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BP Gulf of Mexico Rig Lacked Alarm Systems

Posted by Soulskill on from the eh-we'll-keep-an-eye-on-it dept.

DMandPenfold writes "BP's monitoring IT systems on the failed Deepwater Horizon oil rig relied too heavily on engineers following complex data for long periods of time, instead of providing automatic warning alerts. That is a key verdict of the Oil Spill Commission, the authority tasked by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico disaster."

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As opposed to... by Gruturo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Three Mile Island, where the complaint was that there were too many alarms going off.

    Yeah, surprisingly alarms have to be neither missing nor useless (by being irrelevant, hard to understand, going off for the wrong reasons, presenting wrong scenario, not correlating causes etc etc etc).

    Who'd have thunk it.

    --

    Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
  2. Re:As opposed to... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Truly amazing, indeed. Too lazy to look it up, but earlier reports had shown that Transocean (the rig owners, not BP like the stupid article mentions) had shut down many automatic warning systems because of too many false positives.

    It's not like we've never seen this sort of thing before ...

    "You are about to do something."

    CANCEL, or ALLOW?

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  3. Re:how much did that cost by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't even want to know how much tax payer money was pissed away for that "key verdict" - having worked with quite a few monitoring and alarm systems for years I can tell you that most of the time "automatic alarms" get ignored and in fact can cause worse problems when an actual real alarm does occur because of how the operators tune them out - seems like they completely missed the mark on this - the real problem is most likely where you would expect it, the people running the system - human error I am sure !

    You don't even have to ignore the alarm that isn't there. But I don't think the "alert" that we're discussing is the big klaxon/flashing sign reading "OIL LEAK," or an oil pressure light with electrical tape over it. What the article indicates was missing was an automatic method of indicating that a failure was imminent. As far as the cost of determining this: learning from mistakes can be expensive. Not learning from mistakes is likely even more so.

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    I am not a crackpot.