SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Okay, Kara. I've got a question for you.

SPEAKER_03: 0:02

What's up?

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

Have you ever changed the oil in your car?

SPEAKER_03: 0:06

I've helped my husband change the oil in my car.

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Okay. All right. I play nurse. Okay, so you you like you hand him the 17 millimeter wrench.

SPEAKER_03: 0:15

Yep, I hand him the phone.

SPEAKER_01: 0:16

Hand him the paper towels.

SPEAKER_03: 0:17

Yep, the oil pan, all the things.

SPEAKER_01: 0:20

Make sure you hand him the oil pan upside down so that on his head while he's under the car. Right.

unknown: 0:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 0:26

So just recently I changed the oil in in my car. Okay. And one of the problems that you have when you do your own oil change, as opposed to say, like a jiffy lube or a dealership, whatever, is they have what's known as a pit. Like they can just drain all that oil into a pit, and then a big giant truck comes by, sucks it all out, and then you know, Bob's your uncle. You're good to go.

SPEAKER_03: 0:51

Yeah, you don't have to worry about it anymore.

SPEAKER_01: 0:53

But when you do it yourself, you've got to find a place to put it. So my wife, who works for the Department of Environmental Quality, I always like to mess with her. Like, because she does the same thing whenever I do an old chain, she plays nurse, but she often hands me the wrong wrench, or she'll hand me the wrong socket, or she'll hand me like the old filter instead of the new filter that I put in.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17

Okay. I will not argue.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19

Yeah, she's she's she's she's a government worker. Um, so one of the things I always like to do is like, well, I'll collect the old oil, and I love messing with her. I'm like, hey honey, so uh can I just dump this in the canal? And of course, my wife who like is watching like water quality levels in the state, solid waste levels in the state, ground pollution, all that stuff. So I just love messing with her and like, hey, can I I'm just gonna go dump this in the canal? And she's like, no, no, you're not dumping this in the canal. That's what they did in the 60s. That's what canals are for.

SPEAKER_03: 2:01

No. I'm I'm taking her side on this one.

SPEAKER_01: 2:06

Right. So then I'll I'll mess with her further because in the 60s and 70s it was a common tactic in in this lovely state where you would just dig a hole in your backyard and then dump the oil in that hole and then just bury it, like you just pooed in the woods. Sick. Because the the reasoning was that, well, if it if it came from the ground, you're just putting it back in the ground. Not fully realizing that that oil has to pass through the state's water supply and the aquifers before it before it's settled.

SPEAKER_03: 2:39

Yeah, there's some things that it goes through.

SPEAKER_01: 2:42

Yeah, you know, the 1960s of it all.

SPEAKER_03: 2:45

Gotta love it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:46

So she's like, no, you're not dumping it in the backyard. Okay. Okay. Let's make a concession because we don't actually have anything to do with the ocean in this state here. Let's just bottle it all up and dump it in the ocean.

SPEAKER_03: 3:04

How are you gonna do that in a landlocked state?

SPEAKER_01: 3:07

Um, I know a guy with a car.

SPEAKER_03: 3:10

Fair.

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

So, like, why not? Like, it worked for Exxon Valdez. It worked for the uh it worked for the Tory Canyon outside Britain. Did it? Well, I mean, it eventually worked.

SPEAKER_03: 3:28

After you exploded it.

SPEAKER_01: 3:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did use napalm and they did use high X and they did use some solvents that cause cancer and other terrible diseases. But that's an ocean problem, not a landlocked state problem.

SPEAKER_03: 3:47

I don't like it.

SPEAKER_01: 3:48

I don't know. It I I I feel like it's a valid solution because that's that's how it worked for the uh uh deep water horizon.

SPEAKER_03: 3:57

And the outcome of that was awful. Awful.

SPEAKER_01: 4:02

Yes, it was the worst oil spill in US history. And when that thing, when that thing went off, oh goodness gracious, 210,000 gallons of crude oil a day dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

SPEAKER_03: 4:17

That's ridiculous. I can't.

SPEAKER_01: 4:19

But hey, it doesn't affect our state.

SPEAKER_03: 4:22

I don't like it.

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

And with that, welcome to the Days Dempster Fire. We don't celebrate humanity's successes, but its most fantastic failures. This is a simple little podcast where we look at all the times in human history where people have tried to map out, plan out, and try to just work out every single extraneous variable to make sure that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. And then five minutes later, it literally blows up in their faces. And thankfully, those people get to deal with the screw-ups of their own mishaps so that we don't have to do it ourselves. And joining us always is Kara, who is fresh off of the Prohibition marathon.

SPEAKER_03: 5:28

Hello. I've had a drink since then.

SPEAKER_01: 5:33

And you're like, and I even voted.

SPEAKER_03: 5:35

And I voted. I did, I voted this this past couple weeks, actually.

SPEAKER_01: 5:41

Yeah, so I brought it up.

SPEAKER_03: 5:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 5:44

So yeah, women's rights rides in and women's suffrage and alcohol.

SPEAKER_00: 5:50

Yep. Yep. And mobsters.

SPEAKER_03: 5:52

And mobsters.

SPEAKER_01: 5:53

Yeah. All the things. No, that was. I actually have um I have some of my uh drivers that are listening to that now. Like I've got we we've got super fans in the trucking industry.

SPEAKER_03: 6:05

All right.

SPEAKER_01: 6:06

Yeah. And at the at the place that I work, because there's like 300 forklifts running, uh, like we've got people listening to our show while they're operating forklifts.

SPEAKER_02: 6:17

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01: 6:17

That's what's I don't know how comfortable I feel because these guys are just moving back and forth, back and forth. They don't stop. In fact, at where I work, if you get run over by a forklift, that's your fault.

SPEAKER_03: 6:29

It's like traffic, I guess. Don't jay well.

SPEAKER_01: 6:34

It's yeah, it's it's not crossy road, it's crossy DC. Amazing. Yeah. And so, like, we've got we've got people that are like super fans of the show listening to how humanity has screwed things up beyond all recognition while they are operating 8,000 pound forklifts.

SPEAKER_03: 6:55

That's how we do it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:56

Yeah, we um yeah, that we may be on the news for all the wrong reasons. So, so yeah, today's episode is gonna be about the deep water horizon. This is gonna be a two-parter, uh, just because it's really hard to pinpoint. Well, it's easy to pinpoint exactly when the dumpster fire begins, but it's really hard to pinpoint when it ends.

SPEAKER_03: 7:20

That's fair. You're also talking to somebody who starts their episodes like a hundred years before the dumpster fire, so I understand.

SPEAKER_01: 7:27

Well, I'm kind of doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_03: 7:30

That's how we gotta do it, man. Historical.

SPEAKER_01: 7:32

Yeah, we got okay. So it started shortly after the Big Bang.

SPEAKER_03: 7:37

Perfect. Actually, you're pretty close. Let's hear it.

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

So, yeah, basically, uh part one here like oil and how we get the stuff. So a lot of people and and oil does get a bad rap for a lot of reasons. It's that black stuff that we see spewing out from the ground. Uh, we've all seen the opening to the uh Beverly Hillbillies, right? Where dude shoots the ground, oil comes bubbling up, and now they're super wealthy.

SPEAKER_03: 8:09

I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 8:09

I think of There Will Be Blood, that's a very different Oh oh that's that's a good movie.

SPEAKER_03: 8:14

It's a great movie, but that's what I think of.

SPEAKER_01: 8:17

Because that really gives you a good insight into like yeah, oil is a is a nasty business.

SPEAKER_03: 8:24

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:26

Um, and and so many people like to think that it's from dead dinosaurs. That is actually a myth. Uh dead dinosaurs played a part, but most of the oil that we see is organic compounds, such as like plankton, plants, bacteria, smattering of dead dinosaurs, uh, regardless of what planet they come from. Um, if you're into that sort of thing. Sorry, Karen and I were talking before, just like, yeah, we know some people who think that dinosaurs never existed on Earth, that that dinosaurs came from other planets pieces that formed Earth.

SPEAKER_03: 9:07

And I really want to hear the explanation, but we're not gonna we're not gonna uh go off the rails.

SPEAKER_01: 9:13

I I I do want to hear the thought process behind that, so then I can just move on with my life. Um but yeah, it really all oil is is just organic compounds that got buried underground under tons and tons of pressure and heat, and that basically those organic compounds broke down into carbons and hydrocarbons, and that's where we get oil today. Yeah, it's believe it or not, it is a really, really abundant source, especially when we look at the fact that as it stands, the world is projected to use 105 million barrels of crude oil per day.

SPEAKER_03: 9:54

Good goodness, that's a lot of oil.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

Yes, and America is the top producer. I thought it came from the Middle East. No, America is actually the top producer of oil in the world at 20 million barrels per day. Dang. And it's interesting is that America can't use its own oil.

SPEAKER_03: 10:13

Yeah, I've heard that before.

SPEAKER_01: 10:14

Yeah, the rif our refineries are not designed to handle American oil, which is actually a superior grade of oil, but our refineries aren't designed for it. And I guess it would I was talking to my wife about it, it would take like decades and billions and billions of dollars to change it over. So in the meantime, it's just not worth it. But if you think about it, like each barrel that you see is 55 gallons. So, like when you think about that, 105 million barrels of crude oil per day times that by 55, that's like a lot of oil.

SPEAKER_03: 10:49

That's a lot of oil. I don't feel like mathing right now. So it's too late in the day for that crap. Yeah, no, it's it's almost yeah, no.

SPEAKER_01: 10:56

But yeah, that that and that's just per day. So normally we associate oil with gasoline, um, which you get gasoline out of crude oil by distilling it, right? You take a huge vat of crude oil and you heat it up. The gasoline vapors will rise up, cool down, and then they collect it kind of like how you collect alcohol in a still.

SPEAKER_03: 11:20

I was just gonna say, so gasoline is the moonshine of the oil world.

SPEAKER_01: 11:24

Yes, perfect.

SPEAKER_03: 11:26

Yes, look at us go connecting prohibition to oil, right?

SPEAKER_01: 11:30

And and and the diesel is like the leftover stuff. Diesel's like the corn mash.

SPEAKER_03: 11:35

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01: 11:37

Where so, like, yeah, diesel is like literally the last thing, but when you distill oil, like you can pull out all sorts of stuff from it. And gasoline is just kind of like a small part of it. We always just so associate gasoline and oil, like that's everything. No, like some of the stuff that you can get out of crude oil is like refinery gases such as methane, ethane, propane, and butane. We use a lot of that stuff, especially if you ever go camping. Yep, right. You've got gasoline, or if you're in Europe, petrol. And I like the list here. It's like for cars and other internal combustion engines. Cool. Nice. Uh, you can get nap napha, nap naphtha, nap napha. Yes. So that's a petrochemical feedstock for making plastic solvents and other chemicals, a source for high octane gasoline components. So basically, that fancy new computer that you just bought. Yeah. Yeah, you need oil for that. Not surprised. Kerosene. Cool. So kerosene is used in jet fuel heating oil. Uh paraffin. I didn't know that. I thought paraffin was like a like a traditional wax, but no, it's a kerosene-based type of wax. Um, obviously, diesel. Like if you want to buy anything from a grocery store, you need trucks running off a diesel to deliver it. Uh, my personal favorite, lube. Deja's have too much lube.

SPEAKER_03: 13:13

Deja's cringing somewhere.

SPEAKER_01: 13:15

Oh, yeah. Oh that and crabs.

SPEAKER_03: 13:18

Yeah, she's cringing somewhere. We love you, Deja.

SPEAKER_01: 13:21

She's like pounding her stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 13:24

Stop it!

SPEAKER_01: 13:26

So yeah, you you need uh yeah, you need oil for like mortar oils, greases, waxes, and polishes to reduce friction in machinery. That's a big one. Being able to have a metal on metal surface.

SPEAKER_03: 13:38

So we need oil lubrication.

SPEAKER_01: 13:42

Yeah. Everything otherwise everything would seize up. Yep. Like my um my best friend growing up, I think he had an aunt that she got an oil change on her car, but they didn't put any oil in. And she was just driving it, and she's like, Man, why does my car sound weird?

SPEAKER_03: 14:01

That's awful. Did it just seize up and then?

SPEAKER_01: 14:03

It started knocking and then screeching, and then it started overheating, and then within like five miles, the whole car just seized up and melted together.

SPEAKER_03: 14:16

Um, that's terrible. For my friends who do anything, construction, home projects, you're drilling into metal for some reason. Um, and you're wondering why your drill bits keep breaking, it's because you're not using oil.

SPEAKER_01: 14:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_03: 14:30

Blue bit up.

SPEAKER_01: 14:31

Yep, because oil sheds heat.

SPEAKER_03: 14:33

Yep, that's the worst thing you can get when you're doing anything, metal metal. Heat.

SPEAKER_01: 14:38

Yeah, yep. Uh, we also get asphalt and bitumen. I don't know what bitumen is, but I know asphalt.

SPEAKER_03: 14:46

Paving roads, roofing, and waterproofing.

SPEAKER_01: 14:49

Yes. Cool. And then my personal favorite, petroleum coke.

SPEAKER_03: 14:54

Sick. What is that?

SPEAKER_01: 14:56

I guess it's used for electrodes and solid fuel. Huh. So I I have no idea what petroleum coke is. I'm a huge Coke fan.

SPEAKER_03: 15:06

I'm afraid to Google it.

SPEAKER_01: 15:08

I feel like you can make a like a killer energy drink out of that. Just call it petroleum coke.

SPEAKER_03: 15:13

Actually, that's good branding. You're not wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 15:15

Yeah, like liquid death and and all that. Like, yeah, petroleum coke.

SPEAKER_03: 15:21

That'll get the millennials on it.

SPEAKER_01: 15:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 15:24

We love that stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 15:25

And the caption you put on the bottom of it, it's like it hits you quicker if you snort it.

SPEAKER_03: 15:29

Perfect. We got something going here. Somebody do that.

SPEAKER_01: 15:34

Yeah, somebody, yeah. Check out our merch store for some petroleum coke. So, yeah, it's safe to say that oil is useful beyond than just what we associate with gasoline. So we often think about like when we go to the gas station and we see like, oh, the price per barrel is like, you know,$70 per barrel. And then when we see like$4 a gallon, we're like, oh, well, it's$4 a gallon because it's this much money per barrel of oil. When in reality, uh the gasoline prices is a very small part of the oil industry. So the first American oil well was drilled in Titusville, PA, which I thought was interesting because I used to have a customer up in that area in 1859. And this was at an astonishing depth of 69.5 feet. That that was considered insane.

SPEAKER_03: 16:32

I mean, for the time, I can see, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:35

Yeah. Yeah. And when I when I kind of get into like some of the science behind drilling, like you'll see that okay, yeah, we just didn't have the technology to really go beyond that. But 69.5 feet was considered pretty impressive. So today there are nearly 5 million oil wells across the world, and they are drilled down to thousands and thousands of feet. We're talking like 10, 15, 20,000 feet. And in the case of like the deep water horizon, um, which was an offshore uh drill rig, that thing held the record at like 34,500 feet.

SPEAKER_04: 17:16

Woo!

SPEAKER_01: 17:18

Yeah, that's like what six and a half, almost seven miles.

SPEAKER_03: 17:23

That sounds right. That's a lot of that's some math and yeah, that is that that's that that that's a deep hole.

SPEAKER_01: 17:31

And I think uh the the Soviet Union holds the record because they tried drilling uh like as far as like they wanted to hold a world record, and they drilled down so far that the heat of the Earth's crust was actually starting to melt drill bits and they couldn't go any further. But I think that was like uh hundred some odd thousand feet.

SPEAKER_03: 17:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 17:52

Because the the Soviet Union of it all.

SPEAKER_03: 17:55

That's also just what dudes do. Oh, you went down that far? I can go further.

unknown: 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:04

Oh, you landed on the moon? We dug a deep hole.

SPEAKER_03: 18:09

Yeah, we went the opposite direction.

SPEAKER_01: 18:14

Take that, you you freaking imperial pigs. So there's a catch though. There's only so much land on Earth that can be drilled. So, like, yeah, sure, America has a ton of land, has a ton of oil, but when you factor in that Earth is 70% water and only 30% land, yeah, you're eventually gonna run out of land.

SPEAKER_05: 18:39

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 18:40

And and there was a time in American history, especially like in Texas and whatnot, where there was just like a forest of oil rigs as far as the eye could see.

SPEAKER_03: 18:52

There are pictures, you can find them.

SPEAKER_01: 18:54

Yeah. And for me, what blows my mind is the coast of California.

SPEAKER_03: 18:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:58

So like when you go to like Long Beach or Venice or any of the other 500 beaches that are in like the LA, I don't know, is it valley basin?

SPEAKER_03: 19:09

I don't know what it would be the um, I would just say the LA area.

SPEAKER_01: 19:14

Okay. So all that coastline in like the early 19th century, um, I'm sorry, late 19th century going into like the early 1940s, all that coastline was nothing but oil rigs.

SPEAKER_05: 19:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:28

So like when you see videos or like film reels of California, like there's not a lot of stuff out there involving the beaches.

SPEAKER_03: 19:38

Not until you get to the 50s, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 19:41

Yeah. Because it was shortly after World War II that things started to change.

SPEAKER_03: 19:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:46

And uh they started taking down these these oil rigs. But yeah, you can you can look it up of like early 1900s, LA coastline, and we've got pictures that we'll we'll post up on our website. Days stemstofire.com. Um, but yeah, just from north to south, it was just nothing but oil rigs all across the beaches. And then when they were like, hmm, we can build piers, and those piers can go out into the ocean, and we can build more oil rigs. And it was really interesting is that there's still houses in California where they have like little mini oil rigs in their backyard, just pumping away, doing their thing. Like, I don't know, to me, that's just crazy. So thousands of spiring oil towers line the coastlines of California and piers jetted out in the ocean as far as possible, trying to suck up as much of the crude oil as possible. So there was this idea that like you could put an oil rig in the ground, and then you can then send pipes out horizontally to just try to absorb more of the surrounding oil. Um like roots. What's that?

SPEAKER_03: 21:01

Like roots, like a root system for a plant. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 21:04

Yeah. Well, it was mentioned in There Will Be Blood.

SPEAKER_03: 21:07

Yeah, that's I think that's why I was like, wait.

SPEAKER_01: 21:10

Yeah. He's like, yeah, that the the antagonist is like, Well, you don't have mineral rights to my land. And then I guess he's the protagonist. He's like, I don't need it.

SPEAKER_03: 21:22

I remember that. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:23

He's like, I just went underground and then I just went horizontally into your land and I just pulled everything out. So sounds like a personal problem.

SPEAKER_03: 21:34

Yeah, whoever has not seen There Will Be Blood, please go watch it. And if you come across an opportunity to watch it in the theater, do it.

SPEAKER_01: 21:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 21:42

That's all I'll say.

SPEAKER_01: 21:43

Yeah, that had uh what, Daniel Day Lewis in it?

SPEAKER_03: 21:45

Yep. It's one of his last movies, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 21:47

Yeah, one of his last ones, yeah. He's back now. I guess he's coming out of retirement.

SPEAKER_03: 21:51

Oh, he's a great actor. I wonder what he'll do next.

SPEAKER_01: 21:55

Yeah, yeah, he he does really good with historical pieces. He does. But anyways, anyway, uh in 1911, the Gulf Refining Company in Louisiana had a different strategy. Let's take an oil wheel, strap a bunch of floaty things on it, use a tugboat, and push it out a few miles off the coast of uh out into the the Gulf of Mexico.

SPEAKER_03: 22:18

See, on paper, that sounds really sketchy.

SPEAKER_01: 22:22

Uh yeah. Because like I feel like when you're drilling hundreds of feet into the water, like how do you stabilize that thing?

SPEAKER_03: 22:31

Yeah. How does it not tip over?

SPEAKER_01: 22:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 22:34

If it's on a floaty thing. That's what I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_01: 22:37

With the clever use of floaty things.

SPEAKER_03: 22:40

Yeah. I mean, I appreciate the engineering, but it sounds really sketchy.

