer to monopolise all local work — that situation, he notes, is actually very rare. A firm employing five per cent of the local population has typically already taken more than a third of local manufacturing and mining employment. At ten per cent it will almost certainly shape the local economy and its citizens’ livelihoods. Commander does not draw a red line and declare everything past it irreversible, and it would be dishonest to pretend he does. What he provides is a scale, and the scale is enough.
Hold that scale against Raccoon City and the reading is severe. There is an in-game file called Raccoon City Notes in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, and it is the only solid first-hand source for the figure everybody quotes. The Japanese original describes a provincial city of a hundred thousand that, after successfully attracting the multinational Umbrella and industrialising around it, grew into a kigyo jokamachi — a corporate castle town — in which thirty per cent of the population worked in Umbrella-related business. The official English localisation renders it as an industrialised company town with nearly a third of the population directly employed by Umbrella.
That deserves a pause. The person calling Raccoon City a company town is not a fan with a thesis. It is Capcom, in a document you can pick up inside the game. The Japanese term is the ordinary word for a city that grew up around one large firm, and its literal image — a market town clustered at the foot of a castle wall, living off the lord who owns it — is a reading this article finds useful rather than a claim about etymology. Thirty per cent direct employment is three times the point at which the research says livelihoods are almost certainly shaped by one balance sheet.
To be precise about the category: Raccoon City is not a textbook company town. It has its own mayor, its own police department, a university, a hospital, and Umbrella does not hold the land. It is something else, and arguably something worse — a city with a full set of civic institutions that had nonetheless become structurally incapable of functioning without one corporation.
This matters because it moves the time of death. The standard reading puts the tragedy in the summer of 1998: the leak, the water supply, the quarantine, the missile. Read the employment structure instead and the city passed its point of no return years earlier. The virus did not create the fragility. It only emptied out, in four days and in public, a city that was already hollow.
The real version of this town existed, just south of Chicago
Raccoon City was not invented from nothing. Its structural twin is a real place: Pullman, Illinois, on the far south side of Chicago.
George Pullman made his fortune on luxury sleeping cars — his first, the Pioneer, was built in 1864 and made its name by being attached to Lincoln’s funeral train, and in 1867 he incorporated the Pullman Palace Car Company. In 1880 he bought four thousand acres beside Lake Calumet, about fourteen miles from Chicago, and built an entire town from scratch: housing, shops, a church, a theatre, parks, a hotel, a library, all designed as a single composition by the architect Solon Beman and the landscape architect Nathan Barrett. By the autumn of 1883 more than eight thousand people lived there.
On paper it was among the best worker housing in the United States: indoor plumbing, generous lots, sanitary standards well above the period average. The price was buried in the deed. The company was simultaneously employer, landlord, retailer and keeper of the peace; residents had no ordinary municipal franchise, and what they could read and whether they could drink were subject to company approval. Pullman treated the town as a strict capital investment and set rents against a target of a six per cent return — in the National Park Service’s own careful phrasing, he hoped the rents would ensure a return on the company’s investment in building the town. His stated logic was blunt: people do not value what they have not paid for. Every act of generosity in that town was, structurally, a line item.
The Panic of 1893 hit, car orders collapsed, and Pullman cut jobs, wages and hours. He did not cut rents, and he did not cut prices in the company stores. Rent was deducted at source from the pay packet, workers were left with almost nothing to live on, and shareholder dividends continued undisturbed. On 11 May 1894 the strike began. Under Eugene Debs the American Railway Union launched a national boycott, refusing to handle any train carrying a Pullman car, and the rail network seized up. The federal government obtained an injunction on the grounds of the strike’s violence and the threat to interstate commerce, citing — as the Park Service pointedly notes — the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, a law adopted to fight monopoly by big business. Going over the head of a governor sympathetic to the workers, Washington sent troops. Dozens died, Debs went to prison, and by mid-July the strike was broken. A federal commission afterwards condemned the company’s paternalism and its refusal to arbitrate.
