Episode 152: MV Doña Paz Sinking

The podcast that does back shots is pretty good.

Well, I think the thing is, we have to, you know, we just have to be reminded that why would we want to sleep with our listeners who are the worst people on the over the worst people on God's Green Earth?

Yeah, the Well, There's Your Problem fuck a fan contest

has as yet still not chosen.

It's been derailed.

It was cancelled before it existed.

I'm not updating my drivers, NVIDIA.

Not again.

And last time I did that, I got disconnected from the Zencaster.

Not again.

Not again, NVIDIA.

Did you try and fucking update your graphics card drivers in the middle of a recording?

I have done that before, and I lied to you.

It said I got disconnected when I knew exactly what had happened.

Can we install some kind of like work surveillance technology?

Yeah, bomb collar.

This is the reason.

This is one reason why I have one monitor, right?

It's because the second I get a second monitor, I know that

I have gone to one monitor as well.

I've gone to one monitor as well for it for basically, you know, I like the idea of having two monitors.

I have had two, three, four monitor setups in the past, but I have, if I have two monitors, I'm just going to play Warzone in the background while we're trying to record.

Yeah,

me and my possible ADHD do not get along well with

doing work and then having something else.

My phone's bad enough.

My phone's bad enough right exactly um i i will say that ros has two monitors i don't know how he does it um because i need two monitors so i can show the slides and read the notes also a different kind of neurodivergence

yeah yeah yeah yeah buddy it's fine ros we love you very dearly oh of course yeah yeah um hello and welcome to well where is your problem

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

The new name is not a joke.

Just thought I would reinforce that for the first few times that I say it.

It's real.

I named myself after a month.

Yay, Liam.

Yeah.

Yay, Liam.

And thank you, November.

I have to say November about a trillion times.

The thing is, right, I'm going to terrorize you because I have a drop of a John Lane from Diehard going,

and and I'm going to use that anytime you get the name wrong.

So, you know, just be aware of that.

I actually do appreciate that.

And we're stepping down from the bomb collar, so I'm good.

Hi, I'm Liam Anderson.

My pronouns are he and him, and I exist to agonize Roz.

See,

we're going to have a situation here in November.

Yeah.

Because, okay, Liam, two syllables.

Sure.

Justin, two syllables.

Devin, two syllables.

November.

Yeah, although three syllables.

Activate Windows logo.

What is that?

I don't have to talk to them that much, though.

I'm going to have to change my cadence entirely.

Hey, Ross.

Why do you have to activate Windows again?

I don't know.

Ross.

Ross.

I have a license.

I just don't know where it is.

Yeah, try telling that to the fucking highway troop.

I got busted once in outside of Breezewood, Pennsylvania, doing like 110.

And I didn't have my license.

I had the state troopers like license registration.

And I said to him, I got one.

And he, I was like, this is it.

This is it.

I'm going to have a service weapon discharged into me for bad joke.

Don't speed in a 2,000 2,000 Jeep Cherokee, kids.

That's my motorist advice.

It's cool that you have a whole subclass of cop who are just like highways

and also like state-level stuff, and they all have to wear stupid little costumes that some governor designed in the 20s that all look remarkably fascist.

Yeah, I can't imagine what that's about.

Do they enjoy wearing the hats?

I know they do.

I think they love it.

I think they're polishing the like Sam Brown belts every day of their fucking life.

I think it makes their day.

Which, to be honest, you know, I understand.

Pennsylvania.

Hey, but the thing is, the invention of like state polices higher patrols are historically progressive in that it was often a way of centralizing it against private polices, like the

Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police.

Oh, boy.

You're obliged, as a Marxist-Leninist, to offer critical support to state troopers look at all these dead troopers we've caught you with counterfeit coal and iron

no it's more psychosistic

it's more like uh

you want to go on strike so we're going to shoot you kind of vibes right yeah

well when you see on the screen in front of you there was a trooper who tried to drive from york to lecaster with a bac of 0.144 don't do that the the worst the worst state trooper thing I've ever seen was on Reddit, right?

Which is

automatically the worst.

No, no, no.

A guy came into the like

America subreddit or whatever.

And he's like, I'm driving, I'm doing a road trip coast to coast.

My English isn't that great.

I'm kind of worried about getting pulled over.

If I get pulled over by a state trooper, is there something I should like do, right?

Something I should know about.

And one of the comments was, it's considered polite to ask, do you want a bridge named after you and i think that's maybe one of the most sadistic things i've ever seen done on god's internet

all right that's that's good good let's let's talk about a ship that killed a bunch of people what you see in front of you is a ship

rusty looks pretty rough yeah

This is the MV that's motor vessel Onya Paz.

Nice.

It's a ferry.

Better than I thought you were going to do.

Yeah, you got the NEA.

I know what an NY is.

I don't.

I put one in NA de Me.

Like

the Niacional de México.

The Cat Girl Railroad.

Yeah, the Cat Girl Railroad, exactly.

Now, it is Big Ferry.

It looks pretty ugly.

Nothing fundamentally wrong with it, except for a lot of things we're about to talk about.

This is one of the ones where we don't have a photo of it going wrong.

No.

This being a photo.

No, I imagine a photo of it going wrong is just going to be a photo of the ocean.

There's a lot of reasons for that we'll get into.

I see.

If you're a person who watches these episodes, but isn't happy when a lot of people die in the episode,

this episode is not for you.

Yeah, this is not.

Yeah.

We didn't revise the news that we we had.

It's slightly out of date, but you know what?

It's fine.

You don't come to us with breaking news.

Yeah, I do want to say

should we talk about next Benedict and just condemn the state of Oklahoma for existing and the horrendous evils they have brought upon us?

I don't even know what to say anymore.

The crimes of this guilty nation shall only be purged with blood, you know?

Yes.

Yeah,

I just wanted, because I know that we would normally get, hey, where was this?

I do want to say, yes, we know.

We are at a loss of what to say other than, you know what, I don't care, believe this or not, go to the state of Oklahoma, find the superintendent of schools, find Libs of TikTok, find her house.

Isn't it a guy and isn't he making like videos in his car about superintendent of Oklahoma?

Yes, but Libs of TikTok is a woman.

Oh, sorry.

I confused two people.

No, don't worry.

You guys, you guys, hey, you know,

you guys want to do that?

That's cool.

That's fine.

No one's going to blink this all up.

No one's going to blink this all at the end anyway.

They'll probably just excise the whole thing, but I'm pissed off and I think we should go to their house and

yeah.

I really and truly don't know what to tell you.

What is there to say?

I mean, what is there to say other than rest in power and you deserve better?

Yeah.

Leave that specific part in and bleep everything else.

I want it to sound like Morse code, Devin.

All right.

So first we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh dear.

Oh, I remember this.

Oh, yeah.

We were going to fix that, right?

Yeah, the huge, the huge accident that was supposed to shake the railroad industry to its core.

The East Palestine wreck about a year ago as of when this episode was supposed to come out.

I've just thought of the perfect joke for the Chiron, and it's too late to put it in.

What was it?

It was going to be no consequences for bombing Palestine, and then the next slide was going to be no consequences for bombing Palestine.

Yeah, actually, that would be pretty good.

Yeah, but we'll do that.

Just imagine it in your head.

Yeah, please.

So, you know, it's sort of like, okay, we had this massive, like,

earth-shaking train wreck that was supposed to change everything for about a year now.

Nothing has really happened.

No, no.

You know, it's been largely just in action.

You know, these railroads are still,

you know, they're making record profits, but there's not great safety

still.

You still have all these practices like precision scheduled railroading, which, you know, are making trains longer, more difficult to control.

You still have lots of instances of management intimidating workers when they try to do their job, like say inspecting bearings because that might delay the train.

Of course.

You also have folks like the locomotive engineers, they're not allowed to do their jobs because their job is now fighting with the computer that wants to drive the train for them.

You know, what people used to think Airbus was is what trip optimizer is.

Die by wire.

Yes.

Um, yeah, yeah, no, I,

I mean, like, it really did seem for a minute like something, or at least the appearance of something, was going to be done.

Like,

the fucking, the failing New York Times got you to write about it even.

And, like, yeah,

in, and then nothing.