SPEAKER_01: 22:45

Well, I think what they did is they pushed it out there, and then they built like a structure that would anchor to the ground, like to the ocean floor. It's it wasn't until much later that we got to the like the deep water horizon where it was like an independent free-floating drill rig, and it used GPS and propellers to kind of like anchor itself in place.

SPEAKER_03: 23:08

Even that sounds sketchy. Uh the whole thing is just sketchy.

SPEAKER_01: 23:12

Yeah, but I mean it seems to work because it's true.

SPEAKER_03: 23:15

I mean, you're not wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 23:16

But there's also different types of oil rigs.

SPEAKER_03: 23:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:19

Because you've got ones that are like anchored, like shallow waters at like only like a hundred feet or something like that. Then you've got other ones that are anchored like a thousand or so feet, and then it goes deeper and deeper. And then once you get past a certain point, then they're like a free-floating like city. And then they drop like four or five anchors around them, and then they use these props and GPS to like maintain their location perfectly. It's pretty trippy stuff. Interestingly enough, uh, the pressures of the upcoming oil could be used to push oil via pipes onto nearby ships. So you they would they they would push these little oil rigs out, and then they would have a ship park up next to it, and they would pump oil straight from the little tiny oil rigged right into the ship. And like, okay, that's kind of clever. I think that's kind of how like the Torre Canyon got filled up was through something like that.

SPEAKER_04: 24:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 24:17

So, due to the strategy, today, 30% of that five million oil wells on Earth are water-based. Uh, this helped clean up many of the coastlines, um, the coastline-based oil wells. And if you go to California today, you don't really see those anymore.

SPEAKER_03: 24:33

Yeah, they're way out in the distance. Like you can still see them, but they're e little well, they look ity little tiny because they're so far away.

SPEAKER_01: 24:40

Yeah, they're out there like 20, 30 miles.

SPEAKER_03: 24:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 24:43

Um, but yeah, like if you were to go to like the coast, uh like if you could bring like a backhoe and start digging like this the super deep hole on the beaches, which they will never allow you to do, you will actually find a lot of the foundations that these oil rigs used to sit on.

SPEAKER_03: 25:03

I believe it.

SPEAKER_01: 25:04

Yeah, way, way back in the day. So, yeah, these these floating oil rigs did a great job to clean up California. So you don't see them anymore. And you're yeah, but what they are now are these tiny little dotted oil rigs way off in the distance. And at night you can see the little pilot flame.

SPEAKER_03: 25:22

Yeah, you can see the little little lights.

SPEAKER_01: 25:25

Yep, little yeah, they have like a little flame that comes up because when you drill for oil, it releases uh flammable gases. And so they just feed that through a separate pipe and burn it off.

SPEAKER_03: 25:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 25:37

So yeah, yeah, you can see those at night.

SPEAKER_03: 25:39

Oil rig parts.

SPEAKER_01: 25:41

Uh yes, yeah. Well little oil poots. Um these things are today, these things are like literal floating cities. And today they hold or they can process about 250,000 barrels of oil a day.

SPEAKER_03: 26:02

Do you know the average amount of employees are on an oil rig on any given day? Just curious.

SPEAKER_01: 26:09

Um, I know what the uh Deepwater Horizon was about 100 to 150.

SPEAKER_03: 26:13

Okay. Yeah, because I know there's a lot of people, but I just wasn't sure what the number is.

SPEAKER_01: 26:18

Yeah, because you you I mean, you've got everybody from roughnecks, you've got electricians, you've got engineers. Uh you you you have to have cooks, like it it they are cities, and I think today I would say between 100 to 200 people.

SPEAKER_03: 26:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 26:35

And and what what it is, they they're flowing out in like two-week shifts. So you'd go out, work two weeks, and you work, and I we'll elaborate a little bit more on this later, but like you get out there and you are out there for two weeks and you're working set like 24-7.

SPEAKER_03: 26:52

You're out there Yeah, it's work and sleep and work and sleep.

SPEAKER_01: 26:56

Uh if even that, it's like a lot of people report like 18-hour days.

SPEAKER_03: 27:01

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 27:01

The nice thing is that when you get back, you're off for like three weeks.

SPEAKER_03: 27:05

Right. So if that's your gym, it works for you, you you go for it.

SPEAKER_01: 27:09

Yeah. I mean, and if you're good at it, you can make halfway decent money.

SPEAKER_03: 27:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 27:14

So yeah, uh, these ore rigs could also be sent out to a range of about 250 miles. Um, and these things can cost billions of dollars to make, and they take about two to five years to build because you're literally building a floating city.

SPEAKER_03: 27:31

Yeah, and the things are massive, so I'm not surprised.

SPEAKER_01: 27:34

So part two. Before we pump, we need to drill. So when we see these oil rigs, we like to like we we're we're just seeing the end product, we're not actually seeing the weeks, if not months, of work uh that goes into actually getting the the source ready to oh, oh boy. It's a good thing you don't have smell of vision because I just vomited into my mic.

SPEAKER_03: 28:06

Oh, that poor mic.

SPEAKER_01: 28:08

Oh yeah. Gonna smell like cheese here pretty soon. But yeah, when we see these giant oil rigs, we like we're just seeing the end product. We're not actually seeing what went on to get that oil. So you can't just pick a spot and just start drilling. That's how it worked in the 1800s. Like they would literally in the 1800s, like, well, we know there was oil over there.

SPEAKER_03: 28:36

Let's try over here.

SPEAKER_01: 28:37

Yeah, let's go this way a thousand yards and drill a hole, and let's go that way and drill a hole. Uh, have you ever seen the um oh what is it? The uh that gemstone that comes from Australia. Um oh man, it's like a whitish rock, it has all the colors in it.

SPEAKER_03: 28:59

It's it sounds like opal. Opal, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 29:02

Yeah, so like Australia sits on a huge deposit of opal, but there's no cool way to find it. So it's just drill and drill and drill. And there's parts of Australia where you have to be careful where you walk because you could fall down like a 200-foot hole, and there's just thousands of them everywhere. All because you can't just scan the ground and like, oh well, here we go. Let's go find opal here. The only way you can do it is by doing uh drilling. That's kind of how it worked in the 1800s. Um, and back then, like they can only go down to maybe at like especially in the late 1800s, like a couple hundred feet. And that worked fine, right? The 1800s, that was okay because there wasn't that many automobiles, plastics weren't even a thing yet. It was mainly just gas lamps.

SPEAKER_03: 29:55

Yeah, so they didn't need a ton of oil yet.

SPEAKER_01: 29:59

Yeah, the supply and the demand work together nicely. Now the demand is through the roof, yeah, and we've got to be more scientific about it. So bust out sonic waves.

SPEAKER_03: 30:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 30:16

So the way that it works now is that you have a survey ship go out, and the back end of the ship, they have like this sonic wave projector that just blasts the ocean. I can't imagine it's good for fish. Uh, it's gotta drive sharks wild. Um, but basically the way this thing works is that it shoots out this mega blast of sound into the ocean. And the idea is that different frequencies of sound will penetrate different levels of the bottom of the ocean.

SPEAKER_05: 30:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 30:55

And then it would bounce up. So different frequencies would hit the it would hit the bottom of the ocean, go down a certain distance, and then certain frequencies would bounce off certain layers, and then they would tow like this giant like sound receiver behind the ship, and then from there, they basically can get like a ultrasound of the bottom of the ocean, and what they really look for are salt deposits. So basically, there's what's known as the salt domes, and there are these giant massive collections of salt deep under the bottom of the ocean, and they've noticed that oil tends to pool up around these salt domes. So when they find a salt dome, it's a pretty good idea, it's a good indicator that there's probably oil in that area.

SPEAKER_03: 31:44

Why is the oil attracted to the salt?

SPEAKER_01: 31:47

Um, I'm not sure, but I think, and this is just science by Ed. I have a PhD in nothing, but I have a funny feeling that whenever you have organic compounds breaking down, turning into hydrocarbons, there are a lot of salts inside organic compounds, and those salts got to go somewhere, and so they kind of like crystallize like salt crystals, and they form like these giant domes of salt, you know, thousands of feet underneath the ground, and then all everything that wasn't salty, like through organic compounds, turns into oil.

SPEAKER_03: 32:30

That would make sense.

SPEAKER_01: 32:31

I could see that's just my theory. I have no idea if it's accurate, but it's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_03: 32:38

I could see I could see it.

SPEAKER_01: 32:40

Yeah. Somebody who I wonder if it works the same way on land.

SPEAKER_03: 32:44

I don't know. Somebody who knows more about this stuff, please let us know. Because Ed knows more about me, about this stuff, so therefore.

SPEAKER_01: 32:54

Yeah, if anybody's out there just like screaming at your your car stereo because I'm a I'm a blasted idiot on this, you know, hit us up at the daysdumsterfire.com or um uh was it daysdumsterfire or gmail.com.

SPEAKER_03: 33:12

That's it.

SPEAKER_01: 33:13

Yep, yeah, but yeah, hit us up. Um, I'm kind of curious to get an expert's opinion on like why why do you see salt domes and then you can associate oil with it? Maybe organic creatures were saltier back then. I mean I don't know. Yeah. I may have to I may have to look into that. So uh to drill into the earth, you just don't use a typical drill bit, right? Like when you think of a drill bit, people think of like a wood bit where it's got like a uh it's a helically wrapped piece of metal uh rod, and then on the ends of it has like a chisel cut on it. And what that's what does the cutting is that when that turns, that digs into the wood, and then the helical cut parts that go around the drill bit, that's just for the sole purpose of collecting the the saw or the wood material and pull it out of out of the uh out of the wood. Um it doesn't quite work like that when you're trying to drill into the ground. You you've got to get a little bit more creative. So to drill into the earth, you don't use a typical drill bit that you would use for wood. A wood bit, um, like I just mentioned, uh it cuts into the wood and then it uses the helical cutouts to bring it up. In the olden days, drill bits uh used to drill for oil were like straight rods with a tip that had like a harder metal at the end of it, so they had like um almost like teeth that would you would turn that and then it would just grind its way through the rock. Um, that works fine. The problem is that uh in the old days they didn't have a way of getting the pulverized rock up, so they could only go down so far before all the sediment, dust, and ground up rock would just bind everything up.

SPEAKER_03: 35:09

And you're just trying to drill into a hole of sand at that point.

SPEAKER_01: 35:13

Yeah, yeah, it's like flour.

SPEAKER_03: 35:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 35:16

Like, yeah, you're you're trying to like punch your way through a bag of flour kind of a thing. So that's why the reason why the early wells weren't very deep, you know, anywhere between 20 and 60 feet. However, by the 1900s, things changed where we could drill up to hundreds of feet by using water to flush off the debris. So basically, drill bit goes into the hole, it starts turning, and then you take pressurized water and then you blast that water into the hole while it's drilling, and then it it will blow all the uh debris and crap out. So that helps significantly. Uh, today we use a substance that is affectionately as mud. If you ever look at this stuff, you can see why it's called mud. It looks like mud. It's brown, it's nasty, but this stuff makes it literally possible to drill like miles underground. So mud or drilling fluid is made of a base of either water oil or synthetic oil, and it's mixed with various different minerals to cool the drill bit, remove debris from the bottom of the borehole via hydraulics, and lubricate the cutting bit. Since today they're made out of like, if you look at these cutting bits now, they look like they have like three wheels that kind of like diverge and converge at the same time, and those wheels spin independently of each other, and then they've got like hardened, like carbide teeth on them. So the drill bit is spinning, those wheels are spinning with the teeth on it, and it really looks like a device that would make anybody talk.

SPEAKER_03: 36:52

Yeah, that sounds horrifying.

SPEAKER_01: 36:54

Yeah, yeah. Like if you if you went to a proctologist and they pulled out something that looked like that, you're running out screaming. It's just uh-uh. That but it works, and it works very well. And the formulas for mud are wild because the mixture changes per location, and it is a science. They've got a factor in temperature, proposed depth, uh, type of drilling machinery, type of cutting bit, and all sorts of other parameters. And we're talking, you know, 5% this, 5% that, adjusting this weight by like 12%. It is like being one of these guys that puts mud together is that that's a career in itself. So once there's a reasonable idea of where the oil could be uh under the ocean, a drill rig or a mobile offshore drilling unit or a modu is sent out to get to work. That's what the deep water horizon was. It wasn't necessarily an oil rig, although it's not uncommon for a drilling rig to limelight as an oil rig. So, like the drill rig will find the oil and then it'll start pumping oil until they can bring out a proper oil rig. And then it's like then it's it's mass production for decades after that. The drill rig comes out and positions itself based on the GPS coordinates of this where the search vessel identified. Uh, the rig will then send down a drill to the ocean floor and begin what is known as spudding, or in other words, it's just starting the borehole in the bottom of the ocean. As the drill extends into the ocean floor about 30 feet, the drill stops, and then another extension is added to what is known as a drill string. So when you see videos of these guys drilling, like they drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, stop, and then they grab another extension, and then they screw that extension on, they clamp it, and then they drill, drill, drill, drill. So they go down in like 30 feet increments, and they do this over and over and over again to a point where they're getting into like thousands of um feet at a time. So there's like no room for error. This is considered one of the more dangerous jobs out there because it is like you've got these giant clamps that if you have a finger in the way, it will just pinch them off. Like it will crush your arm. And these guys are just, you know, I think they're paid per paid per the foot. So it's in their best interest to get down there as fast as possible. So eventually, a device called a blowout preventer. So I feel like after you eat Taco Bell, you need a blow up preventer.

SPEAKER_03: 39:45

I feel like the older you get, the more you need it. You know?

SPEAKER_01: 39:49

Actually, when you have a baby, you really wish you had a blowout preventer.

SPEAKER_03: 39:54

Yeah, you're not wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 39:56

Because when those babies have a blowout, like they explode.

SPEAKER_03: 40:00

Yeah, you're right.

unknown: 40:03

Dang.

SPEAKER_01: 40:06

I believe you so a blowout preventer uh sent down it is sent down to the hole, so where it was sputted, you know, and then they get down deep enough. They put this blow-up preventer on there, and then a what is known as a riser is sent through the middle of the blow-up preventer. So basically, what a blow-up preventer is, it's a massive hydraulically powered set of clamps that once initiated would try and close off the well pipe. Um so basically, if you look at it, it almost kind of looks like a uh like a weird like piston engine. So you've got your your um you get the blow preventer, and then you drill uh the riser through that, and then basically the bottom part of it has a series of clamps that when initiated, it will pinch around the riser and it will cut off the flow of mud. Okay. Then as you go up and up and up, you have what is known as a uh a dead hand mechanism or a blind clamp, and these are like two diamond carbide blades. So let's say you are dealing with a massive amount of pressure coming out of this oil well that's going to be uncontrollable. You would close those clamps in the bottom. If that didn't work, you would have what's known as annulars up at the top. Those annulars are kind of like donut-shaped balloons, and when they're inflated, they pinch off the actual flow of oil. They're annulars because they're round, they're like donuts. And the idea is like that's like your first line of defense. If that doesn't work, then you have to resort to those clamps. If that doesn't work, then you resort to the dead hand, which is basically a series of carbide blades that physically cuts through the entire riser and permanently seals the whole thing off.

SPEAKER_04: 42:16

Dang.

SPEAKER_01: 42:17

So this is that is like your last ditch thing. Like this is that's your e-breaking. What's that?

SPEAKER_03: 42:25

That's your e-break.

SPEAKER_01: 42:27

Uh yeah, yeah. The BOP is probably one of the most important devices in all of oil drilling. It is the thing that like if if if you run into problems and this oil that's under the ocean, it is under thousands of pounds of pressure.

SPEAKER_03: 42:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 42:45

And once you access that, that those gases and everything are just wanting to escape. So that that BOP is the thing that controls whether or not everything's going to explode violently.

SPEAKER_03: 43:01

Sweet. That's great.

SPEAKER_01: 43:03

So yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 43:04

I feel like this is um some foreshadowings happening right now.

SPEAKER_01: 43:07

Uh yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're gonna we're gonna talk about the BOP a little bit in this episode, but then we're really gonna dive into it in the next one. No pun intended.

unknown: 43:15

Cool, cool, cool.

SPEAKER_01: 43:16

Oh, yeah. And so the BOP, um, or blow up preventer, it sits on a concrete platform. So basically, you spud your hole and then you pour down like dozens and dozens of feet of concrete that's like a foundation that surrounds the the the borehole, and then you mount your BOP on top of that, and then from there, it's just drilling and drilling and drilling. You know, it's just you know, the the BOP just kind of chills out there unless it's absolutely needed. To kind of complicate things a little more, around the riser and the and like the the borehole, there's another pipe that goes around that. That is the pipe. So when you're drilling, you pump mud down the borehole. So it goes all the way down to the tip of the the drill bit, cools everything down. It's a super heavy, dense fluid. It acts kind of like a plug because it's so heavy, it's heavier than oil, so that if gases do leak out, if things do go sideways or whatever, that mud helps kind of keep things under control. And then it will go down and around this outside, it will go like around the borehole, and then it can be pumped back up to the rig where then it's filtered, recycled, and then pumped back down. So it goes down the the bore hole, hits the drill bit, does its business, goes around the drill bit, and then it goes back up to the surface for recycling.

SPEAKER_03: 44:47

Interesting. That's cool.

SPEAKER_01: 44:48

Yeah, that's that's how they clear out debris and and all that stuff. So it's kind of a kind of a cool way of doing it. It's uh that mud serves so much of a purpose. It is everything to uh a rough neck. Like that is yeah, it's the lubricant, it is a plug, it is a way to cool things down, it's a way to get rid of debris. Without that mud, man, you're you're in trouble. As they get deeper and deeper, what they do is they switch to smaller and smaller drill bits. And so, like the hole at the top could be, you know, 10, 12 inches in diameter. By the time they actually get down to where the oil is, it could just be a few inches in diameter. And the idea is this it once you hit something with a massive amount of pressure, it's gonna go through that small little hole and then dissipate as it gets higher up because the hole's getting bigger. Okay. As opposed to like saying, let's say you start with a small hole at the top and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger as you go down. You hit all that pressure, that pressure is gonna fill up that large volume of space, and then it's only gonna increase in pressure as it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. So, for example, you can take like a pipe, right? You can take a uh say a four-inch diameter pipe has water running through it at say like 10 psi. If you neck that pipe down to a smaller and smaller pipe, like say like down to a half inch, that 10 psi is gonna skyrocket to like hundreds of psi. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 46:22

Yeah, it's like um when you have a water hose and you change the little nozzle to a smaller hole and it goes.

unknown: 46:28

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 46:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It goes further that way. So yeah, that's exactly how it works. But with the here, it it with this case it's backwards. You start big, go small, so then when you do hit that pressure, it will only dissipate as it goes up, so it'll only go down.

SPEAKER_03: 46:43

I'm just picturing one of those old school like uh lightsaber toys where it's the only reason it extends is because it's it nests. That's what it reminds me of.

SPEAKER_01: 46:53

Yeah. And so, like the other reason why um they make the hole smaller and smaller as they go deeper is that it's less material that needs to be pumped back up. Because if that mud is so heavy, like trying to get that thousands of feet back up to the surface, like you need a mega pump for something like that. Like, yeah. So obviously, if you make it smaller and smaller, it makes it easier to maintain. So once oil is detected, the shaft is essentially sealed off and prepared for an old rig to start to come out and collect the oil and use the pressure that the oil is under to push itself through a series of underwater network of pipes that are connected to a series of rigs in the area. So when you see, like you can actually look up a map of this, there's thousands of miles of underwater pipes connecting all these different oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. And so, like, all these oil rigs are kind of networked together. And instead of having the oil come up to the surface to be put onto a ship, it just gets basically the pressure just goes up to the where the uh BOP is, and then it just gets outsourced or outconnected to a network of other pipes that then eventually makes its way to the coast.