A saying circulated in the town that captures the arrangement better than any analysis. We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechised in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell. It is generally attributed to a Pullman resident, and its earliest full appearance is in Almont Lindsey’s research on the strike; the speaker and the year vary between versions, so it is quoted here in its circulating form rather than pinned to a source that does not carry it. Swap one proper noun for another and it transfers to Raccoon City without a word changed. The historic district still stands, now a Chicago neighbourhood and a National Historical Park.
Arcade Park in Pullman, part of the public amenity the company built for its workers. None of it was free — the whole town was run against a six per cent return, and the generosity was part of the business.
Set the two timelines side by side and the resemblance stops looking like a coincidence: one man brings prosperity, the company absorbs public functions, an external shock arrives, and then the ending. Only the last cell differs.
Bright Raccoon 21 and a textbook case of city capture
What turned a declining midwestern town into Umbrella’s private asset was an urban renewal programme called Bright Raccoon 21 and a mayor called Michael Warren.
Warren’s career is the city’s dependency in miniature. According to the History of RESIDENT EVIL file in Resident Evil 5, he trained as an electrical engineer and in 1963 brought electricity to this small town in the Arklay Mountains for the first time; in 1968 he oversaw construction of the cable car system. He ran for mayor in 1987 on that record and won by a wide margin. The City Guide file you can pick up in the game is an open letter from Warren to his constituents, and it is thick with gratitude: thanks to the kind and generous people at Umbrella, he writes, this is a peaceful and friendly city, and Umbrella’s enormous donations have gone to welfare, public works and the preservation of public peace.
Translated into the language of urban political economy, that is a textbook case of city capture. What the capture actually looked like is laid out in a file added for the 2020 remake, the Banquet Invitation: a United States senator invites Dr Bard of Spencer Memorial Hospital to a dinner on the Special Medical Zone, with Mayor Warren and Police Chief Irons among the guests, and adds a handwritten line at the bottom — I’ll be introducing the bill for that new drug of yours in mid-August. Bring the cash.
Be careful about what that document proves. It shows a mayor, a police chief, a hospital director and a federal legislator around one table, and a piece of legislation with a price attached. It does not by itself prove that every municipal agency had been bought. What it does establish is that corporate interest had taken a seat inside the city’s public decision-making. Warren was not a mayor destroyed by a virus. He was a mayor who handed over the key nodes of city governance one at a time, and simply never asked what his buyer was keeping underneath the streets. The banquet was thirteen days before the outbreak.
Bright Raccoon 21 reproduced the Pullman logic almost exactly. In that same open letter Warren names two achievements: in 1992, Umbrella’s donations paid to refurbish the ageing City Hall and to build a modern general hospital. In the very next sentence he records that, in recognition of these accomplishments, a bronze statue of himself was erected in City Hall that same year. Public welfare, corporate money and a monument to the mayor, placed in one paragraph by the man himself, without a flicker of hesitation. (An aside for anyone who has read that Warren was elected in 1992: the letter says 1992 was his fifth year in office, which puts his election in 1987.) In return, Umbrella welded its influence into every capillary of the city, and turned civic loyalty into something closer to gratitude for a debt. This was not the first time the company had worked this way — the same pattern of absorption and infiltration, and where it eventually led, is the subject of our full piece on the Umbrella Corporation.
Even the police were bought
The most dangerous move available to a company town is to acquire the monopoly on violence. Raccoon City made it.
The Special Tactics and Rescue Service, founded in 1996, was formally an elite unit of the Raccoon Police Department, recruiting from the military and from medical and criminological backgrounds. But according to the in-game material and the biohazard archives, the unit was privately funded and able to operate independently — and the parties behind its creation are named directly: Police Chief Brian Irons, Mayor Warren, and Umbrella. The most heavily armed body in the city was built with corporate money, and Umbrella was the most important contributor.
