Doomed to Fail - Ep 26 - Part 1: Under Pressure - The Byford Dolphin & The Titan Submersible

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Can you believe it's been a year since this!! The most predictable / insane story of 2023 - revisited - 🎧 Dive into the depths of maritime mysteries with our latest episode, where we explore two of the most tragic and intriguing underwater incidents: the Byford Dolphin accident and the Titan submersible disaster. Discover the harrowing details, the science behind the catastrophes, and the lessons learned from these deep-sea tragedies. 🌊⚓️ #TrueCrime #ByfordDolphin #TitanSubmersible #PodcastEpisode #MaritimeMysteries #DeepSeaDisasters #ScienceAndSafety #UnderwaterExploration #HistoryPodcast #TragicEvents Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hello. Welcome to doomed to fail. My name is Taylor. We are the podcast that brings you history's most notorious failures and epic disasters twice a week every week. But before that, we are re-releasing our first 26 episodes because those episodes we did in two stories in one show. So they were pretty long. So we decided to do twice a week and have two episodes a week. But we wanted them to be individual as well. So we've been re-releasing these, basically. That's what's happening. And we're almost at the end. So it is episode 26, part one. And can you believe that it has been a year since the Titan submersible imploded? What a wild year of 2023 into the first half of 2024 is and has been and who knows what is next. And can you believe that someone else is

saying that they're going to go down in another submersible to prove that it's safe. It's, I don't know, kind of feel like just don't go there. Since then, we've done a couple scary ocean, other stories as well, Faris and one on the Blue Hole. And, yeah, no, just don't go. But join us for this episode to revisit the story of the Titan submersible, which, as you know, imploded on its way to see the Titanic, and also the equally terrifying story of the Biford Dolphin Incident.

where some people were like above the water but pressurized and then like a door opened and everybody exploded um it's real gory and weird so enjoy these this is almost the end not of the show but of every releases and um yeah so if you have any feedback or questions doomed to to fail pod at gmail.com doomed to fail doomed to fail pod.com and i'm sorry i'll let you do it after the The matter of the people in the state of California versus Horanthal James Simpson Case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans,

ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. So, Taylor. Yeah. This is our last week of anonymity. I just,

I just went out and went to Walmart, you know, just to be unrecognized in public for once, fine, for the last time. I went and triggered a stranger's hand of the grocery store because they weren't ever going to have this chance again because we're going to be so famous. Perfect. Perfect. So let's, we'll go ahead and kick things off. I'll make the intro.

Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where Taylor and I explore two relationships, one historic and one usually true crime, although our promise tends to change all the time. There are full of red flags. I'm Fars, joined here by Taylor. Hi, Taylor. Hi, Fars. I'm so excited to be here. I know it's Sunday and it's late in the weekend. We usually record earlier, but you had your parents in town and I had to work yesterday.

And just this week, I've been more tired than I've ever been in my whole entire life. So I feel like a human today. So I'm glad that we're doing this today. This time, this moment, like, this is exactly why I should be recording. I'm in the exact right headspace. Because like yesterday I felt so rushed. The family was here. I had to take care of things.

earlier this morning they were here and now it's just like they've been gone for like an hour and a half or so and I can just like ease my way into like normal life again you know so this is the exact right time yeah one my husband took the kids to the park because I hate the park I hate the park fucking hate it as boring as shit so he takes the kids to the park because the kids love it so obviously because of their children but yeah so it's nice I've been home for a little bit just kind of and I was I've been home for like an hour by myself and I haven't been listening to anything. I've just kind of been like trying to like get my mind around what I'm talking about this week. And I'm super excited to talk about it and to tell you. But I've been like

in a thing. So as usual, everybody knows, Taylor and I never share a word of discussing beforehand. So I have no idea what Taylor's going to discuss. But I don't know why I get the feeling that there might be like a through line. There's always a through line for Mars. Literally always. There is. always my stories are very unique though but we'll get to that in a second i think today i go first is that right yes so why don't you tell us where your signature cocktail is where your signature drink okay okay i also want to just i'm going to do that in a second i promise but i also wanted to say part of the reason that i feel like i'm in this like crazy mind space of the moment is because like this whole week i've been reading this book on um on what i'm going to talk about later and i listened to

