There’s no catchy phrase like “hippie punching” or “no one could have predicted” to describe this sort of thing, but it’s definitely a staple of modern political discourse. BP Chairman Jame McKay on capping the oil spill (via Josh Green):
[It’s like] performing open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.
It’s essentially the present tense form of “nothing could have been done” and, for some reason, it often involves mixed metaphor type comparisons.
Chyron HR
Sounds like somebody just got the James Cameron blu-ray set.
Zifnab
It’s premeditated ass-covering, and a deliberate attempt to “look forward, not backwards”. Because let’s not talk about what could have been done, or would should be done in the future. Let’s just acknowledge the current situation sucks and it’ll suck to be the plebs in the ensuing catastrophe.
jrg
Presumably Mr. McKay knows this because he has not only performed open heart surgery, but is also operating (and designed) the robot-controlled subs working at the bottom ot the sea right now.
Oh, nevermind… That’s for the more detail-oriented, lower-paid drones. He has to perform the far more difficult duty of belching excuses and platitudes from his pie hole.
Nathan
Shorter BP Chairman: “We’re trying, but this oil rig stuff is really hard!!”
Bnut
I wish he would have said “America, if you want cheap, abundant oil, this shit is gonna happen”. I would applaud and cry at the same time.
ChrisS
No one could have predicted.
Though it was refreshing to hear the BP CEO talk about how it is their responsibility this morning. I would think that Exxon would be a bit more evasive.
Massive disaster. It’s too bad that this type of thing has to happen every decade or so to keep people aware of environmental damage. But, I’m more surprised that the 27-percenters haven’t started crowing about how we need to curtail regulations.
Steeplejack
As a rhetorical device, it also serves to distance you from responsibility. “Open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.” Wow, that’s really exotic and hard. No way those poor B.P. guys should be expected to deal with that.
Conversely, I’m sure when B.P. was doing the equivalent of “pitching” the project initially they didn’t describe it in terms like this. Probably more like, “No, it’s just like taking a really long straw and poking it into a milkshake that just happens to be a mile below the surface. What could go wrong?”
low-tech cyclist
If it’s that hard to shut off a spill like this, then maybe they shouldn’t have been drilling out there to begin with.
beltane
It’s just a smarmy-ass public relations exercise designed to deceive all the trusting fools out there who really believe everything they hear on TV. So far, it has been very effective.
chopper
people near and dear to me traverse the gulf on a regular basis, and your glibness about this thing really makes you an asshole. why, on 9/11…
WereBear
Since friggin’ when has “it’s so hard” been anything but a whine that we allow to little children but not grownups?
One thing that really makes me happy is that the Obama administration is full of grownups, and the public can finally get a grip on what that looks like, and what it means.
Of course, the media is still back in kindergarten.
beltane
@ChrisS: The 27%ers are now saying that the situation isn’t that bad, and that we are all overreacting etc. If we just stopped taxing the oil companies, all would be well. And have you heard that Al Gore is fat?
MattF
“I’m just a regular guy”. Who happens to be CEO of an oil company.
chopper
@beltane:
oil is good for fish! haven’t you ever heard of fish oil? where do you think those fish get that oil from?
SGEW
I.e., “Nothing can be done,” or “No we can’t.”
And I think they’re more mixed similes than metaphors, but that’s neither here nor there.
chopper
@WereBear:
besides, if forseeable issues are so difficult to fix that it’s ‘like performing open-heart surgery in the dark with robots at 5000 feet’ than why the hell did we let you drill there in the first fuckin place?
why can’t we make these leases contingent on whether or not fuck-ups or even acts-of-god are actually, you know, fixable?
low-tech cyclist
@Bnut: the thing is, this shit isn’t going to get us cheap, abundant oil.
The U.S. produces something like 6% of the world’s oil. I don’t know how much of that is produced through offshore drilling, but if even 1/3 of our oil is pumped from under the ocean, then that’s 2% of the world market. And it’s not like there’s a separate U.S. market for oil: the price is determined by the relative abundance or scarcity on the world market, so that’s not making oil a whole lot cheaper or a whole lot more abundant.
U.S. domestic oil production peaked back in 1970, and has been steadily declining ever since. That’s not going to change, no matter how much we try to pump from under the continental shelf: there just isn’t that much left.
And after world oil supplies peak in a few years, oil will never again be anywhere near as cheap and abundant as it is today.
Michael
Did y’all see about the limitation of liability to 75 million? Privatizing the profit while socializing risk is what makes ‘Murka great, and leads to all sorts of good decisionmaking.
Makes me want to send all those commercial fishermen the names and home addresses of the officers and directors of BP…..
jeffreyw
He’s a fan of the Fantastic Voyage movie. His mistake is assuming the RILF label for the female lead meant “robot” instead of “Raquel”.
Adam Collyer
To be fair, what he said certainly wasn’t inaccurate. He doesn’t seem to be passing the blame with that quote. Tapper seems to have asked him to explain what procedure BP is doing to clean up this epic disaster, and he answered by giving some context and a description that people can somewhat understand. We can’t just shut off a valve right now to stop the oil, it’s way more difficult and complicated than that, and that explains what’s happening.
This doesn’t really seem like a “no one could have predicted” statement. I haven’t been able to watch the video in the Tapper story, so maybe I’m missing the context, but it seems clear to me he’s just explaining it. Of course, this guy could be a total idiot and he could have done blame-shifting and BSing in another interview, but I don’t think the quote says what we’re implying it to say.
Bill E Pilgrim
Covering your ass with the invisible hand of the free metaphor.
Citizen_X
@chopper: [golf clap!]
Don
I propose “No one is to blame, it was unpossible!”
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I don’t have any problem with the metaphor, but I do have a problem with the idea that there apparently is (a) no plan in place to deal with this sort of scenario, and (b) regulation or oversight doesn’t require that kind of plan to be in place.
Contingency planning and incident management would seem to be among the most-necessary things you’d want in place if you were going to open a tap on the ocean bottom to let out zillions of gallons of oil near heavily populated and invaluable coastal areas and their waterways.
But in the post-Reagan era of free markets and freedom from regulation, who needs plans and rules? The industry will police itself, just like all good industries do.
Only liberals will hate us for our freedom from regulation.
slippy
@Steeplejack: @low-tech cyclist: This.
The more BP complains that it’s just “too hard” to do this, the more they should be asked what the blistered f**k they were doing down there in the first place if they don’t have the skills and expertise to deal with all contingencies.
