Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 42: Piper Alpha

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

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No, you know what? I am censoring myself for the good of the left unity. Yeah If you were adults, you'd be anarchists moving on. Oh Now here's where we finally find out the truth. Yeah Liam Liam's the anarchist longest. Yeah, that's right. I'll put it off the spaceship I think that's the dode That the bass slipped when I went on a rant about the EU banning cigarettes A little bit of left libertarianism I just I should be able to get chewing tobacco in more than like three countries. That's all I'm saying. That's right

Yeah, it's true Welcome to well, there's your problem a podcast with slides where we don't record in two weeks and forget how to do the intro Oh shit, there's an intro. We forget how to do the intro. This is normal I did I push the right button. Yeah, I thought for a second I was streaming and not recording and people are going to get confused Hi everybody, I'm Justin Rosniak The person is talking right now You should go subscribe to my other YouTube channel and do not eat or you do not eat or do not eat a one on YouTube It's do not eat one. I think not even one. I don't have a Twitter account

And your pronouns are he him my pronouns are he him. I like trains Hi, I'm Alice My I'm I'm the I'm the person from trash future my pronouns are she and her that's a very good podcast You should listen to it. That's right. Hi. I'm Liam Liam Anderson. I'm at old man Anderson on Twitter It's all better sit down because so My pronouns are he and him and I am the guy who gets mad at you if you're an asshole on our YouTube comments. I sure am Thanks, Alice. Back to you. You still remember how to do introductions. Okay, good

Lexing on the introduction. Yeah Okay C plus is still passing baby. This is a fun episode. This is the first regular episode that Liam did most of the work on sorry but What what you see in front of you is oil rig, which is on fire Well, it's good though, right cuz it's cold flaring it makes energy via exploding, right? So this is good This is just very efficient, right? Well usually Usually the fire comes out of here, right?

Mm-hmm here, but you can see it's coming out of here and there's a lot of it. Oh That's efficient. That's central planet. Yeah. Oh, we'll get to that That shouldn't be happening and we'll get into that in a bit first. We have to do the goddamn news As ever There's a border around this transparency. I fucked that up. Okay. Well, everyone has it everyone has the Ronnie the president got it Diane Feinstein was sitting next to Mike Lee when he wasn't wearing a mask and he tested positive today. Yeah, I wasn't wearing one today like motherfucker Everybody's getting covids. It's the new thing

What is this secret drug they gave the president and Chris Christie that somehow brought them back from beyond It's half a million for treatment and it's full of like fetal cells. It's full of stem cells and then like literally Invented what QAnon thinks Yes Him with like dead baby parts and all of the people who spent all of their time screaming about how Planned Parenthood is just like Producing dumpsters full of fetuses and just silent. Why would they produce dumpsters when they could use them for medicine? Yeah, that's right. I just I think this idea that like they they they harvest, you know And then like toss the fetuses out like no, they don't they harvest them. There's very little to valuable adrenochrome in those things

Mitt Romney Stereocycle who is basically the as far as I know the people who handle most of the bio waste From abortion clinics. He owns that company via big capital Hmm and fuck Mitt Romney. Yeah, absolutely Does he Baby furnace Geothermal doesn't have anything on this Oh and Florida is reopening even though now as the recording I think we hit through

50,000 new cases a day the UK is Reclosing and we're thoroughly like second peak going without a hitch. It's not even putting a dent in it What happened to your herd immunity strategy? Oh that thing. Well, what we're doing now is a highly advanced scientific technique called pretending. We never said we were gonna do that Yeah, that's that's very that's very British of you. Yeah, absolutely Steff opera lip, it's like the blitz except you're more likely to die Everything to the fucking blitz Also, if you go in the underground, you'll definitely die. That's true. Oh god. Why are your trains so short and miserable?

I think that charming although you should see the Glasgow subway. It's Always wanted to take that Country The Lakers won their 17th NBA title shut up and the Eagles are bad now. Oh, yeah, that was my next slide Maybe I should have done the go birds drop instead of that. Oh, yeah, I didn't see this slide. Oh, well, yeah Oh And then the Eagles defense forgot how to play cover two And allowed a guy to just literally go right up the middle

And score a touchdown this guy who's now my least favorite stealer besides Ben Rathausberger He went I think to Notre Dame and I wish him nothing but misfortune and ill Well, I mean if you want to know today and then pretty much everyone he knows has COVID now So that's true. Yeah Didn't the Notre Dame president get it? Yes, he did. Amy Coney Barrett confirmation super spreader party Beautiful. Yeah, fantastic. It's all going fantastically. I Used to think like the Catholics were relatively sane and then you know Notre Dame happened. I bizarre

Truly truly commiserable miserable school. No, no catch needs to get that shit under control No, because we're technically in a different senses designated place. Oh my god. Yeah, there's a little there's a little third thief them Yeah, yeah, well one guy ate on himself over the fence Alex knows today Now Anyway, we told you we told you in the Philadelphia Labor Day parade How to control a public health emergency and it was don't spit and yet you kept spitting and now everyone has COVID This shit. I just I'm I'm so I've been talking about this as I said this to Roz

is the thing that just like a Infuriates me but B breaks my heart and it's sort of all the other emotions. Is it like it just didn't have to ever fucking go this way? Oh, no, like Plenty of bad shit happens and really it's like no one's fault Yeah, I was Vietnam doing you know, this is right but like it just it didn't have exactly or New Zealand like I understand we're a different country, whatever but like We're the richest country in the history of mankind or like I would have been But of a no big fucking deal to just give people money and say, you know stay in your houses will bring you food

Well, we can't do that Individualism and bullshit like that. I'm just currently tweeting about how Americans don't want handouts Do I fucking do? Give me stuff. Like give me the Trump box. Yes Fucking understand is like you could win your reelection easily if you said I'm gonna give $2,500 a month to every American until the shit is over I don't care what happens to lose I just it just pisses me off because the people I know who have COVID or have had COVID, you know

So the one person a friend of mine She makes well into six figures as an engineer in New York and like her life is like Far worse now Months after she got it because there's just shit She like the sort of brain fog that people experience and I just keep thinking it didn't have to be this way And I'm sick to death of worrying about my parents who are old and I'm sick to death of just worrying about everyone because the government Chose to and it's not a oh, you know, well, we didn't know it's just chose to not do the right fucking thing And this is what I fucking talk about. This is what Alice talks about on this podcast

It's like you should be pissed off like it's okay to be pissed off at people like Donald Trump at people like the entire fucking You know the health the Department of Health and Human Services were just not doing their fucking jobs And it's okay to be pissed off at Steve Mnuchin Richard and God who can't move for some reason Just can't give money to people and you should be pissed off of the Democrats for like Being little bitchy weasels about it. Just like yeah, you know, I Understand why no one would want to vote for Joe Biden because I'm fucking frustrated as hell, too I'm I'm frustrated that it did not have to be this way I'm frustrated that people are getting angry at like

People they shouldn't be getting angry at like you shouldn't be mad at people for getting money for the government You should be mad at the government for not doing enough and for hoping you die It's okay to be mad at that and you should be mad at that. I'm just so fucking angry. Yeah, what's that? someone from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party called me earlier today and is like hey, I was just asking if you had a plan to Vote and if you were voting for Joe Biden, and that was like unfortunately, I also said Yes, please do not contact me again We have left of his passive aggression. Yeah. Yeah, I just I like it just so

