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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Redefining Failsafe

Redefining Failsafe

by John Cole|  May 13, 20109:23 am| 48 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Science & Technology, Assholes

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How is this not criminal negligence:

A House energy panel investigation has found that the blowout preventer that failed to stop a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a “useless” test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn’t strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil.

In a devastating review of the blowout preventer, which BP said was supposed to be “fail-safe,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, said Wednesday that documents and interviews show that the device was anything but.

Just obscene.

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48Comments

  1. 1.

    fucen tarmal

    May 13, 2010 at 9:26 am

    hey but the good news, the bush admin is off the hook for not requiring acoustic switches, they wouldn’t have helped anyway. it was an act of god that the battery died and the scissors were garbage, hoocoodanode?

  2. 2.

    Punchy

    May 13, 2010 at 9:27 am

    Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, said Wednesday that documents and interviews show that the device was anything but.

    The “device” he was referring to was an IUD, right?

  3. 3.

    MikeJ

    May 13, 2010 at 9:29 am

    Yeah, fail safe is absolutely the wrong word. It means something very specific. Not that it will never fail. In fact the opposite. It means that there’s a good chance that the component *will* fail, and when it does, the failure will leave things in a safe condition.

    Had it been failsafe, oil would have stopped flowing as soon as the battery died. Or as soon as hydraulic pressure fell.

    Sorry for lecturing on the obvious to those who already know what it means, but it’s a concept I’ve had to explain too many times to people who were really smart, but just didn’t know that term.

  4. 4.

    MattF

    May 13, 2010 at 9:30 am

    WaPo buried the most interesting exchange at the end of the article:

    The hearing provided the spectacle of one federal agency drawing embarrassing admissions out of another. Some of the toughest questions came from Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, co-chair of the investigating board. He raised the 2004 study that found that blowout preventers did not have the power to cut ultra-strong pipe joints.

    Nguyem also asked Saucier how the MMS ensures that blowout preventers function. Saucier said for that, the government relies heavily on industry designs and oil company tests.

    “Manufactured by industry, installed by industry, with no government witnessing oversight of the installation or the construction, is that correct?” Nguyen asked.

    “That would be correct,” Saucier said.

  5. 5.

    cleek

    May 13, 2010 at 9:30 am

    how come you never talk about all the oil wells that don’t explode ? huh ?

    liberal bias at its worst!

  6. 6.

    aimai

    May 13, 2010 at 9:32 am

    WOW. Just, WOW.

    aimai

  7. 7.

    jibeaux

    May 13, 2010 at 9:32 am

    Also too, the Titanic was unsinkable.

    The blame lies squarely on BP, and on all the rest of us morons who believe that anything can be “fail-safe”.

    On this topic, NPR used a turn of phrase today that just reminded me of exactly why I can’t stand Republican politicians. It was along the lines of, “Republicans are anxious that the oil spill not be used as a reason to discuss our reliance on fossil fuels.” And that was BEFORE they had on clips of Haley Barbour talking about how it was no biggie because Mississippi’s golf courses were still just fine. I really have to stop listening to Republicans in the morn…., well, ever, actually.

  8. 8.

    Morbo

    May 13, 2010 at 9:32 am

    “How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?” Stupak asked.

    Regardless of all the problems found, Stupak fails hard at understanding a basic engineering term. Wapo does not appear interested in knowing what it means either, seeing how they use it as a money quote.

  9. 9.

    bkny

    May 13, 2010 at 9:34 am

    hopefully the press reports that criminal charges could result will prove true.

  10. 10.

    jibeaux

    May 13, 2010 at 9:39 am

    Sorry to use the wrong term, i no haz engineering nowlej. I think the point(s), though, is that (1) crap like this shouldn’t be failing for four different reasons, and (2) that none of us should believe that human ingenuity can ever completely trump human error and mother nature. All of these huge tasks we undertake — coal mining, offshore drilling, splitting atoms — have risks and worst-case scenarios that we need to consider and prepare for, even if they don’t fit into a three word slogan with two words in it.

  11. 11.

    DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio

    May 13, 2010 at 9:40 am

    Despite the appearance of the hearing circus, what this is is a massive failure of regulation, enforcement and oversight.

    This is what you get when you emasculate government. Why wasn’t the well shut down? Why wasn’t that mine in WV shut down?

