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Comment by jared314 | Hacker News Reader

All of this is hindsight. Every piece of equipment has "problems". It is just a matter of how many failures happen at once. A bit like airliners.

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A valid point, but I would hesitate to agree with this until someone can put together the numbers of how many rigs fall under this "it's a problem, but it's not a risk so go ahead anyway"

In terms of the Horizon, the reports I'm hearing basically state that every single major safety device on the well fit this category.

While I can't speak specifically to the Horizon, almost every major disaster is the result of multiple major events chained together.

To illustrate this point I recommend watching the documentaries Mayday, Air crash investigation, and Seconds from disaster.

I have a few numbers. Almost 1 billion wells have been drilled, and about 100,000 offshore wells.

I saw you mention this yesterday. Can you cite your source for this? I find it a little hard to believe there is (or has been) one oil well drilled for every ~6 people on earth.

Thank you for challenging me, because while in my head I thought "million", I wrote down "billion", and I feel like an idiot for doing that.

No problem :-)

Which is why airline engines are stripped and rebuilt practically from scratch on a federally regulated schedule. There is a federal agency that exists solely to maintain safety in air travel, and maintenance of aircraft is very highly regulated.

Law of large numbers, sure -- there are bound to be incidents. But in industries like air travel there are checks against machines operating for 11 months in unsafe conditions.

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