Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 61: Khian Sea Disposal Incident

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

this wouldn't have happened if we could just dump our trash in new jersey Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

start recording of the actual podcast. Yeah. OK, I'm now recording locally. It's very funny that you had a boat themed nightmare. I was about to say, yeah, I mean, it was it was it was like a partial nightmare, I would say, tragically on brand. It was like it was unpleasant because I was, you know, being bombed by the Syrian Air Force on the Skoukal River

while attempting to defend apparently only the west part of Philadelphia. That sounds like you, man. Not all of Philadelphia. Leave it me to deal to go to go up Red Dawn. Different autonomous communes on the Syrian army of Bashar al-Assad. Yeah. Yes. I mean, these are weird. I would. Well, no, I was I was in a boat, not a tank.

Although you're being bozi. Yeah. But what is a boat, if not the tank of water? Is this a technical? Ah, how many weapons on it? It's just like a septa trolley with a with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it. Yeah. Rose's college rowboat with an M2 browning machine going on.

That's basically what the Coast Guard has. So you would need a second. You'd need a second a second person seated, not rowing in order. Well, I guess you maybe you could give one in two seat, you know, some guns. One steers and one loads, man. Yeah, well, when the rower with the machine gun is killed. Just going full enemy at the gates. But oh, Apple CEO. Nice.

Yes. All right. So anyway. So what welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast with slides with slides where we have nightmares about the lion of Damascus bombing West Philadelphia. Yes. Yes, that was my experience this morning. Sucks. No, then I had to do an arms deal with a Russian arms dealer

after like in a dream or in the dream. I thought I thought I thought you were just like confessing to some federal crimes just to spice the podcast up. But he said, I will give you the arms if you wear these women's shoes. What? Listen, whatever direction you're going with this. I said, no, I'm going to find an arms dealer who will not make me do that. Russian arms dealer just telling you to put on the maid outfit.

And why aren't you in uniform? I'm here to purchase large amounts of weaponry from you in order to fight, not deal with your bull. Yeah, in order to fight Bashar al-Assad, who again, like I cannot stress enough in your dream was invading the city of Philadelphia. Only West Philadelphia. I guess they got a no flies on set up on the other side. Yeah, it's more like a liberalism, baby.

No, they they tried with North Philly, but Kensington is basically Stalingrad at this point. You actually got to come by Pavelov's house in a minute. Yeah, Liam is like wearing like five bandoliers at the same time. And it's like a hardened member of the North Philly Peshmauga. Yes. Welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast with slides where we discuss our various dreams.

Not like dreams like I'd like to do this, but dreams like that's the fucked up shit that happened in my brain last night. Yeah, I had one where I had a nightmare where I got arrested for podcasting, which I don't know what the fuck that says. I was walking down the street earlier, going to the beer store and a police officer really slow rolled past me. And I was like, oh, I'm about to get arrested. No, this was this was this was different for me.

Like it wasn't like an incidental meeting, the police. It was like a dawn raid. Like the police smashed my door down and arrested me for podcasting too much. And I was like, well, wait a second. OK, first of all, I'm not going to say anything and I want my lawyer. But second of all, when did that become illegal? And then I woke up. So there you go.

I had a dream last night where I started and only fans. Nice. But were you actually doing the only fans? Or were you? Yes, yes, I was I was. Giving the people what they want. You've got to I think what would be a funny bit is even if you don't do it to put, start putting it in your Twitter name, like Liam Anderson, top point one percent only fans just to make people look.

I might I might. And then there there would be no link and I would drive people wild with indignation and then someone would cancel me for appropriating sex work. Oh, God, because we can't have fun anymore. Yeah. And that's that's why I would get arrested for podcasting. And then in a sort of butterfly effect scenario, this would lead the Syrian Arab army to occupy West Philadelphia. It all ties together.

Well, Ross, congratulations. I'll buy you a K 98. OK. Point and click, buddy. All right. So welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, which we're introducing for the third time this time properly. Right. I'm Justin Rosnack.

I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. I am Alice Kudrow Kelly. I am the person who interrupts the previous two attempts to start the podcast with a different unrelated bit. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. It's Liam. Hi. I am old Manderson on Twitter.

Thanks to the one person who told me to change it. I have redoubled my efforts to be mean to you in our YouTube comment section. I have started picking more fights on Twitter under my account. Hell, yes. I am just as a point of clarification. I am the person who opens the shit you people send to the box. I have to mail out the package and the address of that P.O. Box is P.O. Box four zero one seven eight Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one nine one

oh six. I I. Layed in down with parcels. I had to open 20 pounds of jelly beans today. I someone sent us an anthrax CD. You people paid for this. Yeah, Tony, but they accomplished that. They made you haul back a giant anthrax plushie because you told them not to send one of them for you.

Oh, that's so sorry. And Ross, someone sent you what I believe is an article of clothing. So when I see you tomorrow, I'll drop it off. When you say an article of clothing, no idea. I didn't know, but it made costume, made costume. Hundred percent made costume. It's the Russian arms dealers. Yeah, look, Ross needs beer.

World has to keep spinning. Deals happen. Promises are made. Sometimes people do things that they regret and they wear outfits for professions that they may not be in. I was about to say, I will say, though, someone also sent us a rubber stamp. All right. I posted about it on Twitter.

That is cool. I'm sorry you spent that much money on it, but rest assured, I'm going to abuse it until the end of the day. You're going to stamp so many fucking things. Yeah, yes. So all my pronouns are he, him, if I didn't say that. I think he did. But what else?

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. So. What you see on the screen is a very pixelated boat. Oh, I like that. It goes tweets. Oh, all right. Yeah, that is that is a guy I forgot. Found a new guy.

Yes. This is actually a less pixelated boat than that. Now, it does not seem as though there's anything wrong with it, but there is. OK. Which is that it's full of incinerator fly ash. And they want or maybe it's not full of incinerator fly ash. And there's this road to your trash boat.

Yes. Oh, we'll get to that. Oh, boy. And I know everyone wants to talk us to talk about the big boat, but today we're going to talk about a different boat. We are going to talk about the key and the sea waste disposal incident. Hell, yes. We love a waste disposal disaster. Yes.

Let's just say that we're in the sanitation business. If you know what I mean. If you know what I mean, yeah. But I'm kind of scared to ask to know what you mean. We investigate sanitation related disasters. Oh, yeah. Investigate. Investigate cause are paid off to avoid things of that nature. Yeah, we're flexible.

All right. But first, let's talk about the goddamn news. I mean, all right. So we knew it was going to be this one. It's a new segment, baby. It's a hell of a thing to happen on our week off. Yeah, we're back from sabbatical. Yeah. And we take a sabbatical and look what you fuckers did.

Yeah, in order to get our attention, the captain of the. I said, don't go. Of the ever given one of the largest container ships in the world, transiting the Suez Canal, drew a dick and balls, a perfect dick and balls on the GPS tracker, entered the Suez Canal and blocked up. Yeah, just seems to have a there was a big windstorm, it seems like. And while countering the windstorm, apparently you got too close to the shore.

And then I read this in a hydrology article a couple of days ago, apparently maybe the fact that the boat was too close to the shore, made the bow go hard, starboard and just slam into the other shore. I mean, if this is the thing, right? If I had been the helmsman or woman of the ever given, I would be throwing out all kinds of hydrological bullshit. I would be like, yeah, no, it was the wind. There was a rogue wave.

Seamonster. Seamonster. Muffman. A guy shined a laser pointer in my eyes. Anything other than I personally got distracted and I turned the thing too hard and I like stopped the flow of 10 percent of global trade for almost a week. I was about to say, yeah, well, that's the thing is I don't know that you could intentionally steer this boat into the shore that that that hardly. Yeah, you've only got to let like let down my accelerationist dreams. I kind of like the idea of someone just going rogue

and being like, I have had it up to here with late stage. Like that United Airlines flight attendant who like grabbed two beers, punched the fucking like emergency exit slide, which was out. Same vibe, but on a boat. And did the whole announcement also before anyone corrects you? It was a jet blue flight attendant or whatever. So doesn't the United own jet blue? No, I have no idea. I don't I don't look it.

