Goddammt, I’d Piss On a Spark Plug If I Thought It’d Do Any Good!
Soooo… Now what?
After indicating on Thursday that the top-kill effort was working, then pausing the operation, then resuming it and indicating that it is going as planned on Friday, BP now says that the amount of oil spewing from the well hasn’t changed, and there is not guarantee that the procedure is actually working.“I don’t think the amount of oil coming out has changed,” BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said on Saturday. “Just by watching it, we don’t believe it’s changed.”
In years to come, I predict there will be a lot of scholarly books on the groupthink that took place in the run-up to this disaster, much like the Tompkins books on the Challenger disaster.
In other news, bin Laden states he is professionally envious of BP.
May 29, 2010 4:14 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Domestic Affairs
68 Comments
68 Responses
JenJen - May 29, 2010 | 4:14 pm · Link
Hey… “War Games” quote!! What do I win?? An oil-free Gulf Coast to call my own, maybe?
MikeJ - May 29, 2010 | 4:16 pm · Link
@JenJen: A trip to Paris, but you’ll have to book it yourself.
JenJen - May 29, 2010 | 4:18 pm · Link
@MikeJ: I was kind of going for “The girl who gets to line up the oil executives against a wall and shoot them on live teevee”
Too much?
Quiddity - May 29, 2010 | 4:21 pm · Link
Sounds like it’s time to play I Got the Top-Kill Blues by Muddy Waters.
stevie314159 - May 29, 2010 | 4:23 pm · Link
Damn. I just knew Obama should have gotten angrier. Or sent Clinton in a wetsuit. Or something like that.
I must say my dolphins with nukes idea is sounding better and better.
Bill E Pilgrim - May 29, 2010 | 4:25 pm · Link
Why Mr Cole, I expected something a little better from you, a man of your education.
Ailuridae - May 29, 2010 | 4:26 pm · Link
Whether he can say it publicly or not Obama should be relaying to BP to go full bore and use all possible resources to get the relief well(s) dug. Again, relief wells are the absolute only thing that has ever shown to work in one of these situations.
LikeableInMyOwnWay - May 29, 2010 | 4:27 pm · Link
Justa couple thoughts. One is that after studying what TopKill really is, it appears to me that it is a fiendishly delicate and dicey operation at best, even if it were being done on land, or under a couple hundred feet of water. At a mile depth, meh. I am not sure that it has much of a chance, at least until pressure reduction is obtained by drilling relief wells.
The other thought is that a carbon copy of this blowout happened in 1979, and it took the world’s most legendary well blowout artist, Red Adair, and ten months, and relief wells, to stop the flow. Why in the world did anyone expect this one to be much different? The technology has not changed much and the depth problems are more severe. Who imagined that they’d cap this well in a month? The same morons who two years ago were singing Drill Here Drill Now down there? And, so why do we listen to them and act as if the well should be capped by now?
What evidence is there that we should expect anything other than an approximate repeat of 1979? Anyone?
Anoniminous - May 29, 2010 | 4:32 pm · Link
And the prediction is for an above average hurricane season.
A nice little storm surge of oily water for the “Drill baby, drill!” crowd is … interesting … to contemplate.
Rick Taylor - May 29, 2010 | 4:32 pm · Link
If you were following fishgrease, you knew this yesterday.
Bill E Pilgrim - May 29, 2010 | 4:33 pm · Link
@Ailuridae: My understanding is that they haven’t stopped, and full bore is what it’s been. They had made progress on the depth of it way ahead of schedule one report said, so it doesn’t sound like they ever let up on that approach.
Right from the start I was reading comments from them that hinted that this was really the only pretty much guaranteed way of stopping it.
LikeableInMyOwnWay - May 29, 2010 | 4:37 pm · Link
@Ailuridae:
Saying this without having followed the story obsessively, but my impression has been that relief well drilling began very soon after the blowout, and the first results from the first relief well were said then, and are being said now, to be expected in August. Also, to my knowledge nothing being done at the wellhead has interfered with the progress of the relief well phase. So it was a matter of starting the most likely-to-succeed scenario, and then in parallel, trying some other things while that other scenario was going on. A fairly sensible approach, given the alternatives.
