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Comment by gometro33 | Hacker News Reader

As interesting of a problem as this is, I don't quite understand how a) BP and other oil companies aren't required to have solved it prior to drilling and b) after more than a month of the world watching, all they could come up with was a solution that might work.

I'm inclined to call to question the caliber of the engineer s working to resolve the leak. Maybe I'm being too harsh?

EDIT: To clarify point (a), I would have assumed that oil rigs would be required to build-in some sort of kill-switch in the event that even the smallest part of the process didn't go as planned.

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According to 60 Minutes's interview with one of the engineers, the main failsafe equipment was damaged weeks before the explosion, and BP didn't bother repairing it and in fact increased drilling speed since they were slipping behind schedule.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490509n

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35642/

I'm pretty sure they do, but the explosive (literally) nature of the situation negated all of them. A few people died in the original incident, iirc.

The one safety measure of note is the relief well. They're not required to drill them along with the primary well. I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well. Good luck with that now, BP. Hopefully we'll see a law that requires relief wells here in the US.

Of course, they're scrambling to drill a relief well now, which they predict will be done in early August.

a few = 11

> I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well.

That's from Reddit, and it looks like it wasn't exactly correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c8t30/in_canada_it...

Wasn't even close to correct.

If you read it on reddit you know it's not true. This is a general rule.

Thanks

They did build in a kill-switch, but it failed. To be fair to the engineers, this is the first time they've encountered a leak at 5000 feet below the ocean.

I appreciate how much of a challenge those conditions must be but I still don't understand why they were so unprepared to fix a leak. Couldn't a 5,000ft leak have been simulated by a computer or in a lab environment? It seems like they're just throwing untested solutions at the problem hoping something will work. With the amount of money these oil companies make there is no excuse to not be fully prepared.

It's for much the same reason you'd struggle to stop an avalanche or a hurricane.

All of the remedies they've tried are ones already tested and modelled like you mention - but at the end of the day this happens so infrequently and under such varying circumstances it's hard to cover every eventuality.

One of my friends pointed out that it's much akin to running one of the mars landers - it takes a long time to sort out what to do, send down the ROV's and give it a shot.

I'm sure they did run computer simulations. However, this is the first time they've had to physically stop the leak.

Good point. However, I think it should not have been the first time they had to stop a physical leak. They could have carried out experiments, at the same depth, with the same set of equipment. Except not under emergency conditions.

Agreed. I bet for a mere $20 million (ok, maybe $100 million, who knows) they could setup an operation to create a man-made "controlled" leak on the ocean floor at 5000 feet depth. And then they try out various methods of stopping that leak. Take notes. Fine-tune. Then they stop the test. Document everything, train people, put resources in place to be able to implement the same solution when a real leak occurs.

I don't think that's a very good excuse. It's not like as if they didn't know beforehand that conditions at 5000 feet are difficult.

I would assume that many of the safety systems already failed. It’s probably (like nearly always in such cases – unlikely events happen all the time on a planet with six billion people) a 1:100,000 freak accident. The only question is then whether that probability should be lower still.

I'm not sure what to think. While I don't know a lot about drilling oil wells specifically, my first degree is in mechanical engineering and although I've never worked as one I know that engineers prefer to oversecure everything where a failure would cause injuries, not to mention disasters on this scale. Simply put, safety always comes first on the drawing boards of engineers.

For example, simple elevators are typically designed to be able to safely carry 7-10 times their normal operating weight, including the cabin. I find it hard to believe that "many of their safety systems" just failed - I think it's a lot more likely that a series of really stupid human mistakes are behind this as well as management that is unable or unwilling to enforce (sometimes costly) safety procedures and practices.

It would in many ways be much better if this were only a failure of regulation. It’s trivial to change rules and with a catastrophe like this the incentive to do so is there. Looking back at other catastrophes (I always have to think of Chernobyl, I don’t know why) I fear much rather that your view of the causes (mistakes and laziness) might be closer to the truth. That’s not as easy to change.

Something like 1 billion! oil wells have been drilled. And about 100,000 offshore oil wells. Many many accidents have there been?

It's actually a pretty good safety record.

Sigh. I wrote billion, but meant million. :(

And when I wrote "Many many" I meant "How many". :(

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