Eideard

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BP, running weeks behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars over budget trying to complete its troubled Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, took numerous shortcuts that contributed to the disastrous blowout and oil spill last year, federal investigators concluded in a report released Wednesday.

The central cause of the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was a failure of the cement at the base of the 18,000-foot-deep well that was supposed to contain oil and gas within the well bore. That failure led to a cascade of human and mechanical errors that allowed natural gas under tremendous pressure to shoot onto the drilling platform, causing an explosion and fire that killed 11 of the 115 crew members and caused an oil spill that took 87 days to get under control.

The two-part report, compiled by a joint task force of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and the United States Coast Guard and covering more than 500 pages, is the most comprehensive to date on the April 2010 disaster. Its findings largely mirror those of other investigations, including the inquiry by the commission named by President Obama to determine the causes of the calamity. That panel issued its findings in January.

“The loss of life at the Macondo site on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent pollution of the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 2010 were the result of poor risk management, last-minute changes to plans, failure to observe and respond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response and insufficient emergency bridge response training by companies and individuals responsible for drilling at the Macondo well and for the operation of the Deepwater Horizon,” the latest report said.

It concluded that BP, as the well’s owner, was ultimately responsible for the accident. But it also said that BP’s chief contractors, Transocean, which owned the mobile drilling rig, and Halliburton, which was responsible for the cementing operations, shared blame for many of the fatal mistakes.

RTFA. It’s about what I expected.

So it was. So it is.

Should we dress like carnival time year-round, too?

Australian Christians are furious over changes to the national curriculum that will drop the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) from text books, replacing them with neutral, non-religious language.

Under the new politically correct curriculum BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) .

Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened it to calling Christmas “the festive season”.

“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

The changes have also angered conservatives in the opposition Liberal National party.

But the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for developing the secondary level national curriculum, said the new terms were the increasingly common standard for the representation of dates.

While BC and AD, which translates to “in the year of Our Lord” are designations used to number years in the Christian Era, the terms BCE and CE are widely applied as their secular counterparts.

Although they were first devised in the 6th century, BCE and CE became popular in the late 20th century to emphasise sensitivity to non-Christians. However, they still use the Gregorian calendar on which BC and AD operate.

The little-known term BP (before present or before physics) is a time scale traditionally used by scientists to refer to the era before 1950, when carbon dating technology became more reliable.

The “political correctness” as usual lies in the dim brains of the religious professionals who have relied on their correctness. The rest of the world – as usual – has been changing.

In every country with self-important fundamentalists of one or another flavor, the blather about Judeo-Christian heritage is not only holy writ in their view – it is supposed to be requisite. As they always wish it had been. As they always wish it would be. Self-deluded.

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The blowout preventer that should have stopped the BP oil spill cold failed because of faulty design and a bent piece of pipe, a testing firm hired by the government said…in a report that appears to shift some blame for the disaster away from the oil giant and toward those who built and maintained the 300-ton safety device…

The report by the Norwegian firm Det Norske Veritas is not the final word on the Deepwater Horizon disaster last April that killed 11 workers and led to more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing from a BP well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

It helps answer one of the lingering mysteries nearly a year later: why the blowout preventer that sat at the wellhead and was supposed to prevent a spill in case of an explosion didn’t do its job.

The report cast blame on the blowout preventer’s blind shear rams, which are supposed to pinch a well shut in an emergency by shearing through the well’s drill pipe. In the BP crisis, the shear rams couldn’t do their job because the drill pipe had buckled, bowed and become stuck, according to the DNV report.

The 551-page report suggested that blowout preventers be designed or modified in such a way that the shear rams will completely cut through drill pipe regardless of the pipe’s position.

The blowout preventer was made by Cameron International and maintained by Transocean Ltd.

The report suggested that actions taken by the Transocean rig crew during its attempts to control the well around the time of the disaster may have contributed to the piece of drill pipe getting trapped.

“This is the first time in all of this that there has been a clear design flaw in the blowout preventer cited,” said Philip Johnson, a University of Alabama civil engineering professor who did not take part in the analysis. “My reaction is, ‘Holy smokes, every set of blind shear rams out there may have this problem…’”

Speculation on why the blowout preventer failed has persisted during the year since the disaster…

Johnson, the professor, said the report indicates that the blowout preventer had a design flaw that may have gone unnoticed by the entire industry, not just by Cameron.

RTFA if you feel you really need to know how each company’s lawyers attempts to pass the blame along to one or more of the other companies. Predictable.