    Why wasn’t the rig operator working within an understanding that there was a requirement of safety and dilgence several layers higher than the one we see at work here, and acting accordingly?
    __

    About 10 years ago, bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service considered requiring deep-sea drillers to install devices called acoustic switches that can be activated off site to close a valve in an emergency. It’s designed for just such an event as the Deepwater Horizon fire, where workers on site are dead or unable to reach the manual controls. Required by some European countries, acoustic switches cost about a half-million dollars each.
    __
    Why didn’t the MMS require these switches in the Gulf, where oil rigs operate fairly close to hundreds of miles of vulnerable U.S. shoreline? In a notably weaselly report in 2003 and quoted in The New York Times on May 4, the agency concluded: “Acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly, and there is insufficient data available on system reliability in the presence of a mud or gas plume. However, acoustic communication in the form of verification of system status and remote arming should be considered.”
    __
    The report is utterly devoid of credibility because of 2008 findings concerning the MMS by Inspector General Earl Devaney, summarized this way by the Times: “(E)mployees rigged contracts and engaged in illegal moonlighting, drugs, sex and gift-taking from oil companies.”
    __
    In the military and in commercial-aviation circles, redundancy, a bane of writers, is an invaluable asset. Every critical system must have a backup. It seems inconceivable that MMS bureaucrats couldn’t see the need for redundancy where shutting off the flow from deep-sea oil wells was concerned. Of course, if they were corrupt — they manifestly were — there’s absolutely no telling what motivated their regulatory approach.

  12. 12.

    kid bitzer

    May 13, 2010 at 9:41 am

    john, do we have to dwell on the past? must we have these recriminations?
    sometimes in life you need to just keep walking.

  13. 13.

    SpotWeld

    May 13, 2010 at 9:43 am

    It’s been pointed out by a lot of propontents for Nuclear Power that the US Navy has been operating ship-based reactors for decades now with an excellent level of saftey. And if it were the Navy that was going to run all these new Power Plants being proposed I would not have much of an argument.

    What can reasonably expect is something more akin to what we are seeing with BP.

    What happened is that a vessel the size of the USS Iowa caught fire, exploded and sank in calm weather.

    While I cannot say the US Navy would never suffer such an accident, I think history has shown that they would have the proper plans, training and equipment in place to deal with it.

  14. 14.

    Maude

    May 13, 2010 at 9:53 am

    The batteries may have not been totally dead.
    You are getting awfully picky.
    /snark

    There are some that say that they thought it was a dead well.
    There are questions about the amount of mud coming up, it was less than expected.
    If it “kicks” that means the well is coming in.
    John Wayne, where are you when we need you?

  15. 15.

    Face

    May 13, 2010 at 9:53 am

    WASHINGTON — In the days after an oil well spun out of control in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers tried to activate a huge piece of underwater safety equipment but failed because the device had been so altered that diagrams BP got from the equipment’s owner didn’t match the supposedly failsafe device’s configuration, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

    ruh roh.

    If this had happened in a nuclear power plant, and actual (white) humans were facing the real threat, instead of just dolphins and oysters, these fuckers would be in jail.

  16. 16.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    May 13, 2010 at 9:56 am

    @Maude:

    The batteries may have not been totally dead.
    You are getting awfully picky.
    /snark

    This. And jumper cables too, also.

  17. 17.

    Kirk Spencer

    May 13, 2010 at 9:59 am

    If everything is done ‘to procedure’ and reasonable effort is made to correct things when flaws are found, the companies involved have a cap to their liability in subsequent disasters.

    We’ve got this. We’ve got supported allegations that people on the drill “modified” tests to get passing grades for the next step. We’ve got a report that instead of following procedure, drilling mud was replaced with seawater BEFORE the concrete plug was placed and tested, not after.

    At this point one or more of the companies is going to be paying not only for cleanup but for damages to other businesses — the gulf fishing being only one example. So far I think Halliburton’s liability is limited. TransOcean and BP, on the other hand, are trying very hard to make the other the fall guy.

    Somebody didn’t follow procedure, someone didn’t use reasonable prudence, someone is going to pay through the nose for it.

  18. 18.

    ericblair

    May 13, 2010 at 10:03 am

    @jibeaux:

    Sorry to use the wrong term, i no haz engineering nowlej. I think the point(s), though, is that (1) crap like this shouldn’t be failing for four different reasons…

    Well, not being able to spel reel gud certainly doesn’t disqualify you from the engineering profession.

    The “four different reasons” can go either way, depending on whether it’s “four simultaneous failures needed to happen” or “four failures could have caused it independent of each other”. In a highly reliable system like a commercial airliner, it’s usually the former: X failed, Y was supposed to take over but failed and Z that would have shut things down safely wasn’t working for some other reason, and all had to fail at the same time.