Fucking stupid and as we're gonna get into this as it turns out when you were to prevent bad things from happening As we saw in like 10 year sometimes they just don't happen. Yeah. Now we have to do this bullshit. Mm-hmm We have an additional piece of news Wides discourse one is from Twitter. The fuck is a double wide? Are you seriously asking? All right? All right? We just went through this all this old discourse Okay, I'm like gonna be cancelled for like classes and if I ask I'm gonna assume they don't they don't have them in Scotland Yeah, I don't think they have cars because what land costs nothing as it does in parts of the United States and

Building a house is pretty cheap and there's no public transit anywhere You need cars to go places carry you to run a hose over them This is this is Reference to the kidnapping plot for the Michigan governor and and that man From Jacob and tweeted about how it was because of economic circumstances. Oh, yeah, I do remember this Yeah, okay, and and and everyone from Twitter was learning about what a double-wide trailer was for the first time and Yeah, like lots of people of varying economic circumstances

Live in double-wides as it turns out, right? This is this is another one of the kidnapping plot people's houses and And check out they have like they have a double-wide and they have like Four newer cars I shouldn't shouldn't part the Mazda there, but besides that I don't Think this is the thing that I've said The people actually in my life is it like when people like I wish you ever live out here

It's like because people have to fucking live places. Yep. People live places. It's a big fucking country I don't know why that makes you want to kidnap a governor though Well, obviously it's the economic circumstances and not the fact that you're just a fucking Nazi. Hmm the latest Trillbilly's Bonus episode I think made a salient point Which is that this is a lot less a story about people being white supremacists or Nazis Or people being you know of a lower economic means so much as it is a story about FBI entrapment Same as it ever was if you meet if you start planning a terrorist attack which don't but if you do and you meet a guy

Who has all of the skills that you need to make that terrorist attack happen? You don't know him from anywhere and he's really keen for you to do the thing that guy works for the We can talk about air McDonald and the bot the play allegedly plotted bombing of the Nimbus dam Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a lot of this just finding the like nearest Teenager who's like there maybe said the word jihad once and being like fuck yeah Here is a bunch of dummy Explosives I will arrange all of this terrorist attack for you. I also have good news for you Hmm, whether spoons are staying up at a mercy side. Oh

beautiful I can commute down to Liverpool And just in time just in time for curry nights I love the idea of sewing telling you go back where you came from and you just have to go hang out at an field by yourself Just like a pint in one hand just like looking around It's a sit in the corner You know trash you to nearly got banned from the weather spoons app because oh Back where back when it was still allowed to go outside Some some of some of our many number were out of weather spoons and because you can do this thing where you like

Say where you're at and what table number you are and people can buy you stuff on on the app or online and just send stuff to you and because I'm in Sufferable I decided to look at the menu and see what's the worst thing you can send someone if you know their table number And so I got on Twitter and said okay Just to just order order my friends as many bowls of peas as you can This weather spoons stopped serving them because they had just I I did not know my own power I still think I'm a small account and so this poor fucking life is like short or a cook was like Yeah, a hundred bowls of peas

That's the good stuff It just starts serving frozen trees direct from the bag Yeah, that's that's the story of how I seriously pissed off the stuff for weather spoons. I'm so sorry I didn't think it would get that big and it did All right, that's that's the goddamn news That's not an oil rig. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Yes, it is Oil rigs are in the sea and they're made of metal and they have the thing. That's an oil wreck. You can't fool me. That's a chimney okay, I

Thought we'd start by talking about what is all all all All This is the one in Pennsylvania. That's so fucking depressing. Yeah, it's Drake's well. Yep. Yeah I had to go there for a field trip. Oh nice This is where the end of the world started This this little shack right here All right, so oil is a bunch of plants which are compressed over millions of years Into this nasty flammable goo made of various kinds of hydrocarbons, right?

You know, it's a big long molecule made of H's and C's Right. Yeah, it is plant goop if radiation is spicy rocks. It's plant goop. Yeah It used to be plants would turn to coal, right? But then a fungus figured out how to digest lignin so everything after that point was oil There's no more coal being produced anywhere You can tell that to those folks who say well god creates more oil in the ground or more fossil fuels in the ground It's like well, that's true, but it's only oil. There's no more coal being made Also, yes, but you're not going to be around to see it. I promise. Yeah

Yeah Now you can take this nasty flammable goo and you can refine it into fuels like kerosene gasoline diesel and products like tar and plastics, right? You know the first commercial exploitation of this where they drilled a well for it was At Drake's well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, that's in the west of Pennsylvania, right? And then they the first offshore platform though was a little bit later It was in Grand Lake st. Mary's Which was a basin built for the Miami and Erie Canal in Ohio in 1891

Okay And Miami and Erie Canal was one of those weird like early canal projects you'll hear a lot about them in Franklin 13 But we soon moved on to larger things and started drilling in the ocean Oh That get both of those give me anxiety don't like that. Oh, yeah. Oh Jesus. Oh, yes. Oh Every day is like Oh god, I knew a guy who looked like this He was 50 meters tall primarily of concrete legs Mike

This is just a Joe Biden story. I Do a guy had these proportions where he had all legs and then a very short torso Can you John Madden a guy around that that reg? Oh Boy You've just made that this is a massive dick good for him. Yeah, well Okay, this is this is increasingly like a full guy Give him a Lego head. Yeah Yeah, he works out with this arm too

That's wall. Yeah, all right, so Undersea oil platforms take a couple of forms right both of these that we're seeing here are fixed platforms though Those are ones that rest on the seabed, right? This one's steel This one's being brought out to the Gulf of Mexico. You can see a couple of houses down here for scale All right, the Gulf of Mexico and nothing bad has ever happened to a fixed oil rig We'll get there. We'll talk about that in another episode And then this is a this is a concrete one. This is I believe this platform is called troll a we'll see how tall it is in the next Slide for comparison. It's Norwegian shit, man

Everything I think they have I think the field is like at the troll field like the way they usually named in Europe at least is Name of field and then like a weird name also. So do we like Piper Viking say oh, we got that's why alpha. I don't claim more That's who this guy I drew in is he's the troll. Yeah, he's troll a yeah So you gotta pay the troll toll to get oil out of the boys hole. Yes So So

These are fixed oil platforms. There's a couple more types. There's semi submersible ones which are on large pontoons, which are sort of They're buoyant, but they're buoyant where the most of the pontoons is below the waterline, right? And those are tethered to the seafloor There's something called a tension leg, which is very similar, but there's Tensile cables holding it down so it doesn't move up and down as much, right? There's something called a spar platform That's where you have a big hollow concrete or steel cylinder that goes

500 600 feet in the ocean right and has a bunch of weights on the bottom and That's used for very very deep level applications Over 2,000 feet or so. There's some oil platforms in water. That's like a Mile a mile and a half deep that use that system Sucking up anglerfish. Yeah Then there's something called a floating production storage and offloading System that's just a ship with a drill rig on it so you can reposition it rapidly but

Yeah, today we're talking about a fixed platform one of these shown here, right or at least the the platform part of it An admirable lack of subtlety like we've talked before about the extremely fast Square train. This is something this is something that has been designed by a guy who's like I want to fuck the sea Yes, oh Yeah, cuz they they bring this out to sea and then they just flip it in there and it just rests on the seabed You see that I like I love the idea of just like tilt tilt And that drive away real quick So these are some of the largest structures on earth. So here's here's troll a for scale right here

You know, yeah, it is really Compared and compare that to here's the Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur Those are those were the largest building the tallest buildings in the world as of 1998 Since then one has been built in the Gulf of Mexico, which is taller. That's the Petronas platform, right? And compare that to the Empire State Building the Eiffel Tower and because this I got this from a Polish document Of course the Palace of Culture I was wondering why they just decided to throw that in there lost her off Stalinist architecture Yes, it is magnificent at least Yeah, so these are very very very very tall structures. You wouldn't you know, only a small amount is above the waterline, but oh boy and