“So, you’re admitting you’re incompetent and shouldn’t be granted any more oil leases, then? Good enough. You’re outta business, dumbasses!”
Mino
Bush/Cheyney, the gift that keeps on giving.
After the subversion of every regulatory agency in our federal goverment, no one can be surprised when there is massive agency “fail”. I hope this is becoming apparent.
I do not want to hear that Obama is approving any new nuclear plants. I will be dying, waiting for the next shoe to fall.
Jamie
maybe they should have put on second off button, like they do in Norway.
RSA
Why can’t BP go with old-fashioned platitudes, like “An ounce of prevention was way too expensive, so we rolled the dice”?
WereBear
@chopper: Yes, exactly. These fools act like our frontal lobes are just for storing grievances, not for silly things like anticipating future events.
jrg
@beltane: I don’t think he’s making things up when he says that stopping the leak is difficult. If it wasn’t, it would have been done already.
My issue isn’t with the fact that it’s difficult, it’s that it’s not difficult for him (If a heart surgeon wants to tell me how hard his job is, that’s fine, but I don’t want to hear it from some overpaid PR wanker). Plus, as others have pointed out, if it’s so damn hard to do, why didn’t they spend more time and energy planning for it, or put more safeguards in place?
Adam Collyer
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Very much this. As a country, we seem to have a really difficult time with contingency planning, incident management, and emergency preparations. Think about Giuliani’s decision to put NYC’s Office of Emergency Management in the World Trade Center despite protests that it was such a high-value target for terrorism that it would cripple the city’s response time to a crisis if the WTC was hit. The city should have gone with the contingency plan, which was putting OEM in Brooklyn, where it is now and where it belongs, honestly.
flukebucket
Turtles are washing up on shore in Mississippi.
I think this is going to turn out to be a fuck up of biblical proportion. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
Llelldorin
That’s a particularly dubious metaphor for something that’s entirely man-made!
I mean, yes, if I build a car that you control by hitting little switches inside the dashboard by poking a pencil through little holes, driving would be like naked ice-fishing in total darkness while dodging polar bears. That doesn’t mean that driving is impossible, it means that my car’s a piece of junk that should never have been allowed on the road.
Mr Furious
I’m not saying this operation is a walk in the park, but I suspect it’s a lot closer to a remote-control sub grabbing a spigot and turning off a hose in complete darkness a mile down, than open heart surgery.
It may not be “no one could have predicted.” but it sure as shit sounds like “don’t blame us, this is the most complex operation in the history of man.”
Persia
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: To be fair, their contingency plan was the shutoff that failed– which is what they’re trying to fix.
Honestly, I think the real failing is pretending they could plan for every contingency in the first place. Sometimes things are just going to break down. It’s the reason a lot of people are opposed to offshore drilling.
Violet
On the Today Show this morning, the BP CEO said it wasn’t their fault. Said the oil rig wasn’t theirs, they were only running it. Blamed TransOcean, who owned the rig, and the blowout preventer. BP isn’t at fault, but they’re going to clean it up anyway! Aren’t they wonderful!
ChrisWWW
Obviously it would have been better if there were more precautions taken before the explosion, but that doesn’t mean you should crucify the guy because he’s pointing out that what they are trying to do is difficult. Seriously, what they are attempting looks pretty f’ing difficult.
If you ask me, he’s just being honest.
Omnes Omnibus
@Persia: This. Exactly this.
WereBear
Fixed. Without the dashes, because now they scare me.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Leave BP Alooooone!
slippy
I would call it the “Wile E. Coyote”
excusedefense.chopper
@ChrisWWW:
“we need to be allowed to drill there.”
“what happens if you fuck up?”
“oh, that’ll be next to impossible to fix. huge oil slick all over the gulf, dead everything, totally death-destroyer-of-worlds-biblical shit for the gulf, and we wouldn’t be able to do shit to stop it. just sign here…”
Jim Bales
FWIW, I spent seven years on the research staff of MIT with a group designing and building fully autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for deep-ocean use[*].
Yes, BP should have installed an automatic shut off. And, BP should have had more redundancy. And, BP should have had contingency plans in place, and domes pre-fabricated to containing the gusher and guiding it through a pipe to the surface.
And, yes, BP needs to be held culpable for the damage.
But, snark as you will, what the engineers and technicians and roughnecks and deckhands and ROV pilots are doing out there is very, very, difficult. It is difficult in water 50 feet deep. It is massively more difficult in water 5,000 feet deep.
If your experience in deep-ocean seabed operations leads you to a different conclusion, please speak up!
Best,
Jim Bales
[*] AUVs are fundamentally different from the Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) that are being used to try to stop the flow of oil from the well. ROVs have a tether to the surface that sends video and data up to a pilot, and carrying power and the pilot’s commands down to the ROV. AUVs have no tether. They are generally battery operated and controlled by an on-board computer.
slippy
@Violet: I am reminded, as I often am, of a line in Stephen King’s “The Stand,” after a completely preventable fuck-up lets loose a superflu virus that has no rational reason to exist in the first place and unleashes near-Armageddon on the world.
In the final days as the stuttering morons in the biowarfare department contemplate that they’ve just ensured the extinction of humanity, one of them says: “In a case like this, responsibility spreads so thin it’s practically invisible.”
I think that’s what BP is wishing right now.
Jim Bales
@Llelldorin writes:
I mean, yes, if I build a car that you control by hitting little switches inside the dashboard by poking a pencil through little holes … it means that my car’s a piece of junk that should never have been allowed on the road.
Llelldorin,
You will become quite wealthy with your interface for ROV pilots that is not, by your standards, a “piece of junk” (which seems to be your assessment of the current technology for controlling ROVs).
Let us know when your company goes public!
Best,
Jim Bales
slippy
@ChrisWWW: He’s setting himself up for failure because it is going to be catastrophic for BP’s public image.
I think it’s time to enact the corporate death penalty over this. BP, you are hereby disincorporated. Your shareholders are FUCKED.
Fair warning for the rest of ya’s. Prove to your shareholders that you aren’t going to be catastrophic screwups.
I guess only in a dream world would a catastrophic screw-up have catastrophic consequences for the well-monied interests that caused it in the first place but a toad can dream, can’t he?
liberty60(Veteran, Great War of Yankee Aggression)
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Ahh, but you see, there WAS a contingency plan- get Congress/ corporate lawyers find creative ways to limit liability, while shifting the cost of spills to the public.