SPEAKER_03: 48:08

Okay. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01: 48:10

And then from there you don't need any ships, you can just pipe it to wherever refinery you need. It's yeah, it's kind of a clever, uh, kind of a clever way of of uh doing things. You you're using the pressure that the stuff is under uh to get it to where you need to go versus using mechanical means.

SPEAKER_04: 48:26

Work smarter, not harder.

SPEAKER_01: 48:27

Right? Yep. So that is a very, very basic explanation of how a drill rig works. I've skipped about 5,000 steps, but hopefully this gives you an idea of the significance of what happened with the deep water horizon.

SPEAKER_03: 48:44

Cool. Well, hey, I learned something new today. I had no idea how any of that works.

SPEAKER_01: 48:49

So yeah, yeah, it's it's a pretty incredible piece of engineering, and the math and the precision that goes into this is it is just mind-blowing to me.

SPEAKER_03: 48:59

I believe it.

SPEAKER_01: 49:00

So now that we're all expert drillers, great.

SPEAKER_03: 49:05

Go ahead. Yes, I'm ready.

SPEAKER_01: 49:08

I'll send you your certificate in the mail. It may be drawn in crayon.

SPEAKER_03: 49:12

Perfect. As long as that crayon is yellow, that's all I care about.

SPEAKER_01: 49:18

Yeah, yeah, yellow and white paper. That's it. Here we go.

SPEAKER_02: 49:22

I'm framing that one.

SPEAKER_01: 49:24

Part three, the deep water horizon. So now let's get into the dumpster fire here, or at least the beginnings of it. So Deepwater Horizon commissioned in 2001. Uh, it was a semi-submersible, dynamically positioned drill/slash oil rig, which spanned 400 feet by 260 feet, and it was about 136 feet tall with the Derek sitting at about 220 feet.

SPEAKER_03: 49:53

Sweet. That's really big.

SPEAKER_01: 49:55

So, yeah, semi-submersible, meaning that like it sat on on these pontoons, and so like when they bring it out there, it's funny because it's like super high up in the air, and it's just like bobbing along on these pontoons. It's got like these four legs that stick out. They look really funny when they're out there, but when they actually get out to the position, they will they will fill those pontoons with a certain amount of water, which will bring the whole thing down. They don't want the oil rig to sit flush with the ocean, they actually want above uh like 100-200 feet, and then those pontoons stay under water. So when there's waves coming by, it just goes around like you like these oil rigs can sustain hurricanes and these tidal forces.

SPEAKER_03: 50:42

It's amazing to me because it sounds so sketchy.

SPEAKER_01: 50:45

Yeah, it's really sketchy, but when you understand that when you see a wave, you're not actually seeing water move per se, you're seeing the molecules of the water kind of go up and down, and that up and down motion is how it transfers the energy to the coastline. So, like, yeah, they they they submerge like halfway down, and that's that's why when you look at these oil rigs, they have those four giant pillars underneath. Uh, that's done on purpose so that the waves have absolutely no effect on on the functionality, which I thought was kind of interesting. And and those pontoons have a series of propellers underneath that they can use to like turn the rig, go forward or backwards, maintain its position. And these things are like automated. It is like they're connected to GPS, and it's incredible the amount of precision. Because if you think about it, that thing is sitting up there, you know, a couple hundred feet above the water. It's got a pipe going tens of thousands of feet below. You know, you can't have that thing moving around because it's going to be torquing that riser to like no end. It'll want to break it.

SPEAKER_03: 51:58

Yeah. There would be too much tension on something like that. It'll break it, snap it easy.

SPEAKER_01: 52:04

Yeah. Or it'll warp it in a way that will make other things ineffective.

SPEAKER_03: 52:09

Or it'll blow something up.

SPEAKER_01: 52:11

Or it'll blow something up. So the rig itself was capable of maintaining a drill shaft about 10,000 feet below the water. And once it got to the bottom, it could drill up to about 35,000 feet underground, which at that time was the world record. Uh, the Deepwater Horizon was built in South Korea by the Hyundai Heavy Industries and was operated by TransOcean. However, it was leased out to British Petroleum or BP for a series of contracts ranging from 2001 to 2004, 2005 to 2009, and then 2010 to 2013.

SPEAKER_05: 52:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 52:47

So, in other words, British Petroleum would go to Transocean, hire Transocean to bring out one of their drill rigs to begin drilling for a BP oil rig to go on it.

SPEAKER_03: 53:02

To put a Hyundai rig on it?

SPEAKER_01: 53:04

Uh no, this that that the the Hyundai Heavy Industries was the company that manufactured it. Oh, oh, oh. So basically, Transocean would write a check to Hyundai Heavy Industries and give them the schematics to build the drill rig. They would build it and then ship it over to Trans Ocean, and then Transocean would staff it. So now you've got this bright, shiny new oil drill rig with a crew, and then British Petroleum's like, okay, I'm gonna pay you guys to start drilling this hole for us.

SPEAKER_03: 53:40

Got it. Okay, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01: 53:42

And it gets a little more complicated too because like each rig is especially like the oil rigs, it could be like 25% is owned by this company, 35% is owned by this other company, 20% is owned by that company. So like all these oil companies have this weird network of like part ownership of all these rigs. And the reason being is that you know the contract for the uh Deepwater Horizon was$544 million or about$500,000 a day. So the rig itself cost about$560 million to put together, and it was insured for that amount of money as well. So the whole rig was powered by six Wartzilla 18 V32 7.2 megawatt diesel engines with six AC backup generators.

SPEAKER_03: 54:42

That's gibberish to me. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_01: 54:44

So there was six engines, diesel engines, right? Your most diesel engines that you're used to seeing are like a V8.

SPEAKER_03: 54:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 54:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 54:54

Uh is a V32. Is that what that means?

SPEAKER_01: 54:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 54:58

Awesome. Okay, that makes sense now.

SPEAKER_01: 55:00

Yep, times that by six, and I think actually, no, I'm sorry. I think they're 18. There's 18 cylinders, and I think the 32 is how many liters? Like that's like the volume.

SPEAKER_03: 55:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 55:14

I think.

SPEAKER_03: 55:15

In other words, it's just a giant diesel engine.

SPEAKER_01: 55:18

But freaking big engine.

SPEAKER_03: 55:20

Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01: 55:21

Yeah, these these things are are humongo. So keep this in mind. We're we're gonna be like, don't forget about the this little part here about the engines because they come back with a vengeance.

SPEAKER_03: 55:33

Sweet.

SPEAKER_01: 55:34

So uh under the water on the pontoons, eight Kamewa 5.5 megawatt fixed propeller azimuth thrusters. So, in other words, the pontoons had these these good-sized electric thrusters that could be used to position the uh deepwater horizon, move it around, turn it. Um so there's a lot of tech in this thing. Uh, the deepwater horizon was heralded as lucky and celebrated as one of the most powerful rigs in the world at the time. Its safety record was legendary. Uh, I think it went seven years with no incidences that caused a stall in production.

SPEAKER_03: 56:14

Is that why they called it Lucky?

SPEAKER_01: 56:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 56:17

Cool.

SPEAKER_01: 56:18

Um, on February 10th or February 2010, the Deepwater Ryzen was sent out to the Makando site um about 40 miles south of Louisiana to begin drilling with a crew of 126 that had to be helicoptered in on three-week shifts. Uh sorry, I said two weeks earlier, three-week shifts, which include 12-hour consecutive shifts. So that means there was like no days off. When you got on that oil rig, it was three weeks, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Sick. But you also get a lot of time off afterwards. So it's kind of like the uh saturation divers. Like they go out for a couple weeks at a time and then they're like off for like a month.

SPEAKER_03: 56:59

Yeah, that's kind of what it reminded me of.

SPEAKER_01: 57:02

Yeah, that that's that's a fun episode too. Uh the saturation divers, the uh Bifard Dolphin incident.

SPEAKER_03: 57:08

Yeah, that's a crazy one. It's good.

SPEAKER_01: 57:10

Uh yeah, that one um learned Extruded Human is the best way to describe that one.

SPEAKER_03: 57:14

You know what's funny? Because of that episode, I understood the which we should do an episode on this, but there's a movie about a guy, one of those divers who got stuck down there. Like he was trying to repair something, a cage or whatever, and he got stuck. Oh. Yeah, I'll send it to you. I I don't remember what it was called, but it was it was pretty good. It had the Woody Harrelson in it. Yeah, it had Woody Harrelson and uh Simo Leo in it.

unknown: 57:42

Huh.

SPEAKER_03: 57:42

It really happened too. I actually went and looked it up, and the guy's still alive, amazingly enough, and yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 57:48

Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_03: 57:49

Yeah, I'll send that to you. It was good. But I understood that because of that episode. So yes, go listen. Go listen to it.

SPEAKER_01: 57:55

Look at you learning sciencey stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 57:56

I know.

SPEAKER_01: 57:57

On um, yeah, February 10th, uh Deep Order Rosen was sent out to the Makando site about 40 miles uh south of Louisiana, and it had a hundred and twenty-six crew, and they worked 12-hour shifts. Uh later on, politicians argued that excessive shifts is what led to the disaster that was about to take place on April 20th, 2010. I don't know. Uh, we're gonna dive way more into the controversy that happened afterwards and the blame game and all that kind of stuff. I think everybody's wrong.

SPEAKER_05: 58:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 58:30

I I I have a theory um based on my extensive background of literally minutes of research um that I think will really shed light on what really happened, but we'll get there. So they started in February. Uh, by March, it was evident that the drilling was not going according to plan. The process was only supposed to take like three, four weeks.

SPEAKER_03: 58:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 58:56

By the time March rolled around, it was just like, okay, what's going on? It was like delay after delay after delay. There was a lot of like once these delays started hitting, then like BP started sending out more and more people to investigate why uh and what's going on. And I can't like they came in and they started making changes after changes after changes, and it was kind of annoying, especially for Transocean. They're like, guys, we know what we're doing, this is a dangerous spot. Just leave us alone and give us a time.

SPEAKER_05: 59:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 59:31

From BP's perspective, I can understand where they're coming from because they were burning through a million dollars a day.

unknown: 59:40

Oof.

SPEAKER_01: 59:41

That's how much it cost to operate and drill and all that stuff. So when this thing was like 45 days late, it was 45 million dollars over budget.

SPEAKER_04: 59:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 59:53

So, like, I I can kind of see where BP's coming from a little bit.

SPEAKER_03: 59:57

I see both sides. I get it.

SPEAKER_01: 59:58

Yeah, yeah. So, like these delays were were very costly. Yeah. Uh one of the major issues the crew at Deepwater Ryzen had was that they were dealing with what is known as kicks. So, in other words, as the drill bit goes through each layer of rock, it may come across a pocket of gas. That that pocket of gas could be the size of a football field, and it could be under tens of thousands of psi, and that gas has to go somewhere. It's like poking a hole in a balloon, right? The air inside that balloon has got to go somewhere and it's going to take the path of least resistance. And if that is a big giant drilling hole, then it's going to go through that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:44

Does it make the little beep noise?

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:46

Oh, yeah, yeah. It makes that's exactly how it sounds.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:51

That's what I want to hear.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:52

As as it's just like that, would be kind of funny if you like look at videos of the deepwater rise on fire and it's like that's the warning sign sign that you need to look at. It's very anticlimatic. Meanwhile, there's flames everywhere and people jumping into the ocean and fantastic. Or like a balloon where you like you squeeze the end of it and it goes.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:19

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:21

That that that would be That's great.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:23

Love that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:27

So yeah, they were dealing with a lot of kicks, and these pockets of gas would basically go up the borehole. That sounds so weird.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:39

I mean you hate it when a gas goes up the borehole.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:47

Yeah, it's supposed to go the other direction.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:49

Yeah, it's supposed to go out the borehole, not up the borehole. Oh boy.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:56

Uh it's gonna get worse. Just keep reading it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:02

Because we got mud involved.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:06

No, this is really the Taco Bell analogy. Keep finish it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:11

Right? All that gas and mud coming out of that borehole. Oh crap. Alrighty.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:22

I didn't even realize how bad it sounded until I started reading it out loud. But yes, uh, the gas would go up that that that pipe and it would want to push the mud up with it. And that's a problem because that could cause the the drill bit to overheat and melt.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:44

Can I read it for the listeners?

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:47

Yeah, yeah, read it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:49

Friends, it would come across pockets of gas that would cause the pressure of borehole to climb rapidly and potentially push the mud out and even cause an explosion. It's great.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:07

My middle school mind is so happy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:13

It's supposed to be a serious topic. Sorry. It's going sideways. Oh crap.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:22

Alrighty. So after each kick, the drilling would need to stop, and then the well would need to be tested for safety reasons. Otherwise, you need to see a doctor about that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:32

Yeah, that's pretty bad. You got gas coming up and exploding mud coming out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:41

I got mud everywhere.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:46

You're gonna need a new borehole after that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:52

All right, sorry. Sorry. More more drilling is is necessary.

SPEAKER_05: 1:04:03

Oh god.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:08

I knew I should have read this out loud before we started this. Sounds so bad.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:13

Entertainment gold right here. This is good.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:15

Oh man, all right. So, furthermore, due to all the kicks and subsequent mechanical issues, Shane Roshto, who was one of the crew members on the rig, phoned his wife. And the the this was like the day of the incident, and he was supposed to go home the next day. He never made it home. He was one of the 11 people that died. Um, but he he coined this well as the well from hell just because of all the issues they were having with it. It was just it was just like one issue after another. Now, I wanna I want to address this part because there's a lot of like when you when if you research this, there is so many articles on who is to blame. Everybody is so focused, and and whenever there's a tragedy like this, whether it's like the Hindenburg going up or you know the Boston molasses flood, we want to find a human being to blame.

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:17

I feel like this comes up a lot because uh we did have the same conversation when we were talking about Hindenburg, but everybody wants to blame a person when really it's just a horrible accident.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:27

Yeah, it's like we want to see heads roll.

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:29

Yeah, like who's responsible when in reality sometimes just really bad things happen and goes wrong. Now it could be bad choices were made, but it doesn't mean that one person is solely responsible for all of the choices that were made when it was probably more like a group effort.

SPEAKER_05: 1:05:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:47

Or just something going wrong. Like you know, something something was deteriorating in the salt water, or like the wind was really high that day, or whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:59

Like or in a case like this, I believe that there was absolutely nothing anybody could have done on that vessel to prevent what was gonna happen. Um maybe like there there were some test results that came back that they should have paid more attention to or whatever. Like maybe they should have stopped earlier or whatever. But yeah, as you'll see, like especially in part two, like I I don't think that even if the test results came back positive and they proceeded, there was nothing that could prevent what was going to happen. And so that's why, like, uh with this episode, I don't want to focus on names, I don't want to focus on too many individuals because these people have been through the ringer, they have been through lawsuits, they've been through interrogations, they've been through hearings, they've been through Senate hearings. Um, whether they were good, bad, indifferent, neglectful, or whatever, these people are still alive today. And I my my interest is not in throwing these guys through any more crap than they've already been through. Because like, even the the quote unquote good guys have just been absolutely wrecked by this, and then like I I think there are some executives that probably could have handled things better afterwards, but yeah, I don't want to focus on the names and all that kind of stuff. Like, you can find those names, you can find all the people that were involved. I I I was gonna go down that path, but it got ugly, and it got ugly fast.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:40

It's understandable.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:42

Like, politics got involved, and like there were death threats, and it's just like I'm no, I just want to focus on the rig itself. Let's do it because that's where I think the real dumpster fire really sits. So, but mid-April, the delays and mechanical issues were becoming a problem for BP due to the mounting costs, and as well as like investors were like, what the heck's going on? Like, you're just burning money, literally. There was a lot of conflict between the Transocean crew and the BP leadership sent out to try and get things back on track. Uh, the crew understood that this well that they were drilling was tricky and needed to be treated carefully. However, the BP execs needed to get this well operating ASAP because it was going on 45 days, past this deadline, and it was literally just dumping money into the ocean. And all fairness, the the in all fairness, the executives and and the BP leadership, like already on the rig. So the folks that BP had out there to kind of manage things uh like next to the Transocean folks, they did have some experience. These weren't just ignorant, you know, office jockeys. These were people that had experience, these were people that were educated in this. This this these were people that had a pretty good idea of what was going on. I think the Transocean folks had a better idea because they're like boots on the ground. This is what they do every single day. But there is when I was doing research on this, so much shade was thrown at the uh BP leadership on the site that like I don't know. I I I can't as much as you want to blame somebody, because like there was one leader, he got charged with uh manslaughter, 11 accounts of manslaughter, and it actually went before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled, like, no, no, after this investigation, uh we we can't just hold this one guy solely accountable for everything. So, in all honesty, I could see both sides of the argument, but when it comes to human safety, I think the operational side should win up because when things go wrong and human lives are at stake, then the cost and the bottom line skyrockets even more.

SPEAKER_05: 1:09:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:55

Like once you start losing lives, who cares about equipment and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, it's gonna get a lot more expensive really fast. And for BP, they're going to really, really see uh some repercussions here. During the early afternoon on April 20th, uh, 2010, a negative pressure test was conducted to see if the cement casing that held the BOP to the borehole had been fully cured, as well as check for any issues along the way. So basically, instead of pushing, like pushing pressure in like on the mud into the borehole, instead of putting pressure on it, you actually kind of pull a vacuum. And that gives you an idea, because if you pull a vacuum, ocean water will leak in if there's any issues and and whatnot. So a if the negative pressure test is a good one, then it starts off at neg or zero psi, stays at zero PSI, and ends at zero PSI. Okay, that means that there's no pressure, nothing, there's no outside factor pushing in, and there's no like there's no pumps on the on the rig pushing down. So it's just a great way to tell to see if the if everything is operating correctly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:18

However, during the uh pressure test, the pressure of the drill pipe rose to about 1300 psi, indicating that something was drastically wrong.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:29

Yeah, that's uh that's a high number there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:32

Uh yeah, yeah. That means that that means when the pressure skyrocketed, that means that there's pressure coming from somewhere and it's coming from the bottom because the the drill bit and everything, like they they pulled that out, but when that pressure started rising, that means that they were seeing a return of gas from the well going up into the riser. So that basically means like they are sitting on a pretty incredible amount of stored vapors and gases and stuff like that. However, though, they're like, well, if that was the case, then why wasn't there any mud coming up through the borehole? There should have been through the rig that there should have been mud like bubbling out of that thing. So that was a confusing result. So they ran the test a few more times and they got one positive result. They got like one result, and like, okay, cool, that's all we need, we're good to go. Can you see the logical fallacy in that?

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:39

I don't like it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:40

You have three failed tests, one positive one. Does that really a good indicator that you're good to move on?

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:46

No, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:48

So I think that's where they could have stopped.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:51

And really investigated things.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:53

That's the stopping point that every episode has. There's always like a stopping point, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:57

Like well This is the point where you can turn around, yeah, walk away, and then reapproach it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:04

This is the point where you get to the haunted house and you say, Nope, and you go back to your car.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:10

Yeah. This is the part in every horror movie where you you you can tell when the characters have made the wrong choice by going into that creepy house with the axe murder in it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:19

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:20

And then everybody runs upstairs and hides in a closet and they wonder why they die.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:24

On the second floor.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:25

On the second floor, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:26

We love slasher flicks. I do.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:28

Or or the attic. I know. Never find us up here where we can't go anywhere.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:34

80s slasher flicks, you gotta love them. All right, anyway.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:38

Yes, this was probably the turning point. However, though, let's say I I'm gonna make the argument that okay, let's say they stop and they fix things. I still don't think that was gonna prevent what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:51

Okay. Why?

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:52

I'll get to that. Cool. This is the engineering by Ed. Got it. Coming in in the next section. And once once you see the explanation or hear the explanation, you'd be like, got it. Okay. That this makes a lot of sense. It's kind of like the Hindenburg, right? Where the whole thing was a giant capacitor, and once once you like have it explained to you that way, you're like, okay. So it just wasn't hydrogen gas, there was more to it that was completely unpreventable. So, but yes, this would be the this would be the stopping point on paper.

