Eideard

An unexploded Second World War bomb is leading to the evacuation of nearly half of the population of the German town of Koblenz.

The 1,800 kilogram bomb was discovered lying in the River Rhine after falling water levels revealed its resting place.

Some 45,000 of the 106,000-strong population will be cleared from an evacuation zone 1.8 kilometres in radius in the biggest post-war evacuation in Koblenz’s history.

Local authorities will provide temporary accommodation in schools outside the danger zone for residents unable to stay with friends or family, and free shuttle buses are being laid on to transport the thousands of people forced to leave.

On Monday two Koblenz hospitals began preparing to move 200 patients and started to cancel operations. Koblenz railway station will shut down, hotels have been told to close, and the inmates of a local jail will also have to pack their bags “The extensive measures are necessary,” said Norbert Gras, a spokesman for the local fire brigade. “It’s true we are dealing with a very large bomb.”

Although discoveries of unexploded ordinance from the massive Allied aerial assault on the Nazi Reich are frequent in Germany, the Rhine bomb poses a particular challenge for explosive experts.

The bomb lies in 40 centimetres of water with parts of it buried in mud, making it difficult to access the detonation fuse. The presence of a smaller American bomb close by has also complicated matters, and set back the operation to defuse the RAF bomb till the weekend…

The low water levels in the Rhine brought on by an autumnal drought have led to a spate of discoveries of unexploded munitions left over from the war. On Sunday 1,000 people in the Rhine town of Neuwied had to leave their homes as experts defused a 500 kilogram American bomb on the banks of the river.

The gift that keeps on giving. Though this bomb was dropped on a part of the world containing the remnants of the Fascist onslaught that threatened the whole world. Our part of comparable dangers presented to civilians from the dispersion of landmines and cluster munitions – during “peacetime” – is a lot less tolerable.

An explosive south Fulton County fire was apparently started last month by a man trying to burn his ex-girlfriend’s body…Sarone Bridges perished in the ensuing blaze, but not immediately after the blast that started the quick-burning fire, Fulton County Fire Chief Larry Few said.

“Based on how his body was positioned, I think (the) explosion took its toll on him,” Few said. “The concussion from the blast could have made him disoriented where he fell, and he received the thermal burns afterwards.”

Investigators from the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said Bridges died of burns and smoke inhalation.

Bridges’ ex-girlfriend, Beverly Bland, 34, was strangled before the fire, police said…

Few said Bridges, 35, doused a sleeping bag with gasoline and laid Bland’s body on the bag to set it on fire. But his plan literally blew up in his face.

“When he threw that match, the vapors of gasoline are what ignited,” Few said. “There was an immediate fireball that blew the windows out…”

Sometimes you get what you deserve.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

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.

Wow!

The United States mostly fits into the latter category. As does Poland. A shame – for there really is no excuse other than governments acting almost exclusively on behalf of some claque of corporate interests or slovenly politicians or both.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

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.

A shallow-water production rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded this morning, causing the thirteen crew members aboard to abandon the structure.

Coast Guard rescuers are en route to the scene of the fire, 90 miles south of Vermilion Bay, Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough said. Twelve of the workers are in immersion suits, designed to protect them from hypothermia. One is reported injured.

Once plucked from the Gulf, the injured will be taken Terrebone General Medical Center in Houma, Colclough said.

A helicopter pilot for a private company named Bristow reported the rig on fire around 9:30 a.m.

The rig is an oil and gas production platform located in 340 feet of water in Vermillion Block 380, according to federal government records. The well was not producing any “product” at the time of the accident, Colclough said.

It is owned by Mariner Energy, headquartered in Houston…According to its website, Mariner is among the largest lease holders on the continental shelf with interests in approximately 240 federal leases and more than 30 state blocks, at year-end 2009…

With all the unwanted attention just starting to wane, members of industry groups were staggered by the latest accident today, even though it was on a much smaller scale and appears to have nothing to do with the deepwater drilling dangers that surrounded the BP incident.

First thoughts, of course, are for the poor buggers in the water. Latest news on TV sound positive. They have all been rescued.

The crew reported to the Coast Guard that they had initiated shutdown procedures before abandoning the platform. The Coast Guard hasn’t yet succeeded in confirming success of the shutdown. But, it surely sounds better than it might have.

