Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 167: 2019 Philadelphia Refinery Explosion

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

kaboom, whammo, blam check out the UCS  paper: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/unrefined-ending-pa-energy-solutions-refinery.pdf see gareth on RAILNATTER: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Three. Two. One. Mark. Okay. Now there's a tone now. Close enough. There's always been a tone, there's just two tones. Oh yes, pick it up Rudy. Okay. Oh Jesus Christ. Oh did you not like that?

I thought that was pretty good. I'm not a Scarfan, right? Yes you are. No, I'm not. Yes you are. Yes you are. You know what's very weird is my One year old daughter is a scarf and she's a, okay. Cheap skies that she loves madness, but she's, she loves the, she loves just getting, she's to

the point where she's starting to say to herself when it plays, which is very good. Yes. We're raising a good one. I say we like I'm helping to parent. Of course you're helping to parent Lana that she, she is, you are across the Atlantic reaching out into my mind and soul and helping me parent. That's what I'm doing. Yes. That's sweeter than we usually have on this podcast. Yeah, usually it's death. And nobody dies in this episode. Well, we don't know that yet. So, yeah, so, um, welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November

Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi I'm Liam Anderson I'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are- did I say he and him already? I can't fucking- Yeah whatever. Say it again. We have a- they're he and him and we have a fourth host- Not a guest.

Not a guest. Not a guest. Not a guest. Temporary fourth Mike. Yes. Until the situation improves you are gonna have to live with it. Is this so- This is Network Rail's fault. Yeah fuck yes. Until the situation improves you are gonna have to live with it

Yeah, this is social security because the there is no such thing anymore in the UK My name is Gareth Dennis. I'm a rail engineer and my pronouns are he and him So I thought about the fact that I was like I mean press myself like no not real engineer anymore by profession But not by career. Thanks handy anyway We're not going to talk about that at all, except for Dory. By information, yeah. By personal interest, yeah, that's it. It's a hobby of mine now. Worse than unemployed, demoted to podcast.

Well, this is the thing, right? If the right get this endless network of think tanks and consultancies and stuff that mean that no one's ever really completely out of work and you never really see the back of someone. We can implement the same thing. We can do it. I believe, believe that this is what they mean by dual power right? Yes. Buy mode. They have turned me into a buy mode. Yeah that's it. I, I'm no longer, I cannot be cancelled. I cannot be cancelled. That's definitely true, right?

There's always more podcasts, you know? If we, like, you know, God forbid we have to fire you from this one for like, I don't know, you just insult another station. We just, we just shift you to kill James Bond. We'll just, we moved the disruptive post around and don't worry about what we're doing on the back end here. Sure. I love that analogy. Again, day one. I also didn't love it.

I didn't love it either. What do you want me to fucking do, Noah? Just like, here's your introductory package. By the way, do I have a metaphor for you about your job? Oh, Jesus. I love you all so much. Love you too. And this is why we're excited that you're joining us, you know, it's an honor

It's an honor and I hope the hogs don't mind hi. Hi hogs. I love you Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's really good. They'll break out of the pen. I don't think so. I also don't think so They're gonna do unsubscribe in an extremely easy process Remember don't hit that subscribe button if you're already subscribed. Mm, mhm. Yeah, cause then you unsubscribe, and that's bad. Then you unsubscribe, that's bad. You know what you can do, you can hit the dislike button, cause that still counts as engagement.

YouTube counts those. Yeah, Joseph Google will come in. So dislike and subscribe. Yeah, exactly, Joseph Google will come in and try and take your giant logo back, which would be a disaster. Mmm. Yeah. God. Also, I'm still out of breath, because I had to sprint across central Glasgow.

Yeah, you've been putting in some calisthenic efforts, working your way across Glasgow. I've been going on a number of dates, and then that has led to me travelling more, and also having to do some urban hiking. It's fine, it's worth it. More than worth it, actually, but it does mean that I am slightly fucked for work, which is what this is. SEAN It's fine. I mean, Roz, I assume, has been drinking.

I've been drinking, yeah, I know. I feel great. I did so many errands today. I feel very accomplished. I don't know, I'm in a good mood. I'm ready to podcast. At some point I will need to eat dinner, so I will mute myself when that time comes or I won't mute myself and I'll just be a huge asshole. I'm kidding. I will mute myself.

I love it. I love a chores day. My ADHD brain brain It's the only day that I get lots of nice dopamine put in a podcast in my ears do chores feel happy about life It's nice You guys are doing chores. I'm not getting shit done. I do yeah I well so here's the thing Nova and so my wife mm-hmm lovely and and talented and beautiful Oh, yeah, I was working to her many times. Yeah, she's she's wonderful She runs this house like the goddamn Navy and I am an ensign. I am wildly over budget. Yeah. My wife is just like, Hey, like you're off, go do these tasks. And I'm like, but I wanted to sit and

relax. She's like, and she says, that's cool, go do your tests. ALICE Yeah. You get married and what you do is you install an objective tracker in your life. SEAN Yeah, exactly. I just, did you go to the, did you get your haircut? Yes I did. Did you do this? Yes I did.

I just wanna watch, I dunno, not Pat Mack if he had ESPN, cause I can't fuckin' stand that prick, but someone else on ESPN because I can't fucking stand that prick But someone else audience yeah, uh-huh All right, should we do a podcast should yeah? You know what no, I'm just gonna keep going friends chatting away Thinking about chores. I want you to suffer Roz I Don't know I gotta finish the podcast so I can do chores Don't know I got to finish the podcast so I can do chores

Okay What you see on the screen in front of you is an oil refinery With a very large explosion occurring in the middle of it. I was that one My house are flickering yeah, yeah, I'm not joking they are so if SEAN I'm not joking, they are, so if I go down, just go without me, baby. ALICE Okay, okay. JUSTIN My were flickering earlier as well. ALICE Oh, so it spread- okay, well, don't die. Um, yeah, I've heard of, like, natural gas flaring, but I think this might be taking it a step too far.

JUSTIN Yeah, I was thinking, I was convinced this was just RGB. But now you say it's explosions and fire, then okay, this puts a whole different slant on the situation. ALICE God, you know what we should do? We should do the Buncefield oil depot fire. Put it on the list. Put it on the list, after the podcast. Anyway.

Yeah, this oil refinery is not supposed to look like this. Mm. Oh. It's using a lot of oil, is the thing. Yes. Which you wanna be like, you know, that's an output. SEAN Right. JUSTIN Well actually, this was mostly propane.

And a few other various- ALICE Nice clean odorless flame? JUSTIN Yeah, low weight petroleum byproducts, we'll get to that in a second. ALICE You could grill over this thing, with a big enough grill. SEAN Yeah, you're actually not too far from the link, you could, if you just stream tailgating. That's a good point. Today we're going to talk about the 2019 Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery explosion.

Well, that is an energy solution. Which is a disaster that was very close to home. I have to make a self-disclosure here. Uh, are you gonna dodge yourself? No, but I will say that at one point my father-in-law did work for Philadelphia Energy Solutions, or Sunoco, or whoever the fuck. Was this while he was like an open Maoist? That's my father.

My father-in-law is far less cool. Sorry, Sean. Okay, I far less cool. Sorry, Sean. Okay, okay, I missed that part, I'm sorry. Sorry Sean, you're alright, I guess. No one in this family's gonna listen to it except Zach, and Zach likes me, so it's fine. Hi Zach. This, this, this event was also known in the Twitterverse at the time as John Oval. Because...

Are we gonna have to explain John to these people? JUSTIN Yeah, we are gonna have to explain John. John is... ALICE What the fuck is a John? JUSTIN John is a thing. ALICE A catch-all noun for anything, person, place... ALICE Oh, a metasynthetic variable! JUSTIN Ooh, yes.

ALICE Like a doohickey, a watchma call it, a thingamajig. JUSTIN I thought it was just when German gets tired. But uh... It's just when yeah German gets tired, but uh And then since the television show Chernobyl was popular at the time of course this became John Oble Wasn't a bad show really like I Enjoyed it. I liked it. It was a little bit like I want me listen to the fucking scientists instead of the guys Who you know ran a shoe factory, but y'know, whatever. Yeah. So I just wanna say, I drew a lot from the Chemical Safety Board for this video, but

also the Union of Concerned Scientists report, unrefined ending, lessons learned from the creation and closure of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery- It's a lot more heavy going than the Union of Unconcerned Scientists report, which was like, eh. Whatever. Yeah, it's probably fine. Union of Chilled Scientists. Yeah. Um, I did not, unfortunately, get a chance to read Beyond Bankruptcy, the Outlook of

Philadelphia's Neighborhood Refinery, uh, by Christina Simeone, I just didn't have that much time. But apparently that was very prescient, as to the events that unfolded. Anyway, so before we talk about this, we have to talk about the goddamn news. Nuclear power is back. Yeah, they're restarting the Three Mile Island Unit 1. It's the great taste that you love. Oh yeah.

For a Microsoft data AI center thing. That's the worst fucking reason to do something that's a good idea I've ever fucking heard in my life. Yeah, I would no longer critical support. I would draw my support for this, I'm unhappy about this. This is extremely not good news. I'm unhappy about this. It applies to a lot of stuff in Pennsylvania. Cause I know we're fucking now.

I guess the idea is that Microsoft agreed to buy energy for 20 years in order to get a unit one reactivated. Unit one's the one that didn't melt down, if I recall correctly. I know who's working on this actually. Unit one reactivated, unit one's the one that didn't melt down, if I recall correctly. It may have been unit two. I know, I was working on this actually. So, um. And this is all just going into a data center, right? Pretty much, or like several data centers. Yeah buddy, yeah buddy, AI.

That's a big bet for Microsoft to make, to be like, we are gonna need like, a large amount of energy. Like a TMI level right there. So many entries in LinkedIn profiles are now going to be automated. Sensational. I'm so pleased about that. And we're gonna ruin GitHub even more. You'll get nothing unlike it. It's literally, it feels like what they're doing is that they're turning on the reactor and they're turning on the turbines and they're taking that electricity and converting it directly

into entropy. ALICE & TROY Yeah. R.I.P. Thomas Pynchon, you would have loved this news story. Also, I think Thomas Pynchon's still alive. GARY You can still give him an R.I.P., that's fine. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Yeah, prospective R.I.P. to Thomas Pynchon, you're one of my favorite authors, please don't go.

GARY Have a nice, nice sleep. ALICE Yeah, have fun, George. ALICE Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is. Yeah, okay. GARY So, uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's pretty wild that we can, we do this all for just to run entropy machines. That's like what crypto is. That's what the metaverse was gonna be.

AI definitely gets the entropy machine. Oh, remember the metaverse, dude? Yeah, all of this was gonna be there to power your robot legs in the metaverse. Oh, Web 3, man. Oh, what a time. NFTs. I don't want to get all, like, a different podcast about this, but this is essentially just virtue signaling from Microsoft, right?

This is Microsoft going, no AI definitely is a thing. Look, look, look, look, we're doing something real about this AI. We're confident that AI is real. This is basically just virtue signaling to their increasingly unhappy investors, right? This isn't actually material. ALICE If you look at what Elon Musk is doing to power- GROCK I would prefer not to. ALICE Yeah, to power Grock, the answer is a fleet

of mobile, like, I think, methane generators? GROCK Yeah, they're natural gas generators. Yeah, that are mobile precisely because if they stop being mobile he has to get a permit for them, so they're just driving around every so often. Just a bunch of guys just running around with a trailer with a methane generator on the back. Yeah, you just have to move them around to prevent regulation, like a Scud missile. So I mean, this is one of the better ways to waste energy, I guess? Like...

Yeah, I mean, at least it's not producing a whole shitload of CO2, and also the reactor's already there, which is the only reason they're restarting it, is because the thing is completely intact. You're gonna produce spent fuel, but like, it's not a huge amount. I mean, it's, I guess the only thing more efficient than this would be hooking it up to renewables like solar or wind that are already built, and doing nothing, and being like, yeah, these are gonna be wasted now. I think it'd be better if this, let's say, powered, instead of an AI data center, instead

of, you can't do math, and, you know, what else does AI do? It tells you to put glue on pizza. ALICE & LIAM Yeah. ALICE & LIAM It generates pictures of Shrimp Jesus. ALICE & LIAM Shrimp Jesus. ALICE & LIAM Writes a lot of college essays that have every academic I know tearing their hair out.

