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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.
For example, they KNEW that the BOP (blowout preventer) was not functioning correctly. one of the 2 control systems was out, and they had been bringing up pieces of the rubber seal in the test fluid. They were cutting corners on their cut corners. You'd think this would serve as exhibit A to silence all the "GOVERNMENT R BAD, CORPORATIONS R GOOD" nutcases in the USA today, but unfortunately it does not seem to have had that effect.
I mean, the whole rig's cost is in the hundreds of millions (Wiki says $560 mil but google link said $350 mil). The whole disaster is in the tens of billions, ain't it?
You'd think they would do anything and spare no cost to keep the fucking thing in working order and floating.
Makes the $500,000 a day lease look like pennies.
There is no evidence that BSODs contributed to this disaster. What is know to have contributed is the cheap cement job, plugged pressure sensors on the blowout preventer, possible damage to the blowout preventer during drilling (rubber fragments observed), and using seawater instead of drilling mud. None of these were automated.
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?
the regulations don't matter in this case. i'm glad you admit we need some regulations, but the real issue here is regulator==regulated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072205133.html?hpid=topnews
the lobbyists, the interior officials, the corporate assholes: all the same people
all the same smoochy same golf hole playing same bar attending backslapping crowd of assholes
that's why we had the disaster in the gulf
you can pass all the regulations you want, it doesn't matter if the ones who are supposed to be policing the industry ARE the industry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I found this episode of 60 minutes quite interesting:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n&tag=api
Apparently, BP was putting on a lot of pressure to do things quickly, since they were running behind schedule and it was costing them money.
Specifically, on the day of the accident, there was an argument between representatives of Transocean and BP on how to close the well (in preparation for later exploitation by another ship). Transocean was in favor the slower, safer procedure. BP wanted things to be done more quickly. They did it the BP way, which was the point when the accident happened. So, according to this report, there were BP emplyes on the Deepwater Horizont, and they influenced the procedures by pressuring their subcontractors.
According to the report, several other things had to happen as well in order for things to go wrong so badly, but I would not so easily let BP of the hook.
I was watching the testimony and he stated that it was a Windows NT system and was constantly giving a BSOD. They had replaced and reimaged the HDD over and over but it still kept happening. There were new servers, workstations, etc standing by and waiting to be installed, but another problem creeped in. They were waiting for another ship to figure out a way to run the old software on the new machines. Once that other ship could get it working and document it, they would then do the replacement on their end. I'm guessing it was a Windows NT 4 workstation.
A company we hired nearly destroyed the Gulf of Mexico... What's that got to do with us?
One our business partners was rating these bonds as AAA when they were worthless, and we were busy making billions passing the bonds off as good investments... What's that got to do with us?
The company we hired to dispose of this toxic waste is just dumping it in a river... What's that got to do with us?
In effect, modern capitalism is a system of mafia thugs and their hired patsies who operate technically within the law, as long as they hire an agent to do their dirty work to take the fall. Any of the real costs can be passed off to the public, either though bailouts or just ruining the commons.
Protip for all you people saying "They could have reconfigured the routers, etc." (on Childs refusal to hand over passwords) - not so much.
Why? Because Childs had either disabled serial consoles, disabled password recovery, or configured devices to -never- save configuration, only to run in RAM.
Well, shit, you say, restore the config from backups. Guess what, SF owned no backups of the configuration files, or network maps. The only configuration files Childs kept were on his personal laptop, encrypted with a key known only to him, and configured such that his laptop was the only device capable of updating configs. Network maps? Same. Sitting on his personal laptop. Nowhere else.
The guy viewed SF's network as his personal playground, and believed no-one else worthy to take the reins of it - guess what, he had no authority to decide that, and when he got nicely obstinate about it, he crossed a fairly clear line in the sand.
Stop the martyred geek defending valiantly our security creed. It bares little resemblance to reality.
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.