The news? They can’t watch it anymore. Outsiders criticizing their progress, saying they’re not working fast enough or smart enough — it’s too much to bear.

They understand how awful the situation is. They are, after all, working on the waters where friends and relatives died. Those losses, and the stories they hear from workers who survived the Deepwater Horizon explosion, are with them every day. It’s a weight they carry as the world watches.

These men and women are working to drill a relief well — 16,000 to 18,000 feet below the seafloor, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen says. It is the only surefire way to stop the oil that’s spewing into the Gulf of Mexico…

There are fewer than 200 workers on board at any one time. They are marine biologists, scientists, construction and tool experts. They must understand the physics of what they’re doing. Simple hired hands? Not even close…

A woman working at a desk thanks the CNN crew for finally telling the workers’ story. Nearby, on a table, are copies of a special magazine memorializing the Deepwater Horizon workers who died…

On deck, it’s a loud and constant operation. Voices call back and forth, giving directions amid massive equipment that towers above. People operating the drill and two cranes maneuver across the rig in a carefully orchestrated ballet. The incessant drilling brings an endless vibration. There is no idle chit-chat for these Transocean employees, who are working 12-hour shifts, around the clock. It’s intense, serious, focused.

My favorite kind of journalism. “…as seen and told by our correspondant.”

RTFA. Learn something about the reality of those folks busting a gut to stop the spill, save the environment and – oh yeah, save their way of life and working. This is the real memorial to their fallen comrades.

Yup – that’s the ATM intact – sitting in the debris

Suspected robbers in Germany appear to have miscalculated the quantity of explosives needed to blow their way into a rural bank.

The building housing the bank in the northern village of Malliss was largely destroyed by an overnight explosion.

The bank’s cash machine survived intact and the suspected thieves are not thought to have made away with any money, Germany’s Welt Online reported…

The presence of a delivery van near the site of the explosion indicated that the suspected thieves may have intended to drive off with the cash dispenser, local media reported.

The explosion also set the stolen van on fire – so, they escaped on foot.

In all, not a stunning or successful exploit.

BP, TransOcean, Halliburton
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

BP was aware of equipment problems aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig hours before the explosion pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a congressional hearing was told yesterday .

In a second day of hearings, the House of Representatives’s energy and commerce committee said documents and company briefings suggested that BP, which owned the well; Transocean, which owned the rig; and Halliburton, which made the cement casing for the well, ignored tests in the hours before the 20 April explosion that indicated faulty safety equipment.

“Yet it appears the companies did not suspend operations, and now 11 workers are dead and the gulf faces an environmental catastrophe,” Henry Waxman, the chair of the energy and commerce committee, said, demanding to know why work was not stopped.

The committee heard testimony from oil executives suggesting multiple failures of safety systems that should have given advance warning of a blowout, or should have promptly cut off the flow of oil.

The failures included a dead battery in the blowout preventer, suggestions of a breach in the well casing, and failure in the shear ram, a device of last resort that was supposed to cut through and seal the drill pipe in the event of a blowout.

Nothing has changed since I worked in the offshore oil drilling industry, decades ago. Preventive technology has improved. The willingness of corporate bosses to take a position on the side of safety – still appears to be non-existent.

HMS Turbulent docked in Plymouth

Two British nuclear submarines went to sea with a potentially disastrous safety problem that left both vessels at risk of a catastrophic accident, the Guardian can reveal.

Safety valves designed to release pressure from steam generators in an emergency were completely sealed off when the nuclear hunter killers Turbulent and Tireless left port, a leaked memo discloses.

The problem went undetected on HMS Turbulent for more than two years, during which time the vessel was on operations around the Atlantic, and visited Bergen in Norway, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, and Faslane naval base near Glasgow.

It was not noticed on HMS Tireless for more than a year, and was finally detected last month, two months after Tireless started sea trials from its home port at Devonport naval base in Plymouth…

The Ministry of Defence memo, which was written last week, admits that both cases involving the sealed-off valves were “a serious incident” that raised major questions about “weak and ambiguous” safety procedures at Devonport dockyard and within the Royal Navy…

John Large, a consultant on nuclear safety who advises governments on submarine safety, said: “It was a very significant failure. These two submarines were unfit for service. It was a perilous situation.”

The excuse offered – and accepted – is that safety procedures are very complex. Seems to be a perfectly good reason for all the more care and oversight.