Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 48: Byford Dolphin

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

this episode sucks Slides: https://youtu.be/azThd0R7Bt0 patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp

You have to switch the big the big does it work switch to. Yes. Yeah, that's that's one of the main problems. I am. See, I got to start the discord call as well. Seed ratio point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one asking me about my redacted.ch membership. Oh, it's so loud. We're good. Yes, I believe we're good. I think we're good. I think we're good. I think we're going. We are moving. We are having a nice time. Yeah, this is this is the alliance of this podcast episode now is is me and Liam, both miserable, raging against everything that in the discord, the discord group.

Ross has a little crown next to his name. And I got to tell you, no, no monarchs will survive the revolution. Ross, the French Air Stocks, you never saw a comedy there. Although we are technically incorporated as a co-op. I got to talk to that guy. Yeah, you got to talk to the accountant so we don't talk to him. Pete tell you Pete, if you're listening, check your fucking emails. Exposed the guy live. Yeah. Yeah, I know, right. God damn it. All right. Anyway, so here we are podcasting. Welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's podcast. It's about engineering disasters. It has slides. If you're listening audio only like through a podcast app,

the slides are the YouTube link in the description. That's where they are. Okay. Here we are. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Yes, me, Alice, she, huh. Fuck you. Liam. I feel like that key and peel skit. Yeah, the East on Spall. Yeah. Temple University, Rutgers University. Fuck you. Welcome to fuck you. Well, there's your problem. Yeah. Welcome to the podcast where everyone's tired and miserable. I'm fine. Let's talk about explosive decompression. Much like what's about to happen to my butt

after the spices process. Oh, God. Feeling grateful that I'm just extremely tired and that I don't have like butt related issues for once in my fucking life. Yeah. Once I got forcibly converted to Islam by the whole truck guy, all your tummy problems became our tummy problems. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You sort of split them down the middle, you know? Yeah. My ass hole is Solomon's baby. Also, my roommate is doing parent teacher conferences from home. So I really hope no parents are on a phone call right now. Oh, boy. I hope it's not the same room.

No, no. Same room. Same room. Cool. I assume at this point, Megan would have come in and beaten me unconscious. So if you hear a voice yelling at me. All right. So, well, that was our original plan was to record this and trash future simultaneously. And Alice just only says stuff which is relevant to both podcasts. Yes. Yeah. So, anyway, how do you know we're not doing that? You don't. Anyway, you don't. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta preserve the wall of history, Rose.

So what you see on the screen here is a diving bell. Nothing bad has happened yet, actually, because I didn't want to put pictures of the aftermath of this one. Thank you. Because they were not good. Yeah. You can find them. You don't even need to. Just look at pictures of like jam spread really thin. Yeah. And it kind of looked like a Thanksgiving turkey after it's been gone through a little bit, honestly. And I saw the picture and I was like, I'm not putting that in the presentation. Thank you.

That's nasty. So anyway, today we're going to talk about explosive decompression and the Bifur Dolphin accident. You asked for it. You wanted it. You wanted to have any other ideas this week. But first we have to do the goddamn news. Ah, New Jersey. Never change. Yes. A man. What is happening? Oh, it's an Instagram. Oh, what's I'm sorry. I was about to say. Sorry. I have to check on my many Instagram messages. No, it was I realized that I had been watching stories this whole time by accident.

And it was just someone we are quoting Taylor Swift. The new album's out. It's good. Go listen to it. Cool. Go fuck yourself. This is this is easily the most chaotic episode of this. I love that this guy lives in Hamilton and I take back my criticism of of Hamilton. I know you're still going to go down to your cousin Vinny's for Sunday Gravy and talk about how it's ridiculous that it costs five dollars to get to your job in South Philly. But at least this guy is one of us, I'd like to say. It's a man in New Jersey has created a very large sound device to make large booms in order to drive both clouds and birds away from his vineyard. American man invents device to yell at God.

What he's doing now is better than I think any of us. Honestly, he's driving those sparrows away. He's just annihilated sparrows within a five mile radius of this device. Imagine you put up a scarecrow and then this guy shows up. This guy's sonic booms your scare your scarecrow into Atlanta County. Yeah. It just looks like the footage of nuke tests. It's just getting blown over. What is this made out of? Scrap. That's made out of scrap. It's a thing according to the article. It's just shit he had laying around. Okay, cool. Yeah. Strong man destroyed by New Jersey man.

My favorite detail of this is they asked him why do this thing and his answer was I got bored of this COVID shit and that is verbatim. Yes, I decided to make the loudest thing I could. And he's like, he's like out in the pine. He's like, I'm surprised anyone heard it just because of how just empty it is. People live in Hamilton. Not good. But people live in Hamilton. Dude, it's the Blueberry Capital of the World, Roz. Oh, I didn't know that. The original headline on this was mystery of like deafening booms solved. So someone's been hearing it. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it must be like mostly the birds.

That is three neighbors who are just constantly now exposed to psychological. They're getting way code. This week, they're all going to be branched of idiots out of protest. Oh, God. Yeah, this guy, he's been using it not only to kill birds, but to split clouds apart in his words. New Jersey man argues with weather. Yeah. Old man yells at cloud with louder. Yeah. And if you do that loud enough, it turns out that's, you know, successful. It's a winning proposition. Who is yelling? Sounded like Korean. Why are people always yelling in my fucking house, dude? I live, I live with two other people

and it's like living in a frat house. What you need is one of these. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then I'd be like, why are you putting that on the roof? Why are you put, I want to use the back garden. Why is this 30 foot thing? Why have you broken all the neighbors glass? Speaking of big booms, you know, other news. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a created West Virginia plant. Yeah, the plant wasn't there before. Hold on, created. No, no, no, no. The guy from New Jersey wheeled his giant thing of scrap in, created a massive explosion which

then generated a chemical plant around it. That's actually pretty impressive. This is basically how Ross plays city skylines. That's how that's, it's like the windows, pipes, screensaver. Yeah. Like, boom, all at once, you know. A chemical plant in Bell, West Virginia blew up. It was owned by a company called Optima Bell Chemical. I tried to figure out what they made there and the answer is specialty chemicals. Oh boy. So whatever turned the Joker crazy. Whatever turned the Joker crazy, some kind of like war crimes, gas, all that fun stuff. I understand this is in a section of West Virginia called the chemical valley.

Yeah. Upwind from Cancer Alley. Well, it's very, it's very interesting that we talk about West Virginia being deindustrialized when there's so much goddamn industry there. You thought, you thought you could only die of black long in West Virginia? Hell no. You can, you can get murdered in a wide variety of industrial accidents. A magical place. Yes. The explosion apparently involved dry chlorine and methanol. Oh, that's tight. Also, Bell is like right next to Charleston, I think it's 15 or so miles. That sounds about right. It's on the, what's the one, the Kanawa River? Yeah, I think so. Almost World War One gassed a large city in West Virginia. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Yeah, did anyone die? One man was killed, three injured. There's no like formal report on it. So all you people in the DM saying, do an episode on this, I'm not going to do it until a report comes out because I don't know shit about this stuff. Yeah, you're going to have to watch us go through OCam again. Well, the good news is, yeah, that's the Kanawa River. The good news, I suppose, is we can, we can use this as course material when I finally get that degree mill off the ground. Yeah. Well, that's your problem with you. It's going to, this is going to be a foundation module. Our one on one course is just a college episode. In a tragic degree mill accident. Crushed in the diploma printer. No, no, no. One of the things is like the fucking degrees

backed up off the rollers and it just fucking shoots out at you. The degrees are made of asbestos, folks. Mm-hmm. And like paint. Don't let your kids like it. The degrees come off the prints in a continuous roll, right? But then it gets blocked up at the chopper machine and starts flying all around. You get a real, you get paper cut in half by a bunch of lines. Justin and I have seen the same steel mill video accident. Oh, yeah, they're also red hot for some reason. How else are you going to print them? Literally hot off the presses. That's right. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. Shit. Yes. Nailed it. All right. Now, welcome to my speed run of BioShock.

