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Is that the best you've got? Put the white Havana down and go take a siesta.
A good write up on the BP Horizon disaster
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Is that the best you've got? Put the white Havana down and go take a siesta.
Topspin
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Don't let facts get in your way of your British shame. 15 dead in Texas 2005, 11 dead this year. 95% of refinery complaints from Brit Petro. There will be a ginourmus fine coming to Brit Petro.
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I67 died on Piper Alpha, the world's worst oil industry accident, yet no criminal charges have ever been brought against the owner Occidental Petroleum.
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha"]Piper Alpha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File
iper_Alpha_memorial.jpg" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Piper_Alpha_memorial.jpg/220px-Piper_Alpha_memorial.jpg"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/d/d3/Piper_Alpha_memorial.jpg/220px-Piper_Alpha_memorial.jpg[/ame]cancel2 2022
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It has everything to do with a disgusting US corporation avoiding their obligations to brave North Sea oil workers who died without their families receiving proper compensation.
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I doubt that you even bothered to read the NY Times article, so here is a quote from it.
Not even environmental groups bitterly opposed to expanding offshore drilling were raising concerns about the industry’s technology for preventing deepwater spills, he added. “We were not being drawn by anybody to a potential issue with deepwater drilling or blowout preventers.”
As for the Minerals Management Service’s own studies on the vulnerabilities and failings of blowout preventers, Mr. Hayes faulted the agency for not bringing them to the administration’s attention. Long before Mr. Obama’s announcement, Mr. Hayes said, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had asked the agency for a report describing the potential risks and benefits of expanding offshore drilling.
The report, 219 pages long, made no mention of blind shear rams. It barely mentioned blowout preventers. It did, however, assure Mr. Salazar that safety and engineering requirements were “extensive” and that blowouts were “very rare.”
“We did not have red flags about a problem with the enforcement culture at MMS.,” Mr. Hayes said. “We certainly have that now.”
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Mr. Obama declared a moratorium on offshore drilling and ordered Mr. Salazar to look for ways to improve safety. Within weeks, Mr. Salazar came back with a long list of changes, most of them clearly responsive to weaknesses that industry and government studies had identified years before.
Mr. Salazar recommended, for example, that all blowout preventers be equipped with two blind shear rams — a step suggested to the Minerals Management Service in 2001. He recommended new rules to make sure rigs were equipped with the right kind of underwater robots and had emergency backup systems to activate blowout preventers — a step suggested to the Minerals Management Service in 2003.
He also urged a break from the agency’s tradition of taking the drilling industry’s word. From now on, he said, government inspectors should witness actual testing on blowout preventers. Rig operators, he said, should have to pay an independent expert to verify that their blowout preventers were properly designed and had not been compromised by modifications.
But Mr. Salazar stopped short of what Mr. Hayward, the BP chief executive, said was called for in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “We need a fundamental redesign of the blowout preventer,” Mr. Hayward testified last Thursday.
Still, J. Ford Brett, a drilling expert who contributed to Mr. Salazar’s list of suggestions, cautioned that blowout preventers, whatever their design, “will not save you in every situation.”
Mr. Salazar has yet to offer ideas for what to do if another blowout preventer fails thousands of feet beneath the sea. In the absence of a Plan B, he ordered his department to come up with new “deepwater well control procedures” in the next four months.
Already, though, pressure is building on the administration to let offshore drilling operations resume. Last month, Mr. Obama lifted the moratorium on drilling in shallow waters. But along the Gulf Coast, where drilling operations are responsible for an estimated 150,000 jobs, politicians are clamoring for an end to the deepwater moratorium, too.
In Senate testimony on June 9, Mr. Salazar made clear that Mr. Obama had no intention of pulling back permanently from deepwater drilling off the United States coast.
“It was the president’s directive that we press the pause button,” Mr. Salazar said. “It’s important for all of you on this committee to know that word — it’s the pause button. It’s not the stop button.”