Like, everyone just kind of got bored, I guess.

Right.

There's, there's like, um, I mean, there's been, there were a series of news articles that sort of came out during the first six months of last year, which is sort of like, okay, the, the workers won this and this and this and this.

And a lot of them are sort of paper victories, as far as I can tell.

You know, because especially with the time off, the sick days and stuff like that,

they had that before on paper.

Now they have more on paper, but

it goes document trail.

You know, I mean, like,

I don't know.

It feels sometimes like Americans have like a kind of intellectual lacuna about trains, where

they just kind of like slides off the American mind unless you are a train person.

Yes.

Yes.

Like,

and this applies to like some

secretaries of transportation, you know, it just doesn't hold attention.

Yeah, I mean,

and we're not nearly in the place we were like back in the 70s when

the Louisville and Nashville Railroad would blow up a town like this, you know, twice a year.

But

getting there.

Yeah, we're getting there we're getting there you know uh

sometimes feeling you know yeah so you know this is uh the situation is still bad and even if you're you know you're a railroad worker you're a person who enjoys trains or you ride passenger trains or you know even if you're a railroad customer has a railroad through yeah or near it yeah this should this should be something that interests you you know

you are secretary of Transportation.

Yeah, you are Secretary of Transportation.

So, you know, in terms of, I guess, is there anything you can do?

I'm confused.

It does sound like the Railroad Workers United,

you know, sort of a cross-craft caucus of railroad workers, is doing some kind of big campaign this year.

I don't know any of the specifics on it.

You can become a sustaining member, even if you're not a

railroad worker.

So if you want to, you know, throw money at the problem, that's one way to do it.

I'll put a link in the description to that.

But, yeah,

the only solution here is and has been since at least World War I to just nationalize the whole thing.

One big railroad, you know?

One big railroad.

Yeah.

Because

as long as you're chasing the operating ratio down to

60, 50%,

you're not going to have room for things like

really basic safety checks.

So, yeah, that's our East Palestine retrospective.

And there's still folks in East Palestine who are

still trying to get out of the town because it's just, you know, there's still enough contamination that it's causing health problems.

It's not everyone, but it's still a number of people.

Real bad.

Yeah, it's not good.

It's not good.

Well,

in other

news.

Hey, we have some good news.

Into some of the things.

We got some good news.

Yes.

The man who did to country music what Pantyhose did to finger fucking has died.

Yes.

If you are frustrated at country music,

being all about trucks, it's this guy, Toby Keith's fault.

He is not dead and in the ground.

my guns and truck and truck gun it's also 9-11 my gun my gun that shoots trucks

oh

trucks gun america troops gun yeah i really like troops that shoot guns i really like trucks i'm gonna punch you in the face

i i really liked uh uh his line about uh in rent soft he's like

like talking about how foreclosable his home was it was like toby keith you're a gajillionaire please stop I'm relatable, and he's relatable because he's dead now.

Yeah, the thing, the thing is.

Fear for my horses still slaps, but

he died as he lived, being a fucking asshole.

If you're concerned about the state of country music,

we have a bonus Patreon

episode.

You can subscribe to the Patreon.

You can go and listen to it.

Yeah, we talk, we trace how country music became reactionary.

Yeah.

It's fun.

Oh, also, I love this bar.

Still slaps.

Sorry.

It should have been a

cancer.

Should have been a cowboy slaps.

There's some good songs in there.

It's just like, oh, and I want to talk about me.

If you have a talent and then you use that talent for evil, that's kind of worse.

Yes.

Ask me how I play Magic the Gathering.

You are the Toby Keith of Magic the Gathering.

I am.

I don't think Toby Keith's I love this bar and grill still has any locations left.

Meanwhile, fucking it cleared by Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett has like wiped the floor with this guy.

R.I.P.

Jimmy Buffett.

R.I.P.

Jimmy Buffett.

And beyond the grave, Jimmy Buffett shot this guy with a cancer gun.

Oh, there's still two in Oklahoma.

Roz, you got to go to Oklahoma City with me, bud.

Oh, fun.

Yeah, we got to go to.

There's like a fucking Japanese conscript still fighting the World War II and like the 70s, you know?

Newman's has not reached Oklahoma yet.

Given what you said about going to Oklahoma earlier, I'm worried about what might happen when we get there.

Crimes!

Hundreds of crimes!

Yeah,

the dual-purpose road trip where you go and visit Toby Keith's restaurants and commit a number of heinous crimes.

Yeah, which are actually

justified in doing, by the way.

Sorry, let me take that again.

It's like natural-born killers with worse food.

Call it out.

I want the politically motivated ass.

I want the big dog daddy prime rib.

Please don't ever say those words in that order to me or anyone ever again.

Big dog daddy prime rib?

Hell yeah.

I'm safe wording.

14 ounces for $35 is fucking ripoff.

I can go to Great American Saloon in Bread Lion, Pennsylvania, and get a much better deal.

Thank you.

Okay, I've just a word to the FBI.

I'm not going to do any of these crimes.

Oh, yes,

yes, he is.

He is going to do

Guess what?

You're all accessories too.

I mean, I'm the only one here who isn't a U.S.

citizen, so I'm the only one who can be subject to warrantless surveillance from U.S.

intelligence agents.

Thank God for that, because it would make the tax bill a lot harder to figure out.

Yeah.

I pay taxes and I'm just like, if we ever come for us, I'm just like, yeah, I'll figure that out.

That's fine.

She's not a U.S.

citizen.

Oh, November,

November.

Yes.

Yes, I'm sorry.

Fuck, I keep dropping this there.

In other news,

speaking of crimes, no

there we go, fucking God.

Because I think

I know on the chat on the Killjack bomb preset, and I have to remember to switch it back to

okay.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, you want to take us away.

World historical crimes continue.

Yeah, real bad.

I guess.

we have to read a fucking history book, though, according to that one guy who gave us a one fucking star review.

I mean, this is the thing, right?

People always,

always tell you, like, and it's the same with like any trans thing, or really a lot of things.

People make a real fetish out of complexity, and they'll be like, it's so complicated.

You don't know enough to be able to say anything about this.

This is genocide bad.

That's all I need.

It's a nuanced debate, and you have to approach it with care and sensitivity.

First of all, when have we ever in our lives approached anything with care and sensitivity yeah we don't second

uh what what you are doing when you take that line of argument is you are pissing down my back and telling me it's raining uh because if you if you have eyes to see you can see that this is a genocide in the making and that this is uh a very bad thing genocides are and that it must be stopped right um

Yeah, and so essentially the most recent thing, if somehow you haven't been following the conflict, essentially Israel has been playing whack-a-mole with the entire Gaza population.

You know, they tell them to they tell them to go to Khan Yunis, they bomb Communis.

They tell them to go to what was the thing in between.

It was like an empty lot somewhere they told two million people to go to.

Yeah, that's the humanitarian zone up in the top left.

I think it's called Al-Mawasi.

Okay, they tell them to go to Al-Mawasi.

They bomb Al-Mawasi.

Yeah, they've also bombed that.

They tell tell them to go to Rafa.

It looks like in the next week or so, they're going to bomb Rafa.

Bad enough, the Egyptians seem to be expecting some kind of colossal

humanitarian calamity, and they've actually started leveling ground out here where they think they're going to have to build the refugee camp.

Yeah.

You know, because at some point you're just going to cause a human crush against the wall, you know, kill 100,000 people, and then the wall falls over, and people climb over the mounds.

But, you know, this is the sort of thing you're looking at if they go through with it.

Yeah, that's that's the goal.

That's explicitly the goal.

It's always been the goal.

Rafa has a population of like 100,000 normally.

It's now up to like 1.2 million because everybody has been forced into this like one town that like abuts the border with Egypt.

And so

now it seems like people are are finally reading the polls in

Europe and in the US.

And so now Biden realizing that he's going to lose Michigan.

Circling the train, right?

Is like, well,

the Israelis shouldn't attack Rafa.

And, you know, like a lot of European countries are saying the same.

And of course, Netanyahu being who he is is like, no, fuck you.

We are going to do it anyway.

And there's no reason to doubt that, you know?

Yeah,

this looks, I mean, they probably already have the weaponry to do it.