As I was going to say, is everybody ready for diving? Is everybody ready for diving? All right. So we have to talk about... Oh, we should post the link and the thing. That's what our caption... When we post that we just recorded an episode, it'll just be, is everybody ready for diving? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is a smart one. So I guess we got to start and ask, what is diving? It's when you go under water, which is harassment. Cursing God, but instead of flying, you de-evolve and go back into the seas. If you've ever dived, if you've ever been submerged in water, you're the bastard of Earth. That's about the same. Yeah, if you were like in, if you were like

underwater in a pool for like... Kill yourself. 30 seconds. Yeah. That was a mistake. That's an affront to God. And man, yeah. Yeah. 4.5 billion years of evolution and you decided to just undo it by going slow. Go back in. You want to stay there? Yeah. So, all right. Yeah. Diving's when you go under water. There's lots of types of diving. There's, you know, like scuba diving. Everyone knows you got the tank on your back, right? There's stuff like tether diving, right? Which is when you got like a hose that goes to the surface that supplies you with air and crap, right? That's more common for like commercial diving.

There's stuff like free diving, like if you're, I don't know, one of those... Lunatics. Yeah, lunatics, right? And, but like diving for extended periods has been around for a surprisingly long time, facilitated by something called the diving bell, right? That's this guy here, right? And so diving bells have been around for a long time. They were first described by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, right? BCE. Show some respect, it's Hanukkah. All right, BCE. Thank you. Is there like, what is the year in the Jewish calendar then? Oh, dude, it's like 5900. We never run out. Yeah, it's like, god, 47 something in the Islamic calendar because we had to have one too. What? No, you guys just got here, right?

But like, no, we're like, well, we need a lunar calendar. Oh, we can't use this one that's already like, people have already done the math on it. We have to come up with our own. It's 5781. So we got only 219 years left until the Messiah comes, supposedly. That's the deadline. So I think we're probably going to smash right through that. Somebody did the math to figure out when the Islamic calendar and the Gregorian one sync up. So if we're all still alive in 20,784, that's going to be cool. It'll probably be shortly after they finally put down COVID. So they finally polish Cyberpunk 2077 to an acceptable standard. COVID is cured

and the calendar sync up. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, back then Aristotle described diving bells being used for underwater diving, right? These sorts of things were mainly used for stuff like salvaging sunken ships, underwater construction, if you're building a bridge foundation or something, and you would have military uses for them. You could pop out from under the diving bell and then sabotage the ship and then go back under the diving bell. The way these things work is this is what's called a wet bell, right? Yeah, you remember that scene from Pirates of the Caribbean? With the canoe. Yeah, that's basically how this works.

So yeah, the way it works is the diving bell has a pocket of air in the top, right? And then inside the diving bell is what is called, let me switch to blue because I'm describing water. So, inside the diving bell is a free surface, right? Yes. That's the free surface symbol, right? So, and this free surface means the diving bell can, it means you have a pocket of air there, but as you descend underwater, this free surface will move up, right? And that means you still, that's because the air pressure equalizes with the water pressure, right? Yes. So, you still get the effects of differential pressure even when you're in this air pocket. Now, I just want to say before we keep going,

I am, you know, I'm not a diving expert, most of what I know about hydrodynamics. We're going to get the airplane guys again, in which case I don't care. We've already disrespected the entire activity of diving up top. We're throwing this together in like two hours. Fuck off, dude. It's Friday. If you dive, if you have a dive, you are fish to mate, yeah, congratulations. Yeah, you are a fish and I don't respect you. And I mean, it's one of those hobbies that I really don't respect. It's right up there with mountaineering in terms of like the idiotic bullshit people do where like, and I get, you know, taking risks and like, that's the only way you can feel alive that and choke yourself while you jerk it. But like, again, it's just not a thing. Like, if God wanted

you to fucking go underwater, you would have given you gills and you would be a fish. Unlike mountaineers, there's people doing legitimate work diving. Hey, man, I get those Instagram stories aren't going to write themselves with my tastefully austere, a gray on white portrait of myself. One of the other problems with researching this episode was almost all the information was in Norwegian, a language which you speak. I don't speak Moose. I do not speak Moose. Do you? Do you not? I thought you spoke Norwegian. No, I don't. Oh, see, I had this headcanon where you do speak Norwegian and that's why I got confused. No, I know a little bit of Russian and that's it makes you feel better. I know some French

and I can limp it in Spanish. Russian is bear speak. Norwegian is Moose speak. What's French? It's pheasants. Skunk speak. Yeah. So, all right, so let's talk about something called saturation diving. And in order to talk about this, we have to talk about bridges. Wow. Most of the text on this diagram is not visible here. We would not need to dive to make bridges if you made the bridges more rigid. That's true. So, we're going to explain why you rhymed. So, built some rigid bridges. You just get like a long enough totally rigid beam. You just like tilt it and lay it across the fucking water. Genius. Genius. And I go ahead.

So, I mean, all right, so sort of, but you still need a pillar and a pillar is made of stone. No, you don't. And if the bridge beer is made of stone, that's the most rigid thing you can make. Okay, that is true. Yeah. Why not more I-beams? Why not just make the whole thing out of stone? Why not just dump a bunch of stone in there to create a kind of like a berm that you then will cross the top of like berms. Yeah, I was about to say, yeah. Feel the berm. Burmy bros. I do not think that would be good for crossing the Mississippi River.

You can just build it high enough, dumbass. Yeah, which is speaks to a fundamental lack of ambition. Just but just down the Mississippi. Yeah, just just damn everything from the Ozarks to the Rockies. That's a good idea. If you don't need to dam it, you don't need to cross it. Welcome to Infrastructure Week, folks. So, now, diving for a long period of time so that your internal tissues come into an equilibrium with the pressure of the surrounding environment is called saturation diving, right? And saturation diving has existed for a long period of time, but people didn't know what it was for a long time, right? Oh, it was one of those things that

was discovered by accident. It was more like the science sort of appeared to say, oh, this is what we're doing and it's bad for us. Looks up from eating giant hunk of asbestos. So, a lot of times folks would stay in a diving bell for a long time while they were salvaging sunken vessels that were really deep underwater and they would come back up to the surface and they would suddenly develop weird symptoms like cold symptoms, fever symptoms. Sometimes they just heal over and die, right? And this has been happening for centuries. But then towards the middle of the 19th century, we started having to put up big bridges across rivers, especially in the United States, right? And this required something called a caseon.