The real story here, of course, is that all the alternatives are pretty bad. They tend to put us into a months-long recovery from a blowout, during which time an ocean of oil is released. This calls the permitting, oversight and regulation policies into serious question, to say the least.
LikeableInMyOwnWay - May 29, 2010 | 4:39 pm · Link
@Rick Taylor:
I have a little different take. My take is that TopKill is so dicey a procedure that a ‘partial success’ can be taken to mean anything that does not blow the BP apart or make the outflow worse than it was when they started. I am not being facetious. It looks to me like those outcomes were at least as likely as total success.
Bill E Pilgrim - May 29, 2010 | 4:43 pm · Link
Honestly, the Obotting here drives me nuts sometimes but in this case he seems like the last person to blame for this monumental screwupful catastrophe.
In a sane world this would be a political disaster but for everyone who was yelling drill baby drill, and instead they’re the most prominent screamers of how this is all Obama’s fault.
Massive, shameless misdirection, and it’s amazing to see the media help it along each and every goddamn time.
kuvasz - May 29, 2010 | 4:45 pm · Link
Past is fucking prelude.
Richard Feynman
Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Appendix F – Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/sh.....ndix-F.txt
Anyone who has read the Feynman Appendix knew beforehand the principle causes of the BP blow-out.
It was thinking that the narrative they wanted to be true actually was; an avoidance of reality for the satisfaction of it.
Mnemosyne - May 29, 2010 | 4:47 pm · Link
@LikeableInMyOwnWay:
Pretty much zero. But Americans love to think that any problem can be solved in 24 hours or one hour of television, whatever comes first. Finding out that this is going to be an ongoing problem for months until the relief wells are finished is kinda freaking them out.
It would be nice if this woke us all up out of our short-term thinking habits and made us realize that we’re all better off if we think about the consequences 10 years down the road before doing something, but I think the chance of that happening is quite a bit smaller than the chance that top kill is going to work.
wrb - May 29, 2010 | 4:53 pm · Link
Of course oil wells are going to fail if you elect a president who lacks empathy for the oil industry.
FlipYrWhig - May 29, 2010 | 4:53 pm · Link
I have a bad feeling that asteroid-diverting mission we’ll eventually need to try might not work either.
patrick II - May 29, 2010 | 4:58 pm · Link
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume,”
Tony Hayward, May 14, 2010.
Guardian interview:http://www.guardian.co.uk/busi.....-oil-spill
So, why worry?
LikeableInMyOwnWay - May 29, 2010 | 5:00 pm · Link
@patrick II:
I feel better now.
MattF - May 29, 2010 | 5:03 pm · Link
I guess it’s just one of those “large amount of energy in small amount of space” things, says the DFH voice in the back of my head. I guess, not changing the subject, we should all be glad to hear that nuclear reactors will save our collective butts, eventually. There is, again, that little DFH voice in the back of my head going “Hmmm. Large amount of energy in small amount of space” but I’m ignoring it.
Ailuridae - May 29, 2010 | 5:27 pm · Link
@LikeableInMyOwnWay:
The real story here, of course, is that all the alternatives are pretty bad. They tend to put us into a months-long recovery from a blowout, during which time an ocean of oil is released. This calls the permitting, oversight and regulation policies into serious question, to say the least.
My primary concern with all of these goofy maneuvers is that one of them will greatly increase the flow of oil into the water. As you have mentioned from everything I have seen all of these gambits have three equally likely outcomes
1) They do nothing perceptible
2) They make the situation worse
3) They fix the problem
I’ve been reading the about the Montara spill from last year. The wiki on it is both well written and has excellent foot notes.
I know next to nothing about oil rigs but this rig was also in incredibly deep water and they had attempted the fifth and final successful relief well within 70 days. The August dates I hear are still seventy days away from now so I am more than a little confused about how the most optimistic date for the only realistic alternative is 150% as large as the last time this occurred less than a year ago. It seems to me anyway that if lessons were learned from that disaster subsequent efforts should be at least as fast if not faster.
charles pierce - May 29, 2010 | 5:31 pm · Link
The number of people who can quote dialogue from WarGames as well as I can truly alarms me.
wilfred - May 29, 2010 | 5:36 pm · Link
Hi John,
Is that your house on Sully’s blog today?