Mike Kay
I hear BP will rename the company Xe
ChrisWWW
@slippy:
Or he’s doing what any normal human being would do when faced with a difficult challenge: explain that it is in fact difficult.
Would you rather he lied and said it was going to be easy? Or do you think it’s going to be easy?
jwb
@Michael: IIRC, that $75 million limit is for economic damages. The company is on the hook, however, for the full cost of the clean-up.
aimai
I heard the NPR commenter actually pointing out that the notion that “Its never been done before at these depths and we don’t know what we are doing” means that there was no realistic planning and testing beforehand for this obvious scenario. This was during the NPR interview, IIRC, with the BP exec or just after when they were touting the next in depth reporting on the issue. Her point was: if you don’t know how to handle drilling at a great depth maybe you shouldn’t drill at that depth until you have realistic plans, tested and put into practice, to handle ordinary events like blow outs and leaks. Its not like BP suddenly discovered they were drilling at 5000 feet.
If no one else said it yet, of course, “Its Open Heart Surgery Underwater” is, of course, the new “This is Rocket Science as performed by non Rocket Scientists.” (TM)
aimai
gnomedad
@Steeplejack:
I
drinkspill your milkshake!eastriver
Metafive.
Done.
Bullsmith
But if you can’t perform the surgery, what the hell are you doing drilling into the heart?
jwb
@jrg: Why didn’t they spend more on prevention? “Because no one could have predicted.” Except, of course, they could and did, but at the time it was deemed an acceptable risk, and I’m sure BP will escape bankruptcy because our fine government regulators, under Lord Cheney’s pressure, agreed they didn’t need the additional preventative measures. Still, my fantasy is that BP will sue the shit out of Halliburton and bankrupt worthless piece of shit of a company.
MikeJ
I always thought those people with the signs were just trolling the Westboro assholes, but I guess it’s true: God hates shrimp.
patrick II
It is not a heart — which is naturally designed (by God if you are into intelligent design) — but a switch which some engineer designed. Which, if it is the last backup option for a large oil spill, should have been designed so that it could make it through a blow-out and be easily turned off by the robots you were planning to send to turn it off. It’s only as difficult as heart surgery because of bad design.
chopper
@aimai:
this.
Crashman
Did anyone see this post about the worst case scenario for the spill?
So much for the recovery.
Fern
@aimai: Well, there are things like relief wells that are known to be useful that were apparently not included in the design of this well.
Elisabeth
I caught a couple of minutes of CNBC just a bit ago and there is a chemical that breaks down the oil into small enough particles that bacteria can eat. BP has tested it in small amounts at the platform site and on the surface with great results. The company, NALCO, is working to increase production in order to use more of it over larger expanses of this mess. The CEO said that they can have a significant impact on the spill, depending of course on weather conditions and the amount of oil that keeps gushing.
I’ll take anything that might make this disaster even slightly less catastrophic.
Llelldorin
@Jim Bales:
I wasn’t talking about ROVs. No-one here is. Despite your aggressive attempts at changing the subject, I was mocking the lack of an acoustic switch.
You’re welcome to keep pretending that we’re mocking the hard work of ROV pilots that has been necessitated by BP’s decision to use substandard equipment in the first place, of course.
The problem with McKay’s statement isn’t that it isn’t true, it’s that it shouldn’t have needed to be true. That’s what I was trying to get across with my car analogy.
EDITED to remove an overly broad claim
Omnes Omnibus
@jwb:
That’s an interesting thought. If, and it is a big if, the structure was designed to safely shut down in a situation like this and Halliburton or some other contractor half-assed the construction, they should be driven out of business.
tavella
Except, of course, most of the cleanup will be done by the government and volunteers. $75M plus what ever microcosm of the cleanup costs survive the appeal to the Supreme Court; BP will spend far more on lawyers and ads boasting what a good job they did of cleaning up than they will ever pay out for destroying people’s homes and livelihoods. And the wildlife will get nothing at all except death.
You can tell the media has already got their marching orders from their corporate masters: it’s the government’s fault. It’s not the fault of BP for cutting corners, they are heroic engineers trying to cut it off, it’s not the fault of deregulation, it’s the government’s fault for not fixing it. They don’t ever explain what, exactly, the government could have done, they don’t have to.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think he should have done more to prevent this from occurring in the first place, but now that it has, McKay is trying to come up with something that will convince people of how hard it is. So you try to come up with an analogy. A lot of computer science analogies are related to cars, so I always enjoy “An analogy is like a car…”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Adam Collyer:
Very good point. From the Iraq invasion to the credit crisis on Wall St., we’ve become the nation of Plan B? There is no plan B!. Funny how it works when you take all your values from the how are we doing this quarter? corporate sector, and a rotten, termite infested one at that. The five most terrifying words in the English language are “no one could have forseen”.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, to be precise, not exactly. Having a shutoff mechanism is of no real value unless you have a plan for what to do when the mechanism fails.
If you have a gadget that must work to prevent a catastrophe, then you have a certain catastrophe when the predictable failure of the gadget occurs. It’s just a matter of when, and not if. Unless … you have a plan that deals with the gadget failure and abates the catastrophe. If you are doing your due dilgence, you have that plan developed and reviewed before the gadget is ever put into place.
The only other acceptable solution is to build a failproof gadget, which has redundancies that make the catastrophic failure nearly impossible. That does not seem to be the case here.
Assuming that whatever happened here can happen to other rigs, then the whole fleet of such rigs is just a large set of potential accidents that will happen sooner or later.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
More often that not, the risk is forseen, but nobody addresses it adequately. Lack of resources, no funds, head in the sand, failure of planning, faulty processes, poor management.
Blah blah blah.
This is what regulation is for, and why the conservatives are wrong about regulation. Without regulation, colossal fuckups are certain. People die, things fall apart.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Jim Bales: I don’t think the point here was doubting that what’s being attempted is just as insanely difficult as he says it is.
It was instead that this kind of excruciatingly imaginative metaphor gets trotted out only now, and not when people are proposing drilling offshore to begin with, at which point you tend to hear “Oh, it’s safe, and we have safegaurds in the event that anything happens”.