It's just gonna, of course, yeah, you know, they're gonna do, they're, they're just gonna do like a world historic

war crime, you know, it's and it's gonna,

it's, it's, it's gonna look bad.

It's, you know, I, I don't exactly know even like, okay, keep going to protests, keep going to all this stuff.

I don't know exactly what you do to stop this, though.

I,

I mean, the, the only thing you can meaningfully do is cut off their aid and sanction them.

And you can only really do that if you are Joe Biden.

So if you're listening, Joe.

Which we know you are, Joe.

Fucking get on that, please.

Otherwise, I mean, look, I don't want to demoralize people and I don't want to say that the protesting is useless, right?

Because it's not.

There's a lot of like

important stuff being done to try and like shut down like albert factories, for instance, or try to get like individual countries to stop supplying weapon parts.

You know, like

the Dutch had to suspend this for a while because, you know, and stop shipping F-35 parts to Europe because

to Europe, to Israel, because

they might be used for a breach of international humanitarian law, which transparently they would be.

Historically, labor action has been very effective here.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It just,

I don't know.

Again, right, for the second time in one news segment, I'm just kind of at a loss.

Yeah.

And I'm not,

I don't think I'm at a loss because there is nothing to be done.

It's just that it exceeds my ability to fucking discern what it is.

Oh, we know what should be done.

And you know, too, listener.

And Devin don't bleep that.

I don't know.

I just.

As a Jewish person, it's just like,

this is the most infuriating.

Not literally, this this is the most infuriating thing.

Like, obviously, the most infuriating thing is that heinous genocide and war crimes are being committed in my name.

It's the

bizarro world evolution of the centrists and conservatives who are like, oh, you hate the Jews.

And it's like, motherfucker, listen, A, I am Jewish.

B, I hate them for my own reasons.

You get told to study Torah long enough, you get pissed off.

And it's just like, yeah, man, I mean, like, I've said this on the the show before, when you've lost my mother,

I can't believe you're doing the right thing anymore.

Not that I believe that Israel was ever doing the right thing, but you know what I mean.

It really is like a sea change in terms of like...

Right.

And you're going to lose.

And we're going to get Trump again.

And that's going to be

the same.

The same, maybe?

Because what more can we actually do?

Like, in terms of what more can we actually do to keep funding.

Like,

we can't, you know, I'm sure we'll find a way to double time a genocide, but I don't know how that works.

A bunch of other stuff will be worse and then this will be as bad, you know.

Right, right.

It does seem like the implication here is that, okay, we move all the Palestinians from Rafa to other Rafa and everything will be fine.

Yeah.

You know,

if you have one impenetrable border fence and then Hamas like surge over it and kill all indiscriminately, right?

Pushing them back behind a second impenetrable border fence means that it's never going to happen again.

Yeah.

Pretty certain.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's not like they'll be irritated because this side has this side has the electricity and the water pipes and this side has nothing.

This is this is desert.

Yeah, this is not tenable.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, if nothing else, like, and this is,

as a lever, this is part of why Israel is doing this

to make people make these kinds of calculations, is to say that, like, at least if every Palestinian is in Egypt, they won't be getting bombed as you

deliver humanitarian aid to them.

But the reason why that's a thing that anyone has to think about is because Israel is bombing the humanitarian convoys.

Right.

Yes.

It's pure fucking evil.

I mean, I don't know what else we can say about it.

Yeah.

Don't do genocide is my advice.

Yeah.

And especially don't do genocide in my fucking name, you pricks.

I still believe that we will see an end to

Israeli apartheid within my lifetime.

Yes.

Once again, throw my name out there for a Nobel Peace Prize.

We're going to be the ones to do it.

One country called country.

One con line called language.

One currency called Liam Bucks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I don't know.

Whatever kind of like...

Deputy Minister for Peace, November Kelly.

That's right.

Whatever kind of like city and the city bullshit that has to be done to resolve this in anything like a kind of peaceful and equitable manner

should happen.

But like,

I do think that ultimately

this is

best understood as like the death throes of a kind of fascist state, right?

It might seem like it's extremely powerful and extremely unaccountable, but I think this is ultimately like laying the sort of groundwork for the destruction of apartheid as it as it is in Israel.

Yes, we can pray and hope and work towards that, and we should.

Inshallah.

You know,

yes, from the river to the sea, and also

get the fuck out of here if you're mad at me.

From the river to the sea, get the fuck out of here if you're mad at me.

It's actually pretty good.

That's usually on the flag.

Just increasingly small pod.

just like you know the the flag is um like black impact font text on white field and it starts with that and it goes to like i i'm tired of these jokes about my text laden flag the first such instance was uh in 1947 when and just continues on like that

was it i've never noticed the name vexology yeah vexillology vexology yeah i love those fucking nerds

all right on that happy note

that was the goddamn news.

Huh.

All right.

We're going to talk about a different part of the world.

It's the Philippines, folks.

Huge fan of these guys.

Great literature, great anti-colonial resistance tradition.

Some fucking weird Catholic stuff.

Yes, really weird Catholic stuff.

But you repeat yourself.

Beautiful country.

Love to go sometime.

It's the location of Manila, the famed

place where the Thrilla happened.

Yes, I knew that joke was coming too.

Yeah.

Hive mind.

So, yeah, the Philippines, they're

in,

you know, the South China Sea.

They're a bunch of mountains, they're a bunch of islands that have mountains on them, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Colonized by the Spanish, then the the Americans.

And

yeah, actually, I don't know a lot about the Philippines or Filipino history.

I actually don't know a lot either.

It's sort of something where

I just,

it's a part of the world which I had never really, I don't know much about Southeast Asia.

Hold on.

We're going to sort this out here.

Right.

Well, yes.

Listen, I'll say one thing about the Philippines, right?

Which is the Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines.

God says,

a country in Southeast Asia.

It consists of 7,641 islands with a total area of 300,000 square kilometers.

And those are broadly categorized into three main geographical divisions, Luz, Visayas, and Mindanao.

Yes, that.

Okay.

Cool.

You know,

this is an area that's been inhabited for thousands of years, but, you know, the sort of modern history

does seem to start with colonization you know yeah i mean i i kind of understand it to be like it's both fortunately and unfortunately located um yeah that it is like a sort of choke point for trade in south asia uh or southeast asia and therefore routinely got kicked around by everybody like the spanish you the japanese roz personally yeah statistically probably us at some point.

The colony of Roz Topia.

Yeah.

Hold on.

We're going to find out.

Britain invasion Philippines.

I'm pretty certain.

Probably did, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, we did.

Of course, we fucking did.

We occupied Manila for 18 months.

1762.

Oh, I see that.

Yeah.

The first week of 1764.

Yeah.

Also a relatively densely populated country.

I mean, there's a lot of people.

And these, since it's a lot of islands, they got to get between the different islands.

And even within the same islands, because there's mountains, you got to go around the mountains.

Well, the mountains go right up to the edge of the island, so you need boats.

Right?

You know,

because you can't build, you can't build bridges.

The sea is too deep.

You don't have enough money to do a crazy system of tunnels like the Faroe Islands.

Yeah, you're not sort of like hiking up over a like 70-degree incline karst slope and then hiking back down the other side.

Not a lot of room for airports either.

So you do boats.

Very strong maritime tradition in the Philippines.

Just a little bit, a little bit more context, shipping and travel in the Philippines.

You know, a lot of people live there.

They got places to go.

They have some railroads.

They're fragmented and underfunded.

Service is not very good.

People actually have taken over the rails themselves.

They go around in little motorized picnic tables that go on a railroad trip.

Yeah, huge.

the ANCAP railroad.

Yes.

Actually, I think a lot of the railroads have been improved fairly recently, but these little

carts still work.

The highway system is full of gaps because of all the water, right?

So you have a bunch of ferries.

Some of the ferries are fairly modern.

Some of them are not.

I think some of them are privatized.

Some of them are not.

Some of these ferry trips are 15 minutes long and some of them are two days long.

Fuck me.

As I understand it, Filipino government is in this, as with a few areas of policy, like kind of decentralized and chaotic.

So it's just like provincial.

Yeah, a bit like Britain in that way.

Yeah.

I've seen Roz on a ferry.

It was.

