But no fatalities, due to the efforts of Martin Baker Aircraft Company Ltd:
Category: Disaster
I Know That I Haven’t Written Much on the BP Oil Spill
Because Jon Stewart and his writers are so on this:
About F%$#ing Time!!!!
The Department of Justice has opened up a criminal investigation of BP’s oil spill.
I don’t know if laws were broken, but we have an environmental disaster, and eleven people died, so there should have been an investigation as soon as the fires were put out.
Of course, prosecuting wrong-doers is looking back and not forward, so I understand why Eric Holder was so loathe to look at BP’s actions.
In the Obama administration, prosecution for things that occurred in the past is generally reserved for whistle-blowers who reveal lawbreaking by Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Deep Thought
There is no oil spill in the Gulf.
BP has just decided to enter the market for sunscreen on a huge scale.
Top Kill Fail
So the blow out, and the resultant oil spill, continues unabated.
But BP needs to be in charge, because they know what to do to fix this.
Why Senior Management at BP’s Should Be In a Deep Dark Hole
Click for full size
The Crime Scene
Hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, representatives of Slumberger*, who had been called in to perform a “Cement Bond Log (CBL) ” test.
Slumberger, much like Halliburton, is primarily an oil services firm, though it’s rep is as the Cadillac of the service companies, and is, unlike Halliburton, considered to be highly ethical.
Well, they were getting ready to run the test, about 6 hours before the blowout and explosion, and they look at the numbers, and say shut down the operation now, and when the BP management says, “no”, they ask to be flown off, and BP refuses, so they call in a Slumberger helicopter to get the hell out of dodge:
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.
Note that we do have confirmation that this cement bond log test was never conducted:
BP hired a top oilfield service company to test the strength of cement linings on the Deepwater Horizon’s well, but sent the firm’s workers home 11 hours before the rig exploded April 20 without performing a final check that a top cementing company executive called “the only test that can really determine the actual effectiveness” of the well’s seal.
A spokesman for the testing firm, Schlumberger, said BP had a Schlumberger team and equipment for sending acoustic testing lines down the well “on standby” from April 18 to April 20. But BP never asked the Schlumberger crew to perform the acoustic test and sent its members back to Louisiana on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight at 11 a.m., Schlumberger spokesman Stephen T. Harris said.
…………
Schlumberger’s Harris said the contractor was ready to do any such wireline tests, but was never directed to do so. The team had finished doing tests on the subsea layers of earth being drilled five days earlier and hadn’t done any work since, Harris said.
In fact, Harris said there was no time to get the company’s wireline testing equipment off the rig before it exploded.
So BP’s side of the story is that they hired the most expensive, top of the line, oil field services company out there to run a test, and never bothered to let them complete what they had paid for, and the time line is a bit different.
But what is clear is that Slumberger left, and they left their very expensive equipment in their haste to get off the platform, because they saw a disaster coming, and they could not stop it.
H/t Thom Hartmann.
*Full disclosure, one of my step-mother’s oldest and dearest friends was a Slumberger, yes, one of those Slumbergers.
†Basically, as they drill a well, they add fluid (mud) to balance the pressure so that it does not erupt out of the well head. When a well is “kicking”, it means that the pressure is not properly balanced and the oil/gas/water is blowing out the mud. See the Wiki.
This and $8.95 Will Get You a Starbucks
BP is claiming success at its latest attempt to ameliorate the oil spill:
After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.
“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”
I’ll wait for independent verification, thank you very much, and BP is not in the least interested in independent verification:
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
So I doubt that a meaningful amount of oil is coming up to the boat.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
Oil Spill Update
Here’s a shocker, the US Government is likely understating the amount of oil flowing out of that busted well in the Caribbean by at least a factor of 10.
Also, they are starting to recover oiled birds on the Gulf coast.
Not Enough Bullets
Transocean, the firm operating BP’s oil rig that exploded and created a blowout that is threatening most of the US Gulf coast, will make $270m from the loss of the rig because it was insured for more than it was worth.
I thought that this has been illegal since the Marine Insurance Act of 1746.
You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.
