And how does this explain the current situation? This was the result of someone making a series of stupid decisions. The current Administration was actually there to give out an award for safety when it happened. You might want to rethink the whole Bush-is-evil mantra and focus on what is actually happening.
El_Kabong, if you have a better diagram of the system or real photos please link them.
then it would be a matter of cutting off the riser at the base or disconnecting it post accident. Why the problem connecting another riser?
Nah, you might want to think about the long term consequences of 8 years of dysregulation before dismissing such concerns as “Bush hatred”. Bush and his crew fucked up big time at the MMS, it doesn’t take hatred of the man to see that, it only takes a pair of mark-one eyeballs that are willing to see. But you can’t see things that way, can you? It’s got to be because someone hates ourformer president. That’s delusional thinking on your part.
Considering nothing about any of your rants has anything to do with what happened I’m left with the conclusion that you’re vision of the world is driven by politics and not rational thought.
This statement is factually incorrect. Improper government oversight of deep water drilling had much to do with the catastrophe, unless perhaps you’re one of those who doesn’t believe in government regulations at all? I know there are such people, but if you’re one of them you ought to be more up front about it. Did Bush fuck up, or did he merely sabotage an agency that should never have existed in the first place?
I remind you that the current administration was in the process of giving a safety award to the very drilling operation in question. There’s your oversight. Again, you keep dragging politics into something that had nothing to do with the event unless you think there should be a government agent standing over every decision made by every company. This was the work of one person who made a bad decision in light of evidence the safety equipment was compromised.
This is a fantasy of yours. You’re not worth arguing with.
On to the next thing:
Top Kill Fails To Plug Oil Spill, BP Now To Try LMRP Cap
It is a FACT that a BP manager overrode the safety concerns of the rig manager in a power struggle. It is a FACT that one of the actuators was not operating properly due to a bad battery. It is a FACT that rubber chunks was reported in the drilling mud.
You’ve provided nothing in the way of a cite that suggests this was a government failure which makes everything you’ve said a political rant.
This is Great Debates, cite your evidence.
Yeah, show me the conviction in a court of law. What you’ve got is a theory that supports your prejudices. It’s shoddy reasoning that ignores most of the chain of events that lead up to the accident (as purported):
Repeated and continuing oversight failure and scandal at the overseeing agency doesn’t count for you?
Then I guess nothing will ever convince you that the MMS was not functioning as a shining beacon of regulatory perfection, until Obama took over when it proceeded to suck big time, so I’ll not bother trying to convince you. Those amenable to reason are likely already wondering about the legacy of Bush’s push for deregulation.
For example:
???
You post a newspaper repeating what I said about BP screwing this up and … What? Are you arguing against yourself?
The more I learn about this, the more it reminds me of the space shuttle accidents. Yet another case of engineers getting overridden by middle management, warning signs ignored because the risks seemed so low, and safety procedures being skipped for cost/time considerations.
I’m just guessing, but I think that in retrospect what happened will be crystal clear, and everyone will be shaking their heads wondering how can all those smart people made such stupid decisions. And it will end up being like one of those Jenga games, where everybody pulled out just one more support, one at a time until the thing collapsed.
No, I mean pipe rams.
Pipe rams:
http://www.rigasdrilling.com/uploads/allimg/100205/1-1002051252170-L.jpg
Once again, pipe rams must be in the stack so that a potential kick can be circulated out by pumping mud down the drill pipe in the hole to displace the invading fluid out of the hole in a controlled manner. When this is done, in most cases the operation can return to drilling without significant damage to the wellbore, with the main penalty being the extra time involved.
Shear rams are last-resort backups. If the drill string is cut this way, it becomes much more difficult to perform circulation, and usually the techniques that must be used to regain well control, if the drill string cannot be used for circulation, result in complete loss of the hole.
I have no idea why none of the rams can be activated. If BP knows, they have either not released that info or I haven’t found it. The most likely explanation is a combination of the stack’s on-board hydraulic fluid being exhausted, and leaks in the system preventing the system being re-charged from an external source, but that’s just a guess on my part.
Well, this sucks. Top Kill didn’t work. How could a process with such a dastardly cool name not work?
According to the Coast Guard, they weren’t keen on sand barriers (and still aren’t to the extent Jindal wanted) because they aren’t a magic solution. You know what they largely do? Make the oil someone else’s problem – namely Mississippi’s.