I’d love to hear the detailed imagery used going in instead, e.g. “Look, Senators, putting a deep oil rig out there at all is like hanging a giant asteroid-sized Buick with a rusty oil pan over the entire the Gulf coast, then just hoping that it doesn’t spring a leak. Now, can we have our approval please?”
DanF
So can we sue his ass for malpractice?
jwb
@tavella: Actually, I think the marching orders are to find something, anything else to cover except the Gulf. They all know that any coverage is bad for corporate America.
scav
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: Hey, but long term planning isn’t innovative, yah no?
Omnes Omnibus
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
No, another acceptable solution is not to drill offshore. The contingency that always must be considered is that nothing is completely foolproof.
SGEW
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Not at all; they always have a plan B.
Unfortunately, plan B can be summarized as “allow catastrophe to occur; place blame elsewhere and retire in luxury.”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Agreed. “No one could have forseen” is an Orwellian phrase – it means the exact opposite of what it says. What it really means is “somebody did forsee this and we decided not to listen to them, because doing so would have [cost us money | violated our rigid ideology | etc ]”.
Michael
Testing to see if wordpress eats another post
jwb
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: I’m not sure you need a failproof gadget, but you do need a serious contingency plan for what to do in the case of catastrophic damage. And it’s very clear that no one has such a contingency plan. These capture domes, for instance, might prove effective. But they should have already been tested and positioned for deployment when the rigs were built rather than being jury-rigged now, when they are far more likely to fail.
Violet
@Michael:
Wordpress is eating a lot of my posts and I can’t figure out why. I’m not using any forbidden words that I’d aware of. It seems not to like links at the moment, so I’m having to take links out of posts.
It’s not sending them to moderation, it’s just eating them. I press “submit” and my post vanishes.
priscianus jr
@Crashman:
Maybe. But there’s another possibility. There will be so much to do to mitigate and clean up from this disaster, and to build in new preventative measures, that Congress will pass a regional stimulus bill, in the form of disaster relief, which will be followed by lots of jobs and investment. The GOP is scared sh-tless over this (hence the intensity of their latest paranoid fantasies about the accident), because the Gulf states electorate, which tends to be among the most anti-Obama in the nation, are about to discover that government does have some use after all, and that maybe unbridled free enterprise has a few drawbacks.
Zach
I seriously don’t get why they can’t just blow up the hole… looking into it briefly, the well’s probably close to 30,000 feet below the sea floor… there has to be some degree of explosion that’s too weak to cause a tsunami and strong enough to collapse the hole (I guess this depends on just how pressurized the oil below is).
Crashman
@priscianus jr: That’s a good point. I hope you’re right.
minachica
@Jim Bales: The ROVs… are… not… laughing!
KDP
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: Regulation alone, though, is inadequate without funding the oversight and enforcement arms of the agencies. A regulation is only as good as the ability of the agency to perform effective compliance audits. Among peers I know who work regularly with the FDA, the report is not that there are inadequate regulations but instead that there are too few auditors and an increasing trend towards creating new regulations every time some new disaster occurs. In many cases, regulatory agencies confront the same issue as did school systems following NCLB, unfunded mandates.
We are like to see a new rush to establish more regulations following this horrific economic and environmental disaster. I do not claim that the existing regulations are inadequate; however, before we add new regulations to the ones that already exist perhaps there should be a focus on how we might have better funded enforcement of the regulations that already exist.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s where the regulation comes in. Good regulation would set the standards for the risks and the responses to the risks, and if the candidates for oil leases don’t meet the standards then they don’t get the leases, and then if they get the leases and fail to pass inspection, they get shut down.
I don’t know what the current state of the art is, but something tells me that either the bar is set rather low, or else the enforcement isn’t there. Much like it is in mine safety, apparently.
eyepaddle
@chopper:
Pretty much in a nutshell. It is as hard as he says. After I had been working offshore for a year or two, I was invited back to give a lecture on drilling (and geologically logging) an oil well to an undergraduate geophysics class, and I likened drilling an oil well to being akin to picking a lock on the far side of a different lock using chopsticks. Everything is a few miles away from you and is done largely with touch and guesswork.
Which some may argue is a reason to avoid doing so in the first place.
Zach
@Elisabeth:
That’s a pretty profitable CNBC appearance. NALCO’s stock’s up 11% today. I’m guessing that was around 10:30? It shot up several percent on top of that and then dropped down once Wall Street took advantage of everyone who takes their cues from CNBC.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@KDP:
Yes, I mean regulation as a verb, and including enforcement.
Sentient Puddle
I’m reminded of Cheney’s 1% doctrine, for some odd reason. Like, “no one could have predicted” should be laughed at its face after the Iraq war.
KDP
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: I did realize that, thanks.
Zach
@Sentient Puddle:
Also, climate change. Apparently, conservatives think that nothing should be done about climate change because there is a 1% chance that it might not be all that catastrophic.
scav
@Zach: well, for one brief off-the-cuff thing, I think there’s prior study and planning involved both in knowing what underwater explosions might do in general for these cases AND THEN there’s what one might do in this exact geologic location and circumstances. Anybody been doing the first and do we know enough about the latter? Maybe they have, but I will admit that blowing things up is not my immediate default solution. Call me a wimp.
Elisabeth
@Zach:
Yep.
Shares looked like they were already up but I’m sure the amazement of the CNBC anchor didn’t hurt. I actually thought it was pretty cool myself but buying stock (not something I do anyway) now seems a bit like ambulance chasing to me. And why I’ll never be rich.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Sorry, more like a gerundive or verbal noun. Heh.
Regulation, as in “regulating.” The act of regulating.
tavella
@Zach: I heard much the same thing suggested, with the speculation that BP doesn’t want to lose the hole. In other words, that they’d rather have three months of oil spewing and hideous environmental damage waiting for a relief well than lose the site entirely.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that person was bullshitting. I’d really like to see the question asked of someone with both drilling knowledge and no skin in the game.
stuckinred
@Zach: Geeze, why don’t you get off that?
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Zach:
I dunno. Duct tape sounds easier.
Citizen_X
I can appreciate his point: that what they are doing is unprecedented; that capping a well at 5000 feet is exponentially more complicated than at 50 feet, etc. But you know what? If you’re going to work at the very bleeding edge of the technology, then goddamn it, work at the very bleeding edge of the technology. That includes pushing the limit on safety technology. And “technology,” of course, includes contingency planning and training.
