i want to bring greetings from my friends and like me again tech they know i'm doing this they want me to do it and they trust me to tell the story you may have heard that to there not that you may have heard about the net x issue i don't know if it's resonated south of the border where netflix has been using these images for a number of its shows why don't i understand about the nuclear holocaust and dimensions of this disaster are more reaching that level they're not to put it diplomatically they're not amused by what's been happening and you know there's been some apologies but in the least in one case they're not retracting taking back you know i'm just erasing what they what they had what they had used you know i've i've i've i've actually the way i came to it i won't go into the the details but it was kind of i kind of it's i kind of just slid into it and then one thing led to another and i actually ended up writing three ports  when i first when it happened i happened beyond occasion and so i could spend more time and i just was kind of transfixed it was horrifying to see those images and i had gone to university very close to t and you know and and to see to see it happening there and i very quickly though the blame game started and and eventually it kind of converged very quickly converged on the last link in the chain which was the locomotive engineer and i thought you know i could write something that that i didn't have a vested interest i didn't have a lot of knowledge about the railway sector but i knew about the deregulation policies and its sibling policies and so i thought i could and then they got back to me from my vacation and i and i learned from my close colleague that she lost three members of her extended family and so that kind of put a whole new dimension on the work and i said i did three reports and at the end of end of it as an ice i spent a year at the law fathi on a on a fellowship and then i had the publisher approach me if i'd write this book and so that's that's the that's the culmination of this this work on it i just want to preface my remarks by saying i mean the railways are both in canada and the united states are really the backbone i don't know where the backbone campaign comes from but they ate vay are the backbone and they were essential to the founding of of canada and in that and the development of the of  united states and then the links are are in incredibly important mode of transport and i i support railway workers i support the regulators the inspectors who you know and there were voices you know warning about this within the department of transport to the canadian department when i you know the canadians called transport canada they use that that language in canada but there were people who were warning that you know it was an accident waiting to happen and and i also support a strong and safer away a strong well resource reservists and dysfunctional regulator that was captured by a powerful regulator a railway and and what what i trace over a period of time and i think a parallel process was going on in the u s you can and let me on that but but kind of systematic erosion of safety protections and this was a violent consequence of that so that's that's the journey that this train took from newtown north dakota and it was headed for the east coast of canada to the irving refineries big refinery there and st john the brunswick is about you know in all that's about four thousand kilometers i don't know what that translates into miles but when someone can can do the conversions for me i should have done it so anyways you can see it traveled down through minneapolis to chicago and then up to detroit and then it entered canada at at windsor up along the north shore of the great lakes to to montreal and the railway was  story has heroes and villains and it's more complicated than that but he's definitely on the on the villainous side and he had all actually when canadian national and c n n was privatized in the in the hundred ninety s very shortly after he was it was privatized he became the c e o he's a southern boy from memphis i believe but he had a formula for running  railroads which was called precision railroading perception railroading but it was you know he was kind of laser focus on shareholder value on costs and cutting costs on cutting staff and fighting with unions on on really running roughshod anyway so he has he was brought back to to c n n after he'd retired from r c p after he retired from c n n i'm potential of c p in these circumstances and he thought the guy had to bring back as is hunter harrison and he managed with a very small percentage of the of the voting shares he managed to control it kicked out the c e o kicked out the board and placed his own people anyways that's a part of the story and a c p was contracted and then they subcontracted out to company called to runs it used to be used to be owned by by canadian pacific and when it was deregulated they sold off what they determined to be unprofitable railways and he was there to do the same kind of number on montreal ma his name was tom harding and he was the single operator the single crew member in this massive train it was seventy two cars highly volatile back and shell oil it was misclassified as  was a company that it kind of tried to engender a cult culture of negligence but he was a pretty responsible guy and had a lot of experience on the railway really from his childhood and was in the family and he picked up that train it to two o'clock in the afternoon it took him about ten and a half hours to get to a little town call normal thing which is about eleven kilometers from that we go on tick on the top of a hill so it's a very steep slope and it took him that length of time because the track was so bad but also the lead locomotive and he reported shortly after it started that lead locomotive was was spewing smoke and it was halting and and and and so that's why it would have should normally have taken four or five hours for that to for that trip so he got there at eleven o'clock at night so meanwhile eleven kilometers away is the town of lac mcgann take six thousand people it's it was founded as a railway town forest products industry is big dependent on the railway for for transportation it was a manufacturing center but that kind of other aspects of you know of manufacturing faded during the globalization period of the eight clear air i'm just trying to paint a picture of this is