You know, these can get very large You know, there's usually a system of platforms, right? We're looking at the most extreme example here Is that fucking town scaper? It looks so much like that game Yeah This is the Soviet offshore city of Neft Deslauri, which is of course in Azerbaijan Yeah, the bad guys the bad guys, yeah, you want to drop for Azerbaijan Yes, we love you Joe Cassane, but

Totally not Azerbaijan. Yeah So, all right Some oil platforms are unmanned most of the time big ones are manned year-round. They got crews They're on long shifts months of a time between crew changes, right? Sometimes there's a lot of people on board when they're doing something exciting like drilling a new shaft You know Diving work going on. Oh, yeah, don't get sucked into the tubes. Yeah Telling us to do bifid dolphin. I don't know if there's enough there for a whole episode

But the short version is you got to do a lot of highly pressurized diving and it's dangerous I people kept telling us to do both this episode and bifur dolphin and I kept getting them confused Hmm. That's fair bifur alpha Piper dolphin Andy bifur dolphin. That's when someone got sucked into the Bifur come on while there's your problem sucked off by a twink. That's what they want these days

Yes, though I Could never figure out if that was a drop or if that was just Milo doing that. Yeah, I have a call in I So otherwise, you know, these platforms are just a bunch of bored people, you know monitoring a pipe Essentially, you know, it's like, well, there's a pipe Make sure it doesn't do anything weird In some wells are tethered to shore with a pipeline Others are tethered to other platforms of the pipeline

Some of them ship oil out on tankers. Some of them are shipping oil and gas They're doing weird stuff. We'll get to that in the next slide And it's a combination of a highly dangerous industrial facility, which is processing Probably one of the nastiest chemicals on earth, which is crude oil and an apartment building So you think you famously want together. Yeah, so they try and keep those two parts as far apart as possible For a large field, you might have accommodation The apartment building part on its own platform, right? Which is actually now starting to be practiced on very large Offshore wind farms as well

Seasteading it's finally not it's not just for libertarians anymore. Yeah, and it turns out you in order to see stead You need a huge government handout to do green energy. Oh really? Yeah I Hying a rough together Attention government, I would like 100 million dollars for use that seed box just crossed out Seed box crossed out I Liberty peace prosperity, please send to Liam. Thanks I

Believe this was one of the one of the first large offshore platforms established here in Azerbaijan You can see the Soviets actually they they built a park for the workers Yeah That's the most Soviet fucking thing to just like give you bark Why you cry? When we build these apartment buildings like this that has to be a park here The fact that it's in the middle of the fucking sea is neither here nor there. There's a park. Yeah, central planning works You wanted a park here it is

Don't go swimming here it now They got a separate platform, which is five kilometers away for people to store their cars There's some allotments, I don't know on another island There's there's there's a steel mill for some reason There's still like one commutal kitchen, but on the bright side you can get that you can get that fire as hot as you want it Maybe just take two days God imagine lighting up your natural gas stove and it just flares like an oil rig I believe one of these accommodation blocks

Just collapsed into the sea recently unfortunately This is not being well maintained That's what you get for being the bad guys Yeah, I was about to say Go go Armenia. All right Yeah, I'll take I'll take all I will take on any Turkish person Yeah, the Turks I met it was weird because they were relatively unfriendly and I was just like look how short you all are They were unfriendly right I just like I felt you know in very few countries. I've been to do it

I did I feel like a giant I felt like a giant in Turkey I will say my time there was lovely if for no other reason than their economy was totally in shambles and the lira was worth nothing That's enabling me to buy all the alcohol from the nice man who spoke no English next to my hotel But did you do the thing where they like pretend to give you the ice cream and then they snatched away several dozen times No, I did not do that my traveling companion did do that and that I laughed at her misery because it was one of those trips Another thing is I if you're working on an offshore platform Usually you make a whole bunch of money. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't know about the Soviet Union You know you probably got

I don't know. I don't even know if you got it. You got a park Luxury unimaginable luxury. Yeah, you can make easy a hundred K out in the West Texas oil fields I went to high school with a guy who did that Graduated fucked off and then like came back about a year and a half ago now with all the money Oh Scotland's exactly the same You know like you fly out from Aberdeen on a helicopter spend six months out in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of the sea Hitting a big pipe with a wrench make a vast amount of money and fly back And and that's where we're going right now actually

Hmm in our imagination ship because we can't leave the country because COVID because our government is full of morons Justin here playing the role of miss Frissel. Yeah, yeah Basically is out on the magic school bus Magic oil helicopter So I should say after The 70s in Britain, which were a very bad time because we had socialism Wealth inequality was that it's lowest rate in Britain since records began in like 1972 but a combination of like

political missteps and industrial action led to the government of Margaret Thatcher and We stopped doing we stopped doing the thing where we were like we can just kind of keep Kicking the can down the road and so long as we keep interest rates under 10 percent It's fine and we started doing the really aggressive neoliberalism of Everything interest rates 2% forever and then like just to add insult to injury like if the if the Labour Party had called an election Slightly before Margaret Thatcher would never have been Prime Minister and they would have discovered natural gas and oil in the North Sea off of Scotland and Basically, it'd be like Norway, right? But instead this happened when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and

We're not like Norway. We're a cursed country Albania everywhere except London. Yeah I Know I've been doing pretty well now, but it's like the kind of like fucked company town wealth where like everything is oil Oh, yeah Yeah, should I do this slide or should you what one is or should we divide it up? Because we made half of the slide beach. Yeah, you want to do this? Yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I'm a little nervous, baby Okay, so

The Piper oil field is up here off to Costa Scatland somewhere and I don't know this vaguely this shape, right? Yes This is gonna get a lot worse. I discovered it in 73 Production began in 1976 during the oil crisis And it was very successful, right, you know, they exported oil on this pipeline out to a Essentially an oil terminal here in Flata, and then they would I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right? Yeah They're all fucking Vikings up there anyway, and they they'd bring it out on a ship and send it I don't know everywhere, you know, I had somewhere away from there, right?

Probably down to Queensferry, which I think is the big refinery, but I don't know they brought it through the canal Not a canal Is the canal everness I forget which just do a Scottish Suisse Yes The can the Loch Ness is like right here, right? Yeah, probably I guess It's near Inverness listen my knowledge my knowledge canal. Yeah, my knowledge of Loch Ness extends only to

Photoshop that I made of the Loch Ness monster sighting with an Austrian pistol in it that I called the Glock Ness monster What the fuck? I like it. I like it. Yeah, it's right. Yeah, you got it It's okay. You're not to Inverness. I know where canals are. All right, so lovely lovely town for what that's worth During the oil crisis or or after the I don't know if it was during or after the oil crisis I don't know when the oil crisis duration was They added gas to the platform, right? Which requires some modifications to the platform The piper alpha platform which

We will get into in a second Or no, we should get into them now. I'm trying to think how to order this. Okay so When this platform was constructed the oil production facilities were located as far away from accommodation Mustard points control room so on and so forth as possible when they retrofitted it for gas They had to just jam in the gas equipment wherever they could right? I know the park Yeah So we I have a diagram of this in the next slide

Now there's a couple other Facilities in the area. We need to sort of explain what's going on here Um, and I gotta I had to change the color of the pen because I've already screwed this up Oh boy Let me get blue Okay, so the piper alpha platform originally she's pumping oil Up here

