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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."
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
Uh...typical ignorant response. You do know that BP doesn't actually make anything that you can buy? Unless you're in the business of buying supertanker loads, of course.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
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'd be curious to know how reliable this software is. In other words, was this software new relatively untested and highly-experiemental; or was it time-tested stuff that had proved it's worth. The article hint's at the former, but doesn't really say.
It's an important question, because on every dangerous job, there is always at least one person saying its too dangerous to proceed. If you always listen to these people then you'd never accomplish anything. The trick is to know when to stop listening and take a risk. So, just because some software model or some inspector says its too dangerous does not automatically mean you can't continue.
I'm not defending BP. I'm only asking questions.
Your two biggest examples are terrible.
First, you should study history, because you are talking about things you obviously don't understand. Communism did not arise out of factory workers revolting, as Marx predicted. Factory workers fought for, and won, the health and safety protections they enjoy today, but went no further. Communism arose entirely out of agrarian societies. Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Korea... none of these countries were industrialized when they adopted Communism. And famously Communist industrialization killed millions. Tens of millions. Possibly into the hundreds of millions. Capitalist robber barons looked like fucking Santa Claus, in comparison to Stalin and Mao. But yeah, the evils of free market industrialization are obvious when you compare North and South Korea today.
Second, calling Bhopal a "free market" disaster also shows an enormous ignorance of history. India was a very socialist country (it still is, to some extent), and Bhopal was 50% owned by the Indian government, and 50% controlled by UCIL, a UCC subsidiary, but not a directly controlled one. The disaster was ultimately triggered by human error, but the deeper cause was (a) UCIL was forced to replace the automated safety systems in the original design with manual ones, so that the plant would hire more local workers, and (b) UCIL was required to source many of the plant's components from Indian firms, and those parts were ultimately substandard and failed far before their design lifes. Does UCC bear some blame for Bhopal? Some. Does UCIL bear blame? Absolutely. But the Indian government deserves most of it. They applied the standard Indian socialist principle of "business' primary purpose it to provide jobs for locals," and in consequence forced a fundamentally unsafe situation.
Or you could wallow in ignorance and enjoy the feeling of self-righteousness you get when you hate on the "free market."
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+
Wow, you accuse someone else of wallowing in ignorance, yet you provide no actual information, just your version of the timeline. And your facts are suspect. The Indian government did not own 50% of UCIL. Indian investors did (including the Indian government). That's not the same thing.
The deeper cause of the disaster, as has been found again and again, was total lack of concern for safety in favor of saving costs. For crying out loud, they fined 70% of their workers for following proper safety procedures before the accident. They refused to replace broken parts or train their workers. You can spin and make up excuses all you like, but there's a huge responsibility there. More than "some."
By the way, the courts also disagree with you on blame and what happened. So while your spirited defense of UCC is touching, it rings hollow.
Incidentally, Stalin and Mao: not really communists. The things that lead them to kill so many people (and Hitler, whom you conveniently neglect, probably because he was notoriously anti-communist) was their total control of their governments and lack of checks and balances on their powers. This is exactly what makes the robber barons so dangerous: lack of accountability. BP and Halliburton have enough money and enough government officials in their pockets that you can bet that they'll never really pay the price for their own greed. You rabid free-marketers never seem to get that that the problems are basically exactly the same. You can't see the issue for what it is over your own ideology. (Which, to be fair, a lot of anti-capitalists also can't get over theirs, either. But that doesn't absolve you.)
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.