Instead, they find themselves fumbling around trying one completely new thing after another, while having the whole world looking over their shoulder. Hey BP: sucks to be you.
aimai
You can put into place a self regulating regulatory scheme, of course. It looks like this:
1) stringent regulations for oil wells and drilling
2) stringent requirements for massive overinsurance
2) insurance companies are liable for the full cost of the cleanup regardless of whether the company lied or falsified information or failed to adequately equip the oil wells and drills with the appropriate high level of backups on backups on backups.
This means that the insurance companies are on the hook to inspect every well they insure because they can’t do the equivalent of “recission” after an incident. No claims of “fraud” allowed–the insurance companies and the oil companies are presumed to be a kind of “witting actor” and tender and acceptance of any monies seals the deal. Both are guarantors of each other and both can bankrupt each other.
Of course I’d prefer real government oversight but the problem is that the cost to the taxpayer is not felt as directly as the cost to the insurance execs and regulatory capture and all the rest of it.
aimai
MikeJ
@Violet:
It did that to me a week or two ago. Deleted my cookie and it worked after that.
stuckinred
@Citizen_X: Yea so let’s just blow the motherfucker up and see what happens.
sukabi
shorter BP asshole:
THIS is exactly why we didn’t have any contingency plans, NOBODY has the expertise to deal with this type of failure.
Zach
@stuckinred: You do realize that the actual oil is several miles further underground, right? Unless the hole’s partially occluded already, an explosion won’t increase the rate of flow. It seems a lot more practical and intuitively likely to work than sinking a dome to cover the hole. If it’s fundamentally a problem of pressure (the long term solution is to drill another well to relieve pressure), blocking the hole should do the trick. I am a physicist by training; taking practical implications into account is not my strong suit.
I’m obviously not suggesting to blow it up and hope it turns out for the best. Just curious what the physical reason not to do so would be… I can think of a couple possibilities.
Zach
@sukabi: Their contingency plan stated that the worst-case scenario was 300,000 gallons per day and that they were capable of dealing with such an event… the Feds and BP were well aware that this was a possibility and accurately predicted the magnitude of the problem. Just overconfident or deceptive about their capacity to fix it.
Montysano
Beyond the obvious failures of regulation and oversight, there’s this: we need leadership that will tell American the unvarnished truth about our energy future. Tell us that all the easy oil has been found, that Peak Oil is real, that we have to make drastic changes in how we operate our society.
Given the state of our media, and the amount of influence wielded by the demagogues, it’s politically toxic to speak such obvious truths. That being the case, Americans continue to be delusional about our energy situation, yammering on about the need to Drill, Baby, Drill until we can find something to replace fossil fuels. That “something” does not appear to exist.
jwb
@aimai: Except you’d still have regulators to make sure that the insurance company booked the risk correctly, or otherwise they wouldn’t have the funds to cover it, they’d go bankrupt and the taxpayers would still be on the hook.
sukabi
@Zach: and they obviously LIED about even that.
Bnut
My grandmother says a neighbor of hers received a letter from BP asking them not to sue in exchange for a 5K cash payout. I hope my grandma gets one, I want to frame it. (She lives directly on the beach in Gulf Shores, Al. btw). Her house has been knocked down 4 times by hurricanes, but this is the most worried I have ever heard her.
Ed Drone
@SGEW:
The problem here is that with a very few more of these cat’s ass trophies will result in there being no place on earth to retire in luxury to! Ruin the Gulf Coast and Florida loses much of its appeal. If this produces enough oil to follow the currents into the Atlantic, and even the Outer Banks lose tourism as an industry.
And the mining industry is working to make the mountains not worth visiting, so where will we go? (Hah! as if I can afford luxury, but I will include myself in that pronoun, simply for argument.)
Ed
Ed Drone
@Michael:
It didn’t.
HTH
Ed
Llelldorin
@Zach:
Taking a wild guess (as an even less practical physicist-turned-mathematician)
I think the problem is that if blowing it up didn’t work, you’d be completely hosed–you turn a three-source leak into a fifty-source leak at similar volume, with oil percolating up through a network of fractures. Worse, if the blowout preventer is partially working now (and is blocking at least some of the flow), you could have a fifty-source leak at substantially greater volume.
Right now they’re working with leaks in wrecked equipment above the seafloor, which is turning out to be very hard. If you’ve ever accidentally cut a water pipe too close to the wall, you’ll appreciate the dangers of blowing things up–they’d be left with no options except “repiping” (in this case, drilling a new well).
South of I-10
@Bnut: I was about to post about it. Fuckers are trying to buy people off, including the fishermen who agreed to help clean up their mess.
aimai
@jwb:
Correct, but that is the same problem we had with AIG which, supposedly, we are now about to fix. I suppose what I’m arguing for is new legislation in which Insurance Companies and Oil Companies would no longer have “limited liability.” I’d be happy to tack on new legislation that would make it a criminal offense to knowingly or unknowingly sign off on contracts which you didn’t have the money to pay off on. The husband of a friend of mine was the head of the London Business School. Until very recently you could have a nice living, after retiring, just sitting on boards. Alas! new regulations in the UK make board members quite liable for everything they sign off on, and for actually paying attention at meetings. My friend was just complaining to me that the stiffer regulations which made the board members liable for bad or illegal decisions by the company was killing their income. No one wanted to sign a contract promising to actually do their fucking jobs. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you make the penalties stiff enough, and the cost of doing business high enough, there won’t be any drilling. These guys have been used to making easy money with no risk to themselves. There should be a lot of risk to the owners/insurance sellers and it should be unavoidable.
aimai
The Moar You Know
@stuckinred: Ahhh, the famous “double down” stratagem that has led to so many successful gambling outcomes.
Linda Featheringill
There may be hope.
IF the containment boxes now being built can bring at least 90% or so of the outflow of oil under control, we might be able to hold off utter disaster until the relief well[s] are connected. They can then turn the off the flow.
Then, we will have a big, ugly, nasty oily patch in the ocean BUT it will be finite. It will have a beginning and an end. And we can concentrate on cleaning up that one terrible but limited mess.
I don’t know, can we ride herd on the present oil patch for another week, until the containment pods are due to be installed? If so, we might minimize the potential for destruction.
And there is hope for a good end to the story.
WereBear
Martin
@Zach: The hole is actually significantly blocked right now. I think they estimate the flow rate would be 10x to 20x higher if it was fully opened up, which is a current concern since the pipe seems to be degrading.