It appears that BP neglected to take precautions on the oil platform, because, “BP did not build containment devices before disaster because it ‘seemed inconceivable‘ the blowout preventer would fail.”
Tell me that this is not an Inigo Montoya moment.
Well, Here’s a Shocker
It looks like the explosion and subsequent oil spill that is threatening Louisiana and other Gulf coast coastal regions may have been caused by a failure to properly seal the pipes with cement, a procedure that was performed by Halliburton:
The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.
Halliburton is the Vampire Squid of the oil services industry.
Plane Crash Kills Polish President
It appears that his plane crashed in a heavy fog, while attempting to land in Smolensk, killing Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski.
He was on his way to the Katyn Woods, where Polish and Russian authorities were to have a memorial service for the Polish officers and politicians murdered by the NKVD in 1940, which is kind of ironic:
Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed. They included Polands deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of Parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.
Among them, the Polish government said, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; Ryszard Kaczorowski, who led a government in exile during the Communist era; the deputy speaker of Polands Parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the presidents chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish Army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Polands national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; and the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski.
My condolences to the victims families.
Note that President is a mostly ceremonial position under the Polish system, though a quick search through my archives seems to indicate that he was a bit of a euro-skeptic.
I Lived There
Middletown, Connecticut, that is.
I lived there for a year when I designed equipment to, among other things, cut new assholes on dead things (see bottom video), and now I’ve heard that there has been a massive explosion at a Kleen Energy Systems power plant under construction there, and there have been fatalities.
It appears that they were purging gas lines in an enclosed building, and the gas ignited.
News report is the top video.
Accident
“Bung Dropper,” which will be used on my daughter’s prospective suitors.
Of Course They Were Trying To Steal Children
For a few days, the Baptist missionaries currently detained in Haiti for trafficking in children has been in the news, and I have been marinating on this.
At its most basic, I think that this was a deliberate attempt to abduct these children, though I think that money was at the root of this evil.
These people weren’t just missing paperwork, they were moving children out of the country for a purpose: to save souls.
They believed that these children would go to hell unless they were raised as, and became, Baptists, so they were breaking the law to “save” these children, some of whom were probably actually had living relatives.
So, much like William Calley, they likely, “destroyed families to save them”.
You must understand, notwithstanding all the stories about Voodoo in Haiti, the populace there is overwhelming (80%) Catholic, and these people were not rescuing people from Voodoo, but from Catholicism, which they see as not Christian, and hence a road straight to hell.
This is the evil that true believers do: Stealing children from the families.
As to the disposition, should it be determined in court that they are guilty, they should go to jail for a very long time.
Any consideration in terms of sentencing on the of the sincerity of their faith will just encourage more people with similar world views to do similarly evil things.
FWIW, I chose the Al Jazeera link just because it f%$#s with these people, here is the Google news link.
Perspective on the Late Night Kerfuffle
Craig Ferguson on the late night shenanigans at NBC, and on Haiti, and on Rush Limbaugh’s drug driven paranoid delusions. (3:37)
Brilliant!
Deep Thought
If You Want to Help With Haiti
Major Earthquake in Haiti
It’s tentatively a 7 on the Richter scale.
Considering the fact that casualties in earth quakes are buildings collapsing on people, and this fact, when juxtaposed with the abysmal quality of construction in Haiti, casualties will no doubt be high.
There have also been aftershocks.
This will not be pretty.
US Airways Jet Ditches in Hudson, All Safe
McClellan’s New Tell-All Actually Tells All
Or at least a lot more than you would expect from the guy who job was to Bush’s liar in chief*.
To be fair, at least from the excerpts on Politico, he does a lot more blaming of Bush’s staff than Bush himself, but still, the allegations are explosive:
- He accuses Bush of relying on propaganda to sell the war.
- Basically calls the press a bunch of lap dogs.
- Admits that the administration was clueless on Katrina
- That Rove, Libby, and possibly Cheney lied to him about l’affaire Plame.
I’m not going to buy the book, paying Republicans only creates more Republicans, but I’m definitely going to borrow it at some point.
*To be fair, this is the job description of every press secretary.