We had the ability to pump compressed air into a rigid structure that you could then sink into a riverbed so you could excavate foundations, right? This is called a pneumatic caseon. So, basically have a large stone or concrete or wooden structure, right? You sink it into the riverbed, you pump compressed air in, you have pumps pumping water out and the pressure inside there is equivalent to the pressure of the water at the bottom, right? And then workers go in there and they manually dig all the river muck out, right? So, one of the things was as we started using these, folks would come out of the caseons and they'd start getting sick, right? And this was sort of like, what's the word? Not empirically studied until the construction of

the Eames Bridge in St. Louis, right? A physician named Alphonse Jamonet. Okay. A hell of a name. Yeah. They don't even like that anymore. Yeah, they started documenting these cases of caseon disease, right? Where workers would go in the caseon, they'd work for 12 hours or whatever hell the shift was back then. 16, yeah. 16, whatever. And then they would leave the caseon and it wasn't like, there wasn't even like an airlock, it's just like you sort of, you went out and there was a rapid pressure change. And then folks started having problems. Sure. But then the idea that this was a disease in itself was new because before this, if you just keeled over and died after getting out of the thing,

you attributed that to living in the 19th century or earlier when people just did that shit all the time. It's like, yeah, he's probably had too much radium or something. Yeah, exactly. Right. We didn't have radium yet. There's probably no lead or asbestos. Probably done too much cocaine and then just like been gnawing on a big block of lead. Yes. After a long day of being in the asbestos mines, I like to cool off with a nice cool brick of lead just a just a way to grinding antimony over my food, like with a pepper grinder. Yes. Use lead instead of sugar. It's also sweet, you know, so

well, they did do that with wine, didn't they? It was lead sweet wine. You know, by this bridge was put up in 1871. There are about 300 workers. I think maybe 390 something workers in the caissons and 12 workers were killed by caisson disease over the construction of the bridge. Now, after Alphonse Geminette sort of described this by 1872, there was sort of a theory that caisson disease was caused by Italians. No, we figured out the science real quick. See, this is unusual because for the 19th century, you expect there to be a crackpot theory along that's like, you know, the Irishman has a higher proportion of whiskey and has blood that makes

him more vulnerable to this. I wonder if that would. I don't know what the science behind that one is. If you know about the decompression sickness while drunk, get in touch with us. By 1872, the method of action had been discovered, right, or at least theorized, which was that, you know, as you move from a place of high pressure to a place of low pressure, gas dissolved in your blood starts to come out of solution and form bubbles really quickly, and that in parachirculation and does a whole bunch of other crap. It generally just affects every single part of your body and just random ways, right? Yeah, just getting your blood. So you got seen from a license to kill. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. The bit where Bond just blows up a dude's head. Great movie. So and the way to avoid this was with slow decompression, right? And the result of this was an immediate and total adoption by the construction industry of periods of slow decompression for case on workers, right? Fuck that. We've got a bridge to build. I was about to say they're not going to pay workers to not work. It's 1871. You need more laborers and you just get them off the next boat. Exactly. I've seen gangs in New York. This is this shit is easy. So no actions were taken to mitigate the threat of case on sickness for workers at all, right?

Case on sickness was extremely prevalent. I wouldn't do that. I'm stunned and shocked that this is such a rampant theme in every single episode we've ever recorded. Especially in the 1800s. Yeah. So case on sickness was especially prevalent in the construction of the 1873 Brooklyn Bridge, right? Which is where it got its modern name, the bends, right? And that actually permanently crippled the chief engineer of the bridge, Washington Robling. Oh, shit. Yeah. So the thing is, slow, as I said, slow decompression would require paying workers to decompress. So no safety protocols or decompression protocols are implemented. The 1890 Hudson River, who's typing? That's me. Sorry.

Is that driving you wild? Yes, because I'm going to have to edit it out later. Sorry. Get up for aggressively louder mechanical keyboard each episode. I'm sorry. I was trying to be as quiet as possible till, which is the worst part of that. You should get a podcasting keyboard that you use while we're podcasting. No, I like the clicky clacks. I don't. I have to edit it out. Okay. You know what? I actually have a backup keyboard. I'm sorry. I was subscribing to it. Nevermind. It was a use that site. I'm 200 years old. Listen, listen, I'm sorry about the clicky clacks. I know that's right up there with my old chair squeaking. Yeah,

I got to subscribe to all dot mechanical dot keyboard. All all that. What was it? Pave the earth? Oh, yes. Well, if you've just done that, there wouldn't be any case on sickness. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. See, see, I'm not the crazy one. Listen, I just, I do love the idea. I always love this idea of, again, I think just because COVID's on the forefront of my mind, this like, yeah, we know what we could do, but we're just not going to fucking do it. Like this has been like, I've been talking about this with Corinne ad nauseam and Megan all day. So I think that's why it's bugging me. But just like the thing we always say about just like, you should be pissed off at these people for just basically letting you die.

Yeah. Like something you're intelligence about at the whole time. I think that's it too. It's just like, you know, there's some fucking thing I just saw on Twitter where the fucking barstool guy is like, let businesses live and die by their own. It's like, no, dude, just pay him to stay closed. And like Mitch McConnell just being like, no, we're just not going to help. Like not, and it's not like, oh, it's too technically complex or whatever. It's just like, no, we just don't fucking feel like it. And I think that's, that's the shit that just, that just makes me so fucking angry. And, and I apologize. My head is, hey, I'm not feeling like I'm being my head is kind of somewhere else right now, but just like

this constant sort of like, you know, I know that the narrative is that basically no one gives a shit about this illness. And I don't think that's really true. I think that like, it's hard to give a shit when the overwhelming amount of messages you're seeing and hearing are that you don't matter. Like you don't matter. Your sick mom doesn't matter. You know, patients in a hospital or a hospice don't matter. Like the fact that like my roommate Megan still has to fucking go to work and teach these poor kids in Kensington is like, is, is, is unfathomable to me. And like the fact that, and you might have to actually edit this out, I was talking about this later, but like the fact that the Catholic, the Catholic schools have just decided to stay open

is, is unfathomable because they need that money. And like, no one's, no one's fucking coming to help. And I'm just so fucking tired. I think of the Catholic Church, I think of an organization that's really strapped for cash. Yeah, no, listen, well, that's what happens when you have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars and settlement because you just couldn't keep, could you just couldn't stop raping kids. I just, I'm just so fucking tired and exhausted. And I know I sound like I'm having a breakdown and I'm not, I'm very under control at the moment, but just like every fucking day realizing that like no one gives a shit about you is an extremely hard way to live. Yeah, I mean that like the thing that's happening with me right now is the public inquiry into