I try not to think about airlines. They're all incestuous anyway. Yeah. Yes. We'll probably discuss this in more in depth at some future date and actually very soon on a goddamn America bonus episode. But yeah, which we'll be recording on the day this episode comes out. Only pod. Yeah, exactly. So what happened is once the boat managed to wedge itself in this position, only I would say about three fifths of this canal is actually dredged

to a reasonable depth, like, you know, from here to here. This is part of an incomplete widening project, I believe, on this side. Huh. So, you know, they're they're they're shoving bigger and bigger boats through this thing without, like, necessarily accounting for the hydrology of what might happen if the canal is too narrow. And, you know, the guy is not necessarily steer in as best he could, whether because of wind or because he's a Suez canal pilot,

which are apparently not very good. And they call it the Marlboro Canal because you've got to pay him off in cigarettes. Which I think is cool. Like I'm sympathetic. That's absolutely. Attic to that. Yeah. Take the carton of cigarettes. Also, the fact that, like, for better sea keeping,

all of these ships have bulbous bowels, which I guess we can, like, John Madden in, but it's got a big protruding kind of like, like, if you look at my profile page, it's kind of like my chin. And just like, and like, that makes it more stapled and open seas. Unfortunately, what it also does is if you decide to go ramming speed on one wall of the Suez Canal and just get stuck in there. Yeah. But I mean, the other thing is like, I think all of the ship from about the R in Evergreen is like beached.

Now, of course, this morning, they got it out. So a very cool video of like the crew of one of the tugboats, the. Well, they were stoked. Yeah, they were they were just they were chanting Marshaur number one. So yeah, how we are. It's also definitely like if they hadn't gotten it out today, because today is high tide, like the highest tide they're going to get for a bit. If they hadn't gotten it out today, it was going to be there for like probably a month.

What's really funny is people like immediately, as soon as this story broke, were both identifying with and rooting for the ship. I really appreciated that. I thought that was funny. It was the only good thing to happen on Twitter. Yeah, everything else that's on Twitter is like something mildly funny. And then it turns out that guy's been like canceling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking shrimp cinnamon toast guy.

It's the biggest piece of shit you've ever heard of on for like 60 different reasons. But for no other reason than apparently he's been trying to quote, go viral for five years. Asshole, start a podcast like everyone else. Yeah. Box, then maybe someone will bill you to 20 pounds of jelly beans. Do not mail a shrimp. Do you Alice, do you want the jelly beans? Yeah, fuck, I'll just exercise.

All right, cool. Thank you. OK. I mean, you're going to have to eat the cost of shipping 20 pounds of jelly beans. I got to ship you something else anyway, so. OK. Wait, maybe we're going to send a we're going to send a 40 foot container of items you've mailed us to Alice, though. It's just it's just like a box being like this is taking a lot longer than I would have thought. I do want to say that like the British tabloid press have been on this because the best newspaper in the world, the Daily Star,

has once again come back to their favorite form of journalism. How has this impacted the global movement of what they describe as sex arses? You know, arses for sex like a like a real doll, but it's a bunch. Yeah, just the but just the ass. And apparently, like if you were looking for supplies of sex arses, you would shit out of luck because like so to speak. Yeah, because either they were like on this ship or they were on one of the colossal number of ships stuck behind it.

And it genuinely caused like a mild supply panic in relation to sex arses, arses for sex. Yes, suppose the ass is for pooping, which I assume also exist. Wait, so you just have like a fake ass that like poops out of it. What do you sex stuff? Oh, I guess that one's probably for kids, actually. They're into that gross shit, you know. Oh, yeah, like if you wipe something else's with something else's ass, you can barely wipe your own. No, no, no, because like think about it.

Like if you've like seen kids toys in the last couple of years, they're all like weird slime shit for some reason, slime shit. I don't know why it's some kind of like conspiracy. I don't know. But yeah, I always like slime. That's true. But like go and find your own damn slime. It's too commercial now. When I was a kid, you just fucking found or made your own slime. But now you're going to buy this package slime.

That's a good point. Yeah, they've gentrified slime. Yeah, that's right. Used to be you could just make it out of cornstarch and water. Now you have to go to the store. You got to buy slime to be able to just mix all the stuff in the refrigerator together until your parents got mad at you. But no, now you have to like fucking buy like a $60 slime kit or whatever.

My God. So anyway, I just want to say, you know, if you diverted a diverted around the Suez Canal, my God, you fucked. Yeah. Yeah, well, best thing heavily on it fucking up and for once. No, never go in against Egyptian tugboat operators. I guess so. Yeah.

I mean, the backlog are going through right now. I'm sure it's pretty gnarly. I read somewhere just before we started recording that they're. Right now, they are only allowing livestock ships through the canal. There's also there was one Russian warship that was stuck there in the queue. Russian warship number five four five, which is it's a tanker.

It's a fleet oiler called the Kola, which genuinely, right, collided with a bulk carrier a few days earlier. And so it was just stuck there with the ship that it hit. Wasting like there you go. What's up, guys? How are you doing? Do you guys want some torpedoes? We're so boring. Incidentally, the name of the the the other phrase that it hit is the Ark Royal.

So, you know, a little bit of a blast from the past there. Imagine if you diverted, you're probably about at Madagascar by now. I mean, oh, yeah, it's also stupid. It adds how much does it add to go around the Horn of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope and then West Africa? Twelve days, about twelve days. Yeah, there's a bunch of a bunch of pictures on Twitter of like, look at all this traffic going around the Horn of Africa.

It's like, no, that's the normal traffic around the Horn of Africa. Right. The diverted Suez traffic hasn't made it there yet. Well, at least they can turn around and go back, I guess. That might not be worth it, depending on how quickly the backlog clears on the ever given. Even though it's now moving, it's not going to be out of the Suez canal because they're just going to stick it in. They have a giant basin called the Great Bitter Lake,

which sort of like transit and storage and stuff. Let's go stick it there and then like do some Marlboro involved safety checks to make sure it can even make it up the rest of the way. I was excited to see what would happen if they decided, you know, we have to we have to ship break this, you know, I thought they might have to scrap it on site, you know, just because it could have been. Yeah, I was like, that would bankrupt evergreen

just because they'd have to actually pay decent wages. I mean, when I say decent wages, I mean, more than like Indian dirt, poor poverty, shipwrecker wages, you would have to like ship a crane. Apparently the crane that you needed for this had like a 60 foot reach, but it had to be able to like move a shipping container at a seriously fucked angle in order to make this work. And so there was like, I don't know, like one of these basically. And if you had to try to like do that,

you're just taking all of those containers off. You're going to be there for months. And it's because your big port container crane can lift up like, you know, like a container every two or three minutes. If you had if you had to unload this with a big fat regular crane, you're taking off like a container every, I don't know, five or six minutes at best. Yeah. And it's got like hundreds and not the low hundreds.

So more than that. I think this is like 20,000 T. You only fuck. Maybe that's too much. It's a lot of sex asses. Well, let me double check this. Twenty thousand seems maybe a little high. That's nuts. OK. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. The podcast will be all Google the thing that we just said to find out

if we're liars or not. Don't worry about that. Ever given ship, wikipedia, one thousand one hundred and twenty four twenty foot equivalent units. Holy shit. Fuck me. No, thank you. You said six minutes per. Probably at best if people got really into the really into it. Because you're not using a specialized container crane at that point. You're using just a regular crane, which can't like, you know, because if you're at the terminal, you have that specialized container crane.