ALICE & LIAM Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ruin just destroys the internet and our ability to use internet searches. Yep. Yeah, I love that Google is just non-functional. Completely fucked.

Yeah, it's so cool that that happens to you, whether you like it or not, you're just like, I want to Google something, perfectly ordinary act, we've all been trained to do a bunch of times a day, and you're like, oh by the way, you've just wasted like five gallons of water doing this. You might as well start almond farming. Why even bother fucking recycling, or like, you know, limiting your household use of water doing this. You might as well start almond farming. Why even bother fucking recycling, or like, you know, limiting your household use of water when one company gets to decide, hey, we're just gonna use more of it than you any time you do anything requiring our service.

Makes me so angry that I cannot switch it off. It's genuinely like, it's increasing everyone's carbon footprint and everyone's environmental footprint. It's just, ugh, we're getting sidetracked here. It makes me so unbelievably angry and I'm desperately hunting for ways to make Google go... Well yeah, that's true. I know. Hello, that's how this all works.

What would be great is if they just restarted this because it's clean energy and it would drive electricity prices down. That would've felt like a good thing. ALICE Exactly. You could power the whole city of Harrisburg with it. Um. Mm. Which is, you know, arguably worth more than anything done with AI.

I think so, I think so, there's some nice stuff in Harrisburg. It gave the world, um, fucking Charles Bronson. Ooh. From Harrisburg. Yes. Yep. And Gareth and I waited at a bus station there once. We did. And got very angry at Steve Graham

Yeah, yes. Yes. I Harrisburg is it I don't know. I like the senators. That's that's all I can say about the Harrisburg I try not to go nice historic center. I'm from the shittier part of central I'm looking at this now. It's in Dofar County, Pennsylvania? Dauphin. Dauphin cat. Okay. I'm not even gonna get into this.

Yeesh. Well. Um, so, good thing happening for extremely bad reasons. Almost to the point where it might be a bad thing. Yeah, it sort of like tipped the scale over at this point, you know? Because they're not gonna use it for anything else. Exactly. I mean, well, hopefully, you know, maybe Microsoft implodes and then they got another 20 year

license on the reactor. They give it to us. They give it to us. Yeah. Well, I think it's more likely that AI implodes and then Microsoft has a bunch of energy it doesn't know what to do with and it has to invent some contrived bullshit, even more contrived than AI. Can you imagine?

It's like, we're actually buying energy for. Step away from the wave, Nova, please. We're gonna build a reverse nuclear reactor. We're gonna spin a turbine really fast. Oh boy. Well, in other news... Ah, you know what this one's gonna be. Yeah, Israel's attacking Lebanon now.

More than just blowing up pagers and walkie talkies, now they're just blowing up people's apartments. Indiscriminately, yes. Oh yeah. A huge wave of airstrikes which are almost certainly gonna lead to a ground invasion and probable occupation of southern Lebanon, which history fans may remember is a bad idea for everyone involved. How have we already done this?

Yeah, literally. And there's a bunch of weepy Israeli movies about it, in fact. But yeah, all of the generals in the IDF now were junior officers the last time they did this, and came up in this kind of occupation of southern Lebanon, so... Christ, I don't know. Basically, the whole thing is completely fucked, because it's this full-c that like, we are gonna get our big regional war now, while the going's good, because we know the Americans won't do anything to stop us. So we're just gonna, like, do whatever we want to Gaza, like, ostensibly now short of bulldozing it into the ocean, but who knows.

ALICE Yeah, give it time. Give it time. ALICE Exactly. And then we're also gonna invade Lebanon and push Hezbollah back past the Littani. Which, best of luck. I mean, they'll be able to do it, I think, but not without a huge amount of bloodshed on everyone involved, and also this kind of separating wound of occupation, which is exactly what happened the last time.

M- The cat is out of the bag, right? So they've... Israel, or rather, the leadership of Israel, Netanyahu and his weird right wing nutters that he's surrounded by, don't care about the fact that they are actually destroying Israel. Israel. Israel is a going concern and continues to be less and less likely to exist as they push this forward. Because the ultimate consequences of this are unfathomable across the board for the region, but they can do it. But they don't care. The little cabal who are currently running Israel do not care because they know that they can do all of this. And as you've said already, the US will do nothing to stop them.

And they've seen that now. They cannot believe what they've been able to do in Gaza without anyone stopping them. And now they're like, well, okay, cool, let's just work our way down our list. Lebanon's next. It's frightening. ALICE I think there's a few things going on there in terms of, like, I've said this before elsewhere, that it's partially the knowledge that, like, the US is gonna, like, continue supplying weapons, continue supplying aid, and not have any enforceable red lines. But it's also like,

this might be our last chance to do this before Iran has nuclear weapons and can kind of credibly threaten us with them. And we can do this without it turning into a nuclear exchange. It will, I suspect, turn into a, like, sort of regional war, no matter what Biden says otherwise about it. And I just... ALICE. Biden's probably saying, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, far as like- Say, alright, good going, fuck ass, you're on your own, good luck, fucking, uh, don't shit where you eat, I don't fucking know.

Yeah, and as far as like, destroying Israel goes, the Israeli economy, uh, mmm, mmm. Yeah, eugh. Is it, like, Israel is a going concern, it seems to be, seems to be kind of attempting to wind itself up. Not all Israelis, but certainly the head of government just seems to not care about the long term viability of the Israeli state, independent of what actually is happening on the ground. They just don't seem to care. Yeah. Well, it's this weird combination, as with Trump in a lot of ways, right, of a guy or a bunch of other people, Berlusconi comes to mind, like, your central guy Netanyahu is like, absolutely cynical about this, and wants to stay out of prison, right, because

the second the war ends he will be out of power and then all of the corruption investigations will land on him at once. But then you also have his various, like, also cynical but cynical in a different way, like headbangers like Bang Vir or whoever. ALICE Oh, that fuckin' psychopath, Jesus Christ. ALICE Yeah, I know. I wish him more car crashes. But, yeah. ALICE Hopefully fatal ones, don't bleep that, leave it there.

ALICE Who are fully on this khanist program of, like, Israel is sort of ethnically and religiously strong, will continue to be strong if it purges its enemies, like, ethnically and religiously, like, strong, will continue to be strong if it, like, purges its enemies, etc. etc. etc. So, yeah, I mean, fucking hell is my answer to this. Yeah. Not good, not good. Looks like they already got, like, men, you know, sort of suited up and ready to go into Lebanon, that's going to be pretty bad. Pretty bad for all of us. It's already pretty bad and it's going to get a lot worse.

Meanwhile, worth just putting a pin in the sand, absolute human misery and suffering just continuing to widen. I know all of us know and care about that, but it's worth just reminding ourselves that the untold human suffering and misery while these pricks machinate. Like, just absolute untold human misery and carnage just continuing to broaden and broaden across the region. Absolutely horrifying. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, Netanyahu went on TV in English, which shows you what the audience is for, saying that, you know, the war isn't with Lebanon, it's with Hezbollah, and it's like,

I think if you- What are we showing ya, dickshit? Well, the war isn't against the Palestinians, it's against Hamas. I mean, that hasn't done- Yeah, exactly, exactly. It hasn't, exactly. It shouldn't inspire any confidence in anyone. It's like, even if this were about Hezbollah's ideology, which it isn't really, like, national

sovereignty is still a thing, right, Lebanon's still a which it isn't really. Like, national sovereignty is still a thing, right, Lebanon's still a country, and apart from anything else, I think there's this idea, right, that if you go like, well, you know, we're only targeting, you know, this movement within your country rather than the country as a whole, that's gonna like, you know, sort of wave the magic wand over it in terms of international law. I don't know why they bother, I really don't, given that the arrest warrants are like, you know, imminent, but yeah. What?

I just, I- it's... part of the problem, historically, right, is that, for every- like, sometimes assassination really works and does just destroy a dude's entire legacy, right? And on the one hand you get Shinzo Abe like that, on the other hand you also get Yichiro Ravin like that. And... Yeah. Yeah. Well, what did we learn?

Absolutely nothing, and it's gonna get worse all the time. Like, I... Who knows where this leads. What is the end? There doesn't seem like there's an end... Like, there is no rational end state at this point. It's just, it's just, what can we get away with next? Escalate, escalate, escalate.

There's just, there's no, yeah, it's frightening. Well, speaking of untold human misery and carnage that there's no logical endpoint to, that was the goddamn news. And this is James Bond. Oh, you motherfucker! Sick. news. Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in northwest Pennsylvania. It's the all. This is this is widely been regarded as a bad move.

Have you done this joke with this light every time as well? Yes. I'm surprised it's not getting like copy burn. You know, they get the copier burn as it kind of gets copied through each time, right? Ah, beautiful. Okay, let's talk about petroleum. It's this great material, has very high energy density. Say vegan.

Yeah, thousands of uses. It's easy to process. It's an animal based product, kind of. No, it's all natural and largely plant based. It's vegan. It comes from the ground for free. Right? I don't know why everyone's so mad about this stuff.

The thing is, it's great for, like, obviously what we use it for as a fuel, but it's also great as a, like, sequester of carbon. Yes. Carbon has sequestered the absolute fuck into this thing. Hell yes. Oh yeah, cause it's all made of carbon. This is like one of the best, like, dead tree carbon storage, like, mechanisms ever devised. Yeah, people are wondering how much, like, you carbon sequest by doing the weird charring

of a log and then putting some mud on top of it. Well, imagine that, but several million years ago and squished real small. You cannot, exactly November, it's the great carbon sink. So the best thing to do with it is, of course, to burn it, question mark. Yeah, burn all of it as quickly as possible. And after 1859 we really got on that. So here's an early oil refinery. The oil refining industry first sets up shop in Pittsburgh. There's a lot of small refiners. Then this guy John D. Rockefeller comes around, he has an oil refinery, I think the first one was in Pittsburgh, but he moves over to Cleveland because he got access to the Great Lakes there.

ALICE Sick of their basement toilet shit. He's just like, fuck this. I mean, I'm gonna go to the city by the land. JUSTIN I bet all of the soil that you can see there, under all that stuff, is today completely clean and fine. SEAN Hyper-irradiated. Yeah. John D. Rockefeller builds up his standard oil monopoly in Cleveland. You know, he's able to manipulate the oil market. He has a lot of sweet deals with the railroads, all this kind of stuff. Eventually people get

so mad at him that Congress passes the Sherman Antit Act, and then about twenty years later they use it. Standard Oil has broken up into several constituent companies. Now this eventually effectively reforms ZexxonMobil, but we don't talk about that. ALICE No, no, of course not. You can't use an Anti-Trust Act today, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE You're gonna break up Amazon! Okay.

JUSTIN When we talk about the facility we're gonna talk about there's two major players here in the history Atlantic petroleum and Gulf oil So if I go foil a golf was the one with the cool logo, and they sponsored a bunch of motorsport stuff the white Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah The g240 liberal yes, oh sick So Atlantic was actually a pre standard oil company It was founded as the Atlantic petroleum storage company in 1886 in Philadelphia But later it fell under control of the Standard Oil Trust, right? The Atlantic brand continued to be used for kerosene in southeast, Pennsylvania

And when Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the company was born anew, right? Atlantic was back. Um. Mm. It's got the names out of storage of all the shit it had absorbed. Oh yeah. And we're like, you know, you're these again.

People of nostalgia. Well Atlantic was... Atlantic held the rights to be Standard Oil of Pennsylvania, but they decided they liked their brand better. So you know, Atlantic service stations pop up all over southeast Pennsylvania as the automobile takes hold of transportation, retail fuel sales far outstrip, retail kerosene sales, right? The refineries are getting bigger, they're being reconfigured for this fabulous new chemical

called gasoline. It's not just for dry cleaning anymore. ALICE You're not rolling up to this in your kind of, like, very strangely designed six wheeled car being filled up with kerosene. SEAN Yeah. The company prospers through both wars. In 1966 it merges with Richfield Oil in California, that creates Atlantic Richfield or ARCO. ARCO is very successful, it then buys and eats up Sinclair Oil and its famous dinosaur

logo. Then it becomes a national chain. For antitrust reasons its northeastern assets were sold off, those were rebranded back to Atlantic. The brand cannot die! That part of the company struggled. Oh my god. It just like, it's like an overflow.

That part of the company struggled for a while, and Atlantic was sold off to Sunoco in, uh, 1988. Hmm. Yep. Anya, our other contestant here is Gulf Oil, right? No GT40 on this slide, why even fucking bother? Good question, Nova. Gulf Oil was founded to exploit oil in Texas and was thus headquartered in Pittsburgh.