Just

on the Avanti West Coast ferry from Liverpool Lime Street to Mindanao.

The windows are welded shut.

I'm broiling to fucking death.

We had an interior cabin and it didn't go so good for us.

We just got drunk, I think.

Yeah.

I like a boat.

Apart from when they like stop, when a boat's underway, that's pretty good.

And even in like heavy weather, rough seas, when a boat's like pitching up and down, I quite like that.

That's a good time.

Until it pulls up to the dock and it's just bouncing around at a standstill, and then I get sick.

There's a great line in the Innocents Abroad where Mark Twain describes how long it takes to get your sea legs on a voyage.

And, you know, it's always about exactly 80% of the way through.

It's a beautiful locomotive, by the way.

What is that?

This is...

I want to say this is some kind of general electric export unit.

It's a U something.

It might also be EMD.

I'm not good with the export units.

It's probably, it was, so it was either made in Erie, Pennsylvania, or Fort Wayne.

I think Fort Wayne.

I forget where.

Strange sort of American workshop to the world moment where you make these things in Erie and they end up, you know, sort of running a branch line in

Cebu for like 50 years.

So

they also have these small pump boats.

These guys, you know, they're just sort of launches without outriggers, right?

Sometimes these are used for short inter-island transportation.

Other just, you know, utility boats.

And there's a whole bunch of private shipping between the islands for basic goods, like food and fuel.

We'll talk about fuel later, but everything goes by boats.

This is my

important thing.

Gotcha.

Sure.

Yeah.

The outriggers on this are cool.

I mean, that's literally like that's a...

What is that?

Like a hardwood?

It's like a couple of logs that they've like lashed together.

I'm not sure.

It might be fiberglass, too.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So the Donya Paz, right?

Oh, boy.

Getting right into it, huh?

Yeah.

This was built as the Himayuri Maru for service in Japan in 1963.

It was 305 feet long, 45 feet in beam, 2,324 gross registered tons.

Keep in mind, gross registered ton is volume and not weight.

It was good good for 608 passengers.

Yeah, gross registered tons is also the sort of metric I use when I'm looking at scales I'm standing on, me too.

See, I just don't have a scale, yeah.

I tend not to use it.

I want to point out that Toby Keys Bar and Grill has a drink called the Crimson and Cream,

which is pineapple and coconut rum, pineapple juice, OJ, strawberry puree, and whipped cream.

Oh, yeah, oh,

I'm closing the tab, I'm closing the tab.

This is

Rainbow vomit arc.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's trying to do Margaritaville, but not quite doing it.

I don't think he can do Margaritaville in

the gentleness of soul required to be in Margarita.

We went to

the Atlantic City Margaritaville and we had a time.

Yeah.

Liam had the most disgusting drink I've ever seen.

Yeah, it was gnarly.

I liked it.

I took a sip and retched.

You were unpleasant.

Yeah, you were not happy.

I would like to recommend an ether article from 2021 called Margaritaville and the Myth of American Leisure.

I don't want to do breathing.

I want to get drunk.

Well, this is important reading about the getting drunk.

Fair enough.

Yeah, continue, Ros.

Sorry, I deep.

No, I'm not sorry, actually.

I don't care.

So this was sold on to another company called Sulpicio Lines.

This was registered in Manila.

For once, it was not a flag of convenience, right?

Although it does help.

Yeah, it just happens to be a lot of fun.

You don't have to be using this as a flag of convenience to register here, but it helps.

Yes.

So, you know, this is a very late sort of streamlined ferry.

You know, 1963 is the end times for really cool ship design.

You know, in Japan, they had airlines and the Shinkansen starts to eat into these inter-island ferries and intra-island traffic.

You know,

I'd even see, even though this is not a particularly flattering photo of the boat, you can see some of this nice streamlined modern influence up here.

It's got some curves, it's nice.

Oh, yeah, I hadn't noticed that actually.

I was too distracted by the rust, but like, it's nice, actually.

It's actually, it's actually a nice-looking boat, yeah.

Um,

now, in service in the Philippines, it would have some more severe issues

than just being put out of uh service.

So, your beautiful sort of like Shinkansen of the sea is sort of like dumped on the Philippines where it's going to have to like haul stuff back and forth over like one channel for the next forever.

So I managed to pull up the website for Silpiccio lines.

Oh, it's beautiful.

I love web design.

I know.

I know it's.

I love the missing images.

This is from Internet Archive, obviously.

More like more internet should be like this.

and i'm just yeah is that the s from shrek

yeah you know it actually sure looks like it i think it might actually be the s from shrek it is

and if it's not no one ruined it for me

there's a man

solficio go

he was a chinese immigrant to the uh philippines And with his sons, he started a shipping company in 1973 with 17 vessels, one tugboat, and five barges.

This is that kind of like you know immigrant get up and go that makes this country brackets the Philippines great, right?

Is yeah it's

you immigrate and you start a small business that has you know 17 ferries.

And then nothing bad happens to you.

We're actually recording well there isn't your problem in an alternate dimension where whatever 2,800 people didn't die.

I was just like leading into this with a kind of like Nepo baby joke, essentially, to be like, Yeah, he started from nothing with 17

fairies.

Yeah, that apparently it's just that easy to acquire them back then.

Everything was cheaper in 1973.

It's like buying AKs in the Soviet Union in like 92.

Yeah, cost of living is very low.

Um,

we're buying NFTs now, yeah,

he got it right after the peak of the market, you know.

So he quickly becomes known.

Ali's in in charge of this company as don sulpicio right

not as sinister as it sounds in spanish don o doña just it just means like it can actually convey respect yeah it sounds cool um it does it does

i i would love to be like a doña noviendre like genuinely be insanely cool don liam don justin i like don liam i like that

so the um the uh this ship in question was originally named for him, Don Sulpiccio, right?

A little bit vain.

Or when it was acquired by the line.

Transit's damn gender.

Yes, it did.

And like a lot of transitions, it was the process.

So this company got really big very quickly.

They purchased this big ship in 1975.

as well as a similar sister ship, Doña Maryland, which we'll briefly mention later in the episode.

And they just, as quickly, develop a reputation for overcrowding and lax safety procedures, right?

It's the budget airline of ferries.

Yes.

So the first thing they do with this ship, it was good for 600 passengers before, they refit it for 1,400 passengers.

Everybody's sitting in somebody's lap.

Yes.

Don Sulpiccio's career in the Philippines starts with a bang.

In June 1979, the ship caught fire and ran aground.

All 1,164 passengers made it off the ship, but the insurers rode it off.

It was completely gutted by the fire.

It just like burns to the waterline or whatever.

Incredible.

Undeterred.

Salpiccio salvages the wreck.

Oh, no.

Changes the name to Doña Paz and puts it back in service.

Come on, man.

Wait, so this is like a zombie ship?

Like, it's

rescued from the dead?

Yes, and

it trans its gender in the process.

I mean, I feel like transitioning from dead to alive has a sort of like different valence to it culturally.

Not that I mean to shame anyone, but I think that is technically a zombie.

It was the coming of the trans zombies.

I mean, it could also be Jesus, I guess.

Jesus didn't change his gender, though.

No, he could have.

It would have been a hell of a flex.

there's there's pope francis scheming oh woke pope i love woke yeah i i i i look forward to uh the pope saying that that that jesus was two spirit and just watching the catholic man watching the catholic church melt down if if if he does vatican 3 anytime soon please cool he might legitimately like get me back on the team like yeah yeah but vatican 3 would be a pretty good idea right now lacing them back up again we have just you're just gonna have Francis, come on the show.

Yeah.

Fidon Sil Piccio so loved the Philippines that he gave his only begotten ship.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

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The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month uh sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for um it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them the money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

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Back to the show.

So here's where the bad pronunciation starts.

Oh, boy.

So this goes from this red dot here, which is Teclaban.

Probably.

Probably.

On Leyte Island.

Sure.

Sure.

I don't know.

To Manila over here.

I'm not 100% certain of the route.

There's a little channel here it might be able to go through,

or it might have to go all the way around the island.

I haven't quite figured out.

I never figured that out.

But, you know, so it goes through and around and over.

It goes up to Manila, right?

So

the time

is 6.30 in the morning.

