Pretty ridiculous that they didn't have a couple of those containment domes ready for immediate deployment.
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I'm not sure that is possible. The one they created for this issue was custom made to fit exactly over the leak, pipe, exactly the amount of mud, exactly the depth. I'm not sure you could have generic versions of these made since situations could be vastly different.
Did you get the memo? They didn't need them because there was practically no chance of this ever happening. They should be fined heavily for lying to themselves in the name of profit-making. You plan for the worst. The worst had to be an out of control oil well. Do they think we are stupid or something? I say throw some of these people in prison. In particular, whomever the jackass was that wrote the TPS report memo about statistics and probability. You cannot even foresee the types of accidents you could have 5,000 feet down in the ocean. What about the sea monster that lives 5,000 feet down? Did anyone plan for that? Hell no! We're supposed to walk away from this with an "accidents happen" viewpoint and shrug it off. Meanwhile, we've got literally tens of thousands of life forms perishing and demolishing of the food chain in this section of the gulf and spreading like a plague. Imagine if it were on land like smokey from "Lost". We would be hurting pretty good right now. Damn I'm still mad about this. As if we all needed a reason to be pissed, this is a good one. The system is not fullproof. Where is the redundancy? Fix the damn system...or be damned. That said...the effort in correcting the problem seems pretty good (considering the lack of BP company planning in the first place)...and I like how the fishermen are taking on the oil spill head-on and not leaving it in the hands of some company man or politician.
Not looking good... "The effort to place a containment dome over a gushing wellhead was dealt a setback when a large volume of hydrates -- crystals formed when gas combines with water -- accumulated inside of the vessel, BP's chief operating officer said Saturday." http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/08/gulf.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T1
I guess look out world...here comes the oil. I imagine at least some of it is going to eventually get caught up in the gulf stream. It will be interesting to see how devastating this could end up being. I mean...I'm picturing oily beaches not only on the Gulf coast but also up along the East coast. This is just crazy. This is war against the sea...and the sea is losing bigtime. So, once the ocean dies, does that mean man will also eventually die? The food chain breaks down at that point. Isn't it dying anyway due to turning acidic? This is only going to help the process I guess. What we should be doing instead of rolling out more and more oil drilling rigs and doing stuff that is harmful...is deploying a bunch of huge water filters that filter the water and make it cleaner. It stands to reason that if you filter water in a fish tank...the ocean is just a big fish tank that needs larger water filters. Hell, if they are also going to leak oil everywhere, then we might as well put up wind turbines everywhere just off coast to generate green energy. Would you rather look at wind turbines (oh...such an inconvenience there) or contaminated water/oily beaches? People need to start doing what is better for the environment over something as silly as "oh...those are unsightly and ruin the view". I think there will be a day when every home will have a wind turbine and/or solar panel roof....where we individually generate our own green energy for our own use. That's where we need to be. My anger has not abated.
The earth is resilient. Our food supply chains are not. Some of the things you know and love eating might not be around in the next few decades.
It makes me angry to read this: Anticipated, but didn't think it would be a significant problem. I guess they didn't learn their lesson from the explosion itself. If they anticipated something like this then they should have added whatever possible to prevent delays, ****.
I think they're making this up as they go. The only thing that we know will work is the relief wells, and those are three months out.
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CH4I1a5vg3w&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CH4I1a5vg3w&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> Video of the oil gushing out of the gulf - starts at about the two minute mark.
Comments from a researcher with access to BP data. Possibility that hydrates are not only posing an issue for fixes, but may have been the root cause (not exactly a groundbreaking proclamation, but interesting nonetheless). Additionally, I heard (NPR, coworkers, et. al.) further speculation that the depth of the drilling resulted in such thick pipes that the BOPs could not "crush" as designed. If so, that is a massive, massive engineering oversight.
I heard on TV yesterday that BP people are all over the place asking for suggestions about what to do. It's so hard to sort through the hyped up fear the media creates about just about everything and a real, dire disaster but the longer this goes on the more I feel like this "leak" is the latter.
its obvious no one knows what to do. they will have to take a long hard look at safety requirements for these rigs once this is settled. these guys are planning to drill a lot further out, which from what I've been reading means a lot more opportunity for these accidents because of a lot more pressure built in deeper waters.
That's why I called for a moratorium on new drilling offshore until real, honest safety procedures that can deal with any anticipated emergency are in place, along with the equipment needed to quickly repair a sudden emergency. If the moratorium is limited to deepwater offshore projects, I can live with that. Drilling in those depths is at the cutting edge of the industry's technology. To allow those wells without knowing what to do if there is a blowout and to not have the equipment on hand to deal with it is an act of insanity. The costs, as we are seeing, are far and away greater than the costs of preparing ahead of time for just this type of disaster. And if someone says that it is impossible to prepare ahead of time, because so much is unknown about drilling at those depths, then I rest my case. My argument has just been made for me. An easy example? There is no reason that the problems experienced after lowering the "containment dome" over this well couldn't have been anticipated, with needed measures to prevent what happened already in place and built into the equipment.
i read somewhere about a previous spill in the persian gulf, the saudis covered it up, something like 700M barrels. they brought in empty super tankers to skim the leaking oil up, then took it and either cleaned the oil, or destroyed it. it obviously would not plug the leak, but it could certainly mitigate the environmental impact, and buy them some time. if this is possible, why hasn't obama rented every tanker he can find, and brought them to the gulf?