I think that might be the point that they consider just blowing it up. At that point, they really can’t make it worse.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: The Gulf of Mexico will greet us as liberators. It might take 6 days, 6 weeks — I doubt six months.
Pigs & Spiders
That’s what she said?
Also, are the ROVs mirthful? Do we know?
The Moar You Know
@Linda Featheringill: I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that we are “riding herd” on the oil patch; it’s already larger than Puerto Rico, and getting bigger ever day.
Nylund
Shorter BP (and Wall St. and every other big company)
“You don’t actually expect us to clean up our own messes, do you?”
Bnut
@South of I-10:
Yeah, the man she spoke of owns a deep sea charter boat. He’s been out all week helping out. Disgusting fucking thing. Of course, considering the continuously reduced Exxon Valdez payouts and the years and years it took to reach a settlement, maybe 5K isn’t such a bad idea. It’s enough money to buy some good drugs and a handgun to end it all.
The Moar You Know
@Bnut:
$500 for cheap .45ACP (you’ll only shoot it once)
$1500 for a week’s worth of heroin and weed
$3000 for Eliot Spitzer-grade call girl
Yep, sounds like BP has the payout down to a science.
Admiral_Komack
@Nathan:
Not as hard as you writiting the check for this disaster.
Strengthen your writing hand, buddy,’cause you’re going to be cutting a LOT of checks.
slippy
@ChrisWWW: You’re asking me to have empathy for people who are too busy and important to contemplate how damaging their failures will be to everyone around them, especially after they’ve SPENT MONEY to bribe the government to ensure they don’t have to even try to do it right.
Honestly, fuck what he feels. BP was responsible and I am completely insensitive to any statement from them that doesn’t start with: “We completely accept responsibility and will do everything in our power to mitigate the scope of this catastrophe that we totally could have foreseen if we’d even given a rat’s ass about anything but drowning ourselves in filthy lucre.”
If I screwed up that badly at my job, I’d be handed my walking papers immediately. I am very much in the mode, after the ass-raping our economy has taken in the last decade, of giving these business fuckers exactly what they would give me. ZERO SYMPATHY, and iron-clad expectations that they will take personal responsibility and shut their whiny mouths. It’s what business has told us working schlubs for decades. Tit for tat, motherfuckers.
You catch my drift, beeotch?
AhabTRuler
Shorter American Public: You don’t expect us to take reponsibility for our insatiable apprtite for fossil fuels, do ya?
KDP
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: Yes indeedy. Regulating does require more than simply stating that ‘The organization shall….’ Ensuring whether shall = has is the job of the auditor/inspector and taking appropriate enforcement action when it does not…..
BGK
Anyone know why the commodities speculators haven’t used this “massive” disruption to bid oil up to $120 a barrel yet?
Jong
There was a contingency plan and backup system to shut off the flow. The backup was ineffective. If that system had worked we would not be having this debate. That’s the big problem.
jwb
@aimai: Yes, I agree.
Satan Mayo
Do you know how hard this stuff is? It’s like open-heart rocket surgery, herding cats, nailing jelly to the wall, and juggling flaming torches all in one. When you’ve done some jelly-nailing cat-herding rocket surgery juggling of your own, you can talk to the masters of the universe who make the impossible possible, or at least superficially possible-looking.
jwb
@BGK: Because it hasn’t yet disrupted the oil supply and the speculators see little chance that it will?
JGabriel
OT, but did Carly Fiorina recently have cancer or something?
In this photo at TPM, she looks like a vampiric recombinant mutant formed from the cross-bred genes of Pee Wee Herman and Max Von Sydow. Seriously, check it out, she really does look like that.
It is not a healthy look.
.
Zandar
If your worst-case scenario includes the phrases:
“This has never been tried before” or
“Unprecedented containment measures”
or causes any layman within earshot to utter “You mean like in that Jerry Bruckheimer movie?”
…then you need to completely rethink whatever the hell you are doing.
Meet the consequences of your “I’m gonna drive my gas-guzzling SUV wherever I damn well want to, you stupid hippies!” lifestyle, America.
Montysano
@BGK:
These things must be done delicately, my little pretty.
Let’s hope that $120.00 is the worst case.
Scuffletuffle
@chopper: Made me giggle!
Corner Stone
@scav: Wimp.
frankdawg
@ChrisS:
(and others)
You might notice that the weasel words flowed shortly there after. BP is stating that the oil platform is not theirs, only the oil. That sets the stage for them to say they are not responsible for the spill.
slippy
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: People keep trying to say that regulations wouldn’t have helped, this supposed acoustic switch wouldn’t have helped, it’s so complicated, blah blah blah blah blah.
Again putting on my best American Businessman attitude, here’s what I have to say:
I could give a ripe shit about how “hard” it is. BP, it is YOUR responsibility. Shut your piehole about how hard it is, quit whining about how mean people are being to you, and get your worthless fat asses down there and start cleaning up this mess. You have until YESTERDAY to get your act together.
The regulations for offshore drilling should be real simple and have no technical details in them. Instead, they should be like what other folks have been saying. BP’s insurer should be totally on the hook for the cost of the cleanup, and furthermore, their insurer should have no connection at all in any other business capacity to BP. Not even an arm’s length one. Therefore, if one goes down they BOTH go down. Finally the insurer should have the authority to withdraw coverage during the planning stages, and the driller cannot drill unless coverage is current. If coverage lapses drilling/extraction must cease immediately. Insurer is further empowered to inspect the installation at any time for any reason whatsoever.
That way, the insurer rides the driller’s ass constantly to make sure no catastrophe can happen, and any complaints about how “hard” it is to prevent, or contain a catastrophe like this are not the government’s problem; they are between the insurer and the driller. The only regulations that need to exist specify who is responsible.
And if the insurer allows a catastrophe to happen and can’t cover it, they lose their business and the government takes it over. And, I can’t hit hard enough on this, the shareholders eat it. No bailout for them. That way investors themselves have a risk that can only be mitigated by voting with their feet. So if a company gets a reputation of being dodgy or of being too cozy with the driller they ensure, they start taking it on the nose in the market.
The way our current business model in America seems to work, nobody is responsible for anything when there’s a big screwup. And big companies whine that spending too much on preventing screwups eats into shareholder profits and drives them off, and frankly it’s time to make the goddamned stock market responsible when one of their investments fucks up everything else for the rest of us.