The only item of substance – aside from laying the blame at the feet of Cameron International and Transocean – is that all the blowout preventers of this type may be potentially faulty. And that had better be changed real soon, folks.

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Britain said on Wednesday it would review its regulations covering offshore oil and gas drilling in the North Sea following the publication of a U.S. investigation into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The review will start within a month and will report later this year, Energy Minister Charles Hendry said in a statement…

A White House panel probing BP’s massive oil spill called on Tuesday for an overhaul of America’s offshore drilling regulatory system, damning it as “entirely unprepared” for disaster..

Last week a parliamentary report warned Britain was not ready to tackle a spill of the kind suffered by BP and that if one did occur, taxpayers could end up paying the clean-up costs.

Hendry said his officials would study the White House oil commission’s report to identify its implications for British deepwater drilling. He said some of the report’s recommendations were already existing practice in the North Sea but that Britain was committed to learning what it could from the findings.

“We have already acted, in the light of the emerging information from the many investigations into the disaster, to strengthen where we can what is already one of the most robust environmental and safety regimes in the world,” he said.

In particular, devices called acoustic switches required by Norwegian regulators and accepted by the Brits could have been, should have been, used on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They had been in place for previous drilling ventures in the North Sea.

The dead have no voice in our politics
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BP and its partners made a series of cost-cutting decisions that ultimately contributed to the oil spill that ravaged the Gulf of Mexico coast over the summer, the White House oil spill commission said on Wednesday. In its final report on causes of the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, the commission said BP and its collaborators on the doomed Macondo well had lacked a system to ensure their actions were safe.

“Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money),” the report said.

Created by President Barack Obama in the midst of the BP spill, the panel is the first government-sanctioned group to wrap up its probe of the causes of the drilling disaster…

Although the commission lacks authority to establish policy or punish companies, its conclusions could have a bearing on future criminal and civil cases relating to the spill…

The commission’s report ultimately blamed management failures for the April 20 explosion that ruptured the Macondo well and unleased millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf.

The commission also concluded the Gulf spill was not an isolated incident caused by “rogue industry or government officials”.

“The root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur,” the report said.

The report offers no surprises. Neither will the responses, I fear.

We wil get to watch Congress in action as both sides work at avoiding doing anything of importance.

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The Justice Department on Wednesday sued BP and eight other companies in the Gulf oil spill disaster in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.

The Obama administration’s lawsuit asks that the companies be held liable without limitation under the Oil Pollution Act for all removal costs and damages caused by the oil spill, including damages to natural resources. The lawsuit also seeks civil penalties under the Clean Water Act…

The federal lawsuit says inadequate cementing of the well contributed to the disaster. Similar charges were made by BP in its internal investigation, and by the independent presidential oil spill commission. But Halliburton Co., the contractor in charge of mixing and pumping the cement, is not named in the suit…

An explosion that killed 11 workers at BP’s Macondo well last April led to oil spewing from the company’s undersea well — more than 200 million gallons in all by the government’s estimate. BP disputes the figure…

The lawsuit alleges that safety and operating regulations were violated in the period leading up to April 20.

It says that the defendants failed to keep the Macondo well under control during that period and failed to use the best available and safest drilling technology to monitor the well’s conditions. They also failed to maintain continuous surveillance and failed to maintain equipment and material that were available and necessary to ensure the safety and protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources and the environment, the suit charges.

Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., a member of the House energy panel that is investigating the spill, acknowledged the government will have a tough fight on its hands since BP has already taken an aggressive stance regarding its liability.

“It may have taken these companies months to cap their well, but they will spend years trying to cap their financial obligations to the people of the Gulf,” Markey said. “That is why it is vital for the Obama administration to swiftly advance this legal action.”

And so it begins. I wonder if the suit will be resolved in my lifetime. Between judicial processes, laws written for lawyers, decisions promulgated to protect corporate wealth, it will be years if not decades for anything approaching justice. It’s the American way.

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Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job…

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners…

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident…

The failure of the cement set off a complex and ultimately deadly cascade of events as oil and gas exploded upward from the 18,000-foot-deep well. The blowout preventer, which sits on the ocean floor atop the well and is supposed to contain a well bore blowout, also failed…

The commission obtained from Halliburton samples of the same cement recipe used on the failed well, including the same proportion of nitrogen used as a leavening agent and a number of chemicals used to stabilize the mixture. The cement slurry was sent to a laboratory owned by Chevron for independent testing.