a balmy summer night lots of people on the street at eleven o'clock at night and there are a lot of people partying at a nightclub called the music cafe about fifteen metres from the track so he he leaves the trainee reports to to the rail traffic controller reports the problem again they say and says you know we'll deal with it in the morning he goes to his his where he said where he's staying in town and right after ed it happened right after he left very shortly after he left there was a fire on the lead locomotive of the firefighters came they put it out and and in putting it out they shut off the locomotive of air brake and that disabled the air brake system so the combination that he he shouldn't go back because he was he was on duty early the next morning and so that's why that's why he was advised not to go back and they sent a tract guy to to check on the fire and everything but he didn't really fully understand what the implications of disabling the locomotive brake tom harding was prohibited of setting the other autumn the the automatic brake which is the air brake on the cars on the seventy two cars so couldn't set that he'd been warned against setting too much hand brakes and so so this is that these were the circumstances under which you know he he he  bit that's what an unit oil train looks like and you've probably seen them here that's at burkhardt that's just after it's a small small picture but it's said he was in the town about a week after took him a while to get there but he wasn't exactly you know a popular guy he was you know there was a lot antipathy lucky to get out so so so i'm having difficulty with ok so i'm not going to go into detail on this but this is and this is by no means the whole story but these are some of this kind of the systematic under eroding of safety precautions that happened beginning in in the mid eighty's and railways were given permission to actually drive through an operating roles the minister had to sign off whoops thanks for it the minister had to sign off but it is a largely elaborate rubber stamp formally the  unions were involved but in most cases they were just dismissed their opposition was not paid attention to and there were some really important changes that happened in the years before  then the kind of the enabler in all of this deregulation was budget cuts and budget cuts all the way through but in in one thousand nine hundred five the transport department cut budgets by by fifty percent you can imagine what that to a regulator that's doing oversight conventional oversight on site unannounced inspections ability to to evaluate said to to to make  proposals and i mentioned the privatization nafta was also a factor and then in two thousand and one they put in this rail safety regulatory system called safety management systems i don't know if that's a term that you're familiar with but basically it's company self regulation which is a you know in my view an oxymoron and they kind of pitched it as a as an additional layer to conventional oversight but it wasn't and you had the budget cuts and you had you know fewer and fewer of actual oversi and and so it became just a they were it was became an auditing process a paper exercise and then the government of stephen harper who was a fervent anti regulation kind of trump ian but not  because i don't want to get into that but but he was an anti he you know was regulations as job killing investment killing and so he put in place regulatory policies which which in the end one of those was called the one for one policy which you know you in the agency proposed regulation had to take one out and you mention a regulator already overwhelmed having to make these hub hubs in choices and so that's kind of this that kind of sets the stage for this with a series of events that really unfold in two thousand and twelve you had the unconventional oil by rail boom which really started to gain traction around two thousand and nine and was you know reaching a real high point in two thousand and thirteen two thousand and fourteen both alberta bitumen and back in shell  and so you know you had this powerful railway industry that was blocking i mean you had this growing danger and you had the industry a saying no no need to no need for any further  regulations what's their wrists as sufficient and the harper government of course was focused on its energy superpower obsessions and it was willfully blind to the dangers as well and then you had the  which decided to buyback and shell sepi sub contract contracted subcontracted and and then material maine in atlantic and then they got permission from transport canada to operate  these trains with a single person crew of these plead the fifth the first one of the companies created a loophole which allowed them to do this and you know and then the railway lobby you know really pushed for this company they pushed for the loophole they pushed for the company and i tell the story in the book of how it unfolded that despite opposition from the union the company union from the inspectors union from from within transport canada from the regional office because they knew how much of a delinquent company this was multiple safety violations and we on resolved and they thought this was the last company that should be quick being granted permission to do that so so that's that kind of set the stage for that's hunter harrison and then this is what happened when the train started to move in about fifteen minutes after it started to move it was it had gained you know it's over sixty miles an hour multiple explosions as you can see in the terms of the magnitude and the worst disaster in canadian and us in industrial disaster and in peacetime really as far as i could tell there was a wartime explosion in one nine hundred seventeen but it was just horrific and i have one of my chapters is it is about as is entitled apocalypse and it just given up it's just too hard so after it after after it happened obviously it was a crisis of confidence in the regulator in canada and in the united states and the you know big flurry of activity you know those people that were partying at that at that you know at that  lacked the the music cafe thank you you know they had no idea of the danger that was that they were facing that was so imminent i mean they just assumed that the regulator was was had their safety is their number one priority was a kind of a panic in the respect south of the border as well and they were