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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."
I think some people need to spend time in jail if this is proven. A lot of time.
Because boycotting BP hurts people that weren't involved in any decision making and doesn't really hurt the ones responsible.
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.
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
Probably you just haven't looked. There has been a massive boycott here in Florida: one, two, three. BTW -- If you're going to boycott BP, you need to boycott all of BP's brands, too.
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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
Read radical news here
they do have a pretty well oiled Lobby and PR machine.
Almost as well oiled as the Mexican Gulf!
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
BP gas stations are independently owned and operated... and they don't necessarily sell BP gas. Furthermore, even if every BP station were to shut down tomorrow, BP would still be able to sell their gas to every other gas station, none of which are locked into buying their gas from a single provider.
In short, boycotting BP won't do anything but hurt locally owned gas stations that had nothing to do with the spill.
We're sorry.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
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!
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?
I'd say BP hurt it's employees. But the real reason there are no boycott campaigns is that people don't make big moral decisions when the SUV is nearing E. Some dont care, others probably think all oil companies are likely as bad, but I'd guess the majority just want a tank of gas.
meep
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.
How does one boycott BP? Some markets have no alternatives. Me, I've never seen a BP-branded fueling station in my life, but I've probably burned lots of fuel that went through BP's hands. The oil marketplace has a gordian interchange of resources that defy any attempt of unravelling what came from where. If you really want to boycott BP oil,,you have to swear off oil entirely.
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.
A "responsible company"? In the oil business?
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.
All of your local gas stations get their gas from the same place. It doesn't matter what brand the label on the pump says.
Yes, the Nazis who didn't commit war crimes are generally not prosecuted.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Unfortunately, BP gas stations are mostly franchises. I believe that they pay an annual fee to use the brand name. BP still gets their money unless the gas station goes bankrupt. Because there isn't much excess refining capacity in the US, BP could still sell their gas to the other stations. A boycott would hurt BP's public image, but wouldn't cost them much money.
Actually, FWIW, here in Alabama, a lot of people *have* been boycotting BP. A number of gas stations here in Birmingham have changed from BP to some other brand because their business dropped off precipitously after the spill. (Anecdotal evidence alert, no hard evidence, just what I've noticed while driving around.)
As for boycotting BP ... well, a lot of people figure the buck had to stop somewhere. To me, it's indisputable that BP made some terrible decisions. The fact that (sadly) they had already determined that the well wasn't economically viable, and BP was planning just to cap it and leave it for the time being, is irrelevant.
I'm a good free market conservative, but I do believe in responsible behavior on the part of those companies that enjoy the benefits of it. If someone were to open a large manufacturing plant in Central Alabama, we'd welcome the jobs . .. .. but we would NOT welcome them cutting corners and poisoning the streams, for example. Stereotypes aside, we ain't ENTIRELY stupid here. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
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.
Franchises play an incredibly minor part in BP's revenue. It is nearly impossible for consumers to damage a company whose product is a commodity, short of organizing a boycott of that commodity in its entirety (and hence, every other company who produces/markets that commodity).
While I'm not saying a gasoline boycott is out of the question, a consumer-lead campaign to financially punish BP would have to be far larger in scope than BP itself. There are, of course, other BP subsidiaries that produce non-commodity products. I doubt they'd notice much of a boycott there though...
BP has a consumer solar division, sells LPG directly to individuals, has a consumer lubricants division, and produces a vast array of petrochemical products for business use (and in quantities far smaller than "supertanker").
Not that I believe a boycott will do much to a company that derives their income primarily from producing a product that is traded as a commodity, but the above comment was too asinine to pass up.
http://www.bp.com/productsservices.do?categoryId=37&contentId=2007985
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.