The claymore platform is pumping oil to that same platform The tartan platform was pumping oil to the claymore platform, which is pumping that oil to the pipeline, right? Now they're adding natural gas So there's two paths for the natural gas, right? Let me change the color again um So number one that natural gas can go to this platform called mcp 01 That's manifold and compressed compression platform number one. That's operated by total e and p uk

That's just a big pump that sends it to the mainland at st. Fergus, right? um These these platforms are otherwise owned by ocedental petroleum, right? Or whatever mishmash holding company that was also done to other people. Yeah But the other thing is they were also sending natural gas Mixed in with the oil To flotta, right? Oh boy from piper alpha and from tartan, right? But not from claymore so

What they had to do tartan would send it to piper alpha Piper alpha would mix it into the pipeline But because they were adding more oil halfway through It had to send excess natural gas back to claymore to be added to the oil pipeline there In order to ensure maximum natural gas saturation in the pipeline, right? Yeah, because it's all just going through one big pipe Like gas and oil together, right? Yeah, and if you start adding more oil without more gas, you're going to throw off the ratio

It's not going to be good Um, I think at least one of these pipelines was inexplicably Run by texco for some reason Yep. Yeah, the oil industry is so rationally well structured Don't even worry about it Okay, so piper alpha platform. Here's a picture of it. Let me go back to that. That really is brutalism Oh, yes I mean like no wonder they pay you well that you're just like living on like the fucking

overhang of that for six months Yeah All right. You got a nice waterfront view though. That's true You can really feel the waterfront like slapping off the windows Yeah, great You got accommodation up here. There's a helipad up here Which is also the most dangerous part aside from diving like the thing that kills the most Oil rig workers is the helicopter there and back. We you know, listen to the osprey episode. Helicopters are death

Yes, yeah Helicopters. Um, so there were 36 wells coming from this one platform Um, that was in module a here That's this this uh elevation is if you're looking this way, right? um So the oil came up into module a right oil and gas Uh, then head to module b

Right and they would remove water and hydrogen sulfide from the gas and the oil Or no, I see I see the module William was module b for oil and gas or just gas Oh, oh fuck Look it's late we've all been out for like 15 hours. Um Um I think everything down here is probably just for gas

um If they I guess the oil and gas must have been for separate wells, I mean there's 36 wells We're gonna assume that for the second Um, so module b is where they separate hydrogen sulfide and water from the gas Then she's using something called a molecular sieve which is basically that sounds very fancy It's basically just having silica gel because yeah as far as I know that's all that's all gas right and then they They cool it down through expansion the heavy fractions of gas condenses of liquid

Right and that's propane and the rest of the gas was your methane continued to export, right? um, so the methane would go up to mcp 01 And propane gets uh jammed in the oil pipeline. I think that's how that works Right. Why is there a mud module? Is they extracting mud? That's drilling mud Drilling mud is something you jam into the drill bit and I believe

I don't know much about drilling. Um, the mud is essential. I know that much Um, the the mud is what makes it work Yeah, it's it's a loop for fucking the earth. Yes Yeah, exactly. That's the uh, that's the earth. Um um Relieving uh, or that's I'm not gonna say it. It's gross. Um, no say it Is the lady juices of the earth Yeah

I think my favorite part about this is knowing how absolutely shameless every oil rig worker would be about this Yeah, you got you're not a delicate breed of people It's just two guys on an oil rig debating whether or not squirting is just p They do this for six months Yeah Yeah, the rest of the slide I think is yours. Oh, fuck. Yeah, everybody hold on Today's it it starts from three days before disaster. Yes All right, no, I made this slide out of one of your slides

Christ Jesus Okay So three days before the disaster they were exporting Uh, or they were they were not exporting the gas up to mcp zero one, right? Yeah, because it's uh Routine maintenance was being done on the the gas. Um Works, I guess you'd call it. So there is uh never do routine maintenance. We've talked about this. It's insanely dangerous All of the worst shit happens when you do routine maintenance. Just don't do it

We'll get there. Yeah All right, um This is all this is all stuff that comes afterwards. Okay, so I so there's there's uh A process here Which is described by this diagram Which Liam will now explain Uh

Nope I just do this is I did math. This is a diagram of the slide. I did not I did not change this one in any way. I put this in I was talking about condensate pumps Uh that had been operating. So on July 6 1988 uh two condensate pumps Are operating to displace Kind of a different transport to the to the coast

And then on the morning of july 6 pump a's pressure safety valve was removed for routine maintenance Uh, so don't do that. Don't do that. It was a plan two year overhaul Um, and they temporarily sealed that open pipe with a blind flange blind flange Blind flange. That's the same thing we were talking about in a bullpaw episode where they didn't install them Right, so the work couldn't be Completed by 6 p.m. The that flange remained in place and it was only hand type So the on-duty engineer files a permit which says that pump a is not ready and must not be switched on under any circumstances

Uh, here's my question. Yeah This guy has a ratchet, right as a ratcheting wrench Why does he not tool tight it? I have no idea. I mean it's fun. I guess it is a ratchet I guess the idea is just we're not going to be using it anyway. So just It's 6 p.m. And you're just like Time I think that's pretty much the answer I mean from from what the inquiry comes out with

What happened ross? Are you dead? No Did you die? No I'd say I have one Right here uh-huh That that was the noise of a man going to get a ratchet wrench. Okay It's fun to use Why are you not tooltiding it?

Because I don't know you want to go in the your apartment block and get sandblasted by oceans and more Anyway, that's my what what they do is they they do Something that we featured on safety third last time The lockout tag out thing right where you you disable this thing and then you put a big notice on it saying hey Don't operate this because if you do Everyone will die. Is that about the size of it? This is about what happens Yeah, the day shift ends And the night shift starts at 6 p.m. The on duty custodian was busy and the engineer neglected to inform him of the condition of pump

A instead he placed the permit in the control center and left Uh, and no one could find it. So there was another Permit issued actually at the same time for the general overhaul of pump a that had not yet begun Uh, we're now at 7 p.m. The firefighting system is under manual control um That had actually been a procedure adopted, uh, whenever divers were in the water Um, it wasn't really seen as a risk to divers unless they were closer Then about 10 to 15 feet

From any of the uh, the firefighting thing just literally sucks up water The one thing you have in abundance and just douses everything And if you're a diver and you're in the water, you may get the suck Right And actually that's that that plays into it. Uh, there had been A recommendation from an earlier audit that a procedure would be developed to keep the pumps in automatic mode The divers were not working the vicinity Of the intakes which was plaque which was the practice on the claymore platform

It was under manual control grace on it. Just put a grace over it Right, they didn't want divers getting sucked in the pumps which had happened people had seen it And it's a lot easier sucked off by a twink. That's what they want these days. That's right So to imagine your pal mic becoming spaghetti that it is a fire especially when you're literally surrounded by water And they did have grills. Yeah, they did on the intakes But you could still be drawn towards them at least Yeah, you could still be uh, spaghettified by I guess going through the grill. That's enough Yeah, yeah, you get you you basically get waffle stomped. Um

The 945 pumpy trips. It could not be restarted because of problems with the methanol system earlier in the day Uh methane Uh clathrate, which is a flammable ice when I was doing research for this I read the set and I read the phrase flammable ice and had to sort of take a breath um Which caused a blockage So due to the blockage, uh, pumpy stopped to cannot be restarted Uh, the entire power supply of the offshore construction were dependent on the pump

