Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 6: MS Estonia

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

Today, @donoteat01, @aliceavizandum, and @oldmananders0n head to the Baltic Sea to learn about Ro-Ro ferries, and the deadliest accident in European waters. And we make some jokes too! Slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eMfv1i3eFk Here's that Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/ Listen to Trashfuture, also on Podbean: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ Here's the Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

Look, that's where we're going to use the Patreon money for is to get you a better mic. Well, now I'm recording. It's to get Liam a better mic and to send me to engineering school so people can claim less about how my tangents are bad. Now that we're all recording, we can say yes. Makersmark, please sponsor us. Yes. Please. Please. I've been to your distillery.

We're all drinking it as we record Astagrila, incidentally, but... I'm actually drinking Makers46. Oh, God. Oh, Mr. Fancy over here. No, I'm drinking like regular Makersmark, but I picked all of the wax off of the bottle was like a fidget toy. If you go to the distillery, they let you dip the bottle and wax yourself. Oh, that sounds satisfying. Well, it's pretty damn cool.

And you can screw it up like me and put way too much wax on the bottle. On the bright side, it was very easy to identify which of your bottles was yours. Just this single bottle shape under like a thing. Because it looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. The distillery is basically Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory, but with bourbon. I like this, though. It adds to the general sort of like break room after work drinks vibe of this podcast, I think. Yes.

All right. I guess we should do the podcast introduction. Hello and welcome to podcast. All right. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, which also has slides attached. I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm one of the people here. I run a YouTube channel called Do Not Eat.

If you're watching this, it should be the first episode on our new dedicated channel for the project as opposed to just going on my YouTube channel. So you'll see a new fancy environment. Maybe we'll have advertisements on it. Maybe Dennis Prager just finished talking to you. I don't know. Sorry. Immediately demonetized. I'll jump in next.

Alice Coldwell Kelly. I'm Alice Aversandum on Twitter. I also am on a podcast called Trash Uchi. You should listen to that. It's very good. Pronouns she and her once again. Finally, I am Liam Anderson. I am not especially funny on Twitter, but I comment in our YouTube comments section because the comments in there are absolute smoking fires.

It's fucking horrible. You make war on the comments section. You got to be able to dish it out. I just meant like just please. It's so fucking tiring to read like 30 comments from 15 year old fucking weirdos to be like, Who's the English guy? It's just like fucking... You know what it is?

We are an NHL team and you are Aaron Forcer. You are just like elbowing people into the boards. At one point, Roz and I were in Toronto and a Hispanic man turned around and screamed the N word at a very clearly white man. And Roz turned to me and was like, I thought we were going to have to beat the shit out of somebody and I was like, I was ready and then I was very confused. It's a very confusing situation. A YouTube comment section leaking into real life there.

Yeah, exactly. Pronouns are he, him. So if you want to get real mad at me in the YouTube comment section. Also, sorry about the tangents, but I'm not sorry. So I'm going to spend this entire episode going wildly off track. Just tell us your theories about like Estonia. I have got some Estonia conspiracy theories ready to fucking go. Let's do this.

I have a joke. I have a single joke. It's a Russian joke about the Estonian language. Because Estonian doubles like a lot of its vowels. So Russians think they talk really slowly. So the joke is there's two Estonian guys on a handcart, like the push thing. And they're on the railroad. And the one Estonian guy says,

Is it a long way to Tallinn? And the second guy says, Not far. And then they keep like pedaling and silence for two hours. And then the first guy says, Is it a long way to Tallinn? And the second guy says, Now it is a long way.

The joke being that like most other countries, they just used to speak to each other. Well, yes. They're pedaling in the wrong direction. Oh, Estonia. Junior Finland is so nice. All right. So as you may, as you may know,

also I forgot to mention my pronouns, which are he, him. Okay. So today we're going to talk about boats. Most specifically, this boat, the MS Estonia, whose pronouns are she, her. Except in Russian. I don't know if you know that,

but in Russian a ship is a he. No, I did know that actually, because I took Russian, but I forgot it. So I don't know if this makes it like a transmask king, or I don't know what. Well, maybe it identifies as male when she's in a Russian port. In Russia, yeah.

Maybe it's like a gender fluid boat. We don't know. Not anymore. I mean, a lot of problems with the gender fluid. It's certainly full of fluid now. Yeah. All right. So let's start by talking about ro-ro ferries, right?

Concept of a ro-ro ferry, fairly simple. You roll on the ferry, you drive your car on, you roll off the ferry, you drive your car off the other end, right? Ideally not, you know, while there's like a ramp at the other end, you don't just drive it off in the middle of the sea. That'd be stupid.

Tell a blogger, dude. Yeah. You don't just like put up, when you say the ramp, the ramp goes down onto a jetty, rather than up into the air, and you like juke the passengers. Sweet air, though.

We took this exact boat, and I will say, for someone who has not taken many ferries, driving onto that thing in driving rain was top 10 most terrifying moments of my life. I just like looked over at Ross, and he said, you're to the sea we go.

