BTTT
Where are the news stories?
About Those Oil Rig S.W.A.T. [S.W.O.T.] Teams…
http://www.redstate.com/vladimir/2010/05/23/about-those-oil-rig-swat-teams/
The ‘cozy relationship’ meme is a lie and a slur on the reputations of some good people - both in government and in the private sector.
Posted by Vladimir
Sunday, May 23rd at 10:29AM EDT
7 Comments
With great fanfare, President Obama dispatched Interior Department “S.W.A.T Teams” to all 29 active deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Their charge:
Perform a thorough, complete drilling inspection of each deepwater rig.
Key on the BOP [blowout preventer] test time frame, leaks and resolution, discrepancies, and repairs.
Make sure well control drills were performed as required by 30 CFR 250.462. What’s that? You missed the results?
Well, you came to the right place.
From a May 12 press release from the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/548791/
MMS has completed its inspection of deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and no major violations were found. … The inspections of deepwater drilling rigs found Incidents of Non-Compliance (INC) on two rigs. Those violations were corrected and no other violations were found. To view the inspection report, click here. http://www.doi.gov/deepwaterhorizon/upload/05-11-10-MMS-Deepwater-Horizon-Rig-Inspection-Report.pdf
[emphasis added]
I’ll recap to save you the trouble.
Twenty-nine rigs were inspected. Twenty-seven were INC-free. Evidence of the “cozy relationship”? No, I imagine that these inspectors went loaded for bear.
Two rigs received a total of four INCs; one of them received three.
The rig with one INC was the Development Driller II, one of the Transocean rigs drilling a relief well for BP at MC 252. Paperwork revealed that proper blowout preventer testing procedure was not followed. BOPs are tested every 14 days, and the tests should alternate between the main and the backup activation panel. DD II function tested the backup panel, but conducted the pressure test from the main twice in a row.
Not a trivial violation, but not one that should be ignored, especially under the circumstances. It’s what operators call a “good INC”.
The other rig:
The Transocean Nautilus working for Shell, received three Incidents of Non-Compliance:
A warning INC for having some flammable material [I heard it was a paper coffee cup. - ed.] in the scrap metal bin of the safe welding area. Corrective Action Taken: the material was removed at the time of the inspection.
A warning INC for having a 6-inch x 12-inch hole [in the deck grating, a step hazard] by the mud pump suction pipe. Corrective Action Taken: additional grating was place over the hole.
A warning INC for having expired eye wash bottles. Corrective Action Taken: the eye wash bottles were replaced.
Few large-scale industrial operations could withstand the level of highly-charged scrutiny involved in these inspections and come away with such a clean bill of health.
Where are the news stories?
Palin accuses Obama of being in bed with big oil
AFP on Yahoo ^ | 5/23/10 | Andrew Gully
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100523/ts_alt_afp/usoilpollutionenvironmentpalinobama
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Right-wing darling Sarah Palin accused US President Barack Obama on Sunday of leading a lax response to the Gulf of Mexico spill because he is too close to the big oil companies.
The former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, who champions off-shore drilling, criticized the media for not drawing the link between Obama and big oil and said if this spill had happened under former Republican president George W. Bush the scrutiny would have been far tougher.
“I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to president Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration,” she told Fox News Sunday.
More than 3.5 million dollars has been given to candidates by BP over the last 20 years, with the largest single donation, 77,051 dollars, going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Palin suggested this close relationship explained why Obama was, “taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, and sank two days later. Ever since, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil, perhaps millions, have been spewing each day into the sea.
The resulting slick, now the size of a small country, threatens to leave Louisiana’s fishing and coastal tourism industries in tatters, ruin pristine nature reserves, and cause decades of harm to the ecology of fragile marshes that are a haven for rare wildlife and migratory birds.
The Obama administration has been forced to defend its response to the disaster as some Republicans have sought to portray it as their Katrina, an allusion to president Bush’s mishandling of the response to the 2005 hurricane that devastated Louisiana.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs mocked Palin’s suggestions that Obama was somehow in bed with big oil because of 2008 presidential campaign contributions.
“Sarah Palin was involved in that election, but I don’t think, apparently, was paying a whole lot of attention,” Gibbs said.
“I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally. We proposed a windfall profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge for gasoline.
“My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country.”
However, Gibbs did make it clear that reforms must be carried out to make sure that the incestuous relationship between oil firms and government regulators highlighted by the current disaster ended once and for all.
“BP will pay for every bit of this,” he said. “We have to figure out and make sure that the relationship that is had with government and oil companies is not a cozy relationship as the president said.
Gibbs also said there was no comparison with Katrina.
“If you look back at what happened in Katrina, the government wasn’t there to respond to what was happening. That quite frankly was the problem.
“I think the difference in this case is we were there immediately. We have been there ever since.”
Palin, who quit the Alaska governorship after serving less than half of one term, famously promoted the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!” that rallied supporters while dismissing possible environmental impact of off-shore drilling.
Her detractors switched the line to “Spill, baby, spill!”
Excerpt of the above was posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 5:01:37 PM by NormsRevenge here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519595/posts
<>
Comment:
“I bet he has an army of political hacks now trying to figure out how to get these oil companies to pay for his new program so he can permanently change the shape of the US” ~ plain talk
bttt
BP was ALREADY doing it for Obama because they were told that “the future” was in “carbon trading” schemes and “green energy” alternatives.
Read on:
Blame BP [Chris Horner] 05/02/2010
I hope to elaborate later I’m wrapping up two weeks on the road promoting Power Grab but it seems to me the issue with the recent oil-platform explosion and subsequent leak issue is BP, not offshore drilling.
Offshore drilling has a very good track record in the past few decades and especially recently; BP has a terrible one. The Deepwater Horizon incident is consistent with only one of those track records.
Like Enron and indeed, in close cooperation with Enron on the “global warming” rent-seeking BP got distracted from its core businesses and spent its energies getting into solar ventures and carbon-trading schemes, and otherwise losing the plot of an energy company. The absurd re-branding to “Beyond Petroleum” (really? your balance sheet doesn’t quite agree) speaks volumes.
They thereby also lost focus on these operations and implicitly told their best people that the future did not lie there.
And for a decade we have seen BP facilities blowing up with human and environmental consequences all over the place.
The newsiness of this spill is testimony to its aberrant nature. The issue today isn’t offshore drilling so much as it is the company that, in violation of all laws of probability, continues to be involved in a preponderance of its various industries’ high-profile workplace tragedies.
More: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=106#106
41 posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 7:09:31 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2519595/posts?page=41#41