    Here, it sounds like the latter. You had several components that weren’t doing their jobs and any one or two of them could have caused the failure. As well, it obviously didn’t fail safe, and this sounds like a deliberate design decision mitigating the risk of an erroneous shutdown over the risk of a spill. This sounds bad.

  19. 19.

    JohnR

    May 13, 2010 at 10:03 am

    How is this not criminal negligence:

    ?

    Silly boy – it was done from a profit motive, which makes it all perfectly OK.

  20. 20.

    slag

    May 13, 2010 at 10:06 am

    “Manufactured by industry, installed by industry, with no government witnessing oversight of the installation or the construction, is that correct?” Nguyen asked.
    __
    “That would be correct,” Saucier said.

    Great work team!

    Also, when are we gonna get a “Fixing a hole in the ocean” title? Too obvious?

  21. 21.

    Maude

    May 13, 2010 at 10:07 am

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck:
    WIN!
    Thanks, you made my day a lot cheerier.
    Thes going to end up being one of those for the want of a nail, the Kingdom was lost. And I quote, Stephan King, The Tommyknockers.
    It did a strikeout with a dash, I’m on dialup and tried to correct in edit.

  22. 22.

    Ash Can

    May 13, 2010 at 10:21 am

    @MattF:
    @DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:

    Exactly. If the regulators aren’t going to enforce rules (or aren’t even there in the first place), then why bother with the additional effort and expense of doing it yourself?

    Private commercial entities can’t be trusted implicitly to do the right thing on their own. That’s not what they’re designed for. They’re designed to maximize profits, and only government regulations, and the enforcement thereof, will ensure that they don’t do so to the detriment of everyone else.

  23. 23.

    Backbencher

    May 13, 2010 at 10:44 am

    I found Bart Stupak’s anti-choice efforts on the healthcare bill to be damaging and reprehensible. However, he has done some good work investigating corporate malfeasance. It was his sub-committee that did much of the work of bringing the practice of health insurance rescission to light and now he is investigating the criminally negligent behavior of the off-shore oil companies. He is a perfect example of why I am a Democrat and why I find being a Democrat so frustrating.

  24. 24.

    gnomedad

    May 13, 2010 at 10:46 am

    @MikeJ:

    It means that there’s a good chance that the component will fail, and when it does, the failure will leave things in a safe condition.

    Thank you for this. This is not mere geekery; it’s an important concept for people to know. I am not an engineer (IANAE?), but it seems that a fail-safe design will result in more down time, and would be resisted for economic reasons beyond the expense of the design itself.

  25. 25.

    Ivan Ivanovich Renko

    May 13, 2010 at 10:49 am

    @Ash Can:

    Private commercial entities can’t be trusted implicitly to do the right thing on their own. That’s not what they’re designed for. They’re designed to maximize profits…

    Dis. Dis rat heah.

  26. 26.

    ericblair

    May 13, 2010 at 11:01 am

    @Ash Can:

    Private commercial entities can’t be trusted implicitly to do the right thing on their own. That’s not what they’re designed for. They’re designed to maximize profits, and only government regulations, and the enforcement thereof, will ensure that they don’t do so to the detriment of everyone else.

    The other issue is that often doing the right thing costs more and puts any company that does want to do the right thing at a disadvantage, in some cases a fatal one. A single company can’t act on its own, and needs the regulators to step in.

  27. 27.

    El Cid

    May 13, 2010 at 11:04 am

    The problem was too much government and too much regulation. With more freedom, John Galt would have invented a magic oil extractor which never would have risked a spill. Hrmmph. Libruls.

  28. 28.

    gnomedad

    May 13, 2010 at 11:07 am

    @ericblair:

    The other issue is that often doing the right thing costs more and puts any company that does want to do the right thing at a disadvantage, in some cases a fatal one. A single company can’t act on its own, and needs the regulators to step in.

    Absolutely this. You don’t have to “hate capitalism” to understand the need for regulation. I recall reading somewhere about enlightened Wall Street types begging for regulation because of what they’d be forced to do otherwise. “The market works” is not always good news.

  29. 29.

    Allan

    May 13, 2010 at 11:14 am

    I look forward to corporate person BP’s arrest and conviction for first-degree murder. How exactly do you carry out the death penalty on a corporation?

  30. 30.

    bemused

    May 13, 2010 at 11:18 am

    @jibeaux:
    Haley golf courses are just fine Barbour: Why is it that when an R sticks a King Kong size foot in his/her mouth, a liberal hears it instantly but a conservative doesn’t even notice?

  31. 31.

    Evinfuilt

    May 13, 2010 at 11:26 am

    Here’s a very simple explanation of fail-safe that I find most people understand.