Fuck it. Like, this is where we close. Yeah. This is what you don't want to do is steer. Yeah. So this is MV Blue Putties, which is on the service from North Sydney in Nova Scotia

to Port Abask in Newfoundland. Where the fuck is it named after socks? Like, a putty is a gator. Why is it why? I have no idea. It's a strange name for a ship. It's a very strange name for a ship. But it's the Canadians.

Yeah. The bow opens up, and cars drive up. There's also a second door on this particular ship, which is above the bow. And one of the things about that is there, with a hole below the bow like this, there's a little less extra risk involved

for like the car deck flooding, right? And, you know, if the car deck floods and the ship's loaded improperly and is like rolling in the ocean, there's a high risk of the boat capsizing, right? Because of the free surface effect, right? The water that gets into the car deck,

if it does so, starts to slosh around and that counteracts the boat's ability to right itself. It'll tend to keep listing in one direction. You're kind of spoiling our Herald of Free Enterprise episode, which is right after our Tacoma Narrows episode. That was a more clear-cut case

of just forgetting to close the doors in the first place. Well, you don't want to do that. Yeah. That's step one of having a ferry with a big door on it is close the door. So, this is why, you know, some crews, like they joke, they call a row-row ferry,

stands for not roll on, roll off, but roll on, roll over. And I chime in with a, haven't you people ever heard of, closing the goddamn door? Oh, very good. So, the MV Blue Putties here has newer design. You can see the bow splits in two,

sort of slides out of the way, right? And then the ramp comes down, and then, you know, ordinarily, there'd be another ramp that connects to it here. You wouldn't just drive off and fall in the ocean. That'd be bad. Oh, that happens, too. So, but the ship we're talking about is the MS Estonia, right?

She had an older design. Yeah, that's depressing. Right. So, MS Estonia was built in 1980 as the MV Viking Sally, which was designed for service on Baltic sea routes, right? I thought they gave the stupid names to, like, freight ships, mostly,

and let the passenger ships have, like, inspiring names. It's Paradise or Odyssey or... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dream, but, no, you're in the Baltic sea. There's no happiness. Nothing good is going to befall you. Like, fuck you. Yeah, it's the MS Depression.

Oh, shit. All of your countries have, like, an 80% suicide rate. Look, if you make it, that's all the paradise you need. We don't know what you're mad about. Look at this fucking boat. Oh, god. I have a story, actually. When I went to St. Petersburg the first time,

I was in the hotel, and I was looking out over the Baltic, and this entirely naked man just jogged up to the Baltic, which was rimmed with ice and just jumped in there. And for a solid 10 minutes until I saw his head pop up, I had no idea if he was exercising or killing himself. I'm not sure he did. That's the most Russian thing I've ever fucking heard in my life.

Yes, yes. I remember being in St. Petersburg when I was younger, and the whole city, like, you know, I was out on my own venturing, exploring, and there were, like, a group of what I think were Spanish tourists, just the drunkest I've ever seen anybody, and it's like 9.45 a.m. I'm all, like, bright-eyed and excited,

and I'm just, like, a gas. You're a horrible human being. Yeah, just, like, oh, my goodness, what's happened here? Also, Blue Putties apparently derives from a World War I, the Newfoundland Regiment. Because we loved, in the Commonwealth, just giving people weird socks and shit. I'm gonna have to wear my Anzac Memorial socks.

The Estonia was built in West Germany for a Finnish ferry company, right? And it was sold to Esteline, which was an Estonian ferry company, in 1993. So two years after the breakup, the Soviet Union, right? Yes, I can blame this on capitalism. Sort of. So the crew of this boat, you know,

they're ex-Soviet Union guys, right? No, so they have a certain attitude about how ferries should be run. And, of course, this is an older design, you know, for the front of the ferry, right? There's this visor here, which opens up, right? And then the actual watertight part is the door that also serves as the ramp, right?

That makes sense, right? There's a hole around that door on four sides, so it just seals nicely into the thing, right? It increases downforce. It's a big spoiler, big lip spoiler. Yeah, perfect, makes perfect sense. But you can sort of see how a problem might develop with this visor, maybe.

No, I can't. Nothing can go wrong with it. No, that looks great. All right, so on Tuesday, September 27th, 1994, MS Estonia set out for Stockholm from the ferry terminal in Tallinn. Tallinn. Thank you.

With the doubled and tripled vowel sounds. Is that what that's for? Yeah, it's literally just because they fucking talk much slower in Estonia. Man, the Estonians are going to hate us after this one. Just lose all of the Estonian viewers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Look, I'm sure that they can, like,

content themselves with their, like, 90% free public Wi-Fi and, like, healthcare and shit like that. And free mass transit. Free mass transit. I'm so salty about. Congratulations, Estonia. You're doing terrific.

