I'm not an oil expert, so I can't answer, but here is the relevant part from last night's transcript (BBM):
BANFIELD: So that leads me to my next question, Wesley, because none of this is now making sense. They found those children in tanks that were nearly full. And as I have learned from you,
the full capacity of these tanks is somewhere between 600 and 700 barrels of oil. That is a lot. So,
let`s just say nearly full is 500, correct?
WILLIAMS: Yes, exactly. And you know, the strange thing to me is openly available, you can find the production rate of that well
. And at its best, it was producing about 200 barrels per month. So it leads me to believe that, you know, the oil probably wasn`t completely drained out by whoever put the girls in these tanks, you know. They probably shifted the liquids from one tank over to the other one, opened, put it in and then shifted the liquids back to the other side. That requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. It does take a certain amount of time to do that --
BANFIELD: Let me stop you there --
WILLIAMS: -- that type of operation.
BANFIELD: -- because that was my next question.
Obviously that drill site producing only you know, 200 barrels a month is not going to be able in four days -- that is the time it took to find the bodies -- to fill even one of those tanks up to 600-700 barrels. It would take three months to
fill them naturally. So, just thinking that through, if, in fact, the opening on the top -- and again, I`ll hold it up -- is too small for Chris Watts to, as he apparently according to the police admitted, too small for him to put those children through, he would have had to do it from the
bottom, which means the tank would have had to be empty or he would have been gushed on by a full tank of oil. So you`re saying there is a pump that goes between those two tanks and he could pump one tank empty --
[18:10:23] WILLIAMS: Yes.
BANFIELD: -- and put -- there is the thief hatch, I think that is your hand Wesley, correct, next to the thief hatch at the top.
WILLIAMS: Yes, that is my hands to give you scale.
BANFIELD: They have a tank that is similar.
WILLIAMS: Yes. That is part of what kind of bent my brain. I really don`t think you could easily get anything -- and it`s designed that way for you to not drop anything through that top hatch. They keep it very small. So eight inches is quite small. That is what made me think, you pretty
much have to take that bottom man way open. And the standard design, you know, there`s 64 bolts. You have to drain all of the liquids out to really, you know, --
BANFIELD: We have a picture of that, put the picture of the bottom man way. Because Wesley has also given us an example photo of the tank where he is standing next to the man way. This is the actual site. What I`d like now is the example site of the man way that Wesley shows us, if we can show that.
It`s called the clean out man way. There it is. You can see Wesley`s hand. Now you can see the relative size of that opening. All of those bolts that would have to be opened, unscrewed and screwed back on, clearly it is at the bottom of the tank. So it`s going to have to be really --
that tank is going to have to be literally dry.
But Wesley, just in terms of the time -- because Chris Watts was seen leaving his house at 5:30 in the morning. And he had to have some kind of alibi to be working by 7:30, 8:30, 9:30 in the morning. So they were -- it`s 45 minutes to drive there. So he didn`t have an inordinate amount of time at this site to dig a shallow grave for his wife and then do all this work at these two oil tanks. How much time does it take to pump the oil between the tanks? It can`t be the same as that forensic vacuum.
WILLIAMS: No. I think you can probably do that within an hour, more or less, depending on how full the tanks were. You could maybe do it within an hour or so. And then the bolting itself, you know, I work a lot around this hands-on type stuff. And even with power tools, taking out 64 bolts on both of them, so, 128 bolts, taking them off, putting them back and taking them off and putting back on, it just takes a lot of time to do.
BANFIELD: Yes.
WILLIAMS: It`s pretty --
BANFIELD: I think, I mean, honestly, what takes even more time, I`m guessing, just from what I`m learning from you, and your petroleum experience,
if both of those tanks were nearly full, then how would you have -- reproduce that oil? You can`t, you can`t put two nearly full oil tanks into one while you stash a body and do the reverse. It doesn`t make sense which now sadly leads me to believe that the only physical way that this could have happened, especially in the time that was permitted, was that he must have put the children through the top hatch of the tank.
And to that I want to bring in Joseph Scott Morgan who is a certified death investigator, he is professor of forensic at Jacksonville State University.
Joe, you and I have been talking about this through the day.
And I know that your theory is just too small. The eight-inch opening is just too small to put a three-year-old, or a four-year-old through.
But now you know how difficult it would be to have emptied those tanks and refill them in order to open the larger hatches at the bottom. Are you rethinking the possibility that maybe something more violent happen and that this was the only way those children could get in those tanks?
Because there`s one thing we know, those children were in those tanks and they were nearly full.
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