It is worth being exact here, because this is often overstated. S.T.A.R.S. was not Umbrella’s private army; it sat inside the police department, and Umbrella was not its only backer — the team’s famous Samurai Edge sidearm came from the local Kendo Gun Shop, another example of the private sector paying for public policing. But a municipal police force that has to pass the hat among local businesses to fund its best unit has already told you who the city belongs to.
The bill for that arrangement came due at the Spencer Mansion. When S.T.A.R.S. officers returned from the Arklay laboratory with evidence of Umbrella’s illegal research, they discovered that their own commanding officer, Chief Irons, had long since been bought by Umbrella’s American operation, and that his job was to keep the company out of every investigation. The reports were buried. Irons is the perfect footnote to the whole system: when he finally breaks down during the disaster, what he screams at Claire is that those monsters from Umbrella ruined his beautiful city, and after all he did for them, how could they do this to him. He died believing he was the injured party — because in his own ledger, selling out a city’s safety was simply one of the services he provided to it.
Even the building has the same fingerprints on it. The gothic pile that trapped so many survivors was originally the Raccoon City art museum; after it closed in the late eighties the RPD bought it cheaply and converted it, and the man who brokered the deal was Irons. Leon Kennedy reported for his first day of work by walking into a police station that had been a museum, acquired through a compromised chief — on the one day the city chose to end.
A cutaway model of the Raccoon Police Department building. It was an art museum, bought cheap through the chief’s good offices — a civic institution that could not even afford its own headquarters honestly.
One reservoir, one subway, one city that could not be opened
The other structural weakness of a company town is centralised infrastructure. The less redundancy a system has, the more lethal a single point of failure becomes, and Raccoon City is very nearly a complete catalogue of the failure mode.
Start with water. The city drew its drinking water principally from Victory Lake, the reservoir held back by Raccoon Dam. On 23 September 1998 the t-Virus reached the water supply, and within hours thousands of residents were turning. It is worth correcting a popular version of this: the virus was not dumped into the lake from the dam or from a chemical plant. It came from below — broken sample containers in the sewers, and rats carrying the virus through the pipe network. That is what makes it a textbook single point of failure. When a city stakes its drinking water on one reservoir, it stops mattering which end the contamination enters. Anything that gets in reaches everyone.
Meanwhile Umbrella operated a chemical plant and its own dock on the Circular River, and the dock was used to move bio-organic weapons in secret. The city’s arterial infrastructure and the corporation’s logistics chain were the same waterway, which is a fairly complete answer to the question of whose interests that infrastructure served.
Then transport. The Kite Bros. Railway opened in 1969 as a short line linking three stations, and expanded to eight stations and eight and a half miles. (The original length is one of those small localisation discrepancies worth flagging: the official English text says it ran only a mile, the Japanese original says two miles. The two versions do not agree, so this article says short line and leaves it there.) What matters is the causal claim the operator’s own 1989 guide pamphlet makes: it credits that expansion, in plain language, to the city’s economic rejuvenation by the Umbrella Corporation. The city’s main artery swelled in step with one company’s balance sheet, and its fortunes were tied to that company from then on.
Geography completed the trap. The city is split by the Circular River; west of it, bounded by Ennerdale Street and the police station, sits the low-density Uptown to the south and the high-rise Downtown to the north, while east of the river lie Raccoon University and the industrial zone concealing the P-12A incinerator facility. The whole settlement is cradled by the Arklay range, so the number of routes out was always limited. When a hundred thousand people tried to leave along a handful of arterial roads at once, wrecked vehicles, fires and crowds of the infected severed the grid block by block, and a perfectly connected street plan resolved into a field of dead ends. What sealed the city, though, came from outside: on 24 September the Department of Defense placed Raccoon City under martial law, and the Army and National Guard advanced to establish a cordon around it to stop the virus escaping. The bottleneck was chosen by Umbrella’s site selection decades earlier. The door was closed by the government.