    18-wheeler brakes. They use a compressor and hoses to work. If hoses are damaged or compressor fails, the brakes will fall into their natural state, which is ON. So in case of failure, brakes are automatically applied (so the opposite of what you see in cinema/tv.)

  32. 32.

    daveNYC

    May 13, 2010 at 12:00 pm

    Dead battery, leaky hydraulics, and safety scissors instead of the jaws of life? Sounds like the work of the Times Square Bomber.

  33. 33.

    srv

    May 13, 2010 at 12:04 pm

    @SpotWeld:

    It’s been pointed out by a lot of propontents for Nuclear Power that the US Navy has been operating ship-based reactors for decades now with an excellent level of saftey. And if it were the Navy that was going to run all these new Power Plants being proposed I would not have much of an argument.

    There isn’t a nuclear reactor operating in the US that doesn’t employ graduates from Rickover’s educational system. That’s why the our reactor safety record is so good.

    TMI was a study in many, many levels of instrumentation/equipment issues that caused operators to make the wrong decision repeatedly. Not two or three times, but a dozen. And still, no China Syndrome.

  34. 34.

    Martin

    May 13, 2010 at 12:27 pm

    @srv: I agree. My dad worked on nuke subs. He said it bordered on the absurd how careful they were on the ships. But consequences for not doing mundane but critical things in the navy are severe. Consequences for not doing mundane but critical things in corporations are mundane.

    But all of the bother of how businesses are so brutal, they can’t get past the sunk costs of employees and refuse to deal with problems as harshly as they need to. Instead, the negative impact on employees is far more likely to stem from bad management decisions, that the employees were powerless to influence.

    I’m a proponent of nuclear power, but I’d feel much better about their operation if the military was running them. Systems with critical failure modes need to be operated by people in an organizational structure that is appropriate to it. There are few corporations out there that I feel have that kind of structure. I’m not so comfortable relying on the guys from the Navy bringing due diligence over as a matter of happenstance – it needs to be part and parcel of the utility, and I don’t see that happening under corporate control.

  35. 35.

    TenguPhule

    May 13, 2010 at 12:49 pm

    Redefining Failsafe

    Even if it fails, they’re still safe from paying for it.

  36. 36.

    TenguPhule

    May 13, 2010 at 12:51 pm

    How exactly do you carry out the death penalty on a corporation?

    Like you kill any other kind of snake. You get the head, take a big knife and….

  37. 37.

    Sasha

    May 13, 2010 at 1:00 pm

    Obviously, this is the fault of too much government oversight and regulation.

  38. 38.

    tavella

    May 13, 2010 at 1:01 pm

    @Kirk Spencer: At this point one or more of the companies is going to be paying not only for cleanup but for damages to other businesses—the gulf fishing being only one example. So far I think Halliburton’s liability is limited. TransOcean and BP, on the other hand, are trying very hard to make the other the fall guy.

    Unfortunately, they won’t. Maximum of $75 million, which is essentially nothing in a spill this big — I wouldn’t be surprised if that entirely disappears into the lawsuits for the value of the rig itself, and even if the fishermen and so on get anything at all, it’ll be something like a penny on a dollar.

    The *extra* stupid thing is that it encourages BP not to care much about cleanup, beyond whatever they think will make good TV ads. Most of the work will be done by volunteers and the government, and whatever money the government tries to get out of them can be held up in lawsuits forever, ala Exxon, with a good chance of being reduced to almost nothing.

  39. 39.

    PTirebiter

    May 13, 2010 at 1:06 pm

    And yet we still hear wankers from Heritage and Cato gassing about how no one in the world could have more incentive to prevent blowouts than BP, and in a completely rational world that might be true. They never seem to consider that at any given moment, incentives will vary among the individuals doing the work. The incentives for the rough necks may be driven by the contractor who belatedly discovered he underbid the job. Apparently Captain Hazelwood’s incentives weren’t an exact match to Exxon’s. These people would benefit from doing a work tour in the real world.

  40. 40.

    Zuzu's Petals

    May 13, 2010 at 1:21 pm

    What I don’t get is that the BOP was tested (per regs) ten days before the event, and according to at least one eyewitness, immediately prior to the event, in both cases showing it was working.  I don’t know how the results could be tweaked, because they evidently go into a database that is transmitted by satellite to the home office for auditing.  I guess we will find out in time.