Martin
@Montysano: It’s not going to be a disruption unless they have to close the LOOP. Losing one rigs worth of oil isn’t that big of a deal.
Now, if this causes other rigs to go offline to install safety equipment, that could be a different matter.
aimai
@slippy:
I really agree with Slippy. And I wish the Dems and Obama would put it in the kind of dumbed down Palinesque terms that the average voter can understand:
“Hell, if my kid throws a baseball through my neighbors window I’m not only obligated to pay for the damage, I’m happy to do it. Its my responsibility. BP and all its associates have a duty to make the people of the Gulf Coast and the environment whole again–and to pay for the loss of life, livelihood, and environmental degradation until the area is normal again.”
aimai
WereBear
@slippy: Heartily, heartily seconded.
I know we all sound like a broken record, but where’s the sense of responsibility? How’s that personal accountability thing working out for ya?
I’d blame people more for their fossil fuel addictions if we didn’t have over a century of corporate scheming to set it up that way. From the automobile, tire, & gas industry destroying mass transit to the infatuation with planned obsolescence, right up to the We don’t need no stinking regulations from Reagan forward, the population has been given no chance or opportunity to consume in a different way.
It’s all very well to preach that everyone should go off the grid and grow their own vegetables… but then who is going to make the wind turbines and write the books on organic gardening?
Communism had serious faults, don’t get me wrong, but it rose up and took hold because society after society needed to get beyond the serf/peasant system, and fast. It did that.
I just hope the solution that remakes our society won’ t be as bitter.
slippy
@JGabriel: It’s contagious. You should see what HP looked like after she fucked them.
The Moar You Know
@JGabriel: Exactly. Cancer.
Montysano
@Zandar:
Appended for truth.
Corner Stone
@Zandar:
I’ve been wondering why we haven’t seen Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck suited up for some deepsea drilling, but then I remembered that was a Michael Bay movie.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@JGabriel:
Breast cancer.
Linda Featheringill
@The Moar You Know: You are quite correct. We are not successfully “riding herd” on that oil slick. But we will have to at some point or live with the destruction.
AhabTRuler
“BP is stating that the oil platform is not theirs, only the oil.”
I doubt that it will allow them to evade liability, but BP is saying this because its, y’know, true.
slippy
@Elisabeth: I remember reading about that like 10 years ago.
It’s a great idea and I hope it works, but I’m sure BP has tested this contingency about as much as they tested the contingency that their rig would burst into flames and leave their well pouring crude oil into the ocean.
JGabriel
@The Moar You Know, @The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: Thank you. That explains it.
.
Jamie
I don’t know, it’s more you shouldn’t expect us to stop this now to my ears.
Scuffletuffle
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry, abstinence is strictly limited to fertile females in this here Amurika!
tatertot
@flukebucket:
turtles, at least a few dozen, had already been washing up on shore due to a ‘mystery disease’ previous to the oil spill. I will try and find the link (not good at this), but don’t let the oil spill cover up this turtle problem. Face it, the Gulf has been a semi-dead zone for ages because of oil industrialization – this leak may be a final, heartbreaking, assault on one of the beautiful places on the planet.
Admiral_Komack
@Montysano:
Of course the media will provide leadership…just as soon as they finish “this oil disaster is Obama’s Katrina” meme.
(and I know you did not say that the media would provide leadership; on that day that happens, my car will have warp drive, a replicator, and two fully charged phaser banks).
scav
@Corner Stone: yup, 110% Grade-AAA wimp!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@slippy:
Now look what you did – you made the invisible hand of the market cry. Do you know how hard it is to dry the invisible tears of teh invisible hand?
IOW, bravo and well put. Now that we have actual aquatic fowl coated with real black goo, the phrase black swan event takes on a certain bitter irony.
AhabTRuler
Slippy@138: I don’t disagree with much of wha you say, but “…make sure no catastrophe can happen…” is functionally equivalent to “…and then a miracle occurs.” We can mitigate risk and ameliorate consequences, but as long as we contiue to extract oil, there will be spills.
Indeed, blow-outs are part of oil & gas extraction, the only thing that has changed is the depth that we drill at. Regulation is absolutely necessary, but it is far from a cure-all.
Zach
@Llelldorin: More or less what I figured (plus what Martin said). If it were the case that the hole weren’t occluded, though, I don’t think we’d have more net output by opening up additional holes… that works if you have a short pipe where flow is dominated by pressure at either end, but not for an incredibly long pipe. Can’t widen the end of the transalaskan pipeline to increase flux, for instance. Color me convinced that an explosion is a poor idea absent further testing, though.
I think the only way to test it would be to blow up another rig, but one that does have an emergency shut-off system in case it doesn’t work. That’s definitely a practical solution.
scav
@Zach:
Any volunteers?
By the by, I think I’m upgrading to weapons-grade wimpery but that was a separate decision.
AhabTRuler
Zach@158: Horizon did have an emergency cut-off switch, it didn’t work.
Zach
I never thought I’d say this, but this post from K-Lo at the Corner is a pretty good overview of where the response was on day 1: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWFlYzMzOGUxNGUzOWYxMDFkY2VjZGUzZTRmZGI3Yjk=
Tyler
@Zach:
Damn, that’s an amazing email.
What the hell is info like that doing posted at the Corner?
Llelldorin
@Zach:
Oh, I wasn’t arguing that you’d have increased flow, I was arguing that you’d have increased pain-in-the-ass sealing them.
Right now you have three distinct sources, and they’re close to closing one (albeit not the largest). 50 sources would make the whole “shove a dome over it” more problematic.
momus
Well, McKay can kiss his knighthood goodbye. Go back 6 months and see how BP was patting itself on the back for bringing in this well. Congratulating itself on its wizardry.
BP trains its employees that all accidents are preventable. All you have to do is eliminate unsafe acts. As the Baker Commission noted after the Texas City refinery explosion, this approach confounds occupational and process safety by addressing only the former.
At the same time Business Unit Leaders (BULs in BP-speak) are compensated based on financial performance. “A dollar saved is a dollar earned.” This leads to tremendous pressure to cut corners and save time. There is little emphasis on safety at the executive level because if a disaster happens on your watch, you’re screwed, anyway. So keep those dollars coming in and hope you have moved on to your next assignment before any goes seriously wrong.
maus
But of course, while doing this is incredibly difficult, preventing it from occurring is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Literally. Completely. That’s why regulation won’t solve anything, guys. So, just step away from that pen. Now.
