Smitty Two wrote:
In article ,
Oren wrote:

On Sat, 22 May 2010 12:04:34 -0700, Smitty Two
wrote:

In article ,
dpb wrote:

This beating up on BP is simply populist Monday-morning qb'ing for the
consumption of the press and populace.
Huh? As far as I'm concerned, they ****ed up. They should not have been
doing something that entailed risk, without a plan for dealing with any
problem that might arise. It's really just that damn simple.
You cannot write a contingency plan for every situation. Can't expect
a plan to cover every set of circumstances. Didn't NASA save the
Apollo with a improvised brainstorm?

Yeah, sure, Apollo 13. Saved the lives of 3 men, who knowingly and
willingly embarked on a voyage positively fraught with danger. Not a
good analogy. Risk vs. reward is a real-world concept. Given the level
of risk involved, I'd say BP had the responsibility to write a
contingency plan for every possible complication that had a better than
1 in a million chance of materializing. And I'd say they failed,
willfully taking risks far greater than that, with no plan B.

Trouble is, with any complex system, you never know all the ways
something can go wrong. Sometimes, things that are trivial taken
individually, when they happen at the same time, cause catastrophic
failure. Not saying BP and the various subs did everything correctly
this time (obviously), but there is a certain amount of risk that you
can never plan for.

As described in a previous message, it looks like the failure this time
was too many cooks in the kitchen, with no one person on-site that had
the whole thing in their head, with the authority to force a production
hold. (Kinda like what killed Challenger...) Knowing a blowout preventer
had failed, strongly suspecting the inflatable 'doughnut' that kept the
mud from blowing back had failed, and then attempting to use a fast
(dry) way to pull the drill shaft back out, all combined to create a
2+2=5 situation. They ran it like a drilling operation on land or in
shallow water, when it needed to be run like a space shot or deep dive
operation. I'm obviously no expert on deep ocean drilling- that is just
my take from published news reports. And wasn't this the deepest anyone
had tried to do a wellhead?

--
aem sends...