President Barack Obama Message Board

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Politics : President Barack Obama

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To: ChinuSFO who wrote (73914)	5/8/2010 6:12:51 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) of 149317

also, from Rockman, If the blow out occurred as the story indicates, how avoidable was this accident? It will come as no comfort to learn it was easily avoidable. As the mud was being pumped out of the riser it was going into a tank that is routinely monitored for volume gains. If more mud is coming out of the well then salt water was pumped down then it’s obvious the well is unloading and “coming in”. Had this been noted they would have immediately gone into “kill mode” and shut the well in. Could this have prevented the blow out? Probably. This is the core of the safety training for well control. And how high tech was this safety protocol of monitoring mud returns? All that was needed was to stop displacing the riser for 2 minutes and have a hand with a high school education looking at a pipe with mud flowing out of it. No mud coming out: all is OK. Mud flowing out: the well is coming in and a blow out could be eminent. We could spend billions of $’s improving equipment and training. And none of that would prevent this type of mistake. I can promise you with 100% certainty that if this is eventually proven to be the cause of the blow out we’ll see new regs from the Feds with regards to displacing risers in the future. But even before those regs are in place companies will issue new internal protocols along the same lines. And the new procedures will be followed religiously. For a while. And then one day a company man will get pushed to move faster and rules will be bent. But it’s not difficult to design a safeguard against this possibility as well as most others: an independent third party observing adherence to safety procedures. An insignificant increase to drilling costs. It might add $1 or $2 million per year to drilling ops on one rig that could have a cumulative cost of to drill of $500 million or more over the same time period. As a comedian once said: “You can’t fix stupid”. No, but you can pay someone to keep an eye on stupid. theoildrum.com

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