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BP Ignored Safety Modeling Software To Save Time
DMandPenfold writes "BP ignored the advice of safety modeling software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide (PDF) prepared by US investigators. The slide in question briefly appeared on the Oil Spill Commission's website in error, but was quickly retracted. Advanced cement modeling software, provided by BP's cement contractor Halliburton, had highlighted serious stability concerns with the well."
Why don't I see any BP boycott campaigns anywhere?
Simply boycott BP. If enough people do it, they will be bought by a responsible company.
All of this is not really relevant to the accident other than to indicate a culture as it wasn't the cement that failed, it was the blowback valve. That is like saying that because Ford installed faulty oil filters, they are responsible for the Firestone tires on their explorers.
Having said that however, this SHOULD be used as an example of a culture of stupidity within the company as it is BP's responsibility to ensure that all safety and engineering standards are followed.
I think some people need to spend time in jail if this is proven. A lot of time.
What? Are you implying that politicians let campaign donations color their decision making? Why I would never have dreamed of that happening!
Quality concerns should never be ignored with projects of this scale. Information like this should result in a shutdown of the project until the issue is addressed.
If you are developing a web site, you can get away with defects in quality because of the nature of the web and precompiled code. To correct an issue, all you have to do is deploy code that corrects the problem. There is no impact outside the site itself. If you want to reduce the possibility of things like this happening, you introduce more advanced testing procedures, beta tests with limited numbers of users, and other methods to reduce the potential for a disruption in services.
If you are building an oil rig, the potential risk of disaster has an impact that goes far beyond the capital involved in building the rig itself, and being faithful to the results of quality assessments is essential to avoiding catastrophes like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Any action failing to meet high quality standards should be considered criminal, as the outcome will have a harm on people / environment / wildlife around the rig.
Reading this powerpoint just makes me angry. BP has been lobbying Congress for a while now to reduce potential penalties they may have to pay, and their marketing arm has been doing a lot of damage control in the public arena. It is very important to hold these people accountable for their actions, since this is the way these people do business.
A dupe that links to the original slashdot post? Why, slashdot? Why?
This seriousely does not suprise me at all. In a recent issue of Popular Mechanics magazine (October 2010 issue) they had an excellent article on just how bad BP blew it in the gulf of mexico. Everything from turning off and disabling safety systems and alarms, to rushing the drilling process, using wrong materials, ignoring advice and warnings from others that they were going to fast and ignoring safety, and more.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
There's nothing in TFS (except the existance of that slide) that we didn't already know from the earlier /. story. As I understand it, earlier this month, the commission seemed not believe that BP et al. necessarily cut corners to save money. Now they seem to be more sure that risky decisions were made (mostly on shore) to save money. The slide was allegedly retracted for technical reasons, but should be part of the commission's final report.
and ignored any kind of safety precautions, even at the cost of an entire ecosystem .....
....
impossible. that cannot have happened.... because, uncle greenspan said that, corporations could regulate themselves. im agape with surprise.... surely, this must be a one-time incident
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Given that BP and Haliburton are in dispute about exactly who was responsible for the leak, I would say that it isn't surprising that Haliburton also 'leaked' the slide.
We're sorry.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Some at BP needs to do Pound-me-in-the-ass prison time.
Honestly, the only competent leader for the US at this point would have to be a dictator. The Office of the Presidency is just too weak.
Should Bureaucrats be fired? Yes.
Are they? Very rarely.
Should Corporate executives be punished? Yes.
Are they? Very rarely.
I'd rather follow one strong, honest dictator than any number of weak, crooked politicians.
I don't get it. Why would they pound YOU in the ass?
the software kept throwing blue sheens of death, then when someone said "Open source", they misunderstood.
rewriting history since 2109
Maybe he's a fan.
They choose to work for bastards, they get what they deserve.
Seriously, do we overlook what Nazis did in WWII just because they werent the ones doing the gassing?
Some at BP needs to do Pound-me-in-the-ass prison time.
The fact that you and many others condone prison justice in the form of the very acts that cause people to go to prison is a brilliant example of how sad our society has become.
I'm sure that BP did cut a lot of corners that they really should not have, and that this lead to the Deepwater Horizon accident.
On the other hand however there will always be 'more that could have been done' in absolutely every situation, by anybody. There's a fine line between taking into account genuine concerns, and listening to every crank or someone with something to sell peddling expensive solutions to minor risks. Nothing is ever entirely risk-free, and there will ALWAYS be more tests, more safely equipment, more drills etc etc that could have been implemented.