it because like everyone I have like a shit ton of stuff to do but it was like 48 hours so I was like in this book and I was like you know bringing the kids to swim lessons and trying to get in my steps I was like walking around the pool listening to this book and like taking notes in my notes app and like trying to like really be in it so and then I was reminded that I read this like dumb ass posts on like Instagram or LinkedIn or some dude was like you know exercise as much to do this and he was like and read one book a week but audiobooks don't count and I just want to wanted to say, fuck that guy. Because A, that's the, that's the, that's the advice and clueless that shares. She says, let's read one non-school book a week. Do you remember that part? And she goes,

my first book is fit or fat. You'll remember if you know. And then also that's like super dumb, but also at worst, it's like really ableist. Like people, some people can't focus on words, people, whatever. So anyway, that's, I've been like, I think listening to this book actually put me like a lot further into the story. So that's why I've been kind of losing my mind. So I just wanted to share that with you. And then also, because we're here before you get started, I had another friend of ours that we know mutually trying to mansplain, whatever, this to me. And they were like, oh, so for every episode, do you just like read a Wikipedia page? And I was like, no, I'm reading like a whole books and I'm like learning a ton. And I just feel like in the past six

months, I've learned so much. And I hope that you have to and that other people have. Yeah. I have discovered that, you know, there's a lot of stories that, we've done before where I will look at the Wikipedia page and I'll read other content around it. I'm like, the facts just, you're left up up in there in terms like what's true and what's not because, you know, I covered what was the guy last week, the guy who killed Versace and Harper's Bazaar. I mean, I actually grown a new fascination and appreciation with magazines and the amount of like actual research that goes into publishing certain articles. Like Harper's Resort ended up, that is the source of truth for all this stuff.

There was another one I did. The Atlantic was a source of truth for like, and you look at the Wikipedia articles, for example, and they're just like taking these like broad swats and copy pacing over from like actual publications that are doing really legit research work, which is really, really interesting. And I think it sounds silly, it sounds silly, but like then I'm like, oh, well, they got this from this article. You're like, oh, now that I've read more than one source on this thing, I'm like getting things. So anyway, it's super fun.

So this week, I am drinking cognac. Do you know what coniac is? I've had conia. Is Hennessy coniac? Yes. I've had Hennessy. Okay. Yeah.

Because I was going to, it's like, it's a brandy. And brandy is distilled wine, which I didn't know or understand. I feel like I haven't had brandy, but I'm sure I have. But yeah, coniacs you might know are like Hennessy and Corvassier. Okay. Anyway, so that's why I'm drinking. That is not a taste profile that I particularly enjoy. Because it's like sweet, right?

Like sweeter than usual. Anyway, in real life, I'm drinking goodlights. It's like a liquor, liquor. Right. One of those things. Anyway. So.

Anyway. I, on the other hand, have just discovered that our, my local grocery store, H.E.B. for anybody that's in Texas, has a passion fruit sparkling water. I'm going to be drinking that because it has nothing to do with my story, but I just enjoy it. So let me go ahead and drink my little passion fruit, fizzly, busy water.

And then I'll go ahead and kick us off. And once again, normally I cover True Prime. This week is a little bit different. Actually, it's a lot different. It's totally different. It's like exactly 180 degrees different. So it has nothing to do with True Crime. What's what?

Oh, my God. What are you telling me? Taylor, consistently, I think that we want to keep this show mostly evergreen. So we try not to cover super topical things that are in the news. And the reason why mine is different is because I'm going to do something. Because what's been in the news this past week has actually sparked my interesting curiosity and things, and I get a lot of research on stuff. So much of the rest of the country, I was following the Titanic's submersible story very, very closely. And mostly because I'm, one, fascinated by the ocean.

Two, I always had a thing for the Titanic. Ever since I little kid, I always had a thing for the Titanic. When I went to Ireland, like, I deliberately detour to go to the Titanic Museum because I'm just like that into it. And I find the story very, very, probably has nothing to do with Jack and Rose or James Cameron. This is like predates all that stuff. Good for you. And the third one is that both the ocean and the Titanic, the story and where the ship currently lies, terrify me to no end.

So scary. But as a lover of all things horror, I'm naturally drawn to things that terrify me. And this terrifies me. Okay. So in the spirit of the ever-evolving premise here, I'm going to discuss a red flag relationship that almost all of us have at some point in our lives, and that is a relationship with hubris. Okay.

So, whoa, I know. I'm not getting super heady with it here. So hubris, the word, is derived from the ancient Greek word for pride and slits outrage. It is defined as a characteristic of one who has excessive pride or self-confidence. Usually the red flaggy parts about this are minimal in our day-to-day lives. Maybe you have a hubris that you're the best looking person or that you're the smartest or that you made the right decisions, whatever. Usually it's just, it ends in being embarrassed or fired or losing a relationship, but it doesn't really matter. Sure.