The Sterilization Strategy at sunrise on 1 October 1998. The most cinematic frame the series owns, and the most misread — it ended the city, not the company.
How a company town actually dies
Which brings us back to the opening claim. To see why the missile is the wrong culprit, look at how Pullman actually ended.
It did not end with the strike of 1894. The strike was broken, the town stayed open, the company went on collecting rent. And here a common error is worth clearing up: Pullman was not folded into Chicago by any court. It had already been annexed by the city in 1889 — and the annexation changed almost nothing, because the houses and the land stayed with the Pullman Land Association and the company carried on managing and maintaining the town exactly as before. What actually moved was a ruling four years after the strike: in October 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman Company to sell all of its non-industrial land holdings, on the reasoning that a railway car manufacturer had no business owning and running a town. The company then obtained a deferment, and most of the housing did not actually change hands until 1907, with residents given first option to buy.
So there is nothing cinematic about it. Nothing killed the town of Pullman. What was dismantled was a property structure — one manufacturer’s integrated control over the land, the housing and the daily life of an entire community — and the thing that dismantled it was not a strike. It was law, applied slowly, over roughly thirteen years. (An aside that would not be out of place in this series: when George Pullman died in 1897, his family buried him under several tons of reinforced concrete to stop militant workers from digging him up.)
Raccoon City’s ending has the same shape, obscured by the mushroom cloud. And the cloud itself is a misreading — the games are explicit that the Sterilization Strategy used an experimental thermobaric missile, not a nuclear weapon. Either way, what that missile destroyed was the city, not Umbrella. The corporation lasted another six years, and what took it apart was the same instrument that took apart Pullman’s property structure: legal process. A news file in Resident Evil: Requiem now sets out that chain more clearly than anything before it. After the incident the government issued a dissolution of Umbrella; founder Ozwell E. Spencer contested it and sued the government in return; the legal battle ran for nearly five years, and ended only when irrefutable evidence established the company’s role in the catastrophe, at which point Umbrella accepted full responsibility and declared bankruptcy. Destroying a company town took one missile. Dissolving the company that owned one took five years of litigation. That is precisely the argument in the Umbrella piece: it was not defeated, it was adjudicated.
This is the coldest thing about the case. What Raccoon City left the public was spectacle — zombies, Tyrants, a mushroom cloud. What it left as an urban parable is something else: when a city mortgages its water, power, transport, policing and legislation to a single firm, its fate stops being decided by its residents, and stops being decided even by the disaster. It gets settled years later, in a boardroom or a courtroom, by people who have never been there. The residents were never the owners of that city. They were the first line item to be written off.
The raccoon city map from the Resident Evil 3 remake. A grid is convenient for property transactions in peacetime; in a disaster it turns a connected street plan into a field of dead ends.
So was Raccoon City a victim or an accomplice
This series keeps asking one question in different costumes: is this person actually a villain. It asks it of Ada Wong, of Wesker, of what Chris does in Village, of Umbrella itself. Here, for the first time, the question is not aimed at a person or a company. It is aimed at a city and its hundred thousand residents.
With the material assembled, the answer is not comfortable. Warren did not seize power; he was elected by an overwhelming margin in 1987, on the strength of having brought electricity and a cable car to a mountain town. Bright Raccoon 21 was not a covert operation; it was the administration’s flagship programme, and the mayor printed his thanks to Umbrella in a guide handed out to the public, alongside a note about his own statue. Public reception, by the official account, was enthusiastic. Thirty thousand livelihoods, the mayor’s record, the police budget and the hospital foundations all came from the same source.
Irons’ breakdown is the clearest leak of the underlying psychology. Note the order of his words: first my beautiful city, then after all I did for them. In his own accounting, selling the city and loving the city were never in tension, because selling it was one of the services he rendered to it.
