“My challenge to you, the average citizen, is simply to care. Believe me, I’d love to hang up my tweetin’ trousers sometimes. I’ve already posted 440 tweets about bp and I’m ready to write about other things, but we can’t let BP slide. We have to keep shining a light on them. Look at the way they’ve acted thus far! Do you think they’re going to change now that the well is capped? They are going to keep trying to play it down, shirk their responsibilities and in the meantime, they’re going to pursue bigger and potentially more dangerous drilling operations. We have to pay attention, we have to care or this could happen again.”
From a comment on The Oil Drum:
Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed…..and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.
“They have about a month before they declare Chapter 11. They’re going to run out of cash from lawsuits, cleanup and other expenses. One really smart thing that Obama did was about three weeks ago he forced BP CEO Tony Hayward to put in writing that BP would pay for every dollar of the cleanup. But there isn’t enough money in the world to clean up the Gulf of Mexico. Once BP realizes the extent of this my guess is that they’ll panic and go into Chapter 11.”
“The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the ‘Library of Congress’ to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One ‘Exxon Valdez’ is reasonable shorthand for ‘enough oil to fuck shit up.’”
BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.
SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.
SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the “company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.
6 hours later, the platform explodes.
Via @felixsalmon and Thom Hartmann.
And here’s the video of the 70,000 barrel per day leak, via The Sietch