When it starts mattering is when it impacts your life and the life of those around you. And most of the time, that happens, when it happens in a consequential manner, like it did this last week with the Titan submersible and with the Titanic itself, that happens in an engineering capacity where there is an immense amount of hubris towards. the engineering prowess of humanity, and then it leads to horrible, consequential things that end up impacting people's lives. The reason I brought the whole Titanic Titan's submersible thing was because I heard something that James Cameron said this week about how ironic it was that the Titan is on the seafloor next to the Titanic because neither leaders of those two vessels heeded all the warnings and instead relied on their own hubris to move forward, resulting in the death of others. So I'm actually doing two stories today.

Yeah, they'll be relatively quick, though I promise. But they're going to have to do with how humanity, humor, and engineering resulted in horrible, horrible tragedies. Awesome. And these are going to be a little bit rare. Like, these are not going to be, like, super obvious ones. Well, one of them might, but the other one I definitely don't think you'll know about. Cool. That sounds awesome.

I am exactly the right age and the right sexual orientation for the movie Titanic to have destroyed my life. I totally believe. Because, yeah, first, that was our vision of, like, this is romance. It destroyed my life. Yeah, no, unbelievable. Unbelievable amount of times I saw the movie in the theater. I, like, how many times I, like, would, like, record on the radio. You know how?

Remember, they'd play the Slene Down song with, like, words in it, like, from the movie? There you go. My God, it ruined my life. I can't wait. Let's the two stories I'm going to cover. I'm going to cover the more obscure one first. That one, also, Taylor, just so you know, a party was like, is Taylor going to get mad at me for doing this?

Because I'm not doing True Prime. And so I don't know if you're mad of me or not. I'm already super mad at you. I know. I can see you squinting your eyebrows. So the first one is an incident that is known as the Bifur Dolphin accident. Have you heard of this one? No.

Cool. Okay, great. Then I got you. Wait, wait. Wait, stop. Read with us when we watch that movie. Okay. We have that horror movie club with our friends and we watch scary movies.

And there's that movie with George C. Scott where he trains a dolphin to kill the president of United States. I didn't see that one. I skipped that one. Oh, my God. It's so bad. And I love George and Scott so much, but it's the whole thing. George Scott is amazing. This has nothing to do with dolphins.

Oh. Yes. It's just called the Bifur dolphin incident. But thank you. I'm going to start with an old mainstay of oceanic disasters, which are oil rigs. In the case of the Bifert Dolphin, that is the name of a natural gas rig, but it's essentially the same concept as an oil rig. Humans have been very unique, or are generally very unique in our capability of going super above and beyond the laws of nature to get what we want.

And oil rigs are a great example of this. Researching this really reminded me, like, how incredibly easy our lives are. Like, people do the most insane labor and work so that we have gasoline in our car stuff. We have plastic. So we have, like, it's insane what people are willing to put their lives to doing to let us have the basic modern conveniences we have. good example of that so in the case of the rig bifered dolphin this was positioned in the north sea in november of 1983 the rig required work to be done at or near the sea floor and it required divers to do that given that the depths that we're talking about here are an incredible huge massive

we learn all about that this week this type of diving that the people had to do on the bifert dolphin is called saturation diving have you ever heard of this before okay it is I snorkeled once and I was scared. Starfying. Not for me. Guys, go watch YouTube videos of saturation divers and Oh my God. Turn the lights off and like just it is worse than any horror movie you'll ever watch.

I hate it. Okay, tell me more. Saturation diving is like a highly, highly, highly technical still version of diving. So out of all commercial divers in the United States, there's only about 330 or so that are saturation divers right now. So it is, these people get paid a lot of money and they take a lot of risk to do what they're doing. As we learn with a time disaster, the lower a person or an object goes in the water column, the higher the outside pressures are that are acting on that body. That's true for all parts of the body, including oxygen and nitrogen and our bloods and our lungs.

The deeper you go, typically considered somewhere around 130 feet, the more of those things get compressed, and the longer you have to wait before coming to the surface. Right. Or you get the bends. Or you get the bends. So if you go straight from, let's hypothetically say 500 feet below sea level, directly to the top, you get the bends. You get decompression sickness, which results in the nitrogen in your body, expanding rapidly from all the negative pressure around you, which results in damage to your blood vessels, blocks the nausea, confusion, you lose motor. You die. Like, you almost certainly die as a result of this. Yeah.