Grenfell, listen to our episode about it is going on. And like everything that you think about it is like worse and more brazen than we ever suspected. Is that right? Yeah, we're gonna have to we're gonna have to revisit it. We're gonna have to do a do another episode, but Grenfell Reduxed. Yeah, yeah, you thought it was bad the first time just you wait just you wait until you see the contractors emails and what's that message to each other. I feel like I feel like I'm gonna throw up if I read those. Yeah, I just like this is the shit that that that on every episode and I think just having now recorded what is this 48 of these. I just want to say if there's one thing you should take away from this podcast is one thing you should ever take away from this

podcast is that the dumb hippie bullshit of love will win and shit like that that, you know, is rightfully mocked as like you're allowed to be pissed off and you should be pissed off with people who don't care about you. You're allowed to be pissed off. You should be pissed off at people who left you to die. You're allowed to be pissed off and you should be pissed off at Bishop McConnell at Joe Biden at fucking anyone who thought that your life didn't matter and that it was more convenient to save a couple dollars basically than to fucking make sure that Megan could stay home or like Miss Venus could stay home or whatever and like the fact that like I every fucking day I wake up and I have a panic attack because my parents are old as shit and I'm

just and I live two hours away from them and I constantly fucking worry that this is the day some fucking asshole in a giant just isn't gonna wear their mask and my dad's gonna get sick and that's gonna be the end and the thing is like I understand that the government doesn't give a shit about you but that also doesn't excuse you from not giving a shit about other people. So like be a fucking adult, wear a mask, stop fucking going to places with other people. All right. Don't even acknowledge that other people fucking exist. Stay in your house. Buy some snacks. Like I don't fucking know. Just get really good at calling chasing. I know that was a guy. I'm 155 in Warzone and I am ashamed of myself.

We should play Black Ops. I would play Transport Tycoon for the past five days. No, you have. I get those messages, buddy. I'm on that group chat. I know, right? We got a good server going and I am making a lot of money in Transport Tycoon. In Minecraft as a joke. I decided to set everything up with Steam Locomotive so I got like a bunch of big... Why? Because I like their... Oh, yeah. Next bonus episode though. Coming soon, folks. Yeah, I gotta write that soon. Anyway, what were we talking about? We were talking about... Sorry about that extended rant. We were talking about decompression sickness and how they didn't give a shit about the workers even though there was at that point a theoretical

way to prevent the case on sickness. And that was just white. That's the theoretical thing. You'd let them wait for a bit. And that's like the smallest kindness you can even do. We just can't fucking have that either. Well, the other thing is they didn't have an airlock or anything like that where they could control the pressure, right? You sort of had a pressurized zone and an unpressurized zone and you just kept pumping air into the pressurized zone and you had to, I guess, walk against the wind when you were entering. Oh, good. Our favorite thing. Yeah. Just taking a run up to go into the case and... Yeah, exactly. Getting a wall of air, fully like T-pose. Yeah, so the first... So there was a sort of spat of

tunnel building in New York City in the 1890s to about 1905 for subways and the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, right? And the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad in 1890 was the first company to use an airlock between the pressurized zone and the unpressurized zone. And this reduced incidence of the bends, right? This was sort of secondary to the main thing, which is conserving compressed air. But it worked, right? But around 1904, after the construction of half a dozen subway tunnels into Lower Manhattan, which killed around 30 workers in total from the bends. Jesus Christ. And that's a horrible way to go out, too. It's not very good, no. Finally, some regulations were put in place to mandate

slow decompression, right? Oh, how merciful. Thank you. Which, of course, business was very unhappy about because they had to pay people to sit around and not do anything. Oh, the horror. It's only meant to be executives. Yeah, well, I mean, ask Robling about that. But you can't because he's dead. Dig his corpse up. Dig him up and shake his hand. Appreciate the man. Dig him up and shake hands with danger. All right. So a piece titled The Prevention of Compressed Air Illness published in 1908

provided a list of tables describing staged decompression, right? It's where if you're, if you have been compressed. I'm sorry, that's just extremely funny. It's just a phrasing. It's just like, if a man does come along and compressed you. Yes. Here are different pressures at which you should be decompressed at different amounts of time. But once we have this theory of preventing decompression sickness, there's now an ability to do something called a saturation dive. So there's some experiments which were done in 1938, the first intentional saturation dive, which was just some people sitting in a pressure vessel in a hospital in Milwaukee, right? God damn. Can you imagine just being that asshole diving in Milwaukee?

America's most romantic city. I know, right? Most socialist city as well. Just leaving a space there for Chicagoans to get mad at us. I like your pizza. I don't like your socialist, but I like your pizza. So, you know, this shows that saturation diving was practical, but there were still some problems with alleviating something called nitrogen narcosis, right? Oh, and nitrogen narcosis is a sort of feeling of drunkenness, right? Owing to the presence of high-pressure nitrogen in the bloodstream, right? So you're telling me I can get drunk for free and all I have to do is hang out in the fucking Marianas trench? All right. So actually, it's a lot less deaf than that. It's a lot easier.

Just hang out in Milwaukee and get drunk for nothing? Yes. Well, a couple of dollars, but yeah. So divers are introduced to something called Martini's Law, right? I think you're getting drunk for a couple of dollars. And Martini's Law states that, you know, your equivalent of nitrogen narcosis is every 10 meters below 20 meters of depth is the equivalent of drinking one Martini. Is that fucking serious? It's a rule of thumb, but yes. I love science. Excuse me, I fucking love science, epic bacon troll. I love to dive to 60 meters and then come back up and just have a nice time. Yeah, I love to just like, I think the modern day equivalent is if you were around for OG

for a loco and you slammed two of those and or if you ever played quad loco or four by four, if you prefer, you know what this is going to feel like. Yeah. For loco, the gentleman's Martini. Rods, who never played four by four, just very into the original bond, ordering a four loco. Shake it, not stood. And they just, and just the foam hits him. Marcus sophistication is James Bond playing the beer hunter with six more locos. Oh, it's time to die. Just like vomiting. Clearly, his bloodshot. For some reason, though, he does not miss.

So he's just stumbling around. No one can get out. No one can get a beat on him. This is all that would catch me alive, just harrowing like empty four loco cans from the back of a motorbike as he's following through like a fruit market. So there's a lot of experimentation with different breathing gases, right? And they found out you can avoid this nitrogen narcosis with an oxygen helium breathing setup, right? And so saturation diving became practical for like commercial purposes. The first saturation dive was accomplished in 1965 when diapers replaced a trash rack on a dam in Washington State at a depth of 200 feet. A trash rack? Yeah, it prevents trash from getting into intakes

and filing the turbines. I have a question that's gonna possibly sound stupid. Is there a reason they don't use like, I guess, the composition of earth's atmosphere in these breathing gases? Or is that you need a higher concentration of oxygen? No, it's because of no, it's because of the nitrogen narcosis. You get rid of the nitrogen, you replace it with helium. You get rid of the nitrogen all together. No, no, no, I understood. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah. All right. Because I wasn't sure what with like normal ass air. Yeah, okay. Air is like 70% nitrogen. Well, right, exactly. That's why I was asking. All right. I think you're helium oxygen mixture. I didn't put this in the note. I don't know this off hand. I think it's

like 95% helium and then 5% oxygen down. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you. But because it's as high a pressure, you get more oxygen. I guess I don't know. I still got a voice thing happening is my question. Absolutely. You come out. Oh, God, I have a very, yeah. Yeah. Bye for dolphin. These guys come out. Yes. Yes. Three of them have been turned into smuggers and the fourth guy is trying to describe what's happened. Oh, my God. All right. So now then commercial saturation diving is something that not a lot of people do. And the people who do do it make a lot of money doing it, right? Yeah, you said do do. Yeah, I did. Yes. So a lot of diving is required with modern industrial society and it's not just stuff like open ocean

