Smart Bombs are not equal to nuclear bombs. They aren't even really in the same development path. It's an issue of robotics and space technology that allows them. When you start putting jailtime to things that people don't have control over, IE their Employees, then you are taking about creating an environment where companies would rather go elsewhere.
I'm just going to leave that out there. The part about bosses don't have control of their employees, and aren't responsible for them. As for brain drain, and making the leap between oil executives and weapons scientists....no. Just no. Smart bombs OR nuclear weapons, that's a specious comparison.
You'd think our city would have learned and replaced the rest, they didn't. In fact one of the newer ones actually ended up leaking as well.
You accuse me of not providing relavent examples, I am providing you perfectly good ones. We are talking about people vunerable to criminal prosecution because of screwups the moment you open the door to such actions by prosecuting BP.
A. Did anyone die because of the sewage leak? Did the workers installing it die?
B. I see willful risk taking that resulted in people dying in BP's case. You're saying "screw up" and using a non-oil, non-industry, city project screw up anecdote to reinforce your belief. They did sewer work in my town too. It sucked.
I did. Nowhere does it say he did what the claim was made, that he decided to use Sub-standard materials. In fact, after reading such stuff I did my own research and discovered that wasn't the case. They honestly felt they were up to standards, particularly at the top. Provide a link backing up your claim, or stop making it. Nowhere in this thread has you or anyone else provided any links saying the BP executive approved substandard building practices or Substandard materials.
By reading the thread, I mean the links too.
*sigh*
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtmlMike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno.
He says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps. The night of the disaster, he was in his workshop when he heard the rig's engines suddenly run wild. That was the moment that explosive gas was shooting across the decks, being sucked into the engines that powered the rig's generators.
Mike Williams was the chief electronics technician in charge of the rig's computers and electrical systems. And seven months before, he had helped the crew drill the deepest oil well in history, 35,000 feet.
"It was special. There's no way around it. Everyone was talking about it. The congratulations that were flowing around, it made you feel proud to work there," he remembered.
Williams worked for the owner, Transocean, the largest offshore drilling company. Like its sister rigs, the Deepwater Horizon cost $350 million, rose 378 feet from bottom to top. Both advanced and safe, none of her 126 crew had been seriously injured in seven years.
The safety record was remarkable, because offshore drilling today pushes technology with challenges matched only by the space program.
Deepwater Horizon was in 5,000 feet of water and would drill another 13,000 feet, a total of three miles. The oil and gas down there are under enormous pressure. And the key to keeping that pressure under control is this fluid that drillers call "mud."
"Mud" is a manmade drilling fluid that's pumped down the well and back up the sides in continuous circulation. The sheer weight of this fluid keeps the oil and gas down and the well under control.
The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long.
Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.
With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.
Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called "mud."
"We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe," Williams explained.
That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars.
"We were informed of this during one of the safety meetings, that somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million was lost in bottom hole assembly and 'mud.' And you always kind of knew that in the back of your mind when they start throwing these big numbers around that there was gonna be a push coming, you know? A push to pick up production and pick up the pace," Williams said.
Asked if there was pressure on the crew after this happened, Williams told Pelley, "There's always pressure, but yes, the pressure was increased."
The article goes on for six pages. You read the rest.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=57121.540From Non-Sapient, who has actually worked on oil rigs.
Listening to the testifying before congress at the moment, just wanted to drop in and let you guys know how retarded this is turning out to be.
When setting casing (a lower rated casing that they shouldn't have used) Halliburton recommended 21 stabilizers (large/odd one in picture but you get the idea, they're used to keep pipe in the middle of the borehole).
BP chose to use 2.
Putting casing down in that well was like shoving a wet noodle into a hole in the ground; it's going to bunch up and bend, causing weird torques and weak points, not to mention being IMPOSSIBLE to cement into the hole properly, because all the cement will end up on one side or the other.
A good point on this: all that tortuosity of the pipe would actually DECREASE flow, due to increased friction and such.
A bad point: this definitely contributed to the problem's initiation, and might mean that the casing is also leaking further down.
That is absolutely ridiculous. I started giggling when I heard it.
Edit: AND there was no secure lockdown sleeve to hold the casing in place. This is crazy.
How BP Cut Corners on Well Design
Of the two major deepwater well designs available, BP routinely used the cheapest, which had fewer safety checks, employing the riskier well in 35 percent of its offshore rigs, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows. Competitors used that well type, called long string, far less often: Royal Dutch Shell only 8 percent of the time, Chevron 15 percent of the time, and BHP Billiton on only 4 percent of its wells. BP’s rivals have blasted the company for its breezy approach to safety. Meanwhile, BP CEO Tony Hayward was pulled from managing daily operations in the oil spill Friday due to his gaffe-prone handling of the crisis.