To prevent this, deep sea divers have to. to stop at certain intervals to go back to the surface safely. The exact interval varies depending on the person, the gas combination, they're breathing, how long have they been down there, the temperature of the water, and a host of other, this is not hard science. Like there's a lot of factors that go into this.

What I've read is that typically it takes between two and three minutes per 10 to 15 feet of depth to go back to the surface. So it has to be like slow. It's slow. So for example, for a 500 foot dive, that would mean, if it's like a, a short like you go straight down to 500 feet you do something you touch the ground and

you go back up it takes about two hours go back up but these guys aren't touching the ground and going back up they're spending eight to 10 hours on the sea floor working right obviously companies want to mitigate how much how much time is lost every day by people going down to the bottom working they going back up because if you actually decompress every single day it would be a nightmare for the divers it would be a nightmare for the companies the profit margins would be like all of it's bad like none of it's good So instead of doing that and decompressing every single day and wasting days of work, what they do instead is they stay in a pressurized tube called a diving bell that maintains the outside pressure of the depths they're working at. So if you can imagine it, there's this like object, like this spherical thing that gets dropped below the ship over the workstation on the C4.

It maintains the pressure of the C4. You swim out of it, go to the place where you're working, swim back into it. and then the pressure maintains, you go back up, you dock with the ship, and then you're good. And then you just stay there. Basically, you stay pressurized. I hate it. So when they're done diving or when they're done working,

they go back in the diving belt, that gets wrench up to the surface to the dock or whatever it is. And there is what is called the pressurized living system or a diving chamber that sits on the ship or the oil rig. And that's where people, the divers, leave the dive belt to go into, to live, sleep, work, you know, do whatever. and get back in the dining bill in the next morning and go back down, it's all pressurized. So they're in like a pressurized place but like above the water.

Yeah, they're on the deck, they're on the ship deck, but they're in a chamber on the ship deck that is pressurized as though they're a thousand feet below the surface. Holy shit. Yeah, it's crazy. And the way it works is that typically if you're a saturation diver, you can work about four weeks, give or take, in these conditions. So you stay fully pressurized for four weeks and then gradually, Once you're done with the job, they start increasing the pressure slowly, slowly, and that is basically reflective of them swimming further up in the water column until they're in atmospheric pressure of one.

Make sense? How do you, yes, but how do you, do you feel normal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, your body gets adapted to it because you're breathing a special combination, right? Like, you're not actually, like, it's the oxygen at that level is so compressed that they have to mix with other stuff for you to be able to breathe normally. But yeah, it is, you do feel normal. Wow. On the Bifur Dolphin, there were four saturation divers. I'm going to use their first name because two of them are Scandinavian,

and that is a lot of consonants in a row that I'm not going to even try and pronounce. Their names are Edwin, Roy, Bjorn, and T-N-N-A-N-R-B-N-A-N-N-T-N-N-A-N-R-N-N-T-N-N-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-N-E-R-E-R-E-R-E. I said Charles, and I was like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. So the diving chamber on the bifered dolphin had two parts. So there was basically one section that was a kitchen and then another section that was like a living area and a bedroom area. So on this day in November in 1983, two of the divers, Roy and Edwin, they were resting in the dive chamber. They were sleeping, essentially.

Underground or on the boat. On the boat. Okay. Yeah. On that day, so they do in shifts, right? So Bjorn, two go down. They do the work. They go back in the diving belt, go back, hook up the chamber.

and then they're up there and then the other two come back in and they go back down. That's the way it works. Bjorn and Trolls came up via the diving bell. Their day was done. They came up via the diving bell. At this point, all four men had been compressed to an atmosphere of nine. So their atmospheric pressure is nine times the pressure that me and you experienced at sea level, essentially. Outside the diving chamber are two dive tenders whose job it is to safely dock the diving chamber to the diving bell.

So make sure that two pieces are connected, make sure they're pressurized, and usually the way they connect them is through this thing called the trunk. So there's a passageway, the diving bell goes up, it fits onto this spherical thing. It's called the trunk. That spherical thing connects the diving chamber. Then the dive tender, make sure the two, all three are pressurizes the same amount that they can pass through from one to the other. Okay. All they're trying to do is equal pressure. It takes a lot of, I feel like everyone needs to be real on in this job.

Real on. You really don't want someone drinking on this on the job here. Yeah, yeah. So Bjorn and Trolls are in the diving chamber. They get hooked up to the trunk. The trunk gets hooked up to the diving bell. And they make their way from the diving bell into the trunk to get into the diving chamber. The two divesenders had successfully pressurized all three areas.