In summary, there's a difference between saying, for example in the event of a car wreck "the driver shouldn't have been drinking" (a genuine concern) and "the driver should have taken weekly driving exams, fitted 2ft of foam rubber to the front of his car, and drove everywhere at 10mph max" (the 'more' that could doubtless have been done). I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's worth bearing in mind.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
I find it fascinating that people were willing to blame Halliburton (and Dick Cheney who hasn't been its CEO for 10 years) when they had computer modeling software for the cement that pointed out problems. I wonder if these same people are going to dismiss this fact as junk science while blindly accepting computer models of weather forecasts for the next 100 years all because they prefer one flavor of politics over another.
Outside of the $20 billion dollar escrow account that BP established after meeting with Obama, and the over $500 million that BP has so far paid for cleanup costs, what other aspects of financial responsibility in this incident did you have in mind? The federal government is in court trying to lift the normal $75 million statutory limit on fines for oil spills. The Obama administration is contending that the cap cap is inapplicable in this case. Obama's 2010 campaign received $71, 000 dollars from BP employees, 0.01% of the total contributions that the campaign received, I don't think his presidential campaign received any corporate PAC money from BP. Despite your sarcasm about hope and change, I'm not convinced that $71,000 in individual campaign contributions to a $710 million dollar campaign buys much influence post election.
Yes, the Nazis who didn't commit war crimes are generally not prosecuted.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
And the ones who did commit these war crimes generally aren't (weren't) prosecuted either, only some notable higher-ups.
In the case of Rudolf Hess, he was found during the Nuremberg Trials to have not committed any war crime, nor crimes against humanity, and he was still sentenced to life in prison, in solitary confinement for his involvement.
Halliburton is everyone's favorite whipping boy and the media has tried to place some blame on them, but they're really coming off looking like some of the good guys in this story. From all the coverage, it sounds like the entire thing was the result of several very poor decisions made by the BP manager of the platform. The scary thing is, it really didn't sound like they were doing all that much differently than how all the other oil rigs are run. It kind of sounds to me like this hasn't happened before now (at least not at this scale) out of pure luck.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Your answer is overly simplistic and ignores history. If East Germany hadn't been set up as a Soviet puppet state, the allies might well have gone further, but there was a Cold War, and an rei-ndustrialized, reinvigorated West Germany was prioritized over imprisoning 90,000 Nazis and restricting the work of 1.7 million others. wikipedia's entry on Denazification
Of course, the Nazi party was disbanded, and what assets it had were used for other purposes. Perhaps BP should suffer the same fate. Stockholders would lose money, of course, but their losses would be limited to what they put in. Officers could be prosecuted and fined, as they bear personal responsibility.
I find it interesting that some people take this act (ignoring software) to be more condemning than ignoring the common sense every one of us would have had if we had been out there. You don't need a computer to tell you that it's flat dumb to start pulling out your extra-dense drilling mud while you're still in the midst of drilling down through rock that's burping flammable gas that's only being held down by said mud.
To me this sounds something like "Pilot of doomed flight ignored weather report just before intentionally flying plane straight into mountain." These guys violated established procedures and safety protocol on purpose in a failed attempt to get to the next drilling site a little bit sooner. Duh they ignored the computer model, and common sense, and every other indication that what they were doing was a really bad idea.
And yet, the Nuremberg Trials considered four different kinds of crimes.
1. Participation in a common plan of conspiracy for the accomplishment of crimes agains peace.
2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
3. War crimes
4. Crimes against Humanity.
Similarly, the Tokyo Trials grouped the charges into three classes
A Crimes against Peace.
B Crimes against the laws of war
C Crimes against Humanity.
Thus, if you are so disposed as to regard the waging of aggressive wars as an honorable pursuit, the phrase "Class A War Criminal" generally implies more than was meant by the original charges. However, such notorious inhumanities as the "Rape of Nanking", the "Comfort Women", the "Bataan Death March" and the actions of "Unit 731" (to name a few, at random), were made possible by the conspiracy to wage aggressive war.
The conversation will soon turn to alternative energy. I just say this documentary which I think will be interesting to others:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/158468/fuel?c=News-and-Information/Documentary-and-Biography
Some tidbits:
1) Model Ts ran on ethanol well into prohibition. Ford had designed it so farmers could grow their own fuel. A major backer of prohibition was J. P. Morgan head of Standard Oil. Prohibition killed the alchohol powered model Ts.
2) The Deisel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil. Rudolf Deisel died under mysterious circumstances
3) The Carter Administration began an ambitious energy research program and reduced the US's dependecy on foreign oil by 25%
In addition I will say the hydrogen economy is a scam. Most hydrogen is produced using hydrocarbon fractionation.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
BP has a long record of avarice compounding arrogance compounding ignorance, and setting up pawns like (sub)contractors for the fall.