Which suggests the victim-or-accomplice framing is the wrong question. When one hand holds a city’s water, power, policing, legislation and thirty per cent of its payroll, it is genuinely unclear how much weight the word consent can still carry. Only one thing is certain. Pullman’s residents at least got an aftermath: they lost in 1894, but the property litigation that followed forced the company to let the town go, and when the houses were sold in 1907 the residents had first refusal. Raccoon City’s residents never reached that stage — not because they did not want to, but because the whole apparatus was pre-empted by a few nights in September 1998. That may be the genuinely extreme thing about this city. Real company towns are taken apart slowly, by strikes and deeds and courts. This one was physically zeroed out before any of those could take the stage.
Workers streaming out of the Pullman works at the end of a shift. They struck in 1894 and lost; four years later the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell its non-industrial property, and nine years after that the houses finally changed hands.
Three things people usually get wrong
Umbrella dropped the missile. It did not. In game canon the Sterilization Strategy was carried out by the United States government, ordered from behind the scenes by the Family and lobbied for by the Connections; Umbrella was a participant and ultimately the party that carried the legal responsibility. One related inference is also worth retiring: the strike did not wipe out Umbrella’s G-Virus work along with the city, because the company had already recovered a sample before the missile came down. The version in which Umbrella nukes its own town belongs to the Paul Anderson live-action films, a separate and incompatible continuity.
Raccoon City was levelled by a nuclear weapon. Not in the games. The Sterilization Strategy used an experimental thermobaric missile. The distinction is not pedantry: a thermobaric weapon clears surface targets through heat and overpressure rather than leaving a long-term radiological exclusion zone behind. Any resonance between that choice of weapon and the word sterilization is this article’s reading, not an official explanation.
The missile finished Umbrella. Umbrella went bankrupt in 2004, six years after the city burned, with the Raccoon Trials in between. What ended it was a government dissolution order and nearly five years of litigation, not a military strike. Treating the missile as the cause of death is the same error as recording Pullman’s cause of death as the 1894 strike: mistaking the most cinematic frame for the fatal one. The full sequence is laid out in our Resident Evil timeline.
Frequently asked questions
What happened to Raccoon City, in one paragraph?
A t-Virus outbreak that began on 23 September 1998 reached the water supply through the sewers, the city was placed under martial law on 24 September, and on 1 October the United States government destroyed it with an experimental thermobaric missile under the codename Sterilization Strategy. Tens of thousands died. The argument of this article is that the city’s vulnerability was structural and predated the outbreak by years.
What was the Raccoon City population, and did Umbrella really employ half of it?
The raccoon city population was about a hundred thousand, and that figure is stated plainly in first-hand files. The employment share needs more care. Three numbers circulate — thirty, forty and fifty per cent — and only thirty can be traced to a primary source, the Raccoon City Notes file, which gives it in Japanese, English and Chinese alike. The forty per cent figure is usually attributed to the City Guide file from Resident Evil 3, but that file contains no percentage at all; later compilations do offer a figure of up to forty per cent employed directly or indirectly, but that changes the denominator to the workforce rather than the population and is not what the original file says. Fifty per cent has no citation whatsoever. This article uses thirty throughout, which is already three times the level at which the research says a local economy is shaped by one employer. The argument does not need inflation, and inflation would only weaken it.
Which games actually take place there?
The Resident Evil Raccoon City arc runs through Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and both of their remakes, while Outbreak and Outbreak File #2 cover the same September nights from street level, and The Umbrella Chronicles and Requiem supply most of the archival documents used in this article. The Raccoon City Resident Evil players actually walk through is therefore assembled from at least six titles released across a quarter of a century, which is a large part of why its details contradict one another so regularly — and why this article leans on the files rather than on any single game’s version of events.
Did Raccoon City have a real-world model?
Not a documented one. No developer interview establishes that anyone designed it from a specific real town, and this article does not claim otherwise. What it does claim is that the structure matches the American company town closely — most of all Pullman, Illinois, and secondarily Gary, Indiana, the town built by U.S. Steel. In both, a single firm supplied land, municipal services and welfare in exchange for total dependence.