You're lined up. The thing goes out. It picks up the container. It brings it in. It drops it into a truck that stopped in the exact correct. Calculations that would have taken them 83 and a third days. Roughly. Oh, yeah. That plus the time to get whatever fucks can to leave it over. So three, four months. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of overtime.

Well, it seems to be mostly 40 foot container. So it'd be a half that time. Oh, OK. In in 2019, this same ship due once again, supposedly to high winds. Oh, OK. Just fucking like struck a fairy in Hamburg. Well, that strike. Yeah. Literally, in this case, literally just gouged a thing out of the side of this fairy. So yeah, dudes rock, less huge fan of the Ever Given. Probably stop ramming stuff and other stuff, though.

I do. I do want to say to all you people who wrote, you know, sexualized fan fiction or made images of the Ever Given. I sent one of those to Roz to this in relation to this image. This ship is two years old. You fucking. Age gap discourse. Cancels. Oh, I'm a child. Am I? I'm a child. You know, that makes you a pedophile.

And I'm dead. I stand by a pervert. Fucking nonsense, nonsense, everyone. And I mean, wedging yourself in the most inconvenient place and making everybody else, making everybody else's problem is a highly two year old move, to be fair. This is true. Yeah. I might be three years old. Lay down twenty eighteen, I want to say.

Or maybe see trousers twenty like how they they did. The ship's been around for three years and already it has like two near catastrophic. Yeah, that's that's not so good. It's a lot of confidence in the bridge crew, I think. Well, I mean, nobody's in trouble so far. Like that's the funny thing, as much as everyone's investigating, like the official line on the crew is like, hey, we're all really proud of them

for like sticking it out. And it's like, yeah, no, you can be proud of all them, except one, the guy with the wheel. You maybe want to ask some questions before you're deciding if you're proud of that guy or not. I don't know how it's going to turn out. I think they're going to find out that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be letting ships this big into the canal before the wide project is finished. Yeah, but I mean, it's a big truck scales, but for boats.

Yeah, it's too much of a like it's too essential to the Egyptian economy, but they like for them to just put a weight limit on like that, isn't it? Yeah, but but they're like almost finished with the canal dredging. They're through the hard part, which is widening it. They just got to dredge it now. So, you know, they may have to just put the kibosh on boats this big for like two or three years and then it'll be fine. But, you know, what before they might just try and keep sending them through.

And, you know, this will happen again a couple of months from now. My favorite, my favorite tweet about this was imagine being the helmsman of the first ship. I think it's a mask ship, the one that this photo is taken from to get through the canal after the ever given starts moving again and knowing that you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing that any human being has ever done. That would merely by wedging your ship in the same place.

Oh, my God. Well, now you couldn't wedge it in the same place. You have to go a little bit farther up. I guess so. Because they've excavated. Yeah, because they excavated under the ship. Yeah. No, no, no.

Also be harder to do at high tide. Oh, damn, yeah. You could try. But if you did that and screwed up. Oh, you're going to ultra jail. That would be that would just be highly embarrassing. Also true. Yeah, one of some of the bit most embarrassment

anyone has experienced in their lives. I think the funniest thing you could do would be to like wedge it against the opposite bank. Oh, yeah, that would be kind of fun. Just to spice things up a bit. You know, yeah, let's see. Let's see. Excavated that one.

Yeah, all the sex asses on board. You know, yeah, absolutely. Is a record. I'm through my first beer before we're. Well, we had a lot of good news. Yeah, it's a long one. Half an hour in. But like, of course we are.

We had to talk about this thing because this, you know, this thing is perfect for us. And it happened the week when we took a week off. Yeah. And it's still not over yet. I prefer to do the episodes once the thing is over rather than while it's happening, because otherwise it's just speculation. But yeah, but anyway, in fairness, we do a lot of speculation anyway.

This is a good point. Yeah. But I think that was the goddamn news. I used the long news drop there instead of the short one because we only have one news item that will do it. All right. So this is the East central incinerator. It's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It doesn't look like it. It does look like an incinerator. Oh, it's incinerating the shit out of something. What? Well, what do you say? I said, what a depressing Goddard, but my mouth was full of beer. Oh, yeah. I thought for a second, I thought you were like, you didn't just like not

hear you offended on behalf of the incinerator. It was like, what the fuck did you just say to me? You got some fun about this building? That's a little funny to say about it. I'm sorry, man. We'll get to that. Tell your jokes. So in the 1960s, in Philadelphia, the city fathers had this bright idea

to make waste disposal a little bit cheaper. Right. Mm hmm. The idea is rather than we truck it out long distances to be incinerated and then land filled, they would build an incinerator close to Center City. Oh, oh, smart. Yeah. I will say this is not a Philly specific phenomenon. A lot of towns and cities in Pennsylvania did this.

Oh, yeah. At the same time, famously bankrupting Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. So the city acquired Pierce 31 through 35 and infilled them to create land for the East Central incinerator. You know, the idea was this is a modern, clean, efficient, automated and architecturally distinctive incineration facility. Right. It's kind of public facing, right?

We're looking at the back end of it. The front end had some 1960s weird architecture on it, right? Oh, you know, I put this thing in service in 1966. They had these fancy 1966 stack scrubbers, which took in millions of gallons of Delaware River water to make the smoke less bad. They used they used no outside fuel, only, you know, forced air to burn the garbage more effectively.

It produced, I think, six pounds of fly ash for every 1000 pounds of waste burned. And it could incinerate 600 tons of waste each day. Right. Yeah. And then it's it's it's not a problem anymore. Obviously, right. Absolutely. The thing about burning stuff is it just disappears. Rosie, now. Yeah. And they built a few other big incinerators in this era

and upgraded a few older ones. The other big one they built was up in Roxboro, which is in the Northwest Philadelphia. Kind of, I wouldn't say affluent area, but you know, it's not not not a poor area. I was surprised they could get this built, but then they built this one right next to Center City. This is right at the foot of Spring Garden Street.

So, you know, I guess people were stoked about incinerators back then. Stoked. Yeah. Very clever. Ah. Damn, thank you. All right. See, it's funny because you can stoke a fire, which is what an incinerator is.

I like that joke. I'm not I'm not a sad little crying bitch, baby, though. I turn it over to our sad little crying bitch, baby, correspondent Justin Rosniak. All right. So the problem is, admittedly, when you incinerate garbage, you reduce the amount of physical waste you have to dispose of, right? You still have to dispose of the fly ash, right?

You know, your six pounds of fly ash for every one thousand pounds of garbage burn. Why is it called fly ash? You know, I have no idea. Oh, OK. This is the this is not the wild speculation segment of our podcast. Why do we think it's called fly ash? I think it's because the stuff that otherwise would have flown out of the stack. I was going to say because it was just pot ash.

Yeah. Ha, flu ash, flu ash. That makes sense. Yeah. Oh, well, we're learning stuff today. The usual method to dispose of this ash is landfilling, right? There's a couple of neighborhoods in Philadelphia that were built on landfill from fly ash, mostly from coal heating, right? A very notable one is this one right here, Logan Triangle, right?

It's not supposed to look like that. It is not supposed to look like that. There were there were row houses there. It was built entirely on coal ash, which had been put in a big pile to fill in a creek, right? And then once they sewerized the creek and then they leveled the terrain with coal ash and then they build houses on top of it, right?

And it they had experienced such severe settling, they had to demolish the whole neighborhood like a couple of decades after it was built. Oh, yeah, I love to go to Sinkhole Park. Yeah. This also happened in Mill Creek in Philadelphia, or excuse me, in West Philadelphia, which they after they demolished the whole neighborhood,

they then built public housing on top. OK, which then very occasionally we get a massive sinkhole. Sometimes houses just collapse into the massive sinkhole in West Philly. It happens. We haven't had a proper. We had the sinkhole two years ago. Yeah, I was talking about the block of Sandsam.