Bastards. Tallinn is beautiful. All we've got is the vowel sounds and the vowel sounds stupid. So there's 989 people on board this ship, 803 are passengers and 186 are crew. Now, when they set out, there was a slight starboard list to the boat

because of bad loading. Now, starboard is the right side of the boat as you're facing forward. Yeah, no red port left in the bottle. Is that how you remember it? That's the mnemonic, is port is a red light and it's on the left-hand side facing towards the back. Look, look, I was gonna be,

I was gonna be a Navy officer when I grew up and then I decided to do this instead. When I was in high school, I used to row, like, the bougie kids, because I guess I was one. And I always got port and starboard confused even though I was in a boat every single goddamn day. I had to ask you multiple times

which direction was which while we were on the boat, so I'm not a seafaring man. Every time I'm on a boat, I'm just really kind of confused. Why is the floor moving? It's depressing that I'm the naval expert on this one, but by default, that is true. Having read more Wikipedia articles about naval battles, I'm looking at this, like, course that you've put up

and I'm just like, well, that's weird, but it's actually not that weird. I made this up. I thought it'd be funny to put a little loop in. Genuinely, if you look up, like, any sort of naval engagement, all of the course charts look like that. Like, there would just be a bunch of weird serpentines. Gravity boost or something.

So you're kind of, like, accidentally more right than you know. Anyway, so when they said out, it was bad weather in the Baltic Sea, right? But it's normal bad weather as some other folks who were on other boats said. 10 to 13 foot waves, winds 30 to 40 knots. You know, it's not pleasant, but it's not going to kill you, right? Yeah, it's a miserable sea.

And I say that as someone from Scotland, all of our sea locks like this too. It's not a nice place to sail at any time of year. Passengers who survived the sinking said that the ship was being driven pretty hard to make up time. Make sure they got to stock home on time, right? Because most ships would slow down in heavy weather like this for passenger comfort, right?

And so people would spend more time and money in the ship's bars and restaurants, you know? You know, rather than go below deck and sort of be miserable in your cabin and, I don't know, vomit a couple of times. Yeah, this is a very Soviet way of... Yeah, you have the target and you have to meet the target. And the commercial imperative isn't there,

but the productivity one is. Love state capitalism. Just to be like, yes, we absolutely have to get there on time. Nothing else, like, nothing else factors into that, though. Yeah, so they said we make good schedule, like good Soviet boat, right? So, you know, they keep going as fast as they goddamn can through the storm and the heavy seas and so on and so forth.

Some poor inexplicably Scottish chief engineer pointing out that you can't even push in any fell-down captain. Oh, they're going to push it further. I wonder what the Soviet equivalent of a Scotsman is. Siberian. Some guy from the steppe. Ah, possibly. Or Uzbek.

Yeah, Uzbeks are fucking wild. Hello to our three Uzbek listeners. Hello and, like, congratulations on being the only Muslims who drink more than I do. There's a story written quickly in Adil Ahmed's Islam After Communism in Central America where he goes to this workers' cafeteria in Uzbekistan and they're like, hey, a Muslim.

That's amazing. Let's have a drink to celebrate. I love that. I, uh, as an aside, I lived in New York, Pennsylvania for a while, not the most progressive place on earth. Shout out to my parents. The Uzbekistan of Pennsylvania. Dude, fuck it is.

We got, we got weird-ass Cold War-era nuclear plants. Sometimes do and sometimes don't work. Uh, but so, you know, Yom Kippur, you fast, but to the grocery store near my parents' house every single year when I was a kid had, like, boxes of matzah and containers of gefilte fish for your Yom Kippur favorites. And that, not quite, fellas, not quite.

We, like, told them more than once and they were like, oh, well, like, but we're making the effort. And it's like, yeah, baby, just don't make the effort. Just don't, just, just, just fucking leave us alone. Around 1 a.m. in the morning, there was a big bang that everyone who was awake heard. Why? Just, just say 1 a.m. Just say 1 a.m.

No, I say 1 a.m. in the morning for emphasis. It was very early in the morning. Just so you know that it was, yeah, as opposed to 1 p.m. Fuck the both of you. Fuck the both of you. I hate this shit. Do you know how far north the Baltic is? You can have a 1 p.m. in the middle of the night. Yes, yes, but for 500 fucking miles in New Brunswick,

he and my dad just constantly said 3 a.m. in the morning. Just, just in the middle of the night, as I pissed off and tired and had to pee. Motherfuckers, the sunrise right now where I am is like 2 p.m. and sunset is 4 p.m. Yeah, move south. That's not my fault. Why don't they just move? The Harlan County of the United Kingdom.

Okay, so we have like, we have loss here, right? Like just in 6 p.m. Yeah, kind of loss. So after everyone hears the big bang who was awake, there's a guy on the car deck who checks the bow. He says, yeah, it looks good. He goes back to report to the bridge. And he says, yeah, it looks good.

And there's a second big bang, right? So they send him back down to check again and he never comes back. That's not a great sign. Yeah, so the ship was heaving in heavy seas, right? So the locks holding the bow in place or the visor failed, right? That's just like a couple of like,

Samsonite TSA patterns. Yeah, probably. It's just like, oh, we put a chain on it. It's like a really good chain. So, you know, so anyway, now it's, you know, it's heaving up and down in the seas, right? And it keeps, you know, since they're going up and down, it's banging into the ocean and all this crap, right?