diving, right? You got to have people go down and inspect things like dam intakes and water supply tunnels, right? So there can be people saturation diving to inspect the New York City water tunnel in White Plains, New York, right? This isn't just like open ocean stuff. Because those tunnels are like 200, 300 feet underground. Again, fuck that. Send by this point, get a robot to do it. I think they do have a robot that can do it now because I think they just sent one through Water Tunnel One, which has never been closed since it's been built in like 1917. They've never done a single repair on it because they can't. No, it's stuck like that. Get a robot. Not our problem. Well, if you shut it down,

you'd have to shut off water to all the New York City. Fuck them. There you go. There's no response. Land maintenance. 100 years overdue. Yeah, exactly. Is that thing holding the fucking diving belt down called a clump weight? Yes. Designed by Dave Courtney. A highly illegal saturation dive. We'll get to that in a second. So if you have a long and involved dive, right, it may not be practical to decompress at the end of every shift, right? So you use something called a dry bell, which is this guy, and a diving chamber so that divers can remain at high pressures for a long period of time. Oh, you just live down there now. You belong to the sea.

No, you only go down in the sea for a little bit and then you come back up. But you're at sea pressure, right? So your dry bell, which is that both of these guys on the screen, this is, it's a diving bell that has a hatch at the bottom, right? And it's pressurized to the level at which the dive will happen, right? So you go down to the bottom of the ocean while you're in the dry bell, and then you open the hatch, right? And then there's just a free water surface there, right? There's no airlock or anything. The pressure from inside the diving bell equalizes with the water, right? And then you go out and you do whatever work you have to do, and then you go back in, they bring you back up to the surface, and then they attach the

diving bell to something called a diving chamber, right, which is a pressurized chamber that has sort of minimal living and working facilities, right? It's very spartan, you know, there's a lot of times they don't have, they don't have, you know, basic necessities that you would usually expect in. They lift you up on a crane and they bolt you into a shethy apartment. Yeah, exactly. Emphasis on shitty. I think a lot of them don't have toilets. You have to like go in a pad. Poop of the ocean, baby. That'd be the smart idea, yeah. Yeah, just go in the suit. I love a NASCAR cardio. I don't want to go in the suit. Go in the suit. You're gonna have to go in the suit, yeah. A shaking hands meme between

saturation divers medieval knights and NASCAR drivers go in the suit. Early astronauts, yeah. All right, so and you might live in the diving chamber for a long period of time, then you decompress at the end. If it's a very deep dive, that decompression might take eight or nine more hours. So it'll take a while. What do you do if you need to make the thing go faster? If a guy just like fucking has a heart attack in there, is that the situation that I find best summarized by a photo I found of a railroad emergency phone with a piece of paper taped over it saying this phone is broken, please do not have an emergency here. Yeah, that's about right. I think you would have to send the

doctors in. I don't think you could take the people out. Oh, fuck. Hope you're trained. Good luck. Let's say can we get anesthesiologist in here? Lower them down, boys. You're all going to be stuck in here for about 16 hours, and we are going to start the decompression process now. So this is why people who do this job get the big bucks. It's very dangerous. The working conditions are not good. But people made a lot of money doing this, and they still make a lot of money doing this. I mean, I wouldn't say no to getting a lot of money to live in a shitty apartment for 16 hours with four or five other people. Just give me a magazine or something. I have to dive at the end of it or before. I don't want to do that. I'll keep them company.

Yeah, I'm going to get eaten by a tube worm or something. I don't want to do that. So I don't know what those things eat. I don't know if they eat anything at all. Anyway, so this is the Bifur Dolphin platform. It was owned by a company called Dolphin Drilling, which at the time was headquartered in Oslo, Norway. It's now headquartered in Aberdeen, Scotland. And the platform itself, I think, is registered in Bermuda. Oh, cool. Yeah, I believe it. It's technically a ship because it's a floating platform. And, uh-oh, someone's signaling to me on the porch. Hold on. I'll be right back. Someone has come to ask about a Pennsylvania Secret Service card.

Dave, do you still have those available? How do I contact God? To be fair, I'm not mad anymore because I've been letting people down now and I'm just like the messages are piling up in the inbox. I feel that. I'm going to get to him. I'm going to get to him. If I haven't gotten back to you, you got to yell at me some more. It'll boost you to the top of the message request. Oh, boy. Well, anyway. Yeah. So I'm still sticking with my plan, which is to train to become a diving bell, like a diver's roommate. I don't go on any of the dives, but I'm just in the couch. I'm just there to hang out. Yeah. They're just like, why don't you get a job? And I said, why don't you fuck yourself? This is my job. I'm keeping you

company. Yeah, that's right. What do you even do for 16 hours to keep yourself occupied? Like they would chuck each other off in there. You can't check your phone down there. No, no. They don't have like a PlayStation or anything. This is my highly compressed PlayStation. However, the N64 we installed works just fine. It's shrunk down to the size of like a sugar cube, but it's just like everything works. The audio is a little gross. Yeah. Our business card sized Game Boy Color that we all share. Just five dudes all making 250 Gs a year. I have to pass around this one Game Boy Color with two games and it's Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. And they're arguing with

each other who could complete the Pokedex first. There's lopsided trades and shit. And then you still got to sit next to that guy for 14 fucking hours. God, I'm trying to think how I would occupy like 14 hours with like nothing to occupy myself with. And I think I'm too, I'm too millennial or too soon or whatever because I don't know if they're lit. I mean, I suppose you could just bring a book. I took a 14 hour flight. I'm taking several of them. And you're just like by hour, four or five. I think because you know the time is so long, you can find ways to occupy yourself on a four or five hour journey. But like, and you'll be fine. But then you start hitting hour six, hour seven, you're just like, All right, I guess I'll try to sleep. Yeah, I just that

would suck. I guess you're just bringing down a phone. You don't care about it and using it for as long as it'll work. Yeah, I mean, I guess at some point, you just got to start doing the like the real deep self meditation shit. We are playing poker in your head and shit. I'm back. Hi. Did you die? What happened? No, I've been arrested. They're taking me away. Someone across the street had put their address down wrong and the package was coming here as opposed to there. Oh, yeah. So I just why didn't you steal it? Because it hasn't come yet. Oh, okay. Well, I just I just left the note on the on our mailbox. Oh, this package should go across the street. All right. Where were we? We were talking about whether or not they have a Game Boy in

the diving bell. They usually got like close circuit television or excuse me, they got they got a television usually they got like at least some amount of entertainment in there. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, I can do that. Yeah. The diving bit still now. But I wonder if you can get Wi Fi in there. If we were talking about that, we assumed you couldn't. I don't know. You probably there's there's definitely like an unbillical system that would be able to supply internet. Yo, it's cat six e up in here. We have the world's tightest land party. Every time I get killed in Call of Duty, I imagine the rich in a life of the guy who like snipe me instantly. And the fact that he would just be like a Norwegian in a diving chamber