Was is it forty four hundred where the where the shopping bag? Yeah, where the shopping bag. Yeah, that was a whole block that collapsed into Mill Creek. You know, just just one day all the houses fell in the creek, which was, you know, 60 feet below grade. Yeah, it seems in like great moments in out of sight, out of mind, sanitation ideas of, first of all, just burning it

and second of all, just bury it in the ground. And we're about to hit the third one, which is just dump it in the sea. And that all like this is the trifecta of it's somebody else's problem now. And I really appreciate that. So another option rather than landfilling it to make productive land is you landfill it to make unproductive land, right? So, you know, you just build a big hill of trash and fly ash and then you cover it with dirt.

You repeat as needed, right? And this is the option they chose once they built the modern incinerators. Well, 1966, modern and seller incinerators. They put all the ashes in trucks. They trucked it across the river. They brought it to landfills in New Jersey, right? Is New Jersey, New Jersey is where you send your trash. It's really interesting to me, the amount of science

and engineering that goes into landfills, though, just like turns out that if you want stuff to not, like, you know, turn into a sinkhole or, like, emit a bunch of weird chemicals from shit mixing with other shit, you have to have like a relatively, yeah, you have to have a relatively good, like sort of impermeable barrier between the trash and the land. And you have to have, like, pretty good segregation between different types of trash. It's like, to me, that's interesting because I have mental problems in the brain, but.

I want I want that New York City Sanitation Department, General General's uniform. Yeah, yes, I do. I absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I want to steal that valor. So this is, you know, here's an example. This is Kinsley's landfill. This is in Gloucester County, New Jersey, just across the river. This is a big one, which is going to be relevant. This is a lot of this is fly ash.

I think it's still partially active, but they're trying to put solar panels on top of it now, because sure, why not? The solar panel got eaten by a sinkhole. Oh, well, there's a lot of near Pennsbury Manor where William and Hannah Penn lived. There's like a massive landfill right next to that, too. And I'm just waiting for the spoil trip to absolutely destroy William Penn's old house, because I'll be the most silly thing I can think of.

Yes. So anyway, they're trucking, they're trucking the ash across the bridge into Jersey, dumping it in landfills, right? Well, this is the 60s in 1970, December 2nd, 1970. Oh, boy. Richard Nixon signs in executive order, creating the Environmental Protection Agency. Well, you said you said a date and it was a good thing, not a bad thing. Yeah, it was a bad thing.

I know, right? Only time is going to happen. Yeah, the EPA is actually a good thing. You really could have freaked them out worse if you'd had a time in there. At 11, 25 a.m. on December 2nd, 1970, the EPA was created. One of the one of the interesting things about the EPA is because Nixon created it, he was just like, yeah, it can fuck shit up. Which is I think not the case of any other president had done it.

Nixon decided to do it, decided to, yeah, we'll give the EPA like some real teeth. Yeah, Nixon could go to China, bras. I have an EPA challenge coin, which I really appreciate, just like being with the environment cops. Yes. So they're sort of in the 70s, early 70s, they're sort of a pollution crisis in the United States, right? Pollution, pollution now is like CO2. It's like kind of abstract, it's particulates, you know?

Pollution back then was literally everything you saw was covered in garbage. There's toxic chemicals everywhere, rivers are catching on fire. You know, you drive down the interstate and there's just a solid wall at garbage on each side of you. In some ways, that's almost more beneficial, right? Because people see that it's serious, like even to this day, like I read this thing about Trump's environmental policy such as it was and whether he believed in climate change.

And well, no, he didn't. But like the like a lot of like rich dudes of his generation, what the environment meant to him and what climate change meant to him was having clean air and water, because that's a distinct thing that if you don't have them, you notice it's there's fucking acid rain happening. Yeah, like the river catches fire or whatever. Yeah, today, when there's acid rain, it's from CO2. It's not from as much sulfur dioxide and stuff like that.

Don't quote me on that. We don't have acid, acid rain. We will soon have acid oceans, but, you know, that's probably fine. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, you can't drink that water anyway. What do you think is right? What we've done is we've we've traded the kind of very obviously bad and immediately bad pollution in most places.

There's still places where we still have that, obviously. But like on a global scale, we've tended to trade that for the kind that's less immediately obvious. But when it hits a certain tipping point, kills all of us. And I'm not sure that was the smartest decision that we've made as a species. Well, I think you need to get rid of the obvious stuff before you can start tackling the less obvious stuff. That's true. I'm not I'm not saying like we oh, no, just just leave the river to catch fire

just as long as you never emit CO2, just that it's somewhat more like abstract now. And that's not doing us any favors. Also, when the river catches fire, it will emit CO2. Oh, yeah, that is true. So the EPA starts regulating certain pollutants, starts taking a closer look at what's being dumped in landfills and stuff around the United States. They drop some new regulation zone and so forth.

And suddenly, you know, having an incinerator on the waterfront right near Center City, where people live and have office buildings and stuff looks a little bit more like a dumb idea. And people start noticing that they're coughing because they're not all smoking 70 cigarettes a day. Yeah, they're coughing because they're they're inhaling their neighbor's garbage. Hmm. This is how we call that vapor.

I now live all of about five blocks from where this used to be. I was just thinking, man, I I'm glad there's not a massive trash incinerator there now. Also, please bring back the seven eleven. Well, it's still full of trash, though. Yeah, I know. I I do walk down Delaware Ave sometimes and I see it, Roz. Yeah, the the site of the site of the East Central incinerator is now festival peer. Yeah.

So I saw Kesha there once. Oh, my God. So and also landfilling garbage requires better techniques to make it safer. So in 1973, the Philadelphia City Council proposed to stop incinerating garbage and instead landfilling it directly, right? Which they were, of course, still going to do in New Jersey. Hell, yes. Yes. New Jersey, New Jersey, the next city over in your game of Sim City,

where you run the connection out to the edge of the map and then it's their problem. Going to import all the power. I'm going to export all the garbage. I do not give a fuck about National Park, New Jersey. It's the garden state. That's where we send our fertilizer. Wink, wink. I'll talk more about that in a bit.

So the thing is, New Jersey was suburbanizing rapidly after the opening of like A, the Ben Franklin Bridge, B, the Walt Whitman Bridge, you know, and Jersey Turnpike, a lot of other stuff like that. And of course, the sort of New Jersey, you know, horrible, horrible road network, which they built, which if you want to go way, way back to episode five, I think we talk about. Left of their own devices, traffic engineers will always build New Jersey. Yes. Mm hmm.

So in the new suburban New Jersey, I eat New Jerseyans were fed up with being Philly's garbage dump, as well as being New York's garbage dump. But that's a different story. Yeah, they all went to G's elbow room to complain about it. They walked along the highway to the bar. Yeah, there's nothing good about your state or the people in it. Tired of getting this New York garbage is mostly snitches. Yes, I am sick of tea.

I am sick of digging bones out of the trash can. So you had a bunch of a bunch of protesters blocked trucks from Philadelphia at the gate of the Kinsey landfill, right? And they started lobbying and agitating their lawmakers. And they passed the New Jersey Waste Control Act of 1973, which banned Philadelphia's garbage from New Jersey. So Philadelphia's incinerators were turned back on. Oh, you're welcome for the jobs.

Yeah. And the economy you have because of us. You're welcome. You're welcome. Oh, you come here. Jumps is what? Mutt locks? No, jobs in Center City. Oh, I noticed. Yeah, I was going to say they all and you like the Sixers and you like the Phillies and you like you sure like the Flyers because you love screaming the n-word at the three black players on the ice.

They like having a wah-wah, as I understand it. The fact that you just said having a wah-wah. Having a wah-wah. Just no, there's it's a trip in Jersey. There's a process of cultural exchange going on here, and it can't always be pressing. No, that's all right. Wah-wah is has a presence in all of South Jersey. Yeah, that's what I see. I was right.

