“If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.”
– Friedrich Nietzche
BP Cited ‘Well Control Situation’ Six Weeks Before Blowout
May 31 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc told regulators six weeks before its well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded that workers were having trouble maintaining control, according to e-mails released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the spill.
A March 10 e-mail to Frank Patton, the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s drilling engineer for the New Orleans district, from BP executive Scherie Douglas said the company planned to sever the pipe connecting the well to the rig and plug the hole.
Hello, Obama?
Anyone?
Bueller?
“We are in the midst of a well control situation on MC 252 #001 and have stuck pipe,” Douglas wrote, referring to the subsea block, Mississippi Canyon 252, of the stricken well. “We are bringing out equipment to begin operations to sever the drillpipe, plugback the well and bypass.”
Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the panel’s oversight subcommittee, released the documents related to oil-well design, and e-mails from March, February and November 2009. The documents “raise questions, but their connection to the blowout, if any, require additional investigation,” the lawmakers said.
The e-mails shows that as early as the second week of March, BP was enlisting help from J. Connor Consulting Inc., a Houston-based firm that advises some of the world’s biggest energy companies on how to respond to oil spills.
So this administration received notice that trouble was a-brewin’.
Federal regulators gave BP permission to cement the well at a shallower depth than normally would have been required after the hole caved in on drilling equipment, the e-mails showed.
There was considerable contact between BP and the regulators under Obama. This is officially Obama’s oil spill.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
Massive regulatory failure, says the NY Times.
From the get-go, when MMS approved a risky ‘single hulled drill casing’ well plan, this well was doomed to failure. And our “never going to let it happen again” Exxon Valdez mindset bureaucracy failed us miserably.
That’s the way the system is rigged, campaign cash for MMS waivers and hope nothing goes wrong. We want change with that hope.
It’s amazing how many people Obama can carry water for… too bad the American public isn’t on the list. Of course the system is set up so that if you spend your time as POTUS golfing, the course of political events will be determined by congressional lobbyists and other DC lifers. Thus the need for leadership skills which Obama has none of… and really, where would he have developed them, given his resume?
BTW it’s spelled ‘Nietzsche’ and a better translation would be ‘…abyss stares back *into* you.’. The use of the same preposition twice in the original is not an accident.
It seems that as soon as people start working for the government they stop working. I don’t know if it is just that they are inept or lazy or a combination of the both.
savage24 — bing bing bing — comment of the day, an apt observation.
@bbartlog, You can be on the list for PEBO to carry water for you, just make out that check to Rahm Emmanuel and they will get back in touch with you for further installment payments.
@savage24: I’ve known some people in government work (loosely defined) who did work reasonably hard (not small-business-owner hard but they did their work each day). Culture, well-defined and easily verifiable job duties, and good elected leaders at the top *can* compensate for the perverse incentive structures that come with having government do something.
yes now we all want big government and the nanny state to take care of us THAT IS SOCIALISM !!
Mr. Ryan
The ignorance shown by your post is amazing. When something that the federal government should be involved in heavily, you cry foul because we want the federal government there at the forefront? This isn’t healthcare or any of the other federal assaults on individual or state freedom and liberty. This isn’t something the federal government should be on the sidelines for. This is something that is in their purview and their responsibility to deal with.
And lets not forget it is something that the Drillers have been paying for now close to 20 years. at about 50 million /per, so were the fark is the money!! This was supposed to be EXACTLY for this situation, man, material, mobilization and there is not a freaking thing for it. They pissed every damn bit of the money away, all of it and we have nothing. This is just what Big Government does best, and yet, this is one of the few things that they should actually be doing!
“They pissed every damn bit of the money away, all of it and we have nothing.”
Should we assume that the MMS went bad sometime after Obama took office?
No Greg, but at this point I think that we can assume that you are a pretentious ass and have some issues with reading comprehension. Obama was still in Indonesia 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago, let’s see, that leaves a bush, a Clinton, another bush and then an obama, I think that spreads it around pretty well, although I don’t think any of the others promised salvation from all the worlds evils like the latter. But now that you bring it up, if there were any of the Billion left, Obama would have spent it by now. Grow up, I think that there is plenty of blame to go around, especially with the EPA not allowing drilling where it is actually easy to cap a rouge well.
Just saying, lose the fcuking chip dude, it gets old, oh so very old.
When you mentioned the time of the emails it reminded me of the BP executive who sold over one million dollars worth of their stock about that time.
Now we find out that The Netherlands offered to help with the oil leak and Obama said no. The Netherlands is VERY experienced with oil drilling.
DrJohn
You don’t know much about politics. Just because a politician makes the decisions doesn’t mean it’s their fault. George Bush still has the power to ruin everything. Don’t you read or listen to the propaganda media?
Cary,
There are some things that are better done by a central command, addressing disasters is one of them, which is why the Government took on the oil spill clean-up and containment and why the oil industry has been paying into MMS about 50 million a year, you know that is 1 billion dollars over 20 years. Now, I am quite upset that the material to fight this current spill has not been bought, stockpiled and staged and that somehow we have lost 1 billion dollars and have nothing for it except a big spill. I guess that I should not be too upset, about the 1 billion, because Obama has spent, say it with me now, one hundred and thirty thousand times that amount so fretting over 1 billion seems silly. Why he couldn’t have follow the simple plans for containing the spill does worry me, it was it black and white, written down, spelled out, probably had pictures and diagrams and everything, all he had to do was put the plan into action? Man, he didn’t even need to use his vast community organizing skillz to come up with a plan, already done, all he had to so was say “go!”