is extremely funny to me. I just love the fans work better at higher pressure. No, except for those Delta fans that are only designed for server captains. Those things work great. It's just that that one picture of a land party with the guy duct taped the ceiling, except that's every guy. All right. So Biford Dolphin was and is a floating platform for North Sea oil exploration. It was built in 1974 still operates, right? We already talked about different types of oil rigs in the Piper Alpha episode. If you want to hear about that, go back to that episode. Once again, all bad things are the result of oil insert tricks. Well, image. Yes. I'm surprised. It's not in this one. Yeah, I was like, I could put it in, but I'm not going to because I had to go

through a report written in Norwegian to get the good pictures. So let's look at the diving chamber set up here. Okay. We're in 1983, right? Oh, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Digger clocking. Yeah. Yes. Yes. The Digger clocking. That's Norwegian for diving bell. I believe they call it a diving clock for some reason. A bell in German is Glocker. Yes, it is. Glocken. So Glockenspiel. There you go. In 1983, saturation diving was a relatively mature profession, right? There was sort of this Wild West period in the 1970s, right? Just carrying a gun down there. Yeah. Seabed. Pressure is not your friend.

Getting back on the diving bell. Seabed's on it. It's not even an awesome message. He's got a revolver. Yeah. Yeah. Don't break. Yeah. So, you know, now like a lot of the stuff by 1983 was relatively safe, almost routine, right? But there was still old equipment in use. Bifert Dolphin's diving chamber system was built in 1975. It was labor intensive in operation and it lacked a lot of safety features in mechanical interlocks, right? It's probably fine. Now, oh, we'll see. Bifert Dolphin was drilling in the frig gas field, right? The diving contractor was a company called Comex. So let's look at this system here, right? So down here, we have the Digger clocking, right?

Let's see. That's the diving bell, right? Mm-hmm. That's what the kids are calling it these days. You have your chamber one. That's the chamber one. You have your four-comer. That's your four chamber. You have chamber two. That's the living chamber, right? You have the Forbindelsus tunnel, right? And that's the connecting tunnel between the Digger clocking and the four-comer, right? Okay, sure. And if you look on Wikipedia, that is where the, they just call it the trunk, right? And then over here, you have the Hyperbar Evacoring set, right? Oh, boy. Okay. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. This is the Hyperbaric Evacuation Chamber, which they use in case they haven't decompressed, but the order to abandon ship comes on, right?

Oh, shit. Okay. Yeah. So if that happens, they're just fucked, right? Oh, no. So here's a picture of the setup and you can see it's mounted on top of a lifeboat. Oh, okay. Yeah. Just get jettisoned into the sea, still in my fucking Hyperbaric Chamber. I understand this has the ability to independently decompress on its own, and then there's a hatch so you can get in the lifeboat proper. Huh. But yeah, so you haul the diving bell in with this Derek here, which I assume extends out this way. You attach the diving bell, right? And then people can go in and out. It's also tiny. Like, if you look at the size relative to the lifeboat, that's

Yeah. No room for, you know, three, four, five guys to be living. Yeah, it's not such a, it's not a luxurious lifestyle. So, all right. Saturday, November 5th, right? Saturday in the comments last time said, you know, it's about to get really bad when you've read a date. Yes. Yeah. So divers had been trapped in the water in the diving bell at 1.43 AM, right? And they

inspected a valve on the ocean floor. It's always in the middle of the night, hell. Yeah, I don't know why people work during these hours. Well, I guess it doesn't make any difference to you how light it is on the surface, right? This is true. This is awesome for a bit. Yeah. And the dive was called off at 3.50 in the morning due to bad weather. And the bell was recalled, right? Which I was a little confused about if it's, I mean, the divers don't feel bad weather when they're down on the seafloor, but I guess maybe you'd have problems with something.

Maybe the process of bringing it back up would be a pain or something. Yeah. Yeah. Fellas, you got to get back in the dick o'clocking. Yeah, you got to get back in the dick o'clocking. So, you know, the whole system at this point, it's all pressurized to the nine atmospheres, right? And they recall the diving bell, the dick o'clocking, and they get it back up. They reattach it. It's about 4 a.m., right? Nine atmospheres is about 130 pounds per square inch.

That's about 301 feet or 91 meters of water. Full head exploding pressure. Yeah. No, that's head imploding pressure. That's like that scene from Scanners. Yeah. You have two reference points here. License to Kale, which is head go out and Scanners, where head go in.

So, at this point, we have two British divers, Edwin Arthur Coward and Roy P. Lucas. They're resting in chamber two, right? And we have Bjorn Javer-Bergensen and Trolls Helovik, right? They're coming out of the dick o'clocking, right? They were assisted by two dive tenders on the deck of the oil rig, right? Those are William Brown Crammond and Martin Andrew Saunders, right? So, your normal procedure here, right? It's all systems at nine atmospheres, right?

So, once you attach the diving bell, right, you close the door on the diving bell, right? You then slightly increase the pressure on the diving bell. This is after people have exited, right? And that seals the door tightly because it opens inwards, right? Right. Now, you close the door to the four chamber here, right? And then, this trunk here, the Forbindelsis Tunnel, you slowly depressurize it until it reaches a pressure of one atmosphere.

And then, there's a clamp here that you then open, and that separates the diving bell from the rest of the system, right? And that way, you have this system is still at nine atmospheres, the dick o'clocking is still at nine atmospheres, but they're now separate, right? Yeah, so you don't have to go through like a difficult repressurization process on the dick o'clocking, yes. So, since this is an early system, there's no mechanical interlocks, right? So, it's easy to get this procedure right, but also easy to get it wrong, right?

So, on this day... It's like driving a car without, like, before traction control and stuff. Yeah, these are divers who are like, yeah, no, I actually prefer this. We'll get to that. None of them do. That you can really feel the road this way. So, today, one of the dive tenders, William Brown Crammond, got it wrong. No one's entirely certain why.

He opened the clamp here before Helivik had fully closed the door to the four chamber, right? And almost instantly, all hell broke loose. Things got very bad very quickly. Very, very quickly. This is probably all over in about 10 seconds. All right, so the door to chamber one was immediately jammed closed by the pressure, but not fully jammed close, which is a problem. This is sort of this weird center hinge thing, apparently, which I don't know how people got

through. I can't visualize this in my mind how it works. I had some difficulty with it because, again, everything, all the information is in, in Norwegian. So, it almost jammed shut, but not quite, right? So, there was just this crescent-shaped opening about 24 inches long remaining, right? So, nine atmospheres of pressure and 25 square inches of opening was about 25 tons of force sending everything through that tiny opening.

So, Helivik, who was right there, went through. You ever see a sausage extruding? Just kind of that, but it's 25 tons of weight pushing it through. I do not recommend looking at pictures of his remains. Nope, they're very easy to find and you don't want to find them. The escaping air also then popped the diving bell right off of the system, right? And that killed Crammond and severely injured the other dive tender Saunders, right? When you say popped it off the system, how do you mean exact?

Like a champagne cork. Yeah, essentially, it just popped right off. Okay, and then they went to the surface. Are they on the surface? Or bad? Yeah, this is on the rig. Okay, okay, my bad, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this thing just goes, this multi-ton diving bell just goes flying across.