And they make their way through this in the middle of them going through this. So what is opening the diving chamber where the tour of sleep? the other guy is closing the diving bell because once that's closed then they're inside they can pull it away and then come back later on and reconnect it in the middle of this a dive tender released the clamp

holding the diving bell to the trunk I'm so nervous because I just I feel like someone's going to explode and I like feel like I want to throw up yeah that's exactly what's going to happen you really you really stepped on the story I'm sorry I'm just like

very nervous I'm like oh my God I feel like it's because you feel normal, right? But then like one weird thing happens and you realize that like you're not normal, you're super pressure eyes. Oh, my God. I can't feel my arms. When this clamp was released,

the negative pressure as nine atmospheres of pressure rushed out of the chamber into the opening basically turned one of the guys into just confetti. Because the temperature, the pressure is trying to equalize. The only way it can equalize by going out. Right. the guys was right next to in trying to close the diving bell hatch and got squished right through it with the force of nine pressure nine pressures of

atmosphere wait how well oh my god i'll explain i'll explain this because actually in case i'm wondering if i read just with piti articles uh go i will be referencing their exact autopsy report from 1983 here in the oh god three of the divers were super lucky because their blood boiled immediately. Like they were, they were, so all of them died before, you know, it's like the Titan submersible situation. They said that if it was an explosion, the time they would have understood what happened, it would have been over.

Right. Same here. Like the amount of pressure we're talking about was enough to where they didn't know what was going on. Nobody experienced any pain or anything like that. Their blood boiled immediately. One of the interesting things in the autopsy report I found was they found like a ton of fat in these guys' veins and their arteries and around their origin.

is and it was like what on earth happened like because nobody's experiences this has never happened in history before nobody knew what was going on they concluded that the rapid nature in which their blood boiled broke down in denature the composite material of blood in ways that chemically i don't totally understand but it converted them into adipus tissue into fat it basically converted what was left their blood into just pure fat it's like i have no idea how it works chemically that was was the inclusion of the autopsy report oh my god the one that got of the worst was a diver who was beginning to close the diving bell door that was trulse he had his entire body shoved through a tiny opening in the door which bifurcated him completely in half his organs except for his trachean

and small intestines and his spine well that's not your organ but they found his spine everything exploded basically immediately so you're right he did explode wow those pieces plus his spine were spit about 30 feet out in the other direction i found the autopsy photos so in the in the autopsy of um that they generated for these guys there's pictures of them they so three of them are just like weird looking like they just like they had like weird bruises all of their body because apparently it just immediately flashed them from the inside but they look mostly normal this guy trolls he was confetti they in the autopsy report um it states that he was delivered in four sacks to the to the corner oh my god there was a picture of his face there was

no bone nothing like it was just like all you can make i was like he had like a he had the kind of beard that i have and you can see that and like kind of where his mouth was and that was basically it it looked like it looked like leather face were they inside inside they were inside suits no no okay so the three guys that had their blood flat uh boiled immediately they were not wearing suits because the odds pictures were taken when they were there and they were just in their underwear. I don't know if Charles was in in in space. So what I remember reading about saturation diving is that the typical protocol is you take all your gear off in the diving belt before you crawl in. Uh-huh. So probably not in his suit. Oh my God. The ultimate cause of error

was the ultimate cause the issue was human error on the part of the dive tender who disconnected the dining belt before trolls and Bjorn were in the chamber. So one of the dive tender that did that actually died too because the diving bell hit him with such force and pressure just like panicked him completely the other one suffered tremendous injuries but somehow remained alive the families of the divers ended up suing the government of norway who had approved this system there was a lot going on here that i'm not going into because it'll take 17 more hours there was no outside ability to read the pressures from one from the trunk to the chamber like there Right. He should have had more.

Yeah. We don't know why he disconnected it. Like, we don't know if he was just confused. He didn't know, whatever. But basically, there's family suits saying that the government in Norway approved this process. They approved these materials, these chambers to be used. That was in the wrong. And apparently, they only finally won judgment in 2008, which is 26 years after the accident actually occurred.