You know, it's just swinging freely at this point. Around 1.15 in the morning. Free ballin'. The front fell off. Ah, the part of the boat where the front is falls off. We production. And, you know, there's nobody around to tow it out of the environment. So, you know, the visor falls off and damages the door as it goes, right?

And so plenty of ships have suffered pretty bad damage like this, you know, and they sort of limped back to port. And at this point, the Estonia's... Well, Herald of Free Enterprise almost did. Like, it had the door open, but it wasn't until they pushed it up to maximum speed that the water actually got into the cardiac. Yeah. That's an embarrassing accident right there,

because it was like, what, five minutes? Oh, tell me about it. It's like, that's not good. Yeah, this looks much more confident. Yeah. So, now at this point, Estonia is not very far from land. It's about 25 miles offshore from the, you know, the Finnish archipelago, you know, like all those islands out there in the Baltic Sea.

And, you know, if this were any other kind of ship, they wouldn't easily made it back. But Estonia is a row-row ferry, and any amount of water that gets on the cardiac is a major issue. By like 1.20 in the morning, the ship's already listed 15 degrees to starboard, right? We should say that the reason why that's bad is because about the turn of the 20th century, we figured out how to compartmentalize so that water doesn't just like splash around through the whole length of the boat. And you can't do that with a cardiac because it has to go the whole length

so people can drive into it. Yes. So it's just, it's this long void in like the bottom of the ship. Which is exactly where you want it. That makes the most sense. Yes, of course. They sound the alarm at 1.20 in the morning. They send a Mayday at 1.22. But by this time, the list is rapidly increasing, right?

And there's people inside are panicking, you know, and the crowding and the hallways prevents a lot of passengers from leaving their cabins, let alone getting to the upper decks. The ship loses power pretty soon. List continues to worsen by 1.30 at 60 degrees. By 1.50, it's 90 degrees over. It's on its side, the funnels in the water. Yeah, I mean, if you didn't know just for context, listing is, it tilts.

It shouldn't do that. It's bad. It's very bad. We don't love to see it. Yeah, it's not good. It's also noting that because it listed so quickly and the flooding, like, prevented people from getting to the boat deck, water also came in through windows and cabins as well as the windows along deck 6, which gave way to the water and then the sea reached the upper decks

and water flowed down from basically everywhere and just kind of forced it down faster. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most nightmarish things about this. There's a long article about this that I will probably put in the description once I find it. But because it just sort of flattened onto its side, some of the people who survived never even got their feet wet because they could just walk across the hull that was like up in the open air and on what is their floor are all of these portholes full of cabins, full of people who are like trying to grab up at them that can't reach them.

So it's, it's horrifying. Don't forget that the May Day communicated at 1.22 didn't follow the international format for May Day. It was just, it was, it was a Soviet May Day, which was like, everything is fine. But if it's not, hypothetically. Yeah, they also lost power. So just everything that could go wrong basically did go wrong. Just a Soviet May Day is like, we're pleased to announce that we've fulfilled our targets for the five year plan of listing in an hour and a half.

Flee said our greetings to the Premier as we go right into the water. In the form of, in the form of several rescue boats. Yeah. So, yeah, the evacuation of the ship was pretty clumsy and very difficult and it started way too late. And that late alarm, you know, people got trapped in their cabins, passengers got trapped in corridors that basically turned into vertical shafts as the boat continued to list. Yeah. It's, it's, it's that bit in Inception where the hallway turns, but with an extra dimension at it.

Yes. It is absolutely, and I say this with no trace of metaphor, nightmarish. Yeah, there's an article in The Atlantic, which we may have been talking about the same one. That's the one. Yeah, I'll link that in the description if you want a real vivid description of what happened. Content warning, you won't want to go on a ro-ro ferry after you read it. No. So the ship was lifting, listing far enough they couldn't launch the lifeboats.

Because the lifeboats are on davits, right? I don't know what that is. Oh, it's like a crane, like it sticks out horizontally and it has the lifeboat on it and you drop the lifeboat into the water. But if it's listing, either the davit is underwater so you can't do it or it's just going to hit the hole on the other side and it's just going to smash the lifeboat enough. Right, yes. So since they don't have the lifeboats, they got to use the life rafts, right? And there's pretty strong wind and these life rafts are inflatable, right? So, you know, you take them out, if they inflate properly, they just sort of blow away.

Yeah, and I should say, the Baltic is a level of cold that I feel like temperature doesn't quite... Like, just giving you the Fahrenheit or Celsius doesn't quite give you the sense of it because there is also wind chill and that's substantial. It's very, very inhospitable. Just being immersed in it, fully clothed and everything and trying to swim to one of these things that's blowing away is enough that you can get into it and you can die anyway. It's not good. The water temperature was like 50 degrees if that. Yes. Yeah.