SPEAKER_03: 1:14:28

On paper. On paper, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:30

So drilling commenced as scheduled, with many of the roughnecks on deck reporting really, really weird events. Uh, like they were experiencing like more kicks, they were experiencing vibrations on the drill shaft or the extensions. There's like if you're ever watched these guys drill, it's interesting. The like the the foreman will always, while he's operating the drill, he has his hand on it. So as the extension is going down, he puts his hand on it and he can feel when there's a kick, he can feel weird vibrations, he can get an idea of what's going on thousands of feet below ground just by feeling that thing turning as it's drilling into the ground.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:11

It's like fishing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:13

What's that?

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:14

It's like fishing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:15

Yeah, yeah. Oh, and that's the reason why those guys are the ones in charge is because they've got the most amount of experience and they just like they can just tell when things are are misbehaving.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:26

Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:28

So let's go back to the early 1900s, Venice Beach. Okay, you got workers out there building these piers, putting these oil derricks up and whatnot. And a lot of these workers reported while they're pumping the oil up, they would see like a lot of bubbles coming up from the bottom. Keep in mind the ocean was only like maybe 10, 20 feet deep, you know, because they're all they they can only go out so far. Uh, but they noticed that right around uh the pipes that were pumping the oil up, they saw like a lot of bubbles coming up. And they they also reported a very strong like petroleum kerosene smell coming from the water. These bubbles would often, these these bubbles and the strong smell would often preclude a massive blowout. And these blowouts would take out like 10, 15 wells at a time. So, like, and and of course, these guys are smoking cigarettes and and all that stuff. So, like, yeah, there were there's a lot of history in California where these workers in the early 1900s are like, huh. You just don't see bubbles coming up of this volume from the bottom of the ocean.

SPEAKER_03: 1:16:40

Yeah, it's weird.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:41

Yeah, it's it's a very weird thing, and have it to smell like gasoline and kerosene.

SPEAKER_03: 1:16:47

That's I'm sure it's great for the environment as well. That's oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:52

That's like I can only imagine what the smell must have been like in California and those beaches. Because you know those those rigs leaked like a sieve.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:00

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:01

It's like no wonder why California, no wonder why the Palisades was so bad. It probably had all that residual oil in the ground from the the oil rigs. So, part four, the disaster. This is the oily dumpster fire we've all been waiting for. Excellent. By about 9 p.m., if you could go down thousands of feet under the ocean and look at the BOP and the concrete casing, you would see a similar sight of bubbles emanating from the seafloor. Uh it it would just be everywhere. No one on top could see these bubbles because they're one, they're hundreds of feet above the surface, and two, uh, water does a really weird thing. Remember in our classroom where I had that CO2 thing in the fish tank? It had the little bubbles. You notice how the bubbles would come out of the the uh dispenser and they would just get smaller and smaller and smaller as they went to the top. That's because the water absorbs gases.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:06

So, like, there was no way anybody on that rig had any idea of what was going on in that ocean floor. Uh, because I mean it was just swarms of gases coming out of that whole concrete pad and the BOP and the substrate and all that stuff. Um, I wonder if they anybody even noticed like dead fish coming to the surface.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:31

Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:32

I feel like that would have been a good indicator. Like, so like, why are all these dead fish all over the place? Because fishermen actually really liked hanging around the oil rigs because fish would gravitate towards the oil rigs because they would eat stuff off of the pontoons and stuff like that. So I wonder if there was like anybody on the rig that, like, why are there dozens of dead fish all over the place? That would have been a good indicator as well. So at around 9 40 to 9 50, things happened really fast. We're talking minutes out of nowhere. The pressure of the drill pipe skyrocketed to about 3,000 psi. Mind you, it it red lines at a thousand. So this was in the control room, and alarms started going off all over the place. In the movie, they call them magenta alarms. Uh, I don't know if it's that's a real thing or not, but like I guess in the movie Deep Water Horizon, um, great movie. It is very well done. Um, like a magenta alarm means critical failure. It's like the check engine light flashing on your car. It is like the worst possible scenario. Uh so alarms started going off all over the place. Workers in the mud room. So on the lower deck, they had that mud room. That's where the mud would get pumped up, recycled, and then sent back down again. Workers in the mud room where the mud. Was pumped to the bottom of the board and then recycled and all their fun stuff. Uh, they started hearing like these giant, like eight, nine, ten inch in diameter pipes. They started like groaning and creaking, and then the valves uh were starting to like spit out mud shortly after that. Like normal, however, though, the pumps weren't running, so some degree of pressure was pushing the mud back up into the return lines of the mud room. Sick. So, like that that so like the people in down there were like, Why that's not supposed to happen? You know, was pushing all this up. They didn't know that the magenta alarms were going off like crazy upstairs. So, up top where the drilling took place, workers felt what was described as an earthquake of sorts, but instead of the vibrations coming from the ground, it was actually coming from the drill shaft. So the whole drill shaft started shaking.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:06

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:07

The operators in the control room instantly saw the pressure increase and quickly moved to close the annulars. So remember, the annulars is that first line of defense. Those are those donut-shaped things that you basically you squeeze them and then they put pressure on the pipe, and that's supposed to like stop the flow of mud coming up and stop the pressure uh from coming any higher up. That's the first line of defense. So, so yes, they they tried to close the annulars. Uh, this was no normal kick, and the annulars that sat above the BOP would be the first step to prevent a blowout. This did work, but only for a few minutes. So they're like, oh, cool. And then after a few minutes, things started acting weird again. It was not long before the annulars failed, and then the pressure skyrocketed to over 5,000 psi. We don't actually know what the max was because the max on the gauge was 5,000.

SPEAKER_03: 1:22:12

Uh that's like the radiation levels of Chernobyl.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:16

Yes, yeah, like, oh hey, yeah, it's only 3.5 Ronkin. Okay, that's not great, but not terrible. But that's the max the decimeter goes to. Oh okay, whatever. It's fine. It's 3.5. Let's just roll with it. Um, but I don't think this was a case of like this, this was five times above what the rig was rated for.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:39

So this wasn't just three four 3.5 ronkin. This was This was a lot. Yeah, this was a lot, even for what they couldn't measure. Once they saw that 5,000 psi, the BOP was activated. Uh one clamp after another. So now you got below. Okay, you got below the uh those cutoffs, those those dead hands. The there was a series of clamps that then circled the drill pipe, and these are like stronger than the annulars. This is like the next line of defense, right? Usually this would stop anything coming up. Uh the pressure still kept climbing, like nothing was changing. So those clamps failed. Eventually, uh the dead hand was activated. So then remember, the dead hand is a series of blades that physically uh they have these solenoids on either side of them, and they physically cut the pipe and they seal it. Like once that pipe is cut, that well is done for, right? That dead hand, the blind cutter thingy, that like once that is activated, there's no fixing that well, it's done for. Like you you have to go drill someplace else.

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:55

So, but that was their that was their last option, was to just cut it off and hope for the best. Um, by 956, every safety option that had been implemented had failed within minutes. So the annulars, you've got the clamps, now you got the dead hand. Um, the people in the mud room were trying to like open and close valves to release pressure. Uh literally, the deep water horizon was turning into a pressure vessel. From here, the well up top exploded into a stream of mud, oil, and gas that blew hundreds of feet above the derrick, which was already 250 feet tall.

SPEAKER_05: 1:24:38

Man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:39

So it was crazy. People reported like it was just like the derrick was just like one mud explosion after another, and as it was just taking out uh the whole drilling mechanism. It was it it the whole thing just blew apart into pieces. Once the operators in the control room confirmed the blowout, a Mayday was sent out to the Coast Guard and any other vessel in the area. Uh the people in the control room were like, okay, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, like, and now the Coast Guard is being notified that there was a catastrophic failure. Um like ships, like there were little like little fishing vessels all over the place. They saw it from like dozens of miles away. Like just the one guy called it it looked like a brown Christmas tree, and the whole rig was just covered in it. In the mud room, pipes and equipment started to explode at every point as the crew tried to close valves. Uh the valves, the valve wheels, which were up to about two feet in diameter, blew off the valves and it killed anybody in the way. Uh these these valve wheels probably weighed about 70, 80 pounds, and they were probably moving at nearly five to seven hundred feet per second.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:03

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:04

So if you got hit by that, it's just gonna go right through you.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:07

Yeah, game over.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:08

Yeah. Uh on the drill deck, mud and now oil covered everything and making it impossible for anyone to see what was going outside. Uh, soon debris such as rocks and pieces of metal came shooting out of the borehole near where the workers were working like bullets. So people heard like ricochets. It was literally like being shot at with a machine gun. That that's the kind of pressures that we're dealing with here. Some striking the workers as they tried to find some sort of cover. The real disaster is about to begin. So, like, it would have been a happy day if it just stayed at this.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:43

If it stopped.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:45

Well, even if the blowout just continued the way it was, like, that is still manageable. It everybody's covered in mud, but it's manageable. Like, this is okay, fine, we can work with this. Yeah, even though the blowout shot mud and oil hundreds of feet in the air, highly flammable gases were being blasted out into the air. So you're thinking, like, crap, that's gonna make it hard for people to breathe. That's not the real danger. The real danger were the giant diesel engines that powered the entire rig. Flammable fumes got sucked into um all the air intakes. Oh man. That fed the six Wartzilla 18 V32 7.2 megawatt diesel engines.

SPEAKER_02: 1:27:27

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:29

You cannot put like gasoline in a diesel engine. Yeah, it will cause a lot of problems. If you have a diesel engine and you start spraying, like, say, like brake cleaner into the turbo, it will cause that engine to run away.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:45

So, like a V8 diesel engine kind of redlines at like 3,000 RPMs. Imagine what it would be like if that thing revved up like 10,000 RPMs. So these fumes cause the six engines to literally run away. A runaway diesel engine is a phenomenon where something happens where the engine revs up to an RPM that far exceeds what it can handle. In this case, the fumes cause the engine engines to climb to thousands of RPMs above the rating, which then turn, uh, which in turn caused the props and the pontoons to run away as well. So now the the deep water horizon, all those props are just spinning like crazy, and the whole thing was turning left and right, going forward and backwards, putting a lot of torque on that riser pipe. People inside reported that like all the lights inside got super bright because those generators are now, you know, they're probably humming along like at 1200, 1300 RPM. Those generators are now humming along like at, you know, between three and six thousand RPMs, producing all that electricity. So everybody inside reported that like it got suddenly super bright in there, and then light bulbs started to explode. So, yeah, light bulbs started to explode, computers started shorting out, uh, because there was just way too much current running through everything. Yeah, it's too much power. Yeah. So by 10 p.m., the engine seized, and uh it's a bad deal when a diesel engine seizes because there's uh the the compression on a diesel engine it far exceeds a gas engine because you really, really, really have to compress that diesel in order for it to combust. Whereas like gasoline, you have to mix it with a bunch of air and compress it and throw a spark and then it fires and all that stuff. Diesel, there are no spark plugs, they have glow plugs, but yeah, a diesel just relies on air and then you compress the crap out of the diesel and then it ignites. When a diesel seizes up like that, each cylinder is like its own stick of dynamite. It is there's just so much air and gases compressed in there, but yet they the engine is still trying to run. Uh, it eventually causes the engines to explode catastrophically. The explosion was so great that it nearly destroyed the living quarters, which were on the opposite end of the rig. Yeah, I I I have a picture here, we'll we'll put it up on the website. You can see where the living quarters is on the below deck, and you can see where the engines were on the opposite end, like 400 feet away. The explosion was so great that it like took out nearly the entire living quarters, and people were like, if you were standing by a closed door, the explosion would have blown the door in you like through a wall. Yeah. So like people got rocked when that took place. Like that was and and that also causes another problem. When the engines exploded, you now have an open flame. Oh, the gases that are in the air, and the oil that is now spewing out of this thing at 400 feet tall.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:06

It's horrible.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:08

A fireball.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:09

Yeah, a big fireball.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:12

It was 500 feet in diameter and it engulfed the entire deep water horizon.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:18

Holy crap.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:20

So, like you couldn't see, you couldn't see the Derek, you couldn't see the crane, and and the fishermen that were miles away saw that. And this extremely bright fireball off in the horizon, and a lot of these fishermen are like, uh that's not supposed to happen.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:38

That's not normal.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:40

Yeah, like that that's not like the Titanic launching fireworks.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:44

Like, this is Yeah, that's uh that's different.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:47

Yeah. All in all, the explosion killed 11 of the 26 crew.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:52

Out of how many people?

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:54

11.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:55

Out of how many people in the crew?

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:56

126.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:57

126.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:58

I'm surprised that so many people made it in.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:01

I am too, actually. That's um it's horrible for the 11 people in their families to have to go through that. But out of 126 people, that's pretty lucky.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:11

Hence the nickname.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:12

Yeah. Like this could have been so much worse. This could have been like a total loss.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:16

Yeah. Easy, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:19

The remaining uh workers scrambled to get on the lifeboats. Um, they got onto the lifeboats, but the problem was is like they still weren't out of danger. They had to get away from this thing as fast as possible because they were worried that the whole entire thing would collapse on them. Like the whole rig would collapse on the lifeboats. So you get everybody in the lifeboats, and then now it's like, okay, now we gotta get out of here. Yep. Nearby uh fishing vessels saw the explosion and they pulled anchor and started rushing to the scene. Shortly after the explosion, the rig lost all power, leaving survivors below deck in complete darkness while their bodies were embedded with glass and metal shards and and all that stuff. Uh, there was one dude, he was the Transocean leader guy. He was taking a shower and it blew him across the cabin, and he literally had like glass shards embedded into his hands and feet, and like he was laying in pitch black darkness, you know, obviously buck naked. And so, like, with glass embedded into his feet, he somehow managed to get dressed, get boots on, and he was blind because he had like glass in his eyes. Um, he was blind in he was like the foreman, and he managed to get himself out, and he rescued like a number of people. He got them on the lifeboat and got them on on the safety vessel that was nearby. Holy crap. Yeah, and he managed to like stay up for the rest of the night, taking constant inventory, like taking attendance and roll calls to figure out who was on and who wasn't there anymore.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:00

What's this guy's name? What was this guy's name? Um, only asking because I think he deserves some recognition here. That's great.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:08

Like incredibly, but he got blamed.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:11

Well, let's not say I'm saying for the good things he did.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:16

But yeah, I think most people kind of recognize him. Uh his name is Jimmy Harrell.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:20

All right, Jimmy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:22

Yeah, uh Kurt Russell plays him in the movie.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:25

Okay. I haven't seen the movie. I've I've heard of it. I've heard it's good. I just haven't said that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:29

Yeah, it's a really, really good movie. Um, yeah, Jimmy Harrel, he was kind of like the foreman. He was like the lead engineer for uh everything, and he was the one that always butted heads with the VPs of BP. Got it. And so yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:44

Well, just the feat alone of going through all of that and still managing to rescue as many people as he could and making sure that his crew, he was responsible for his crew, even though he was all jacked up.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:58

So much respect to that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:35:00

Yeah, he had like a coat on, and yeah, he was basically trying to get people onto the onto the um the life rafts, and like he was still like almost pretty much completely naked. All he had was a coat, and then he was just like porky pig in it, just trying to get everybody out there, and then yeah, he had glass embedded all over him and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:25

Man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:35:26

Yeah. So at this point, the entire top deck of the Deepwater Horizon was on fire. Um, after a last-inch attempt to get back the uh or get the uh backup generators up and running. Like, hey, if we get the generators up and running, maybe, just maybe they could save the rig. Like, at this point, that that Jimmy Harrell guy, he was just like, okay, because he really couldn't see. Yeah, he didn't know how bad it was. So he was just trying to like, okay, let's just get this, let's get some power going here. Meanwhile, everybody's like, um, I don't think we can save this. This is like a foregone cause kind of a thing. Yeah. So yeah, uh once they couldn't get the backup generators to work, at this point, it was time to abandon ship. Yeah, just out of the 126 crew, 94 made it to the life rafts and lowered down to the ocean surface. I didn't know this, but 17 were rescued by helicopter.

SPEAKER_03: 1:36:22

Oh, that's interesting. They were still.

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:24

Yeah, I thought that was I like I don't remember that part. I don't remember researching it until this this afternoon. But I thought that was interesting. Like they managed to get a helicopter out there to get some people out, and then of course, 11 lost their lives.

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:38

Uh many of these guys were set to come home the next day. That's so sad. That that's that's really sad. Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty, it's pretty tough. And then four crew members literally just jumped off the top deck into the ocean. And thankfully they they were all recovered. They they survived. Uh huh. So during the daytime, uh in normal operations, there was a ship called the Damon B. Bankston. It was a uh it was a supply ship, and it would be tethered to the deep water horizon. It would supply the um it would supply the rig with like mud and supplies, food, and all that kind of stuff. So it was kind of like just hanging out there, and it was maybe a few hundred yards away. And yeah, the the crew of the Bankston were like, when they saw that fireball go up, um, they're like, uh, okay, that's a bad deal. We should go. So they jumped into action and they started to like put together uh like this this was crucial. If it was if that bankston wasn't there, who knows how many more people would have died? Because they set up like a field operation on that ship and they got everybody aboard and started getting medical treatment going and all that kind of stuff. Um, and that was it was that ship that brought the surviving crew back to shore. Uh, I think it was like a day later, a day or two later. Meanwhile, the deep water horizon burned for two more days. And again, we'll have pictures of it um on the website at DaveStemps of fire.com. It is an an intimidating fire.

SPEAKER_03: 1:38:08

Well, yeah, it's just it's an oil rig. Oil's highly flammable, so I'm not surprised.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:16

Well, and the thing is, is like it would be much preferred if it would just stay this way. Let the fire burn out of the rig. Because the oil is being burned.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:29

Yeah, pollution and stuff like that. But it's easier to deal with a fire like that when it's above surface versus what's about to happen.

SPEAKER_03: 1:38:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:40

Um it burned for two more days, surrounded by a Coast Guard, ship spring, water on the inferno, and yeah, it it that the the the the actual derrick itself was beginning to melt. That's how hot it was getting. However, on April 22nd, the structural integrity of the deepwater horizon gave out, and the entire rig buckled, tipping over, and proceeded to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:07

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:09

It's at this time that the ecological dumpster fire begins because the deepwater horizon sank, the drill pipe snapped off where it connected to the BOP, and since the BOP failed, there was nothing to stop the flow of oil being dumped into the ocean. It is estimated that 210,000 gallons of oil per day was being dumped into the ocean via that broken pipe, um, and that it would take engineers 87 days for them to figure out how to stop this pipe. That's awful.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:46

The whole thing's awful.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:48

And this is the end of part one of the largest oil related disasters in American history, and the ramifications have only just begun.

SPEAKER_03: 1:39:58

What a way to end it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:02

Right. So yeah, in the next episode, I'm gonna go into how this affected the ocean, how it affected the coastline, how it affected the economy of the entire Gulf of Mexico area. And then I'm gonna go into like who did they bring in to try to fix this venting oil in the ocean. Um because they came up with like five, six different ideas, and almost all of them failed miserably, uh just because they just couldn't get anywhere near that vent. Right. So so yeah, that is that is the part one.

SPEAKER_03: 1:40:45

Awful. Like the disaster's awful. Episode's good. Excellent work. Yeah, that's rough. That's hard. I don't even know what to say after that. Like just because there's no it's a cliffhanger. It's like watching the end of the first Lord of the Rings when you haven't read the book and you're just like, wait.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:06

Wait, that's it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:08

Frodo and Sam are just walking out in the Mordor.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:10

Like, yeah, you're like, wait.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:12

Well, because that's actually how the first book ends, is like that. That's true. Yeah. The second book doesn't end the way the movies did, but that's whatever. Yeah, but that's fine. But but yeah, no, that's end of part one. Um be sure to hit up our website, daysdomsafire.com, uh, where we are we do, we we we're fully caught up on there, right?

