Sunday, May 16, 2010

Slick and Slicker

60 Minutes serves up actual broadcast journalism:
  1. This was the second attempt to drill a well in about the same spot. The first well had to be abandoned because the well had been drilled too fast (under pressure from BP to bring the well in quickly). Result: the rock fractured, causing loss of control of pressure in the well. Twenty-five million bucks down the drain, said BP to the crew. So they had to try again, in a rock formation known to be problematic.
  1. Early on while drilling the second well (the one that eventually blew up) an accident damaged part of the blowout preventer (BOP). According to Williams, they were conducting a routine test of the annular, a ring of rubber that closes around the well at the top of the BOP stack. While the annular was closed, thus closing off the well, a driller accidentally pushed a joystick, which pulled the pipe casing up through the rubber seal at very high pressure. A short time later, after drilling had resumed, pieces of rubber began coming up from the bottom of the well. A drilling supervisor told Williams that the rubber debris was "no big deal".
  1. The BOP has two redundant electronics boxes, called pods, which communicate with the surface. These are critical devices which trigger the BOP to close the well in emergency. One of the two pods was problematic and occasionally inoperable. The batteries on the BOP were also weak.
  1. The well was in the process of being closed with cement plugs when the blowout occurred. The day of the blowout, there was a disagreement between the Transocean supervisor and the BP supervisor over how that should be accomplished. The Transocean guy wanted to keep mud in the well (i.e., keep pressure in the well) during the cementing. The BP guy wanted the mud pulled from the well for cementing, because it was faster and they were already behind schedule. The BP guy won the argument. If pressure had been maintained in the well during the cementing operation, the blowout would not have occurred.

The bottom line: the blowout was caused by gross negligence on the part of BP. There is no other way to spin it.

The whole piece on Keith Pickering includes the damning clips from the show. More news includes lax regulatory inspections under the Bush/Cheney Administration that clearly continued after they left. And this is with BP having been called out along the way:

A summary of the inspection history said the Deepwater Horizon received six "incidents of noncompliance" – the agency's term for citations.

The most serious occurred July 16, 2002, when the rig was shut down because required pressure tests had not been conducted on parts of the blowout preventer – the device that was supposed to stop oil from gushing out if drilling operations went wrong.

That citation was "major," said Arnold, who characterized the overall safety record related by MMS as strong.

A citation on Sept. 19, 2002, also involved the blowout preventer. The inspector issued a warning because "problems or irregularities observed during the testing of BOP system and actions taken to remedy such problems or irregularities are not recorded in the driller's report or referenced documents."

During his Senate testimony last week, Transocean CEO Steven Newman said the blowout preventer was modified in 2005.

According to MMS officials, the four other citations were:

_ Two on May 16, 2002, for not conducting well control drills as required and not performing "all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner."

_ One on Aug. 6, 2003, for discharging pollutants into the Gulf.

_ One on March 20, 2007, which prompted inspectors to shut down some machinery because of improper electrical grounding.

Late last week, several days after providing the detailed accounting, Interior officials told AP that in fact there had been only five citations, that one had been rescinded. The officials said they could not immediately say which of the six had been rescinded.


And who will pay for the spills? Ask Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R):

In the wake of last month's catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is "not where we need to be right now" she said.

Murkowski's move came just hours after Washington's top oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API) expressed vociferous opposition to raising the cap. It argued that doing so would "threaten the viability of deep-water operations, significantly reduce U.S. domestic oil production and harm U.S. energy security." API's membership includes large oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP America, as well as smaller ones.


The big question that goes to the heart of our democracy is if the damage from BP's negligence destroys the grand natural resource that is the Gulf of Mexico and damages both land and water masses beyond, if it eliminates the livelihood of tens or hundreds of thousands, if it dries up a significant percentage of our food supply, all because they wanted to save some money, then what is the appropriate legal remedy? Is it for BP to go bankrupt and some government to seize its assets? Is it for our government to have to step in and spend billions in band-aids for these ills? Should the CEO on down be imprisoned for life?

I'm not sure there is precedent for an industrial environmental disaster of this magnitude, in large part because it is in the ocean, source of all life on earth. On dry land you can always erect fences; by it's very nature the ocean flows.

For a larger, starker analogy (that may not be so far off), if a large multi-national, billion dollar corporation were to accidentally irradiate the entire earth...would there even be a remedy? Sure, we wouldn't want them to get away with it, and we'd want them to pay everything possible in useful reparations, but at some point the damage to mama Earth is too great, when it irrevocably alters life as we know it, irrevocably degrades life as we know it.

So is the disaster in the Gulf a big enough warning, finally, that even the yahoos alter their drill baby way of thinking?

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