Oh, boy.

Due in at 8 a.m.

the following day.

This is already, we're moving very quickly here, right?

Yeah.

Also.

On December 20th, 1987.

Keep in mind, you know, we did a lot of missionary work down there.

So everyone's Catholic.

Everyone's going home for Christmas.

It's not even really like your fault so much as it is the Spanish and Portuguese.

Spaniards?

This is true.

It's why they're not just Catholic, but like strange, weird, Catholic, voluntary self-crucifixion Catholic.

Yeah.

Thanks for nothing.

Thanks for losing the 2010 World Cup, you fuckers.

And thanks for all the genocide and imperialism.

You people are the worst.

I, as an American, of course, am free from set.

Yes.

Of course.

Yeah.

So, Sil Piccio Alliance does the prudent and reasonable thing and secretly overbooks the hell out of the ferry.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Of course.

I mean, the thing is

internationally, it's always fun going to places where your country was not the colonial power and seeing how people feel about Britain, but it's about France or about Spain.

You go to like North Africa or whatever, and everyone's like, yeah, Britain, fine, whatever.

You guys suck too.

But we really fucking hate these guys because of all of the massacres that they did.

So up to 4,000 passengers boarded this ship.

They were on cots and mats in the hallways.

They were out in tents on the deck.

It's rated for 6.

Yeah, it's rated for 600, and then they uprated it by having people sit on each other's laps to like 1,400.

Yeah, and then they put 4,000 people on it.

Fucking fine.

Should be fine.

Yeah.

This may have included something like 1,000 kids and a whole battalion of soldiers who boarded at the last minute.

Everyone was buying cheap, illegal tickets in cash aboard the ship.

Again, mentioning the kind of decentralized and chaotic government, if you're moving your battalion of troops on a commercial ferry last minute, paying cash,

I think says something as well.

Well, you know, I, I mean, on the other hand, if you, if you worked for the Philippine Army at the time, apparently petty cash system, very generous.

Yeah.

The Philippine Army works on an honor system, you know?

The best of us all.

We'll not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate a cadet who does.

Selling illegal tickets on board was a very common practice, but during the Christmas travel rush, it was particularly bad.

Gotcha.

Anyway, so this is our first ship.

This is not the tanker MV Vector.

This is just a tanker.

If you search for MT Vector, you get a bunch of images of Vector mountains.

For real.

Yeah, because you can't use Google anymore.

It doesn't work anymore.

It doesn't work and it's flooded with AI bullshit now, which took about two weeks.

I was telling people, oh, this is going to make the internet unusable.

And it has done.

Torrent Leech.org still operated well.

Nice.

This tanker is similar to the one involved in the incident, but I think it's smaller.

It's

adorable, actually.

one in the incident would have been about twice as big but this is

MT here is motor tanker this is what we got so shut up

I do I do like that all of the shit prefix is it kind of just made up yeah oh it's the P and E oh yeah the P and E this there's no reason why it's like MVU rather than MS

and then you get a bunch of like different ones yeah motor tanker fine So MT Vector is just a little guy.

He was 170 feet long, 38-foot beam, 12-feet of draft, 250-horsepower diesel engine, single-screw propeller, 629 gross register tons.

It has less horsepower than like a modern minivan.

My GTI, yeah.

It's not as massive.

Just know my GTI is not stocked before you try to correct me on fucking horsepower numbers.

It's not like the massive ocean-going tankers most people picture when they think of, you know, tanker ships, right?

Just a guy.

Yeah, this is for hopping from island to island, you know, it's the size of a nice three-bedroom apartment.

Gotcha, like the gas station on this one, you know, island of a thousand people needs a refill.

Exactly, they send this guy like you don't bother building a pipeline to it, you just send one of these guys.

Yeah, gotcha, yeah.

So, this is this is like uh, the mission here.

This is also known as a product tanker because it's not

for transporting oil, it's largely for transporting oil products, you know, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, right?

Gotcha.

And so in this case, the mission here is to transport 8,800 barrels of those assorted petroleum products,

kerosene, gasoline, and diesel, from LeMay, which is just across the bay from Manila here,

to

Matt Spate Island, which is...

Mazbate, I guess.

Masbate, I guess.

I don't know.

know.

Where is it?

One of these thousand-people islands that has a gas station on it.

He has a gas station.

It needs a refill.

If you call a boat, it'll be there in a week.

In the meantime, people can walk.

Waiting for everyone to fill up their adorable

import minivans.

Oh, yeah.

I love those things.

They're absolutely ubiquitous all across Southeast Asia at this point.

It's great because they will have five different brands.

So, like, it's nominally a Toyota, but it's built in China and it's branded as a brand you've never heard before.

And yeah, incredible.

The thing with this kind of tanker is it transports products, not crude oil.

And there's much, those products are much more highly refined.

And therefore, compared with crude oil, except for certain grades, like back in crude oil, they're more likely to do things like explode.

I thought that gasoline was relatively safe, like to

as long as it's not long as it's not like vaporized, yes.

Why does it put like a cigarette out in a puddle of gasoline, right?

Yes, but what if that puddle of gasoline has a lot of volatile

gaseous gasoline above it?

Then you have a problem.

That's why all the big gasoline tanks have roofs that move up and down with the level of the liquid.

I would simply like flick my cigarette perfectly through the vapor cloud and be fine.

I would avoid all

the atoms.

Yeah, I'd just frame perfect parry every atom, you know.

So, you know, these things are highly refined.

They're very volatile.

They're more likely to do things like explode.

So you want to be pretty safe in how you operate these things because exploding is bad.

Very expensive, inconveniences people.

Yeah.

Another problem is that there are a lot of these, which are almost universally owned by small fly-by-night operators who contract.

It's like the guy.

It's like, you know, the guy who you call to refill the gas station, and that guy calls the guy who has a boat.

Yeah, exactly.

Gotcha.

So they're owned by these small fly-by-night operators who contract with big oil companies in order to shield those big oil companies from liability.

In this case, the ship was owned by Vector Shipping, transporting products for Caltex Philippines.

Now, this company, Vector Shipping, was notable in that it didn't actually have a license to operate the ship,

and they had understaffed it with no lookout or qualified master or chief engineer.

Cool.

Again, we like

highly centrally organized and regulated system of government.

We sure do, Alice.

Of November.

God damn it.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

So, the thing here, here, the thing here is, I wasn't able to confirm this, but I very much suspected it from reading everything about it in the court documents.

I'm pretty sure this vector shipping company owned exactly one ship, which was MT Vector.

Hey, um, if it if it's working for a certain Anglo-Dutch oil company, you could say it was a shell company.

Wow,

wow,

Thanks.

Thank you.

If anyone wants my job,

nope, can't have it.

Roz, you got to look out, though, bud.

MV Donald Paz.

Yes, sir.

He's gone through the Philippines, through the various bays and seas

straits.

They're about two-thirds of the way over.

They're in the

Tablas Strait.

Tablas.

Tablas, probably.

Tablas.

Yeah.

Tablas between

Marinduque and Mindoro.

Marinduque.

Marinduque.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Cultural sensitivity at an all-time high.

Do it very well.

MT Vector is, of course, coming the other way.

I sense the Princess Alice disaster happening again in Filipino.

Now,

the crew isn't worried about that, right?

Because there's a capable seaman in charge of MV Doña Paz.

Maybe.

The apprentice mate is the capable seaman.

So literally, like some kid.

Just a little bit.

It's probably fine.

It's probably fine.

Listen, if kids can't step up to pilot vessels and shit when the time comes comes.

And like, no,

I'm calling.

Why is Ender's Game a popular book?

Right?

Be fine.

It should be fine.

Yeah.

Be an adult.

We're sending you to the Hunger Games.

Another young adult novel.

Yeah.

I think that's all the young adult novels there are.

I think so.

I'm not going to talk about it anymore.

Whichever.

No, it's fun.

Nope.

Nope.

J.K.

Rowling can eat my butt.

Okay, what?

Who?

What?

Well, if that person existed, they could eat my butt.

Yeah.

JK, the guy from Jameriqui?

Well,

there's about to be a series of unfortunate events.

Oh, good books.

See, this is the thing.

I do the whole shell company thing.

