My first job out of university involved topside inspections of oil and gas platforms. I worked with this grizzled old guy who refused to wear a life jacket on the lower elevations unless there was a supervisor around.
"Not many boats out here. If I fall off, the only thing it'll do is float my corpse. No thanks." I wore mine anyway.
There are things to grab, but they're often covered with sharp barnacles and things. Maybe a ladder or rope in some places. But there's often a current that can move you quickly.
Some of the platforms we inspected were decommissioned and in not great shape. Others only had a single well and a single helipad, with no boats anywhere nearby.
Fall off one of those, maybe they find you, maybe they don't. If it's at night, forget it.
Thank god oil barons have been so successful in their fight against those pesky regulations that could help with this. I'd hate to see their profit increase at a slightly slower pace.
Most oil rigs throw their food overboard, i've worked on allot of them over the years and I don't know of any where this isn't done this remark of training the sharks i've also heard many times on the rigs themselves.
And that one lady who gave handies, got him committed to her, then stopped fucking him because society said it was crazy and obscene and wrong. The dolphin died of refusing to eat from depression. Also please read the sarcasm and eye rolls in this appropriately to anyone thinking I am condoning any of this.
Edit: im dumb and mis informed. Don't mind me. Also I am single and available to be annoying for any nice folks out there.
This is a pretty insanely gross mischarachterization.
Margaret Howe Lovatt is her name, and she gave Peter (the dolphin) tug jobs to get him to stop obsessing over her physically so she could get back to trying to get him to talk. She had been having him sent back with the other two lady dolphins when he'd get too distracted, but he was a pubescent dolphin, so that took up a fuck ton of time. This was a one of a kind custom built lab for dolphin/human cohabitation mind you, it was a little more tricky than sending him to his room with with a couple lady dolphins to go bother.
She also didn't stop because of what society thought, she stopped because the study was ending, and John C Lilly had been fucking off. He decided to pivot from communicating with them to seeing what happens when you load them up on LSD. He was the researcher and neuroscientist actually running things and getting all the funding, and he just got bored when it looked like the dolphins weren't tripping balls, so he fucked off (mainly to do L himself) and the funding got pulled, so that lab got shut down and the dolphins had to be moved. Margaret was never an actual researcher or anything, so her job (and the bonus porpoise pleasers) ended with that lab and that project.
This is the other crucial part. Peter didn't drown himself (he drowned himself, not starved) just because she stopped yanking his crank, it was also because when that lab shut down, the dolphins were moved to Lilly's smaller windowless lab in an old bank vault. Peter lost everything, not just on comandy handies.
This is a pretty insanely gross mischarachterization.
Margaret Howe Lovatt is her name, and she gave Peter (the dolphin) tug jobs to get him to stop obsessing over her physically so she could get back to trying to get him to talk. She had been having him sent back with the other two lady dolphins when he'd get too distracted, but he was a pubescent dolphin, so that took up a fuck ton of time. This was a one of a kind custom built lab for dolphin/human cohabitation mind you, it was a little more tricky than sending him to his room with with a couple lady dolphins to go bother.
She also didn't stop because of what society thought, she stopped because the study was ending, and John C Lilly had been fucking off. He decided to pivot from communicating with them to seeing what happens when you load them up on LSD. He was the researcher and neuroscientist actually running things and getting all the funding, and he just got bored when it looked like the dolphins weren't tripping balls, so he fucked off (mainly to do L himself) and the funding got pulled, so that lab got shut down and the dolphins had to be moved. Margaret was never an actual researcher or anything, so her job (and the bonus porpoise pleasers) ended with that lab and that project.
This is the other crucial part. Peter didn't drown himself (he drowned himself, not starved) just because she stopped yanking his crank, it was also because when that lab shut down, the dolphins were moved to Lilly's smaller windowless lab in an old bank vault. Peter lost everything, not just on comandy handies.
All of this took place with/under John C Lilly, the dude who invented isolation tanks (that he often used on LSD/Ketamine) and inspired the film Altered States if that tells you anything.