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:34

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:35

With all the episodes, all updated. Oh, beautiful.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:38

All the way up to Prohibition. Perfect.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:40

So yeah, uh, we have that fully updated. Um so go be sure to check that out. Uh, one of these days we'll get our Instagram updated. We'll get there. I'm actually kind of digging into doing some uh research on how to like actually use Instagram to promote a podcast. Um, so yeah, we'll we'll we'll have uh check out our Instagrams. Uh if you have any ideas for more topics, or if you want to send us clarification on things that I probably got mixed up on this episode, and you yourself are an expert on this, yeah, send us an email um at thedaysimsifier at gmail.com. And for everybody else, please uh share this with your friends and family. Uh, we do have like we're we are building quite a library of episodes ranging all sorts of topics and whatnot. Parents, this podcast may be handy if you've got a kid that needs to write like a history report on something that is a little bit more unique than just like Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Because we could argue that that whole expedition was a dumpster fire in his own.

SPEAKER_03: 1:42:52

Actually, you're not wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:54

Yeah, as we approach Thanksgiving. Um, so yeah, uh grab people's phones, show them how to get here if you've got anybody that's interested in history. Uh, I actually I was talking to one of my drivers today. He had no idea that it had a podcast, and he's a huge history nut. So he's now gonna start listening to everything. I've got some drivers that like to listen to podcasts in terms of like science-y stuff, and we've got we've got a 50-50 mix of sciencey stuff and good old-fashioned historical events and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, the spread the word. It it'll um it yeah, it'll it it'll help us out greatly. So I know Kara, you're I think you're on a vacation from researching.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:37

I'm not.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:38

Oh, you are you working on the next the next dumpster fire?

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:43

Yes. Um, I'll tell you what it is this time. I'm I'm uh I'm working on the Great Depression.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:48

I thought oh wait, that was the well, we talked about the Dust Bowl.

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:52

Yes, we talked about the we touched on the depression, we haven't actually done the depression. And I was like, it's time.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:02

Yeah, yeah. Given how things are going today, economically, it may be a worthwhile. Because it's it's a it's complicated.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:11

It's been very enlightening.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:12

So uh yeah, keep an eye out for that. That is in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:15

No pun intended.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:16

No, but that's a good one.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:18

At least it's not in the borehole.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:20

That's true.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:23

All the mud, with all the mud and explosions.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:29

Gotta keep drilling, Kara. You gotta keep drilling until you get that borehole.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:34

Nice and muddy. And with that, we should probably end the episode. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:41

Yes. So, yeah, guys, keep it a hot mess, and we will catch you for the next episode.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:47

Bye. Uh, the borehole.

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Hello and welcome to your days, Dumpster Fire, where we don't celebrate humanity's humanity's successes, but its most fantastic failures once I learn how to talk. It's not that late. Uh it's it's well it's 1 p.m. It's late enough. I guess. I've been plowing this stupid episode out for like since like two in the morning. Trying to figure that how I'm gonna tell this story. Fair enough. But yes, that that voice you heard in the background there, that is uh our famous co-host and prohibitionist, anti-prohibitionists, pro everything right, con, everything wrong.

SPEAKER_02: 0:45

We'll go with that, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

But yes, so yeah, joy joining joining us as always is Kara, and she is uh joining me on this rabbit hole of mine that try as I might, I could not get this to be like a four-part series.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06

Because if I did, uh I feel like half the nation would be like, oh god, oh god, just a lot of explanations about how oil really reacts to water. Oh god, like so.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24

Yes, if if uh you're joining us today, we're talking about the consequences of the fallout from the uh uh deep water horizon oil rig, drill rig, fallout. Um so if you haven't heard us talk about this before, you might want to go back to what episode 63? Yeah, I think it's 63.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50

Yeah, 63.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

Yeah, 63. So in episode 63, I kind of like broke down, you know, what was the deep water horizon, what was what was going on, what happened. Yeah, it's kind of uh it's kind of a hot mess. Where unfortunately it left 11 men dead, and there was a period of days where like nobody even knew, like the family had no idea. They they were not aware of where is their loved one. So they're out in the middle of the ocean with no way to communicate until after the fact, so yeah, and we still at like at the end of the last episode, we still don't know like what actually happened. Now, with that in mind, with my minutes of experience in engineering, I think I kind of figure out what happened. So let's get into it. So, yeah, let's get into it. But first, let's go back a little bit. Um, let's talk about part five, the response. So, shortly after the uh catastrophic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, Maydays were called everywhere, it went out everywhere, it was like received all over the place. Do you know what Mayday means?

SPEAKER_02: 3:19

I've never actually looked into it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:21

It's actually a French term.

unknown: 3:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:25

Mayday means help me.

SPEAKER_02: 3:29

Because I know it's a call for help, which makes makes sense, but I have never I never actually looked into the history of the word, I guess, the etymology.

SPEAKER_00: 3:38

Yeah, well, and I'm I and I'm pointing to my screen here. I'm I'm I'm noticing that I have completely misspelled that. But yes, is it's a French term to say, I need help, I need help, I need help. Technically, it only needs to be said once, but in a case like this, it was probably said 200 times. Yeah, because we're talking about a deep water horizon drill rig was one of the most safest rigs out there. Its sole job was to kind of like sail out, you know, and then it would sink down into the water, it would sink down, kind of like stabilize itself, and then it would start drilling, and it would drill for like tens of thousands of feet. And its sole job was to like, okay, cool, find oil. They put a blowout preventer on it. Here we are, we're good to go. We're moving on to the next site, and the deep water horizon was rocked by this Mikondo site because it wanted to like push back. It there was so much pressure involved in this oil reservoir that it wanted to blow up the deep water horizon, and unfortunately, it kind of did. So here we are, April 20th, going into April 21st and April 22nd. They the Mayday went out. Uh, and and I'm really shocked that like the Coast Guard sent out like an armada of ships within 24 hours of this. And they were like, they they literally sent out like fire ships, they sent out everything that you could possibly think of to kind of like quell this this fire. So this isn't a uh like what we're getting into is the ecological, the economical, uh, the cost of all this. We're getting into all of that nitty-gritty in this episode, and it's no fault of the responders.

SPEAKER_01: 5:53

No, they were there to help.

SPEAKER_00: 5:55

They well, yeah, yeah, that they're there to help. But how many times in history have we been like, oh my gosh, responders, what are you doing? Like, why what's going on? And yet the American Coast Guard and like they were out there instantly. I did talk to a guy who was about 50 miles away from the actual explosion. He was on another drill rig, and he saw the explosion, and then about 15-20 minutes later, he felt the heat from that explosion.

SPEAKER_02: 6:33

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00: 6:34

So, like, everybody is just like, what is going on? The Coast Guard, what is going on? And so, yeah, the I we gotta give credit where credit's adieu. The Coast Guard was out there doing their best. However, on the 22nd of April of 2010, the deep water horizon essentially melted and sank because all that oil that was coming up was just burning in some crazy inferno, yeah, and it just melted and collapsed. And to this day, the deep water horizon is living up to his name, unfortunately. Um, it's in the deep water, and it is I think it's about a few hundred yards out of from where the BOP was. Okay, so when I say BOP, I want to specify like the BOP is the thing that sits at like the well head and then it extends above, and the BOP has like multiple different types of safety mechanisms that can close off the pipe, it can close off the mud pipe, it can close off the well head, it can close off everything to the point where yeah, it can just shut off everything, it can throw out what is known as a dead hand or a blind shear, meaning you push this button and it will shear off the pipe, like multiple different layers, and it will kill everything.

SPEAKER_02: 8:13

Yeah, that's the um the kill switch you were talking about last episode.

SPEAKER_00: 8:16

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a kill switch or a a dead hand if you're in the uh the the Soviet era and and whatnot. So that's what they tried to do. That failed, everything exploded, and that's where we get our 11 men who who passed and all this. And there's a a lot of heroes, there's a lot of leaders, there's a lot of your average worker, and I didn't want to bring them up in the last episode because uh, like as I kind of like sorted through the news articles and whatnot, they got blamed for everything. That kind of irritated me to like no end, yeah. Because how how how can one person in that situation understand what is going on globally? And so, like, yeah, I kind of left them out, but you can find their names, you can find their records, you can find these families. These 11 families are still battling for some sort of settlement, they're battling for some sorts of like closure. So, yeah, it's uh it from a human resource standpoint. From a um, I don't know. Um God, what's the word I'm looking for? Just from a like a corporate type of perspective, how do you re-e how do you even respond to this?

SPEAKER_02: 9:57

Yeah, I don't know. I'm a historian. No, it's tricky, but yeah, yeah, no, the HR of it all is is it's pretty tough.

SPEAKER_00: 10:07

But I also know you, Kara, and I also know because you've ran accounts and and stuff like that, there's things that you can do to try to like stem off chaos.

SPEAKER_02: 10:22

That's true.

SPEAKER_00: 10:24

Be careful, be empathetic, and try to provide a solution. Yeah, so yeah, shortly after the uh catastrophic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, Maydays went out, people got picked up. It's it's a hot mess. The Coast Guard sent out an armada ships to spray water on the rig, and then and you can find pictures of this. There, there's like four or five like vessels, all they do is spray water on things, and yeah, it's usually one of the first images that come up when you look it up. Exactly, yeah. And then Deep Water Horizon sinks, and now we have a modu in a spot horizontal to where it was drilling. That means the pipeline to the surface had to be severed, and now it is estimated, and it really varies. It varies between about 47,000 gallons of oil per day to 210,000 gallons per day of crude oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, it's so bad. I know, but what like we make it like ultimately humanity fixes it, but we also kind of figure it out after breaking it, yes, after breaking it, but like hey, like ultimately at the end of the day, nature is gonna be like, dude, I kicked your guys' crap in, but good job. I don't know what that looks like in your mind, but once I kind of go over like the fallout from all this, like you you you may see it. So BP calls in a guy, they call in aerospace agencies, they call in all these people, they call in anybody that can provide any sort of data. Bear with me here. There's a lot that BP could have said or done to kind of like ameliorate the situation immediately. However, though, they really did dump some serious money into this, and they did not hesitate, as you will see at the end, because it's not just billions of dollars, it is tens of billions of dollars that they spent to try to like fix this whole issue. So for 87 days, the drill hole spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I know it's the Gulf of America now, but it's the Gulf of Mexico.

SPEAKER_02: 13:03

Continue.

SPEAKER_00: 13:03

Let's face it, yeah. Anybody who's ever grown up in this nation knows that it is a Gulf of Mexico. But for 87 days, this drill hole was just left open, and it was kind of like unabated. And then the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, so the NOAA is how I'm gonna refer to them, and the Coast Guard and the EPA or the Environmental Protection Agency, and a bunch of other federal agencies, as well as universities, created a coalition umbrella over BP. Now, I want to specify right now, yes, BP stands for British Petroleum, British Petroleum. So is this like a British problem?

SPEAKER_02: 13:50

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00: 13:51

Yeah, this is where it gets really confusing.

SPEAKER_02: 13:54

It happened in American waters. So even though BP is controlling it, it probably has to be a collaboration of the two countries to fix it.

SPEAKER_00: 14:04

Ah so you fall into the majority in this regard because British Petroleum was bought out by an American company. Ah. But they kept the BP name, and BP, well, I don't want to say BP. BP took a lot of hit, but like England, the Prime Minister, you name it, from 2010 to like 20 whatever, they received death threats. Uh, they received all sorts of nonsense over stuff because well, if it's an American company now, even though their name is the same, then it has nothing to do with the British. I know. That's silly. Anyway. Well, it's silly, but it's also really freaking stupid. Like, come on, people.

SPEAKER_02: 14:58

Just take five minutes to look up the company before you start setting up death threats.

SPEAKER_00: 15:01

Uh, they did.

SPEAKER_02: 15:03

It makes no sense.

SPEAKER_00: 15:04

And this is what frustrates me about this to no end, is that the media never took the time. And I don't care what media you look at, you read it all, they never took the time to specify that this is yes, British Petroleum, and it's now this other company, it's now based in America, it is controlled by America, it is owned by America.

SPEAKER_02: 15:30

Yeah, then it has nothing to do with the British government.

SPEAKER_00: 15:32

Yeah, yeah. It's just like whatever. Could you imagine being the prime minister and being like Right?

SPEAKER_02: 15:39

They did nothing.

SPEAKER_00: 15:41

What's going on? Uh uh this is the first I'm hearing about it. So, yes, um, the coasts of like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, uh, they were going to get wrecked by all of this oil. And what's crazy is that the oil that actually ended up on their shores, super small. It was like less than 10%.

SPEAKER_02: 16:09

That means it's all in the water, though.

SPEAKER_00: 16:11

Well, and that's where it gets complicated because now we have to figure out in part six how to cap this well from hell. And I use well from hell endearingly because the people that worked on the deep water horizon, they called it the well from hell. This thing kicked a lot, it it tried to do everything it could to blow up the whole rig. I'm amazed that it got to this point so far. There is enough energy in this well or whatever to kind of like be on proportions with a nuclear bomb. So the first step is one, you gotta figure out what in the world is going on. So they sent ROVs, remote operated vehicles. They knew that this was going to be with when the Deepwater Horizon sunk, they knew that it sheared off the well pipe. The BOP was still in place, but like they knew that this was gonna be a hot mess. So they sent ROVs to go out and be like, can we just like turn some knobs and levers and stuff and shut this off? No, no, because there was nothing left to turn off the knobs or turn the levers, but it gets better, and this is where the oh gods are gonna start to come into play. Because, like, the guy they call in, oh, what was his name? He was Bonnet.

SPEAKER_02: 17:49

Uh David Bonnet?

SPEAKER_00: 17:51

David Bonnet, yes. They call in a guy. David Bonnet was literally in Abu Dhabi, and he was like an oil engineer kind of a guy, and they they called him like literally the next day and be like, hey bro, we need you in now. Like in Louisiana, get in here now. Uh, you need to figure out how to fix this. And he's like one of my favorite guys because yeah, he's got like 40 years training in oil digging or uh drilling, he's got all this time, uh, what engineering background and whatnot. So yeah, they call in this guy to be like, we kind of need you to figure this out. So, first response is is this okay. We know that oil floats, therefore let the oil float. He put together a team of people that built a dome. So, like, we have a uh a mega a mega spill here, and it turns out there was actually like two locations, so like he kind of like built this mega rig that would like sit as an umbrella over the entire oil spill, and then that that pipe would feed up into like a uh oil collection vessel and all that kind of stuff. Okay, on paper that it seemed to work. On paper, so in May, yeah, yeah, no, it really does. It's like, hey, dude, if oil floats, like just you know, collect it and just bring it up, and then we'll keep collecting it, and then we'll bottle it up and sell it. On paper, they seem simple enough. And in May of 2010, the dome was placed over the well, and things work fine for a bit. So this is a dumpster fire within a dumpster fire within many, many dumpster fires.

SPEAKER_02: 19:51

I feel like if you look at dumpster fires, that's how they go. It's usually the giant one, and then there's a bunch of little ones in there.

SPEAKER_00: 19:57

Yes, like what garbage bag catches.

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

Is on fire in between.

SPEAKER_00: 20:05

It turns out that the gases mixing with high pressures and extreme cold of the bottom of the ocean creates a substance called methane hydrate crystals. That's fun. I mean, if you're Daenerys store born, you would have loved this stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 20:23

Sounds like it smells like a fart.

SPEAKER_00: 20:25

Um yes, it probably does. Methane hydrate, yeah, it probably does smell like a fart. The problem is it's a solid. That's worse. So it smells like poop. Uh no, it's an ice cube. It doesn't at these temperatures, it would be fine.

SPEAKER_02: 20:40

It would form a solidified fart.

SPEAKER_00: 20:43

It was it was solid methane hydrate poops, and then it would collect underneath the collection well, and then it would build up like severe constipation, and then just block everything.

SPEAKER_02: 20:57

Look at us talking about the three states of matter.

SPEAKER_00: 20:59

Yes. We're actually getting to the fourth state here in a little bit. But yeah, no, like it's actually a a brilliant idea of just like, hey, let's just cover up everything and then just let it all just behave on its own and then travel up the pipeline, and then we can bottle it up, sell it as oil or whatever. But when you have that that methane hydrate crystals, or uh another name for it was called fire ice, it just clogged up everything and it didn't work. The next step is can't we just turn the thing off and rely on the dome thingy to collect all the oil at least contain it?

SPEAKER_02: 21:43

Okay, fair.

SPEAKER_00: 21:45

Yes, to be fair, this would be a logical step. I could see where it would go wrong, I think, but well, the next step was to try to use our old friend mud.

SPEAKER_02: 21:57

Uh mud. We like mud. I like mud.

SPEAKER_00: 22:00

So that's right. All the rectal and poop jokes from the last episode come back to us, but in reverse.

SPEAKER_02: 22:10

Oh, so it sucks right back up there.

SPEAKER_00: 22:13

Oh, it's gonna be right back up there.

SPEAKER_02: 22:16

Oh, that's not healthy, that's awful.

SPEAKER_00: 22:18

It's the bottom of the ocean, the fish don't care. Exit only, they eat their own poop, anyways.

SPEAKER_02: 22:23

Not this kind of poop.

SPEAKER_00: 22:24

Have you seen a goldfish?

SPEAKER_02: 22:25

Yeah, but not this kind of poop. This is fatal poop.

SPEAKER_00: 22:28

I think all poop is fatal. It's the reason why it exits our body, not goes in.

SPEAKER_02: 22:34

That's fair.

SPEAKER_00: 22:35

Anyway, but yeah, the idea here uh with Bonnet's group was like, okay, drilling mud is super heavy, and it can really weigh things down, it can like reduce the pressure. So Bonnet's team tried to block the diarrhoea with constipation. I hate to word it that way, given the ecological disasters, but I kind of have to roll with it. Fair. It is kind of true. So, again, this is a policy that looks good on paper. I'm not sure how this analogy looks on paper of reverse constipation. Um, but I'll let you roll with it. I'll let you create your own mental visual on this.

SPEAKER_02: 23:22

Well, I'm just trying to figure out how they made it constipated.

SPEAKER_00: 23:24

Did they give it a bunch of cheese or sort of what they did is they gave it a that they tried to like block it by doing junk loading, meaning, hey, let's dump in all this mud, all this concrete, let it solidify, let it be super heavy, let it push it all down, and hope that works for the best.

SPEAKER_02: 23:45

Got it. So basically tried to plug the hole.

SPEAKER_00: 23:48

They tried to plug it with constipation, but we all know at the end of the day, diarrhea is gonna win. Okay. So when this pump is now suffering from humanity's meat sweats, uh, now we have an extremely violent well pumping oil into the ocean, and all that mud on top of what was already expelled earlier, and all this other stuff that's coming out is mostly toxic to marine life. Uh it's all now jump the marine life.

SPEAKER_02: 24:23

It's so bad.

SPEAKER_00: 24:25

Yeah, this is this is where it gets absolutely wild, and this is where we are getting into billions of dollars of repairs and and environmental issues and whatnot. So that mud, I would argue, is even more dangerous to marine life than the oil itself. Because at least the oil itself is made of hydrocarbons. The oil itself is made of you know, just like broken down dinosaurs. That's not how it works, but that kind of computes on her head a little bit. This mud is gnarly, it is heavy metals, it is heavy compounds, it is teratogens, it is all sorts of nastiness. So they've tried to cap this thing off, they tried collecting oil from it with this doohickey, they've tried sticking pipes inside of pipes to try to like get down into there to try to like figure out like, all right, cool. Okay, we can't send one. I hate to say it this way. You don't want to send one big pipe down the hole, you want to send many smaller pipes down the hole. Uh I see Kara just like, oh dear. It's like a uh it's like a junior high locker room right now.

SPEAKER_02: 26:05

It's so bad.

SPEAKER_00: 26:07

It is, uh, but when it comes to stuff like this, it it it it it does kind of work. So the issue when you have multiple pipes in one hole, um you're you're gonna get some stuff that's gonna leak out.

