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On the morning of 21 April 2010, Sara Lattis Stone started frantically calling the burn items of assorted hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana. She was looking for information about her husband, Stephen, who labored on an offshore oil rig within the Gulf of Mexico the place an enormous explosion had occurred. The blast came about the day earlier than Stephen was scheduled to return residence from his newest three-week hitch on the rig, a semisubmersible floating unit referred to as the Deepwater Horizon.
Within the hours after a spokesperson from Transocean, the corporate that owned the Deepwater Horizon, referred to as to inform her that an “incident” had required the rig to be evacuated, Sara veered between panic and denial. One minute, she was telling herself that Stephen was positive. The following, she was satisfied that she would by no means see him once more. On Fb, she got here throughout scary messages – “the water’s on hearth!”, “the rig is burning” – posted by the spouses of different employees. At one level, Sara bought on the cellphone with one in all them, a lady who had her TV tuned to the identical channel that she was watching, which was airing reside protection of the blowout. As they peered on the display, they heard the identical replace, describing the blast as a catastrophic accident and elevating the likelihood that nobody on the rig had survived. The information made them drop their telephones and scream.
Sara lived in Katy, Texas, a city simply west of Houston the place she’d grown up and the place she and Stephen had settled after getting married. The day after he bought residence from his hitch, they had been planning to satisfy an actual property agent, having simply obtained preapproval for a mortgage to purchase a home. Now Sara questioned if Stephen would ever come residence. Not one of the hospital burns items that she tried reaching had any details about him.
Finally, Sara obtained one other name from Transocean, informing her that though the blowout had induced a number of fatalities, Stephen was amongst those that had managed to flee from the burning rig. The survivors had been now being transported by ferry to a resort in New Orleans, she was informed. After consulting her mom, Sara tossed some belongings right into a suitcase, drove to Houston airport and boarded the subsequent obtainable flight to the Gulf. The next morning, at about 3.30am, she bought a name from Stephen, who informed her he was on his technique to the resort the place she and different members of the family had gathered to attend. “Are you OK?” she requested him. “Yeah, I’m positive,” he mentioned.
Later, when she noticed him shuffle by way of the corridor that had been cordoned off for surviving crew members, she knew instantly that he wasn’t positive. His expression was clean and, like the opposite survivors, he regarded shell-shocked and traumatised. “When he walked in, from the look in his eyes, it was apparent that one thing horrible had occurred,” she recalled.
In 1937, a 12 months after he visited the coalfields of Yorkshire and Lancashire, George Orwell mirrored on society’s dependence on the individuals who extracted these sources from beneath the earth. What Orwell discovered after descending into the pits – “warmth, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped area” – struck him as a “image of hell”, teeming with miners whose exertions had been as invisible as they had been important to society. “Within the metabolism of the western world the coalminer is second in significance solely to the person who ploughs the soil,” Orwell wrote in The Street to Wigan Pier. “He’s a form of dirty caryatid upon whose shoulders practically every little thing that’s not dirty is supported.”
He went on: “Virtually every little thing we do, from consuming an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, entails using coal, instantly or not directly. It’s only as a result of miners sweat their guts out that superior individuals can stay superior. You and I and the editor of the Instances Lit Supp, and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, writer of Marxism for Infants – all of us actually owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats filled with coal mud, driving their shovels ahead with arms and stomach muscular tissues of metal.”
In Orwell’s day, the griminess of coal mining – the ash and dirt, the foul air – was bodily, staining the clothes, in addition to the faces and our bodies, of the employees who ventured underground. By the point Stephen Stone discovered himself on the Deepwater Horizon, the taint of working within the fossil gasoline extraction business was much less bodily than ethical. Individuals who cared in regards to the surroundings related the oil business with disasters just like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and with carbon emissions that imperilled the planet. It was an business whose pipelines and tasks threatened delicate ecosystems just like the Arctic nationwide wildlife refuge in Alaska; an business from which increasingly respected establishments – universities, philanthropic organisations – had begun divesting; an business that anybody involved in regards to the destiny of the earth would sooner protest in opposition to than flip to for employment.
