I agree but it seems to me there could be all kinds of reasons a pipe could structurely fail and there fore there should have been some kind of plan to handle it.
I think it's more along the lines of "ignorance is bliss." The oil companies, BP, in this case, were happy to keep doing what they had been doing, cutting some corners along the way to save a few bucks, because how could anything go wrong? They were happy making billions from this technology, so why bother spending millions to protect the public and the environment in case of a disaster, when there hadn't been a disaster in, golly, years? Brute stupidity, greed and hubris. That is what we are witnessing. The head of BP should be cooling his heels in a Louisiana jail, in my humble opinion, lucky that a lynch mob isn't howling outside.
I know. The blissful ignorance extends to previous administrations as well as previous sessions of Congress. Let the Louisiana state police capture this fellow and put him in a dingy cell, if he's trotting around the state claiming how "sorry" he is about it all, at the same time he's lamenting how much trouble he's having to go to dealing with this. Then let the courts sort it out. I'd love it. He's be released, sure, but some folks will still feel some satisfaction that the jerk had a few hours in jail.
They did, hence the blowout preventer. Apparently what was not forseen or planned for was the blowout preventer failing.
MMS issues go back decades... probably to the founding of the agency. This is a multi-generational, multi-party, multi multi-international company failure of the highest order and ultimately it's on us because we could have elected people that would have done something about it or demanded that preparedness and safety be the dominant consideration in this business. Now, we're all screwed.
Yes, we're screwed. The ultimate cause is greed. The greed of politicians for the money and goodies handed out by lobbyists on behalf of the oil companies, causing them to vote for the welfare of the oil companies at the expense of the public. The greed of the public for cheap energy to power their cars in their millions, when there are alternatives available. Their willingness to let their beautiful beaches become soiled in the process, to let pipelines carry oil and gas through their neighborhoods, refineries belching fumes that they breathe and, like the politicians and the oil companies, accept the risk because accidents and disasters happen to someone else. Someone in Nigeria, or Alaska, or the North Sea. Either one of us could write for an hour about what we've done wrong as a nation when it comes to energy. Houston and Austin used to have extensive trolly systems. With payoffs from the tire and auto industries to their polticians, cities destroyed perfectly good mass transit and littered their cities with buses spewing diesel fumes. I love Rome, but when you visit there, the smell of the buses is something you just have to get used to, while the fumes dissolve the heritage of two thousand years. We destroy our much shorter history pushing freeways through historic neighborhoods. One could go on. It's depressing.
As I expected, we're starting to get an increase in resource orders for people to go to the Gulf. Right now, there are about 700 people on duty from the wildland fire agencies. Doesn't sound like much, but the total is more or less 1/30 of our available, qualified wildland firefighter organization. Moreover, the positions they're taking are mostly critical ones like planning, communications, and logistics, all of which are in short demand. There's also a fair amount of what we call "resource advisors" which could be anything from a biologist or botanist to an archaeologist. Those guys are needed as well... archys walk the fire line in front of dozers to make sure we don't blade a site, biologists and botanists help us design suppression tactics and develop rehab standards for burned areas. Anyway, this will be a constant suck on our resources all fire season.
Crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill washes ashore in Orange Beach, Ala. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...ainment_plan_for_oil_spill.html#ixzz0qhbRLaML
Greed is a problem but its also just how messed up our economy is and how addicted we are to oil. For example even as the Gulf States are wrestling with the destruction of beaches and the marine environment from oil there are still a lot of complaints about the 6 month moratorium put in place on off shore drilling. We have the perverse situation of those who are getting the most affected also saying we shouldn't stop even though we have no idea what caused this disaster exactly. This goes back to the argument that I brought up earlier how the oil industry has become like GM, too big to fail. We know there are a lot of problems with it but we can't stop it, even briefly, because our economy is addicted to it.
we live in a big ass nation and it takes a vehicle to get most places. a lot of people in this country don't have the luxury to do alternatives
Its not just because we live in a big ass nation but that we made a lot of development decisions that made it so that we are dependent on cars and fossil fuels. We didn't have to develop like this. We are large but that doesn't mean that our model is destiny anymore than other countries with large land areas are developing following our model.
its hard to blame politicians and industry for not seeing the future, fossil fuels have been relatively cheap, and the environmental impact has only been stressed the last 15-20 years. it takes a little longer for a paradigm shift. Maybe we are arguably 20 years late on being serious to change, but as has been noted in this thread, the oil majors are at the forefront of investment in new technology, its in their best interests.