there was lots of back and forth  d you know there was a flurry of activity the department of transport in canada immediately one of its first emergency directives was to prohibit single person crews but but at the same time the railroads were in there lobbying intense you to block delayed dilute any actions to address this and in fact in the three months after the intensity o that lobbying was greater than any level of any three month period between twenty ten and twenty fifteen so that's kind of it just gives you a sense of what they were of what they were you know been warned by the transportations five minutes oh my god couple more minutes so there is all kinds of things that they they they did and try to do but there are all kinds of problems with with those and you know and i have people have talked to me i've investigated and i know what the risks are and i know how the railways pushed back and were able to reverse the  and i'm trying to where does the buck stop ok so yeah so for three frontline workers were charged with criminal negligence no one no company executives owner not charged  was a jury trial i attended parts of the trial they were acquitted so no one's held accountable no one in the government was held accountable from the minister on down i mean ministers have resigned the transportation safety board left a lot its report reported about a year after just over a year after and you know there are problems with that report there are a lot of good things but i document in my book  the problems and they refused to hold an independent judicial inquiry and this is an example of a classic kind of perp walk the three men and it was meant as a p r you know the men were going into court and it was meant  kind of a p r thing to to kind of indicate to the population that justice was being done and someone yelled out in the crowd the right people aren't there and and i talked earlier about how the deck was stacked and there's a long list that's longer than that and the risks remain with the questions are still problems with the tank car still and i could talk about those in some detail the  points at the end so oil by rail traffic is at record levels both in canada and in the united states after a drop you can see the comparison and the alberta government for a whole variety of reasons has actually made a commitment to to buy oil trains seven thousand cars eighty thousand locomotives that increase the volume by an additional one hundred twenty five thousand barrels per day and most of most of that oil that's produced in canada goes goes south eighty percent as export of ninety nine point nine percent to the u s at the same time there's been an increase in in train runaway since lakme again take  and so major spills are happening and i mentioned moser a mention i'll and in maine and have the lessons been learned and basically they haven't and i point out why they haven't been and why you know the government the prime minister is arguing for pipeline expansion in canada because they're safer than dangerous rail i mean what  the cascading tragedies in the town i can still talk about that that's a picture of before and after a year before you can see the church there that's four years after it's still just an open desert there's been some reconstruction but the actual town center is that open desert and that is another tragedy and that and the people the coalition the activists are are demanding a judicial inquiry and they've got a parliamentary petition going and if anybody wants to pick up that lincoln and and sign that petition i urge you to and so i just end with just based on the lessons i learned about what the what those activists and like me again take are doing i just kind of prepared for the people in the communities that i went to in northern to brunswick and i'm sure they're activism so that's these are my parting words and they're from a book that was very inspirational i've come to know the i she lost her brother in the ocean ranger was an oil rig that sank off the coast of newfoundland and  the early eighty's and she and she wrote this and all the great it time and time again public's trust governments to ensure that companies operate prudently time and time again we are shocked by a new disaster caused by corporate negligence we say we will never forget then we forget and then it happens again so let's not forget like me context thank you very much all along this journey and for bringing bruce campbell here and especially mary patterson for your organizing thank you all right so yeah i saw another quote about how the  learn from history is that we don't learn from history ok this is not funny really you know this is the hundred year old tunnel underneath seattle you know  but you know as much as we're opposed to this i think that one of the lessons from back home campaign over the years has been that our no is only as powerful as our yes is compelling so some years ago we were challenging some rare old labor folks about it our coal trains and oil trains you know the best thing we can do with this incredible infrastructure and there's like well we were involved in scenario two thousand a report around the northern transcon one that you see if your people can green it that was the end of like a six month conversation so we're trying to be faster so i built a team of great folks solution ery rail of people powered campaign to electrify america's railroads and open corridors to a clean energy future our vision is to electrify major rail corridors for faster cleaner trains that provide a more reliable service for people and goods we want to draw a high value cargo off of roads and back on to the tracks for highly efficient transportation and near zero carbon emissions and we envision opening rail  dors for the transmission of renewable energy unlocking stranded wind and solar assets which will not only power the trains but also the communities they travel to the united states has the largest economy in the world yet its transportation infrastructure is overloaded underfunded and crumbling meanwhile we are failing to provide solutions for the most pressing environmental and economic needs of the twenty first century the taxpayer subsidized highway system built in the one nine hundred fifty s triggered an exodus of freight and passengers off of the trains and on to cars and trucks accelerating the decline of us railroads rail transport was forced to become increasingly dependent on moving cheap heavy