John R. Carroll wrote:
Jon Elson wrote:

On 12/27/2010 03:04 PM, Ignoramus7943 wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how
ineffective all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the
Diesel operators, who should have known what was going
on, but failed to shut them down until they exploded. The
overspeeding Diesel generators may have olver-volted critical
electrical equipment and caused some other safety gear to fail to
function. Of course, if they didn't have a compression release on
those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there would have been no
way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is ineffective if the intake
air is combustible. You'd think, however, that a drilling platform
would be designed with this possibility in mind.


It was.
A careful reading of the article discloses that all of the automated
response systems had been specifically disabled.
This wasn't anything nefarious and was done with deliberation.


But, as far as I could tell, at least TWO operators were standing right
AT the control
panel, and apparently did nothing as the engines started wailing like
banshees! That
seems pretty amazing, as the article seems to state they knew a blowout
was in progress
and they could see the gas alarm panel indicating massive amounts of
methane all
over the platform. So, I'm not talking about an automatic system, but a
manual intervention.
Disabling automatic systems assumes that personnel will be able to react
to an emergency.

Jon