Alright, yeah, alright. It was largely financed by the Mellon family, better known for their banks. The Mellon family. Oh, these motherfuckers. The melon family is a bunch of far right neocon and paleocon freak shows. I believe his name is Richard Melon who is one of the largest single donors to Donald Trump. If anybody killed JFK. Huh.

Not him specifically, but like these are like... Richard Melon's scafie. Yeah. Yeah these are the fucking guys, right. Also found a Carnegie Mellon, along with Carnegie's. And also Mellon Bank, yep, that's all of them. And the Big Fruit as well, of course. He is, he's dead now, but I'm gonna dig him up and piss on his grave.

He died on July- he died a day after his 82nd birthday So I hope his his last 24 hours were not a happy celebration But instead miserable writhing and twitching right before he saw the good Lord it was sent straight to hell Fucking asshole List of melons and up on this list of melons is Cordelia Scaife-May with an incredible one line biography, famous recluse and funder of multiple anti-immigration organizations. Also birth control and family planning, so who's to say.

I feel like if you're a famous recluse, you're not doing- being a recluse. Again, Thomas Pynchon. Yeah, she, uh, she, she, she hanged herself. Remember, it's hanged for people, and, uh, she said that America was being invaded by- on all fronts by immigrants who breed like hamsters, so so long you dead bitch, you deserved it. Jesus Christ, I mean- So some of the worst people. Mm.

Uh, Gulf oil invested heavily in pipelines, allowing them to extract petroleum from as far afield as Oklahoma, and ship it very cheaply and very quickly to its Port Arthur, Texas refinery. Port Arthur is right near the Louisiana border on the Gulf Coast. I was just thinking this is like, Manchuria, right? On like, the Russian Far East. JUSTIN Yeah, that's different. They couldn't build a pipeline that far.

Gulf was known for consistency in quality, and its distinctive, these nice small neoclassical service stations. ALICE Hmm. I mean, if we're gonna set the world on fire, nice building to do it from. RILEY Yeah, it's a nice little one. This one just got moved to somewhere in Fairmount Park, I think, in order to make way for a big condo tower. RILEY Um.

RILEY Oh, I gotta stick my flag in the sand and say I don't like that. I don't know, I find it icky. Look at our tweeve service station burn the planet. ALICE It's a little kitsch the planet. It is quite catch little catch. Yeah Well, I don't think they knew they were burning. Well. I did know they were burning the planet They thought it was a much slower time This is this is this is still the days when we thought so looking serious good pre-empt so this is true They'll they do since the 50s that the cigarettes are bad for you shut up. I know the 50s and then cigarettes were bad for you shut up I know. Gulf oil leads in technology it was the first to install a catalytic cracker in 1951 we'll talk

about that in the next slide. It's called a catalytic white person. You beat me to it. Great, fantastic. They also lead on influence they have significant political contributions that lead to significant influence in Colombia Venezuela Kuwait, uh Kuwait excuse me. Why don't you say Kuwait? Sounds like a little bird. Oh And even horror of horrors Canada Oh God God Gulf oil eventually winds up with a massive portfolio of oil and energy related businesses, from nuclear power, to basic research, to private militias to protect wells in Angola. Yeah.

Yeah. This is a really evil corporation. I mean, not that there's a good one kicking around, but like... No, it's like stinky evil. Yeah. Yeah. Private militias, that's always a term, a noun, that always fills me with confidence that a company is good. Yeah, it's a right Coca Cola Death Squad.

This is so infuriating, Alexa, play Jungle Work. All of this stuff is expensive, as a result, Gulf Oil's portfolio underperforms significantly, and it falls victim to corporate raiders in the 1980s who break up the business, and the refining side is sold to Chevron. ALICE That whole corporate rating thing was really funny in the sense that, like, you just had these bloated, extremely vulnerable, extremely evil corporations that are like, yeah, we make paperclips with a paperclip making company, we have done 50 coups to prevent anyone from

developing an alternative to paperclips, we have a ton of bodies on us, and then just getting effortlessly defeated in boardroom judo by one guy who like read the SEC report. Yeah, weird critical support. Strange critical support to the corporators, to like the sort of hulks. Like Carl Icahn and like, yeah, Warren Buffett. I mean... Exactly. The only company that survived that was like 3M. Yeah.

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Barbed铆es at the gate is a good book. You just like take the door shut, you know? Yeah, exactly. I can't get in, they put a post-it over it. Super glue everything! You come and take it, it's just two cross bottles of super glue. I kind of had three M in mind when I was thinking about the, like, you know, assassination attempts

to prevent someone developing an alternative to the Post-It. JUSTIN They made a... we can't let them develop a better paperclip. ALRIGHT. So, those are our two corporate players here in the early days of this refinery, but now we have to talk about the refinery and the process. Which means it's time for some diagrams! ALRIGHT.

LEARNING! Which means it's time for some diagrams Learning that's that's that's a Department of Defense looking Golly Okay, how do you refine oil what does that even mean you do all this shit to it? Yeah, you know this shit to it Yeah You put your hands down to the bottom and you get the chunky stuff and if if you just scoop your hands in the top, you get all the little light stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

You do a bunch of really interesting chemistry with it, involving fractional distillation or whatever the fuck. Yes. I don't like the black pink crude oil one in the middle here. I don't like that. That's not very nice. You take a jar of crude oil and you do what you do to make whiskey to it, kind of, for a bit, and then you do a bunch of other shit.

Kind of. Sort of. But with less fire than with whiskey, yes. Mm. Cowards. Well, as we're gonna learn, sometimes more fire. Yeah. Broadly speaking, refining oil, you take crude oil and you make it into more useful oils.

Crude oil is made by natural processes and is therefore full of stuff you don't want. Yeah, it's just sequestering whatever, you know? Yeah. Like... It also varies a lot in molecular composition, but we want oil products with consistent properties, right? Mm. This is all about the molecules.

Uh, hydrocarbons. They're just molecules made primarily of hydrogens and carbons. This guy right here is an octane. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. And like, the properties of these hydrocarbons vary based on length. You can select for these. Oh yeah. This is not the good octane, the good octane is isooctane, which is pictured in the later slide. This is the bad octane, which actually

does not increase the octane rating of your fuel. Yeah, so these things, so this this like big long molecule thing, because it's big and long, well this one's kind of big and long, you get lots of intermolecular forces which makes it stickier and changes its performance, its behaviors, and how it like, you know, how quickly it burns and stuff. Whereas the smaller ones, like methane, which makes it stickier and changes its behaviors and how quickly it burns and stuff. Whereas the smaller ones, like methane, which is just one, has less intermolecular forces because the molecules are smaller, and so that's why it's a gas versus being a liquid or whatever. And it has different sorts of properties. So that's kind of why these forces... The longer your molecules stick, the more it sticks to other molecules

near it. It's kind of like, I don it sticks to other molecules near it. It's kind of like, I don't know, like stickle bricks. Mm. Yes. And that's why you know you have a- I don't know, that's a deep cut for the 90s kids like me and Nova. That also applies to like different grades of crude oil, like you can have a very very heavy crude oil with a lot of long chain molecules, it looks like this poop bottle.

Or you can have something much lighter. So yeah, generally speaking when you strike oil, the product that comes out of the well is a big mishmash of about a million different molecules, plus impurities and whatnot, so there's general categories here. You can have heavy and light crude oil, and you can have sweet and sour crude oil. Yep. Yeah, and those are not euphemisms. Like, you can t- don't do this, but you can taste-

You can do it, yes. Yeah, sweet crude oil tastes sweet. You can go to the oil well on your property and take a sample, and taste it. Yeah. You will die, but like- We cannot advise enough, please don't do this. We don't taste a lot of it. Mm.

Yeah, alright. Do not do the one scene from the movie Three Kings to yourself. You will get a variety of interesting flavoured cancers if you do that. Do not do that. Oh yeah. But yeah, heavy crude, full of big hydrocarbons, it's very viscous, it may even need to be heated to flow at all. Your mazute type shit.

Exactly. Light crude is primarily full of the smaller hydrocarbons, it flows pretty readily, it may come out of the ground on its own, that's a classic gusher you'll see in old western films due to pressure from the soil forcing it out of the well on its own. Sweet crude oil has very few impurities, it's mostly just straight hydrocarbons, it's especially low in sulfur. Sour crude oil has many impurities, which again, is especially including sulfur. Yeah, these phrases do originate from tasting it.

ALICE Incidentally, the name petroleum comes from your kind of, like, the oil that flows out of the ground on its own, just collects from rocks and stuff. Rock oil. Petro-olium. Petroleum. Ah, thanks November. It's the things you learn. Yeah, you do the Cambridge Latin Course and it makes you like this for the rest of your

life. So, to get from crude oil to wonderful petroleum products that improve our lives, you need to go through many different processes, right? And there are different process units that perform these processes, and not every oil refinery has every process unit. They might be designed for specific feedstocks, while you might have a very full service refinery that can take any kind of oil you can throw at it, you might also have one that, let's say, can only take light oil, so, y'know, there's a lot of stuff that, let's say, down here it doesn't have, or...

Yeah, like, cause you build it within reasonable transport of your oil field, so. And you know what kind of oil you're getting out of that, so unless you have multiple oil fields giving you different kinds of oil, you build it to the thing that it is. RILEY And even if land is cheap, these facilities, they're sprawling facilities, every new thing you plug in is a huge amount of complicated machinery that you have to have someone has to design they Have to build the thing they have to maintain it. They're parts you need for it. It's expensive. Huge amount of power. Yeah, absolutely So you want to minimize how much of those these you want to minimize the extra bits you've gone

Yeah, lots of heat lots of maintenance. So if you're like, let's say you're you're only taking a light crude oil I don't need let's say a delayed cocker here. I don't think you're only taking in light crude oil. I don't need, let's say, a delayed coca here. I don't need that. I don't think you're pardoned. Yeah, please. What else do I not need? I don't need necessarily, um, crap. I had this written down.

I thought I had this written down, as an example. You don't need some of these things. You don't need some of these things. We're only gonna talk about a few specific processes. ALICE The anime treating at the top there? Don't know what that does. JUSTIN Oh yeah, you gotta anime treating. You know, you've got your...

We got some funny names later, don't worry. ALICE Yeah! I'm just enjoying a hydro treater, to be honest. Pleasing to me. JUSTIN So you've got, you've got, um, what we're gonna talk about here very briefly is the atmospheric distillation column, uh, we're gonna talk about the fluid catalytic cracker, and then we're gonna talk about the very important alkylation unit. Of course, the alkylation unit, yep.

Yes. Um, obviously. What do we do without the alkylation unit, you know? What would we do without the alkylation unit? I mean, genuinely, though. But also I think we should speak a little bit about these different grades of oil, and how we use them in the United States, specifically after the oil export ban was lifted. ALICE This is where we post, like, a random farmer in the US discovers the largest reserve of oil.

Yeah. Thing, again. JUSTIN So, the United States, you know, as every democratic president will tell you, oh, we export more oil than we import now. But we still import hell of a lot of oil. And those numbers are pretty close together. So, you know, it's an interesting economic situation. You know, in the United States we have a lot of access to this very good, high-quality, light, sweet crude oil. It's in Texas, it's in the back end formation in the Upper West, you know, you can frack

it in Pennsylvania to a certain extent, you know, and this is very- Well you sure can, buddy. It's in your backyard. Just go out and start digging. Yeah, exactly. This is very easy to process. Despite this, a lot of United States refineries are actually set up to process heavy sour crude oil, which has to be imported from like, Venezuela, and you know, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, even Russia, you know.

ALICE They fully couldn't, even when the sanctions were coming and cut off Russian oil completely, because it just wouldn't... you crash everybody's economy. Cut off Russian oil completely because it just wouldn't though you crash everybody's economy This does sound silly though Why why? Why are you in capitalism was the most efficient distribution of resources etc etc? Oh it is you you're you're the moron Oh, okay You know, why don't we just use our own own oil and avoid a bunch of geopolitics, you know, why don't we just use our own oil and avoid a bunch of geopolitics, you know, we've had for the past 50 years, you know, for the good chunk.

Trade policy is fascinating. We had an export ban, right? Yeah. The answer is, of course, the United States, we have a lot of industrial capacity and technical know-how to build these humongous, technically advanced refineries that can take the most garbage feedstock in the world, and turn it into high grade petroleum products.