Like a champagne cork, yeah. Yeah, it just would boop, right? And away it goes, right? In the meantime, the three remaining divers in the system, they did not get sucked out, but they were subject to explosive decompression, right? Oh boy. Which essentially gave them very extreme form of the bends, like their blood just boiled instantly, right?

Yeah, nope is about right, I think. Yeah, so that stopped circulation and they died very, very quickly. You would hope, but like. Exactly, but holy shit, though. And then autopsies that were performed later found that all the fat in their blood streams precipitated out of solution and sort of just covered all their arteries. Just like, it's just like a weird, weird thing, you know, it immediately causes the results of coronary artery disease.

Yeah, just obesity, speedrun. Exactly, yeah. One weird trick to be obese without actually having to gain weight. All right, five men were killed instantly because one man did the procedure wrong. Who is at fault here, right? Guy who did the procedure wrong and the guy who designed the procedure. Well, the official investigation came out shortly afterwards. Yeah, no, no, they said the problem was human error.

Oh, the dead guy. Yeah, the dead guy is the dead guy's fault. Human error is how it's always the dead guy's fault. Exactly. You want to blame? Yeah, blame the dead guy, right? Open and shut case done and done. Pack it up, boys.

That guy Crammond was an idiot and there's nothing else to learn here, right? Well, I had to go to a Google translate of an Internet archive copy of a 2008 Dagbladet article for this. Dagbladet. Dagbladet is a funny name for it. It is a funny name for a newspaper. So there's a lot of folks who allege there was a cover up, which, you know, I think pretty objectively there was, right?

Because they're trying to shield. Again, shocked. Yeah, trying to shield the Norwegian government from liability here. It was this gladio again. They're like smuggling CIA weapons caches in the clock and they're just up and down. Not anywhere else. Why are we even doing this? Because Alan Dulles told us to 50 years ago.

These are the same five M16s and there's one Stinger missile and it's full of water that doesn't even work. Get on the bell. We have to arm, train and fund the moderate underwater forces. It's just merfolk who are just like the Stinger missile doesn't work. It's full of salt water. Like we told you last time. What?

Harvest merfolk. This is the guy down there. There's a merman wearing a fucking pack hole. This is our oil. So the year before the disaster, the Norwegian petroleum directorate, right, the NPD, introduced requirements for diving companies to install a new kind of clamp between the diving bell and the decompression chamber, you know, which was designed. You're going to tell me that this clamp was installed here, right?

That's the thing that they did. No, no. Wow. The new clamp had a mechanical interlock so it could not be opened while under pressure. They didn't install the anti-murder clamp. Yeah, they did. They didn't install the thing that was required because Bifert Dolphin and Comex had a dispensation to use the old type.

They're like, OK, yeah, you need to do this regulation, but actually you don't have to. Variation? Yes. Cool, great. One month after the accident, the NPD made this regulation absolute. They got rid of all of the variances, right? What the hell are the kind of waivers out there floating around at this point, you know? We don't feel like it.

OK, a lot. So, you know, there was an expert witness who was brought in for hearings at Stavanger in 1984. His name was Tom Halverson, right? So Comex, the diving company, had applied for and received several other dispensations from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, one of which was to extend the diver's period and saturation from 12 to 14 days to 16 to 18 days. So you're living in that chamber for 18 days, right? And figures presented in court showed that 38% of all dives were extended,

so it was kind of a general exemption, right? So you just had extreme strain on a few divers. And dive tenders, presumably. Oh, yeah. Yes. Well, yeah, because everyone was working 16-hour shifts. There was mandatory overtime. And part of this is because there were not a lot of people who were trained

to do the kind of work that needed to be done for the oil industry. But it was also, you know, it was very, very stressful work. Mandatory overtime is a bad thing in any industry, but in something as stressful as diving, it's very bad. Yeah, I mean, so you like about video game crunch, but generally speaking, when you hit the button... You're not doing it underwater. Right. You're not doing it underwater. And if you're developing, say, cyberpunk, right, and you forget to turn off the make dick visible through clothes button, it doesn't, like, fire a guy through a hatch and turn him into, like, chunky marinara.

Yes. No, no one was liquidized as a part of the cyberpunk 2077 crunch. Yes. That said, crunch still sucks. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And, you know, I appreciate you guys getting all mad about the bugs and not about, you know, everything fucking else that's happened during development of that game.

Yeah, although I will say that it is funny that they pushed people that hard to release on this schedule. And then the thing that they released on this schedule was, you know, sometimes the guy just has his dick out. So in the testimonies, it emerged that, you know, the divers had discussed that they were being pressured into overtime and then he got out. And even his pressure into pressure into pressure, pressure. 01:14:39,520 --> 01:14:50,400 Tom Halvorson said, when even the British divers reported that they had gone that they had gone too far, it said everything about the situation, because the British never complained. They were all being quiet. If not, you lost your job in the U.S. sector.

That might be true. But like, British, no, we love complaining. Snidely, we know. Well, this is, this is a Norwegians report on the British. Apparently Norwegians think they're better at complaining than the British. Norwegians think they're better at everything. The exact opposite. No, I'm, I'm sure that they were, they were the British divers were like, we're going to suck it up and bear it and we're going to make the whole thing.

We're going to suck it up and bear it and we're going to make the overtime in that spirit, you know. Love diving. Love getting paid. Eight being forcibly decompressed. Simple as diving bath. Simple as. So, you know, so mandatory overtime and long shifts and fatigue. This contributed to the incident.

It's not just, it's not just the failure of one guy. And also there were some allegations that a supervisor had ordered the one guy to open the clamp. What? No one could corroborate this. Because the one guy was dead. Sure. And the supervisor isn't exactly going to hout himself. Right.

I love this, this constantly just blaming the dead guy. We can never take responsibility. That's the shit that I was talking about earlier in this episode, man. Yep. You hold these fucking people accountable. Don't fucking vote for them. Jesus Christ. He said, you voted for Biden.

I'm a fucking moron. So, you know, lawsuits and litigation were brought forward soon after the incident, but the reports seem to clear the companies are wrongdoing as well as the Norwegian government. How convenient. I know, right? We never expected this. There was a group of divers who were unsatisfied with the poor unsafe working conditions. They were subject to 56 fatalities between confirmed fatalities between 1965 and 1990. Lots of long-term injuries, right?

They formed something called the North Sea Divers Alliance in the 1990s to, you know, try and pressure governments into companies into finally taking responsibility for these unsafe conditions and correcting them, right? Yeah. And after decades of pressure, they finally got the Norwegian government to do a new investigation or they got a better investigation than the one that they had been presented earlier. And the government finally admitted some guilt and compensated families in 2008. Oh, Jesus. At least it came. Yeah. Only as a result of union action for fucking decades.

Yeah. Yeah. What, 30 years? It's hard to make that feel like a picture. 30 years, yeah. So, yeah, it's, once again, it follows on the workers to demand better working conditions. Otherwise, it just keeps shoving you and pressure vessels from the 70s. Bosses don't give a shit about you. I promise you are, you are, you are replaceable.