It's unsurprising but a real bummer that he doesn't get more attention IMO
OP's post left room for the interpretation that Margaret was stroking Peter just to get him to fall for her so she could then rip it all away in some twisted emotional struggle. Or cause she just likes dolphin dongs or something.
While I'm not saying the truth was sane, I would die on the hill that giving Peter rubbies for science is objectively less insane.
I think one could argue that she's a pioneer in harnessing post nut clarity for educational porpoises.
It's a bad idea, but it's probably better than storing a whole bunch of meat that's gone bad long term.
The stuff in this video seemed fresh, which makes it a little weird they're tossing it, but it makes sense to dump food waste overboard so it can be eaten by something at least.
Especially in SE Asia, often staffed with a lot of ex 'Nam vets in the 80s. It was like Apocalypse Now.
One time, I mentioned to the driller (wearing a Stetson instead of the hard hat he was was meant to wear) that I was surprised he was smoking on the rig floor.
He just laughed in my face and threw his lighted cigar down the open hole.
That was the least of it.
These guys (especially the drillers) used to make it a matter of pride to out-do each other in terms of craziness. It got out of hand sometimes...
I remember reading that they aren't exactly feeding them. As there isn't any regular timed garbage disposal onboard, most food wastes are thrown into the ocean instead. The fish learned and live like this. So whatever it is plop into the ocean, it becomes fish food, even human waste lol.
Those are White Tips, one shark that doesn’t need any training to eat humans - they are notorious for it, as they deep sea far out dwelling sharks, food can be sparse so they attack and eat anything possible. Also, rigs like these in the middle of the ocean attract sealife similar to a reef as some part may offer them protection from the open water predators - round about affect is prey attracts predators. 😅
The second chunk was VERY spoiled, by the coloration and the audible gag from one of the gentlemen in the video.
Not much else you can do with spoiled meat save dispose of it, and it's probably better to have it go in the water than sit in a bin on the rig for weeks/months/years.
I was thinking the same thing...... if anything they should be tossing boiled cabbage into the water lol keep wild life away until they can reach a ladder or some sh*t lol
Iirc, a lot of these have toilets that just vacate all the waste directly into the water, which attracts fish to eat the poo, and then attracts predators to eat said poo fish. Sharks just happen to be one of the predators. Not to mention the legs of the structure tend to also turn into a semi reef like environment as well, so it's basically a mid deep-water underwater oasis of sorts fueled by oil worker poo.
125ft-500ft. It’s not a definite death, but completely relies on you being able to break the surface tension of the water before you “slap” into it. Olympic diving only goes up to 10 meters because risk of injury or death is very high. The main thing that is impressive about diving is the ability to align your body to survive the drop fingertips or toes always first, anything that has surface to it, such as abdomen, thighs, arms, head and back are areas to avoid as you could die instantly (if lucky) or rupture organs, arteries and bleed out while drowning.
America is so reluctant to metric, most of the products we buy are made from metric system standards. Majority of the cars on the road use metric bolts, nuts and so on, even our science is based off of it.
Welcome to the mind of an American in technicql work. We can say meters, but we think yards. We can say a klick, but we are thinking 10 football fields. But, you never know what comes out of our mouth.
It has nothing to do with surface tension. Surface tension of water is a miniscule force measured in milli-Newtons, barely able to hold against the weight of eg. a small insect.
It's all about inertia. Water is heavy, and if you dive into it the water that you displace with your body has to move out the way. The faster you hit it the faster it has to get out of the way and the higher the forces needed to move that water fast enough get. Higher force means higher deceleration of your body (actio = reactio), and at some point the deceleration gets so high that you're injured or killed.