From Louisiana’s Daily Comet last Wednesday:
So we’re faulting Obama and the Coast Guard for not going with the knee jerk solution and just funneling the oil into some other state without any sort of studies or research? I bet the people of Mississippi are kind of happy that they didn’t.
That doesn’t make any sense. Protecting a shoreline doesn’t funnel anything.
The oil’s going to go somewhere. If not the shoreline in LA, it’ll be the shoreline in Mississippi or Florida. Unless your answer is to ring the entire gulf states with a solid, unbroken wall of sand barrier.
Again, in my opinion the stupid decision grounds in not treating offshore drilling with similar caution as nuclear fission. Nuclear reactors don’t need all that housing to function. They’re there to prevent a regional catastrophe in the unlikely event that something goes very wrong- whether a perfect storm of human fallibility, mechanical breakdown, natural event or what have you.
In the unlikely event something goes terribly wrong with an undersea well… there’s nothing. Mainly because private companies have been clamoring for years, and using every dirty trick at their disposal, including providing drugs and hookers to regulatory agents but going way beyond that, things like siccing at least 4 pro-industry lobbyists on every congressperson, to browbeat government into allowing them to run a riskier- and cheaper- operation.
Once they got their way they didn’t even respect the limp regulations that they themselves agreed to- silly things like using a functional BOP or having major decisions made by competent staff (nuclear engineers tend to have Ph.Ds, no? Business people might as well be uneducated where real-world considerations are concerned).
And then, once this deadly serious situation emerged- they lied. From the gate they sought to minimize the size of the spill, a downplay which might have delayed a more vigorous initial response. I know they were lying. From the start they were saying things like ‘there is no way to measure the volume of the leak’. Puh-leeze :rolleyes: check out this pdf on Gauss’ plume equations.
On page 24 buoyancy flux is discussed. I believe this equation can be used to approximate the flow rate. A broader review of the subject reveals that Gauss did the math on point source flows and plumes almost 150 years ago! If the biggest oil companies in the world pretend nobody on their teams have even heard of this, it means they are bald-faced lying.
So. That’s why I don’t trust BP. They aren’t doing enough, and they seem unlikely to do enough, as too many of their solutions hinge on extracting the oil to the surface rather than plugging the hole. A group like, say, the Army Corps of Engineers, which has an actual team and tools, could examine the plume after BP cuts the riser and make a fairly accurate guess of how much pressure is being exerted by the wellhead.
They have connections to guys like the Coast Guard, who are surely in possession of things like barges and winches &etc. And connections to the federal government, which has the deep pockets to hire private industry if necessary to construct the apparatus required to realize my cap-pylon-pulley solution.
The most advanced technology in the world (the kind BP is supposedly in possession of, and which is supposed to force you to shut up when they wave it in your face) isn’t necessary to cap the hole. Just a calculation of the forces involved, then a Stalinesque overwhelming of those forces. The Army Corps of Engineers could do it, and probably should consider doing it soon instead of watching BP’s deadly dog-and-pony show.
Yah sorry for the Stalin reference. I’m not a communist and don’t find much to admire about the guy. But I don’t want to be associated with industry or govt right now either. Plus the guy’s overbearing engineering/public works aesthetic seems practical for this application.
Here’s a quote from this article. In a nutshell, I call bullshit!
I just showed you the math and the basic engineering plan to plug the hole, at least in part until the relief well can be finished. It does not require the most cutting-edge technology in the world. You got a better idea? Put up or shut up! I’m not a fucking idiot! If you can’t plug the hole, implement my plan or debunk it.
As said in above posts, no, BP is not doing enough, and is buying time and covering their ass with PR. The extent that the government is complacent with that; we can’t see the depths, but, it’s a longstanding wink-and-nod relationship, well beyond Obama’s term. Why isn’t our former Vice President, Dick Cheney,who certainly knows the oil Biz well, weighing in on this crisis to help all Americans? You would think he’d be generous with his expertise in this time of need.
Yeah, Bleah, I care more for the real damage to the ecosystem, the real world that sustains us, beyond all the props we think are important. Here’s a good eye opener, which should have been taken into account from the git go :
This is a disaster of far more overeaching concerns than 9/11. I’m in no way intending to diminish the trajedy of that event, but this is an event that has epic proportions beyond human loss of life, and one that will send more awful ripples beyond what we know.