and often dangerous payloads with longer slower moving trains making fewer stops and abandoning regular service to the communities that they served now ever smaller crews are forced to work without schedules on call twenty four seven which results in chronic fatigue that endangers workers and trackside communities meanwhile semi trucks clog ports towns and freeways causing disproportionate wear and tear on our roads killing thousands each year on freeways and polluting the air with diesel exhaust the rest of the world is overcoming these problems by electrifying their railroads many countries in europe and asia have made massive investments in publicly owned railroads that rapidly transport goods and people unlike national railroads of other countries u s freight railroads are almost entirely owned and operated by private companies maintaining their own tracks unable and unwilling to make the large long time investments for electrification and track modification solution ery rail addresses these challenges through a tax exempt not for profit steel interstate development authority creating a public private partnership with railroads and other stakeholders to finance build and operate the electrification and transmission infrastructure our vision champions the needs of numerous stakeholders for rail workers minimum crew sizes set schedules and improved working conditions for passengers decreased travel times through higher speed rail networks for farmers increased capacity for bulk commodities and faster more reliable service for moving perishable crops to market for tribes right of way justice energy sovereignty and export opportunities for trackside communities reduced air pollution from diesel exhaust for green energy developers and rural electric co ops new transmission opportunities and access to distant customers for the railroad industry increased market share of high value free and long term vitality and for rural communities an opportunity for access economic renewal and cultural vibrance solution ery rail is a people powered campaign for sustainable transportation and a clean energy future and now we need you to help move this people powered campaign forward join the team learn more at solution ery rail dot org so that's just a really efficient way of trying to give you an introduction to solution area which is actually quite complex and i'll tell you when we started this project i knew nothing about rail when the guy told me when mike elliott said well the pit talked about the paper about the northern i didn't even know the north of trans con was so in my learning curve has been huge and it's been really fascinating but i'm a student of grand strategy and the power of building alliances and what has kept me continually engaged in the learning curve that it is this project has been the amend the number of sectors in our society that whose interests are connected by with the railroads so i'm going do my best to just speed through some slides here and so that we can get to the discussion since we've got this wonderful guest in town guests in town i trains trains are far more efficient than than wheels on trucks right so the one of the basic fundamental problems we're trying to solve with solution area rail is how do we shift the business model away from long trains fewer not on a schedule with smaller crew sizes that is stripped all of those communities that they used to serve along the route and re direct services are spread out across those communities is it so that we can d carbonized trucking and that means we have to have trucks that go a couple hundred miles a day not a thousand miles a day if we're going to deep do this kind of work that we need to be done at the speed that needs to be done so there's lots of ways that electric of trains are more efficient and electricity is more efficient than diesel fuel like you said in the video it is happening around the world in switzerland they actually have the trucks drive onto the train why not in the u s well that's a long history that i've been having to you know get educated on and people like fritz back there has been a key part of that education  but one aspect of it is that our pride our infrastructure is privately owned it's it's in kit's competing with a publicly subsidized  reg freeway infrastructure the capitalization cost of the kinds of improvements we'd need to make in terms of grade separation and electrification are something that is it's a daunting proposal for a private industry that's worried about quarterly profits and the actual price of electrification is not really that much when you compare some of the early numbers of that the ultra high speed rail what i call a boondoggle it's so fashionable right now with the governor and bill gates is that they're talking about one hundred twenty five million to a billion dollars per mile new right  and it's not going to carry freight so we're talking about a two million to two and a half million dollars per mile for double track and another impediment that our economy is so worked on this and get this is a big team of people he's identified that one of the impediments is if the private railroad companies do the infrastructure improvement along their right of way their property taxes just like when you build a house on land  property taxes for those improvements are one of the impediments and then the need to electrify across large corps across corridors so  the one this guy bruce the economists one of his big ideas and some of the others we've been influenced by is the idea of creating a public belt having the new the infrastructure improvements actually owned by some tax exempt entity so the federal government the states could be in that role or what i think would be a poetic historically poetic situation would be if the tribes for instance own that infrastructure improvement so that's what we call in the steel interstate development authority and it would issue tax exempt bonds access federal to funding except for to finance and operate that that corridor that we of course were dealing with because we were in the process of fighting oil trains and coal trains we wanted to come up with a better vision for the future is the northern transcon this is it there's a southern and northern route the  current empire builder train goes along the northern part missing the population center of montana sadly so that's about forty four hundred miles worth of track now you'll see on this this is the the