And it's only, I believe, 160 people that made it actually to the lifeboats. Yeah, that's the thing you can see. It's like a series of hurdles where it's like to get out of the corridors and then get off of the superstructure and then get into the life raft and then to survive in the life raft. And each time there's a little attritive sort of bar on there that just kills a few more people and makes the total survive account that much lower. Well, yeah, because you're running up an MCS or ship in 50 degree water. And because they've lost power, you have to do this in the dark. So the lifeboats and the life rafts could easily accommodate 2,000 people. But the 250 or so people who made it to the promenade deck couldn't even get enough lifeboats or life rafts to blow up and not blow away to get even like a tenth of that amount.

Yeah, I mean, if you've seen these, there's a picture there, there isn't a good scale, but that's meant to fit like two dozen people, right? You need, say, I don't know, six people at least to like unfold one of those and launch it. And to do that on a deck that is wet, it's dark, and then it's inclining all the time even more is almost impossible. It's amazing they got any launch at all. The rescue effort started a little late because they screwed up the May Day. The first ferry arrived at the location at 2.12, which was 22 minutes after the boat sank. They got there very quickly because the Baltic is a very busy shipping channel, but it's still, you know, not necessarily quick enough. Oh yeah, hypothermia will kill you in 10 minutes.

Easy, yeah. So if you've been immersed all of that time, unless you're very lucky or very physically fit, you're dead. The emergency was declared at 2.30, you know, so 38 minutes after, right? Finish rescue helicopters arrived at 3.05. I mean, see, this is the thing, that sounds so fast, right? And in practical terms, there isn't much that onshore you could have done better. It's just that the margin is so low there. Right, because you're talking about literal seconds.

Yes. You're going to die in 10 minutes once you get the water. Yes. And you said you're doing all this shit in the dark. Yeah, it's very much like if you've done a first aid course and you know CPR, they'll tell you that it's, you know, brain death in like, I don't know, 4 to 10 minutes. Same sort of deal. It is absolutely that thin a margin. Yeah, not good.

Helicopters rescue 104 people. The ships rescue 34 people, even though they got there earlier, because the heavy seas made it really difficult to get people out of the life rafts and into the various ships and ferries that showed up. In both cases, you have to lower someone down to rescue people and then winch them back up. That's perversely easier in a helicopter, but still, like, still insane. Like, you have to send a guy in basically a wetsuit down on a rope and have him fish people out of this incredibly cold water. They winched open life rafts, just one of the ferries, just straight into the sea and managed to grab 13 people that way. Wow. One of the things that's insane to me is that like, helicopter landing in the dark in the Baltic is the safer option here.

Yes. Or the quicker option at the very least. But they had to land on the ferries and managed to save a good amount of people that way, 104, like you said. So, 852 people drown or die of hypothermia in the water. Not so good. A third of those who had escaped from the boat by the time the helicopters arrived. A third of the people who had escaped from it had died of hypothermia, which is fucking nuts. Yeah.

And again, there's like, there's not much room for improvement there. It's one of those things where the safety margin is either... The safety margin is making sure something like this does not happen. Because if it does, you just... It's pretty much it, yeah. That may kind of die anyway. So, yeah. Now, eventually, you know, so what happened here, right?

After the ship has gone down, they later salvaged the visor and some forensic investigations determined how it fell off. And also, how did no one notice it was going to fall off, right? So, this visor was not really visible from the bridge. They couldn't see what was going on. Which is like a habitual problem with ro-ro-ferries. That you can't see whether or not the door with the ramp on it is open or closed from the bridge. Yeah, which is... So, you just send the guy to tell you whether it's open or not.

In this case, they send the same guy twice. He doesn't come back the second time, which is not a great sign. Yes. Not a good sign for the door being closed. The bow visor and ramp had been torn off in points that wouldn't trigger the open or latch-forwarding of the bridge. And there was video monitoring of the ramp, but you couldn't see the monitor from the conic station. Because they didn't consider the visor and its attachments critical items regarding ship safety. So, that was also under-designed, which is super tight.

It's the most fucking dwestern thing I've ever heard. I feel like the way you design this thing is as a modification, right? You design a ferry and then you think, okay, well, we need to put cars on this so you retrofit it. And you think, oh, we'll put the visor on there. We'll put the safety systems for the visor and everything. But it's not designed from the ground up to be this. And so you end up with these, these oversights. And we have this, the most clear title drop of this podcast.

Well, there's your problem. There's your problem. Wait, was it not designed as a ro-ro-fairy initially? I think it was. I think what I mean is, in terms of, just in terms of shipwrights, I think you don't develop this base of expertise for ro-ro-fairies. You develop a base of expertise for Baltic fairies. And then later you think, hey, can you stick a thing on this? And we'll put up, put out a new class.

And you say, sure, of course I can. Yeah. Yeah. Technically, it's not safety critical because it's not the watertight portion. But it turned out when it broke, that pretty quickly broke the watertight portion too. And of course, another thing is that even after there are these big bangs and loud noises, the crew were like, we're going to make schedule. They didn't slow down or try and take any corrective safety add-hits.