This. And I don't think people realize how much our country really depends on petroleum...it is so ingrained in our country it would change how EVERYTHING is done if we stop using it. Not just how our cars run, but our power, clothes, toys, building materials, transportation systems, nearly everything you see in an electronics store or department store used petroleum to make it or to get it to there. It's not just expensive to use alternatives, but if we REALLY wanted to change even one of these categories it would take a massive overhaul that would be difficult to integrate into everything else that still works with petroleum. I really wish we could get away from oil, it's obviously bad for the environment in many ways, but in my (only slightly educated ) opinion the only time we'll really get away from it is when we're damn near out and alternatives are the only choice...luckily(or unluckily) we won't see that in our lifetimes, but it'll happen. As of now, oil provides too much energy for how cheap it is(hell a barrel of say, olive oil or grape Jelly is 100 times more expensive!)...compared to all other alternative sources it's insanely efficient, it just comes with some bad byproducts. Unless we come up with some crazy innovative power source we're stuck with petroleum, although nuclear power is pretty good...too bad it still has that stigma about it.
there has always been talk of running out of oil since the oil embargo, but oil was relatively cheap as late as 2001, from 98-00 oil companies were in layoff mode because it was so cheap, in a booming economy. that's almost unheard of now, but not so just recently as ten years ago.
People have been aware of the environmental impacts for much longer than 20 years. People have also been aware of the developmental and societal impacts or our auto based infrastructure for much longer than 20 years. You are right though a lot of this was due to shortsightedness and its hard to go back and say that maybe they should've known better. Even granting them that though the history that led us to where we are now isn't just a matter of inevitablility. For example consider that GM bought many cities trolley lines only to dismantle them. It was moves like that that contributed to why we are so dependent on autos. In their longterm interests perhaps but corporations like people rarely show the ability to think longterm.
BP cut corners before the well exploded. A question for those who work in the industry. How often are these sort of cost cutting decisions made and could these decisions be criminally negligent? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37695879/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf Documents reveal BP's missteps before blowout Oil giant engineer describes 'nightmare well' six days before rig explosion By MATTHEW DALY, RAY HENRY Associated Press Writers updated 6:15 p.m. CT, Mon., June 14, 2010 NEW ORLEANS - BP made a series of money-saving shortcuts and blunders that dramatically increased the danger of a destructive oil spill in a well that an engineer ominously described as a "nightmare" just six days before the blowout, according to documents released Monday that provide new insight into the causes of the disaster. The House Energy and Commerce Committee released dozens of internal documents that outline several problems on the deepsea rig in the days and weeks before the April 20 explosion that set in motion the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. The committee has been investigating the explosion and its aftermath. "Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig," said Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Bart Stupak. The missteps emerged on the same day that President Barack Obama made his fourth visit to the Gulf, where he sought to assure beleaguered residents that the government will "leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before." The breached well has dumped as much as 114 million gallons of oil into the Gulf under the worst-case scenario described by scientists — a rate of more than 2 million a day. BP has collected 5.6 million gallons of oil through its latest containment cap on top of the well, or about 630,000 gallons per day. But BP believes it will see considerable improvements in the next two weeks. The company said Monday that it could trap a maximum of roughly 2.2 million gallons of oil each day by the end of June as it deploys additional containment efforts, including a system that could start burning off vast quantities as early as Tuesday. That would more than triple the amount of oil it is currently capturing — and be a huge relief for those trying to keep it from hitting the shore. Possible 'game changer' "It would be a game changer," said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mark Boivin, deputy director for near-shore operations at a command center in Mobile. He works with a team that coordinates the efforts of roughly 80 skimming boats gathering oil off the coast. Still, BP warned its containment efforts could face problems if hoses or pipes clog and engineers struggle to run the complicated collection system. Early efforts at the bottom of the Gulf failed to capture oil. Meanwhile, congressional investigators have identified several mistakes by BP in the weeks leading up to the disaster as it fell way behind on drilling the well. BP started drilling in October, only to have the rig damaged by Hurricane Ida a month later. The company switched to the Deepwater Horizon rig and resumed drilling on Feb. 6. The rig was 43 days late for its next drilling location by the time it exploded April 20, costing BP at least $500,000 each day it was overdue, congressional documents show. As BP found itself in a frantic race against time to get the job done, engineers cut corners in the well design, cementing and drilling mud efforts and the installation of safety devices known as "lockdown sleeves" and "centralizers," according to congressional investigators. In the design of the well, the company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities to provide a barrier to the flow of gas in space surrounding steel tubes in the well, documents and internal e-mails show. The decision saved BP $7 million to $10 million; the original cost estimate for the well was about $96 million. 'Crazy well' In an e-mail, BP engineer Brian Morel told a fellow employee that the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well. "We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place," Morel wrote. The e-mail chain culminated with the following message by another worker: "This has been a crazy well for sure." BP also apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 "centralizers" to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers. In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine." The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20. Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded. BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig. A spokesman for BP could not immediately reached for comment on the findings, but executives including CEO Tony Hayward will be questioned by Congress on Thursday. The letter from Waxman and Stupak noted at least five questionable decisions BP made before the explosion, and was supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents. "The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman chairs the energy panel while Stupak heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
Yes, we live in a big ass nation and in a big ass state, but we have also consistently made poor choices with regard to energy. Be honest. How many folks do you know that drive their car a few blocks to a 7/11? Heck, a couple of blocks? There are places in many of our cities where you can still see the electric trolley tracks that haven't been completely covered up. In many cities across the nation, including Houston, those mass transit systems were thrown away after the big industries that would make a killing off of discouraging that kind of transportation used political contributions and ouright bribery to make it happen. That's an example of what I'm talking about and that happened back in the late '30's and during the 1940's.