Now, if we can now, if we can just get Liam to say that he's going out to Big Tesco, you know, you guys want anything? Can I get some of those fancy? What's the other grocery store? Marks and Spencer. Yeah, Marks and Spencer. That's a little bit fancier. Can I get a 40 pound salmon with the with the dressing that I have to order a couple days in advance?

The really fancy one would be Waitrose. That's the like middle class one. That's like a sort of a Whole Foods kind of experience, I think. Oh, I'm too trashy for Waitrose. Yeah. I went to the I went to the Acme a few days ago. Yeah. Do you mean the Acme? No, the Acme.

Oh, yeah, you mean the whatever. All right. So Philadelphia. Backup track. Philadelphia contested this act. They sued New Jersey in court. Right. Yeah, buddy. Doing the night court theme, but for garbage. It's garbage court.

And they they managed to get I think they managed to get a stay on the act. I'm not sure. But they did escalate this as people score. Fuck shit. Just loving our trash logs over the Delaware. Just I take a lot of pleasure in knowing that like every single person in that courtroom is going in the head. You know, how many years of law school led me to this?

The garbage case. It well, it escalated all the way up to the Supreme Court. Pull a shit. Yeah. And a case. Did we win? City of Philadelphia versus New Jersey. Story of my life. Yeah, was decided seven two in favor of Philadelphia. The waist control.

The waist control act was an unconstitutional regulation on interstate commerce in Philadelphia. I had a constitutional right to dump its garbage in New Jersey. The problem was this decision was reached, I think, in like 1977. And by this time, the New Jersey landfills were almost full, right? Just put down a bet and they wouldn't approve any new ones, presumably. Yeah, the massive suburban sprawl in the decades prior to the decision left New Jersey landfill operators unable to expand their landfills.

So they need to find some alternate destinations for the waste if it was to be landfilled without burning it, right? Because they only limited space left in the existing landfills. And in the meantime, the incinerators kept churning out the fly ash, which, again, was sent to New Jersey, right? I'm going to use the restroom because you had two beers. You know, I did. I didn't live.

Oh, I'm terrific. I'm I'm on Google Maps just wandering around New Jersey. Oh, it's fun. No, thinking about landfills, thinking about how fucking hideous and depressing they are. Yeah, one of my EPA challenge coin. I know it's in here somewhere. I got a fish and wildlife service challenge coin here.

Well, that's pretty sick. Protecting wildlife here and abroad. Thanks for making a difference. And it's like you're in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and each state has little like animal in relief that I guess they were protecting. So North Carolina has some kind of bird, I think maybe an eagle. South Carolina has a turtle and then Georgia has a rhinoceros. Oh, OK, yes, the famous native.

Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not sure if that like maybe I missed that class. But I too must have missed that class. Yeah, if you if you the listener can tell me what the fuck is going on with a Georgia rhinoceros being protected by the Fish and Wildlife Service, then then please do and or send me some more challenge coins. I got hopelessly addicted to these things. Here we go, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of the Inspector General.

And it's just like the EPA's got a fucking like it came of age at the same time as the DEA. So they have the kind of like 70s logo. Yes, if you look up the EPA logo, like, especially in this kind of like one color thing they have on here, it looks fully like someone's just stuck a lollipop in the ground in between two leaves. I'm back and talking about how bad the DEA logo is. In 1984, New Jersey officials had the fly ash,

which was being brought across the bridge, tested for hazardous chemicals. Right. Oh, did they find some? They did. Wow. What were the odds? Why would you go in there? Turns out all this burned up household waste had cadmium, lead, mercury and other nasties in there. So testing for hazardous chemicals and fly ash thing is very much like

this feels at least a little disingenuous. Did you ever see that that old book cover that was identifying wood? And it's a picture of a guy using like a jeweler's loop on a log of wood. And it's just like, yep, that's wood, very similar vibe. Well, so this is this is the interesting thing. They were trace amounts of all those chemicals, right? You know, they were there. They weren't there in any huge quantity.

So what's the problem? Well, because New Jersey uses an excuse to ban it from their landfills. Stupid. This time constitutionally, right? Motherfuckers. Yes. And another landfill the city was using near Baltimore also closed because they were unable to meet new EPA regulations around landfilling, right? So, you know, the city was kind of left with a predicament as to what to do with a small mountain of ash

that was accumulating next to the East Central incinerator, right? Just leave it there. Put it there in a big heap like the Great Gatsby. Well, they were running out of space for the heap. And used the ash to infill more land to put more. To get into the ocean. Ah, well, OK, we're getting there. See, this is this is during the administration of Mayor Wilson Good.

Well, but America's the first mayor. Yes, America's most domestic air warriest mayor. Yes. So, you know, Wilson Good. Fresh off the move bombing. Contracts, a company called Joseph Peolino and Sons. Defined a place to dump the stuff, right? Joseph Peola and Sons.

Yeah. So they were refused at landfills in Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. But they had as the rhinoceros. Yeah, they had a great idea. They could send the fly ash to somewhere that didn't have an EPA. They're going to dump it on the third world. Yes, yeah, it wins again. So the first idea is they're going to hire a company called Amalgamated

Shipping Company of the Bahamas to haul the waste to a manmade island in the Bahamas that the shipping company owned. And they would dump it there as landfill, right? Garbage Island. Yes. So in September, 1986, they set off in a ship called the Key and Sea from Philadelphia with 14,000 tons of fly ash from the incinerators, both the East Central and the Racksboro incinerator. Give me give me an idea of scale here.

How like how long had that been accumulating for? How much like ash was building up? Well, if they're if they're. OK, so it's like. Six to a thousand. They're they're doing six hundred tons of waste each day in one of those incinerators, probably 1200 tons. I've been sitting there for a long time.

I mean, the city had a couple of different landfills that could put it in, but two of its biggest ones closed. So I got this. This is a four hundred and sixty six foot seventeen year old at that time. Boker registered in Liberia, right? The captain was named Arturo Fuentes, right? And so this seems incredibly above board.

That's like the most importantly, the vibe that I get from every single detail of this is so fucking legitimate. If I had to put a word on this, it would be legitimate. Yes, it feels so legal and normal and totally above board. So the thing is, Greenpeace gets on the case, right? Fucking hippies. The fucking hippies are here. They're toxic trade team.

Fronts did not go too far enough. Oh, we're cancelled, boys. God. Of all the intelligence agencies that we thought Liam would get cancelled for endorsing. I did not think it would be the DGSE, but go off. That was how I cancelled for this. But there is there is some room for debate as to exactly how hazardous this fly ash is. Oh, boy.

Oh, yeah, I'm already going to get yelled at for that joke. Whatever. See you in the comments, assholes. Liam, you're being awarded the quad, the fucking quad on out the fucking of the Legion of France for this about time. Yeah. Well, France is part of the second verse saved. I'll take my citizenship, whatever you're ready. Yeah, technically, it says here, you know, Colonel in the Foreign Legion. That's me. All right.

So please mail Liam a capy. Actually, do I wear it? Oh, I heard that sigh. So Greenpeace has what's called their toxic trade team. They track international shipments of toxic waste. And they were on the case here. They informed the government of the Bahamas that this ship was inbound. They're going to dump the fly ash on their private island in the Bahamas. And then they were going to, you know, they're just going to keep doing that.

So the Bahamans block key and see from entering Bahamian Bahamian waters. Hmm. Good for them. Yes. So the captain has to search for other locations to dump the ash, right? So I guess you could say he was really hauling ash. Hulling ash. Yes. No, he was plodding around very slowly through the Caribbean with the ash. It's got 14,000 pounds, right? So not driving fast, needing ash.

Hulling, hauling 14,000 pounds of ash around is a big move. 14,000 tons. 14,000, whatever. I feel that. Yes. All right. So here we go. From late 1986 to August 1987, Key and Sea Seas sales the Caribbean searching for a place which will take the ash. Look at my pen out here.