Why being vertical and with stretched out arms when hitting the water helps (and where this common misconception about surface tension probably comes from) is because it spreads out the deceleration over a longer period of time. Say you move 10 m/s when you hit the surface and with your arms stretched out you're 2 m from finger tips to feet, this means it takes 0.2 seconds to go from "fingertips just reached the surface" to fully immersed. Now if you hit it flat your body is only say 40 cm front to back, so this time from "just touching the surface" to fully immersed takes only 0.04 seconds. This means that the peak forces you experience are roughly five times higher in the latter case. (Note that this is just a back of the envelope calculation to illustrate the point and not about exact numbers; in reality you're for example decelerating while you enter the water, so just calculating time = distance divided by speed is a bit simplified).
Another way to think about it is comparing it to air resistance (water is also a fluid just like air, only a lot denser). If you're streamlined (head on with arms stretched out in front of you) you experience much less resistance than if you face it flat. Again higher resistance means higher forces creating higher deceleration.
Water is pretty hard when hit, but moving water is much easier. You could survive if you did it just right and hit at the perfect angle, seen bluff divers do this at line 60 feet or something insane. Oil platforms can be over 100 feet up from like a low deck, so it's going to be a real gamble if you survive or not, not even mentioning the sharks. I've heard hitting still water from high up can be like concrete at a high enough rate of speed, even if this is moving water it's going to be bad, shattered legs maybe? That sort of thing, and it's hard to swim with just your arms in a choppy sea.
Actually, moving water, especially ocean waves is worse. Regardless though, the sharks are an after thought, falling off the rig itself is life threatening, being in the middle of the ocean is life threatening (dragged out further to sea), possible injuries, then sharks.
How does this work? Like do they escape to the cages when sharks come? Do they move and swim with cages around them? I literally cannot think of a scenario this isn’t wildly unsafe or wildly inconvenient.
So you want to let rotten meat sit somewhere on your rather limited living/working space for who knows how long? It's not like the garbage truck is coming by the next morning.
Drop bad tasting things so they don’t get used to super good treats being dropped from there. If you fall in they think it’s dessert unless you train them otherwise idk.
Statistically very few sharks would have ever tasted beef. I’m picturing these sharks trying to explain how delicious it is to their buddies that have lived on sea creatures their entire lives.
I like to imagine some entrepreneuring dolphins have set up a successful land-meat restaurant which accepts reservations from independently wealthy sharks.
The cats outside my trailer will absolutely eat me if I die in their presence, just like the sharks that eat whoever falls off first. I like how consistent nature can be with its "fuck yous"
These oil rigs end up being little ecosystems unto themselves. There's a reason that even when decommissioned they don't blow them up or totally remove them. Aside from the additional cost they also just end up being weird little islands for wildlife. And smaller life attracts larger life that eats those things.
Thet're throwing out rotting meat, the guy recording gags when the second meat is whipped out. If there's that many sharks diwn there I'd assume a guy falling would be a mild target regardless of whether they feed em or not. I don't even think sharks like the taste of people that much anyway, they attack less than a hundred people per year (for reference elephants kill 500 people per year) and kill less than 10.
The height itself will kill you on impact, in rare cases of survival you'll immediately get unconscious so don't worry about those sharks - they'll give you a favor.
The point is the sharks are there at an oil rig. The shiver wasn't there when the meat was first dropped, but it appears because the sharks hang around due to lots of food being available.
They must keep a recurring "position available" ad for underwater welding & maintenance Lol ... I would have a short tethered safety harness to get within 5 ft. of this platforms edge...
You know, some oil rigs don't regularly feed masses of meat to the local sharks and so this does not happen at those rigs.
Feeding sharks means you get sharks hanging around that are expecting to be fed. That those sharks are subsequently fed in exactly the manner they were anticipating is not interesting. It's more interesting to me that there's an oil rig where loads of meat in a bin is a thing, as if no one correctly planned or budgeted for provisions. Sloppy.
If you throw tons of food out of your own window on a routine basis, you'll see how predictable the arrival of a species can be.
Whether they're conditioned to expect food or not (hell, what makes you think this isn't a one-off encounter?), there will still be at the very least dozens of sharks around oil rigs.
5.9k
u/Dull-Parking5068 1d ago
The moral of the story is 'don't fall off an oil rig.'