    As to “modification” of the BOP, there’s also this to consider:

    The story says “modification” but reads “short cut”. As a point of fact, modifications are made all the time to rig systems. They are just like any other piece of industrial equipment. Service bulletins are issued by the manufacturer on a regular basis to recommend improvements, or increase safety or to fix newly discovered flaws. Subsea BOP stacks are multi-million dollar systems that span the technology spectrum from huge iron castings to fiberoptic systems. No single manufacturer provides all of these, and as with other products, multiple manufacturers provide a selection to choose from. When Cameron builds a stack they go to their suppliers just like everyone else.

    Agin, I guess things will come clear with time.

  41. 41.

    Zuzu's Petals

    May 13, 2010 at 1:33 pm

    PS, I see the article says there was a pressure testing just before the event that “should have raised a red flag.” If that was the actual BOP test the eyewitness was talking about, it quite obviously wasn’t good to go.

  42. 42.

    Zuzu's Petals

    May 13, 2010 at 1:44 pm

    At this point one or more of the companies is going to be paying not only for cleanup but for damages to other businesses—the gulf fishing being only one example. So far I think Halliburton’s liability is limited. TransOcean and BP, on the other hand, are trying very hard to make the other the fall guy.

    Well under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, BP is the responsible party in terms of cleanup costs and damages.  Since drilling contracts typically include a “protect and indemnify” clause that applies even when the drilling company is negligent, it seems they may have to prove something beyond simple negligence to recoup from Transocean.   Cameron may be another matter.  We’ll see.

  43. 43.

    Xenos

    May 13, 2010 at 2:03 pm

    @Allan: On a state-by-state basis you withdraw its registration as a foreign corporation. If it is no longer registered it will no longer have standing to go to court to get its contracts enforced. It also automatically loses any licenses and permits it needs to conduct business in that jurisdiction.

  44. 44.

    Zuzu's Petals

    May 13, 2010 at 2:09 pm

    @Xenos:

    Doesn’t the fact that a party to a contract lives or does business in the state in itself give the court jurisdiction/

  45. 45.

    patrick II

    May 13, 2010 at 2:29 pm

    Bad design, bad regulation, bad motives. When smart people are actually serious about engineering and implementing something right, it gets done better than this. This is pro forma design and implementation the purpose of which is to meet legally defensible definitions of safety to avoid losses in court, not to actually do the job correctly.

  46. 46.

    A. N. Ymous

    May 13, 2010 at 10:37 pm

    I can’t believe that no one is in jail. No one is even in custody for questioning! Frankly, everyone in a managerial role relating to (1)
    the drilling platform, (2) the men working on the platform, (3) the construction or alteration of any part of the drill stem, (4) testing any part of the drilling systems and accident recovery systems, (5) any other supervisory role whatsoever, should be in custody and be undergoing interview 18 hours a day. No torture, just an unending severe interview with the understanding that their career is over if they don’t cooperate to their fullest ability.

    As it is now, these guys can be rehearsing their stories to be sure there aren’t any inconsistencies.

    All materials (email, twits, voicemail/phone records, radio transmissions, memos, blueprints, engineering diagrams with time stamped changes authorized and the engineer’s seal applied, photos, videos, minutes of meetings and phone conversations at every level in every company associated with this cluster) should be in the hands of attorneys general for the prosecution of the 11 murder cases we know about. Copies of all this material should be posted in a wiki as it is received into the US Attorneys’ offices and logged with a bates number.

    Database backup images, logs and extracts must be obtained by Federal IT staff competent in the database types in question.

    These people potentially committed more serious damage to the USA than the Taliban ever dreamed of, and they’re not even being questioned by law enforcement?

    Words Fail Me!!

    The Gulf of Mexico is being turned into a toxic bowl of chemical soup… The weather for the whole eastern half of the US comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Does anyone have any guess what a change in evaporation rates in the Gulf might do to the weather?

    What happens when the toxic slop finally flows up the east coast on it’s way to Ireland? Rush will have a view then, won’t he? Natural as sea water, right? No more Chesapeake Crab Boils, no more Gullah dinners…

    Words fail me.

    G’nite.

  47. 47.

    Zuzu's Petals

    May 14, 2010 at 12:45 am

    @Zuzu’s Petals:

    Okay, according to this article, the pressure testing was for the cement job, not the BOP. No mention of the BOP test.

  48. 48.

    Boney Baloney

    May 14, 2010 at 3:15 am

    When I read something like this, I always flash on the (possibly apocryphal) Heinlein quote about how to reduce industrual pollution.

    Paraphrased: “Pass a law that water and air intake have to be downflow from the waste systems, and punish violatiors with confiscation and red-hot irons.”

    Now that’s Randism I can believe in. Deep-pile carpet drenched in crude oil? Yeah, we could’ve! I’m pinning my hopes on that automatic second term, me.

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