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BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon
ctdownunder passes along this excerpt from a NY Times article about a rig worker's testimony concerning the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon well:
"The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident. ... On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to 'bypass mode.' When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded. ... Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.' 'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.' Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said."
The article doesn't mention whether it was specifically a Windows BSOD, or just an error screen that happened to be blue.
From most of what I've read, the subcontractors in question (Halliburton and Transocean) were doing the work, but BP had full control over the operations.
The flow was something like this:
Halliburton or Transocean: That's a bad idea, we don't recommend that.
BP: Do it anyway.
H/T: OK...
Although the question is at what point H/T should have said, "Hell no!"
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean.
This is a common legal and accounting ploy: subcontract everything to other companies, then you're not responsible for anything, even though you're in charge of everything.
I recently worked for a company, run incidentally by the spouse of a BP chief executive, that sells a medical product for applications that the product can not legally be sold for (in the US). Its way around this is to create three companies, one for engineering, one for distribution, and one for marketing. That way, the parent company claims that its selling nothing illegally because it distributes nothing, but only provides information. And the distributor claims that it does not target its product for the illegal applications, since it merely distributes. And the engineering company evades FDA engineering process requirements by saying that it merely distributes the product made by the engineering company, which ignores the regulations because it is ostensibly not subject to regulation since it is not the distributor, and it doesn't have a distribution operation that can be shut down. But all three companies are essentially the same company, run by the same people. The 'ethic' involved is that if you haven't yet been sued successfully, or shut down by regulators, then its all good.
At least Halliburton and Transocean have a separate existence from BP. But BP is still responsible.