However whereas condemning the greed of oil firms was simple sufficient, avoiding counting on the product they produced was harder. For all of the speak of shifting to wind and solar energy, fossil fuels nonetheless provided 84% of the world’s power in 2019, and in lots of locations their use was rising. A part of the rationale for this was surging consumption in nations like China and India. One other issue was the huge carbon footprint of the US, which made up lower than 5% of the world’s inhabitants however consumed roughly 1 / 4 of the world’s power. Greater than 80 years after The Street to Wigan Pier was printed, “soiled oil” was no much less essential within the metabolism of world capitalism than coal had been in Orwell’s time. Though he spoke continuously in regards to the significance of addressing the local weather disaster, President Obama presided over an enormous enhance in crude oil manufacturing, which grew by 3.6m barrels a day throughout his tenure. When Obama left workplace, the US was the world’s main petroleum producer. His successor, Donald Trump, was an much more unabashed promoter of the fossil gasoline business, rolling again environmental rules and proposing to open 90% of the US’s coastal waters to offshore drilling.
Stephen Stone didn’t develop up dreaming of working within the power business. He was much more all in favour of having fun with his pure environment. All through his childhood, his favorite place to spend time was outdoor, swimming within the Tennessee River or trekking by way of the wilderness close to his residence in Grant, Alabama, a small city nestled within the foothills of the Appalachians. The bucolic setting suited him, not less than till he bought a bit older, when life in a backwoods city with restricted alternatives started to really feel stifling. Throughout what would have been his senior 12 months in highschool, he began working the evening shift at a rug manufacturing unit in close by Scottsboro, the identical manufacturing unit the place his mom labored after his mother and father bought divorced. After graduating, he stop the rug manufacturing unit and enlisted within the navy. Two and a half years later, after being discharged, he returned to Grant and began calling numerous oil firms to see if he might land a job on a rig. He’d heard that oil firms preferred to rent former navy guys and the work paid properly, excess of some other job a highschool graduate from rural Alabama was more likely to stumble throughout. A while later, he flew to Houston to interview for a place as a roustabout with GlobalSantaFe, an offshore drilling firm that will later be purchased by Transocean.
It was on this go to to Houston that Stephen determined to strike up a dialog with the redhead sitting subsequent to him on the airport shuttle. The redhead was Sara. They chatted for 3 hours; inside a 12 months, they had been married. In some methods, Stephen and Sara made for an odd couple: she was a university graduate with an introspective method; he was a very good outdated boy who was fast with a joke and preferred to chuckle and celebration. From the second they began speaking, although, Sara was struck by Stephen’s intelligence, the books he talked about studying and the considerate gaze in his eyes. Each time he would go offshore on a hitch within the years to return, Sara would discover, Stephen made positive to pack some studying – novels, poetry, philosophy. He additionally introduced alongside a few pocket-size notebooks that he would fill with poems and drawings. To some faculty graduates, marrying a rig employee, even one who wrote poetry in his spare time, may need appeared odd. To Sara, it felt pure. Just about everybody she knew in Katy got here from a household with ties to the oil business. Her personal father had labored within the business for many years. The rhythm of the approach to life, marked by two- and three-week hitches throughout which rig employees had been separated from their spouses, was acquainted to Sara, who typically went months with out seeing her father throughout her childhood. When Stephen would go away on hitches, she would miss him, however she additionally preferred having time to deal with her personal pursuits, specifically her artwork. In faculty, she’d majored in portray and pictures, visible mediums by way of which she’d all the time discovered it simpler to precise herself than phrases.
Within the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, Sara began a sequence of portraits of the blast’s survivors. The work had been drafted, fittingly, in oil and had been impressed by a go to that she and Stephen paid to Washington DC, the place they and different survivors had been invited to testify at a Home judiciary committee listening to on the Deepwater catastrophe – a catastrophe that was nonetheless unfolding and that, upon nearer inspection, was hardly a shock.