ALICE. Getting you a sort of like, kerosene out of like, a rock I found. JUSTIN. Yeah, exactly. So, as such, either, y'know, you just didn't really drill for oil too much in the United States, there was still some domestic production, but it wasn't like, it was still more expensive than importing the oil, so, you know, and there was no export market.

Now we export it, of course. You know, we can export that expensive light sweet crude oil to countries with less advanced refining industries. And then we can import the cheap, heavy sour oil that, you know, we would've, uh, and we get more oil for it. The high flute- the high-

Sorry, go on. Go on, Nova. It's just good business sense, in a very evil way. Yeah, you have the good product, you export it, and you take in the bad product that you can use because you have the really good oil refineries. This is now universal, there are still imports of light sweet crude oil, I don't think we have much sour crude in the United States at all, someone's gonna correct me if I'm wrong, gonna have to correct me if I'm wrong here, cause I'm, I had to learn

all of this. Um. So actually you might have to import from us, right? Yeah. Isn't North Sea Oil mostly sour crude? North Sea is Brent Crude, that's sweet. No it is not. Not even close, okay.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm... The podcast that checks Wikipedia in real time. Nah, that's another fun one we'll get to later, is of course there's two light sweet prices, and this was relevant for a while, there's the West Texas Intermediary, and then there's the Brent oil... ALICE Hmm, Brent crude, yeah. Which I've heard of, yeah. JUSTIN Which, Brent is just everything that's not in the United States.

So this is also why it's, y'know, it's expensive to be an underdeveloped country, y'know, oil runs a whole lot of stuff, if you have a primitive refining sector you're paying more You're paying more for expensive oil or if you're especially poor like I don't know your Haiti You actually have to import refined products, which is a total ripoff right? You know shipping finished petroleum products is expensive, and it's dangerous, and you can't use a giant supertanker for it But this is one of the reasons gas is so cheap in the United States, other than low taxes, we export the oil, we use that money to import more oil than we would have otherwise had. That's thinking with the brain head.

I love capitalism, I love our planet and the way that our society functions, it's fab, it's wonderful. As a result of this beautiful idea, now a bunch of poor countries have oil, but also have it at lastness rates. Yes. So, let's get to the process units. This is the heart of the refinery, this is the distillation column. So you pump your crude oil into the furnace, right, and then, y'know, you pump the heated crude oil into the bottom, or actually, in this case, into the middle of the distillation

column. I think, yeah, actually it does go in the middle. ALICE. Fractional distillation. The different stuff in it is gonna have different temperatures at which it, uh, like, just separates out. Exactly. So each section of the distillation column is at a different temperature, and it has

various pans where whatever condenses there collects, and then it gets piped out. This is, weirdly this is one thing I sort of know about, and that is the only bit of like, my, uh, fuck, the only bit of my GCSE chemistry I remember still. JUSTIN Yeah, I remember being told this. ALICE Fractional distillation. JUSTIN Yeah, fractional distillation. The good stuff. Yeah.

There's this entire tration. JUSTIN Heavy molecule goes down, light molecule goes up. ALICE In fact, I think they fully taught this with this example. So I've like, labelled this diagram before. Um, but most of these products here, they need more processing, right? You can see here, okay, up here at the top you've got naphthas, those can be made into gasoline, I think also some plastic, uh, constituent products. You know, you've got your kerosenes, you got your gas oils,

you got lubricants, fuel oils, asphalt... ALICE So getting less and less reactive as we go down. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE More like sludge as you get closer to the bottom, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. Stuff at the bottom of any process unit is just called the bottoms, right? So, and that's going to be the basis of a crude joke later, don't worry. Oh, I was gonna say, none of us responded there, it was very disappointing.

Yeah. Listen, I've spent too much of today doing that shit in real life to respond to jokes about it, sorry. The problem with the distillation column is it only produces the hydrocarbons you already have. Very heavy crude is going to produce a lot of tar and fuel oil, and not much gasoline, and a light crude oil is going to produce a lot of gasoline and kerosene, and not much tar.

Um, generally speaking, the lighter products have always been more desirable, higher grade, and result in higher price fuels, right? So if I am the owner of a heavy crude well, I need a way to convert those heavy oils into lighter ones. Which leads us to our next process unit, the fluid catalytic cracker. A bunch of pipes. SEAN Yes. That is one factor which is constant in the oil refinery.

ALICE BELLIN Pipe scalore. Yeah, if you're selling pipes, you're quid in. SEAN Yes. In an oil boom, sell pipes. ALICE BELLIN In an oil boom, learn to weld. SEAN Yes! SEAN So, cracking is the process of taking a few heavy hydrocarbon molecules and turning them into lots of light hydrocarbon molecules. The old way to do so was lots of heat and lots of pressure, but thermal cracking was

overtaken by cheaper and safer fluid catalytic cracking in the 1950s. Yeah, remember those long hydrocarbon changes, going in there and snapping those apart? You snap them in half, yeah. So in this case, the example I'm using is taking gas oils directly, it can take other heavier feedstock through vacuum distillation that I don't want to talk about, I don't understand that. This is not an important process to thoroughly understand here. But yeah, you're cracking these hydrocarbons in half and then in quarters and so on and so forth. Then you have a problem that you get a

lot of the product you want, but then some of the molecules got too cracked. Oh, we've all been there. Yeah. Now we've got to join them back up together. Yeah. Um, you know, in a lot of refineries this is just a waste product, or you set it off with other gases from the distillation column for separate processing, but uh- You can just flare this off, you can just burn this shit. Obviously you could do that. It's a thing, some refineries do.

But what if I want more gasoline? No, I mean, who wouldn't? So we gotta go to the alkylation unit. some refineries do. Um. But what if I want more gasoline? I mean, who wouldn't? So we gotta go to the alkylation unit. This is where the things get a little complicated. Now? Yeah, this point. Okay. Those are beautiful tanks, by the way.

They're very nice, aren't they? Very very pretty. Full of the worst chemicals you can imagine. Oh yeah, incredible like, this is like a, looks like, I can only interpret this through the lens of like, this would, if this were a 3D model, this would be a really well constructed one. Oh yeah, there's a very nice pin model on this. Yeah, this is the shit that turns the guy into a sludge at the end of RoboCop, right? Oh yeah yeah yeah.

Hold that thought. Oh god, fucks sake. So we have these lighter gases from the fluid catalytic cracker unit. They're propene and butene, right? Mm. Uh... Oh, ene, not ain. Ene.

Oh, okay, yeah, that means there's a double bond in there somewhere. Yes. I remember my organic chemistry-ish. I wanna snap one of those bonds so I can get butane so I can light my lighter, you know? Yes. We also have isobutane that comes from another part of the plant, which is I think the hydrocracker or something. I don't know what that one does. We've talked about too many processes.

It's iso because it's not one line, it splits, right? That's why. So it's butane is four, but the isobit is because it's oh man I'm having a bit of I'm tripping back actually this I'm remembering Dr Atkinson and Dr and then my my my flat back to the time when I very vigorously flirted with my male chemistry teacher and he did not let it happen he stopped it right there and then in the lesson and in a very firm way not physically that would be that would have been exciting but but no, just like, stop. And I was like, aw, okay, I'll stop flirting with my chemistry teacher. ALICE We appreciate a safeguarding kid.

RILEY Yeah, absolutely. He nipped that in the bud and I stopped doing that. I probably still have that chemistry book somewhere upstairs with my handwritten notes in it for no good reason. One of those things that I've yet to set on Sephar to because there's no point keeping it. A- I actually never took organic chemistry. Everything I've done for this podcast I've had to learn on the fly. ALICE I sort of want to learn, like, this is the

thing, one of the benefits of the podcast is I get to go back to uni, which is what I'm doing now, and part of me wants, for as long as we're doing this, to just keep doing that and just end up with like fucking 50 bachelor's degrees in whatever I feel like for that given like three or four years. That is kind of fun. I, I, I, yeah. I love it. Genuinely. Like, and I discover every time I learn something how much more I don't know, and I'm like, oh that's perfect, I can fill this in, you know? I can sort of like, because I've learned like one or two things, I'm like, I don't know shit about, in this

case, organic chemistry. And I'm like, oh. Mason- It's interesting, lots of people moaned about organic chemistry as being the bit of chemistry they didn't like or they found annoying. I was the opposite, I hate inorganic chemistry because there are no rules and none of it makes any bloody sense. Whereas I always enjoyed organic chemistry because there were nice rules and none of it makes any bloody sense. Whereas I always enjoyed organic chemistry because there were nice rules, and you got to play with the little plastic balls and make models of these increasingly fun, complicated looking molecules. I always enjoyed that.

Shout out to organic chemistry heads. I actually also, the limited amount of organic chemistry I got in chemistry 2, I thought was pretty fun. PFFT. Then you look at the people who do either of these things for a living, right, like professional, either organic chemists or inorganic chemists, and it's like, what do you do for work? Oh, like, some of the most evil shit imaginable. Yeah yeah yeah. You get into petroleum engineering, yeah.

Uh huh. Yeah. And I just wanna look at it and say, haha, look how long the molecule is. Um. So. Anyway. Using these two chemicals, plus an acid, right, the isobutene, and, um, the, ah crap. Um, I lost my place here.

The isobutene, the butene, and the, um, propene. SEAN The propene, yes. Plus an acid, we can create alkylates, right? Which are very high octane hydrocarbons. Like iso-octane here is the standard for 100 octane. ALICE 2-2-4-trimethylpentane. How nice. ALICE That sounds like some shit that I don't want

on me, or around me. SEAN It's, y'know, I mean, people have survived getting splashed with racing fuel. Yeah, survived is a lot of work there though. Yeah, burns so clean that you are on fire invisibly. Oh yeah. Out. So we can blend these hydrocarbons into our final product and produce premium gasoline from our horrible heavy sour crude oil.

So a fairly common process, which is pictured here, uses sulfuric acid, right? ALICE It's really funny that part of the reason why you blend these into your gasoline is to reduce, uh, NOC, which previously you would use lead for. So this whole which previously you would use lead for. So this whole thing stops you from getting lead poisoning. Gives you a bunch of other different poisons, but like, you know. Yeah, no lead poisoning, because you have, uh, you have good gasoline. Mm.

Um, so yeah, fairly common process, which is pictured here, uses sulfuric acid in the alkylation unit, right? It's not particularly efficient, it consumes a lot of sulfuric acid, you know, enough that you need a dedicated sulfuric acid process on site to supply it. Oh my god. It also requires... it requires refrigeration, and so this seems very inconvenient to produce a whole shitload of sulfuric acid constantly. What if there was a more efficient way?

What if there was a better way? SEAN Let's talk about hydrofluoric acid. ALICE Ooh. Don't get this on you. SEAN Yes. ALICE Or, or, yeah, just don't, just don't, don't. RILEY Don't get this mixed up with the cortisol, like this is, no, don't do that. This is not mouthwash. This is critical. So hydrofluoric acid is not to be confused with hydrochloric acid.

Yeah, that one's fine. You can mouthwash with that. No problem. Pretty much, yeah. It's in your stomach. It's supposed to be. This one has a fluorine instead of a chlorine. So this stuff is really nasty

Yeah Right. Yes. So my local and Zen cast are crashed on me Zencasters showing finished it crashed at 48 minutes in how far in are we we are an one hour or two? Okay, so I've lost 14 minutes of audio. Okay, well, I mean, you were muted for most of that. No, I was talking, I was making jokes, but it's fine, let's just, I don't have time to redo it, so. Okay, well, we simply eat the lack of Liam.

We eat the 14 minutes, yeah. Yeah, and we keep the local recordings and send those to death. Yeah, alright. Yeah, okay. Yep. And we need more Liam in the second half, then. That's the only way. Alright, we can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we need to do is, uh, we need to restart the Zencaster, um, and... One second. We're back? I believe we're back. We've never been so back. Okay. Are we back?

We're back. Oh, let me get rid of my face. Goodbye. Lovely. Then we will need to, uh, re-sync the audio. Um. Yes. Do we want- are we going for- are we keeping the- keeping our locals running as they were?

Yeah, please. Yeah, that will save so much of a headache. Thank you, Devon. Hi, Devon. Alright. Three, two, one. Mark. Right. Alright. Let's go back into it.

