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.
fucen tarmal
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?
Punchy
The “device” he was referring to was an IUD, right?
MikeJ
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.
MattF
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.
cleek
how come you never talk about all the oil wells that don’t explode ? huh ?
liberal bias at its worst!
aimai
WOW. Just, WOW.
aimai
jibeaux
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.
Morbo
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.
bkny
hopefully the press reports that criminal charges could result will prove true.
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, 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.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
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?
__
kid bitzer
john, do we have to dwell on the past? must we have these recriminations?
sometimes in life you need to just keep walking.
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.
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.
Maude
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?
Face
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.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Maude:
This. And jumper cables too, also.
Kirk Spencer
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.
ericblair
@jibeaux:
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.
JohnR
?
Silly boy – it was done from a profit motive, which makes it all perfectly OK.
slag
Great work team!
Also, when are we gonna get a “Fixing a hole in the ocean” title? Too obvious?
Maude
@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.
Ash Can
@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.
Backbencher
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.
gnomedad
@MikeJ:
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.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Ash Can:
Dis. Dis rat heah.
ericblair
@Ash Can:
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.
El Cid
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.
gnomedad
@ericblair:
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.
Allan
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?
bemused
@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?
Evinfuilt
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.)
daveNYC
Dead battery, leaky hydraulics, and safety scissors instead of the jaws of life? Sounds like the work of the Times Square Bomber.
srv
@SpotWeld:
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.
Martin
@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.
TenguPhule
Even if it fails, they’re still safe from paying for it.
TenguPhule
Like you kill any other kind of snake. You get the head, take a big knife and….
Sasha
Obviously, this is the fault of too much government oversight and regulation.
tavella
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.
PTirebiter
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.
Zuzu's Petals
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:
Agin, I guess things will come clear with time.
Zuzu's Petals
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.
Zuzu's Petals
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.
Xenos
@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.
Zuzu's Petals
@Xenos:
Doesn’t the fact that a party to a contract lives or does business in the state in itself give the court jurisdiction/
patrick II
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.
A. N. Ymous
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.
Zuzu's Petals
@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.
Boney Baloney
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.