SPEAKER_02: 26:25

And even that's what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 26:31

Yes, yes. Um, but yeah, you're you're still gonna get stuff working its way around this method. The drill ship Discoverer Enterprise managed to collect 924,000 gallons of crude oil using this method. So by sending a whole bunch of stuff down there, even though knowing that stuff was going to be escaping, by trying to collect as much as they can, 924,000 gallons of crude oil that they can now turn around to sell, that's uh that's not a half-bad approach. And it did buy some time for the surface cleanup crew to try and figure things out. Because don't forget, at the same time that this was going on, you had tens of thousands of people trying to like collect this oil, absorb this oil, skim this oil, burn the oil.

SPEAKER_02: 27:29

Like just trying to get rid of it.

SPEAKER_00: 27:31

Yeah, they're just trying to just collect it for whatever it's whatever it can be, and yeah, it it still was a problem, and this was not a permanent fix. They found out they had a second leak.

SPEAKER_02: 27:46

Good. I'm sure they were real thrilled about that.

SPEAKER_00: 27:51

Actually, they weren't.

SPEAKER_02: 27:55

You don't say well, they weren't surprised by it.

SPEAKER_00: 28:00

So, Kara, and and and you as our audience, you can do the same thing, and this is gonna tie in later on to what I'm talking about pipes with multiple holes and and and all that kind of stuff. Next time you make spaghetti, take a dry noodle. Again, that sounds weird, take a dry noodle, grab it end to end, and then bend it. How many pieces does it break into?

SPEAKER_02: 28:32

I'll let you know. I'll go try it, and then I'll report back.

SPEAKER_00: 28:36

You're gonna discover that it's gonna break into three. Because when you bend a rod, such of brittle substances like a uh starches or carbohydrates or whatever, or metal, when you bend it, when it breaks, it's gonna break into three separate sections. So now we have two leaks. So thankfully, on May 10th, some uh smart people, I'm assuming they had really, really thick glasses, lots of pens in their pocket.

SPEAKER_02: 29:14

Oh, that's a stereotype. Leave the nerds alone.

SPEAKER_00: 29:18

Yeah, but it's also the nerds that figure stuff out. Right, that's why we need them. They kind of solve a lot of these problems.

SPEAKER_02: 29:27

Yes, we need them, they're good people.

SPEAKER_00: 29:30

So in May, what these nerds decided to do, and and and nerds is an understatement, it's actually it's a misstatement. Um, these are people like Bonnet and the rest of them that are like, cool, I just got pulled out of my site to go spend the next 87 days here working 24, 7 hours a day to figure this out. And if I don't, I lose my career. Like what they were able to accomplish, I'm sorry, yes, did it take 87 days and did it cause unbelievable amounts of damage because they couldn't figure it out sooner? Yes, however, though, they did figure it out and it could have been so much longer and so much worse.

SPEAKER_02: 30:20

Oh, yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_00: 30:22

That's kind of how my mindset is, and and you'll notice that I really haven't focused on names of the executives of BP. I haven't focused on a lot of like, oh my goodness, what could have possibly happened? Who screwed up? I don't know. I just don't think people screwed up here. I think this was a matter of people trying to do what they feel is best to fix the problem, given what they were given. I can't fault a person for that. I'm sorry. I I know our show is about dumpster fires. I know our show for the most part revolves around people that have really crapped the bed, but it's super hard to really pass judgment for anybody who is in that moment sometimes, especially in a situation like this where it was only 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_02: 31:14

I think we have done a good job in explaining the perspectives of people who make the choices they make. So I I I I would defend us in that we don't really unless it's somebody who deserves it.

SPEAKER_00: 31:28

We don't really like Adolf Hitler.

SPEAKER_02: 31:30

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00: 31:33

We we can't even have a show on Adolf Hitler because the animosity that we have against such a guy would would tarnish a show. Like there was no way we could ever be balanced on somebody like Himmler or Hitler or other mass murdering psychotic despots out there.

SPEAKER_02: 31:54

Yeah, I couldn't. It would have to be done in a certain way.

SPEAKER_00: 31:58

It would be, or like with the Native Americans, because I know we're we're passing Thanksgiving. Like, I I would want somebody from the Native American community on this show to moderate it, regulate it, and keep it truthful. So there's a reason why we haven't done a lot of stuff like this, and and and it's with that train of thought, is one of the reasons why, like, I'm kind of taking the approach that I am with this, is like I'm trying to focus on the people that are trying to fix the problem, not cover it up. Like, let's celebrate those guys. So, what Bonnet and his team did was like, okay, Kara, have you ever had an explosive ejectile like pimple before?

SPEAKER_02: 32:51

I feel like everybody has, especially in their teenage years, you know? Yeah, that's a normal human body thing.

SPEAKER_00: 33:00

Where it's like, man, you squeeze this thing, and it's you're you're gonna spend a half hour cleaning your bathroom mirror.

SPEAKER_02: 33:09

That's a long time to clean up a mirror. That's a big pimple.

SPEAKER_00: 33:13

I think it happens more to like male sports players. Possibly. So there was another idea brought on board that I thought was kind of clever was like, okay, the main deep water horizon site is like the pressure is just astronomical. Whatever we would do with this thing, like if we try to cap it with a dome or whatever, it doesn't work. And like the next step is like, okay, let's try to relieve the pressure. Hence the pimple analogy. If you have two pimples that are connected, releasing one eases the pressure on the other. This is exactly what has been running through your mind all day today, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02: 34:07

No, I've been deep in the 1930s. So no.

SPEAKER_00: 34:15

But yeah, no, the idea was that they sent out, and uh I love the name of these ships, the development driller three.

SPEAKER_02: 34:23

I like the number at the end. It's good.

SPEAKER_00: 34:25

Yes. I I feel like this is something that you could only find in very specific shops. So I'll just let you roll with that. Because they also send out another driller for the uh the for the purposes of of releasing more pressure, the development driller two. Wow. Right. On on May 16th. So, like the idea, so May 10th, hey, let's send out a driller, we'll go down near the Mercando site, try to relieve pressure. And what it was is that it would try to vent out gases again. If you're uh if you're a specific item and a specific source called the uh development driller three and the development driller two, releasing specific gases, you've got a task on your hand.

SPEAKER_01: 35:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 35:37

And it's a mission. Yes. But yeah, the idea was like, okay, if we can drill enough holes around the bottom of the ocean until the main leak to just like calm the F down. Like, dude. Now, the engineering involved in this is incredible because they had to look at the pressure of the values of the oil, the crude oil and gases spilling out of the main drill head from the deep water horizon. And then they had to figure out how far out they need to go to drill relief holes to vent some of those gases and pressures out so that they could readdress the the main issue. That's uh that that's some incredible modeling and math. And I was in engineering school around that time where we were kind of given much scaled back problems to this, like way back when there was this like, oh, you know, what's the difference if you subtract 30% of the pressure of this heat sink versus that flow valve and and whatever? And from what I remember being awake in those courses, it's pretty involved.

SPEAKER_02: 37:05

I commend you for being awake.

SPEAKER_00: 37:07

Um, well, for the ones that I was awake for. There's a reason why I became an English teacher, which that gives you an idea of just how bad it was when you go from mechanical engineering to British lit.

SPEAKER_02: 37:26

I wouldn't even give engineering a try. I know my limitations.

SPEAKER_00: 37:30

So but I also know that you would never give British lit a try.

SPEAKER_02: 37:35

I would. I have. I've done it. Remember, my minor is in literature.

SPEAKER_00: 37:41

Literature, but like old school British lit from like John Dunn.

SPEAKER_02: 37:46

And I've I've taken a class on Brit lit.

SPEAKER_00: 37:49

Yeah, it's kind of boring.

SPEAKER_02: 37:51

Yeah, there were some there's some that I like, and there's some where I'm like, it's not my favorite. You know, it's fine. Just like everything else.

SPEAKER_00: 38:01

Yeah, yeah. There's gonna be pros and cons to all of it. So they start drilling these these vent wells, and now it it made it possible to like start capping off this main leak. By June 3rd, pieces of the damaged well head were removed and a new cap was installed that in conjunction with the reef wells and a subsequent cap, the flow of oil can now be somewhat retained. However, the US government, when they kind of looked at what happened, uh thinks that 50% of the oil was still being vented into the Gulf of Mexico.

SPEAKER_02: 38:48

But that's only 50%.

SPEAKER_00: 38:50

It's half yeah, yeah, that's less than glass half full. Yeah, yeah. It's it's way less than than what it was, but it's still well, it's like the 3.5 Ronkin thing in Chernobyl. It's like, oh, it's not terrible, but not great, kind of a kind of a thing. But some containment was achieved, and some value could be pulled from the wreckage. On June 10th, 2010, we're introduced to what I love the name of this. And I'm I'm reading a book about like interstellar travel through like timelines and everything, and the universe purposely puts these things in place to keep us like I cannot appear in a timeline when you're in high school, like the universe won't let me, and in physics, that's called a top hat. Okay, so a top hat is what keeps 42 year old men from showing up in you know, 15, 16 year old girls' lifetimes, but it also that does a laws.

SPEAKER_02: 40:00

But yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:01

Yeah, well, yeah, thankfully we have social laws for all of that. Um, unless I was a school teacher.

SPEAKER_02: 40:09

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 40:10

Wait, what year did you graduate?

SPEAKER_02: 40:12

2011.

SPEAKER_00: 40:12

Okay, I started teaching in 2012. So the laws still don't apply. Cool. All right. But like these top hats are kind of designed to be like an end-all be-all. Like, we're gonna cap this thing off with these top hats, and it's gonna be great because we have the top hat number 10. It's better than the number nine.

SPEAKER_02: 40:35

Does it go to 11?

SPEAKER_00: 40:36

Doesn't go to 11. It doesn't need to be 11. It's just easy to be. And um, this thing was interesting. And and I've seen some of the engineering on it. It's kind of cool because it combines everything from like siphoning oil out to using vents to dump in more and more uh cement and mud to try to like keep the pressure down. Like it was the end all be all. Like it was supposed to do all the things. It's supposed to, and and you know how well anything engineered that is designed to do all the things.

SPEAKER_02: 41:29

The uh the construction guys on the field would beg to differ with the engineers, the time old argument that is in the construction world.

SPEAKER_00: 41:38

Yes, like the the the machinists and the whatnot were that and my my dad, who was a machinist, hated engineers because he would look at these plans and be like, This can't work. This is this is breaking the laws of physics, yeah. And then the engineers would go back to my dad and be like, How can you not figure out how to break the laws of physics?

SPEAKER_02: 42:02

Yes, it's still it's still in uh that conundrum is still in effect today.

SPEAKER_00: 42:08

Uh yes, given your current profession, I'm pretty sure you are well aware of that. It's funny. I find it is kind of funny because then you go back and you'd be like, guys, physics isn't just recommendations, it's the freaking law. It just won't work. So you can imagine whenever you have a top hat number 10 attached to uh this sort of situation, it's gonna go off just like I hate the word it, it it's gonna pop off like Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

SPEAKER_02: 42:47

There were so many other analogies that I could have thought of.

SPEAKER_00: 42:54

A party. I'm just trying to think of top hat, and whenever you think of top hat, but actually, no, wait, wait a second. He didn't wear a top hat, he wore a stovetop. Yeah, he wore a top hat. No, it was a stovetop. It was like a little top. Yeah, straight up and it was super tall. Yeah, those were the stovetops.

SPEAKER_02: 43:12

Oh, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 43:13

A top hat is shorter.

SPEAKER_02: 43:15

Okay. I think most people think top hat, they don't really think about the technical differences.

SPEAKER_00: 43:21

Okay, so what analogy would you provide?

SPEAKER_02: 43:25

I don't know. You said pop off like a party, you know, like a poop party or something that would have a poop party? Yeah, with the mud and the oil, you know, we're gonna keep the poop thing going. But you went with assassination.

SPEAKER_00: 43:41

I I went to like you went to like eight or nine, I went to like 12. Just okay, so like a uh a party pooper popper, uh the the top hat thing didn't work. So back to the drawing board. Shockingly, on July 15th, the best option up to this point, and and it it just blows my mind how simple this was. You send one of those remote operated vehicles down with a bolt-on valve. Okay, you open up the valve so that the oil and the gases can pop out, do whatever they need to do. Keep in mind, we are in July, 210,000 gallons of oil a day has been spent. So bad. So here's the thing, and this is what I love, and this is this is where like I I love the engineering behind this. You put this open valve down, you bolt it on to the BOP. Okay, that's the damaged BOP, the blowout preventer from the last episode that caused all the havoc. Let's just bolt it onto this thing. Now, here's the key: you slowly close it. So this is where it's it it gets really interesting, and and I want you to keep this in in mind here. Okay. If you slowly close something, would you agree that that would help reduce stress in other areas?

SPEAKER_02: 45:20

Yeah, I feel like it would give it time to slowly equalize its pressure, kind of like when we were talking about the Biford dolphin, and you have to slowly come up to give your body time to adjust. Similar to that.

SPEAKER_00: 45:34

Well, and that's the thing, is it's like there was a few people that understood that, like, okay, let's manually close it off, but do this over the course of hours. And this is the point where like BP and Transocean had an idea, or some people did, that like, hmm, let's try approaching this differently. Instead of just trying to like solve it in one crack shot, because it's already been blowing out oil at 210,000 gallons a day for the past 60 days, eight hours isn't gonna change much. So, you remember those two root uh relief wells? So on I have August here, that's feasibly impossible.

SPEAKER_02: 46:23

Actually, no, no, July, so that makes sense. We were in July, so that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 46:30

Yeah, it did. It took him a couple of months. I thought I mistyped it and put April in, but that one even made more sense. So, like on August 4th, testing on those two uh relief wells were proving effective, and then what they were doing is they had those two relief wells just sending everything it could up to the ships up top. The ships would separate the gases and then just barted out the side of the ship at a flame. A lot of blue flames. I'm pretty sure all the men were like, oh yeah, I can relate after that last breakfast burrito. I know you you're married to. You've you've experienced those gas blowouts.

SPEAKER_02: 47:16

I plead the fifth.

SPEAKER_00: 47:18

It's called a uh Dutch oven for anybody who's been in the game long enough.

SPEAKER_02: 47:22

But she's just as the woman, I am not going to respond.

SPEAKER_00: 47:26

Because anybody who is not married understands it's both parties that contribute to that action.

SPEAKER_02: 47:34

It's true.

SPEAKER_00: 47:37

But like those those two relief wells, um, yeah, they they tested positive. And so, like, suddenly now, like, okay, we can address this original well, and anybody can go onto YouTube. This is one of the coolest things about this whole incident, is like, you like a lot of this stuff was made public. A lot of people had a higher speed internet in 2010 through 2015. A lot of people could see live time real footage of what was going on, and they literally had like a webcam just focused on this well, like 24-7, just watching it just billow out, you know, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil. So once the media saw that, like, oh, okay, it sounds like somebody's got this under control, they were now able to take off on September 3rd the 300-ton failed blowout preventer. Think about that. A 300-ton failed blowout preventer was removed and a new one was installed. On September 16th, here's our friend Mud again in cement was injected into the reef wells at a very, very, very slow weight. There's that phrase again. Let's let's proceed slowly. Let's not let's not try to piss off the guy and gods here anymore than we need to. And there is a company that's gonna get sued to oblivion. Um they left on the deep water horizon early without confirming that that cement pad that they had the blow-up preventer on and everything was fully cured. Here, they're like, no, no, no, no. Let's give it some time, let's give it a few days, let it cure. We can now close off those valves. And finally, on September 19th, 2010, National Incident Commander Tad Allen. Sorry, I have nothing against Tad, it's just really T-H-A-D.

SPEAKER_02: 49:54

It's a name, I think it's short for Thaddeus.

SPEAKER_00: 49:57

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_02: 49:59

I think so.

SPEAKER_00: 50:00

Okay, I had no idea. That actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah, whereas like Thaddeus is kind of a cool name, which is short, shortened up, like uh Frank Franklin. What about Todd?

SPEAKER_02: 50:15

Todd.

SPEAKER_00: 50:17

Todd?

SPEAKER_02: 50:18

I think that's another version for Thaddeus, too. I could be wrong though on that one.

SPEAKER_00: 50:22

Or it's just Todd. Like everybody I've ever known. Yeah, it's just Todd.

SPEAKER_02: 50:27

Yeah, it could just be Todd, and that's cool, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 50:29

Yeah, I've never known a Todd that could go by any other name, but I could see Tad going by Thaddeus.

SPEAKER_04: 50:37

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 50:37

That's yeah, that's kind of cool. So, all right. Thanks for correcting my research on that one. That's what I'm here for. Yeah, I should have picked up on that earlier. Uh, but, anyways, yeah, the National Incident Commander uh Tad or Thaddeus, if that's your name, please email us at the uh daysdumpster fire gmail.com. Let us know what your real name is. And if you do want to like add something to this, because I know I'm missing a bunch of stuff, like hit me up. We're totally cool having having you on. So yeah, on on September 19th, uh Ted Allen officially declared the well effectively dead, and like it's it's so crazy because like that's how they refer to this like, how do we kill the well? How do we kill the well? How do we kill it? How do we end the life of this thing? And there are so many pictures and diagrams out there. You care, I'm sure I'm sure you'll have some on the days from Safire.com. Like, it is such a complicated process to get all of this to work in tandem just to put a cork in it. Like, that's all they had to do was just put a cork in it. And it was such a monumental task that took 87 days, and like when Bonnet and his crew was called in, I I'm pretty sure out of all those 87 days that he was working on this, he probably got nine hours of sleep.

SPEAKER_02: 52:16

Yeah, I can imagine.

SPEAKER_00: 52:18

So, part seven. The cleanup. Here's another dumpster fire. I'm gonna make some references to the uh Tory Canyon episode.

SPEAKER_02: 52:31

It's a good one.

SPEAKER_00: 52:31

Because like cleaning up the oil is just as tricky as like trying to stop it from flowing. So there was a whole bunch of different methods that were used to clean the oil slick. Um, like people were out there treating this as though it was like a shipwreck, right? Like the Torrey Canyon cracked open outside of Britain and all this oil dumped out, but we knew how much was on there, and they knew the measures that would effectively take care of that. But there was 210,000 gallons of crude oil being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico per day. This made contaminant or uh containment and cleanup very difficult. The daily dose of crude oil being dumped into the Gulf made it seem like to some people, when I was listening to some other podcasts about it and whatnot, they're like, dude, this disaster has a mind of its own. Like we have to respond differently every day to because it it changes every day. Whereas if you crack a boat in half, well, we can look at the paperwork and tell how much oil is really on this thing. So, one huge advancement um that the uh NOAA or NOAA had at their disposal was satellite imaging. And this was a game changer. This was a a new thing that was coming out. This is when Google Maps was starting to come out, and this made it so that like every day people could log on, look at satellite imagery, and see like, oh, here's where this flood is, here is where you know that that leak is at, here is where this slick is at. And they actually got to the point where they could do infrared imaging because like certain thicknesses of oil would have a different infrared bounce back than say like a lower thickness, and they were even able to tell, like, okay, we need to send boats out with booms here, we need to send boats out that can just light the stuff on fire here, and then we can send out the boats that can put disbursement or disburns all over the place here. This is this is probably one of the greatest accomplishments to restoring human-related disasters in history, and and we're talking aerospace companies, we're talking tech companies, we're talking like everybody was just like, hey, look, we spent billions of dollars getting these satellites up there, use them from whatever you need. And that's like to me, one of the coolest things was one, how fast your response was to the initial disaster, and two, like everybody, like universities and whatnot, just go take our equipment, do what you gotta do.