Hydrofluoric acid burns. Hydroflu- yes, okay. Hydrofluoric acid. Not to be confused with hydrochloric acid, this one's got a fluorine instead of a chlorine on it, right? Don't fuck around with a fluorine, I swear to God. If it's got the phoneme, floor, floor in there and it's not in your toothpaste, go nowhere near it.

Yeah. So, this stuff is really nasty. It's extremely corrosive to the point where normal acid handling protocols don't work very well. Oh. It'll eat glass. Me too. It'll burn sand.

Oh dear. It reacts vigorously with most metals. It boils at room temperature and becomes a very nasty gas called hydrogen fluoride. It's also extremely fond of flesh and bone. Oh, I mean don't we all but but you know. Yeah. HF burns are very nasty. The first thing it does is it takes out your nerves HF burns are very nasty. The first thing it does is it takes out your nerves so you don't feel anything, so you don't seek treatment for hours afterwards until problems start to occur. Oh, I was gonna say, cause that one doesn't sound too bad at the start.

Everyone likes having their nerves taken out. Uh, HF readily penetrates your skin and your flesh and goes right to work dissolving your bones. Oh no. No. No. Yeah. Don't worry, it also fucks up your flesh as well. Comforting.

And distributes pretty widely, because once it gets into your blood it will react with the calcium in it. Which is a bad time. Yeah. Yeah, it'll go into your circulatory system, it's also distributed enough around the body, causes horrible damage everywhere. It also happily penetrates latex gloves. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. Um, this is not the worst chemical out there, but it's probably one of the worst ones commonly used in industry, and in industrial quantities. Yeah, all the others are also fluoride. These get hauled around in trains, right? Uh, no. No, okay. You don't transport, well, generally you just don't transport hydrofluoric acid.

Okay. Good. Yeah, it doesn't move. Like, it stays where it is. Yeah, you gotta make it on site. But they also said that about vinyl chloride. Oh boy. They do definitely move that around in trains.

Yeah, okay. I like the little picture of the molecule here, which looks like kind of the aftermath of one of my kind of lazy attempts to make a new planet in universe sandbox. So, in the alkylation unit, hydrofluoric acid can be used in place of sulfuric acid. It produces less byproducts, it lasts longer, you can use a lot less hydrogen fluoride than sulfuric acid, and it can produce high octane alkylates from a wider variety of feedstocks. The downside is you have to over-engineer the hell out of the alkylation unit to ensure it doesn't eat itself. Now this is by and large a solved problem."

Yeah, and you just have engineers, chemical engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, who just, you know, you just pay them a bit more money and they design you a fancier thing that doesn't turn into mush and then spread the HF- Yeah, exactly. Just gotta do the maintenance on it. I'm still, I had to track down the, John Clark, in his book Ignition, about chlorine trifluoride, one of the, like, many terrible, terrible chemicals you get in rocket engines. Oh god, yeah. Oh dear.

Yeah. Extremely toxic, hypergolic with every known fuel, so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. Also hypergolic with cloth, wood, test engineers, asbestos, sand, and water with which it reacts explosively. Oh, it's a good job there's not loads of water in the atmosphere. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals, steel, copper, aluminium, etc. because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride, which protects the bulk of

the metal. If however this coat is melted or scrubbed off, the operator is confronted with the problem of a metal fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes. It's a good idea. I like that a lot. Now, so the Gerard Point refinery was relatively unique in the United States. We've talked a lot about importing sour crude oil for use as feedstock. This was a very large refinery set up exclusively for light sweet crude oil for use as feedstock. This was a very large refinery set up

exclusively for light sweet crude oil. A whole lot of the process units for heavy sour oil were just never installed. Most notably the one that really makes the economics work right now, which is a delayed Coker. Well, it's too delayed. Yeah, exactly. Never showed up.

This meant that in the latter half of the 20th century it began to have sort of questionable economics Mmm, okay. So this is a combination of two oil earlier refineries the Atlantic Refining companies point breeze refinery and Gulf oils Gerard point refinery. So Hold on. There's okay. The the Platte bridge isery. So, hold on, there's... okay, the Platte Bridge is here, so... actually, I think this may only be a picture of the Girard Point side, and then Point Breeze is over there. Anyway. ALICE Okay, so it just spans the river. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. So, Atlantic had interests in the oldest oil fields in Pennsylvania,

thus it located its major refinery in close proximity to both the oil and to population centers. Great. Oh good. Um, I mean, safety wasn't invented yet. Yes. Well, people had to walk to work, you know? I mean... Mm.

Uh, Gulf located a refinery here because it was near population centers, and by the 20th century, or the early 20th century, big oil tankers were finally practical. Obviously not that big, but they're not like merchant sailing ships filled with barrels of crude oil. Sure. Right? Mm-hmm. Both these sites have had a lot of history and a lot of legacy infrastructure.

They've been refining oil on this site consistently since 1874. Jesus. Wow. And the site has not been without its fair share of accidents in that time. What I thought was worth mentioning would be the 1975 fire, just cause it may tie into a certain other podcast. Didn't have too much time to go into detail on this. Big beautiful golf sign though.

Oh yeah. Right on this big beautiful Art Deco building that just got demolished. F. Yeah. Don't have time to go into a lot of detail on this, this could almost be its own episode, but a tank exploded from being overfilmed, the fire was almost contained, another tank exploded right as the firefighters were containing that fire. Fire Commissioner Joseph Rizzo watched eight of his men consumed by flames right in front of his eyes. Oh dear.

Jesus. And then Mayor Frank Rizzo broke his leg. Good. Should've broke the rest of him. The fire commissioner's leg. No, no, no. Joseph Rizzo was traumatized, Frank Rizzo was on the scene, also there, just because he was Frank Rizzo, and then one of the tanks exploded, his security guard ran away, and

tripped over the mare, breaking the mare's leg. A bad day for a- a bad day to be a Rizzo. Yeah. And the podcast is called No Gods No Mares. Go to nogodsnomares.com. JUSTIN Um, so this was an 11 alarm fire, it was the worst fire the refinery had until there was a 9 alarm flyer a week later. It was not a week, it was more like a year. Anyway. Eventually- ALICE This facility has worked 364 days without a lost time accident.

Don't ask about 365. I had time to cause one. Now, Sunoco, we remember, took over Atlantic Refining in 1988, in 1994 they take over the GoFoil half, which was then owned by Chevron. They could really fucking do a logo back in the day. They could. They could. NASCAR, which they don't bake.

The little swoosh on the end there. I guess it's a serif, or s-er-eef? I've never been sure how you pronounce that. But, uh, yeah. It's sort of a serif. It's nice. I like serif. Senoko then does as so many vertically integrated oil businesses did, and starts to exit the

production side of the business. They idle the Marcus Hook refinery, they demolish their Eagle Point refinery in West Deptford Township, New Jersey, and Sunoco sells half of the combined Point Breeze-Gerard Point refinery to the Carlisle Group in 2012. It's like investment, guys. Yes, exactly. They subsequently focus entirely on retail sales of fuel. So uh, guess who makes the official fuel of NASCAR?

Not Sanoco? Not Sanoco. They just sell it. It's all brands now! Just brands. Just brands all the way down. The Carlisle Group subsequently scranges up some funds to keep this antique refinery going under the moniker Philadelphia Energy Solutions.

Or PES. That's a- see, this is a shit logo. Why is it a shit logo? Is because it's so low effort, because it's so clearly just like, spin this thing out, call it something, fucking, I don't know, Philadelphia Energy Solutions. Yeah, sure. Essentially, the success of this project required a few conditions, one of which was privatizing the Philadelphia Gas Works, the subsequent construction of a large diameter natural gas

pipeline from the refinery to the fracking fields, and the conversion of the facility to take more natural gas as a feedstock There would also be just a little bit of direct public subsidy Let me say a little bit. Well, how much we talking here? How many zeros? Several? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was about to say about seven Rob. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was about to say about seven Now the thing is almost none of this pans out Oh Despite Mayor Michael nutters best efforts to sell the gas works. It's still in public Yeah, second name alert the mayor what now nutter mayor nutter

He's kind of a goofy guy. He's a goofy dude. So obviously this refinery is sort of on shaky grounds. What happens next? Good things, I'm sure. Yeah. Oh yeah. Back in crude oil came to the rescue.

Some random farmer discovers the oil came to the rescue. Some random farmer discovers the largest deposit of the resource. So PES winds up benefiting from so-called shut-in oil, right? Oil that's being produced but can't easily be transported due to the lack of pipeline capacity. That meant that a lot of the sweet crude oil was sitting in North Dakota with no way to be processed and no way to be transported. ALICE Yep, shout out to the DAPL protesters. They were right. SEAN Yeah, exactly. So this resulted in the one

crude oil exchange, the West Texas Intermediate, trading at a discount compared to Brent crude oil everywhere else. This was compounded by the fact that while the back end formation was being exploited, the US still had a blanket export ban on domestic crude oil. So PES was in an ideal spot to exploit this. It had pretty good rail access, it had ready supplies of cheap, sweet crude oil, all they had to do was take in a dozen or so mile long back and crude oil trains that went right through the center city- Right next to Char- yeah.

Yeah right next to Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania right here. Um. Oh god. Yeah, if you're a sick kid you can look out on this like crude oil train and feel better. Yeah, there's like a dozen of them a day. Thankfully there are no previous episodes of this podcast that talk about the consequences of running these sorts of trains through built up areas. Oh.

Wouldn't worry about it. Completely safe. Uh. I think they did derail one in the South Philly rail yard once. Oh my god. It did not explode, but it did derail. So it looked for a while like, alright, we've carved out this insane niche that shouldn't exist, and the refinery's future was, you know, secure. And then two things happened.

Things always be happening. So two things happened. Things always be happening. So two things happened that ruined this brief run. Number one is there was a big downturn in oil prices in 2014, during which time OPEC refused to cut production, that lowered the Brent price and therefore the discount that PES was counting on to stay competitive. Then in 2015, the oil export ban was lifted. Now your West Texas Intermediate Oil was an international market, which also meant there was basically no discount on it anymore. So the whole thing became pointless.

So all of a sudden they were, yeah, they were paying a lot of money to import, to bring all this oil down on so many goddamn trains a day. down on so many goddamn trains a day. Uh. I genuinely- it was constant, um, for a while. A dozen mile long trains a day. A day. This is like me when I fuck up in workers and resources. This is like how many trains you have to run in Transport Fever 2 because the game basically

makes you run an entire railway like a metro system. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting how we both went to the video game that we play about this, and no one has mentioned Cities Skylines 2. LIAM Oh yeah, well. RILEY Oh, now there's an episode. Anyway, no, no there's not, it's not, it's fine. SEAN Yeah, it was, the state, I believe, paid for

them to build a new crude oil terminal. It was like called a rapid unloading terminal so they could get these mile long crude oil trains like, um, like turned around in a few hours. So yeah, these, these, uh, they, they, they moved a lot of oil in by train, and all of a sudden it didn't work anymore. Oh, stonks to stinks. Stinks. Not stonks.

Not stonks. PES couldn't afford to ship in the oil by rail, they go back to using ships, right? A brand new state funded unloading facility was written off. This was sort of spun at the time as addressing the city's concerns about having all that crude oil run through Centre City. It was not about that, it was about economics. Yeah, like they cared about Centre City. Yeah, exactly. Ultimately, PES can only struggle on for a few more years. The entire company enters bankruptcy in 2018. Ultimately, the outlook here is very bleak.

This is a large, old-fashioned refinery with high labor costs and a limited range of expensive feedstocks. Upgrading the facility was out of the question at this point, so they turned to President Donald J. Trump. Oh, Jesus. And asked for relief from complying with the renewable fuel standard, which is the one that makes you put ethanol in the gasoline because corn ethanol is sustainable, I guess. You're sort of like...