The manager had only a few minutes to bring the pump back online. Otherwise the power supply would fail completely Uh, a search was made through the documents to determine whether pump a could be started Remember it can't be started under any circumstances that everyone would die Yeah, but we don't know where the what they don't know where the documentation is Yeah, because the guy just left at the right 952 permit for pump a Uh Resertification not found and pump restarted the permit for the overall was found But not the other permits stating that the pump must not be started under any circumstances

Because of the missing safety valve There's a different location from the pump and therefore the permits were stored in different boxes Because they were stored by location. Yep lock out tag out successes We love to see it like this is why if you have to like Do maintenance on any particularly dangerous piece of machinery? What you should be doing is having a warning physically attached to the controls of it But instead it's in a filing cabinet And not even the filing cabinet they're looking in nope. Nope. They just had no idea. Uh, so they

restart pump a at 952 and bad things happen Uh, so next slide please Uh, you never want to see that little explosion sprites and the and the diagram It is not our friend Uh, so at about 10 Uh explosion one

Uh We'll get there many uh many. Uh So condensate leak from the psv flange Uh, the pump a was switched on gas flowed into the pump and because of the missing valve Produced an overpressure which the loosely fitted metal disc did not withstand Yep was never intended to not an overpressure for say Uh, but it was most likely within the Safe opera operational range of the pump itself, but because the blind flange was only hand tight leakage occurred anyway

Again, what is it tight? I know it would have taken you another 30 seconds. You could have made a tool tight This wouldn't have happened Witnesses heard a sustained high-pitched screeching noise before anyone could do anything the gas ignited and exploded Blowing through the firewall made up of eight by five panels bolted together Which were not designed to withstand explosions. Yeah, it's not an explosion wall Yeah, yeah, but you know if if you would just assume like a lot of times when there's a fire There's also an explosion. I don't know why people haven't like figured this out fires and explosions go together Maybe your firewall should also withstand explosions to a certain extent. I don't know like

I Shades of a certain other episode. I I'm sure it was just very thick drywall or some Yeah, but the bad news is Pretty much on the other side of that firewall is the control room where they had just been like, you know, this seems safe to turn on Yeah, and there's there's a A store, uh, not a story, but but one of the lines Is that the men in so the the custodian slams the emergency stop button? Which closes huge valves in the sea lines and ceases all oil and gas extraction, but doesn't do some other stuff

Which we'll get to Uh men in the control room were knocked off their feet and thrown to the floor Most men however were off duty in the accommodation block and they were lifted from chairs or thrown from their beds And just being in an accommodation block as an oil rig is lighting up like the fourth of july Sounds like we talked about sort of the terror of it. Mm-hmm. But just like imagine you you're just like in bed It's 10 p.m. You got to be up balls ass early tomorrow And it's dark presumably and now you've been thrown to the ground and the thing you're standing on 150 feet above the sea is about to

Absolutely. Oh, yeah. I am just like standing on a plank lined with explosives Yeah, uh, so there's a huge explosion In module c which is gas compressor. There's a condensate line teeing into the main oil line That ruptures in module b which is the oil separation module Witnesses reported a second flash and bang as a huge fireball roared into the night sky That's these notes just say kaboom yes This is a picture of the first explosion shortly after it started

All All right, so this is the thaurus which is a large semi submersible firefighting rescue and accommodation vehicle Uh, and I wanted to take a second to talk about how sweet this thing looks you have a fire truck oil rig that rules so hard Also, it can't use its water cannon, uh on people because the cannon was so powerful It would injure or kill anyone hit by the water So they used it sort of where they could but it's worth noting that uh, piper alpha This fire suppression is basically just didn't work

Yeah It was jammed full of divas it was As far as I can tell as far as um, uh, the report said that the fire suppression system on the uh on piper alpha itself never turned on Because it just simply couldn't get there I imagine yeah, well like the control room gets obliterated pretty quickly is the thing Yeah, and and once it does all of the controls for pretty much everything Are gone along with all the people who know how to operate them. Those are just uh, like uh a thick vapor by this point Yeah, you want to take this

Oh me. Yeah, or either one of you. I don't care, huh? So this is the kind of care That uh makes you makes you my favorite host the second gas line ruptured as mentioned the gas line riser to the mcp Oh one platform Which ejects millions of cubic feet of gas into the fire and increases intensity huge flames shot over 300 feet into the air the theros had been driven off by the heat which began to melt the surrounding machinery and steelwork. Nope If only there was some kind of metaphor for this about like applying Uh, you know some kind of fuel to a fire

um for reference, uh What's a riser right so you have an oil you have a gas pipeline At the bottom of the sea right? Um She's going along the bottom of the sea you want some kind of control point. Maybe you want a valve or something So you bring it up to the oil platform And there you have you know a valve

Right So that then you know your nice happy guy right here He can like turn it And and and turn it off if he has to and then he goes back down to the seabed and then it goes up to mc1, right? So that's why that's what a riser is. That's why there's a bunch of extra gas being pumped into this Uh This um This oil platform

Even though they've shut off all the extraction on the platform itself, right? Yeah, and good luck closing that valve because well, what valve? Yes It's fine though. You you have this like industrial pipeline spraying highly flammable gas into I think extremely on fire thing But they can just shut it off at the other end, right?

Wait Right It was actually only after this that the claymore stopped pumping oil because wait for it They did not have authorization and stopping oil pumping costs a lot of money and many days to restart Yep Yep Yeah, just just really make the like capitalism explicit there It's just like what looking out from the control room at my friends being on fire and being like

Can I hit the button to make them not be as much on fire? And you just being on the phone with your boss is like well is really expensive is the thing Let me just run those numbers and I will get back to you As the screams of people burning alive echo into the dead night. Yeah um So personnel still left alive after these explosions Whether death's really sheltering In the scorched smoke felt accommodation block or leaping from the various deck levels including the hella deck

Which is 175 feet into the north sea That that's one that always Scared it was the one, you know, we talked about the sort of the desperation in 9 11 Where you know, you have the videos of like the falling man and that I'm just the the idea of like i'm just gonna fucking jump into the north sea and take my goddamn chances Like it's not a choice. I would whatever want to make certainly is like Is the actual sea burning at this point because like it seems like Because all of the infrastructure is so concentrated on the platform

It's just soaking up all of the combustible material. So it's just burning on the platform So at least you're not jumping From like from one fire into another right as far as I Know it's not the sea is not on fire. Okay. So I have no idea It doesn't it doesn't scientifically it doesn't look like it's on fire there. So yeah So this is a fast rescue craft which has been launched by a stand by vessel called sand haven Imagine being in that shitty little fast boat

Just go back a slide Imagine driving in your shitty boat towards this and being like the fuck am I gonna do with that? The worst part of this is that they actually rescued six people So there was a three-man crew and they had rescued six people from the sea And the second explosion basically swallowed up the boat and killed them Jesus Uh what we got next it was the helicopter. Yes Uh, so this is an raf rescue helicopter

Uh arrives on the scene at 1135 Big ol big old time gap. Well, it's got to get from the high the other side of the highlands all the way out there, right? Yeah, exactly So the the the uh scottish af um helicopter would have got there first but uh You know Yeah, the uh raf rescue helicopters always have to be piloted by like A dilettante prince who is just like taking a year out from being a prince

So, you know, they've got to take that extra time. God damn house of nobles That's a large excuse Pass the god damn titles and ability amendment like right now This this means I don't need whatever Napoleonic needs or whoever was designed to prevent to becoming uh Just getting wind up into this pilot has like zero chins Or conversely has like nine chins Despite them weighing only 145 pounds. Don't worry chaps. You're you're all safe now Wow