The fast reason behind the blast on the Deepwater Horizon was a bubble of methane fuel that floated up by way of the drill column, most certainly due to a breach within the cement casing that enclosed it, and unfold throughout the deck earlier than igniting right into a lethal fireball. Within the view of many analysts, the deeper trigger was the recklessness and greed that pervaded the oil business. This appeared significantly pronounced at BP, the corporate that leased the rig from Transocean and owned the unique rights to the Macondo Prospect properly, an oil and fuel reservoir situated 49 miles off the coast of Louisiana. “Make each greenback depend” was BP’s motto, an ethos that happy shareholders and drew reward from enterprise analysts. Security specialists had been extra alarmed. In 2005, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas Metropolis killed 15 employees. An investigation by the US Chemical Security Board faulted BP for pushing for 25% funds cuts “though a lot of the refinery’s infrastructure and course of gear had been in disrepair”. Between 2007 and 2010, the Occupational Security and Well being Administration, a regulatory physique, cited BP for 760 security violations, by far probably the most of any main oil firm.
Leasing the Deepwater Horizon price BP $1m a day, and the Macondo properly had fallen delayed, rising the strain to brush apart issues that may have slowed the tempo of drilling. Some employees feared that elevating such issues would get them fired, which helps clarify why an array of ominous indicators – issues with the cementing, flaws within the blowout preventer – had been ignored. Hours earlier than the rig went up in flames, a BP government on the rig congratulated the crew for seven years with out a “lost-time incident”. After the blowout, BP scrambled to include the oil gushing out of the properly, which leaked 210m gallons of crude into the Gulf, devastating fisheries and befouling the coasts of a number of states.
There have been additionally human prices, which Sara sought to seize in her artwork. She painted a portrait of Chris Jones, whose brother, Gordon, was one in all 11 employees killed within the catastrophe. In Sara’s portrait, Jones’s lips are pursed and his face, painted ash blue, is creased with anguish. Titled Survivors, Sara’s work had been stark and vivid, capturing the uncooked grief that stuffed the room on the congressional listening to on the Deepwater spill in Washington. However the portrait she drew of Stephen captured one thing totally different. Based mostly on a photograph that was taken throughout his testimony on the congressional listening to, it exhibits a bearded determine with a vacant, faraway expression in his eyes. He doesn’t look grief-stricken a lot as bewildered and unmoored.
The bewilderment was nonetheless obvious after I met Stephen a number of years later, at a bar not removed from the place he and Sara had been residing on the time. Stephen was in his late 20s, with a shaggy mop of chestnut-coloured hair and languid, downcast eyes. On the bar, he was taciturn, nodding sometimes at one thing Sara mentioned whereas straining to maintain his gaze from drifting off. In contrast to a few of the employees on the Deepwater Horizon, he had managed to flee from the rig with out sustaining any burns or bodily accidents. However as I might come to study, the absence of seen wounds was a blended blessing, prompting associates to surprise what was improper with him and exacerbating the disgrace he felt for struggling to maneuver on.
Because the explosion, he’d been unable to carry down a job. He prevented social gatherings. He additionally had bother sleeping. The explosion on the rig had occurred at evening, collapsing the stairwell above the room wherein Stephen had fallen asleep after finishing a piece shift. The blast startled him awake and despatched him racing into the change room, the place he slipped on a pair of fire-retardant coveralls and fumbled his manner towards the deck, at which level he noticed that all the rig was smouldering and heard the panicked screams of his co-workers. It was an expertise he now feared reliving each time he shut his eyes, Sara had come to grasp. “The best way I perceive it’s, he’s continually making ready for that wake-up,” she mentioned.
Within the days that adopted, I visited Stephen and Sara a number of instances of their house, a two-storey dwelling in a posh of look-alike gray bungalows. A lot of the time, Stephen sat on a sofa in the lounge, sipping black espresso from a inexperienced mug and, each couple of minutes, taking one other toke of medical marijuana, which a psychiatrist had prescribed to quell his nervousness. The identical psychiatrist had identified him with PTSD.