I get nothing.

That one's really good.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Is there going to be some Artemis foul play?

Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

No one understands me, like, like the shitty books I read as an eight-year-old.

I loved those books.

Oh, they're pretty good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so the apprentice mate is having a young adult novel experience where he has now been put in charge of the ship.

Yeah, probably pretty novel.

Yeah.

Yes.

So the crew went down to the wreck room and started drinking.

I mean, technically, if you crash the ship, every room's the wreck crash.

That's true.

Good point.

The captain was in his cabin watching a Betamax tape.

Hold on, what are you doing?

What?

87?

1887.

Okay, that's a lot more normal.

I was expecting he was just into

old movies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was running a YouTube channel out of the captain's cabin.

Big, weird, big, weird techmone guy.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

The ship is otherwise.

Sony continued to sell Betamax cassettes until March of 2016.

What?

Wait, wait, wait, hold on.

I'm going to need to know what's the like latest mainstream movie you could get on Betamax?

If I had a Betamax player, what could I...

I mean,

it made it 41 years.

I don't.

What came out in 2016?

I don't know any movies.

Mission Impossible 1, the like OG Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise.

was the last movie released for Betamax, apparently.

That's still not even bad.

No, I mean,

I should.

The last film on VHS was sore too.

So,

so, other than this, the ship is doing great.

Um, it has just a minor list from overloading.

Um, they ran out of food and drink.

Uh, the toilets were overflowing, uh, it was full of screaming kids.

So, it is an Avanti West Coast fairy.

Okay, yes.

Um, I, I, meanwhile, you know, there's a fucking podcaster on there being like, this cannot get any worse.

This is hell.

I hope this fucking thing sinks and takes me with it.

Ask Ross how he did the cabot straight.

One of the things here is they're going through this busy shipping channel.

It's dark.

The apprentice maid can't see anything.

A lot of this is conjecture and not like actual, you know, facts, because what we really do know

is that shortly after 10 p.m., the MV Donya pause whacks into the MT vector.

The MT vector catches fire and immediately explodes.

Oh, likely place for it.

You know, like traditional thing for it to do in these circumstances, given that it's filled with

gasoline.

Exactly.

This explosion sets the Donya Paz on fire again.

Oh boy.

And no officers save for one are at their posts.

Yeah, they're all watching like different YouTube channels.

Like

you got one guy watching Tech Mone.

You got one guy watching Big Clive.

You got one guy watching us.

You know,

hopefully not watching this episode.

They'd be able to avert the disaster.

Just like naming YouTube channels we think are cool at this point.

So all hell breaks loose, right?

And again, we don't know too much exactly about what happened here.

The fire rapidly consumes the overbooked ferry.

Oh, I mean, again, this sounds fucking nightmarish immediately.

Yes.

The crew panicked.

They never gave an order to evacuate.

Even if they had, there wasn't a lot of time here, and there was no way to launch the lifeboats because the water was covered in gasoline, which was on fire.

Oh, yeah.

You don't want to launch a lifeboat into a

fire.

Yeah.

Because then your lifeboat's on fire.

And yeah.

Yeah.

It's in where the fire is.

And you kind of.

The life jackets were all locked in closets.

I mean, the power went out almost instantly.

What?

The thing is, you have a lot of light to see by from the fire.

Sure.

But there was also smoke.

Oh, well, see, yeah, kind of.

That's bad.

Kind of ups and downs with the fire, really.

So

on the one hand,

you can't use the lifeboats.

On the other hand, the lifeboats would be useless.

On the other other hand, there's a lot of light from the fire.

On the other hand, there's a lot of smoke.

So, you know, that

is how I would describe that.

People have to run for their lives down pitch black corridors, which are all full of cots and the tritas.

I wouldn't be good at this.

I think I would, I would probably.

I know you don't want to say skill issue to these people dying, but I would say

a lot of people turned out not to be good at this.

I think it's a thing that very few people are good at, you know?

So there were

dumb luck.

There were no lifeboats launched,

which,

yeah, again, if you had launched them, they would just catch fire.

You know, this was a very difficult to survive disaster.

Those few who managed it all jumped off the ship into the water, and many of them were seriously burned in the process.

Because of the gasoline.

Because of the gasoline.

I get to swim away from the ship as far and as quickly as possible.

Underwater.

You have to get under the gasoline,

swim under it while it's burning, and then

hope for the best, basically.

Yeah, hope you don't run out of breath before the, you know, you get to the edge of the thing.

And because this is, you know, South Pacific, there's another problem.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No,

no, no.

Much like this bin in IKEA, it's full of sharks.

It is transgender after all.

Yeah.

Fucking.

I knew it was heading this way.

I had in my head the fucking USS Indianapolis.

Um,

these fucking guys.

What's the Trump tweet, folks?

You know, I

people are very mad at me for hating sharks, but don't worry, they'll be here long after we're gone.

Um,

Trump's fucking anti-shark tweets.

Yeah, uh,

I don't know, maybe he deserves to be president again.

Trump shark tweets.

Sorry, folks, I'm not a fan of sharks.

And don't worry, they will be around long after we are gone.

It was back when Discovery Channel made you get hyped up about Shark Week every year.

It's like, I don't care about sharks either.

Sharks are last on my list, other than perhaps the losers and haters of the world.

Fair enough.

President confirms Stormy Daniels' claim that he's terrified of sharks.

She claims he said, I hope all the sharks die.

I think I'm changing my Twitter bio now to, I hope all the sharks die.

It's such perfectly like hater behavior.

So this is a very busy straight, and this accident was almost immediately spotted by the passing MS Don Claudio, right?

Right there, which is this guy here.

Hold on, doing that.

I hope all the sharks die thing.

Yep, gotcha.

Um, which rush to the accident scene, it arrived there almost instantly.

They couldn't get close, they couldn't get it close to the accident because it's on because of the fire, you know, yeah, because

and they couldn't, no one could see anything, right?

Right, they were like, there's no lifeboats coming down, all we can do is pluck survivors from the water.

Everyone who swam far enough horrifically,

Yeah, I mean, just skin peeling off everything, real nasty.

So, and those who managed to get up close to the Don Claudio were too weak to like climb up ropes or use a ladder or anything.

So, they actually had to like pull them up using nets.

Yeah, again, that's probably not what you want, especially when all of your skin is not so attached anymore.

Yes,

so that all 26 survivors, survivors, 24 from Doña Paz and two from MT Vector, were pulled directly from the water by this ship.

Out of

out of 4,000.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, this is a very bad accident.

Generally speaking, like,

I mean, that's in a kind of like horrifying middle ground because like a lot of the stuff we've talked about is just stuff that is like

totally unsurvivable.

Like plane crashes or whatever, where it's like it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

You just get like mulched instantly.

Yeah.

But this is like, oh, there's like just enough of a chance, you know?

It's like horrifying.

It's like a couple people made it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, rescue efforts here were further hampered because

nobody had a radio.

Of course.

Yeah, why would that be important?

You know?

Yeah.

Adds wait.

It took eight hours for the MS Don Claudio to get to a port to alert the authorities.

Jesus, fuck.

You're just fucking lying there with like 96% burns or whatever for like eight hours before anyone even like knows anything's happened.

Yes.

When the authorities finally got to the scene of the accident, there was nothing there.

Jesus.

This is like,

you know what it reminds me of?

Is something that I've been have been wanting to do as an episode for a while.

There's a few uh like early-ish like post-second world war aviation disasters in south america where like planes just go they just disappear in the andes because like you know they they crash for one reason or another and there's just no way of finding them again right yeah

this this bit is particularly grim uh evidence soon became piling up in the nets of local fishing boats and washing up on beaches uh there were so many corpses that it actually became a public health concern.

They had to close down beaches.

That's correct.

There was no comprehensive official death toll initially, but it was assumed to be very high because the ship was very overloaded.

Silpiccio lines, of course, disputes this.

Oh, of course.

You know, for legal reasons.

I don't know.

It's also striking how the, like, just waiting for bodies to wash up thing, how reminiscent it is of like

earlier maritime disasters, like Princess Alice, or like, you know, the fucking Birkenhead or whatever.

There's like a bunch of these.

Just really, really grim.