Uh rask you take this slide, please I'm very anxious. What is happening here? Well, this is this is a helicopter, which as you may know is not actually, um heli and copter, but uh helico and pter which means uh a rotating wing Now I need I need to figure out what on this slide is important and what isn't because you copy pasted the notes Yes, I did It's a timeline

I not everything on the timeline is important. All right. I'll go then Okay, 1137 thyrus, even though we're going to cut this out. Anyway 1137 thyrus contacts Uh nibrod rescue zero one to apprise of the situation Uh the standby vessel sand haven picked up 25 casualties including three with serious burns another one with an injury Thyrus requests evacuation of its non-essential personnel to make room for incoming casualties Rescue 138 is requested to evacuate 12 non-essential personnel from thyrus transfer to ocean victory before returning with paramedics At 1150 with critical support structures burning away and with nothing to support the heavier structures on top

Platform collapse begins one of the crane's collapses followed by the drilling derrick the generation utility soap module d Which included the fireproof decommodation block slips into the sea That that's because you put all of the nano thermite in there. Um All right, it's impossible. It must be to control demolition by thatcher. Yeah. Yeah uh the rest of the timeline is basically just uh Witching up the rescue 138 sort of going back and forth and one of the things that kind of gets me is that they seemingly only had One helicopter. Yep. Yep. That's not really that weird like the

Like raf and royal navy search and rescue units are really small and were so then also so Yeah, no, um I mean the other thing is like how much could you do with two helicopters over one like you're you're essentially evacuating people to This nearby tiny oil platform slash rescue vessel, right? You know, I figure maybe you could maybe you could Do something with two helicopters, but Yeah, I don't think you could do this. I mean, there's there's 81 people in the accommodation deck What it uh collapses into the sea and all 81 die

So it's it's worth noting that if you were not already basically in the north sea swimming for your fucking life You are doomed Yeah, and one of the things that we keep coming back to and I think of ms. Estonia here is that like The course of action that saves your life is Never obvious or like intuitive We talked about that with bo paul about the idea of no, you actually have to run into the gas That's literally choking you for breath Yeah, that's

Maddening I you know, it's one of the things I come back to and there's not a lot when we record this It sort of gets me but just like Being in an accommodation block with 80 other dudes. I'm just thinking. Okay. I'm safe like it's fire Yeah, I'm gonna stay in the fireproof thing and wait for rescue and not take any like Dangerous risks because I don't want to make anything worse And then you're you're doomed because you basically did the right thing And it's not your fucking fault like I just I it's it's one that that really does get me is this is the idea that like

You're being choked for air because it's already filled with smoke I just like you're sort of holding on with everything you have just to be doomed by falling into the sea Yeah, like that's that's grim Uh So the fires from the wells and oil and gas line All of which ended up rushing one by one um That produced flames at the height of about 200 meters. That's about what 700 feet

750 maybe yes Very very tall and consumed a peak energy rate of 100 gigawatts Which I find found directly means that's three times the rate of uk total energy consumption Reminds me of an old soviet joke about shinobal Which is that the soviet news starts up and the anchor announces Yesterday evening the the vladimir lenin nuclear power generation plant of pripyat Ukraine achieved the five-year plan for electricity generation in point zero zero zero zero five seconds

Nice, I suppose good old external combustion engine So, uh civilian helicopters show up at 12 58 uh, the platform Is totally gone. All you have to do is the module is the module on screen. Mm-hmm. Um, that's module a uh So we have now more helicopters start to get fatalities Uh, the last the last survivors are uh

Taken from tharos to avardine at 7 25 a.m So I also wanted to point out like I can't imagine being the fucking guy who's flying the helicopter No, it's like because it feels pointless Like I yeah, you know, I was I was talking today was sort of a hard day for me personally And talking about you know what with you know coronavirus in just 2020 in general how hard sort of anything feels and just like You know the reason the notes some of these notes suck ass is because just I couldn't really bring myself to do it And uh, just the idea of everything feeling hopeless and sort of decaying and with the election

It's like, you know, would you rather be poisoned or shot essentially? Mm-hmm. Um, yes, would you rather jump the hundred and fifty meters or uh, burn alive? Yeah, and so uh The thing that I the like the helicopter Again, we talked about emissive stonia, right the helicopter landing in the middle of the night You know extremely vicariously and you sort of already know what's happened I think is that like, you know, you've seen it sink into the sea, you know, those guys are dead now And you're just trying to like

Keep it together long enough to to get out anyone who can um So 228 people Uh 226 people excuse me. We're on board uh piper alpha that night 61 survive 109 die of smoke inhalation 13 of drowning four of injuries including burns In four cases the cause of death cannot be established and 30 bodies were never recovered Um, it takes three weeks for the fires to be extinguished And there remains a piper alpha toppling to the sea

um in 1989 And this is like I said, this is when they really got me just like There are no good choices sort of deal And just uh, yeah, I kind of actually wanted to apologize for the note sucking but I just I can't imagine the sort of All of us all of us are extremely depressed And I guess the other thing with like oil oil disasters is like they have that such this Huge long tail, right? We're like, yes, not only are you um, just

Yeah, dealing with all of that but But incidentally you have this massive fireball and that's just going to keep going until you stop it And that's going to be what two weeks This is the thing I was concerned about here is like But you can see like there's one pipeline here And I don't know if this is one of the wells or if this is one of the risers And that is continuously feeding a flame the next day And I would assume, you know

This if this is not something you can shut off with a valve somewhere else This would be very very very difficult to cap Um, because you'd be looking at sending a crew in here. I mean, I guess you would have to explode Some kind of you'd have to you'd have to cause some kind of explosion right here, right? Have you ever seen lessons of darkness is wonderful wonderful visuals of how to put out an oil well file fire And you would have to get some folks in here with probably cutting torches To you know, just sort of get a solid surface here where you could install a blowout preventer That was one of the big problems with um

Deepwater horizon is that the well was cut at a bad spot. So it was Really difficult to install a well out module. Yeah, that was still on fire And they actually had to bring in the guy the Texan who's read a dare Uh, that's the guy who basically invented capping oil fires They actually bring him in To to to to cap uh to cap it and they didn't really think anyone could do it um, so they P1 which is the well they have to cap uh, because they didn't want to do it under the sea because that could take two to three years

They basically, uh, they ended up blasting it with water The guys lieutenants come in stuff a sealing device into it pumping pump fluid to the bottom of the pipe and kill the well And then they sealed the rest uh with cement But like oh god No, thank you. I believe this is how I would uh How I would describe that um I will say that uh

When they're recovering the bodies they're doing Surveys, uh, they had to use fish the fishing vessel like a sort of everything they could have um And they had to take the the the module the accommodation module from the seafloor Uh in october of 1988 1988. Yeah And then uh, they do for what it's worth topple the well heads Uh into the sea in a controlled demolition in march 1989 So they're the supervision of George W. Bush, of course. Yes, of course. Yeah

So there's uh, there's a hundred there's a hundred foot high pile of debris on the seabed now apparently This is the uh accommodation module after they rose a they salvaged it and put it on a barge Uh interesting um Contrast between the patina from rust and the patina from fire yeah it's very uh What's that word rustic so to speak

All right, so I suppose let's move on and talk about the inquiry and uh, the thatcher response, which is actually pretty brief, but um Thatcher cabinet basically says I don't want was it good No, uh the thatcher cabinet, um Basically as soon as it happens says they don't want, uh, the labor unions to use it for capital and against uh, north sea drilling and it came out that in 1986 Um, the thatcher government had not given more money to the north sea for safety because it was deemed not a priority yep

