Facebook left 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid off the coast of Oregon | Hacker News Reader

Facebook left 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid off the coast of Oregon

theverge.com

56 pointsguptaneil16 comments

6,500 gallons of drilling fluid sounds much scarier than a 9.54ft cubic container's worth of water and clay.

Anything to get the clicks

... already buried under 50 ft of rock.

The drilling mud used to lubricate the equipment was a clay called bentonite with small amounts of a polymer additive, according to Facebook. It’s biodegradable and nontoxic, the company tells The Verge. Bentonite on its own isn’t usually bad for the environment, John Dilles, another professor of geology at Oregon State, tells The Verge in an email. It’s sometimes used to absorb toxic metal at sites that need to be cleaned up or where waste needs to be contained, he says.

In the case of an accidental release, however, the drilling fluid components used at the site should be prevented from “entering sewers, waterways, or low areas,” according to safety data sheets published by the state. Facebook opted to leave 6,500 gallons of mud in place to “minimize the risk of leaks,” it wrote.

Facebook also left behind a drill tip, tools, and 1,100 feet of pipe. It’s not uncommon for companies to leave behind pieces of broken equipment when digging it up is more costly or could cause even more destruction. There’s a risk of losing more equipment when working through hard rock, according to Goldfinger.

Not much to discuss here.

At first I thought "Facebook doesn't lay cable do they?" but to my surprise:

>Facebook subsidiary Edge Cable Holdings

How common is it when you want to build out a cable like this, you have a subsidiary of your own do it?

I would think you could just contract that out...

...and exactly how many facebook scale projects do you run?

probably cheaper for them to use the cable company they bought likely to support crazy projects like this.

Is Facebook running cables at unusually large scale?

If by "unusually large scale" you mean for FAANG-scale companies, no. It's probably pretty much in line with other global-scale companies. Which is to say: At one point, Google owned 30% of all long-haul fiber runs in the world. I doubt they're at that number anymore, but it's not because they've sold them off. I would not be surprised if Facebook owned only a tiny fraction of that, but even if they own 1% of the world's fiber runs, it's worth them having their own specialized subsidiary.

If they'd contracted it out they wouldn't be in this mess. A cable laying company leaving drilling fluid out doesn't make headlines unless it's named Facebook.

Also I presume most cable companies know the rules / try to follow them and etc. Maybe, maybe not, but at least you'd be somewhat insulted from that.

That's... not that much, is it? I'm trying to find a good mental model for water volume. Best I got is an olympic pool contains 500,000 gallons. So, around 1% of an olympic pool.

Or around 160 oil barrels worth.

A 9.5 foot cube

How come fb is not panalized of environmental disaster or pollution..??

There doesn’t appear to be any environmental damage yet, though it’s possible this incident will produce some in the future. Also, they are being penalized: they’re being fined for violating their original permit and being required to rectify the situation, either by removing the offending materials or coming to some agreement with Oregon to leave it there in exchange for as-yet-undpecified compensation.

With environmental pollution there doesn't need to be any actual damage to sue.

They left a tiny amount of clay. It’s not some special toxic chemical clay either. It’s literally the same clay people use for face masks.

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