So,

all right, what happened in the aftermath?

A big part of this investigation relied on pinning down a simple statistic.

How many people were actually on the ferry?

Fuck, that's grim.

Yeah.

No one could give a straight answer.

Sulpicio insisted the ferry was at normal capacity as indicated by the manifest 1493 passengers and 59 crew yeah tony straight face we don't know how many bodies we we we there's only 683 bodies don't worry about it yeah to to be like there's there's only like three times as many as it probably should have had after we put this back into service after it ran aground and burned down yeah

survivors described a much different scene with the dangerously overloaded vessel filmed with the teeming masses right?

All but five of the passengers who survived the wreck were not on the official manifest.

And the more recognizable bodies that were washing up were also not on the passenger manifest.

Yeah, the guy who washes up with his like EDC asbestos wallet that, you know, survives perfectly.

That's not to mention it was official policy not to record non-paying children under four on the manifest.

Which is going to be, again, like a high number because

there were a lot of kids on this thing.

So Piccio's claim was clearly bunk.

Yeah, of course.

Eventually, the media in Tacloban had to compile a list of missing people from surviving relatives.

Eventually, there was a list of 2,000 names published in the Philippine Daily Enquirer.

It wasn't until 1999 that the official estimated death toll was up to 4,385.

I'm remembering Princess Alice again of just like having to do best guesses and people doing things like perpetrating frauds because no one knows who really got killed and who survived.

And yeah.

Yeah, it's

a big, big forensic situation here.

You know, you just can't,

the records were so bad that you can't tell who's alive, who's dead.

So,

sending down divers to shake down sharks for information.

Exactly.

How many people do you fucking eat?

Let's get that big one.

Just grabbing the fastest shark by the fins and like shaking it.

Who do you know here?

Who'd you eat?

Show me your teeth.

Show me your teeth.

Doing the third-degree police interrogation on a shark is.

That image is sort of like distracting me from some of the horrors.

So,

well,

you'll be happy to know that the

legal proceedings.

Oh, my fault.

Boy.

Oh boy.

Who gets compensated for this?

Who's at fault?

It's time to enter the exciting world of torts.

Delicious torts.

Delicious torts, yes.

Chocolate torts.

Flourless chocolate torts.

You know, there's some guys with deep pockets here who could get sued.

Yeah, I mean, that, like, if you take out the sort of like bullshit shell company intermediary, there's presumably like a

like an oil company.

A whole oil company, yeah.

They they have a shitload of money.

Um, Sulficio probably has like a decent amount because they have lots of money.

Yeah.

Yep.

Sulficio at this point controlled something like 40% of domestic Philippine shipping.

They said, well, the ship is insured for 25,000.

I forget if this is Philippine dollars, Philippine pesos.

I think it's actually pesos.

It is a peso, yeah.

So everyone with the family member that was on the manifest was going to get 20,000 Philippine pesos as payout.

And if your relative was not on the manifest, well,

that's fake.

You don't get anything.

$357

US

today.

Well, that's almost an Xbox.

Is it?

Xboxes are getting cheaper.

$299.99 for an Xbox Series S.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

So you can get an Xbox in a couple of games for your dead kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Assuming they were on the manifest, of course.

Assuming they were on the manifesto.

All they like washed up with their asbestos wallet or their like, you know, skull tattoo.

No, if they weren't on the manifest, Sulpicio didn't want to give them anything.

Oh, okay.

Maybe that guy just like fell into the strait where the ship sank by accident.

Yeah, it could have just happened, you know.

So the victims' families didn't like that.

They staged a massive protest,

you know, and eventually the Supreme Court of the Philippines had to step in.

I mean, it's always good when a Supreme Court steps in.

They're not about to do something completely horrible and assined.

It's always good.

I love to hear from the Supreme Court.

And the question of blame is important here.

Caltex Petroleum in the Philippines was a massive oil company, right?

It had chartered MT Vector.

Could they somehow be liable since they might have some duty to ensure the seaworthiness of the vessel?

and the court decided in 2008,

no.

Oh, wow, the blame for the accident rested solely on a crappy little shipping company with one vessel, and they'd have to bear the burden of the payout, which means I don't think anyone got any compensation.

As far as I know, this would also be the case in Scottish law of delicts and probably therefore English taught law.

I'm gonna get yelled at because I'm gonna get the case wrong because it's been years since I did my delix exam.

But I want to say my authority for this is transco-plc

against

stockport something,

but I could be wrong.

Uh, that's pretty good.

Hey, I mean, listen, I

it's sometimes the stuff just lodges in your head, and it may well be entirely wrong.

Uh, don't tell me in the comments.

Oh, they're good, don't worry, yeah, yeah, that was fucking dope,

You assholes.

So you may think that

this shipping line, Silpicio, they'd have been like, well, there was this horrific loss of life.

We need to improve some of our internal procedures, make sure none of this happens again.

Even we host the show.

They're sort of like, you know, shocked into sobriety by this entire situation.

Here's the thing.

Why would they when

nobody faces any real consequences here?

and uh you're correct the answer to that is no

here's a Wikipedia article you don't want to have about you list of maritime disasters involving the Philippines Span Asia Carrier Corporation.

Oh my god.

Which they it's it's a it's not a super long one, but there's a lot of big death tolls.

Um oh, they changed the name though.

I mean, that's how you really know they did

those consequences.

Oh, look at the fucking rust streaming off of

this.

Is actually

sunflower.

This is when the

MV Donna Maryland was owned by a Japanese ferry line, but this was also later sold to the Philippines.

Silpiccio loses two more big ships.

Donna Maryland here in 1988 that kills 300 people.

And then down here is Princess of the Orient

capsizing a typhoon in

1998, killing 150 people.

For whatever reason.

Why are you sailing in a typhoon?

Don't do that.

You know when they're going to be.

Well, you know,

people got to get to work.

I guess so.

I have no idea.

That's a different disaster.

Finally, in 2008, When the Supreme Court decision is coming down that says they're not responsible, MV Princess of the Stars sank in Typhoon Feng Shen, 814 dead and missing.

You gotta stop sailing in the fucking typhoons, boys.

I don't know what to tell you.

And the Philippines Board of Marine Inquiry finally suspended Sulpicio's license to carry passengers.

You know, it's like they always say, right?

Fool me three times, shame on me.

Four or four times.

Fool me four times.

Shame, shame, shame on me.

yeah

thus uh justice was served-ish i guess uh-huh they they should ever they should go to the houses of the executives of this line and

or the shoes or whatever

yeah whatever you guys feel is appropriate

um Sopicio Lions, which is now named Philippine Span Asia Carrier Corporation, is appealing this decision, but they do not currently run passenger service.

This happened in 1987.

Here's the thing: someone still does,

right?

Like, because

the islands have not changed, the movement between them has not changed.

Someone still has to run a bunch of ferries, and statistically, I know that they're going to be trying to do it on the cheap.

So, the same shit's happening.

It's got to be.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely like

I mean, granted, the last two ships were sunk by

whatchamac.

Mysterious factor foods, right?

Yeah,

so this is this is just

a question of not sailing in heavy weather.

But

you know,

this company just had this insane safety record and was allowed to keep operating for

two decades.

It's it's

you know, it's massive failures at all level of administration here.

Yeah,

you get sort of like a 9-11 and a bit's worth of casualties out of

this one, and then nothing happens.

Yeah, I mean, well,

since October 7th, we now have proportional 9-11s.

So I think that's this is actually significantly more proportional 9-11s for the Philippines.

All right, let's do some maths here.

Population of the Philippines.

All right, the population of the Philippines is 113.9 million.

So we say roughly a third of the U.S., give or take.

And it had,

and it was like 1.1911s.

So it would be like

three and a third 9-11s.

Yeah, that sounds about right for me.

Back of the envelope, this is three and a third 9-11s.

Yeah, I mean, you know, what if...

What if 9-11 actually was an inside job and just no one did anything about it?

This is sort of what happened here.

Yeah, it's just like

9-11 was just like extremely negligent.

Like United hired Muhammad Atta and he like flew the planes into the fucking World Trade Center.

And then United were like, sorry about this.

Here is $300.

Go buy an Xbox.

You cannot sue us.

