Report: Deepwater Horizon rig was reportedly not equipped with a shutoff switch [View All]

[seafan]

.....because the U. S. "regulations" don't require them.


W T F



Updates, April 29, 2010:


Washington Post

.....

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said in a "Today" show interview Thursday that the company welcomes the offer of U.S. military help. He did not, however, specify what type of help might be coming.

On Wednesday, the Coast Guard said the company corralled the thickest areas of the oil slick inside fireproof booms, lighted it late in the afternoon and burned it for 28 minutes. By burning off several thousand gallons of oil, the Coast Guard said, it could limit damage to coastal areas.

The unusual strategy has been used for damaged tankers in World War II, in an oil spill off Britain and in rare cases on inland waters in Louisiana and Texas. But a burn off U.S. shores and the prospect of oil landing on the gulf coastline could become powerful symbols of the perils of offshore drilling, just as President Obama and Congress appear set to open new areas to offshore oil and gas exploration.

.....

At its current rate, the spill could surpass by next week the size of the 1969 Santa Barbara spill that helped lead to the far-reaching moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, a ban that Obama recently said he wants to modify. It would take about 260 days for this incident to exceed the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, but it took several weeks for a similar oil well blowout to be brought under control off the coast of Australia last year.

.....

A BP official said controlled burns can get rid of 50 to 99 percent of oil within a limited area, but Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who worked on controlling the damage of the Santa Barbara spill, warned that in open seas, companies have generally captured less than 10 percent of oil spilled.

"It's premature to say this is catastrophic," said Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry. "I will say that this is very serious."

(Pardon us for noticing, but this Coast Guard official has not inspired confidence in her assessments.)




ABC News:

With five times more oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico than originally estimated and the price tag for last week's explosion predicted at $8 billion, questions about BP's response and level of responsibility are mounting.
Doug Suttles, the energy company's chief operating officer, admitted some responsibility for the disaster "because we're the lease holder," but assigning blame, he said, should come after the cleanup.

.....

The new leak estimate is about 5,000 barrels a day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

.....

The Deepwater Horizon rig was reportedly not equipped with a shutoff switch that could have been used to try to close the well. Such switches are not required in the United States, but are used in other countries such as Norway and Brazil.

But Suttles said the rig was equipped with some safety devices that should have prevented this kind of spill.
"They didn't do that, we don't know why they didn't do that and ultimately we will find out," he said.

Suttles was quick to point out that another company was operating the rig at the time of the explosion, not London-based BP.

"I can say that we had equipment required by the regulations," he said. "We don't know why, when the accident occurred, and I should probably clarify, the lease we are drilling on is owed by BP and a few other companies."

.....

Oil from the area is called sweet crude, but LSU's Overton said the name is deceptive. It contains heavy compounds, called asphaltenes, that do not burn easily or evaporate, even in the warm climate off Louisiana.
"When you've got a spill like this," said Overton, "there are three things you can do. You can burn it, scoop it up out of the water, or use chemical dispersants to break it up. This oil is not particularly good with any of those three."

"With light crude," he said, "you could burn most of it -- 70 or 80 percent. With heavy crude, I don't know. I'm not optimistic."

These are the questions I want answered at this point:


1. Who are the other companies in addition to BP that own this lease?

2. Which company was operating this rig at the time of the explosion?

3. Why does the U. S. not require the use of shutoff switches to close these wells, as is required in Norway and Brazil? What year did that regulation fall by the wayside?

4. How many oil rigs off our shores are not equipped with shut off switches?



When we obtain answers to these questions, we will be a good distance down the trail of responsibility for this ecological disaster.



(This is a cross-post from this thread.)