The Obama Spin Machine is hard at work.
Instead of 21, BP decided to use just six. Halliburton warned that would mean a well with “a severe gas flow problem.”
I’ll bet there are Cheney bashers all over the country who just burst into tears.
BO won’t mention the part about Halliburton.
Turns out it’s better to do it right than to do it on time, and on budget.
Someone might ask how Obama’s inspectors missed all these safety violations.
ping
Words that will haunt them
There is indication that there were disputes over procedures on the Deepwater Horizon hours before the explosion. The disagreement was between employees of rig operator Transocean Ltd. and oil giant BP PLC. Deepwater Horizon drilling crews had fought a multitude of troubles from this well for months. One thing was the alarming gas pressures coming out of this well.
Key representatives from both companies had a heated argument in an 11 a.m. meeting on April 20th, less than 11 hours before the platform exploded. It ultimately ended with a BP official deciding to remove heavy drilling fluid from the well and replacing it with lighter-weight sea water that was unable to prevent gas from surging to the surface and exploding. This was the fatal mistake that set the chain of events to follow.
Employees and experts testified that in the hours before the explosion, they witnessed a power struggle over the lighter sea water decision. It was typically the kind of argument among the different parties that lease and run complicated offshore drilling operations, but this time it had deadly consequences.
One employee who worked for the rig owner, Transocean, was so mad after the fight he warned they’d be relying on the rig’s blowout preventer if they proceeded the way BP wanted.
“He pretty much grumbled, ‘Well, I guess that’s what we have those pinchers for,’” the rig’s chief mechanic, Doug Brown, said of Jimmy Harrell, the top Transocean official on the rig. “Pinchers” was likely Harrell’s reference to the shear rams in the blowout preventers, the final means of stopping an explosion.
So, were the guys that made this decision killed in the explosion, or are they around to face the consequences?
Here is a much expanded synopsis of the well from the first attempt in Oct. 09 until the explosion on Apr. 20, 2010.
A few excerpts:
BP started working on the well in October, using a different rig. After three weeks natural gas got into the well, called a "kick." That's not uncommon. But two weeks later a hurricane damaged the rig and it had to be towed to port for repairs.
BP started again in January, this time with Transocean's Deepwater Horizon, a warhorse rig that had worked for BP for years. BP filed a new drilling permit with federal regulators ......
March 8, 2010.......
That day, workers discovered that gas was seeping into the well, according to drilling reports from the rig reviewed by the Journal. Workers lowered a measuring device to determine what was happening, but when they tried to pull it back up, it wouldn't budge. Engineers eventually told them to plug the last 2,000 feet of the then-13,000-foot hole with cement and continue the well by drilling off in a different direction.......
Other problems arose. The rock was so brittle drilling mud cracked it open and escaped. One person familiar with the matter estimates BP lost at least $15 million worth of the fluid......
end excerpts.....
So I guess Obama is going to give back all the BP money he took. With interest.
ha.
Fragments of info are worth less than crap without the complete picture.