David - May 29, 2010 | 5:47 pm · Link
McCain’s response would have been:
“We’re letting BP handle this and giving them a tax credit to compensate for any overtime, stress, or missed golf games they may incur.”
PeakVT - May 29, 2010 | 5:50 pm · Link
@Ailuridae: I heard on NPR a little while ago that BP has stopped drilling one of the relief wells so they can use that well’s BOP on the leaking well. Why BP has to stop instead of finding a BOP somewhere else wasn’t explained.
What I’ve been wondering is why BP doesn’t try to fake the wellhead (as in leak -> space -> intake -> pump -> wellhead/manifold system -> normal riser). I think that would keep the gas under pressure, so the hydrates wouldn’t form. AFAIK, the previous try with the siphon tried to lift the oil from above. (There’s probably a good reason why this hasn’t been done, so I guess I’m just rambling here.)
Mnemosyne - May 29, 2010 | 5:51 pm · Link
@Ailuridae:
I was reading the footnotes but I couldn’t find the water depth—do you remember where that was? The drilling was very deep into the seabed, but I saw some (unconfirmed) references saying that the water itself was 600 feet deep and not 3,000 like with Deepwater.
kay - May 29, 2010 | 5:55 pm · Link
@Ailuridae:
It’s a good point, but try it the other way.
BP announces the only realistic fix is a relief well. They’re at around 4,000 feet now (they started May 2) and they have to go to 18,000 to intersect the line. It’s layers, I would think the first 1000 is the easiest, so it’s not a straight “100 feet per day” or something, but, anyway, August.
The same 15 engineers media consulted who said the top kill had a decent chance of working (there were a lot of them, and they don’t work for BP, they work at universities) would probably still say the top kill had a decent chance of working, and there would be a huge outcry that BP was cutting corners and not trying everything humanly possible.
“Do something!” carries risk.
fucen tarmal - May 29, 2010 | 6:04 pm · Link
the situation made me dig this out of the old cd collection. the true hell no one can answer, is what a hurrcane or 3 might do with all that oil.
black rain
Cat Lady - May 29, 2010 | 6:14 pm · Link
@charles pierce:
I see the wife still picks your ties.
ETA: In the WTF BJ mindmeld department, my one month old grand-nephew’s name is Jack Berringer. I guess I’ll nickname him general, teach him how to say DEFCON 5 really loud, and see who gets it.
AhabTRuler - May 29, 2010 | 6:16 pm · Link
I’d be interested in how the Tompkins book compares with Vaughn’s The Challenger Launch Decision or Perrow’s work on System Accidents (both are Organizational Sociologists).
AngusTheGodOfMeat - May 29, 2010 | 6:16 pm · Link
Okay …. Autolite, or Champion? We are ready to get started on your plan …..
mellowjohn - May 29, 2010 | 6:22 pm · Link
THE charles pierce? “funniest writer in the world and author of ‘idiot america’?” (now out in paperback.)
arguingwithsignposts - May 29, 2010 | 6:26 pm · Link
Interestingly, I just watched an episode of Modern Marvels on Hulu that featured Transocean’s Discoverer Enterprise. The whole episode is interesting, but the segment starts at around 26:30. The DE is on site at the oilcano.
And there’s a short discussion about deep-sea drilling with some Transocean guy.
TomG - May 29, 2010 | 6:34 pm · Link
That Bin Laden link was pretty funny – okay it was funny in the “this is just…wrong” but yeah it was funny.
I’m not planning to cut BP any slack, and I don’t think libertarians ought to be blindly defending them (I’ve read a couple of feeble efforts in that vein). It is simply not true that a huge corporation is never corrupt, and “regulatory capture” is only one aspect of the problem we face.
SiubhanDuinne - May 29, 2010 | 6:35 pm · Link
@Anoniminus #9:
A nice little storm surge of oily water for the “Drill baby, drill!” crowd is … interesting … to contemplate.