One thing that isn't in the Atlantic article, but it's always worth asking, and the Herald of Free Enterprise is the obvious comparison. That's a British ro-ro-fairy that did exactly the same thing on the channel, is how long have these guys been working for? When did they last take a break? Was it longer than 20 minutes? Things like that. Because you don't get this kind of pressure for, as much as we talk about Soviet mentality or whatever,

you don't get this pressure for timeliness or for targets from nowhere. There has to be someone from management pushing downwards saying, essentially, if you don't make this target, that's your job. And so that's a safety issue, but it's almost never considered as one. Yeah. Absolutely. The crew was apparently unaware that the list at all was being caused by water entering the vehicle deck. Apparently, they just didn't know.

No one was saying anything for the bridge. Obviously, the alarm took way too long, and the crew was very passive, which is very easily like, it's 1.30 a.m. I'm on the Baltic Sea. I haven't slept in two days. And we said earlier, this is a crew of, what, 180 people? There's no way that some person who suddenly is like, okay, I have to evacuate this corridor with, I don't know, 200 people in it,

who is not being spoken to by officers is going to be like, okay, well, this is what's happening. I know this despite the fact that I can't see anything. I don't have any windows. Nobody's telling me anything. That's going to give me the correct amount of urgency or whatever. It's really grim, and I need another drink on this because Jesus. All right.

That'll be four Makers Marks consumed through this podcast. Please sponsor us, Makers Marks Celery. Yeah, it's like sponsoring an eSports thing except, you know, better. And I'm about halfway to the bottom of this one. So, yeah, no, this is fine. I'll be damned before I get a Skillshare sponsorship. No, we're just shopping around for different bourbons. Like next week, it'll be Buffalo Trace.

And then the week after, it'll be like Woodford Reserve. Wild Turkey. I only want Wild Turkey. Yeah, exactly. I'm only trying to get that sweet, sweet Campari money. So, you know, here's the thing, though. There's as much as like there were obvious major things that went wrong. Of course, people want to talk about conspiracies, right?

Oh, hell yeah. I'm ready. I'm ready. So, Mothman. It was Mothman. It was the Jews. We did it. We did it.

It was Mossad again for some reason. Oh, that's crafty bastards. Yeah, full of communist Nazis that Mossad was going to get. Yeah. So, we're just at some point, we're going to do Korean Air Flight 007. So, I'm just going to be like, yeah, this is it. The Soviets shot it down with a missile. Did it happen several years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union?

Yes. Is that going to stop me? No. Yeah, Soviet strategic forces shot down a ferry with a surface-to-air missile somehow. So, there's a bunch of conspiracies about this sinking, right? So, some guy who survived the sinking reported seeing a bunch of mysterious trucks with a military escort being loaded on the ship just prior to them departing Tallinn. I mean, yeah, shit probably.

What year was this? It was like 1994. Yeah, 1994 is the prime year for all kinds of shady bullshit with military trucks coming out of former Soviet countries and having West. Sure. Why not? I don't think it's necessarily connected. It's probably full of ex-Soviet military technology.

They got to ship out the engines or ship out knowledge how to make engines bigger and smokier and build heavier armor. Just noisy. Yeah. This is our secret technology on how to defeat air protection more effectively. Well, much of the chagrin, of course, of rednecks in the West and the Cummins Diesel Corporation, the Soviets have always had us beat at rolling coal. I don't know.

For all I know, it was trucks of AKs that ended up in, that are right now in Syria. Nobody knows. But that one's probably true. It just probably doesn't have anything to do with this. There had been non-explosive military equipment aboard the ship indeed on the 14th and 20th of September. Yeah, that sounds right. But according to the Swedish Ministry of Defense, nothing was on board the day of the disaster.

But of course, the Swedish would say that considering that they were helping to smuggle ex-Soviet arms and they're never ending war against Norway. I like that they just ship it once a week. This is my weekly subscription to 80,000 pounds of AK-47s. It's like Dollar Shave, yeah. Oh, good. My A at 94s are here. Getting real mad at whatever Swedish go-puff, because they're taking too long with their

A at 94s. I just love the idea that what happened to all of the former Soviet unions, like loose ICBMs, was essentially like an ICBM of the month club. And the CIA was just waiting in Stockholm and was just like, again? You know, they're never going to ship you the Tsar Bomba in the ICBM of the month club. The thing is, if you subscribe for two years, you can assemble the Tsar Bomba yourself. I'm so excited to get my R36. My R36 knockdown kit.

Just assembling my backyard in Stockholm. Some folks think the ship was sunk with torpedoes by a NATO submarine to prevent whatever was being smuggled out with those trucks from reaching Swedish customs. That's stupid. NATO owned everything coming out of the USSR at that point. There's nobody else who could have done that. So, if we get to the point where there's something that was clearly a NATO conspiracy, that's going to be a future bonus episode on the Eustika massacre.

This thing? No, come on. No, I got it. I got it. Sweden, as far as I know, they're not a NATO member. So, what happened was that Sweden sank the submarine. Oh, shit. Because they have those old diesel subs.