Given what he’d been by way of – a near-death expertise that shattered his sense of safety – this prognosis made sense. Like army veterans who’d survived explosions in Iraq, Stephen was delicate to loud noises and given to paranoid fears and panic assaults. The rattle of ice within the freezer was sufficient to set him off typically, Sara mentioned. However as with many army veterans, there was one thing else that appeared to afflict Stephen no much less: not concern however anger and disillusionment. These emotions percolated instantly after the blowout, he informed me, when the rig’s survivors arrived on the resort in New Orleans. They had been exhausted and nonetheless reeling from the shock, but earlier than attending to see their households, Stephen mentioned, they had been taken to a gathering room the place a Transocean supervisor delivered a speech that sounded to him like an train in spin. The expertise left a nasty style in Stephen’s mouth. Just a few weeks later, a Transocean consultant reached out to him and, over a cup of espresso at Denny’s, provided him $5,000 for the private belongings he’d misplaced on the rig, which he accepted. Then the consultant requested him to signal a doc affirming that he had not been injured. Stephen was dumbfounded. “I’m not signing this,” he informed the consultant. “I don’t know if I’m injured but – this simply occurred.”
When he had utilized for the job at Transocean, Stephen assumed the business adopted strict security protocols. After the blowout, as he examine what number of warning indicators on the Deepwater Horizon had been ignored, a wave of disillusionment washed over him. To some extent, accidents on offshore rigs had been unavoidable. However the toll in lives was not the identical in all nations, famous a report on the Deepwater spill {that a} bipartisan nationwide fee submitted to President Obama. Between 2004 and 2009, fatalities within the offshore business had been “greater than 4 instances larger per person-hours labored in US waters than in European waters”. The report traced this disparity again to the Nineteen Eighties, when a sequence of lethal accidents came about, together with a blowout on the Piper Alpha, a platform within the North Sea, that killed 167 individuals. In Norway and the UK, the response was to enact stronger rules that put the burden of stopping future disasters on business. The US adopted a laxer method, leaving security to firms like BP and Transocean, which, a number of months after the Deepwater blowout, introduced that it was awarding bonuses to a number of senior executives for overseeing the “finest 12 months in security efficiency” within the firm’s historical past. When Stephen realized in regards to the bonuses, he was nonetheless a Transocean worker. Afterward, he submitted an indignant resignation letter. “I stop,” he mentioned. “I used to be like, fuck you guys. I don’t wish to be part of your organization.”
Army psychologists typically use the time period “ethical damage” to explain the struggling that some troopers endure after they perform orders that transgress the values on the core of their identification. Such wounds also can happen when troopers really feel betrayed by their commanders, violating their sense of “what’s proper”. One thing comparable appeared to grip Stephen, who felt deeply betrayed by an business that upended not solely his sense of safety but in addition his ethical bearings and his belief. “I feel there’s the private betrayal of the company-employee relationship,” he mentioned. “However there’s an excellent bigger sense of betrayal. I didn’t suppose the business was this unhealthy.” He paused. “It simply form of takes some hope from humanity, shatters your illusions a little bit bit.”
There was one different betrayal that appeared to weigh on Stephen: the betrayal of himself, the a part of him that liked nature and, after the blowout, as the size of the catastrophe grew to become clear, felt dirtied and implicated. He felt this specifically on a highway journey that Sara persuaded him to take by way of a few of the locations within the Gulf the place the air pollution from the spill had begun to clean up. Amongst their locations was Dauphin Island, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Throughout his childhood, Stephen had holidayed there together with his household. It was one in all his favorite locations, well-known for the ribbon of pristine white sand that graced its shores. After the Deepwater spill, the sand was stained with oil sludge, a sight that stuffed Stephen with disgrace and disappointment. “This great spot from my childhood was getting shit on,” he mentioned, “and I used to be a part of the group that shit on it.”
For Sara, too, seeing the affect of the spill dredged up tough emotions in regards to the world she’d grown up in. When she watched BP air adverts on tv burnishing its dedication to the surroundings, she was livid. However she was equally upset at environmental teams that, after the spill, appeared to focus much more consideration on the pelicans and dolphins who’d been harmed than on the rig employees who’d died. Every single day on the information, it appeared, she would see photos of lifeless seabirds and marine mammals. The faces of the rig employees by no means appeared. Sara couldn’t perceive why they had been so invisible. “It’s simply bizarre,” she mentioned.
However Stephen didn’t appear to search out it so bizarre. The general public he labored with had been “blue-collar guys” and “nation bumpkins” from backwoods cities just like the one he’d grown up in, he famous. The sorts of individuals “superior individuals” regarded down on, in different phrases. Then he talked about another excuse why the general public would possibly discover it simpler to sympathise with lifeless dolphins than with employees like him.