You're Great Plains farmer's bribe. Right. Yeah. So this was designed back in 2005 to accelerate the development of advanced biofuels, and I'm sure we'll get one of them one of these days That's I didn't weigh had an echo to to to the last episode we recorded actually around about this time Everyone was convinced that biofuels were the future and they were gonna save everyone's ass Any second now there's also this sort of inscrutable financialized credit system, which during the bankruptcy the Trump administration allowed PES to bend the rules on, and that raised them about $350

million. Uh huh. Yeah, I couldn't figure out how it works. Oil guys when they find something that doesn't involve a financial instrument. Yes. So they got their waiver, they got the money, but that wasn't enough to fix the finances, they make it through chapter 11 bankruptcy by the skin of their teeth, they needed major investments to keep the plant competitive, and a miracle was needed for that money to

be found, right? ALICE It's like the bit in a, like a, you know, Disney movie or whatever. We need like $359 to save the community center. Yeah, we're gonna start a bank sale to save the neighborhood. Putting on a show, yeah. Yeah. According to the UNI-

The inspirational music roles in just 50,000 people are dead of HF exposure. This is from the Union of Concerned Scientists report. PES also expected major turnarounds coming due in order to continue operating, and these would require investments in equipment renewals. The sulfuric alkylation unit in 2018, low sulfur gasoline would need new equipment in 2019, they would need a sulfur plant in 2019 and 2020 They would need a distillate de-sulfurizer in 2020. What are you doing with this fucking sulfur, man? Like, make your mind up. Fucking it. Fucking it.

They need a hydrofluoric alkylation turnaround in 2020. They need the Turnaround here is doing really heavy maintenance, right? Gerard Point fluid catalytic cracker 2019, reformer in 2020, I don't know what an UDAX says but they need that, yeah. Butane isomerization unit. You gotta isomerize your butane. All this stuff would be incredibly fucking expensive to do.

Just a standard ass Amazon Prime order list right there. I'm pretty sure you gotta go to Alibaba for this. Teemo. Just like, yeah, we need you to build us a new oil refiner. Essentially. Yeah, you were looking at renewing all this equipment. It was also unclear if PES was actually in compliance with existing environmental standards on gasoline.

Duff. Like they give a shit? so the company's finances were clearly still on the rocks when in january 2019 they scrapped a major maintenance turnaround, right, where the plant would actually have to be shut down for a very long time. so whether this would have caught the problem we're about to see is anyone's guess, but they were at this point deferring maintenance. Oh, that's always a recipe for success.

It is John Opel. Yeah, good God. Okay, here's another annoying diagram from the CSP. So in red here, this is the actual alkylation unit, right? Uh-huh. But we also have to talk about the things that happen afterwards. Shit, a lot of pipes. Yes.

Not all of the product is fully processed in the alkylation unit, so we have some additional processes to return usable product back to the alkylation unit. Oh, Jesus. That's the depropanizer, right, and the propane stripper. ALICE & LIAM The two sides of Hank Hill's nightmares. ALICE & LIAM Oh, yeah. At 3.34am, an operator in the refinery's main control room starts the process of reconfiguring the alkylation unit so that the propane stripper bottoms-

That's where? Fucking where? Yeah, down here at the bottom. That's the products that come out the bottom. Yeah, likely places them to be. Exactly. They flowed to a treatment unit for storage instead of being recycled back into the alkylation unit, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. This is to remove excess propane from the unit because the propane just sort of accumulated over time.

The operator also slowly increased the feed into the propane stripper from 73 barrels per hour to 80 barrels per hour. Pumping 80 barrels per hour into the propane stripper. Yeah. Jesus. And presumably, like, commanding all of this with the finest industrial technology of the 1950s. Yes. Jesus.

Well, probably about 1973. Oh, okay. Okay. Which I believe is when this unit was installed. You're like your sort of anti-woke 1970s, uh, like propane stripper control unit. Yeah. So it's 73, so all of this is like, slightly charbroiled from the 1975 fire? Um, good question.

I think this is on the... yeah, this would be on the Gulf oil side. So yeah It's got lots of like white like hand white marks People saying we try the Cocks yeah, that's it. Just drawn in this suit on the side of the tanks nice So at just after 4 a.m. An elbow between the deep open the deep propulator, and the propane stripper ruptured. It all comes back to pipes, once again. It's all bad welding at the end of the day. This is dangerous because A. Propane is flammable.

B. At this part of the process, the propane is contaminated with more than trace amounts of hydrofluoric acid. Oh, fucksticks. Something like 2.5%. Anything above 0% is bad. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's 2.5% more hydrofluoric acid than I ever want involved in anything originally. Correct.

Yes. So, okay. Down here we have, okay, one thing I have to say about this diagram is that for some reason North is down. Okay. Mmhmm. Yeah. So, we have down here, here is the alkylation unit as a whole.

There is a control room for the local operators that's attached to the old control room. The new control room was blast proof. Oh good. Yeah, exactly. And you have two field operators inside the blast resistant control room. One of them is outside.

Oh, no. No. All three of them heard outside. Oh, no. Oh, boy. No. All three of them heard a bang and a roaring noise. Oh, you never want to hear a bang and a roaring noise. No, no, no. In an oil refinery? I suspect not. No.

The one who was outside went back into the control room. I think he fucking did. Through the old control room. Saw to his horror a large cloud of ground hugging vapor the juice was loose when I when I pull my oil refinery employees service weapon that is only used for like you have to bleep that as well. So go for it in Cyanide tablet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotcha. They should issue you those in these situations, I feel. It's not a situation you want to be in.

No. So, at this point alarms start blaring in the control room, there's various low flow warnings, acid detectors, all kinds of things. The field controllers are overwhelmed instantly. One of them inside the control room, oh, one of them opens the door from inside the control room, sees the vapor cloud had now enveloped the whole building, and he shut it again. Yeah, what else do you do, right?

Like, just, yeah. Nah, fuck this. Nope, no, no, no. No, no, no. But the other guy. Doing the kind of like looking through the window and the door like a teacher asking if they can borrow a kid from a class. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, slamming the door shut. Yeah, either you close the door or the door will be closed for you. Wait, the door closed? Yeah, exactly.

Oh, okay, that makes sense. It's an outwards opening door. I don't know why I was visualizing a door opening inwards for some reason, but no, okay, that makes sense. Outwards opening door, slam shut. Blast resistance. Blast resistance. Yes.

Yeah. He was shaken but not injured, so that was just a comedy experience. What? Just like ragdolled across a comedy experience. Just like ragdolled across a control room. Source engine ragdolls. Covered in soot. Oh, Nico.

The first flash had rapidly consumed most but not all of the propane, so the field operators made their escape out the north door of the control room. ALICE It just burns off. Perfect. SEAN Yeah. They radioed the central control room. They needed to activate the rapid acid de-inventory system. ALICE That's such a euphemism.

I love the de-inventory. I love to make de-inventory. ALICE You're too much of a shitting out inventory right now. SEAN I think we gotta de-inventory this guy. ALICE All of us have been on a recent de-inventory'd. ALICE I'm not too much of a shittin' out inventory right now. JUSTIN I think we gotta de-inventory this guy. ALICE All of us have been on a recent de-inventory risk of AMLO, it's, you know, I like that. ALICE I mean, this guy just got de-inventory'd across

the room, you know? JUSTIN So, this is a clever piece of kit, essentially this process unit is so goddamn hazardous, the designers foresaw the need to shove all the horrible chemical contents into one big protected drum as quickly as possible in the event of a fire or other problem. Uh-huh. The rapid acid de-inventory system does just that. Well, hooray. Put that on a T-shirt.

It's so good, I love that. This is cool, this is genuinely cool, this is like, it triggers the same sort of feeling for me as the Apollo program escape tower, y'know? Yes! Something needs to happen very quickly, and violence will be used to achieve this end. Yeah, so essentially, the turn on the pumps, all the stuff from these two tanks up here flows into this tank down here, and also this tank here. I think all you have to do is open a valve.

Um. That's reassuring. It's just like the mother of all valves. Yeah, exactly, everything gets pumped into the big tank and it sits there off-site and protected as a horrible pile of acidic slop. Neat. Yeah, do you want your acidic slop on-site or off-site? Yeah, exactly.

Ask yourself, Hogs. So two minutes and 21 seconds after the incident started, the rapid acid de-inventory was activated, but it would take some time to pump all 43,000 gallons of acid and product into the tank. In the meantime, more problems were developing with the process unit. Emergency responders pulled up about 4 or 6 AM, they began setting up monitors as the firefighting sense of monitor, which is a fixed water cannon that's pointed at the Ah, so not just a guy with a pair of binoculars and a whistle. Looks bad, man! They set up a very low-lying 19th century early war ship.

Yeah, now they've got a bunch of big 36 inch gaming monitors. Set up a bunch of Maramax. Oh god. It's like a monitor, but more racist. Yeah. Yep. There were additional very large permanent water cannons that were designed for to mitigate any HF release. Those would have also assisted in suppressing the fire, which was still ongoing, but the

remote activate controls for them had failed, and no one could get to them to manually turn them on. Oh, that's terrific. We're gonna need you to put on this suit and go and activate the fucking HF cannons. You've told me six songs about you, see ya later! The suit is coming. Oh no. I was joking.

You gotta step away from the lathe. Like, the number of times this has happened, people are gonna think that I read ahead. I swear to you, I have not read ahead on this. So the fire was too hot to get to the controls. To get to the- to manually operate the pumps. And at 415AM, the first small explosion occurred. Then a second occurred at 41919am, both of these were contained within the unit, but the fire was worsening. And then, ugh. Yeah, the whole damn alkylation

unit blew up at 4.22 in the morning. This can't be good for the camera. Oh, yeah, that's bleaching your sensor bleaching your bleaching your sensor right there um I did not like that the previous slide just casually had two explosions on it It didn't fit that that was there was there's some unpleasant foreshadowing there just two casual explosions Couple a couple tiny as opposed to this which is like a professional explosion yeah Couple a couple tiny ones as opposed to this which is a like a professional explosion. Yeah So the treater feeds surge drum. That's a V1 up here

Essentially that was just a big tank for the feedstock for the out alkylation unit. I gives up the ghost it fails Catastrophically and it explodes sending refinery parts hundreds of feet into the air. Ooh. Mm-hmm. Infamously, half of this tank was found 2,000 feet away on the other side of the Schuylkill River. That's bad. Jesus. So, this explosion also woke up everyone in the city.

You bet it did. Yeah. Except me, because I fell asleep in like two minutes. Yeah, you were asleep with us. Yeah, you were asleep with us. I think we were both asleep with at this because we were both drunk. Yeah. The two Philadelphians who were just like, whatever.

If I go, I go. We lived like what, two miles from it? We would have been in the- Hold on, I'm measuring, I'm measuring. Well, Ross, while you do that measurement, I want to briefly talk about explosions. So most explosions are no fun at all, and they're just like a big bump pump of air and they just make a load of dust and there's no big fireball. This is like a proper Hollywood like big beautiful bright fireball. Once you get those hydrocarbons in there, you know? Yeah, ooo.

Very very reactive, you know? Yeah. I mean the pyromaniac in me is very pleased, you know? Yeah. And very, like... I mean the pyromaniac in me is very pleased, but also this is in the middle of an enormous built up area, so... I would say we were somewhere between three and three and a half miles, so I couldn't quite place where the out-colation year was. I don't think that we would've been going too good, dude. So there's, I don't know if I've told this story before, but in the Scottish Central Belt near, in

Falkirk, near the Grangemouth refinery, so there's all the petrochemical stuff in the Scottish Central Belt, off the 1st and 4th Grangemouth, the Falkirk football stadium was built in, they didn't quite get the distances right. And so one of the wing, one of their intended wings of the football stadium could not be built because it was inside the dotted line of the, this bit gets vaporized zone if Grangemouth refinery goes up. Oh, good enough. So, yeah. So, I mean, I presume you wouldn't be doing too nice if you're on the, just the other side of the dotted line either. But yeah, so if anyone's ever wondering why there's a half of the, or a quarter of Falkirk football club stadiums missing, that's why. This refinery is interesting in that there was actually a small residential neighborhood

essentially inside of it. Wait, what? What? Yeah, I probably should have... Led with that? Put that up somewhere. Yeah, I probably should've led with that. Yeah, it's right off of Passchunk Avenue. Hold on, I put the Google map over here. There it is. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, that was right.

How did this happen? How did this come to occur? Well, it used to be two refineries. Oh, okay, and people just lived in the middle. Walter Street. And then the Gas Works was over here. Porcher Street. Yeah.

The Sonoco Gas Station. They got a nice big, they got a nice big gasometer too. Anyway, before I reveal secrets here. Yeah, uh, yeah. Don't ever go on Twitter, that's the secret. Yeah, exactly. So almost everyone except Roz and Liam are awake now. That's where we're at.

