(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I have been a tort lawyer for 32 years, the last 28 of which I represented injured people. Ironically, my first two years I worked in the Exxon litigation department in Houston during the 1979 Ixtoc spill. Fortunately, I left Exxon before the Exxon Valdez spill.
I have handled or been involved in many product liability cases over the years. To have a product liability case you must show that the product was defectively or dangerously designed and the best cases are those where cheap alternative designs or parts would have either prevented the accident or greatly reduced its effect. When I say that you would need a lawyer for cases such as this, I mean it!
When I was in college, for several summers, I worked in the water department of a small city and got a real appreciation for how to do plumbing and piping.
So I am aghast at what I see on BP’s riser. The riser is the 5,000 feet of pipe that goes from the blow-out preventer, called the BOP, to the surface vessel. The blow-out preventer is about a 100 ton object that is made up of several on-off valves and one or more pipe cutters.
One of the first things you learn in piping is that there are two main places where you don’t want leaks to occur because they are so hard to fix: (1) near a valve and (2) near a pipe joint. You do everything you can to design the piping so as to prevent a leak near a valve or a pipe joint.
When a 5,000 foot riser breaks loose from a surface ship, the last place you want the pipe to break, bend or leak is right above the blow-out preventer, because stopping a leak there is going to be damned impossible if the blow-out preventer fails. And where did this riser bend and begin to leak? Did it bend twenty feet from the blow out preventer where you actually had some good pipe to work with to effect a repair? Oh no. It appears to have bent about a foot and a half, or maybe two feet, from the top of the blow out preventer.
The riser is reported to be 21 inches in diameter. The first twenty feet or so should have been about 36 inches in diameter and if it had been, then BP would have had about twenty feet of pipe to work with to effect a repair. If that had been the design, the bend in the riser would have taken place after the pipe was reduced to 21 inches from 36 inches. With twenty feet of good pipe there are lots of repair options, even under very high pressure. There are lots of ways to clamp a pipe and add a shut off valve to twenty feet of good pipe and no good way to do it with a foot or less. As I type this, BP is in the process of cutting the riser about six inches from the top of the blow out preventer.
Twenty feet of larger diameter pipe in the right place might have really kept this leak to a much less catastrophic spill. BP might have been able to have shut down the leak in days or likely a couple weeks maximum. It would have cost virtually nothing to add twenty feet of larger diameter pipe. Virtually nothing.
I can’t believe that there is not some regulation that requires the first twenty feet of riser to be much larger and stronger than the rest of the riser. I can’t believe that engineers didn’t require it either.
And if I were suing BP for this accident, I would certainly make this section of the riser a major focus of the case.
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I’m new and not real certain how things work here yet.
what did Exxon have to do with Ixtoc??
That’s new to me.
Were they contracting for Pemex?
(and I’m still thinking about this) – if they did have a 36″ pipe, and if it did bend in that section – wouldn’t we have a greater flow now? Well, until today, when they cut this mess anyway. Still you’re right- it probably wouldn’t have bent in that section, but above.
depending on how fast they could produce results in stopping this ecological disaster. Homicide, EPA laws, go for it! Let them learn a motivation beyond profit. Let them feel the whip of pain.
I say this as someone who understands and remains strongly resistant to the ideas of BF Skinner. The simple elicitation of pain will become associated with bad behavior, regardless of “consequences.” It is not the “consequence” that teaches you: It’s the association of one event (what you think is happening) with another (what happens). The “consequences” are “built-in” to both the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus.
One might simply call them “mutually associable and conditionable stimuli”
…. a big lever and torqued off the BOP right off that wellhead. Then you’d got a big completely uncontrolled gusher.
I have a lot of respect for that BOP. It might not have actually done everything that it was supposed to, but it took a lickin’ and is still holding on tenaciously the well pipe sunk into the seafloor and is holding on to what is left of the riser pipe that they are beavering away on trying to saw off nice and evenly. I am, in fact, in awe that the damn thing didn’t break off below ground (seafloor level) and come out… That is a pain in the ass. And before you say, of course it couldn’t do that, we are seeing already a lot of “that couldn’t happen.”
Force applied has to have an effect somewhere….
The main problem is extreme location, the depth, pressure, and temperature making the site inaccessible except by remote robots, and the well design, leading to missing section between the pipe’s changing sizes way down towards the bottom, (inexcusable) and a rotten, breached borehole now from their using the wrong cement (“nobody could have anticipated the chemical reaction of the cement heating up as it cures, would also heat up the methane….” ) and there is a lot of other stuff I’m sure that will come out in the next days, weeks, months, that we don’t know about yet- they certainly were in a hurry to get this Transocean drill rig moved off the well as fast as possible after the lovely Halliburton cement job. Many people working on it knew it was a problem well, and may have been jockeying for this upcoming finger pointing game before the thing blew out, even.
Many students are concerned as to if they qualify for student aid. They want to know if they are going to be able to obtain the student aid that they are going to need in order to meet the financial obligation of college. They want to be confident that they are going to be able to fully concentrate on their studies without worrying about if they are going to be able to afford the next semester. They want to have the solitude of knowing that they are going to have the student aid that they are going to need to cover one of the hugest expenses that they will ever incur in life. After you complete your first year of college, the process is generally much easier. Most of the difficulty comes from the fear of the unknown.