You're only available as work you create to them though. It's you and me and everybody else in the diving though, and then them not. Yes. So, yeah, that was the Bifert Dolphin incident. Once again, do not look at the photos. Don't do it. If you like me, you're going to do the thing. We were like, man, that sounds terrible.

So immediately I'm going to do it. Follow Walker Carton Brash Fix. Yeah. R slash morbid. No, no. Don't do it. Yeah. So, well, on a lighter note, we have a section on this podcast called Safety Third.

Safety Third. Yeah, you did the drop on time. Yes. So this person sent us two safety thirds. I'm only going to read the first one. We'll save the second one for later because it's also good. All right. So this story is moral of why you don't listen to your superiors when you clearly know better

and never accept unsafe working conditions, right? That's right. I spent eight years working for a well-known pest control company. I won't say the name, but it begins with T and ends in Erminix. Now, before I begin, I will say corporate did the right thing, sort of. And the guy responsible eventually gets his comeuppance, right? Anyway, we had a customer somewhere on the border of Queens and Nassau County on Long Island who managed to get the only infestation of dry wood termites I have ever encountered.

Dry woods don't live in the soil like most termites and have to be fumigated with a tent over the house, right? This was not something I or any of the technicians on site had ever been specifically trained for, but I was selected to be on roof duty as I had previous experience as a roofer. In addition to myself, there were five other technicians, three sales techs, my service manager, the sales manager, my branch manager, and the responsible person on the site, responsible as, in quotes, the regional manager. It's too much directing around here. I was about to say too many conductors for the orchestra.

First thing we do when we get on the roof is we need to secure ourselves, right? This is done with something we call a saddle. This is two steel plates attached by a hinge that has a chain holding a ring for us to hook safely. That is, I believe this guy here sort of goes over the top of the roof, right? We had two of these saddles and I wanted to secure one on each end of the center of the peak and run a safety line between them so we could hook directly onto them and never have to adjust the length of the ropes attached to our harness. Reasonable.

I guess you have one at each end of the peak of the roof, right? And then you have a safety line in the middle and then you hook onto that safety line, right? So I was overruled. The regional manager only wanted us to attach one saddle in the center of the roof. I protested as using the old calibrated Mark I eyeball. I estimated the length from the center of the roof to the end of the peaks to be longer than the distance of the center of the roof to the ground. Okay.

And I know how pendulum action works. So I pointed out that if myself or my buddy fell while working the far end of the roof, our elastic cord would not be able to completely arrest our fall. Oh, boy. Now, once again, I was overruled in front of the entire team. I was told to adjust the length of my rope as I go by tying loops into it to shorten it and was told, look, just don't fall off. So we got through the first day of putting the tent up with no incidents.

48 hours later, it was time to take the tent down with the same crew on site. After the tent itself came off, we had to remove the carpet squares on the edges and corners of the roof that had been stapled gunned down to prevent the tent from ripping. This is typical on a hot summer afternoon, a rainstorm moved in while we were doing so. The roof became slick and while working on the far end of the roof peak, I slipped. Oh, no. Dude, they specifically told you not to fall off. Yeah, I was about to say if you'd just not fallen off, you would have been fine.

Okay, sliding down the roof, I instinctively grabbed for my rope and managed to grab one of the loops I had tied in. Oh, no. Now, still sliding, I attempted to plant my feet. Managed to stand up and when the rope went taut, good old pendulum action kicked in, causing me to run uncontrollably downhill in a fetal attempt to slow down and stop myself. Oh, fuck. Still holding the rope, I reached for the gutter line and now swung out away from the house

and my outstretched leg collided with the next door neighbor's brand new wooden stockade fence. Oh, ow. Snapping three of the top points off with my right calf. I then slammed up against the house and came to rest still holding on about one foot off the ground. My safety line that was supposed to snap and go elastic at the gutter line was still laying on the ground, right? My buddy saw the whole thing and very nonchalantly told everyone below, uh, he fell off the roof. Fucking brilliant powers of deduction there, bud.

Yeah, this was, yeah, this was first met with laughter, but that ended when I limped around the corner. All in all, I was all right, but my leg was left with a nasty lump in bruises in the shape of the fence. A picture of which from the night of is enclosed in this email. Cool. God damn, dude. Yeah, not so good. So the next day we had to file an incident report. In that incident report, the regional manager claimed he was not on site at the time of the incident.

You heard that torpedo did not destroy itself. You heard it hit the hole and I was never here. Yes. And he claimed we had installed the one saddle with no input from him. The rest of the management refuted this claim and after an HR investigation, the regional manager was bumped down to a branch manager and sent out to Suffolk County, the Suffolk County office, or as we called it, the circus. I like the implication that like within the world of pest control,

exile to Suffolk County is like a punishment worse than death. Yeah, I've been to Suffolk County can confirm. So it's a branch that was known as a place where managers are sent in the region for their careers to slowly die. By the way, to repair the neighbor's fence, apparently the regional manager took money from the salesman's commission to do it. About a year after the incident, my now former regional manager and I happened to cross paths and he immediately brought up the incident and told me that I had gotten him in a lot of trouble over it. And you know, you can tell he's a quality human being. In retrospect, I could have told him we were fortunate that nothing worse happened

and we should be thankful everyone went home that night and it all could have been avoided with another five minutes of work. But instead, I pulled up the picture of my leg on the phone and showed it to him and told him to suck a hard one, Bob. He told me he could have me written up for insubordination and disrespecting a manager but we were in the branch parking lot alone with no witnesses and I reminded him he doesn't exactly have the best track record of honesty with his company reports. Insubordination too, like it's the Marines.

I know, right? That's amazing. Conduct unbecoming, a pest control officer. I got court-martialed. I got NJP'd. I got Captain's must for telling my boss to suck a hard one. Dishonorable discharge from termination. Solemnly to everyone at Terminal X, shaking their hands.

Thank you for your service. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your service defending us from the bug, Manus. That's right. Well, that was safety third. I've inspected some peak roofs in my time and I never had any kind of safety equipment. Now I realize I probably should have.

Well, you know, that's what happens when you're an intern. The next episode's on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Got to find out how the CIA did that one too. Yes. Are we going to try and do the Q&A episode? Yeah, let's do it. Sounds good.

Episode 50. After Tacoma Narrows, obviously. Hell yeah. Because this is 48, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So 50.

A 50 will be Q&A. Do we want to try and set up that curious cat there, Hickey? Yeah, please don't be mean to us. Yeah. Well, we're a group of three people. So you can't use it to cause us to have a mental health episode. That's right. Which is the usual.

We're perfectly capable of having those on our own. Thank you. Exactly, right? Yeah. If you use it to hurl abuse at us, I will fight you. Wow. Take it up my mantle. Congratulations.

Yeah, exactly. We'll all fight you. We're unified front here. Recover one hemisphere, actually. I was going to say two hemispheres, but I'm actually not sure. No, no. It's all North and it's all West, I think. Well, bye everybody.

Yeah. I was about to say. Unless we have commercials, do we have commercials? I just want to go lay down. Yeah, I also want to go lay down. All right. All right. All right.

Ending on a positive note. Fuck off. Fuck you. Fuck you. That's a two and a half at least. Yeah, especially with one major interruption. Sorry. All right.

Bye everybody. We'll all go decompress now. I hope that explodes.