Oh great. An entire Gulfful of santorum.
O/T which I haven’t seen mentioned yet, unless it’s languishing on another thread, but it turns out that Mark Kirk (GOP), who’s running for the Senate from Illinois (Obama’s old seat), actually didn’t receive the US Navy’s “Intelligence Officer of the Year” award the way his official biography has stated. Oops.
Toni - May 29, 2010 | 6:52 pm · Link
@LikeableInMyOwnWay: I think the only possible difference is that it won’t take 9 months but 3 – 4. The 1979 disaster was at 200ft and these methods being tried today were tried then and it didn’t work, so why would it work at 5000ft. The relief wells, of which 2 are being dug is the only proven solution.
As long as the oil is flowing, everything else being done is containment and there is an area where more resources has to be put in, to try to deal with as much of it offshore as possible. The reality is that some of it will come onshore just because of how long this oil will flow.
Ailuridae - May 29, 2010 | 6:54 pm · Link
@Mnemosyne:
This from the NYT suggests that the well depth was much more similar to the Ixtoc 1 than the Deepwater Horizon.
The Montara spill differed from the gulf spill in some ways that made it easier to stop, and in other ways that made it harder to stop. To begin with, the Montara drilling platform was operating in water that was 250 feet deep, while the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP was on a seabed 5,000 feet deep.
But the seabed geology around the base of Deepwater Horizon has been well mapped, which would help any effort to drill a relief well there, Mr. Danenberger said. The Montara spill occurred during initial exploration of a seabed that is less well known.
So that explains some (all?) of the difference in drilling times.
AngusTheGodOfMeat - May 29, 2010 | 6:58 pm · Link
I just heard that a 90 year old woman is going skydiving.
Okay, where are the 90 year olds who are willing to go deep sea diving? Let’s send some 90 or 100 year olds down there and get this thing taken care of.
Also, isn’t the Gulf Coast the reddest area in the US? Where are the Drill Here Drill Now fans willing to suit up and go down there and stick their fingers into this thing? Hello?
Why are the crankiest people on this oil thing the same cranky shits who wanted more drilling two years ago?
goatchowder - May 29, 2010 | 7:06 pm · Link
@charles pierce: +1 for War Games reference.
it’s good to be at an age that most of the people running the world are also. Damn, that movie was almost 30 years ago….
Linda Featheringill - May 29, 2010 | 7:13 pm · Link
From Suttles [BP]:
I want some of what he’s smoking.
Linda Featheringill - May 29, 2010 | 7:16 pm · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Angus GOM: Hi. Haven’t seen you in a while. Perhaps I haven’t been attentive enough.
Ailuridae - May 29, 2010 | 7:17 pm · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Why are the crankiest people on this oil thing the same cranky shits who wanted more drilling two years ago?
Most of the beltway types (and I include Peggy Noonan here) are pissed because during the last ten years of debate in the energy field they have been treating off shore drilling as reasonably safe despite ample evidence that if there was ever a leak that it would be an incredibly lengthy process to stop it. So now, rather than own up to the fact that the scientists and dissenting hippies were right all along they want to pretend that there is something that a President could do besides what Obama is currently doing.
They were always wrong and now that it is easy to demonstrate they can’t just own up to it.
Ailuridae - May 29, 2010 | 7:22 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
This is the stuff that is starting to worry me. It would seem to me that cutting a damaged riser would have to create an immediate increase in the rate at which the oil is released as some riser is better than no riser, right? So if they do this and the containment dome fails they’ve actually increased the rate of flow by some percentage X. if X is small like 5 or 10% it seems like a reasonable risk If doing this would increase the rate of flow a sizable amount it almost can’t be worth the risk.
Linda Featheringill - May 29, 2010 | 7:27 pm · Link
@Ailuridae:
I agree about the worry. Nothing has gone right since the well blew up in the first place.
So now they are going to slice off the BOP and create a really big hole. Stuff is going to be coming out of that thing with umpteen units of pressure and they think they are going to persuade a new top to settle over the old one and allow itself to be screwed down and sealed off?