Sit-Ram, everyone's awake except Roz and Liam. How are we doing on like broken windows? Um, I don't think there were that many. This is not like a high speed explosion. This could have gone way fucking worse. Yeah, as you're saying, like a big Hollywood, it's like Hollywood, so it's not a huge, it's not like a Beirut sort of High speed blast. It's just it's a very big fiery powerful, but but fairly slow

explosion Yeah, so after the explosion At around 439 in the morning the shift supervisor Don protective gear. I think it's called a bunker suit weird name Supervisor Don Protective Gear, I think it's called a bunker suit. ALICE Weird name. Don Protective Gear? SEAN Don Protective Gear. DARREN And he finally made it to the water pumps and turned them on.

This was sufficient to suppress residual hydrogen fluoride, but not enough to contain the fire. ALICE So he actually had to do the Fallout 3 and what the hell. SEAN Yeah, you gotta put on a horrible suit and go into the horrible fire. Turn on a water cannon. The big suit from Loki series 2, you walk out there. You know what? I appreciate that it's the shift supervisor, right?

I'm sure you could have got a higher ranking guy to do that, but it's not like that one safety third we got where it's like, oh the apprentice has to do it, you know? Your duties include making tea, making coffee, donning the fucking hyper asbestos suit, and like entering into the zone of danger. Yeah, the person with the tier two health plan is, for once, is the person who's actually going out and putting the work in. Okay fine, good. Yeah. Uh, I apologize for this, I really have to use the restroom, I'll be right back.

It's all good, we'll vamp. Yeah, we can treadmill. Yeah, that's fine. Mm-hmm. I have my calligraphy supplies, or my first batch thereof. Go on. So I got a bunch of inks from a Korean company called, I'm gonna fuck up the name. It's like, Wearing Gyuul. Gyuul is like a letter in Korean, I think. And yeah, I got a bunch of these, I have a bunch of cheap Chinese fountain pens from AliExpress, which are very very good. And I'm just, while we're recording, I'm just fucking around on Scratchpad, trying to get

back into some calligraphy. That's sweet. That's really cool. Yeah. Having a great time. I, yeah, yeah. I, one of the things I used to really enjoy doing when I did, art and design, at higher, advanced higher in fact, was, I used to love just getting in, getting in and getting into the pens and like just doing some really nice pen and ink stuff. And I suppose that kind of foreshadowed my interest in typefaces and stuff, which I'm a nerd about. So yeah.

ALICE I can't draw at all for shit, but I'm not a horrible calligrapher. You know, something I used to do. And you know, so I'm going to try and get back into it because I really like the kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously like another tremendously expensive and annoying hobby. I'm gonna try and get back into it, because I really like the kind of like... Oh, that's exciting! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously another tremendously expensive and annoying hobby. Oh, dude, you have to post some of the results, I'm super keen to see it, sounds really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I get any that I'm happy with, I need a proper workspace for it, but I'm hopeful for

having one of those soon. And yeah. I really like, like, blackletter calligraphy, like, like, fractor. A circle core, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, like, to me, easier, right, because you're just, you're like holding the pen flat, you're not doing any of the, like, weird, sort of like, Copper Place or Spencerian stuff. But yeah, you don't even have to have a kind of like, I don't know, it works well with thick line weights as well.

Mason- One of the calligraphy styles that's always appealed to me is ornate, but obviously crafted in a sense. So some of them are so exquisite that you almost cannot tell that it's not been mass produced. And I mean that in a positive way because it's so intricate, but perfectly created. I've always quite enjoyed ones where you've got all the serifs, all the really fancy stuff in the start, but also you can almost see the hand rotations to achieve the different marks. I don't know why, I suppose a bit like a locomotive that's been hand-bashed, that's all the metal where it's hand-bashed and you can see all the dents from the original hammer that built it. I find a satisfaction

in that. ALICE Yeah, a little sort of imperfections or textures. RILEY Exactly. You can sort of see the person who's kind of holding the pen, which is quite nice. ALICE That's brilliant. Mm. Yeah. This has been Calligraphy Hour. Yeah, sorry. Calligraphy Hour.

Calligraphy Hour begins now and does not end. Does not end. You will be subject to Calligraphy Hour. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, Calligraphy in itself could be a decent episode. I'd be happy to record that. Because like, yeah, there's a lot of history there and like- Oh, I'm sure there are some disasters as a

result of misinterpreted or misrepresented... yeah, absolutely. ALICE Yeah, well I mean the reason why Black Letter Calligraphy exists, even though it's less legible than stuff that preceded it, is because it's faster to write? When I say it's easier, I'm not just saying that, it's like a technological advancement in the sense of, like, fucking, I don't know, Middle Ages Cory Doctorow, early modern Cory Doctorow would call it shittification, right, but like, because what you're getting is a scriptorium that can produce books much more quickly, but they are harder to read. And ultimately, what you had was this return with a V to tradition of a Carolingian

hand, which is much more readable, much more humanistic, and which would otherwise take longer. So, yeah. I mean, I, let's just, let's just do this. We don't need to talk about the aftermath of this horrifying explosion. I'm absolutely hooked now. There is absolutely now going to be a Wikipedia tab explosion that's going to keep me entertained until four thirty in the morning. Interesting thing to read about is, um, Courthand, or Anglicana, which was one of the distinctly English forms of calligraphy, but which existed solely within the legal system.

And it was like, uh, court roles and stuff like that had to be written in Anglicana. And even as late as like, y'know, 19 century, you know, after it was sort of like banned, after it fell out of use, to go into legal archives you still needed to be able to read this very strange kind of like, script. That kind of like, long since, not long. Because I- Mason- Now I'm fascinated to know about the history of the ability to read who a particular, what a particular school or even in trained individual that the origin

of certain forms and within or, or, or certain texts within the form. Um, and, and, and textions are getting, you know, doing things like deliberate errors to protect, but repeated ones to protect against forgery and stuff like that. Now I'm very, okay. The times continue. Let's let's go back. I got it. I gotta do a bunch of shit Okay So Anyway, so the shift supervisor turns on the the the fixed monitors, right? This is enough to suppress the residual hydrogen fluoride that's in the atmosphere around the process unit But not enough to contain the fire right mm-hmm additional fire fighter fighters make it to the scene in including the both

firefighters from the plant itself from the local private Industrial fire department which just sort of covers all of the chemical plants in this area Horrible job. Yeah, and the fact for you. So well they got a lot of specialized knowledge. You know Fuck that for a year, soldiers. Well, they got a lot of specialized knowledge, you know, which is useful. And from the Philadelphia Fire Department. It took over 24 hours to extinguish the blaze with the final embers being put out on the morning of Saturday, June 22nd.

The stored HF mixture had to be neutralized over a period of months, which was completed on August 27th. Just slowly pumping fuckin' Pepto-Bismol into the van full of kill-you-instantly chemical. How do you neutralize a giant HF spitlight? I mean, you joke, but I just visualize it. It is just guys with like 250 crates of Pepto-Bismol just emptying those pink little balls in there. Just one at a time. Yeah, you have to- You have to- They send in the Gavaskhan cum fireflies in?

You have to turn it into a salt in some method. Oh, okay. Yeah, you gotta precipitate out all that fluoride. I don't know exactly how it works. Nasty, nasty work. Right in, as you do know. Ultimately, there's no injuries and no fatalities, which is astonishing considering how bad it could have gotten.

Mm. That's amazing. I mean, so, even with all of this like, extreme degeneration of like, the plant and everything else around it, like, the system works. Sort of. Sort of, yeah. Sort of doing a lot of work there, yeah. And the things still blew up.

Hi, milkshake. Uh oh. No, that's the microphone. Hi, milkshake. Milkshake unpaid contributor. I was about to say, yeah. So, uh, let's talk about what almost happened here. This is one of the goldfish tests, right?

Where the Department of Energy released large quantities of hydrogen fluoride in the desert to study what would happen. ALICE Oh, the Department of Energy's some scary fucking bureaucrats. Closest thing to the Federal Bureau of Control going. JUSTIN They're just fucking around in the desert, they're just out there doing shit. Mm.

JUSTIN Hope you're not an armadillo in this cloud Prior to these tests oil refiner's thought than a large HF release it would remain liquid milkshake get out of the way the notes He's very happy to see me I've been away for a bit It would remain liquid and pool on the ground, thus alkylation units were protected by the standard containment dikes that you see around oil tanks and things like that. ALICE How much did they actually believe this? How much was this just, I don't, like, wanna pay for more stuff? ALICE Like, who's to say maybe, right?

SEAN Very much, sort of, I don't wanna think about that. Yeah. Let's hope it doesn't happen. When these tests were performed, of course a different condition was observed. The HF forms of massive vapor cloud that... God dammit, milkshake. Saboteur. I was about to say. Um.

The HF forms a massive vapor cloud that then spreads out over the landscape, reducing animal and vegetable alike into sort of goo. Oh, I do not like that. This is not ideal in the middle of a major city, particularly when prevailing winds would drive the HF cloud directly into the densest parts of South Philly. Jeeze. Can you imagine Philly 9-11 but it's just like everybody you know gets reduced to goo? Yeah, everyone gets turned into a sort of slop, yeah, that would not be good.

Supply homogenous, you might say. Well, I'm imagining, I don't know, maybe there's a house show running really late and the gas comes in and, y' know Concentrates in the basement Not good not good least it didn't happen in Pittsburgh cuz I've taken out a bunch more of them cuz the basement toilets That's a good point. Yeah No house shows in the basement. It would be a I don't know maybe it's like a metal band with one of those insane logos Yeah, and then all of a sudden everyone in there looks like that insane Metal sucks used to do unreadable metal logo of the week

I love your life, Liam So anyway, we have a lot to thank the control room workers for had that hf not been de-inventoryed so quickly there would have been a lot of people just turned into sort of You well we would have been de-inventorying hf. We've been de-inventorying a third of the population of Philly Like a septic tank truck, you know just sort of suck everyone Septic tank truck, you know just sort of suck everyone Fine red mist They just pumped it out of the environment. Yes Funniest thing you can do with this is just like we'll just put this over here

I was putting somewhere else now. Yeah, it's not a problem anymore Well anyway around problem anymore. Cool. Well, anyway. Around $750 million of damage was done to the PES refinery, which, to remind you, was old, expensive to operate, only took expensive feedstock, generally very annoying to own and have to operate. Mmhmm. More so now, I imagine. Yes. Yeah, cause it doesn't have that alkylation unit, you can't even make the high quality

fuels anymore. ALICE If you don't schedule time for maintenance, the maintenance schedules the time for you. SEAN Yes. For whom the maintenance tolls. ALICE Mmm. SEAN So, PES has to idle the plant, then they declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy for a second time, on July 21st.

It quickly became clear that Chapter 11 was not feasible, and so the process moved to Chapter 7. Liquidation. ALICE Which is what was going to happen to all the people in South Philly. Mass Chapter 7 event. JUSTIN Oh god. This was, I mean, I assume that's what happens if you declare chapter 7 personal bankruptcy. Well they just liquidate you. They just liquidate you, yeah.

You get in the fucking HF, uh, like, pressure washer. So, chapter 7- New nightmarish weapon invented. Absolutely. Carcher pressure washerer filled with hydrofluoric acid. You're gonna need a hell of a protective suit for that one. So this was opposed by PES's union, it was opposed by the Trump administration, and it was even opposed by a few creditors, right? Because losing refinery this large would eliminate good union jobs. Keep in mind this was one of the largest union employers in the city. This would affect national security because, you know, this is a very, very big refinery that's good for refining domestic

crude oil. And it would put unsecured creditors at risk of losing their investments, respectively, right? That being said, there were plenty of people who were in favor of closing the refinery, not the least of whom were the people living near it who were almost liquefied. Understandably. And so it wound up, okay, the refinery's closing, we can't reopen it.

There's a wide range of proposed ideas for the site, right? Mayor Jim Kenny's administration convened the refinery advisory group to involve the public in decisions about the future of the site Drexel's Lindy Center for Urban Something or other released a wide-ranging report on future uses for the area after remediation All of this involved, you know, public stakeholders, blah, blah, blah, you know, the sort of thing that you do when you release a big long report. All of this was completely ignored and the site was sold to Hillco Development Partners. Wait, what? This is a site that's... What? So this is a site that's bigger than Center City,

right? This is a huge area. It's massive. It is a massive, massive site. And it just got sold off, just straight off to the development part. It's not seen as like a genuine public good that could have been, you know, usefully expanded a nice walkable new part of the city. Condos! No, absolutely not. What if condos?

