Steve B wrote:
I have reserved any judgement or opinion on this incident until these final
facts have come out. Having speng years on offshore drilling rigs, I can
clearly see that this is a management failure, and that failure is to let
men whose own lives are at risk control the safety devices. Had they been
allowed to activate these, the well would have been shut in, and we would
have never heard about BP.

Well, maybe. It wasn't just paralysis at the moment of crisis, there
was stuff done wrong
starting, probably, before the well drilling was begun. I think there
were 5 things (or more)
wrong with the blowout preventer. At least 4 of those were known to BP
and Transocean
at the time. the BOP was 10 years old, and overdue for a major
inspection. There was apparently
another drill pipe left over from when the got a stock pipe several
months before the accident
that was passing through the BOP, and they had no idea it was in there.
This may be why
the shear ram couldn't cut the drill pipe. Of course, it is well-known
that the testing of the
final cement job was VERY poorly done, and a RAFT of abnormal
indications were pretty
much ignored. So, the BOP may have worked if activated early enough,
and it may not have
worked due to the multiple problems in the BOP and the extra drill pipe.

This was such a HUGE blowout, however, that there may have been no
stopping it, once it
got started with only seawater in the casing.

Jon