Yep, that was the uh, that was the call unions fault. I assume of course. That was the ncb's fault Um, well, there's your social murder Uh, next what is it lord collins report? Yeah, trying to like reconstruct this because like there's no witnesses from the control room like That was one of the sort of the darkly funny things to me I don't want to say funny, but just fuck this was uh The fact that they couldn't interview uh anyone for piper alphas management team because they were all dead

Yep Yeah Blew everyone to smithereens this had to like uh, and I mean those the fact that those were the luckier ones is extremely fucked um But yeah, no having to having to like reverse engineer. Oh, well, this is probably what happened. We assume Uh, because we know that the these pumps went on at these times Uh, and that this maintenance was due so this is probably what happened, but like

I mean, yeah, there's you know, they didn't So some of the stuff that went wrong, I guess is that uh, the people with the authority to order an evacuation have been killed in the first explosion Uh, which was a consequence of platform design, which didn't include blast walls Tartan and claymore continued to pump gas for like an hour until the pump line ruptured Uh, I mean they could see piper alpha burning, but didn't have the authority to stop Which makes you want to throw up frankly. I really don't like thinking about that Is it really worth four or five days worth of production? Listen

That fire would have burned itself out really quickly if they had not kept pumping That's the worst part of this disaster This would not have been anywhere near as bad as it was if like folks had seen Seen the there one of their neighbor platforms on fire and said, hmm I should probably stop sending flammable liquids and gases to that platform and they were like Well, I don't have authorization So I assume the riser is probably fine

And then you know, it just causes multiple extra explosions And it's like you fucking moron like listen you you can probably withstand Five days worth of production not happening like it's not going to kill you right? I mean, I I don't know. Maybe maybe you'll get You'll get yelled at Four, you know You know and if you get yelled at I Well, that's the other thing is you might get yelled at and and then like maybe it'll fire you

Because you prevented a disaster Which of course is something that happens very fairly commonly under our fucked up economic system It'll be good to have some kind of a union to enable you to feel more confident to like Just unilaterally do stuff for safety reasons, I guess That's an interesting one. I wonder if if if if it was only management who would have the authority to shut off production It kind of sounds that way if all the guns were off with just on on play for alpha would just kill it instantly, you know Yeah It's also worth noting that uh when play for alpha was usually built. Uh, they weren't doing gas export. Um

So when they did that they had to retrofit it, uh, which they put all the new facilities next to the control room Uh under the electrical power radio room and accommodation modules So that when uh shit went south, uh, you know, every everything bad happened I think the the line that really, uh, that gets me reading over this is, um And there was just no communications. They blew up the control room Yeah, but the the line that really gets me is as the crisis mounted. This is as, um As the guys are like in the the accommodation block as the crisis mounted two men don protective gear And attempted to reach the diesel pumping machinery below decks to activate the firefighting system and were never seen again

Yes Yeah, no, that's the shit. It's it's the same thing with that. Uh, what was it the The railway employee in bo paul. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you know, you know, literally risked his own life and died if I remember correctly Yep, so that they would not stop and therefore make everything worse Um, you know, the we talked about the the fire safety system, um Which so water alone would not have uh, obviously put out oil fires And with gas fires, you shouldn't even try to do it, but it might have at least significantly delayed The that gas line rupture, which was the major

Factor and everything getting much worse And that's because you had to start the pumps manually as mentioned um And they had they didn't have a system in place for making them automatic obviously like You don't want to see your friend mic, you know made into spaghetti, but the main risk here is fire Yeah Your friend mic times 200, uh turned into bacon

right, uh Can we stop for a second to make fun of scottish judge robes? Sure, just ridiculous Santa I gotta say I I just I can't imagine like on you know talking about the worst experience of my life You know seeing to a dude dressed like Santa Like being like, yes, I you know I saw people fall into the sea and they died

And my friends were burned alive and then they collapsed into the sea in the accommodation modules And scottish Santa is up here in his wig being like that. How did that make you feel? just God God damn what a silly country. Oh tell me about it Yeah, I mean It's very bad and I mean the Lessons to draw from this

Uh aside from put your permits all in the same place Put your permits all in the same place Physically have a lockout tag out thing attached to the thing Like it just it's not that difficult to like put a guard over a button to say hey if you press this Everybody dies. The wildest thing was that the the valve Was actually about 25 feet Uh above and 45 feet away from the pump itself Because the pressure release valves were located uh above the floor above the pumps. That's another thing

Just the you know the permitoric system was all just informal communication And this is why we standardize our safety procedures Yeah, and all of this stuff is like it within a maze of pipe work Exactly because you've you've like fitted and refitted and retrofitted the this fucking platform The safety induction consisted of being handed a booklet and being told to read it Cool you don't shift change all that that's more than I've had for safety procedures a lot of the time Yeah, you get your own booklet Yeah, they probably

So communications are also destroyed from the first explosions um and it's not thought that uh Rabbit shutdown would have helped but uh shutting down the oil lines would have made a difference. Hmm Yeah, I I see here. It says that there was no contingency plan for having to abandon the control room. Correct I have to say if you can get a lot of water on that platform that's going to help you a lot that's going to stop

uh various metal components from you know, uh melting or Bell bending too much. I guess it would be your main thing That would stop a lot of buckling that would keep things cool enough that you wouldn't have to worry about the platform collapsing Um, if you just had those firefighting that firefighting equipment working um, and I I mean this is uh This is one of those things about um, you know fire Equipment is sometimes it is very dangerous for people who are working In the wrong space. I forget who told me this

It was a while back. It was about the um Fire ventilation in the Holland's tunnel. I think or one of one of the Hudson river tunnels Oh, yeah, you just fucking die if you're in there. Yeah, exactly If you was that on this podcast I think it may have been but yeah, I think because I referenced Uh, uh an awful still versus the Stallone movie about the whole Oh, yeah The gist of it is just the big suck uh takes all the air out of it

Which is kind of bad if you need that to breathe but so does fire so Yeah, I say if you're doing if you're doing work in the uh fire ventilation tunnels and the fire suppression system comes on Yeah, you get subject for her with hurricane force winds full of uh smoke for The rest of your life, which is probably going to be about 10 minutes Definitely There's some other stuff. I mean the let me guess how many people went to fucking prison Uh, zero people went to prison Well, they were all dead

Um, yeah, I guess uh, yeah, so there's nobody nobody like in an office who decides Hey, you can't shut off this uh, this natural gas pipeline that you're killing your friends with Because no none of those guys Ever went to prison right and they couldn't evacuate because the uh, they the the assumption was that they'd be able to evacuate by helicopter And then the helicopter, uh, the helodeck was rendered inoperable by very thick black smoke Mm-hmm. Uh same as 9-11. Theros had a near total power loss uh There they never launched any lifeboats or inflatable life rafts

So everyone who did survived uh did so by making their way to sea as we said Including jumping from the fucking helodeck, which is yeah, again. Fuck. Thank you. Yeah So, I mean I think it's sort of in conclusion I A follow make safety procedures consistent and follow them Mm-hmm. Uh, please don't assume there are there are fail safes because there aren't Uh and be if your friends are being burned alive and you have the power to at least burn them alive a little less Please do it no matter what it costs

Yes, but please please volunteer to get yelled at Yes, and see Keep it in the ground Yes See do that keep it in the ground where it doesn't hurt us and D If you get an excuse to use a ratchet wrench use it They make a cool sound tight tool tight. Yes, tool tight all the time You know, I use a cheater bar. Fuck it. I

Keep it tool tight. All right. Yeah All right. Do you want to do safety third? Yeah, we're gonna do safety third. We have a segment No, it's called safety third. Yes This uh The safety probing diagram already this safety third comes from uh I assume because they're a public figure. I can I can talk about them