Why did the government destroy one of its own cities?
The stated reason was containment of the t-Virus. Several in-game files point to two more that could not be stated: allowing the Connections to reach Umbrella’s G-Virus research and the Elpis countermeasure held in the Ark before anyone else did, and destroying the evidence of long-running collusion between the government and the corporation. The strike was both a containment measure and a clean-up.
Do the ruins still exist?
They do, and the exclusion zone is still growing longer. The lockdown had originally been scheduled to begin lifting in 2026, but a news file in Resident Evil: Requiem reports that the federal government overturned that plan and extended the quarantine to 2040, on the stated grounds that safety still cannot be guaranteed — nearly thirty years after the fact, to considerable anger among survivors and bereaved families. As for the mayor who handed the city over piece by piece: Michael Warren lived to ninety and died in a nursing home in 2026, according to an investigation report from the same game, of a delayed-onset t-Virus condition found mainly in survivors of 1998 and known as Raccoon City Syndrome. The city is still collecting, by a method considerably slower than a missile.
How this article sources its claims
Tier one, in-game text. Files from Resident Evil 2 and 3 and their remakes (City Guide, Banquet Invitation, Marvin’s memo), the Raccoon City Notes from The Umbrella Chronicles, the History of RESIDENT EVIL file from Resident Evil 5, and the Investigation Report and lockdown news file from Requiem. Population, employment share, the mayor’s career, the influence of Umbrella over specific public institutions and decision points, and the execution and timeline of the Sterilization Strategy all come from this tier. Note that the full chain of command behind the strike, and the judicial process that ended Umbrella, reflect the version as completed by Requiem rather than something spelled out from the beginning.
Tier two, official published material. The biohazard archives second edition, page 304, and Archives, page 258, for the description of S.T.A.R.S. as privately funded and able to act independently; Inside of BIO-HAZARD, page 8, for the Japanese account of the unit being funded by Umbrella and other large local firms as part of Bright Raccoon 21.
Tier three, real-world history. Pullman and the Pullman Strike, the 1889 annexation to Chicago, the Illinois Supreme Court’s 1898 divestiture order and the 1907 transfer of the housing, from the National Park Service’s strike history, park brochure and the Pullman National Monument foundation document; the employment thresholds from Simon Commander’s review for IZA World of Labor. This tier is the analytical scaffolding and is cited separately from the game material, never blended with it.
Tier four, this article’s own analysis. Company town, city capture and single point of failure are frameworks this piece uses to interpret the game material, not official Resident Evil terminology. Mapping Raccoon City onto the company town model and setting it beside Pullman is likewise this article’s structural reading. The facts on each side have first-hand sources; the comparison between them originates here, and with no official or developer statement behind it.
Sources
In-game primary files: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Raccoon City Notes; Resident Evil 3, City Guide; Resident Evil 3 remake, Banquet Invitation; Resident Evil Outbreak File #2, Old pamphlet and Marvin’s memo; Resident Evil 5, History of RESIDENT EVIL; Resident Evil: Requiem, Investigation Report and Raccoon City Lockdown Extended to 2040. The three files carrying this article’s central argument — the mayor’s open letter, the banquet invitation and the investigation report — are linked to their transcripts at the relevant point in the text.
Series compilations: Resident Evil Wiki entries for Raccoon City, Michael Warren, Bright Raccoon 21, Brian Irons, the Special Tactics and Rescue Service, the Sterilization Strategy, the Raccoon Trials and Raccoon City Syndrome; Capcom’s official Resident Evil Portal on the corporation’s bankruptcy.
Real-world history: National Park Service, Pullman National Historical Park — The Strike of 1894, the park brochure, and the Pullman National Monument foundation document (source for the 1889 annexation, the 1898 divestiture order and the 1907 sale of housing); Simon Commander, One-company towns: Scale and consequences, IZA World of Labor; the circulating Pullman saying via Almont Lindsey’s research on the strike.
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