From Crooks and liars
Who Could Have Known... That There Were Safety Concerns With The Deepwater Rig? BP Engineers, That's Who.
Posted: 30 May 2010 07:00 AM PDT
"Who could have known?" I am so sick of that all-purpose excuse, aren't you? Maybe if we passed a law requiring the electric chair for anyone found guilty of major pollution, we could trust these companies to make safety their priority instead of profits:
WASHINGTON — Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.
The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.
The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.
On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”
The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.
Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks.
“Nobody believed there was going to be a safety issue,” Mr. Hafle told a six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials.
“All the risks had been addressed, all the concerns had been addressed, and we had a model that suggested if executed properly we would have a successful job,” he said.
Okay, here's the thing, Engineers are not Safety People. Sure they have some background in it but their primary concern is getting the job done. Sounds Harsh, but as Engineers they are under a lot of pressure to produce. What Safety People do is like being a Private eye or a undercover agent. They have to ask questions, sample, anaylize
and instruct. How do I know this, It was my life for 20 years. I had to fight Management and yes Engineers on a daily basis. So what I want to know, who was the EHS Manager responsible, at deep Horizons. What is their credentials. Most important is what they can tell of working for BP. As a large part of our World dies, we must find the ROOT CAUSE. The short answer is Money and Greed, I want to know it all and I want justice. Those 11 souls want justice, the Earth wants justice.
10 comments:
BP engineers knew all that and more. They knew that there was a much more effective blowout preventer available (It's use is required in Europe.), but they wanted to save $500,000 on a well that would have produced $billions.
The real problem was what BP executives knew. They knew that if they could get Dick Cheney alone in his office they could write the regulations themselves and strip the requirement for that blowout preventer along with most other safety requirements.
And so it all comes back to Cheney.
Obama for reasons I don't understand won't got after him. I have to wonder if he has something on Obama.
Listening to survivors it was obvious from day one they ignored malfunctions to "drill baby drill"
So sad..
Someday perhaps we can discuss the new oil...water
Just to make everything complete, somebody should trot out Condolleezza Rice, just so she can say "Nobody could have anticipated the breach of that oil rig."
Tom
That about makes it perfect..
For 20 years, a few muzzled voices have been screaming that this was bound to happen. Nobody, anywhere, wanted to hear it.
Can you hear them NOW?
It's hard, sometimes impossible, to see warning signs when you've got dollar signs in your eyes, and when your focus is forever on the corporate bottom line.
Safety and prudence frequently come at the expense of what's perceived as peak efficiency. Letting anything come at the expense of efficiency/profitability is a bad career move, unless something like that wellhead blowout occurs.
On top of that, as we've learned in one instance after another for, oh, the last eight or nine years now, justice is completely blind.
Or, as Thom Hartmann mentioned last Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder previously worked for a prestigious law firm whose clientele included the major oil companies. How likely do you suppose he is to go after executives of a -- you guessed it -- major oil company?
even in Nigeria the blowout preventer is required
not here - because profit is more important than some shrimpers.
you know the engineers are doing what they can - and you know the BP execs are doing what they are supposed to
and that is scary
Cap
When faced with the question whether of not all deep water wells should have relief wells, the stinking officials scoffed and said it will never happen sighting cost.
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