lines are weighted by volume so the real corridor that that's got the most volume out here is the southern transcon the route from l a in long beach through kansas city to chicago it's very possible that the folks in california who are already leading the way on decarbonising transportation may beat us to the punch on this and that's it's a competitive business you know for some people that's a great argument right in wind rich of along the north so this is not an unprecedented idea other countries came to us to learn about electrification this is i believe in one thousand and nine the tunnel cascade tunnel  and in washington state in one thousand twenty eight we had three times more tracks ten times more rail jobs nearly every community vashon except for pascha was served fifteen percent of all of electric of all of our rail in washington state was electrified and we've been using regenerative braking since one nine hundred fifteen this is not something new that toyota came up with ok so there's a chart hard to read of course but what we get to  the ton miles of freight in the us but what they say but they move very little of the actual value of freight in the u s only three point five percent of the value for the time of the writing of this book seventy five to seventy percent of the value of freight moves on trucks and some on planes so our objective is to find a way to get those trucks that valuable freight off of the trucks and onto the tracks and figure out how can we move it with the kind of regularity the speed and in order to be competitive with trucks so this is on dock electrification because down into coma they actually have the capacity for some of the reasons we need to do this obviously highway damage takes thousands of cars to equal the same kind of damage that a semi truck does on our roads we can  wind of the midwest out to population centers accessing the sun rich reasons of the southwest and allowing this is a interesting thing i learned in the process was a seventy five percent of our land mass is served by rural electrical cooperatives now they've actually been resisting a distributed noble energy which asserted it was originally sort of surprising to me i think they'd be encouraging their farmers to put up windmills and such but because they're paying off the debt of the fossil fuel generation they don't want cheap energy to come on line that goes for say gets first is sold prior to their they're dirty energy so i think they're turning around on that but if you think about providing them a way to transmit all of that energy then you can imagine them maybe shifting their their their vision this is a map done by some folks from the know and know as scientists who are modeling how do we get to eighty percent renewable energy by two thousand and thirty and the important part is not all the little dots of how we generate the energy the really important part in this is are those lines that is a grid of high voltage d c efficient transmission so that we search balancing the variability of renewable energy so that when the wind's not blown here it's definitely blown someplace and vice versa now that grid and this grid so this is a real passengers a map of the yellow lines  existing passenger rail but that the density of those lines and and the grid that was suggested in the other map to me they kind of match it is to me that says well why not use those corridors road having to cut green this report or that railroad workers united now over the last number of years i've been back on campaign and social rail project has been involved with the moving forward network addressing the impact of diesel on communities and how the warehousing of our current system of the way it concentrates impacts because of long haul trucking there are thousands and thousands of trucks going through these communities and poisoning the air killing people but this is trance parson this is not just a progressive issue these are the communities that have been left along the wayside passed by for many decades now we can renew their economic vitality and cultural access provide quicker  opportunity for crops to get to market and and we can also solve problems for the around historical problems around right of way justice for tribes right away justice and export of energy for tribes is a major aspect of this and another reason why tribes could play a really important leadership role you can see all the number of tribes along the routes north and south so i was just down at the affiliated tribes  fully aided tribes in northwest indians conference on monday and i tell you that tribes have been asking for renewable energy opportunities this is standing rock there's a be n s f line through there stan dark yellow that's very high wind intensity these are places that have been asking for this we've got lots so back in campaign so cheryl project has been doing interviews of stakeholders over the last two years  trying to build this grassroots coalition this is just another example of another port that could use out embrace harbor that might be an interesting example of  trying to electrify a corridor and use it for transmission to get wind energy from the coast to the i five corridor and then now tom white a great rail engineer who's been involved for thirty years in wash state d rail planning he came up with has come up with a proposal for an inland port in moses lake and do you know a new line that would start in auburn and help bring container traffic to moses lake and other places so right now we're working like tomorrow we're going to be at the legislature doing a presentation in the senate building trying to tell folks that way we need an interdisciplinary study of the feasibility  ideas presented in the solution a real book and we need that from the transportation department but we need the whole legislature to get behind this where their energy environment or transportation the problem is this is a very interdisciplinary problem and thus issues silos and other agencies and that academia is a stumbling block for us actually being able to get the funding that's necessary to prove the point so we can move forward what we ask for you to do is to share this video that you saw earlier so share rail dot org forward slash as our video and pass resolution your local group and join a lots of other organizations around the state have done so and help us make this a priority jake five the other day when i was you know how you deal with