This comes from twitter user at poppy underscore haze Um, all right, so I used to work In pathology at a major new york city hospital Uh sorting slides as a summer job Paid $12 an hour Pretty good for the time

When people see a doctor sometimes they need to get their meat bits checked So we got to cut them out Use a micro micro planner to take a wafer thin slice of their meat Put it onto some glass Shock it with some chemicals to make it prettier And then an emo pathologist named doctor first name Stares at it and tells you either you're fucked or you're fine Afterwards the slides have to be put in storage

In a case or in case you come back with a new disease so we can examine your meat then Versus now Listen, we're all gonna we're all gonna get a nasty disease and have to get a biopsy taken one of these days And that's where I came in These microscope slide cabinets are filled with glass each unit over two meters tall About one meter wide weighs about a metric ton when full They look like this just row after row of glass slides containing slices of people

Yeah, although that's not the scary part to me the scary part is they've probably got slices of brain So i'm just terrified of prions Whoa, I want to avoid that I they gotta they gotta put the prions in like I don't know another building like they find out you have prions They probably have to like you know that doctor who episode where the hospital is transplanted to the moon That's what they should do if you have a prion We we do we bring back manned space exploration, but that's why is we just get you as far away from me as possible There there is a there is a prion among us

The hospital where I worked had a forklift accident Transporting a cabinet full of slides from the upstairs access room To the most recent slides to the morgue backroom storage They needed someone autistic enough To reorganize several million fallen and broken slides They budgeted me three months to fix it and I did it in three weeks Well, so they sent me into the morgue to help them clear out the backlog created by the accident So every day I'd clock into the morgue

I'd clock into the morgue Where I'd work in the back getting phone calls or emails from upstairs to pull a patient's slide history And I have to run from shelf to shelf grabbing them all Bagging them into padded envelopes to be taken upstairs or bike messenger to another hospital Yeah, there should be like a pneumatic tube system for this shit, you know As you can imagine a big city hospital fills these up rather quickly So the basement storage area has these deep rows of cabinets on motorized shelving units There were like 20 of these huge one-ton slide cabinets next to each other in a row

And two back-to-back on Each motorized shelf and there were about 10 of these shelves, right? It was a bit of a walk to get from one end to out again I was told that if there was ever a problem to kick the bottom of the unit Where there was some red and white tape, there's supposed to be an infrared sensor that when they Detect in obstruction the shelf stops and beeps Incessantly So one afternoon I'm finishing up requests putting away the last of the slides

Uh, I The last of the slides I had all the way in the back When I hear the shelf system beep for the reset to move, right? I shout hey I'm working back here Here's a diagram of sort of how it worked and see Bloodthirsty bastard shelf and other shelf. Yeah Uh Sometimes someone has a rush request so they send someone downstairs to grab it immediately

Instead of adding it to my queue and it happens But I hear nothing at all except the system beeping again and the cabinets. I'm working on start moving towards me Nope, I kick the tape and the shelf kept moving No towards me I kick this I kick the tape again And it kept moving And the infrared safety center sensors turned out not to work on that unit

Nope, I kicked the one behind me. The shelves are still moving and that one didn't work either I looked at the open end and there was no way I could run out before becoming entrapped I looked up, but I didn't think I could climb up before my leg got squished Then I looked at the back wall where there's just enough space to fit a twink Getting sucked off by a twink. That's what they want these days. I cannot relate And I threw myself into it as the shelf closed over my face I can hear the open shelf I was working on being bent and then shut by the closing shelves

And now I'm between the shelving units and the back wall I shimmy my way out until I hit an empty section covered in dust and I start shouting Hey, you could have killed me As I walked to the front But there was no one there I realized No one would set the system to look at the empty section. I was standing in. Oh, no The morgue has a huge heavy keycard door with a loud ass solenoid and it's negative pressure

So the door opening makes a racket and there's a breeze when it opens and I realize I didn't hear that Or feel a breeze before this whole thing started I'm alone down there just me and these merciless shelving units It was 4 30 and I checked and realized it was Friday the 13th Jesus I clocked out early I told the pathologist that usually does autopsies that the shelves were dangerous and were told that they They had known that some of the sensors were broken, but most of them worked I told my supervisor from pathology about the system resetting itself and nearly crashing me

And she crossed yourself and said it was scary down there She doesn't go down there I kept working there another month or so until summer ran out and then I went back to school Incredible yes I will never use shelves again. I will just put my shit on the floor everything goes on the floor I've I've been in libraries with systems like this, but they're hand cranked. I can't imagine a reason you would need them to be motorized People die a lot Yeah, it's so you want to kill your pathology interns. Yeah

Survival of the fittest Oh my god I just can't I cannot imagine being killed by a shelf full of biopsies Mm-hmm. This is this this episode has been long on the body horror, you know Yes, can we do a lighter one next time, please? We'll do buy for dolphin next. Oh, no Getting sucked out of a twink All right, so that was

Safety third and piper alpha Yes, it was very good. Well, there's your problem. Uh much much announcement. Um, yes my fucking I Because I'm weird. I bought an id card printer and that means I have been running up Pennsylvania Secret Service Id cards You can put them in your wallet. You can flash them at people. You can get arrested if you want If you want one

It's gonna be like first come first served But if you find me on twitter at alicefazandam and dm me A name and a picture you want on there and a mailing address Then I will send you one for as much as you want to pay me for it or as little Please do not attempt to impersonate an officer of the law with these cards We do have to say that I don't want the actual Pennsylvania Secret Service To show up at my door and start asking me questions Use these responsibly or else but

You can you can buy a card that says Pennsylvania Secret Service on it. It also features Signatures by all of us and the activate windows logo and the wawa logo and the sheets logo Not the runner's logo though our secret master Why go anywhere else it's true. Yeah Um, oh we might have a discord soon We should talk about that But we have a shirt soon

No, we should have a short shirt soon. I mean that that store is all but set up It's just that I keep getting Halfway to the it's like a zeno's paradox thing I keep getting halfway to the next step and then not actually doing it I'd love to know if you needed any help with that Franklin 12 is coming out soon Uh, actually actually soon um

And then we are still having The world transform festival session We had to delay it because of course we were working with city skylines as the primary Visualization tool and of course it it farted all over the save Right when I was recording the cinematics So we had to Scrap it and move it back two weeks. That's happening Shit this sunday

What is this sunday? The sunday is the 18th rose the 18th. Yeah, so that's still happening um Yeah, what else is in the news? Oh In the in the plugs. We are recording our october bonus episode Next tuesday the 20th Yes, which is my birthday Uh, and we will have on as guest uh, dan mcquade formerly of deadspin now of the defector

Uh, so i'm pretty excited for that Are you ready for some football? No wrong sport. Yeah We're gonna talk about basketball. It's the only ball that i'm ready for you are gonna have to get ready for some basketball yes Uh, next episode the steven lace mistroch disaster. Well, sure I've been coming i'ma continue to come skips been coming He's gonna continue to come and people just need to get over that Thank you for that my pleasure

All right, are you eating cereal? No, i was getting burrito out of my mouth Very nice very nice our next perfectly on brand Next episode, of course will be on the tocoma narrows bridge disaster. I just said that did you yes Well our next episode will be on the tocoma narrows bridge disaster I I just said that the tocoma narrows our next episode will be on the tocoma narrows bridge disaster All right, uh, I am All right, we're good Yes, bye everybody. Yeah, oh if he does in

How do I stop this? Okay