All right. So we started in Philadelphia, sort of here. Sales down sales down to the Bahamas are up here, right? They can't get it and they can't do it in the Bahamas. They sell the Bermuda. Where's Bermuda? North Carolina, but what? It's off North Carolina. Is it off North Carolina?

Yeah, that's where Bermuda is. Is that this thing here? Yeah, but it's a little too low res for me to tell you. OK, so anyway, they sell the Bermuda. Then they go down. That's good enough. They go down to the Dominican Republic to try and dump it. They refuse their green pieces one step ahead of them each time. They go to a fucking common San Diego.

Yes. They they they sell the Honduras, which I think is somewhere here ish, right? Not by. Then they're like, well, all right. They go to Guinea Bissau. Yeah. Yeah. They go all the way across the Atlantic.

It's somewhere around here, I think. They're refused there. They go all the way back to the Dutch Antilles. I don't know where that is. Somewhere back in the Caribbean again. So and on the way, they slowly change the manifest of the ship from fly ash to topsoil fertilizer. Hmm.

Will it, in fact, fertilize your topsoil? No. Oh. January of 1988, the Key N.C. reaches the port of Gonevies, Gonevies, the Navy. It's in Haiti, right? Or Haiti, if you prefer. Haiti, right. And two of Haitians.

OK, so there's this guy, Lieutenant Colonel Jean Claude Paul. He's over. He's a Haitian. He's in the Haitian military. He's sort of your classic Caribbean corrupt drug dealing military guy. Right. Jesus Christ, Roz. No, they were all CIA agents, but like exactly. Two of his cronies sign for the topsoil fertilizer.

I'm doing air quotes there. Topsoil fertilizer. And the crew begins unloading the ash onto the beach, right. Four thousand tons of the ash are unloaded before the government gets wind of the situation and they order the crew to reload the ash. Right. No, stop it. It's your problem now. Well, yeah, because instead of reloading the ash, what they do is they just said they just steam away.

Right. Nice. I'm doing a burnout in my fucking 14,000 ton for our dreams at Nightmares by Meek Bell. Haitian Navy escort. Yeah, I tell you that much when a country's military is just kind of up for sale to the highest bidder more than in the ways we already expect with defense contractors and stuff, it may not be a good thing for your country, but it does lead to some extremely funny moments such as this or like any of the

times in the like early history of the Russian Federation after after Gorbachev were like the Soviet paratroopers were just like hiring themselves out as hitmen. So you'd have guys getting killed over like essentially the same thing over garbage disputes, but like with nerve gas or like C4 under their chairs because like the only people killing people had been like trained to do this by the Soviet government for 50 years. All right, but the thing is by this time that the captain of key and C he's sort of given up at this point.

He's not going to find a place to dump the ash returning defeated to Philadelphia. Right. With your sword with your shield or on it. Yeah. So with your 14,000 tons of fly ash or on them. Listen, in fairness, he got rid of 4,000 tons of them with your 10,000 tons of fly ash. So he goes back to Philly to dump the ash on Pier 2 owned by Joseph Peolino and sons of the waste disposal company. They arrived back in Philadelphia on February 29th, 1988, ready to repatriate the ash. Right. They anchor in the Delaware and they wait for a birth to open up.

Right. And 3 a.m. that night, Pier 2 burned down. Yo, that's crazy. Wow. What are the odds? Imagine that. Just imagine the Academy like, oh, no, I can't believe it happened the way that it happened. Listen, well, I'm going back to Haiti. Joseph fucking Ben A. Celci Chord, it must have been so fucking upset about that.

Like that was his beer. I was going to say it must be very, very mad. Absolutely. I checked. I had a hard time locating where Pier 2 is. Because Pier 2. Yeah, because no snitching. Well, as far as I can tell, Pier 2 is a skookle pier. And I believe it still is a waste transfer facility.

But yeah, so. All right. So Key and C is now anchored in the Delaware River under Coast Guard orders not to leave Port at this point. He's also it's an international sensation to this, this, this garbage barge, which, which can't unload to garbage anywhere. And they waited at anchor there for three months. And then one day they just said, well, we have to go out to sea for engine trials and left.

God damn it, Coast Guard. So he and C at this point, they weren't really, they, they, they, they, they left Philadelphia, cross the Atlantic. They went to Senegal, right? They were refused there. They went to Morocco. They were refused there. Then they disappeared.

Until a suspiciously similar looking ship turned up in Yugoslavia. They got through the Mediterranean up there, gave her a new coat of paint and a new name, Felicia, registered in Honduras, right? Cool. Now, Yugoslavia repainted and renamed the ship, but they would not take the fly ash. Listen, we're an accessory here. We're not fucking like getting your ass.

We're not going to take this. Yeah, fuck off. So they, um, so they're like, all right, all right, one last try. They leave Yugoslavia, they go through the Suez Canal, all the way out to what's the last third world country we can think of? Ash Sri Lanka. Let's go there, right? Oh, come on.

And Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka said, no, we're not taking this shit. The ship left again. It was not seen until a few months later when it was spotted in Singapore in November, 1988, once again renamed now the Pellecano, but without the ash. Huh. So what happened? Well, I got detained then early the next year by the feds. They renamed the boat again.

Now the San Antonio. Again, the vibe is so legitimate. The crew and the captain were brought in for questioning. And the captain eventually admitted that, yeah, we dumped the ash overboard in the Indian Ocean with a front end loader. I mean, okay. Yeah. Didn't didn't really take Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out.

But yeah, well, he stayed quiet for a while until one of the crew members showed investigators some pictures and he was like, all right, yeah, I'll talk now, whatever. Betrayed once again by the gram. No, I like I'm genuinely surprised they didn't do this sooner. Like, I guess that guy did not feel that his time was particularly valuable because he was like willing to try and offload this on like a good thousand countries.

They spent 27 months at sea with this cargo. Jesus Christ. I guess the captain's being paid hour hourly. I don't think he has to care that much. I guess so, yeah. So, you know, the thing is, after this, after this incident, no one was convicted or punished for the illegal dumping. International waters.

We love to see it. I know, right? But the two officials for the shipping company were convicted of perjury and briefly jailed. So there is that. All right. United Nations convened the Basil Convention banning shipments of toxic waste from developed countries to developing countries.

And 187 countries ratify this convention. But among those not ratifying were, of course, the United States and a few developing countries that we export toxic waste to. Yeah. Yeah. And in the meantime, the fly ash was still sitting on the beach in Haiti. That looks great. I know, right?

So Greenpeace started something called Operation Return to Sender with the idea that this waste would be repatriated to the city of Philadelphia some way or another, right? Um, so they start a bunch of big public campaigns. I know in 1990, several groups in Haiti affiliated with Greenpeace started mailing envelopes full of fly ash to Wilson Good's office. That's cool. That's I think that's funny, but it is funny.

Yeah. Wilson Good didn't care. Um, look, you think the guy who like bombs his own citizens with a helicopter is going to be first of all, you think he opens his own mail and second of all, you think he casts? I was about to say, no real action was taken until 1996 when the New York City Trade Waste Commission finds out a company that they were licensing to haul commercial garbage was operated by one Louis Peolino, right?

Who was a play of the month. Yeah. It was a principle of Joseph Peolino and sons. Of course, instigated all this. Interesting how that works. Interesting how the guy with the last name of the other guy is actually, I mean, I imagine he was one of the sons. So he was a friend of ours.

Yeah. So he was trying to haul commercial waste in New York City and they decided, you know, we'll let you haul commercial waste on one condition. You got to, you got to clean up the waste in Haiti, right? So you got to, you got to think I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to commission a or license a garbage company that doesn't pick up after itself. That is true. I appreciate the idea of like international sanitation commission guy.