No, it's not condos either, it's worse. Oh god. So anyway, the workers were laid off, the refiner was closed permanently, the future of this massive site directly adjacent to the center of the fifth largest city in the country was thoroughly and completely in private hands. Oh, here's the disaster part then. Yeah. Now before we get to that, I will say, okay, what was the cause of the incident?

Bad corrosion. Bad corrosion. Bad corrosion. It was corrosion. Yeah. Well, I'll do it. I'll do it. Yeah. Namely, it was different cause of the incident? It was corrosion. Bad rotting. Yeah, it was corrosion. It was corrosion. Well, I'll do it. Yeah.

Namely it was different metals corroding at different rates. Huh. Uh, I mean, this'll get you on a bridge as well, as we've discovered. Most of the carbon steel piping on the alkylation unit was made from an alloy which was low in nickel and copper. This elbow, however, right here, was made from Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company's proprietary YOLOI. Oh, that's...

YOLOI. Yeah, I heard a Drake song about that once. It had a much higher nickel and copper concentration. This made the steel... It's the worst elbow thing to happen since the keyboard player turned out to be a turf. This made the steel more ductile and easier to work, and in fact it still had pretty good corrosion resistance, but not so much that it could be used continuously, subjected to trace hydrogen fluoride from 1973 to 2019.

Oh good. Mm. At some point it's about to hit its mcfucking limit. Yeah, I don't want any components in an oil refinery to be called YOLO. I don't like that. It's the YOLOI. Oh. It's the accent.

These two parts, they've been working on a cocktail called Grounds for Divorce. There were random inspections to determine corrosion in pipes, but not on every component, so somehow everyone admits that while this elbow was installed, when this elbow was installed it had a wall thickness of a third of an inch, and when it ruptured it had a wall thickness of a hundredth of an inch. Oh, that's not a lot! That's very thin. That's half the thickness of a credit card. Yeah, that's gold foil levels of thickness there. This is paper thin, level of... yeah, okay.

Good. You gotta hire more pipe inspectors, I think. Pay your pipe guys. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, this is far less than the standard for retiring and replacing a section of pipe like this. And of course, y'know, this has been a very unloved facility for about, for a good chunk of this time, right?

It was, y'know, it was old, it was decrepit. If the oil refinery doesn't feel loved, it will explode. Yeah. It's very needy. LIAM Yeah. Who amongst us? ALICE Oh, same. Yeah. I'm referencing a Vice article, some of you will know.

LIAM As a result of this, there are now more stringent practices in the industry about inspecting piping on alkylation units. All pipes must be inspected and not a random sample I feel so much better about this and anyway problem solved there we go yeah job creation for the pipe inspector now we have some great job creation coming thanks to Hillco development partners they are putting on this shit the bellwether district they're building the Bellwether district. What the fuck is a Bellwether district?

It's a bunch of fulfillment warehouses. Oh my god. Are you shitting me? Fucking da- great! Amazon fulfillment center, but it gives everyone who works in it cancer, and also probably you cancer, from getting the Amazon parcel. And also Amazon is an unusable website now because it's all full of knockoff bullshit. Do you know why this is? And I say this as someone who's lived on... The last two places

I've lived have been on former industrial sites and therefore have had to have ground remediation. This is to avoid doing the onerous ground remediation. All they have to do is basically drive a dozer over the top of its hill, it's flat, and then put the rapid fire giant Amazon fulfillment warehouse on top. ALICE Just sprinkle some Amazon workers over it and call it good. JUSTIN Exactly. I think they've been doing some amount of remediation, but yeah, they're obviously not

aiming for residential or commercial uses here. At least in this part. Further up, I think they have something they're calling an innovation district up here. That'd be closer to Point Bruce. Yeah, innovating new kinds of cancer. Yeah. The good thing is, they probably put more biomedical space up there so they can cure the cancers as quickly as they can make new ones. The good thing is that when, you know, the city gets taken over by the, when we see the good future take over, you can quite easily flatten this lot, redo the ground remediation and actually convert

it into useful human space. Yeah, I mean the other thing that gets me about this is this site has excellent rail access. Oh, they're going to use that again. I think there's one building down here that can theoretically get a spur. Oh. I looked at the website. Ha!

Oh, god. They advertise rail access, they don't plan for it. Oh, boy. And uh, well, I guess this is what environmental justice is. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. What a nightmarish little story. Yeah, I mean, you know, and you gotta think, okay, uh, you know, there's still, like, this

is the largest polluting facility in the region, but the thing is, of course, we're still completely surrounded by oil refineries. Yeah, and any one of them could turn you into goo at any moment. Yeah, exactly. There's one in Traynor, there's one in Palsborough, there's one in Delaware City, I think the one in Traynor is actually operated by Delta Airlines, which refines their own fuel. I mean, I suppose we've gotta be glad, I mean, this is maybe a happy story, in that we didn't kind of, uh, to like convert a lot of- No one got gooped.

Yeah, no one got gooped, we did not, um, we did not make- we didn't end up with a situation that made threads look like play day. You know, that's- we, we, yeah. That's good. No one experienced Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Yeah, we didn't de-inventory a third of the population of Philly. That's good. You just have to get a steam hose and shove bodies into the drain.

Oh god. Massive sewage buildup. Oh my god. I mean... Kind of Fatberg situation. Yes. Praise be to the engineers who put the de-inventorying system in. It's an actual...

Very much a W for that safety system. Oh yeah. Build safety systems in that day it worked You know fair play well. What did we learn? Don't live near an oil refinery by near I mean within 20 miles Hey, the trainer in the the trainer in the market sook refineries are they have they have two blocks of houses right in between Yeah, so this is this is the story of the PES refinery We have a segment on this podcast called safety third. Oh god. I got a 50-50 chance here Pro hello

Hello Nova, and Justin. No hello for Gareth. Missed one. Yeah. Fuck that guy. And Liam left early. Yeah, exactly. So you're wrong twice.

Today I bring you a story laden with danger, sexism, every pronoun imaginable, and workplace neglect in the private yachting industry. I did not see that coming. You have my attention. Yes. Trigger warning for loss of life. Oh, I'm less funny now. I read through this, it's not directly in the story.

Um, okay. These days I am a card carrying member of the no voice train gang. Hell yeah. Solidarity. And my pronouns are he and him. But years ago when this story took place I was deep in the closet and still presenting as femme with she-her pronouns. Hang on to that.

I spent a couple years working as a deckhand on private yachts. God, I'm so sorry. Yachting is a blatantly sexist industry. Men are deck crew, officers, and engineers. The girls are stewardesses. When I started working I didn't quite understand that I was trans but I did understand that being perceived as a masculine worker filled me with a joy that I couldn't quite recognize and I wanted to replicate it as often as

possible. Though the men around me set the bar pitifully low, I was regularly lauded for showing up to work on time and mostly sober. I was still passed over for a lot of jobs because girls aren't strong enough to be deckhands." ALICE Maybe this is my naivete happening, but what kind of like heavy physical labour are you doing on the yacht for like the 1%? You know, like- JUSTIN Stupid boat stuff.

ALICE Yeah, I guess so, like fucking around with anchors and stuff, y'know, hurling Robert Maxwell's bloated body over the back. Yes. Crates of illegal alcohol, that sort of thing to this nation. Illegal cigars, illegal, um, I don't know what- Must be able to lift and carry, y'know, weight of principle. The pallet of bricks of cocaine. When I finally did land a job, my position was precarious.

It was made known to me that my employers had never hired a female deckhand, and whether or not I succeeded at the job would determine whether they continued to hire women in my role. Not fucking hell, no pressure. Extremely illegal. But, y'know, it's the sea,. Oh, fucking hell, no pressure. Extremely illegal. But, you know, it's the sea, so whatever, you know. Exactly. International law has no HR.

Mm. Or maritime law. Whatever it is. If at any time they thought I would be unable to perform the duties in the exact same capacity as a man, I would be immediately fired and sent back home. It's also important to note that yachts have very little in the way of worker protection. You can be fired for anything at any time. All this made me number one determined to prove that women, because they're women not girls, can do the damn

job and number two the deckhands... number two the deckhand liable to be handed all of the shitty jobs because I wouldn't or couldn't say no. Great. On this particular day, the Boson, who we'll call Phil, this is Phil right here. Oh yeah. And this lovely hand drawn image. Oh it's beautiful. Oh nice. Love this. Post it note. Shout out to 3M. Shout out to 3M, yeah. Phil wanted me to polish the forward flag pole, which was about 15 to 20 feet tall. We did not have a 15 to 20 foot ladder, but we did have a hydraulic crane that we used to lift the jet skis off the bow and lower them into the water. I think the rich people here should probably

be f***ed. I think we can say that if your yacht has like a jet ski crane I think you should be f***ed. Phil instructed me to climb up to the peak of the crane arm with my polishing equipment and balance on it while he used the remote control to maneuver me to the top. Nope don't like that. Beautiful beautiful idea Phil. The crane was not rated for people to be standing on top of it. And it was painted with very shiny, very slick, white all grip with aesthetic rounded edges. We were also, you know, on a boat in the water, which is a substance famed for continuous movement. It's kind of like holding onto an icicle in this situation, right?

Yeah. Yeah, this has got to be like, I imagine this crane is like something that's been designed very aesthetically in this very sleek, horrible yacht. You know? Uh huh. You know, it's like all white and it's like, uh, you know, it looks like it's made a render right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah yogurt pop

When I asked for a harness Phil replied I didn't need one as the fall wouldn't be that far Oh, yeah, that's okay. Fair. Cool. Only 15 to 20 feet. Yeah Yeah, you can you can walk off and as long as I kept my balance on the very shiny Very slick all-grip paint with my very sweaty bare feet, I would not fall. Now, if I had been asked to do this about six months before, I might have swallowed my fears in the name of being manly. And gone to work on a hydraulic balance beam of death. Because it's probably going to be okay, right?

And dudes rock, right? But just a few months prior to this incident, a friend of mine in a similar situation in the yachting industry said Yes, and ended up falling over 100 feet to her untimely death Jesus While I missed my friend terribly I also knew she would be annoyed if I showed up in purgatory So soon after her for the same reason showed up in purgatory so soon after her for the same reason. Giving men, especially men in a position of power, an outright no usually ends pretty poorly. So I suggested we check with the

first mate Patrick, who was our acting captain at the time, before starting the job. Phil wasn't happy about this, but decided to radio Patrick just to be sure. Patrick took one horrified look at the setup and forbade anyone from standing on the crane and gave Phil a good chewing out for even suggesting it and suggesting we do elevated work without the required safety harnesses. He prevented a serious workplace disaster for me and as I am sure I would have lost my balance and broken my neck on some useless billionaires shitty jet ski. I stayed in the industry for a couple more years until I finally realized that being a man does not necessitate manual labor and cargo shorts.

I am now settled on land as a happy little twink and working on a law degree so I can provide legal counsel to unscrupulous orcas carrying out vigilante justice without fear of seasickness, or being asked to sweat on the job." Maritime law, let's go. "...thanks for a great show, I found, well there's your problem on an r slash ask reddit thread back in May, and have been binging the podcast since. November, I've always been self-conscious about my voice, but listening to you presenting unapologetically as yourself has been a joyfully affirming experience.

Thank you." Thank you. You're very welcome. I'm just too lazy to do it, but I'm glad that people seem to, you know, get something from it. Um, yeah. to, you know, get something from it. Yeah. Respectfully, fuck you. Hey, whoa, fuck you too. You and the Lord.

Okay. Yeah. Wow. Let's get this twink out of here. Yeah. Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Rail Natter? Oh, yes. Kill James Bond and

No Gods No Mayors. I have excitedly, I've been thinking about mayors and I've thought of one that is so much in in everything's wheelhouse that I've already, I need to suggest it because I'm excited to think about it. Yeah, yeah, please do. I think about mares constantly. I'm always happy to hear mare or suggestions. You've got so many mares to choose from.

Oh, it's, yeah, no, the spreadsheet is getting out of control at this point. Excellent. The mare or master list. So many mares. Ze list? You have a mayor cage match. Although what I'm thinking of, the color of puce that he can go when threatened. Yeah, that's uh, yeah, I reckon he's fucking in a cage. Who? All right, well with some of the worst technical

difficulties we've had in any podcast in a while, well actually that's not true at all. No, no, when we lost the four and a half hour episode. That was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. This is a mere two hours twelve. Exactly. Alright. I'm gonna say, that was a podcast. Bye everyone. Bye everyone. I'll fit you in.