NOW.
eyepaddle
@Zach:
I’m not certain, but the geology of the gulf may have something to do with why nobody is talking about your solution. We used to refer to the top 2000-5000 feet of sediments on the ocean floor as “whale shit.” It is a very soupy and poorly lithified shale which blurs the line with being mud Often well plans call for “jetting” the first several hundred feet the hole–this is just using the pressure of jets on the drill bit to blow the stuff our of the way without bothering to rotate the drill bit.
Perhaps any blast in that mushy zone would just cause the oil to come out somewhere else.
Jim Bales
@Llelldorin:
DougJ posted:
BP Chairman Jame McKay on capping the oil spill (via Josh Green):
“[It’s like] performing open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.”
The topic is, of course capping the oil well, which is done using ROVs, because of the depth.
Llelldorin responded:
“I mean, yes, if I build a car that you control by hitting little switches inside the dashboard by poking a pencil through little holes … it means that my car’s a piece of junk that should never have been allowed on the road.”
I failed to see how these words can be anything other than a claim that the work involved in capping the oil well at a depth of 5,000 feet is hard because the equipment being used was “a piece of junk.”
However, Llelldorin now follows up with:
“I wasn’t talking about ROVs. No-one here is. Despite your aggressive attempts at changing the subject, I was mocking the lack of an acoustic switch.”
I must admit that I still don’t see why not having an acoustic switch is like “hitting little switches inside the dashboard by poking a pencil through little holes”, but, I now know Llelldorin’s true intent. My apologies.
As to changing the subject, I took the subject to be the work required to cap the oil well. The fact that BP is using the difficulty of that work to try to mitigate the criticism BP is receiving doesn’t change the fact that the work is truly hard (no matter how strained of a simile BP uses). It happens to be of interest to me.
And, I agree, given the potential damage (and lost revenue in oil getting away), it seems foolish to not have an acoustic control link in parallel with the mechanical link.
Of course, the acoustic control is not a panacea.
First, as I understand the current conditions, we don’t know why the blowout preventer failed. The problem may be in the preventer itself, in which case the acoustic switch would be trying to activate a broken system. (Still, it would be preferable to have the chance to try an acoustic control.)
Second, acoustic systems in the deep ocean are susceptible to a variety of failure modes, usually involving attenuation of the command signals over distance or the presence of sound ducts that bend the sound away from the intended receiver. Other failure modes I have seen include weak batteries in the receiver (exacerbated by the low temperature of the deep ocean) and receiver transducers that were broken during deployment.
A particular concern here would be ambient noise. What is the sound level by the well head, and how much noise is generated by the oil rushing out into the water, and by the oil flowing through the pipe? It is quite possible that the receiver would be in an environment that is too noisy to allow it to hear a command. (If so, getting an ROV to carry the transmitter to receiver might help.)
Finally, adding an acoustic switch introduces new failure modes (some involving inadvertent activation of the switch). My gut reaction is that the benefits of having the switch outweigh the risks and costs, given the very large cost of a failure such as the one we’ve seen, particularly since similar failures have occurred in the past.
Best,
Jim Bales
Jim Bales
@Bill E Pilgrim writes:
I’d love to hear the detailed imagery used going in instead, e.g. “Look, Senators, putting a deep oil rig out there at all is like hanging a giant asteroid-sized Buick with a rusty oil pan over the entire the Gulf coast, then just hoping that it doesn’t spring a leak. Now, can we have our approval please?”
I absolutely agree!
Best,
Jim Bales
Jim Bales
@minachica writes:
The ROVs… are… not… laughing!
minachica, I try not to anthropomorphize the ROVs. They hate it. ;-)
Best,
Jim Bales
JL
translation: “This is very difficult. So don’t blame me when an entire region is destroyed.”
ChockFullO'Nuts
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. I see this as the same sort of problem set as aviation industry regulation, mining safety regulation, and so forth. Those regulatory examples are highly technical, exactly because the technical requirements provide the basis for inspections and compliance tests which form the basis for enforcement.
Using the Federal Aviation Regulations (lovingly known as the FAR’s in the business) as an example, the regs make up a library of materials that is pretty daunting. Those complex regs are one of the reasons why flying is relatively safe. The regulators, and the industry, can follow precise requirements and standards in the course of their duties, and maintain, and verify, compliance at a pretty granular level.
That way, the inspector can come into the shop, take some samples and measurements, compare the findings to the requirements, and force compliance or shut the operation down …. before an accident happens.
The alternative is what is known in the industry as Tombstone Engineering … using the death count to set the standard for safety improvements. Wait until something breaks and then count the bodies and decide what needs more aggressive regulation. Or if you prefer, the “Nobody could have predicted” model of safety engineering.
If you leave the details to the industry, then you pretty much have a “free market” system for compliance with rules and maintaining safety …. and this oil rig, and the recent mine disaster in WV, are good examples of how well the free market will keep itself safe if left to their own devices.
Bill Murray
@El Cid: and we know where the leaks are. They are North, South, East and West of the oil platform. Unless they have snuck over the border into the Caribbean
Steeplejack
@slippy:
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
frosty
@tavella:
If you really want to hear some expertise from exploratory geologists, wildcatters, and petroleum engineers, check out TheOilDrum.com, especially the commenters. You’ll learn all you ever wanted about how about offshore drilling. You’ll know more than 95% of the bobbleheads on the news and 99% of the Washington elite.
As for blowing it up? Right now there’s a cased, cemented, ~6 inch hole going close to four miles below the Gulf to the reservoir. My guess is that blowing up the top part won’t collapse it, considering the pressure forcing the oil up. It’ll just make a bigger, nastier, impossible-to-seal orifice on the Gulf floor.
Wile E. Quixote
Well shit, if that’s the case then these fuckers shouldn’t have any problem. I mean they managed to remove that guy’s blood clot in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage" Fantastic Voyage and unlike the crew in Fantastic Voyage BP doesn’t have to deal with the always treacherous (except in The Great Escape where he played a sweet-natured ornithologist/RAF photo reconnaissance interpreter) Donald Pleasance or with white blood cells that ate all of Raquel Welch’s clothing.
In fact by the standards of Fantastic Voyage, which was one hour and forty minutes long these guys should have been done a long time ago.
DPirate
So hire a fucking navy submarine doctor.