SPEAKER_02: 55:48

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00: 55:51

That that to me is called human advancement. Yes, humans caused this problem or had a hand in it, but humans also banded together to try to make it better again. So it's just not something that we see every day, and I want to celebrate that more than like, oh, this business executive wanted to cover this up, or this HR person wanted to cover that up, or I don't want to focus on that crap. I want to focus on the people that were like, okay, we're gonna figure this out, and we're gonna fix this at all costs. I kind of like that. So that's that's that's that's the big difference between this, and and there's like other podcasts out there, and I encourage you to listen to them because they do an incredible deep dive into all of this stuff where they look at every aspect, every person that was involved, everything. Remember, we don't celebrate humanity's successes, we celebrate their fantastic failures, and the people that are cleaning up these failures and the things that went wrong, they need to be celebrated. Anyways, let's go back to these satellites. These satellites concluded that the oil slick was, and this was about June, July. The oil slick was about the size of the state of Oklahoma. There weren't enough, yeah, that that's massive, and there weren't enough ships with booms to try to like encapsulate the oil. Because you've seen it before. I think uh anybody's seen it before where they'll send out ships with these giant floaties that will try to like circle an oil slick and then like contain everything. There wasn't enough ships, there wasn't enough booms to affect or to correct what was going to happen to all five affected states. So that's like Florida to Texas. It got so bad that President Barack Obama had to fly out and work with my personal hero, Rear Admiral Mary Landry of the United States Coast Guard, who was one of the first ones to respond to the April 20th disaster. Basically, he got with these folks and like, okay, who are we gonna prioritize because we don't have enough to go around? And yeah, it's just like, yeah, he they they they had to call the shots. Like, I'm sorry for other states. Uh, you're going to lose billions of dollars of your coastal economy because we have to do what we have to do. And it kind of goes back to like when you and I were both working together in trucking, when something was failing horribly, the proper procedure was one, tell the customer that their load is failing. And then now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always told anybody that I trained or I worked with, it's like, you tell the customer what is going wrong, and then what are you going to do about it?

unknown: 59:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 59:13

It may not want to be what they want to hear, but it is going to be what they need to hear. And that's all there is to it. And I feel like that that solves so many problems. But we're also talking about paper rolls failing, not your entire billion-dollar fishing coastal line being slathered in crude oil.

SPEAKER_02: 59:37

Though I did have that one that caught fire that one time.

SPEAKER_00: 59:40

Yes, you did. I think every good account manager should have a load that catches fire.

SPEAKER_02: 59:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 59:45

Anyway, my brother had one of full of pizzas that caught fire. In a cornfield.

SPEAKER_02: 59:50

Probably smelled good.

SPEAKER_00: 59:52

At first, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 59:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 59:55

It's like being thrown on the rack, right? You know, where you got your arms and your feet. Being stretched out, you know for a fact there's a period of 10 seconds where, like, oh yeah, this feels great.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:05

That's true. And then your body straightens out.

unknown: 1:00:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:08

Oh yeah. Oh man.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:10

And then it gets painful after that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:11

Yeah. And then, and then 10 seconds later, your arms are ripped out of your sockets. That's gotta be what that pizza load was like. Where it's just like, man, man, where's the pizza? Oh oh oh man, it smells like uh people are dying out here. I feel like it's gotta be one of those things. Unfortunately, none of that happened here with the uh Deep Water Horizon. So, oh boy. Um, so yeah, the president and rear admiral Mary Landry, they had to come out and they're like, okay, this is what we've got to work with, this is all we can work with. I I will give BP some credit here. At the drop of a hat, they ordered like 32 more vessels to come out to help with the cleanup. Like they just paid cash, whatever, get out there, do what you gotta do. Uh, and they also paid for a lot of helicopters and planes and all that kind of stuff. Now let's go back to April 22nd, 2010. Deepwater Horizon just sank. And first, since the day of the incident, the US Coast Guard was like, Yeah, we don't see any oil floating around out here because there wasn't any. Um, they the oil hasn't come to the surface yet. And before that, they couldn't tell anything different because, well, think about it, it wasn't a thing. They're all the oil was just being leaked out, was being burned at the inferno on top of the Derrick on the rig. So cool. However, once the rig sank, the US Coast Guard and NOAA saw oil forming on their surface, and there was like an O crap moment. They're like, they did hit oil, and it is now spewing into the ocean on April 22nd. Planes carrying tons. We're talking, I think I saw somewhere, it was like 1.3 million tons of chemical dispersants started dumping their their contents all over where they could think where there was a leak. God. Now, the dispersants, I I okay. They they may they may have kind of had like an knee-jerk reaction to it, but I can also see why. Because in a lot of respects, that oil that was coming up could have already been the thousands of gallons of oil that was only on the rig, right? That's a static situation. Cool, you know, we have uh a couple hundred thousand gallons of oil that's spewing out of a rig. That's fine. We'll just put the dispersants on it and it will go. But when we look back at the uh Tory Canyon episode, those those dispersants are like a double-edged sword. Yes, they help disperse the oil, they help it sink below where microbes can take care of it. They they do their job well, they're also like insanely toxic to the wildlife and the corals and invertebrates and the fish and everything else. So I have a funny feeling, and I know for a fact, Carrie, you and I have both been in this situation where it's just like we need to contain this issue, we'll deal with the aftermath, whatever it may be later on, but we've got to get something going now. And it's like a a Franklin Delano Roosevelt approach. Say what anybody wants to say about him. I we we've got to accept the fact that his mindset was like, okay, a third of our nation is in poverty, we've got a mass murdering psychopath across the ocean. Winston Churchill hasn't been sober since he was an infant. Like, we've got to try something. If it doesn't work, then try something else.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:19

And sometimes we'll be talking about him a lot next episode.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:24

Well, sometimes it's just like, yeah, you just gotta try something, and and and it may result in problems down the road, but I can't fault somebody not being none the wiser and okay, this has gotta be coming from the the rig, not the well. Use dispersants, it'll be fine. So by May and June, every available ship that could be that could pull booms were out 24-7. The goal was to corral as much as the oil slick as possible so that it could be barreled up and sold. I didn't know this, but there was like actual according to the uh NOAA podcast, there's like actual companies, that's all they do. There's an average of 200 oil spills a year, granted they're not as big as this as the Deep Water Horizon, but like all they do is they like they suck up this oil and then they turn around and sell it as like their own crude oil. Like, they literally have their own business model revolving around other people spilling their oil, and then they just turn around and sell it for a profit. Like, it's kind of like all those times we had those paper roll shifts, and there were companies that were set up, that's all they do is they just hang out on that Oregon uh Northern California coat or uh boundary, and they're like, hey, your load is shifted, we can fix that for you in 10 minutes for$6,000. Like that's all they do. Which I mean, yeah, it's I I don't want to say it's shallow. I don't want to say I don't want to criticize them because they are actually helping. Like we're using a capitalist Yeah, you're using a capitalistic environment or a situation to really clean up something. Like I said, the first trillionaire in human history will be the one that can get the carbon out of our atmosphere and fix global warming. The guy who can figure out how to do that and use that carbon in a profitable way, instant trillionaire. That's just my my own two cents. You probably don't agree with it, but in a in this world, if you can figure out a way to solve a massive problem and still be profitable, then kind of good on you, man. Like, and I'm not saying electric cars are the way. Sorry, Elon. You can email me at the daysomier at gmail.com. Kara may not read it. Because it's a we we we are now kind of getting into another problem here. At the peak of the cleanup process, 47,840 men and women were assigned to the 6,000 marine vessels, 82 helicopters, and then the little tiny 20 fixed wings aircraft that were probably dispensing dispersants everywhere. But they that that is like how many people were called out to work on this. The other thing was hey, let's just burn the oil. So, what they actually had, they had ships uh that came out, and there was like 411 controlled burns. So they would try to like corral as much like thinner level oil as possible. Whereas like the thicker level oil, they could skim that, bottle it, sell it, or barrel it and sell it. The thinner stuff that was only like one or two microns, dude, just flick a match in the ocean, just take care of it. So, like, yeah, there was between uh April and mid-July, there was 411 controlled burns that took place. So, like, imagine the pollution that put in the air. Imagine the stuff that didn't burn now sinking into the ocean. It's a double-edged sword.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:33

Like, we gotta take care of putting it like we gotta take care of the oil, but uh so like the air now, the ocean, the air, our world, our planet.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:44

We got well, so the idea is that so this is like a bioengineering thing, and I actually studied this for a week in college. If you can render something down to basic carbon, there will be bacteria that will eat it. There will be biomicromes that will take care of those other toxic things that can come down. Because what happens is that things now eat those things, and then it gets rendered down further. So, like you and I, your family, my family, we know that you're an idiotity thing. You don't have a lot of fat on you, but the the fat that you do have, and you're like, no, I'm actually a Twinkie, I'm just small, but but the like the fats and the cholesterols and the phosphates, the sulfates, the permanganates, all those things that are in your body now came from a bacteria that got eaten some point in the past. And a lot of times, those compounds, those polyatomics, can only be derived from burning hydrocarbons. Now, generally speaking, in nature, that's like forest fires, that's wildfires, that's like you know, being having that the you know, the one six fish that are just getting blasted by lightning, like that's that's where those come from. That's why they're in such minuscule amounts. But that's kind of the idea is it's like, hey, this is gonna suck short term, but again, Earth is gonna try to figure itself out one way or another. And by reducing the elements, reducing complex, like we saw that list in the last episode of all the things that you can pull out of crude oil, none of which nature can use. Yeah, but if you can render that down, okay, it's gonna look like crap, but it may be able to work itself out that way. There was another problem, though. The satellites that were surveying everything like on a daily basis, they're like the amount of oil that we are seeing on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico doesn't come anywhere close to what is spewing out of the wellhead below. So now we run into the problem of like the Torre Canyon, right? You take a oil tanker, you crack it in half, oil spills out. Yes, it is a disaster, yes, it isn't a mess. But you can look at the paperwork and tell, like, oh, this is how much oil we're going to be dealing with. It is a static incident. The deep water horizon is a very dynamic situation. Every day it's different. Every day it's just more and more oil being dumped out. And one of the things that they discovered was those dispersants that they sent out, where they drenched the surface of the ocean with all the dispersants. Yeah, it did their job, but then those dispersants sank. But now you have an oil well that is spewing out 210,000 gallons of oil every day being carried by the current with the dispersants now raining on top of it, thousands of feet below. Well, those dispersants are going to get to work. Those dispersants are, oh hey, there's oil, let's go. And it proceeded to disperse the oil, which prevented it from ever getting to the top. And it is estimated that 50 to 75 percent of the 134 million gallons of oil that came out total of this well, so 134 million gallons of oil, 50 to 75 percent of it never made it to the surface. Dang, it stayed in the middle of the ocean. Crazy. Which now we've got wildlife, animals, fish, sharks, you name it, breathing that in.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:07

And crude oil is nothing like the oil that you get from like your parts store. Crude oil, like I I would I would wager that you could take a spoonful of motor oil, swallow that. I'm not a doctor, I'm not saying anybody do this, but I feel like you could take a spoonful of that stuff versus crude oil, take a spoonful of that. I guarantee you the crude oil is gonna rock your world. The nasty stuff. The motor oil is gonna rock your world, but like the crude oil is gonna rock your world in terms of like exclamation points, with maybe a death metal band playing in the background.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:53

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:54

So, so yeah, all those dispersants that like they they're thinking that at least half to three quarters of the oil that was being dumped into the ocean never made it to the surface where it could be reclaimed, regardless of BP's efforts, regardless of all the other ships, like they did a remarkable job. They really did collect like millions of gallons of oil, but millions of gallons of oil compared to 134 million. Drop in the buggy. That's that's brutal. So eventually, once they kind of got this thing somewhat capped off, where they were able to replace the old BOP, put a new one on there, they got their the relief wells, those are now capped off. Everything just turned their attention to the shorelines. Um, economically, this was a disaster because the volume of fishing that takes place between Florida and Texas. By June 21st, 2010, 37% of the Gulf of Mexico's fisheries were ordered to shut down, uh, which cost them about six billion dollars of revenue because you safely can't eat the fish that are coming out of the oceans when they're filled, were in the pet industry. You never really worked, you never worked in a pet shop, have you?

SPEAKER_04: 1:15:12

Mm-mm.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:13

So there's there's a thing in the pet shop industry where it's called gut packing. So let's say you want to feed your leopard gecko some crickets. What you would do is you'd buy crickets, you would give them all sorts of vitamins and nutrients and whatnot, and then you would feed them to you'd gut pack them, you'd feed that to your leopard gecko, so then your leopard gecko would get all those nutrients and vitamins and whatnot. It's the exact opposite in this situation, because now you have fish that is being gut-packed with toxic chemicals that's not safe for any consumption. Yeah. So, like, sorry, fishermen and and vessels and fisheries, you gotta shut down. Um in terms of tourism, it is estimated that 20.8 billion dollars was lost between 2010 and 2013. A lot of it's because the food couldn't be eaten. And there are so many documentaries of like people are like, dude, we're we're gonna die. Like, we we can't produce food, we can't make money, we can't do anything because of this oil spill.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:29

Yeah, people don't realize it's a vital part of our not just our economy, but it also it's where we get fish in that area, it's where we get a lot of stuff, rely on it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:38

And I would hazard to say that whenever you have a any coastal community, the seafood that you get is a part of their culture. Like it is a mainstayer in their culture. So, like if you go to Japan and you suddenly tell the entire country of Japan, sorry, you can't collect fish for sushi, that's gonna really collect fish at all, that'd be bad. Yeah, like you can't collect anything, like that's gonna be very damaging to somebody, uh like a business owner or whatever in Japan, then say, like, in North Dakota.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:16

So it's like, yeah, it's one of those things where when you look at the culture of that area in between Florida and Texas, and you you look at all those coastlines where it's super tourism heavy, it is super food heavy, uh super seafood heavy, and it all comes from the Gulf of Mexico, and everything is covered in oil. Like, I saw so many videos on YouTube where they were doing interviews with like local fishermen and whatnot, and I could see in their eyes like they have no idea what their future is gonna be like. Because this problem is gonna take years to fix. And I don't know about you, I I don't have enough saved up for years to figure out something else.

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:08

Yeah, yeah, but when that's all you know for generations on end, yeah, but you still need to figure it out, or else you're dead in the water. Yeah, you can't let stubbornness and pride mess you up like that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:21

No, no, no, no. It I I agree. I'm just saying, like, at first, when that happens to you, that sucks.

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:28

Oh, it's terrifying, yeah. It's terrifying, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:31

Because a lot of them did figure it out, and a lot of them, like ultimately, if you've got a family you need to provide for, you're gonna figure it out.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:40

Um, but I I've been in that feeling before, and it is terrifying.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:46

It it especially when you don't even know how to proceed. Like, okay, cool. I gotta change professions now. What? I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, thanks, government. Appreciate you for telling me that my life is ruined. So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife uh department, uh, they began uh work to start rescuing animals from this spill. Uh the spill area that the Deepwater Horizon incident caused affected nearly 9,000 different types of species. Man. Yeah, you know, like when you play Minecraft and you switch over to like God mode, and you can just like hit spacebar twice, go up a bunch of blocks, and then head forward for like five minutes, and now you're suddenly in a different biome where you've got like weird mushrooms and whatnot.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:39

You're talking to the wrong human, but I'm sure we have a few listeners who know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:43

You've never played Minecraft to the point where you just went to a different area, like No, I get bored of Minecraft. Oh.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:52

Yeah. It's not for me. I tried it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:01

I could share my screen with you right now. I literally have SimCity 3000 playing in the background.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:07

I actually love um those like Sim games, Roller Coaster Tytoon, Zoo Tycoon, Planet Zoo, Planet Coaster, all of those games. I love them.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:16

Like City.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:17

I just can't do Minecraft.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:19

Yeah. It is kind of weird, but it is also like a great way to just be like, what happens if I try this?

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:29

And no, it's fair. I understand.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:31

We had a lot of students that were like hardcore Minecrafters.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:36

Yeah. I always felt bad when they asked me if I played it, and I had to tell them no.

unknown: 1:20:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:41

If it had better graphics, would you play it?

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:45

Probably not. It's not the graphics.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:49

It's just the concept behind the game where you're just plopped down in the middle of nowhere and just figure it out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:54

I just don't have enough interest in it. Because I can play ARK for hours.

unknown: 1:21:00

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:03

Yeah, see, I won't get into ARC because that will like there's a reason why I gave up on City Skylines because I can't I don't have enough hours in the day.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:12

To I have to work eventually.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:16

Anyway, we're on a tangent.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:17

Yes, anyways. Um, but yeah, there was like 9,000 different species of animals, and we're talking a the entire Gulf of Mexico here that was affected by this. So we're we're talking, and the reason why I brought up the Minecraft thing is we're talking like biome to biome. We're talking everything from marshlands to wetlands to deep sea fishing to the weird guy that's doing weird stuff on the west coast of Florida with the goats and and the kerosene. Like we're Florida man, okay. We love you, Florida. You you make all the news special. Um, there's a lot going on, and there's the matter of also trying to catch these animals, so like the seagulls and the turtles and all that stuff you'd like, and you gotta try to clean them up. That there's not a lot of stuff you can use to clean things up. That's why Dawn Soap is so popular, is because it does treat animals without killing them. However, universities along with the uh along with NOAA or NOAA and private aquariums, so like the one that we have here in um Phoenix, Odyssey, um they they still do water and wildlife testing. They they still go out and they check on fish, do DNA testing and whatnot. And to this day, they are seeing elevated cancer rates, uh, synthetic chemicals that you don't want in the food that you eat, uh, and other teratogens uh that make their way into the offspring. So a teratogen, I'm not sure, I'm not sure, Kara, if you've heard of that term before, but if you have a child and you smoked crack cocaine while you had that child, that crack cocaine is gonna make its way into the child, and that is what a teratogen is, is where a parent animal passes toxins onto their offspring, and then the offspring now has to deal with that. Yeah. Uh like I I kind of want to look at like syphilis uh cases and like in Africa, because it's one thing if you are born, uh it's one thing if you are born, attract um syphilis, and then you live the rest of your life, but it's a completely different thing if if you've contracted syphilis and then you pass it to your unborn son or daughter, and then they're born with it. It is horrifying the effects because that's a now congenital disease. So this this whole thing has now sparked multi-generational issues with all the uh the wildlife and even the economy and what people can eat and what they can't eat. So now, part eight. My second longest part title ever. Okay, so part nine. Part eight, cool. One of us is paying attention for every action. This is like the longest title I've ever had for a part. Part a every action, there is an equal and opposite lawsuit and settlement payout for that action, of course. So for BP, this is ugly when you when you factor in everything. Uh needs to say that there was an investigation. Um, you had an entire uh oil drill rig explode, break apart, sink to the bottom of the ocean. You have a hundred and thirty four million gallons of oil that spilled out. I like, yeah, I I can't even keep track of the lawsuits, the litigations, the hearings, the meetings. Um, there was one schedule that was released, and it was just a raw schedule of what these here the like there were just the titles of the hearings, and it was like a hundred thousand long.

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:48

Good lord.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:49

Yeah. So apparently, when you cause the largest ecological disaster in American history, a lot of people are pissed.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:00

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:05

Don't blame you. I really don't. The last I counted, there was 133 of them, which includes like many uh it includes an umbrella of other people that were like, oh, I had this type of cancer that was these, you know, that that was derived from this incident. Oh, you have this type of cancer that was, you know, derivative of this incident. So we can we can like formulate a joint lawsuit kind of a thing. So there was that's also the definition of a class action lawsuit. Um some of these 133 are still going on today. On June 16th, uh, 2010, President Obama. This this must have been a fun meeting. He's like, hey, BP executives, state leaders, government agencies, and anybody who's involved with any part of the alphabet. Let's have a meeting. Let's talk about what we're what we're gonna do here. This was called the settlement, and$20 billion would be put forth to help with further cleanup and ramifications of the spill, which became known as the spill response fund. It is still going on today.

unknown: 1:27:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:34

Like 15 years later. Now I wonder who had what company do you think had to pay the biggest portion of that settlement?

SPEAKER_02: 1:27:45

Considering you said BP got wrecked, I'd assume it was BP.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:50

That's just the tip of the iceberg. It gets better, and actually, I hate to say it, like knowing what I know about like corporate culture, corporate everything, everything is so much more complicated than what meets the eye. And and I know BP took a lot of hit in the very beginning for not saying anything or coming up with accurate estimates or whatever. There is there's a percent of me that's like, yeah, that's just corporate BSing, but there's also a percent of that that is like, we don't have all the facts, we can't say too much until we get more information.