And that's been probably the single worst accident when it comes. comes to pressurization and diving bells and diving chambers has ever happened. Well, I just want to warn everybody that when you Google this, you're going to get a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he's on Mars in, uh, what's that movie? Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. Um, oh, God, right, uh, it's not running, man. It's, um, I just had it and I don't know what I mean. I know what you mean, yeah. And that's definitely not what happens. What happens is so immediately that, and you know what Taylor, like, I was thinking about because like when I was, because that's

of what fascinated me about the whole titanic thing was like total recall total recall because the pressure like the um the physics of what happens to like to the human body in these situations you just you can't believe it right like right and it's not like that far away if you went like if i walked 500 feet you know i'd be like oh i just or like whatever like you walk i could walk that far and nothing would happen to me but you go down that far you know it just becomes so like crazy and then i always think about always i mean whatever the titanic is crazy but i you know like all the other stuff like there were like dishes and clothes and books and people and it's like everything is like it's like at one point getting soaked in this freezing water and then also the pressure the pressure is

just like changing everything it's crazy i mean also like if it was safe i would love to go down there oh my god how cool is that so like i get the appeal i don't think it could ever be like So safe where I could, where I would do it. I'd go with James Cameron, whatever he's doing, I'd do. No one else. Yeah, even that was here the hell of me. So that's the thing is like, that's why like there isn't an issue with the Titanic and there's not an issue with the people. The things that are down there is because the pressure is equalized.

Right. That's the issue. The issue with this submersal was that inside had a vastly different pressure that outside. But the Titanic, all the water and all the pressure has been equalized. Like, there's no. Right, right. Because it ended up there for so long. well it broke up when it went down so the the titanic itself the inside was equalizing as the

outside was equalizing so that's why i never went through a crush experience but oh right because it was like because it was like open yeah it was open your problem is only when you're trying to keep the pressure from outside from coming in but at the titanic's case that was a foregone conclusion right and that yeah i mean obviously along with the rest of the world watched a bunch of of videos of like steel drums being like vacuumed clothes this week so yeah yeah the second story is going to be a lot more familiar but i also found it really really interesting and i actually paid this one specifically because of your fascination with russia do you know what the k-141 is no do you know what the kursk is no so the kursk was a russian nuclear-powered cruise missile class

submarine from the early 2000s i remember oh god there you it was called the k-141 that is a classification like back then or um during world war two the u was used for uh a classification for german nazi boats the k is for russian boats peace for american boats so on and so forth so every country has their own classification essentially and the cursed tragedy happened in the the year 2000 and that's an important part of what ends up playing out here because to put things into perspective on why things happen the way they happen at 2000 is about nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union so Russia was coming out of their USSR state and they were financially crippled they're militarily kind of embarrassed because that's what crippled them they're not

doing too good the the exercise in communism didn't play out as expected the world's looking at a certain way. And so they found themselves kind of this weird, friendless state, you know, from the year 1991 onto when the first disaster ended up happening. In 1998, the entire world suffered a huge global economic recession, which resulted in dramatic increases in prices for Russia's main export at the time, which was energy. So around late 1998 to early 1999, while the rest of the world was suffering from this recession, Russia began to actually feel a bit of researchers. They started filling some pride in themselves. Like, oh, we're, we're doing good now. Like, you know, this can be what we need to kind of turn this ship around. And that's an

important factor in understanding why things happen with the curse of way that ended up happening in August of 2000. So Russia wanted to show that, hey, we're still here, we still got it. So they put on the largest display of military exercise in decades in the country's history. So they wanted to put together in this August of 2000, this massive display of all of their naval warship power. And part of that was the K-141. K-1. Curst was considered the flagship submarine in the fleet. It had a reputation that, again, is another through line here, fits with the Titanic perfectly because it was considered unsinkable. Nothing is.

It was considered unsinkable. Why would you even say that out loud? I know, I know, seriously. you're asking for to fucking drown the reason that this was considered unsinkable had to do with its double hall design which essentially meant that if one you could breach one part of it and then still not sink the ship and or the submarine until you breach the second hall again there's no such thing as unsinkable literally everything which is literally what the Titanic said was like oh we have all these different chambers so if you like breach one chamber it won't go in the next one or the next one and then it got sliced across the side and it was over this goes back to my theory that marketing people never talk to product people. They literally never communicate. You're totally right. Oh my god, never. Tech and submarine construction. On this morning in August of 2000, the curse was authorized to fire off a dummy torpedo as part of this war game and kind of kick things off. Something goes wrong. At this point, we don't know what's going on yet because I'm describing the events

as they're happening. All we know at that time is that Norwegian seismic detectors detected a seismic activity measuring 1.5 on the Richter's scale. Two minutes and 14 seconds later, they recorded a 4.2 on the Richter scale at the exact same spot on the C4 this time. I'm going to describe what we learned two years later about what ended up happening. And the reason I'm going to kind of blow past this because that's not the important part here. Basically what ended up happening was a torpedo they fired uses hydrogen peroxide fuel source. And with this type of fuel, when it interacts with the catalyst such as copper, which it also coppers what torpedo tubes are made of.