Jesus Christ.

This is.

This is depressing news.

Depressing episode.

Yeah.

That's what we're here for.

Yep.

We're here to provide you lots of extremely bleak content.

I already legitimately suffered a workplace psychiatric injury doing this podcast, doing the fucking Preons one.

I still have anxiety disorder problems about that.

And now on top of this, you hit me with the fucking depression beam.

you know

that's what we're here for getting the getting well there's your problem syndrome syndrome.

I'm getting work woman's comp is what I'm getting.

That's, that's, yeah.

I don't know.

You guys are

paying for my therapy.

You know, make him do it.

No, no, no.

The Patreon subscribers are paying for my therapy.

Which we thank you for.

Yeah, thank you.

So, what did we learn today?

When you find someone who's negligent, go to their house and beat them to death with their own shoes.

I think my answer is simply the word don't.

Yeah.

Just

don't

do that.

We've learnt nothing.

Well, because there's nothing to learn.

What we could have learned was like extremely obvious.

Like

hold corporations responsible for their acts and omissions.

We could do the names and addresses song.

Yeah, that's doing the animaniac song, but like countries of the world, but it's like names and addresses of executives of

this company.

Yeah,

it's just kind of bleak.

I mean, it also relates, well, even in the goddamn news talking about East Palestine, you know, the railroad hasn't really been meaningfully held accountable.

The whole industry has.

And, you know, here we also see, you know, 20 years for them to decide actually the ferry line isn't accountable.

You know, it's,

it's like, you know, this whole system is,

this whole system is fundamentally broken.

Yeah, of course.

And it's fundamentally broken for like historical reasons, too.

Like, if you want the Philippines to be a country that has a judiciary and has a government that allows the meaningful regulation of shipping and consequences for people who break it and kill a bunch of people, then

the reasons why it doesn't are

a history of colonial exploitation that kind of creates inequalities that persist to this day is why.

Good old, good old, the purpose of the system is what it does, right?

Here,

yeah, yeah, anyway, it's all fucking Douglas MacArthur's fault.

I'm pretty certain, yeah, I think so.

Well,

we have a segment on this podcast called

Safety Third,

shake hands with danger.

Ooh, three slides for safety third this time.

Yes, hello, Roz, November, Yay Liam, Devon, and/slash/or possible guests/slash guests.

No.

I've got a recent safety third for you where I was both the idiot and the somewhat intelligent one.

I've got a Stan Rogers song I like and another weirder Stan Rogers song.

Yeah.

I work in the world of museums, specifically science museum,

an absurd space where bizarre maintenance requirements and procedures collide with the oddest people possible, all covered with the delightful penny-pinching blanket of non-profit life.

Cool.

I can relate.

The museum I work at has a planetarium.

We replaced the lamp projectors with LED projectors as part of a recent series of major changes and upgrades.

Still thinking about the tweet that's like, I work at a planetarium, and when the Earth came on with the thing, this is the Earth, one of the kids booed.

Fair enough, honestly.

For a few reasons, the main planetarium operator was let go at the same time, and my department was tasked with getting the planetarium cleaned up and organized.

Yeah, just fix up the planetarium.

You know, it was like we bought a zoo, except it's a planetarium.

The former operator could be quite accurately described as very devoted, but quite odd and a bit of a hoarder.

As we were cleaning the space, we found out that instead of disposing of burned-out projector lamps, he'd kept every single dead lamp.

Sometimes you get the autism and it hurts your feelings to throw them away, right?

Yes,

these aren't just big light bulbs where the inside it's a vacuum, and you only need to really worry about broken glass when you break them.

Large old theater and cinema projectors tend to use xenon arc lamps.

See figure A.

This is cool.

A, I believe.

Look very like,

I don't know,

industrial.

Yeah.

Where fused quartz glass contains xenon gas at potentially up to 30 atmospheres or 440 pounds per square inch.

These are effectively very small pressure bombs that have built-in shrapnel.

Built-in glass shrapnel.

Put a pin in that.

I don't think I want to put a pin in that.

Yeah.

We don't know how long he'd been hoarding lamps, but I've found dated boxes going back at least 15 years.

years when he when we finished cleaning we had about 125 of these lamps just sitting on a pallet needing to go somewhere i mean sometimes you lose the contact details for your lamp disposal guy yeah sometimes you think that the lamps have personalities and you don't want to like get rid of them

right sure

being as their pressure vessels Yeah, to safely dispose of them, we needed to break the glass to release the pressure.

Oh, no.

Sorry, we we needed to do a kind of planetarium operation sailor hat right destroy the destroy the village to save it yes i'm i'm familiar i'm sure it's fine

after a discussion about the cost of the proper tool versus the fact that we were only going to use it once due to the led upgrades my boss uttered the words no person wants to hear

Can't we just make a tool to break them ourselves?

No,

can't we just drop the like Acme 16 ton weight on them on the palate?

At this point, you know, maybe you just want to throw them in a lake.

It's a safe and legal thrill, you know.

You're about to get some really bright electric eels.

Yeah.

I was effectively tasked with the impromptu explosive ordnance disposal.

Yeah,

I'm not the step EOD tech.

I'm just the EOD tech who stepped up.

Good challenge, actually.

I found a method of breaking them online see figure b a youtube video don't do that

yeah i found this guy called fps russia

the uh

the

exact door just going right past him

I made the rig involve to make things go smoother.

I started removing the bulbs from their housing.

figure c it's on the next slide uh-huh um

which

i assume it's this one yeah

because i'm not a complete idiot i was wearing as much protective gear as i could leather gloves long sleeves masked full face shield not quite a full eod suit but you make do with what you got yeah i was wearing my don't like that sense don't like that

world war one trench armor right

As I pulled the lamps out, I gently placed them in a five-gallon bucket with a piece of heavy plastic on top as a blowout panel.

Smart.

Yeah, about 25 lamps de-housed.

I gently took the bucket over to where I had the smashing rig.

I took the plastic cover off, reach in, still with full PPE, gingerly start to pull a lamp up, and shit immediately goes sideways.

That tracks, bud.

Near as I can tell, one lamp shifted and fell on another lamp, which cracked ever so slightly.

And physics took over.

Pressure released.

Yes.

Yeah.

You're just doing like nuclear fission, but for glass at that point.

The physics took over.

The cracked lamp went boom, and a chain detonation started as the glass and metal shrapnel cracked all the other lamps in the bucket, including the one I was holding.

I felt the wave of pressure hit my hand as the bucket immediately became a giant shotgun of shattered glass and metal rockets out of the bucket.

Fuck.

Once the explosion finishes, I check to make sure I'm not down any fingers or spurting blood, quickly shout, I'm okay, and pull my hand/slash arm out of the blast zone.

Thank the various deities for protective gear, as the only damage to myself is a bunch of redness from the pressure wave, some minor scrapes, and a bruised ego.

A TBI, a traumatic bulb injury.

The fact that I'd just been appointed to the safety committee was not lost on myself or my boss, and my punishment for being a dumbass was cleaning up all the shrapnel and having to smash the rest of the lamps outside in the cold.

I just ended up smashing them with a sledgehammer.

Sounds kind of fun, actually.

Yeah.

It does.

Like those Mexican guys who have

weak explosives strapped to sledgehammers and then just hit the ground with them.

Moral of the story is: proper PPE will save your life, and don't put a bunch of breakable pressure vessels in enclosed spaces.

Love the podcast.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for many hours of engineering disasters.

If I ever run into any of you, drinks are on me.

Fantastic.

Excellent.

Thanks so much.

I'm so glad that the World War One trench armor, leather jerkin-ass situation protected you.

Yeah.

so uh

that was safety third

shake hands with danger

hands with danger our next episode will be on chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go um

i i think we're good to be honest um yeah i think we're good too

it's it's it's fashion's coming

it is it might be out by the time this comes out probably will be yeah uh

And yeah, if you want to donate to Railroad Workers United, that link will be in the description.

Absolutely.

Cool.

Become a sustaining member today.

All right, we did it.

We recorded every podcast.

The workflow is fixed.

Yes.

Okay, good.

I was hoping to have a shorter one so that

we did not

send Devin to the Torment Nexus.

Still recording, bud.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.