The mixture failed nine separate stability tests designed to reproduce conditions at the BP well and did not pass any, according to Chevron’s test results, which were returned to the commission this week.

Enough said. Now, we can look forward to years of politicians, pundits, pimps and lawyers delaying resolution of the disaster. Survivors be damned will be the rule of the day.

Arranging blue crabs for sale in New Orleans
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The US government reopened nearly 30 percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico that were closed to fishing following the BP oil spill after tests showed that seafood there is safe to eat.

The area covers 6,879 square miles off the coasts of Florida and Alabama, and is the ninth reopening of waters since the spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a statement on Friday.

At its closest point, the area is about 110 miles southeast of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in April and sank to the sea floor, hemorrhaging crude for more than 100 days.

“Each reopening is a reassuring sign that areas once impacted by oil can again support sustainable fishing activities,” said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.

“Tourists and consumers should know most Gulf waters are open for fishing and seafood from these waters is safe to eat…”

About seven percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, or 16,481 square miles (42,685 kilometers), remain closed to fishing, it added.

Of course, if you think you need more to worry about in terms of food safety — you can always warm yourself with no confidence in any testing whatsoever.

One of the benefits of being a lifetime news junkie.

With a final shot of cement, BP permanently “killed” its deep-sea well in the Gulf of Mexico that ruptured in April and unleashed the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the top U.S. spill official said on Sunday.

Some 153 days after the Macondo well ruptured, the U.S. government confirmed that BP had succeeded in drilling a relief well nearly 18,000 feet below the ocean surface and permanently sealing the well with cement.

“The Macondo 252 well is effectively dead,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who has overseen the U.S. government’s response, said in a statement. “We can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico.”

President Barack Obama…welcomed the long-awaited development as an “important milestone.”

Obama said his administration was now focused on making sure the Gulf Coast “recovers fully from this disaster. This road will not be easy, but we will continue to work closely with the people of the Gulf to rebuild their livelihoods and restore the environment that supports them,” Obama said in a statement…

The development provided an anticlimactic end to the disaster nearly five months after the well ruptured on April 20, causing an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and spewed more than 4 million barrels of oil into the sea…

The spill marred the coasts of four U.S. Gulf states, prompted a ban on new deepwater drilling and left BP’s image in tatters in the United States, home to 40 percent of the London-based oil giant’s business…

For the U.S. offshore drilling industry, which is reeling from a deepwater drilling ban imposed by the White House soon after the spill, uncertainty still abounds. Operators in the Gulf…will now have to contend with stricter federal regulations that will make it harder and more expensive to drill.

Get used to the whining. In Oil Patch states like Texas and Louisiana, Republican and Democrat politicians alike – mostly – will spend half their campaigning time towards the Fall elections complaining about the burdens borne by the “poor oil industry”. While the oil industry picks up the tab for re-electing loyal servants.

But, don’t hold your breath.

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Scientists have found a decline in oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill but have found no “dead zones” as a result, a federal task force reported.

Levels of dissolved oxygen in deep water have dropped about 20 percent below their long-term average, according to data collected from up to 60 miles from the well at the center of the worst oil spill in U.S. history. But much of that dip appears to be the result of microbes using oxygen to dissolve oil underwater, and the decline is not enough to be fatal to marine life, said…Steve Murawski, the head of the Joint Analysis Group studying the spill’s impact.

“Even the lowest observations in all of these was substantially above the threshold,” Murawski said…

Early findings from a mid-August survey led by the University of South Florida indicated oil had settled to the bottom of the Gulf further east than previously suspected and at levels toxic to marine life. At about the same time, a team from Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia released a report that estimates that 70 to 79 percent of the oil that leaked from the well “has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.”

The latest study “does not discuss the broad ecosystem consequences of hydrocarbons released into the environment,” NOAA said. But it concludes that the oil is continuing to break up and disperse underneath the surface, making the emergency of a major oxygen-poor dead zone unlikely…

BP, rig owner Transocean and well cement contractor Halliburton have blamed each other for the disaster. BP plans to release the findings of its internal investigation of the accident on Wednesday, the company said.

My money’s on Halliburton. Mostly because they have a history of screwing-up in similar disasters – like one off the coast of Australia, last year.

Now, we can return to the usual dead zone caused by pesticide runoff and other profit-based crud streaming out into the Gulf through the Mississippi delta.