HOUSTON � A Washington-based research group says two BP refineries in the U.S. account for 97 percent of "egregious willful" violations given by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The study by the Center for Public Integrity says the violations were found in the last three years in BP's Texas City refinery and another plant in Toledo, Ohio. In 2005, 15 people were killed in an explosion at the Texas City refinery.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab says BP has a "systemic safety problem." He told The Associated Press BP has not adequately addressed the issues, despite being fined more than $87 million.
Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA David Michaels says similar problems are pervasive throughout the U.S. petroleum industry.
Want to hear something scary? BP (BP) has been fined by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) 760 times. By contrast, oil giant ExxonMobil (XOM) has been fined only once.
As The Stock Masters say: How is BP even allowed to operate?
Let's take a look back at BP's horrid track record, courtesy of ABC News:
* Back in 2007, a BP pipeline spilled 200,000 gallons of crude into the Alaskan wilderness. They got hit with $16 million in fines.
* "The Justice Department required the company to pay approximately $353 million as part of an agreement to defer prosecution on charges that the company conspired to manipulate the propane gas market."
* In two separate disasters prior to Deepwater Horizon, 30 BP workers were killed and more than 200 have been seriously injured.
* "According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the "egregious, willful" violations handed out by OSHA"
* OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.
BP, Transocean and oilfield services contractor Halliburton all have pointed fingers at each other in hearings in Washington and in New Orleans.
Coon says the documents his law firm unearthed in the Texas City case showed BP employees warned that corners at the plant were being cut, and dangerous conditions were being ignored.
"Quit waiting for a known possible disaster to happen before correcting the problem," one worker wrote.
Another stated, "This company deliberately put my life in danger to try and save a buck."
A third complained, "If this facility was an aircraft carrier, we would be at the bottom of the ocean."
I'm just going to stop there. You're asking for a smoking gun or a memo that says "Cut corners, muwhahahah." There is ample evidence that it's happening without that. Also, while it's cute that you try to undercut OSHA's safety violations by claiming BP has a million fringe, non oil businesses that require OSHA supervision....BS. BP has 600+ violations. The next biggest, 4. Or is BP the only one with millions facilities? Because they aren't the dominant oil company in the US, even before DWH.
My opinion is that someone is criminally negligent, and instead of prosecuting the BP executive, we should find out who really is responsible and prosecute them. In fact, later on I named a name which I think should be investigated. Richard Miller ring any bells? This is the guy who I think was in charge of designing the thing. The guy who had the responsibility to say "No, it has to be like this."
And if it turns out he's been pressured by his bosses to take short cuts and approve sub-standard designs...what then? Should we let their mid-level engineer take the fall for their overall policy decisions? Are they not where the buck stops?
Your claim is he basically laughed. All I see is behavior of a typical executive. He can go and do whatever he wants because he really can't do shit about it. If you were talking about sending all their engineers on holiday I'd agree, but I believe they have their enginerring team working around the clock to solve this issue.
Now you're just nitpicking. I'm saying their overall response early in the disaster was disrespectful to the public that buys their gas. They down played it, tried for as long as they could to conceal the HD video of the leak that they had set up, had their jackass CEO speak off the cuff as though this wasn't a huge freaking deal...yeah, I get the impression that they essentially laughed this off and then realized we are quite seriously pissed about all this. There's no citation for that, and I trust you can read the difference between opinion and informed conclusion. And you can't fault them for the perception they could throw money at this and make it go away; our regulation and punishment of them up until now has only reinforced that perception. It's going to stay that way until we actually hold them accountable for the dozens dead, and the hundreds injured.
Just about every company has a similar record.
No, they don't. Nor was almost every other company been involved in the whole Iran thing that made British Petroleum even more notorious.
A directive from the top of "We need to earn 1.2% better profit this quarter" translates into "You need to make a new wingnut out of duct tape!" You cannot punish the leader for the directive, but you can punish the corner-cutting follower who decided that this was the best way to carry out the leader's plans.
Find the people REALLY responsible and don't just cut up the guy at the top because he makes a ton of money.
Ok, here's where I could possibly agree with you. There is always the issue of management and policy decisions trickling down and it's hard to find out who really made the call that got people killed.
EXCEPT that warnings have gone from the top to the bottom in BP's case. If there has been a systematic pattern of ignoring safety violations, if mangers at all levels expressed their concerns and the word from the top continually was "Don't care', then you hold the people at the top responsible.
I find it hard to believe that, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for even a month's worth of delays, that BP execs weren't hovering over the phones going "Progress report! You need 18 more stabilizers?! We don't have that kind of time! How many do you have on site? Two? Do it. No, I don't have time for you to do the math, and neither do they. Just get it done. Wait, we're out of concrete too? Jesus christ, do we have any liner left? Ok, just use the liner for the rest."
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Topic: There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea - One Year Later (Read 110470 times)