Yep. Yep. And in order to prevent the proliferation of whatever, hunt for red October bullshit, Sweden finally getting revenge. Wow. Thank you, Sweden. Yeah. Yeah.

Neutrality wins out, finally. So, another theory is that whatever they were smuggling, the smugglers decided they didn't want to smuggle it anymore. They were going to get found out and they were going to try and open the bow themselves and just shove their trucks out. They just didn't want to play. They just didn't want to paint duty. Yeah, just like when you're getting chased by the cops and it's world's wildest police

videos and you just roll down the window and you throw the drugs out, but with an ICBM. We'll come back for it later. We'll come back for it later. Other people think the trucks were filled with explosives, which done blowed up. But it didn't done blowed up. It doesn't sunk. It doesn't sunk, yeah. But what we do know is that Swedish authorities have thoroughly protected the wreck site so

that no diving or real investigation is allowed and they tried to cover up the whole wreck with concrete rather than salvage and investigate it, right? Okay, that's weird. That's some radiation shit because I can't think of, you don't cover a wreck with explosives, a wreck with concrete because of explosives. And you don't cover a wreck with concrete because of, I don't know, notebooks about how to make diesel engines smoke here. But you do cover a wreck with concrete if you have like, I don't know, CBRN shit in there

and you don't want it to leak. So they managed to put down a bunch of gravel over the wreck. They couldn't finish the job since families of the survivors got really mad about it. They were like, what are you doing? Hey, why are you dumping two tons of gravel on my uncle? Exactly. Especially because it's in international waters. I mean, this absolutely seems plausible to me on the basis that my general theory of

conspiracies is that everyone is corrupt and everyone is incompetent at the same time. It absolutely jibes with that to be like, yeah, we're shipping some stuff that we don't want anyone to know about on this thing. And then independently, by complete coincidence, these idiots sank it. And now we have to clean up the mess. Yeah, it sounds about right. I mean, a bunch of people's Nuke of the Month Club is now at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. What do you call customer service for this?

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. There's somebody's crates full of ricin or Ebola or, I don't know, nuclear warheads down there. So the good news for Roz and I, but sucks to suck Alice is that the Estonia Agreement 1995 is a treaty between Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Russia, and the United Kingdom for some reason, declaring sanctity over the site and prohibiting their citizens from even approaching the wreck. The good news is that it's only binding for citizens of the countries that are signatories.

So Roz, we're going to the Baltic. I don't want to go to the Baltic. That's how we're going to spend the paycheck, buddy. I can't say anything. All I can say is it's very strange for a country that does not border the Baltic, but that does invest heavily in submarines and also smuggling stuff to be interested in this in any sort of formal sense. I cannot say anything else, but you two can speculate about why that might be. So please do.

I will. There were there were reports out of new statesmen that lab tests on debris recovered illegally from the exploded off bow yielded trace evidence of a deliberate explosion, which they alleged was concealed by the Swedish, British and Russian governments to cover up an intelligence operation smuggling military hardware. So congratulations, Alice. You're a party to all that shit. Amazing.

Yeah, I love to be the beneficiary. The U.S. has clean hands. Yeah, for once. We found the one thing that the U.S. didn't do. Yeah, we had no idea. So I look forward to not appearing on any future episodes of this because I like fracture my hyoid bone. Well, that's another interesting one is apparently public domain photos of the ship just keep disappearing like off the Internet.

So I don't know. Maybe they'll take down the podcast. Yeah, I mean, shit. It's still monitored by the Norwegian Navy, apparently. This is the thing, right? As far as every other conspiracy goes, like I believe the official 9-11 narrative on the basis that if there was a cover up of more than the most superficial thing, it would be this incompetent. You would Google 9-11 and nothing would come up, right?

Like that's that's the sort of level we're pitched at here. We'll have to do a 9-11 episode at some point. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Jeff, whether it can or not melt steel beams. You know, it can melt steel beams. Is it being hit by an airplane? Paper. Yeah, paper burns real hot.

Of course, that'll have to wait because our next episode will, of course, be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Of course. Yes. It's going to be a well-awaited episode. It's going to be real exciting. We're sorry for the delay, folks. We're really proud of what we're putting out next week. Yeah. Talk about the possible CIA involvement.

Mothman sightings in the area. Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, before we do any of these, I get a big cork board and I draft and I pin all of the mothman sightings in the vicinity. Very few mothman in the Baltic Sea, but, you know, I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that other than that mothman's involvement remains unconfirmed. Yes. Most mothman activity is concentrated in West Virginia, but that just might be that, you know, he's on break there, so he's not so worried about being clandestine. Absolutely. It's a busman's holiday, right? You cause engineering disasters in your home and then your vacation and you find out that you have to cause an engineering disaster there.

Yeah. You know, it's sad, really, and what we need to do is we need to radicalize mothman and we need to get mothman to join the SA and unionize and to agitate for better working conditions. I believe there should be a cryptid's union. Yes, absolutely. All right, so. Get out to New Jersey and we will work on it. Exactly. So start organizing cryptids under, like, the Teamsters.

