JstAnotherSub
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from your linkquote:
And that appears to be the story. BP, Transocean, and Halliburton avoided standard tests and inspections on the blow out preventer stack. The stack apparently does not have a top-kill mechanism, forcing the crews to improvise on the battered BOP stack on the sea floor. We also learned that three days before the disaster, the crews took an economic short cut by pumping free seawater instead of expensive, man-made drilling mud into the well to try to close it. The crews apparently knew, or should have known, that the seawater was not countering the pressure in the well. The crew knew for at least an hour before the explosion that the blow out preventer was failing. This much we know, even before the formal investigation ordered by the White House gets going.
Blow out preventers are not new technology. But like any technology, they are only as safe and effective as the people and procedures that use them. Even if the formal investigation finds flaws in the equipment, the failure to follow known, established procedure is clearly a major factor in the disaster, and is the likely root cause of it.
We can tolerate failure in many technologies we use daily. When our PC crashes, we curse and reboot.
But some failures cause too much havoc to tolerate, so we focus on prevention. Just as our technology is not adequate for dealing with an off-shore oil spill after it happens, there is little we can do to save the passengers after an airplane crashes. Thus, for decades, the aviation industry and government regulators cooperated on prevention.
It looks like what happened in the Gulf is like an airliner taking off a list of outstanding maintenance reports, plus ice on the wings, and letting it fly into a thunderstorm. In aviation, that nightmare scenario just would not happen. Pilots, mechanics, and controllers would be fired first for neglecting the rules.
An off-shore oil well can affect the lives and livelihood of far more people than the passengers on an airliner. Shouldn't the people responsible for the well be held to at least the same standard as the people responsible for the airliner?
This failure occurred not because off-shore oil drilling is morally bad, but because it is inherently risky, and people who should know better took short cuts. The investigation may indeed show that enforcement of existing rules would have been sufficient to avert the disaster. After all, that seemed to work for over 3,800 other wells drilled in the last 30 years in the Gulf of Mexico.
i see failure all right, but not from the blowout preventer. time will tell, unless they are good at coverups....
like i said, the more i hear, the madder i get.
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