I was about to say, yeah, he's a, you know, principle internationalist. Yes. You know, despite this, the company, the company owns didn't didn't do shit about it for a while until they were taken over by waste management incorporated. And I have my own beef with waste management. They know what they did. Oh God. What did waste management do to you, Liam?

I know it. We'll see that for another episode. OK, OK. So and into the year 2000, waste management incorporated finally sent down a barge to pick up 2,500 tons of fly ash. So that you're going to each what? So that you're again 2000. Nice.

So it's been sitting there for how long? It's been sitting there for 12 years. Cool. And they pick up 2,500 tons of fly ash, which is down from 4,000 tons on account of erosion, right? On the basis that like, well, it's all still there, but you can't ask us to go and fish it out of the water. So yeah, or the wind picked it up and, you know, Haitians breathed it in.

Yeah, that problem. Yeah. So they shipped it to Florida en route to a landfill in Louisiana. And when Louisiana heard about it, lawmakers there banned the ash from Louisiana. Time is a flat circle. And this is barge stated dock for two years until finally a landfill in Franklin County, Pennsylvania agreed to take the fly ash. That's two counties over from York case anyone's curious.

They shipped it up there on a train and the fly ash is there to this day. Right. So yeah, they tore down the East Central Incinerator. They built Festival Pier there. Incineration and landfilling in Philadelphia today is kept within the four county area because that seems to be involved fewer international incidents. However, Philadelphia never paid for the ash to be removed. Since the contract stipulated, the ash had to be disposed of legally.

So this all incident saved Philadelphia taxpayers six hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Yeah, which brought the savings into podcasting. Yeah. Hell, yeah. I love how this is not even the first sort of U.S. municipal governance issue that causes an international incident because we've done the Vulcan Bridge and that also did. Yeah.

This is just you would think it'd be easier to get rid of fourteen thousand tons of fly ash, but what do you want to take it? No, I don't have enough space for anyone who wants to take it. I'm going to be honest, like people try to really play up how toxic the stuff was. I don't think it was that toxic. I think it's just people didn't want to like have to deal with that much. There's less than like lead and cadmium stuff and more than like fourteen thousand tons aspect. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, they pay you to take it, obviously. But, you know, maybe you don't maybe you don't want to deal with that. Yeah. Yeah. So. What's the moral of the story? Don't put further into New Jersey. Yes. Find different ways of disposing of trash

that other than like the big three of it being someone else's problem of ship it to New Jersey, burn it or dump it and see by a bucket. I don't know. Use your imagination, send us a space. Just fire it into the sun. That's probably good, I think. I believe now we land fill it up near Telly Town or we incinerate it in Chester. So now I like the space thing.

You should do the space thing. It's now waste to energy incineration. So, you know, that makes it clean, right? Other than the fact that it's exactly the same and you just add a turbine to it. So, yeah, garbage. Garbage, we produce a lot of it. And the thing is, right, we we can't ever produce less of it. Impossible, can't be done.

Cannot do it. Cannot do it. Got to have individually wrapped everything. Yeah, you got it requires a lot of personal responsibility, you know, you'd be one of those crazy people who like has leads a zero waste lifestyle. Yeah, impossible. Yeah, my God. I don't know. I mean, if stuff was like made out of things which.

You know, decomposed easily. You might not have to burn it at all. Maybe also that we could burn some kind of like so called. There's got to be a name for this sort of cycling stuff again. Oh, hmm. Oh, it was a beautiful. It was a beautiful dream. But like until then, we just have to burn it.

We'll talk about Philadelphia's single stream recycling system another day. Yeah, cycling is great. Just if only for the fact that like everything that you throw away that has a battery in it could just kill a guy. It's fun. Yes. Well, we were a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. They were going to we're going to talk about boilers. Oh, no, no.

Fuck, fuck. OK, so if you're not familiar that. The boiler in my apartment, the hot water heater is now so old that every time it breaks, which it does constantly and I text my landlord and he's like, yeah, I'll send my cousin over to fix it. And the cousin gets over here and he's like, wow, they still make these. No, no, it's just it's that old. It's got fucking like steampunk cogs and shit on it.

And like it's a it's a potten puma. If you want to like look up when that was a success. It sounds like a sex ass. It runs about as well as if you had just decided to use a sex ass to heat hot water. And yeah, no, about once every couple of months or so, it just fucking dies for whatever reason, because it's old and I don't have hot water for however long at a time. It rules big fan of boilers.

Well. Our our incident involves a indirect heater and boiler system. Now, before I begin, I want to I want to mention this about Safety Third. A lot of people have been sending me very long and well written Safety Thirds. And I like the well written part. But could you please keep them keep them to about a page? No, not going to happen. That's my only request.

I would like about a page worth on a Safety Third, no more or no less. All right. OK, anyway. So now we start Safety Third. So my day jobs sees me helping oversee operations of a local heating company here in the Worcester, Mass area, Worcester, Mass. Now, in my line of work, it's not normally the customer and their actions that ends up mentally traumatizing the service technicians. In fact, mental trauma is not a normal thing.

But in this in this industry, right, I think I might be a close second by having a water heater that was full of water fall on me as we tried taking out of a basement, but that's a different story. But unfortunately, in this case, that's exactly what happened. A few months back, one of the techs was out to do a cleaning with a customer, right, and noted two problems. One, the relief relief valve on the forced hot water boiler is seized shut and nonoperational.

To the coil in the indirect water heater has a pinhole in it. And so street pressure is bleeding over into the boiler. Now, so the way the way this works is right, we have a indirect heater and boiler, right? Where's my there we go. So you have you have a boiler. This is where the heat's coming from, right? And that's heating like a very hot water thing, which goes to like a radiator or something, maybe a heat exchanger with a forced air system, right?

And then that comes back cycles around. But in addition, that boiler also runs through a heat exchanger through the actual hot water heater. That's this guy here, right? And that, you know, the very hot water running through that coil heats the actual water that you use for your taps and your shower and stuff like that, right? It's the same principle of operation as the nuclear reactor, right? You don't want to get your your spicy, your spicy water mixed up with the hot water.

Yes, but in this case, instead of, you know, there be a spicy water, it's just regular, regular water from the oil burner. Yeah. So in this case, the heat exchanger, one of the valves had a small hole in it so that the high pressure water in the water heater was leaking into the coil system, right? Um, so anyway, the tech ins isolates the water heater by shutting off the ball valves on the two pipes that connected the boiler. Press easy five button. Yeah, he then draws off the pressure on the boiler by opening a purge valve, which is what you would open if you needed to purge a large large amount of air out of the system to bring the pressure back down to a safe level, right?

In this cast iron, fired, forced cast iron oil, fired, forced hot water system. The maximum is 30 psi at which point the relief valve should open. But again, the relief valve is broken. That's the hot water circuit here, which is 30 psi, right? And that's the maximum that can be operated safely. And then your your water heater itself is at a higher pressure because it's getting water directly from the mains, right? Which is, I think he said 90 psi later, right?

Yeah, 70 to 90, 70 to 90. So the tech tells the husband that he has two problems and at bare minimum, he needs to replace the relief valve on the boiler so the system is safe and won't risk blowing the boiler out. And the husband says, no, don't bother. Oh, boy. Yeah. So the tech calls me and explains the situation. With that valve stuck closed, you've got 70 to 90 psi of street pressure

hitting the boiler, basically creating a ticking time bomb if that water heater is opened back up and the system reactivated. I told them to leave the boiler off, keep the water heater isolated. And then if the customer insists on running it, we note it on the paperwork that it's run at your own risk and then make him sign the paperwork. And he does all this and he gets the customer to sign, so on and so forth. Well, lo and behold, right as the technician is cleaning up,

the husband turns the entire system back on. Gotta have hot showers, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, it's probably fine to run a heating system at three times the pressure is designed for. When a guy tells me, hey, what you've created here is a bomb. And if you switch it on, you you're going to start the countdown on that bomb. Obviously, what I do is I go, yeah, but I do want a hot shower, though. Yes.

