Slashdot Mirror
Chevron Got North Sea Contract Despite IT Safety Crashes
DMandPenfold writes "The UK government gave Chevron the go-ahead in September to drill in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, in spite of the US oil giant's admission that its contractor's spill prediction software constantly crashed and was not a reliable predictor of how far oil could travel if an accident took place. The news comes in a week that US investigations into BP's disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill hit the buffers, after an IT contractor firm refused to hand over access to its software."
Oil and government... do mix.
The positions that control contracts like this are all controlled by tenured bureaucrats, regardless of what "face" the rest of the government is wearing this election period.
When you understand the unique chemicals and items we can synthesize out of this ancient black goop, you realize how stupid we are for simply burning it.
That's a lot of potential plastic...
People have been drilling in deep water in the North Sea for decades, with admittedly a couple of nasty accidents, but so far things have gone pretty well. And do you know what? No-one had oil spill prediction software when they started. They relied on the skill and experience of the people operating the rigs.
Bear in mind that this is the UK, where we have far, far tighter safety regulations than the US for the oil industry. We know what we're doing. Oil companies in the US clearly don't, or don't care to do it properly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha
"An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men, with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes two crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact."
"People were still getting off the platform several hours after the initial fires and explosions. The main problem was that most of the personnel who had the authority to order evacuation had been killed when the first explosion destroyed the control room. This was a consequence of the platform design, including the absence of blast walls. Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."
Why is Snark Required?
Shit is blowing up and burning around you...and you do nothing because you don't believe you have the authority to do anything (at least, anything significant)?
One hell of a corporate indoctrination seminar that had to be. I'm sorry, but if it were me, shit were blowing up, flaming out, people getting killed, it really wouldn't matter to me who had told me I couldn't do X, Y, and/or Z, if X, Y, and/or Z could at least prevent things from going from worse to OMFG (and provided I had the ability to do those things--else I'd be all 'see ya later bye'). When it's life and limb, only the guy with a uniform, badge, and gun is in charge.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
You do know that Guy Fawkes was fighting to replace one monarchy with another? That his intention was not to get rid of Parliament but rather to kill Protestant Christians and replace them with Catholic Christians and maintain the political status quo (a group of rich, landed members of Parliament serving a monarch), just change England from Protestant to Catholic rule?
I think a lot of people cheer Guy Fawkes because they think he was standing up for democracy and overthrowing tyrannical states whereas I am pretty sure the situation was that he just wanted to overthrow one religious authority with another. He wanted the same political system (monarch served by ineffectual unrepresentative MPs) just a different religious flavour.
His goal was to replace King James the first of England (and sixth of Scotland) with his nine year old daughter princess Elizabeth.