legislators after scott get in the way he said you know people need to be asking me about this i need to feel he be hearing from this about this from other people than you basically what he said concrete for folks in the last year in two thousand and eighteen twenty two railroad workers died in north america eight of them in canada in that time each year the number of runaways bruce mentioned this number of runaway trains has increased and that alone should be enough to tell you that there's something very very wrong here then the narrative the story you're being told by the government and by the railroad companies because you have this tragedy that incinerates families and kills all these people in the small town of lakme again tick and you would expect and they tell you that they've learned those lessons and they've incorporated them and they fix the problems and what and yet the next year a large number of the year after that a large number of the year after that it's continues trains today in north america are on precedent at least long up to two hundred fifty cars and seven and eight locomotives they are longer they're heavier and some of the products that bruce has been talking about in particular the crude the volatile crude is an unprecedentedly dangerous product a product that i mean people here crude oil and i actually have you know try to get activists to make sure they're clear about this when they hear crude oil they just think like that well that we had fifty years ago and one hundred years ago that hadn't been refined yet this is a whole new ball game this fall to loyal that we're talking about today and it is so incredibly lucrative when they transported the way that they have in mind transporting it that it will that it means that they rush forward to do whatever they have to do without having necessarily done all those things but the point i'm trying to make to you is that the situation that existed in two thousand and thirteen is a lot worse today and it's not just worse because of oil it's also worse because of speed up it's worse because they take less time to train people it's worse because they continuously try to reduce the number of railroad workers skilled experienced people capable of using judgement on the  trains they're exhausted they're threatened with discipline when they try to get more rest and these are all sincerely on precedented things and in the industry it's a chaotic thing many many people have lost their jobs and so that everything that decisions they make policies they make are all about the next quarter not about five years from now not about ten years from now and not even about river transportation because their quarterly numbers are really all about money and it might you might get the money by selling off the important things are getting rid of the safe with not being got to you or the trial support or tolerating and the very least helping with america and you know find out and telling that story and support you actually pretty much gave it a nutshell this is a situation where what we know what bruce is able to document is really ironically it's really only something that we know about because there was a criminal trial they shouldn't have put these people under those criminal charges but the fact that they did opened up a huge amount of stuff that is otherwise keep and kept hidden by the government in the railroads and just a little more than a year ago in the first week of january last year the trial which went on for months culminated in all of these guys being acquitted of the charges that would have put them in prison for the rest their life that hasn't stopped the regulators and the railroads from trying to essentially say that they were the guilty parties and that the everything is good and everybody should just move on but anyway the and the support of everybody who was involved in this part of the world and that was a key thing to what we were able to do but working together with the  that really i skipped over that so it let me just expand on that a little bit so it's a deeply wounded community but there are also you know wonderful stories of courage and prevailing and and not being crushed beneath the wheel but the level of p t s d is still going on six years now affecting the majority of the population there still you know there are people people leaving in the community is not growing and the economy is very you know these these are are are if you can imagine a community that has you know trying to recover from a tragedy like that and there are you know i mentioned cascading tragedies one of the tragedies is that  the and the victims families were exploited by ambulance chasers or case runners whatever you want to call them is this guy came up from el paso guy who you know  really kind of monitors disasters worldwide and he's there he's there right when it happens very clever guy stays out of the camera but he's kind of connecting with with with lawyers and complexion to figure out how it works and can come back and so you know within within days basically after it happened he had convened a meeting of all the victims families at this hotel and he basically sold them  story line that if they signed up with him that they could get justice for him because because you could get you know but the us was you know you could get justice  for you know more effectively and i mean he had a law firm but he was no more here and he just signed up those people and then handed the maf to wrongful death lawyers so eventually in the civil suit the you know part of the civil suit went for the wrongful death and forty percent of that went to to the lawyers and that's just there was also a and i won't go into it  could kind of for anybody read naomi klein's book the shock doctrine well there was a shock doctrine element to this as well where there was money for reconstruction and that kind of disaster capitalism kind of swooped down and convince people municipally and power that they needed to wipe the slate clean like that big desert that you saw in you know a majority of people up big majority of people didn't want almost buildings that they tore down after the fire they didn't have to but it was kind of you know let's wipe this creative destruction as what it was is very divisive and so those are just kind of a sense of some of the things that are that are going on but i you know a lot of those people who who you know people both fritz and i have met and work with their real