Well, lo and behold. Oh, excuse me, I already read that part. As it turns out, the water heater one page of the future, folks, we're begging you. Yes. As it turns out, the water heater would be under the manufacturer's warranty. So I tell the husband that and he just kind of fluffed it off and said he'd think about it, right? He joked it off. Yeah.

He just, yeah, he jerked it off, yeah, he jerked it off, Alice. At this point, I noted the account and figured that there's nothing else I can do here. Fair enough. You're a boiler technician, not a cop. You can't tackle the guy. You can't tackle a guy. You should. What? Stop. Work into his mouth.

Yeah. I feel like he should have the authority to, like, you know, take a valve off the system and just say, no, you can't you can't use this. You can't use this until it's fixed. It's free country. If you're going to blow yourself up, it's your house. People love, like, just not having safe or reliable, high-pressure hot water systems, you know? Yeah.

Like, what's the only thing in your house that's likely to blow up in a failure mode? The hot water heater. What am I not going to do any maintenance on the hot water heater? So a month passes and I walk into work to find a foreman and the service manager panicking because we blew up a boiler. I asked one of the other office staff what happened. She tells me that the customer called wanting to swap the water heater. And when it was a light day,

the service manager sends an installer over to swap the defective water heater that morning. The installer got to the house about half an hour before I showed up to work. He had to go pick the water heater up from the supply house. He walked in knowing someone was on their way to get help. Knowing someone was on their way to help get the new water heater into the basement in the old one out, right? Now, bear in mind, this is a 45 gallon indirect water heater. It's only about 60 pounds at most and one person can move it on their own, but it's a bitch to bring it down the basement stairs solo.

So the installer figures will go and at least get it started. Now, the wife mentioned to the technician that pipes have been banging since we had them had been at the property a month prior. Right. When you told them that if they reactivate the thing, it will explode. Yes. OK. Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, if you're hearing water hammer frequently, that's a bad sign. So the installer takes one look at the temperature and pressure gauge on the boiler and saw that the pressure was holding at 80 PSI at the time.

Oh, I've seen I've walked into a scene from the Hertz locker. Just start giving boiler technicians the EOD suit. Oh, my God. He didn't he didn't get to take another step before shit went south. Yeah. As he was standing in front of the boiler, it blew out from the pressure. Now, thank God it didn't go on an all directions trip into the realm of the honorable ancestor, because then we'd be dealing with a far worse situation. But a chunk measuring six inches long and two inches wide,

rocketed out of the back of the rear section, threw the boiler's jacket into the foundation behind the boiler. Yeah. Water and steam were going everywhere. The boiler going off shook the house and significant emotional events were had by all present in the house. Yeah. Now, I want to know how quickly that technician moved out of the basement. Well, I would assume very.

So I was told all this. He was all a gash. Yeah, I was told all this and already remembered the house. I looked at the service manager and asked him what we were doing. Service manager says we're doing the block at cost because we fucked this up. And the first words out of my mouth were, did you bother reading the slip from the last guy or looked at my notes? And he got a dumb look from him and the foreman.

So I pull up the account, point out the notes, then pull the service history on the account and the same thing is noted there. I pulled the slip and gave it to both of them. Not only the tech note what he said, but he put a note on the slip after he got it in the van that the customer had brought the system back online as he had watched them shut it down. So the foreman goes to help swap the block out and I managed to probably save that last technician's job from a heated moment pink slip.

End of the day, the wife calls me and asks what would have happened if the husband had listened to the last tech. I told her point blank that they wouldn't have had to pay to swap the boiler block for one, but he's also lucky that he's not looking at a police investigation. She asked me why and I told her the fact that the boiler didn't take everyone out in the basement was a miracle. I've seen what exploiting boilers do to basements and by my own estimation, they turn any living thing to paste on their way through the basement.

So while I'm sure that the installer is likely not going to want to go back to the house after that day, they should count their blessings that this just cost them money and only took out a chunk of their basement wall. And of course, the wife's response was that the husband, you know, he slept through the whole thing. OK, cool. Yeah, two months after his stupidity paid itself off. So, I mean, that's damn lucky.

So just have to eat. Yeah, but what did you do at work today? Yeah, I dodged a bomb going on. I dodged a high pressure steam bomb. And I dodged an IED that a guy set up for me in his basement. I did not get Boston Marathoned. Yeah. Incredible.

When the Boston Marathon also. Yeah, you're fucking as a pressure cooker bomb. Yeah, get your fucking boiler inspected regularly. And then don't turn it back on. And someone turns it back on when the guy tells you the guy tells you not to turn it back on, you should not turn it back on. Yeah. Also, if your pipes, if you're hearing like

in all of your pipes, that's not a records record regularly. Yeah. My next neighbor is back when I lived in Virginia. We lived in like a townhouse. It was like a 70s townhouse, though. So, you know, I had, you know, paper thin walls. They did some stuff to the plumbing in their in their house at some point.

And then we just constantly heard water hammer in the in the living room of our house. You know, I was like, yeah, just forever. I was like, well, this is I didn't know shit about water hammer back then. But now I'm like, that's probably pretty bad. The fact that that house didn't, you know, at some point just, you know, go and get yourself water is is bizarre. Hmm.

But, uh, yeah, that was Safety Third. So they really did in this case, like the drop is merited for previous Safety Thirds have not had this. Like getting getting your ship bombed by the French Air Force. You didn't really shake hands with danger. Danger just decided to give you the reach around. But like in this case, this is fully a guy. Knowingly, just, yeah, shaking hands of danger.

Yeah, but the other technician who went down and looked at the 80 PSI pressure gauge. He was probably not prepared for that. No, no. They should give him like the fucking like explosives ordnance disposal pin metal say, give him a give him employee the month at least. Give him a raise, give him something. You know, the customer is not always right. No, the customer is a goddamn moron.

The customer is a goddamn moron. Yes. All right. Our next episode is going to be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Yeah, another great example of what happens when you maintain your boilers. Does anyone have any commercials? Listen to my other podcasts, Trash Future and Kill James Bond. It's very good. They're both very good.

We have payatrons. You can give me money. I like money. I need it for things. Yes. Money. Also continue to like mail the P.O. Box stuff. Just weird shit. I appreciate that a lot. Yeah, sure you do. Let me let me get some some fucking weird vintage

military in the P.O. Box for for shipping for that. Yeah, if you're going to mail us like huge amounts of food in bulk, could could you give us like stuff that, you know, we we we can like it's cold. Are actually going. Yeah, I don't I don't know if I can do that many peas or that many chickpeas. Ross, do you want some jelly beans? Just send send them a baker bucket.

I would I would I would take some black beans or maybe some pinto beans. I think you want chickpeas or do you not want the chickpeas? I don't know if I can make that much chickpeas. Yeah, I was about to say, I don't know if I can make that much for lawful. Fourteen thousand tons of homers slapping around the Caribbean. No, yeah. The Israeli strike again.

Yeah, you thought BDS, you thought. The Israelis sending us chickpeas, so we will. Yeah, we were just remote cancellation. We get canceled for getting a giant shipment of Sabra. Yeah, we we're going to get a 40 foot shipping container full of Sabra Hamas. And on the side, it's going to be painted. Actually, those settlements are not a clear violation of international law. Hey, check it out, guys.

We all got soda streams and a desert eagle. Yeah, we'll take a eagle. If you could mail that. Do not attempt to do this. I cannot stress enough. Do not attempt to do that. I'm not sure what kind of paperwork you would have to do to make the P.O. Box of registered firearms dealer.

I like the concept of reverse BDS, where the Israeli government just starts shipping random crap. All right, we did a podcast. We did a podcast and now we're in 33 minutes. All right, bye, everybody. Yeah, I was about to say. Off you go.