“Individuals see the surroundings as fully harmless,” he mentioned, “whereas we, simply being in that business, you realize, you form of introduced it on your self.”
Stephen didn’t appear to begrudge individuals for feeling this manner. He had, in spite of everything, collected a paycheck from Transocean, making upwards of $60,000 a 12 months as a roustabout, a wage that was certain to extend as he gained extra expertise. Had been it not for the blowout, he in all probability would have continued working within the business, he informed me, for a similar cause many of the blue-collar guys on the Deepwater Horizon did: the cash was good. The identical incentive defined why 1000’s of working-class males flocked to locations just like the Williston Basin, residence to the Bakken rock formation, throughout the fracking increase, the place drillers and swampers might typically pocket greater than $10,000 a month. A few of Stephen’s co-workers on the Deepwater Horizon earned six-figure salaries regardless of having nothing greater than a highschool diploma. As with fracking, the job was laborious – 12-hour shifts throughout which Stephen raced round stacking gear and mixing drilling mud – but it surely beat residing paycheck to paycheck with few advantages or holidays like everybody Stephen knew again in Grant, Alabama.
“A path to a life in any other case out of attain” was the phrase {that a} group of reporters from the New York Instances used to explain how the crew members on the Deepwater Horizon considered their jobs. If environmentalists had little sympathy for the employees who took these jobs whereas ignoring the “soiled info” in regards to the fossil gasoline business – water air pollution, land degradation, the discharge of nearly all of the US’s carbon emissions – who, actually, might blame them? These soiled info had been actual, Stephen acknowledged. Alternatively, it was not misplaced on both him or Sara that lots of people who noticed rig employees as complicit in these soiled info had been glad sufficient to pump gasoline into their SUVs and minivans with out feeling in the least sullied themselves. “We wish to overlook that our on a regular basis lives are what’s making that the fact,” Stephen mentioned.
Who finally ends up doing this type of work is formed by class but in addition by geography. In a 1994 e-book, the sociologists William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling in contrast the standing and prevalence of offshore drilling in two states with massive shorelines, Louisiana and California. It was in California that, in 1969, a blowout on an oil platform within the Santa Barbara Channel first drew consideration to the environmental dangers of offshore drilling. The spill prompted then-secretary of the inside Walter Hickel to subject a moratorium on offshore drilling in California’s waters. Many years later, few residents of the Golden State had been clamouring to alter this, Freudenburg and Gramling discovered. Just about each Californian they interviewed opposed offshore drilling.
In southern Louisiana, a sequence of blowouts additionally came about within the 70s, polluting the Gulf and, in some instances, inflicting fatalities. However in contrast to in California, no moratorium on offshore drilling ensued. By the point Freudenburg and Gramling carried out their examine, greater than 13,000 manufacturing wells had been drilled within the Gulf of Mexico’s outer continental shelf. As soon as once more, the topics of their examine all appeared to carry the identical view of this exercise, solely this time it was the other view: in Louisiana, opposition to offshore drilling was nonexistent.
One clarification for these starkly divergent attitudes was ideological: California was a liberal state whose residents tended to care in regards to the surroundings, whereas Louisiana was a conservative one the place individuals held beneficial views of enterprise. However the divergence additionally mirrored radically totally different financial prospects. As Freudenburg and Gramling famous, the Californians they interviewed didn’t appear to care that closing the coast to drilling would possibly hamper financial growth. Actually, lots of them had been transplants from different states who had chosen to reside in California “to get away from that form of shit”, as one respondent put it, describing rigs and derricks as eyesores that will defile the state’s pure magnificence, which wanted to be shielded from growth. Louisianians didn’t have the posh of considering this manner. The oil business meant jobs in a poor state the place, for many individuals, there have been few higher choices.
