[quote]Neuromancer wrote:
‘Every precaution’ means different things in different places.
[/quote]
I’ve been trying to understand how on earth there isn’t a manual override on the ocean floor.[/quote]
It blew up. The well head is damaged and that is what is causing the oil to spew out. Oil is lighter than water. Usually the oil drillers even on land pump water into the well so the oil floats to the top and it is pumped out. On land you stop the water and the oil stops leaking out. In the ocean it is full of water. So there is a hole that is concreated to withstand the pressure of the earth on the ocean floor. This concreat is so think that it is not going to collapse. Hopefully the two holes they are drilling will take some of the pressure off the main well, and then they can do some of the things they have already tried and get the main damaged well under control. Only time will tell.[/quote]
If the well head was damaged, the remote device in the WSJ article wouldn’t do anything, correct?[/quote]
That device is just essentially a remote control to trigger the BOPs to close. The first thing they did with the robot subs was to try to manually actuate the BOPs, which didn’t work. So, no, that thing would not have helped in any way.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
That’s another huge problem. People look to government to make the rules, they do and when it blows up in everyone’s face the government blames the company when in reality if the company would have been allowed to follow their profit motivated plan by drilling closer to shore this would have been over a long time ago.
[/quote]
Or it would have happened and been even worse because it was a mile from the shore.
Drilling closer is not better than drilling farther, and people should not have to see oil rigs a mile off their beaches.[/quote]
Is that so? Well thanks for clearing that up.
He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talkin about LOL! Which is fine. Most people wouldn’t. Until he makes assertions like this which happen to be in direct opposition to those who actually do know what they’re talkin about which doesn’t include me. I’m just repeating what those people have said.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
That’s another huge problem. People look to government to make the rules, they do and when it blows up in everyone’s face the government blames the company when in reality if the company would have been allowed to follow their profit motivated plan by drilling closer to shore this would have been over a long time ago.
[/quote]
Or it would have happened and been even worse because it was a mile from the shore.
Drilling closer is not better than drilling farther, and people should not have to see oil rigs a mile off their beaches.[/quote]
it’s a matter of depth, not distance from shore. Every 100 foot down in the ocean exponentially increases the pressure and dangers. We can find a land-rig blowout, in a matter of minutes, because we can get the tools and people right to it. We can fix shallow depth blowouts in much the same way. But a mile down, equipment and manpower options are very very limited as we are witnessing
Live feeds, as in real time from the BP cameras observing the operation at the ocean floor. http://mxl.fi/bpfeeds/
Watching them try n get that remote socket on that bolt is making ME wanna hang myself and I’m not even the one that has to do it. Wadda nightmare this whole thing is.
[quote]The Mage wrote:
Okay, sorry for the sarcasm. But everybody here knows exactly what would have happened to Bush had he been president when this happened. He would have been raked over the coals for not solving this issue.[/quote]
If Bush was still president it would still be a fuck up of epic proportions… on the part of BP.[/quote]
Please explain why you think this is a fuck up on the part of BP and what you think BP’s role in drilling this well was?[/quote]
Wow.[/quote]
I didn’t think you knew what you were talking about, now it’s confirmed.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
That’s another huge problem. People look to government to make the rules, they do and when it blows up in everyone’s face the government blames the company when in reality if the company would have been allowed to follow their profit motivated plan by drilling closer to shore this would have been over a long time ago.
[/quote]
Or it would have happened and been even worse because it was a mile from the shore.
Drilling closer is not better than drilling farther, and people should not have to see oil rigs a mile off their beaches.[/quote]
it’s a matter of depth, not distance from shore. Every 100 foot down in the ocean exponentially increases the pressure and dangers. We can find a land-rig blowout, in a matter of minutes, because we can get the tools and people right to it. We can fix shallow depth blowouts in much the same way. But a mile down, equipment and manpower options are very very limited as we are witnessing[/quote]
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It’s a matter of depth to a point once you go too deep to use divers thats about 300 meters, you only have a limited set of options and tools to perform intervention and deal with incidents like this anyway even if it was at diving depth it’s too dangerous to send divers to work on a well like this so the same diverless solutions would be used. By the way the pressure increase linearly by 1bar every 10meters not exponentionally.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
That’s another huge problem. People look to government to make the rules, they do and when it blows up in everyone’s face the government blames the company when in reality if the company would have been allowed to follow their profit motivated plan by drilling closer to shore this would have been over a long time ago.
[/quote]
Or it would have happened and been even worse because it was a mile from the shore.
Drilling closer is not better than drilling farther, [/quote]
There has to be drilling somewhere. Where do you suggest it occur?[quote]
and people should not have to see oil rigs a mile off their beaches.[/quote]
Why not? Will “seeing an oil rig” cause blindness?
I see man made structures offshore all the time including large cruise ships full of fat people with drinks with umbrellas in them. What’s the problem with an oil rig?
[/quote]
It pains me to agree with you and Tirib, but I too have to ask our resident Democrat what the alternative is? I hate that this happened as much as the next person. I have even looked into volunteering to help with the clean up (I’m in the Reserves, but it looks like the Guard is helping in the cleanup for now). Perhaps, if Big Oil wasn’t so powerful and in bed with the government, maybe we would have seen the development of viable alternative fuel source.
Unfortunately, this is the hand we have been dealt. And saying that off shore drilling must cease just isn’t an option.
I am wholly unqualified to comment on what led to this. I am however pretty sure that some things did not lead to it. The idea that any company, including BP, would not take every precaution, regulated or not, to avoid a disaster like this is ridiculous on it’s face. Even if they stomped puppies and ate children, from a purely business standpoint they are the very last people on Earth who would ever want to see this happen. We will find out that no amount or type of regulation would have prevented this and that it was either a technological failure or a procedural failure or both.
[/quote]
While parts of that may be true, it’s common practice for businesses to cut corners on whatever to save money and time.
“Not wanting it to happen” is not the same as “making sure it doesn’t happen.”[/quote]
Here’s the part nobody wants to hear. Where human engineering is concerned there has never been and never will be any such thing as “sure” of anything. I am going to grope in the dark here and guess that they did quite a bit more than simply not want it to happen. As we are seeing they had EVERYTHING to lose if it did.
Of course you’re right. Businesses do cut corners and sometimes in unforgivable ways, but not usually in a manner that puts themselves at great risk of both global front page PR disaster and astronomical financial loss. Folks have already all but forgotten that people died on day one. There is no way that there wasn’t already regulation and precaution enough to the limits of present technological know how to prevent this. If we ever do find out what exactly caused it it WILL be either present knowledge was insufficient for these depths or somebody didn’t follow the rules. It will NOT be because there wasn’t enough federal government.
Listen, Obama’s own inspection gurus passed this rig recently. Were they not doing their job? I don’t believe that. I’ll repeat. This is not Obama’s fault and he cannot fix it. It was unbelievably stoopid of him and his people to tattoo it on themselves like they did.[/quote]
This is a political situation now for Obama and I have two problems with Obamas comportment of this incident. First at his press conference on the topic he suggested that the previous administration had been responsible for tolerating a ‘close’ relationship between oil companies and regulators which he says compromised the regulators independence, if he had a problem with this as president why didn’t he do something about it - lets not forget that this is a president that came to power promising change.
Second he blamed BP alone for this incident despite the fact that the rig, equipment (which has failed), people, engineering and pretty much every piece of hardware associated with drilling this well belongs to Transocean an American drilling contractor. BP are the responsible party according to the US law that’s clear but BP also have the BEST or near best safety record for drilling wells in the gulf - that’s factual. So is the root cause of this incident really BP?