Teamsters are already basically cryptids, so yeah, we're half right there. Jimmy Hoffa is a cryptid. That is true. Yeah. I mean, he's kind of a reverse cryptid in that mothman causes parts of road infrastructure to collapse. Jimmy Hoffa being part of a foundation actually prevents the collapse of, I don't know, an overpass on, like, I-95. So. Shea Stadium, right?

Yeah, possibly. Well, Mythbusters confirmed he was not there. Yeah, that's what they wanted. It's true, it's true. You're always in our hearts, Jimmy. Mythbusters in on the conspiracy cannot be trusted. Possible mothman. I mean, the one with the moustache kind of, he has something of the mothman about.

That's true. All right. I'm going to do a couple of announcements here. So this should be the first episode on our brand new, our own YouTube channel. Also, we should have a proper podcasting set up at this point where you can have an RSS feed, but you don't get the slides. We have a Patreon now, or we will by the time this goes up. Unlike on my channel where it's $1, it's going to be a $2 tier here. Yeah, because we have to split it between three people.

So we need that extra dollar. We're also going to have a Twitter account because I'll do that. And yeah, it's going to tweet things about mothman and things of that nature. If I could also get access to that so I can get real salty replies. Yeah, I'll just read the password for it live on air and we can just like, yeah, total chaos. There you do it. That's what I always want. I always support chaos.

This is a Twitter for everyone. We democratize the Twitter. We are doing democratic centralism under the leadership of Abdullah O'Salan. It would just turn into like just this most absurd, incredibly pro-Assad account like immediately. Simultaneously pro every side in the Syrian civil war at once. Pro-Assad, pro-Turkey, pro-YPG, pro-America for some reason. So on this Patreon, you're going to get one bonus episode a month. Our first bonus episode will be on Grover House.

So hopefully coming soon. I guess we got to schedule that. Tell the children what Grover House is really quickly in case they, because we're old and some of them won't know. Oh, God. It's true. Grover House is from an ancient place called the Something Awful Forums. It was terrible. Where one of the moderators was trying to build an addition to his house and chronicle that in a forum thread.

And it ended up with him, his, the house didn't pass inspection. So he got himself certified as an inspector in his town in order to pass the work with the city. So. Yeah. It's wild. It is wild and wonderful. You absolutely have to, you have to like give us two bucks for this because that's going to be a lot of fun. That's one fifth the price of signing up for a Something Awful Forums account.

That's true. And, and I think they give you like, it's like 10 bucks for an archives account to go and read the actual thread. So you're making insane savings. Supporting us for 20 months, excuse me, 10 months is cheaper than signing up for a Something Awful Forums archives account. Take that Richard Lotex Chiyaka. Yeah. Directly. Like the worst punch that Lotex has suffered since Offer Ball.

Dear Richard. Oh, that's right. Suck my dick, Lotex. I paid, I paid you like 30 bucks and those all. I am excited to talk about the basement pool thread. Everybody, look, there's, I should say this. Everybody that you like or dislike on the internet now, whose name you know, either started on Something Awful or 4chan. And I feel like we are all something awful here.

Yeah. And that, yeah, that trauma that we carry with us has led us to the podcast you are listening to today. Never go on Reddit. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever go on Reddit. Except for OSHA. That's a good subreddit. That's funny. All right.

Well, that's... Shit, I'm going to finish the bottles of that. All right, so that's 50 minutes or so. Anyone got anything to pitch before we go? Ooh, listen to Trash Future. We are on trashfuture.podbean.com, I believe. Or just, you know, Google us or on the, on whatever app you use to get your podcasts. This is also www.gettingyourdicksucked.com.

Yes, that's true. That is genuinely, no joke, a multimedia project that we're trying to launch that our fearless leader Riley is trying to launch. The gist is we're trying to do a serious news site whose name is guessingyourdicksucked.com with no jokes in it, apart from the name, because that was the last name available was guessingyourdicksucked.com. So help, listen to Trash Future, support us in that aim. Yes. I guess the only thing I have to pitch is listen to this podcast that you just listened to. And your actual...

And my actual YouTube channel, yeah, this won't be on that. You have to pitch that separately. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, listen to my, watch my YouTube channel where I talk about cities and socialism and stuff like that. Yeah, you play some kind of video game like a fucking nerd. I have to finish Disco Elysium tonight. Yeah. I was going to play some Minecraft, probably.

Wrap this up, I'm Liam Anderson. Follow me on Twitter at Old Man Anderson. It's really just going to be getting pissed off at people who are dumb as shit in our Twitter comments. And also just, yeah, go to the videos and then watch idiots fucking embarrass themselves in front of the whole world by tweeting dumb transphobic shit and then getting dunked on by like 30 people. Who's the English guy? Like first of all Scottish and second of all girl. Bad comments, we'll go on Twitter and you'll be mocked.

And then let me remind her that crimes against her are crimes. All right. Awesome. Yeah, sounds good. Bye everyone. Bye everybody.