SPEAKER_02: 1:28:37

That's usually where I camp out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:40

Yeah, yeah, where it's just like, okay, let's just be patient, let's see what unfolds. But then again, though, there are 11 men who lost their lives, their families are still trying to figure out if they're dead or not days after the incident, right? Like, if my if if one of my children were affected in in some sort of disaster, and the police had an idea of what was going on, but they can't tell me, I would be livid.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:19

But because we've done this podcast long enough now, it's like, okay, I can I can kind of see where BP is coming from. I I really do genuinely feel where the families are coming from, and this isn't even the communities that are affected ecologically in all that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:39

Oh, yeah, it's a whole complicated mess of issues. It's not gonna be a black and white thing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:45

No, and and and like I said before, like a lot of this is still going on today. Like they're still trying to work this out.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:52

By May of 2010, 130 civil okay, so we now have the federal stuff, like the federal litigation stuff going on. We also have 130 civil lawsuits were filed against BP. And between the spill response fund and the civil suits and the criminal suits and the neglect of BP and all that, they had to shell out 69 billion dollars.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:29

Ooh, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:33

Well, BP wasn't gonna just take this all by themselves. BP sued the crap out of Transocean. So that was a company that ran the rig. They sued the crap out of Halliburton Energy. That was a cement company that was supposed to like lay the cement to cure the pad for the BP to prevent a blowout. And then they sued the living crap out of Cameron International, which was the manufacturer of the original blowout preventer for 40 billion dollars. So whenever you file a lawsuit like this, you always want to diversify your the sueze, I guess. Like you want to diversify it because let's say two of them get out of it and one of them doesn't, well, cool, they get stuck with all 40 billion. So, like, BP really went crazy or went ham on this. It gets better for BP because what does BP stand for?

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:41

British Petroleum. Oh, this is the conversation we had at the beginning of the episode.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:47

Yep. Where is BP located?

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:50

Somewhere in America.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:52

Yes, because you remember the conversation from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:56

BP was and it still is British Petroleum, and it still is British Petroleum, but they merged with an American company, Amaco, and they moved their headquarters, they moved everything over to America. British Petroleum Amaco is an American company. But the news media did everything in their power to say that this is a British problem. This is Britain's failure. And so, like, there was like death threats. There were there there was all sorts of shenanigans going on in Britain that had nothing to do with this incident whatsoever. And it got to the point where the British Prime Minister at that time it was like, America, calm it down. Yeah, like, yeah, just because there's the name British in there, that doesn't mean we we cause this problem. Like, get off our backs. And even to this day, they're still battling the PR from this whole incident. And I'm not trying to paint BP in any sort of like innocent camp, like they had nothing to do with this, they were completely, they should be exonerated, they should be completely devoid of uh any responsibility. I'm not trying to say that. I'm just trying to really focus on that there was a problem. I don't think it could have been fully prevented. A lot of people were lost, but a lot of people stepped up to fix the problem. And yes, the higher-ups, the executives, the leaders of these companies, they could have done better. But I honestly don't know what I would have done in their situation if I was thrown into that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:58

Part nine. The final part. I'm almost gonna turn this into one of your uh mega episodes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:34:05

Do it. We'll see how big the depression one is, and we'll just keep trying to up each other's links.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:14

No, you're you're still gonna win. I said at the beginning of all this that there was no way this could be prevented. And this is gonna strike a chord with a lot of people because you could be writing with a pen, right, Kara, and your your pen runs out of ink. Knowing you, the point zero zero zero zero zero one seconds is going of your mind is gonna be like, I'm gonna slaughter the person that failed to fill this pen properly. But then after that, you're like, no.

SPEAKER_02: 1:34:50

I actually no there's not in the literal sense, no, there's not that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:56

There's gotta be a part where you're like, ah, but it happens so short, like you don't even realize it. Because it's not even a thing in your main conscious. It's like um, it's like when you stub your toe on a coffee table, you want to burn down the manufacturer of the person that just took out your pinky toe of the coffee table, but then within a fraction of a second, you're like, no.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:23

Usually I just blame the coffee table. I don't blame anybody else, but the coffee table. Just the coffee table. Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to blow up your analogy. I just I I don't get mad often at all. Often when I do get mad, it's like the coffee table.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:40

But I I very rarely get mad at people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:43

But would it be all coffee tables?

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:46

No, just the one that stubbed my tooth. Just the one that particular coffee table at that time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:51

Okay, so it's just homicide.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:52

No, no, just oh, darn coffee table, and then I move on with my day.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:56

Got it. Okay. Um, you're totally ruining my analogy, even though I gave you an I gave you an out that was like at the subatomic level of time of frustration that you could have been like, yeah, I probably could have gone for a plank time and and been fussed.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:15

I'm like the worst person to to talk about that with.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:19

Oh, you're killing me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:20

I know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:23

Try to reach out to a listener, will I sure understand me not so much, but I'm sure a listener will totally get it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:30

So when when stuff like this happens, when we look at say, um, you know, like a dam breaking or um the Hindenburg bergs, if we want to look at those two episodes, we we humanity because apparently you're not a part of humanity. Um weirdo. Yeah. Um we want to like point fingers at a human being. We we we want to blame somebody who is still living. Look at Titanic. Like, look at look at the uh Boston molasses flood, look at Custer's last stand, look at Gallipoli, look at all the stuff that we've covered. Everything zeroes in on a human being. In this case, and what I am discovering is that dumpster fires happen outside of human control. It's more like how does humans control the dumpster fire?

SPEAKER_02: 1:37:37

What are the choices being made in response to?

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:41

Um, one B410 and 3.14. Perfect. No, what I'm what I'm trying to get at is in a very roundabout way, is that yes, Transocean messed up. Yes, British Petroleum Amico messed up. Uh, yes, the other two companies that were affiliated with them messed up. But when they pulled that BOP up from the bottom of the ocean, I'm sorry, the Gulf of Mexico, and they took that thing apart, and they they they like took micrometers to everything. There was a couple of ways that this was catastrophic, and the first one was that like, yeah, one of these things was human related, but even if it was, if it wasn't for this other catastrophic failure, it would be different. So let's go back. Let's go back to that night, okay? The pressure gauge skyrocketed like 5000 psi. They saw mud flying out of that hole, like the diarrhea that we have constantly referred to. There may have even been pieces of corn in there or whatnot. Okay, they hit that dead hand, and that dead hand is a blind shear where it is two sharp blades converge over the L the oil well, and they block it off, and there's three of them. Okay, I have pictures on this, so and and you can you can post them on the website. Um those shears are based solely on the functionality of a solenoid. Cool time to really impress you, Kara, with more engineering terms and science and electromagnetism that that you love so much.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:57

Do it, because I'm sure there's somebody out there who loves it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:00

Well, let's say you're floating down a river. Okay. You're in a canoe or whatever. You're floating down a river and you start rowing backwards. Okay. Are you gonna go back up that river?

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:12

Am I going with the flow of the river or am I going against the river?

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:15

You're going against, you're trying to flow up river.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:17

Oh no, I'll just stand still. I'll just either stay still or keep going with the current because I'm not strong enough to keep up with it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:22

Okay. So let's say one of your paddles doesn't work.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:27

And now you're trying to go spinning out of control.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:31

Yeah, you're spinning. Yeah, yeah. You're going, you're doing donuts in the middle of the river, and well, that's how a solenoid works is you take a piece of metal, throw it into the middle of a copper coil. Okay. The copper coils are supposed to send positive electrons or positive energy one way. That one-way action is going to interact with that metal rod and throw it out because it's going downstream. It's going to throw it out with a great deal of force. That's a solenoid. Okay. That's how your car engine works.

SPEAKER_04: 1:41:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:15

So, like when you go in and you turn the key on your car, there's a solenoid in your starter that throws a gear out to the flywheel of your car and then starts spinning really, really, really fast to get your car running. If that solenoid is not wired correctly, it won't throw the gear out far enough where it'll engage or do anything at all. Because you have half of it saying go forward, and then you have the other half saying going backwards.

SPEAKER_02: 1:41:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:52

So when we look at these dead hands or these blind shear rams, they found out that there was a couple of them that were wired in reverse. So like they did shoot out with a ton of force, but it wasn't enough to sever the pipe. Therefore, everything could work around it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:18

So, like, yeah, they did find some evidence to indicate that okay, yeah, these solenoids weren't developed or assembled appropriately, and then that's where that company got sued by BP. Like, hey, you you built a failed BOP. This is where I think it's a bit more complicated. You can do this yourself or whatever. Uh, the audience can do this. Take a soda straw, okay? Put it on your desktop so and with your finger, and don't do this while you're driving. Um, put it on your desktop and just gently push on one side of it, okay? Still have your other hand pushing down on it, but then just push sideways on it. What do you think's gonna happen?

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:14

I mean, it's gonna bend until or it's gonna bend until there's a little hole in it, and you can't drive it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:19

Or it's gonna bend until it buckles one way or the other.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:23

Or another way to look at it is this if you take a soda straw, put it on a table with your, you know, your finger on top of it, and you push to one side, well, that pressure that you're pushing with one finger in the middle of the straw is going to deviate from the amount of pressure that is going to be in the outside of the opposite edge of that straw.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:50

You follow me?

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:52

Think so.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:54

So, like, if I had a straw with, say, one pound of pressure sitting on top of it, and then I push to the side of that straw, say, like, you know, a half a pound of force, would it be safe to say that one side of that straw would be at like 1.5% or 1.5 pounds, whereas the other one would be at less because it's now being deformed, and then the pressure inside is like super confused and doesn't know what to do.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:30

I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:33

Now, that alone wasn't enough to cause the BOP to explode, or not explode, but cause everything to fail. What happened was at the molecular level, we're talking at the atomic level. We're talking the degree of precision to manufacture a pipe like this would have probably cost more than what the rig was worth to build. When they had that kick, when they had that kick on on April 20th at around what was it, 9 50, 10 p.m. ish, it caused that pipe to warp. And so when the blind shears were engaged, they missed the pipe, or they only partially engaged it. And if it only partially engaged it and missed the mud return line and all that kind of stuff, then it would have just that pressure that they experienced would have blown all the mud through the mud return collections, which is what killed those 11 men, and the subsequent crude oil flow going upwards would have been enough because it would have been preceded by gas. And for the lack of better words, and I and I apologize for being this crude, but you tend to fart more before you poo. So all those gases came up, then the oil came behind it, or the mud came behind it, for the lack of better words, and then all the oil came up. So the mud is what killed everybody. The gases are what simultaneously fell into the engine airtakes that caused them to rev up at the same time that the oil was now spewing out of the derrick, and then when the engine is engines exploded, it ignited the oil, and here we are.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46:47

I don't think there was anybody on that rig that could fully comprehend what was going on.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:55

Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting though.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46:59

It's kind of like on the Hindenburg episode, is like the guy who threw down the rope to the ground, and that wet rope grounded the frame of the Hindenburg to the capacitor that was the outside shell. Now it it was later determined by a litany of litigation settlements and and and all that stuff. That like, okay, BP and Transocean and that Cameron Company and and all that, like, they were horrifically neglected negligent of all of this, and there was even some BP executives that were put on manslaughter charges. And then it was later discovered that, like, there was no way that BP executive could have known what was gonna happen, even given the reasonable expectation of his experience. Right. So, like, I know it sounds weird, but it's one of those things, it's just like when we when we look at something like the the Deep Water Horizon, whenever, and and and I'm gonna quote or reference Willem Cullen Bryant's uh Thanatopsis. Whenever we try to pull something from the earth, we exact a debt. We have to give that back sometime. And that's what happened here, in my personal opinion. I understand that that BP and on all these billion-dollar companies could have handled this completely differently, and they should have. Um, but I also think that eleven men died to pay some of that debt back to Earth in in a respectful way. That hey, these guys died and they paid the ultimate price, and Mother Earth, you better respect these guys, given how like difficult it is to try to fully understand what happened on that night. So I don't know. I this was this was been running through my mind for like the past week or so trying to tell this story, and yeah, it's a it's a it's a wild one. And when we really dive into like the engineering aspects of it and how the BOP works, and then also like what were these companies doing to try to cut costs and all that stuff, I I I I kinda see the perspectives here, and I just hope that we can live the rest of our lives knowing that hey, as humanity progresses and pulls resources from Earth, a price will be paid, and a price will be exacted, and these 11 guys more than made up for it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:32

Well, I think there's something that can be learned from too. You look at the mistakes that were made, see what went wrong, and then learn from it, and try to remember it next time you make a decision, next time you make an oil rig, or next time you just decide to drill somewhere.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:49

So there's um there there's one line in um the Deep Water Horizon movie that I I liked a lot, and it's one of the technicians, I think he was one one of the ones that passed away when they were doing that initial test, and they saw that huge kick, right? That thing, the pressure went up super, super high. And he's like, it's okay, it's okay, it's just the well keeping us honest. And I thought that was a very from a uh from a writing standpoint, I thought that was a very unique statement, especially when you hear the dialogue between one of the bosses of Transocean dealing with one of the bosses of of um BP, and they don't get along and how things are supposed to work. And there was a there was a like a brief discussion about like what is Gaia, and the Transocean guy was like, Oh, it's pronounced Gaia. No, the BP guy is like, no, it's pronounced Gaia, both of which are the terms for Earth. And and then you have another guy who's just like it's okay, it's it's just the well trying to keep us honest, that's all it is, therefore, we're better off being honest. And I feel like if they had slowed down on that first test, if they had just slowed down on the process of drilling further, if they had just slowed down, given it an extra day for that concrete to cure, if they had just slowed down and be like, okay, let's just give it another day, let's hammer out our procedures, because the Deepwater Horizon got an award the same day that it exploded for having the most amount of unaffected days of issues, like they they were heralded for their efficiency for their safety. If they if everybody on that rig had just slowing down, much the same way that we look at how, like, okay, we got these relief wells now. Let's slowly put the mud in, let's slowly put the concrete in, let's slowly close them down, let's cap off the main well and slowly close it down, not just slam it shut like a BOP would, which would then build up pressure, bend the pipe, and then we would have another explosion. Let's just take that extra day or so, and let's proceed with caution. And I feel like there's so many dumpster fires that you and I could have, like, if we could go back in time and just be like, guys, guys, guys, time out. Build that stupid molasses tank with a few more bolts. Just right, like just a little more, a little extra. Yeah, just a little extra. Before Chicago burned to the ground, just like fill up more trucks with water and head in and then try it. You know, it's just there's just so many times where like we I could I could yell at Winston Churchill, like, bro, shell the beach lines and shell the water lines before you head into Gallipoli. Just take that extra few minutes. And I feel like that is one of the core constructs of this podcast is we have so many dumpsterfiers because people are rushing through things. We have so many dumpsterfiers because an answer has to be met now. Uh, the exception would be Nero. That guy was crazy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:04

He's special.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:06

Yeah, yeah, he's like 50 stages special. But but that was like the thing that I took from this is that instead of rushing to try to find the answer to a problem, maybe slow down and work my way to a solution to the problem.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55:25

Yeah, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:28

Yeah, well, or better yet, don't cook all your eggs and throw them in a basket and then throw them over the Grand Canyon. Right. That's an there's actually a dumpster fire around that, too.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55:38

I believe that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:40

But yeah, no, that that was like the thing that like personally in my life I took from it. The other thing, too, is like I get to wake up tomorrow morning knowing that I'm not being sued for 70 billion dollars.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55:55

There is that, yeah. Yeah, that is nice.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:01

Because I also found out that a lot of those litigation suits are still in progress, but BP had to pay that out immediately. And whatever they win, so like let's say they win 20 out of the 130 billion or 130 class action lawsuits. So say they win 20 of them. The money that they win from that, they have to give to that restoration fund. They can't keep it, they can't reinvest it, they can't do anything. It all has to go back into that coastal um like that rebuilding fund.

SPEAKER_03: 1:56:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:44

That's a big check to write.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56:49

Kind of reminds me of the uh World War I reparations Germany had to pay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:54

Oh yeah. Yeah, that that that's it, that's another that's another one because there was no way, there was no way they could pay that off, but yet they did, what was it, 10-15 years ago?

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:05

Uh more recently.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:06

Angola Merkel?

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:07

Yeah, Merkel paid it. That was a good one.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:09

Yeah, she paid off the last check.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:11

Five, maybe six years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:13

Oh, sorry. I thought it was further than that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:16

But yeah, we're gonna talk about that next episode.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:19

Really? I thought you're going in the Great Depression.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:25

Or are you looking at it from the perspective of like Europe and and whatnot? Because they were way worse off than America. And don't get me wrong. Well, don't get me wrong. Like America was in a pretty bad spot, but like Europe was way worse.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:41

We're gonna talk about all of it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:43

Okay, so it's gonna be another, it's gonna be a 20 episode.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:49

I I don't know yet. I don't know how many episodes it's going to be.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:55

Well, you need to have at least an episode figured out in the next two weeks so that I can get it edited in out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58:01

It's already the research is done. I'm typing it. It's fine. But we're typing it up.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58:07

But yeah, no, that's that's the Deepwater Horizon. Um this one really affected me. It it probably because I remember the events.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58:18

I was yeah, I was a senior in high school, but I didn't pay much attention to it at the time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58:23

Yeah, no, I was I was just working in retail at that time trying to figure out how to pay a paycheck because I uh lost everything in 2010, but whatever. Um but yeah, this one this one hit me differently, and I wanted to try to approach it differently. I didn't want this to be a blame game, and I feel like ultimately the message is is that we can accomplish so much more if we just don't blame each other as much as we see each other as the solutions to these problems.

SPEAKER_02: 1:59:05

Work together, not apart. Yeah, keep the eating together that whole deal.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59:09

If I have a driver that failed the crap out of a load, that same driver is going to be the solution to getting that thing delivered appropriately.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59:21

And I feel like I I kind of came to that realization after what 64 episodes of or 63 episodes of this show. No, 64. Um, yeah, stop treating each other as a problem, start treating each other as a solution, and we're gonna get a lot further.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59:40

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59:41

And speaking of solutions, be sure to check out the day Simpsonier dot com where Kara is gonna have all our show notes. I'm kind of throwing her under the bus right now, but she can just copy. Yeah, well, I know, but you get a lot going on. I do. But I did try to write out these notes with a lot more pictures and stuff like that because it's very, very tough to describe.

SPEAKER_02: 2:00:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:11

Uh vocally. But like, yeah, check out thedaysimsifier.com. Please email us at the daysimsifier at gmail.com. Uh, if you have suggestions, I I personally find my suggestions from the audience. So, like, if you have ideas, hit us up. Um, if you want to see some of Kara's amazing artwork, yeah, the website is where to go. Uh, one of these days, we're going to update the uh Instagram feed. I don't know anything about all that hipster technological stuff, but I'll figure it out. So we will we will get our Instagram feed updated. Uh, but more importantly, um, if you if you know somebody who is struggling through stuff and who could probably benefit from other people that have really gone through it and come out on top or come out okay, then yeah, find the show form on wherever they get their podcasts.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:28

Usually it's on you know, podcast or what is it, uh iTunes or is it iTunes, Spotify, there's Castbox, Amazon, uh yeah, wherever you get your podcast. What whatever you want to use, you go for it. It's there.

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:45

Yeah. Um, you mentioned Amazon, right? Okay. So yeah, where we we are completely ad-free wherever you go. So we're not here to make a killing off of this. However, if you do want us to make a killing off of this, let me know. And then I'll give a percent to care.

SPEAKER_02: 2:02:10

Like, subscribe, leave a review. We'll talk to you next week with the Great Depression.

SPEAKER_00: 2:02:18

Yes, yes. We we will we will depress you and then economically. Yeah, just economically. After we've come out of like a what is it, a a 40-day government shutdown. It's gonna be a great time. So, but yes, thanks for listening, and uh, we will catch you on the next one. Bye.