The Gang that Couldn't Drill Straight
June 14, 2010 8:55 PM Subscribe
Put on your surprised face. BP made a series of money-saving shortcuts and blunders that dramatically increased the danger of a destructive oil spill just six days before the blowout.
Has BP done anything right in trying to handle this spill? They lowballed the magnitude of the spill, operated the well with incorrect or incomplete schematics, and couldn't even manage to get their message straight.
OSHA documents indicate that in BP refineries, the company has more "egregious" and "willful" violations than all other refinery operators combined. They used to have friends at the Department of Justice, but it may not help them this time. Of course, they just might weasel out under Bankruptcy Protection. Will Obama succeed in holding them responsible?
Has BP done anything right in trying to handle this spill? They lowballed the magnitude of the spill, operated the well with incorrect or incomplete schematics, and couldn't even manage to get their message straight.
OSHA documents indicate that in BP refineries, the company has more "egregious" and "willful" violations than all other refinery operators combined. They used to have friends at the Department of Justice, but it may not help them this time. Of course, they just might weasel out under Bankruptcy Protection. Will Obama succeed in holding them responsible?
This post was deleted for the following reason: This is a really shitty thing, true, but this needs to be less MeFi Op Ed and more "here's something neat I found on the web" to get above the "same old shit" BP posts we've been seeing. Try again tomorrow maybe? -- jessamyn
Let's just look forwards, not backwards 'cause it ain't pretty back there
posted by Salvor Hardin at 9:14 PM on June 14, 2010 [2 favorites]
posted by Salvor Hardin at 9:14 PM on June 14, 2010 [2 favorites]
A post about Obama and Joe Beese is there.
posted by boo_radley at 9:17 PM on June 14, 2010 [11 favorites]
posted by boo_radley at 9:17 PM on June 14, 2010 [11 favorites]
The more you read up on this, you realize that there are a series of tasks to perform in a "proper" way to do the job: overlapping mechanisms, safety tests, and various procedures. Lots of redundancy. This would presumably occur in any complex, high-importance systems engineering.
So when a disaster like this finally comes to pass, when we look back, we see a series of bad decisions. Barring random meteor strikes, that's what is required to defeat all of the precautions which ought to be taken. I see at least four missteps in the article: Two for safety (skimping on centralizers, more risky gas flow barrier) and two for testing (cement bond log, drilling mud).
This reminds me of a trend I keep running across in my elaborate data cleanup routines at work. By the time I notice a problem, it's a Big problem, because all of my normalization, assumption-making, and general smoothing out of information flow masks upstream corruption until the situation is fairly bad. It's as if the Robustness Principle ("be conservative in what you do, liberal in what you accept") builds up a "bank account" of safety, which is then spent out by others. Look at the situation, far less ecologically damaging, in web browsers, which historically attempted to render just about anything they received, leading to Very Bloated Browsers.
It's as if validation and safety procedures produce temporary assets, subject to eventual exploitation by someone who will come along and look at all of that Subgenius slack as a place to take advantage, cut costs, do it the easy way, or run the whole shebang a little faster. Cheapness, laziness, corruption, disregard, any one of these can short-circuit solid design.
This does not say good things about the future of the interface between human organization (business, government) and systems engineering.
posted by adipocere at 9:28 PM on June 14, 2010 [1 favorite]
So when a disaster like this finally comes to pass, when we look back, we see a series of bad decisions. Barring random meteor strikes, that's what is required to defeat all of the precautions which ought to be taken. I see at least four missteps in the article: Two for safety (skimping on centralizers, more risky gas flow barrier) and two for testing (cement bond log, drilling mud).
This reminds me of a trend I keep running across in my elaborate data cleanup routines at work. By the time I notice a problem, it's a Big problem, because all of my normalization, assumption-making, and general smoothing out of information flow masks upstream corruption until the situation is fairly bad. It's as if the Robustness Principle ("be conservative in what you do, liberal in what you accept") builds up a "bank account" of safety, which is then spent out by others. Look at the situation, far less ecologically damaging, in web browsers, which historically attempted to render just about anything they received, leading to Very Bloated Browsers.
It's as if validation and safety procedures produce temporary assets, subject to eventual exploitation by someone who will come along and look at all of that Subgenius slack as a place to take advantage, cut costs, do it the easy way, or run the whole shebang a little faster. Cheapness, laziness, corruption, disregard, any one of these can short-circuit solid design.
This does not say good things about the future of the interface between human organization (business, government) and systems engineering.
posted by adipocere at 9:28 PM on June 14, 2010 [1 favorite]
gasp
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 9:31 PM on June 14, 2010
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 9:31 PM on June 14, 2010
BP has $96 billion market cap. Even if they payout dozens of billions, there are still billions.
BP is paying its bills with BP stock? That will end well.
posted by stbalbach at 9:34 PM on June 14, 2010
BP is paying its bills with BP stock? That will end well.
posted by stbalbach at 9:34 PM on June 14, 2010
A post about Obama and Joe Beese is there.
But Joe Beese is right. Which is more than can be said for those who kept arguing that BP is the only party that can fix this mess, when it is plain to see that they have been wholly and uniquely incompetent from the very start.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:34 PM on June 14, 2010 [1 favorite]
But Joe Beese is right. Which is more than can be said for those who kept arguing that BP is the only party that can fix this mess, when it is plain to see that they have been wholly and uniquely incompetent from the very start.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:34 PM on June 14, 2010 [1 favorite]
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posted by Joe Beese at 9:11 PM on June 14, 2010 [3 favorites]