On 5/3/2010 6:42 AM, Han wrote:
"J. wrote in
:

Or maybe calmer heads will prevail and instead of looking for excuses to
create new boondoggles or axe the blameless, they'll figure out what
went wrong and fix the design of the BOP so that it doesn't happen again.

I'm a cynic. As long as the BOP gadgets are mechanical, a large enough
explosion will render them useless. Redundancy can only be carried to the
nth degree.

Bingo. There is no machine that cannot be broken. Never has been and
never will be.

But what went bust this time can be allowed for in future designs.
Which means that next time it will go bust in some other way.

I'd venture to guess that when the real causes of the disaster have been
pinpointed, more redundancy and remedial actions will be taken. I'm
neither in favor nor totally against drilling, but this disaster shouldn't
happen again.

Not sure how you can do redundancy though--have two BOPs stacked? Bring
a second manufacturer into the game so that they are completely
different designs with different points of failure? What will happen
then is that one will break in an unanticipated way that blocks the
operation of the other.

And then there's the possibility of deliberate sabotage.

One good thing may be that in the armer Gulf more of the sticky and toxic
components will evaporate before getting into the ecosystems. (I can hope,
can't I?).

Nahh, when the volatiles evaporate, that's when the sticky stuff gets
_real_ sticky. And if you've lived in that area you'll have experienced
slowly sinking into a paved road if you stand still too long.