There's a fine line between taking into account genuine concerns, and listening to every crank or someone with something to sell peddling expensive solutions to minor risks. Nothing is ever entirely risk-free, and there will ALWAYS be more tests[...]
Yeah, funny how many folks here are up in arms about TSA sticking their hands in people's pants to coerce them into using the x-ray machines because they feel the cost isn't worth the difference in safety but they want the BP decision makers roasted alive (or worse) for stopping short of deploying every last iota of safety protection.
You mean we should start comparing Apples and Oranges just because they're fruit?
It's because there's the assumption that people in prison are the types that commit those kinds of acts. So they should be grouped with their own. I see no reason that it's "sad". Hell, Hammurabi's first code of laws included an eye for an eye. And we're not calling for the death penalty for the executives that caused the deaths of 11 workers, possibly caused cancer in thousands of cleanup volunteers and did incalculable damage to the gulf environment and fishery businesses. I think it's a relatively tame response.
Don't kid yourself. IF (and it's a big if) any BP execs go to prison, it won't be the supermax, it'll be the one that's more like a suburban elementary school with uniforms. Decent but not great food, a strict rule not to wander past that hedge, clean environment, free health care, gym membership and a nice TV, etc.
They don't send poor people who rob the liquor store there because they don't want to encourage robbing the liquor store.
If you really want to punish the execs, make them live like the people they harmed (and live with the harm they caused). They'll find that far worse than the minimum security prison.
Apparently your reading comprehension is poor: Joe the Dragon isn't condoning prison justice, he wants some at BP to pound *him* in the ass in a prison.
Hell, Hammurabi's first code of laws included an eye for an eye.
The year is 2010 AD, not the mid-1700s BC. Hammurabi's laws also included such gems as --
The precursor to witch trials: If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.
Promoted eavesdropping: If conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.
And also called for incredibly harsh punishments for children: If a son of a paramour or a prostitute say to his adoptive father or mother: "You are not my father, or my mother," his tongue shall be cut off.
Source. I will admit though, that some of the laws appear to be both well-reasoned and well-thought.
So they should be grouped with their own.
What you say here would be correct if we segregated murderers with murderers, rapists with rapists, thieves with thieves, etc. . . This however, is not the case. The line of thinking is much more akin to a thought of "throw them to the wolves."
And we're not calling for the death penalty for the executives that caused the deaths of 11 workers. . .
Who says some people aren't? Also, there are varying penalties for manslaughter and homicide based on the intent.
. . .possibly caused cancer in thousands of cleanup volunteers. . .
Improper protection and unmitigated exposure is what would cause cancer to cleanup crews, not the executives.
. . .and did incalculable damage to the gulf environment and fishery businesses.
I don't know what a fair penalty would be in this case. Monetary compensation of those whose businesses were hurt would be a start. This is being carried out. It's also akin to the eye-for-an-eye law in Hammurabi's code that you like, no?
I think it's a relatively tame response.
And I think it's a relatively barbaric response.
And frankly people shop at Walmart when they're looking for something cheap to fulfil a purpose.
and that cheapness, comes from the act of walmart killing local businesses first by selling with zero profit margins, and then exploiting you in an environment where there is no competition.
a cheapness which is dearly bought.
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Well, let's see, replace the income of the fishermen, the lost income of Gulf coast resorts, subsidize the cost of seafood for all since it got more expensive due to reduced fishing, etc.
Then, of course there's completing the cleanup of what can be cleaned up. We don't have the technology to extract all that oil from the water (yes, oil naturally seeps into the water, but the oil from the blowout is a significant increase in that amount). That will just about cover the actual damages.
Of course, the standard for willful or negligent acts is treble damages, so we should all expect a nice check for that (no, I'm not holding my breath).
On to the criminal aspects. BP execs owe us a perp walk, embarrassing trial, followed by a lifetime of menial jobs and living next to a crack house since ex-cons are not terribly employable.
That's a stupid outlook. Let's punish them all, because they all worked for this evil company, and are therefore evil themselves.
OR... they needed money, and hey, here's a company hiring someone for data entry or stock-boy or whatever. Ima go work there so I don't starve to death. They don't know nor have ever heard of the "evil" of the company.
Ponder this. Say the president of the company YOU work for was suddenly discovered to have been using company money to fund dogfighting. Long story short, company reputation severely damaged, president arrested, etc, etc. Should YOU be put in prison for inadvertantly assisting in dogfighting?
>but was quickly retracted
If there is proof that there was a message about the security of the well's platform, and that it was removed, and the government can pin it on them, i believe it might be the end for them, that is totally disregarding the lives of all the marine animals, and all the local residents along the shoreline that they just stomped on, to make a few more bucks, they should be closed down if the proof sticks.