The fuel source, the fuel denatures and expands in volume by 5,000 times. This particular torpedo was not well maintained. It was actually 10 years old, which put it well past its service life that it should have been used anyways. It also had cracks in the fuel cell. So you have a torpedo that's made of copper, you have a fuel cell that has a combustible material that reacts negatively when mixed with copper and that has cracks in it so that's the situation when the crew fired this torpedo off they introduced the accelerant to light the fuel

source which expanded the peroxide mixture by 5 000 times exploding the torpedo and setting a 4800 degree Fahrenheit fire which immediately incinerated the entire torpedo room wow that was richter 1.5 that's what was recorded the second blast detected was the initial blast setting off five more warheads, which explains why I was like four times stronger, basically. Oh, like by accident? By accident. And the blast basically destroyed the command center. It blew a hole in the hall in one of its compartments. The ship basically just like filled with water and sank to the bottom of the ocean floor. It took a while for the government to realize what had happened in launch response. But the response, I'm sorry, I interrupt you, but didn't we think

it was like missing for a little bit? We, so we didn't think. it was missing. Okay. We didn't think it was missing. They thought it was missing. I'll explain that here in a second too, actually. That's a really good point. So they launched a response, but the response itself wasn't that great. They actually had a submarine rescue vessel, but it was a converted lumber ship called the Mikhail Rudnitsky. And it had a diving belt, a crane, specialized gear, all that good stuff that it needed, but it didn't have the thing that obviously wouldn't have being a lumber ship, which is automatic positioning. Basically, the way it works is that a lot of these ships that have to do search and rescue missions and stuff like that, they have to stay stationary

over what they're trying to do that's on the ocean floor. Right. And the way to do that is through automatic stabilizing. So when waves hit you, the ship is correcting itself. It's like cruise control for the ocean. You don't have to be like port, bow, stern, low, 20, 12, all, none of that shit. Like the ship has little projectile points on the bottom that are kind of doing it for you. And actually, what's interesting is that the Arctic.

rose or whatever that that um the submersible one was that also didn't have auto correcting and that was also an issue initially because that was the first uh shift that was on the scene so anyways consistent pattern there 12 hours after the curse sank uh this ship the michael rudinitsky left port to go help the sailors trapped in the curse by this point the families were going concerned but they've been told the sub was unsinkable so very similar the time submersible they hoped that this was a loss of communication and nothing more than that The day the curse went down, even before Moscow knew what had happened, so this is before, so back then, Putin was president, well, she will be forever and always. The day it went down, the U.S. knew was an accident. They knew where it was. They knew it hit the ground.

And on that day, this is literally before Putin knows what happened. The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, all six countries reached out. saying we know what's going on we can help we have all the shit we have the material we can tell about russia refused yeah they mounted their own rescue which i will say it was admirable how many things they tried it really it really was they did the best with what they had but given the nature of russia coming out of the ussr stage it was just like amateur hour basically so yeah they had one submersible that found the curse can try to dock with it but it couldn't form a vacuum seal with the escape hatch and it ran low on batteries And so, and they had no more batteries.

Like that was the only, they had to take this thing back up, plug it in for God knows how long before we could try to go back down again. It's just like stuff like that. The ship, the Mikhail, whatever, Winnitsky, didn't have the auto positioning. So the sea waves and all that would just constantly move it off position, which was, yeah. They tried to lower a diving bell, but couldn't actually position it over the subs latch because of the non-positioning piece of it.

They tried putting a remote submersible back down there to open it, but they couldn't open the latch. The batteries on that one submersible recharge enough so they could relaunch it. They freaking ran the thing into a boom on the ship and destroyed it. And so that had to go back down and had to start getting worked on for repairs. So it took five days after sinking before Putin finally said, yes, I will accept help, not for America. I won't help take help from America. I will take UK and Norwegian help, though. So that's what happened.

So the UK and Norway put together a task force, a plan to do this. They used a Norwegian ship with a British submersible. It was a joint operation. And it took a couple of days and settled that. So by time they actually got to the curse, the course has been down for seven days. That rescue team decided to cut holes in the hull of the ship and compartments they need were already flooded. They did this and were told that only Russians could go in.

