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.

Comments

Re:They didn't fix a lot of things

[Bigjeff5]

The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations.

And they didn't do that. There would likely not have been a spill if they had. BP's safety procedures are based on industry standards, which were so good that there had never been a spill in the 40 years prior to the BP spill. 40 years without incident, think about that.

The problem is the regulators in this case waved BP on through their own safety procedures, which would have prevented the problem had they been followed to the letter. Saying "Yeah yeah, that's fine, we know you'll do it" is not how you ensure a company is following their safety procedures.

I don't think the US Government is at fault for the spill, but they were very much in a position to prevent the spill from happening. Since that is what those regulators are paid to do, there should be serious consequences for failing. Possibly even criminal liability for dereliction of duty, but I doubt there is anything close to that sort of thing on the books.