Geigerclick said:
Given BP's safety record, and the complete failure of 5 or 6 attempts to fix this, I am no longer giving BP the benefit of the doubt. I can't say what they did or did not plan for, but now that we've seen their multiple failures I can say with confidence that they did not plan for THIS, or that their planning was naive or stupid.
I'm not sure you read/comprehended what Mech_E said. He said
yes, BP did not plan for dealing with this event. You're not disagreeing with him there.
What you don't seem to be understanding is that the contingencies that
were planned for were all [apparently] to
prevent a blowout, not to deal with one after it has happened. This makes some sense, since if a catastrophic blowout has already happened, you've already had a major disaster.
So then the questions are:
1. Is this approach reasonable?
2. Why didn't it work?
By now, most of the important facts of what led-up to the disaster are pretty well known. There were multiple failures at multiple levels by multiple companies, and if anyone of several failures hadn't happened, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today. What that tells us in answer to the questions above:
1. Yes, the "prevent" instead of reacting after the fact approach is reasonable, but it requires that the "prevent" approach is being faithfully followed. This is where (2) regulation comes in.
2. It failed because employees of the companies involved cut corners and there was inadequate regulation (enforcement) in place to catch the corner-cutting.
I'm sorry, but if you built a LWR without the ability to kill the reaction, who would accept "we're learning as we go" as an excuse?
Invalid analogy, since what you are describing for a LWR is
exactly the approach taken here. You want to prevent a meltdown, not deal with it after it has already happened, just like you want to prevent a blowout, not deal with it after it has already happened.
This was not unimaginable, in fact from reading some links earlier in this thread it was expected by many other than BP. They had been having issues since March, and so so.
Indeed, given all the failures, it was certainly imaginable that this would happen. But if you had a finite amount of money available to you as a government agency and could choose to do one of the following, which would you do?:
1. Inspect the BOP monthly and order the well shut-down if it wasn't in proper working order.
2. Inspect the disaster recovery contingency procedures and equipment (say, a large, clamp-on BOP) monthly and order the well shut down if it didn't look like they could quickly recover from a disaster.
Obviously, picking #2 means reacting to a disaster
after it has happened and #1 means preventing the disaster from happening. I don't think there's any reasonable person who wouldn't rather prevent it than do a better job stopping it after it failed.
Ivan Seeking said:
Deep drilling itself is clearly not safe at this time. So the deep-drillling ban should continue at least until a method to handle a disaster like this one, is clearly demonstrated.
Nonsense. With all we know about all the rediculous failures of BP and subscontractors that were required to make this disaster happen, one could not possibly reasonably believe deep water drilling is incapable of being made safe. If BP hadn't been cutting the corners and the drilling company hadn't kept trying to use a well with a known-to-be-faulty BOP, this never would have happened. To me, this is a clear indication that offshore drilling isn't unsafe when the proper safeties are implimented, but that the regulations and more importantly the enforcement needs to work better.
This was not a technological failure, it was a
human failure. And as I've said before, this is par for the course for engineering failures:
-Challenger
-Columbia
-TMI
-Most coal mine accidents
These are not failures of technology or foolish pursuits of the impossible, these were human failures due mostly to greed that can be easily avoided with proper regulation. The Columbia and Challenger do get a caveat though, in that space travel is an inherrently dangerous and complex pursuit with a known track record and pretty accuratly predicted failure rate and the choice is made with eyes open. But while both cases include technical failures, the failures were for the most part forseen in advance and the proximate cause of both disasters was human, not unforseen technical failures. Ie, both almost certainly could have been prevented, had people made relatively straightforward different decisions.
Next, put the Republicans and their deregulation hysteria to bed, once and for all. It is more clear than ever that heavy regulation of this industry is required.
What regulation would you have put in place? They are already required to inspect their BOPs periodically. The problem (as in the recent coal mine disaster) isn't the regulations, but the
enforcement of those regulations.
I may be different than many republicans in that I believe in reasonable regulation/enforcement. The problem I see is that we have too many useless laws and not enough enforcement of the necessary ones. The problem is that congress is great at passing laws, but not good at creating a mechanism for enforcement of those laws. So rather than deal with a problem by fixing the enforcement, they layer more unenforced laws on top of the ones we already have.
When enviromentalists tell us a danger exists, instead of putting on the blinders and calling them tree huggers, instead of turning up the nose and accusing them of fear-mongering, shut up and listen.
So-called "environmentalists" have contributed nothing of any value to this issue. Ignorant fear-mongering most definitely is the primary tool to achieve their misguided and destructive goals. They don't get a win for casting a wide net that once in a blue moon gets a hit. I've never heard an "environmentalist" talk about blowouts or blowout preventers (before this event). Vague fears are not an understanding and are not sound policy.
Taking it a step further: if another similar blowout happens
tomorrow on a well built by a different company, it still doesn't change the issue at all: Oil is the lifeblood of the economy and having domestic sources is important. And while perfection is as unreasonable as it is impossible, the risks of offshore drilling are not particularly difficult to manage.
A relief well drilled in parallel with the original well, as is required in Norway and Canada, could have prevented this nightmare.
As would a functioning blow out preventer.