The Russians go in. They collect all the classified material. They collect some bodies and come back out. one thing i mentioned here that i really love was learning like how big of a piece of shit Putin is and how he consistently is a piece of shit so apparently during this entire time he was out having an amazing time vacationing and this ended up turning into a huge PR disaster for him eventually he came back and was like i'll meet with the families of the sailors who just like tore him a new one the media had reported that foreign assistance had been

offered as early as the day after the ship the curse had gone down And Putin had been like, he was film doing this. He told them, no, no, no, they only offered help like two days ago. I accepted it two days ago. And the media was a false. And the family, there was a lie too. At one point, this lady whose son was down there started screaming at Putin. And somebody from the government, like, injected her with something.

I was going to say, did they all get killed? Are they okay? Because I feel like once you yell at Putin in the face, you jump off a building. I mean, that was it. Like, this woman was, like, swimming at him saying, we're not going to let you get out of here, a lot of you piece of shit. It was like she was going on a lot on him. And then someone just grabbed her back and just like inject her with something.

And she just went limp and they dragged out of there. 23 men on the curse gathered in one of the compartments is a compartment nine that was slowly filling with water, but was somehow somewhat survivable. And it also had an escape hatch. The problem was when the ship went down, the nuclear reactors were set to automatically shut off. When those shut off, the air purification systems that scrub CO2 from the atmosphere are also shut off. So their oxygen supply was growing limited. in theory they could have opened the hatch and made a break for it but they were in the arctic sea so yeah yeah death from the cold so a they could have drowned before they got the top

they didn't have to worry they didn't super have to worry about the bends because they were pressurized to the atmosphere of sea level because they were at sea level when they went down right problem was the compartment was seeping with water and so their bodies were absorbing nitrogen and their bodies were absorbing more pressure being down there. So there was a risk of getting the bends. But more importantly, they're going to die out of being frozen at death before they got to the top anyways. So that was the biggest issue.

And their assumption was, look, we're in the middle of like a massive military exercise. Of course somebody's coming down here. So that was the idea. The contentious part about what happened with the curse had to do with whether saving those 23 people was possible if Russia hadn't tried to save face and accept help early on. the answer is we don't know and it kind of doesn't matter because if there was a 50-50 chance they could then they should have accepted the help and should have not try to save face the way they tried to save face notes that were recovered from the sailors were timed and dated to about six hours and 17 minutes when the

ship went down but there's some assumptions that at least up to three to four days those men were still alive in there there's reports that there was banging hurt on the hall yeah like a company that didn't that that couldn't have happened because because again the ship was double hauled so like there was right all the rumors of like this week i've been hearing that about like remember about happened in pearl harbor where like people were banging on the hole for like two weeks when they couldn't save them yeah which which could have been because those ships are iron ironclad they're not double hauled so like that could have been a possibility but in this case it's wouldn't have been impossible because there were been like this sheet of of air between between that and the outside of water so so So that part is not true. We don't know how long the men were alive. We'll never know how long the men were alive. It is possible that they could have been alive and saved if they'd accepted help from outside sources. So in the end, the families of the curse sailors received a total payout of $35,000 from the government.

12 or so of the high ranking leaders of the Navy were fired and Putin went on to become the guy we all know and love today. So that is my little tale of two horrific ways of dying using pressure, water, oceans, and all that. Oh, there's such a horrible way to die. There you go. It's unbelievable. Although I would rather die like the Bifur Dolphin guys and die like the sailors in that compartment. 100% because it's also probably dark, right? Oh, yeah.

It's pitch black, you're starving and slowly losing all of your oxygen, mostly oxygen. You're going to die of not having any oxygen. And all you smell is kerosene and the screen, hear the screams of your sailors next to you. Oh my God, that was terrible. And also, I covered a Russian story. So look at me, I'm like Taylor. I do.

I Instagram about Russia yesterday because there's so much Russian stuff happening in the world always. And I just, I love talking about Russia. Happy to continue to talk about it. I'm having an emotional crises watching the last couple episodes of the season of the Great because it's so good and I'm so upset. So like it's just a whole thing, I love it.

Never saw that one. Oh, my God, it's so good. It's so good. There you go. Are you covering Russia today? I'm not, but I have to pee. Can you hold on? I can hold on.

I think you. Taylor, I can hear you. I'm muted. I think you could have heard me peeing, but I just like to mute it just in case. Just in case. I pee in this totally different room, but just in case. I thought there was a bucket. Oh, God.

Like you remember when you were like, oh, I'd like a joke. You know,