By the tip of the 90s, practically one-third of the US’s home power provide got here from offshore manufacturing within the Gulf of Mexico. To Louisianians who discovered jobs within the petroleum business, this was a supply of livelihood and some extent of delight. However there have been important downsides, together with the best stage of air air pollution within the nation and the degradation of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. A lot of the oil and fuel that flowed by way of the state’s pipelines ended up servicing different components of the nation, absorbed into the metabolism of affluent areas like New England. In the meantime, Louisiana’s coastal communities had been sinking, leaving the residents of cities like New Orleans extra weak to storms and hurricanes, an issue more likely to develop worse sooner or later, because of rising sea ranges precipitated by the local weather disaster.
At the start of the pandemic, some analysts speculated that the period of soiled power was coming to an finish. Lockdowns and journey bans induced the worldwide demand for oil to plunge, and at one level, the worth of oil futures fell beneath zero, prompting some to counsel that fossil fuels would quickly give technique to a brand new period of unpolluted, renewable power. However with out help from the world’s main economies, the shift to renewable power stands little likelihood of being realised. Throughout Trump’s presidency, such help was sorely missing from Washington. The agenda appeared to shift underneath Joe Biden, who introduced that he was elevating the local weather disaster to a nationwide safety precedence. Not lengthy after assuming workplace, nonetheless, Biden urged Opec to extend manufacturing to be able to alleviate the pressure on shoppers saddled with excessive fuel costs.
Such cognitive dissonance didn’t escape the discover of the employees I met. “I realise oil and fuel isn’t the very best factor for the surroundings,” one former roustabout in Louisiana informed me. “How’d you get right here?” he requested, pointing to the automobile I’d pushed to our appointment. “I chuckle on the states that say we have to get off this – positive, then don’t use it,” he went on. “They only need it to be someone else’s drawback.”
Though they hardly ever made the information, oil spills have continued to happen with distressing regularity within the decade because the Deepwater blowout – in 2018 alone, there have been 137, in line with the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Fatalities are additionally nonetheless frequent. “From 2008 to 2017, roughly the identical variety of oilfield employees had been killed on the job as US troops in Afghanistan,” notes Michael Patrick F Smith, who labored on an oilfield in North Dakota throughout the fracking increase. These deaths, too, hardly ever made headlines, a lot to the dismay of Lillian Espinoza-Gala, an business security marketing consultant who labored for years on an offshore rig, till an accident killed one in all her co-workers and practically claimed her personal life.
After I visited Espinoza-Gala at her workplace in Lafayette, a metropolis in southern Louisiana, I observed an award displayed on one wall, recognising her as “one of many first Gulf of Mexico feminine manufacturing roustabouts”. On one other was an image of 11 picket crosses planted on a strip of sand, one for every of the employees killed on the Deepwater Horizon. When the blowout occurred, it felt like 9/11 to her, Espinoza-Gala informed me. She turned on a pc and confirmed me a PowerPoint presentation she’d made in regards to the blowout. After coming to a slide that confirmed the faces of a few of the victims, she paused. There was Donald Clark, 49, an assistant driller from Louisiana. There was Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, a crane operator from Mississippi.
Earlier than shutting down her laptop, Espinoza-Gala clicked on one different slide that includes a employee, a bearded man in a navy go well with and silk tie who was sitting at a congressional listening to, delivering testimony. It was Stephen Stone. Behind him was a lady with lengthy pink hair and freckled cheeks dabbing a tear from her eye. It was Sara. On the subsequent slide, a congressman was proven holding up a photograph of one of many blowout’s better-known victims: a crude-encrusted pelican, Louisiana’s state fowl.
A proud Louisianian and dedicated conservationist, Espinoza-Gala was not unmoved by the picture of the pelican. However, like Sara Lattis Stone, she discovered it obscure why the pelicans aroused extra sympathy from politicians than the employees. “The widows had been in these hearings, the place they’re holding up footage of birds as an alternative of their husbands!” she mentioned. For a very long time, she informed me, this enraged her. Finally, she got here to phrases with it, reluctantly concluding that if not for the pelicans, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe would in all probability have been ignored in Washington, the best way most rig accidents had been, owing to the low worth positioned on the lives of the individuals who did the soiled work.
“If 11 employees would have died, no one would have cared,” she mentioned.
Tailored from Soiled Work: Important Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality by Eyal Press, which can be printed by Head of Zeus on 20 January
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