On May 23, 3:16*am, aemeijers wrote:
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?



No. The world record was set by the same rig some months before on
another well. But it doesn't really matter, it was still a very deep
well.

Regarding the overall situation and who is to blame, there is
certainly plenty to spread around. While you can't predict every
possible failure mechanism, one would think you would have a plan to
effectively deal with the aftermath that works. BP did file such a
plan, claiming it was capable of cleaning up, containing, and dealing
with a leak that was huge, with most saying it was many times larger
than this actual one. Obviously, the plan didn't work. It will be
interesting to see exactly how much capability they really did have in
place prior to the accident.

I would also add the EPA and which ever agency issues leases, Dept of
the Interior?, to the list of those responsible. For years everyone
has been concerned about the dangers of oil spills in the ocean from a
variety of possible sources, eg pipeline leaks, tankers, oil well
accidents, etc. It's not something new. Yet, just a few days ago
the EPA ordered BP to prove that there is not a more environmentally
safe dispersant available to use and if there is a better one to start
using it. WTF? The EPA has a budget of what? 50bil? And they
don't know what dispersants are environmentally safe to use in the
ocean? And this latest fiasco came two weeks after EPA ordered BP
to stop using the dispersant because they thought it was doing more
harm than good. Later, apparently they reversed that decision, only
to bring it up again now.

Then we have the genius Admiral of the Coast Guard, who when asked why
they didn't immediately start burning the oil, said that he was
following a plan written many years ago that said you could only burn
if the winds were coming offshore so as not to possibly generate
onshore air pollution. WTF? Why didn't he get on the phone with
Nepolitano or Obama and get this obvious nonsense overidden on an
emergency basis.

What about all the Congressmen and Senators that have oversight on
this, including the ones that always bitch about the potential for
disaster? Did they do anything to make sure that the drilling that
was being done was done to safe standards? Along those lines, it
seems to me a reasonable thing that should have been done was somthing
along the lines of the EPA superfund where they taxed all the chemical
companies to establish a fund for environmental cleanup. Before
issuing any leases, the govt could have required that the drillers all
contribute to an entity created to be available to respond quicky and
effectively to ANY oil spill. They could also require oil shipping
companies to contribute. Said entity would not only have all the
necessary eqpt on hand to respond instantly to any accident, but would
also do research to establish best practices to deal with such
situations. Then, we wouldn't have BP looking on Google for safe and
effective dispersants.