The power of positive thinking.
John Cole - May 29, 2010 | 7:32 pm · Link
@wilfred: No, but I know exactly where that house is.
Toni - May 29, 2010 | 7:33 pm · Link
@Ailuridae: I agree. They have already tried all the least riskiest and most likely to succeed methods which haven’t worked. At some point in time, which is getting to be soon in my estimation, the operation will need to shift focus to cleanup and containment in a much larger way while waiting for the relief wells to be ready.
Navigator - May 29, 2010 | 7:40 pm · Link
The only upside is that Dick and Liz Cheney probably won’t exit their bunker to be interviewed for the duration.
AngusTheGodOfMeat - May 29, 2010 | 7:41 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
I was tipped, and couldn’t get up.
toujoursdan - May 29, 2010 | 7:41 pm · Link
Maybe the rapture is upon us (written tongue in cheek):
—-Revelation 8
wrb - May 29, 2010 | 7:42 pm · Link
@Ailuridae:
Maybe, maybe not.
One of the front pagers at The oil Drum calculated that the passage through the BOP needed to be only .7” for the estimated amount of oil to be passing through at the pressures reportedly involved. If there is such a constriction there the constriction provided by the riser pipe might not be significant.
Linda Featheringill - May 29, 2010 | 7:47 pm · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
“I was tipped, and couldn’t get up.”
A cow joke! :-)
AngusTheGodOfMeat - May 29, 2010 | 7:58 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
This gig is hard on ungulates. Typing with a hoof, the flies. The whole thing. Knowing that it could all end with becoming a pot roast.
Sorry to moo like this, it’s just been a long week.
Linda Featheringill - May 29, 2010 | 8:03 pm · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Don’t worry about the roast bit, honey. You are too old and tough. You would probably taste terrible.
Yutsano - May 29, 2010 | 8:04 pm · Link
@toujoursdan: You gotta love those poor Phoenicians who didn’t know how to pick their wild mushrooms correctly. Or they did. Hard to tell a couple thousand years after the fact.
AngusTheGodOfMeat - May 29, 2010 | 8:10 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, to paraphrase the great Otis Redding, Try A Little Tenderizer.
Keith G - May 29, 2010 | 8:13 pm · Link
This is a shit sandwich. This is a Guinness World Record sized shit sandwich and it’s gonna be around for a long time.
I would like to think that this is why Obama has chosen to remain “calm and analytical”. This will not be a sprint. It’s a freeking marathon run only with the help of a small group of highly technical professionals (like them or not). He knows short term histrionics will be of little value and may even undercut his authority.
Unfortunately the ‘POTUS crises’ this most reminds me of is the Iranian hostage mess – complex, packed with incendiary emotions, solutions that befuddle the angsty adolescent mind set that modern Americans get when we can not solve a big problem quickly.
Shorter me: We’re doomed.
D-Chance. - May 29, 2010 | 8:14 pm · Link
Have hey ever considered the Randy Quaid option of allowing a drunk with a cheap plane fly inside it? It saved the world once before…
Until then, we might consider moving to California and opening up a beachside kiosk of some type. After all, that’s the only coastline in the contiguous US that will be clean enough for vacation destinations in a few short months. Atlantic staters can fly past the St Louis Arch, hop over the Rockies, marvel at the Grand Canyon, then view the odd site of an ocean that doesn’t sheen…
Jody - May 29, 2010 | 9:57 pm · Link
Well, that’s it. We killed the fucking Gulf of Mexico. Let’s all stand around and point fingers at each other for the next few months while the oil seeps into the Atlantic current. That’ll be exactly as effective as anything BP is planning.
We all share the blame on this one. We’re not even going to change our lifestyles appreciably to reduce demand for the stuff. We’re all just gonna feel bad and then go back to our commutes and plastic grocery bags and disposable everything.
The plutocrats that rule us don’t care that they’re poisoning the planet to death and we are too lazy to be anything but compliant. We’re fucked.
Comrade Luke - May 29, 2010 | 11:50 pm · Link
“That’s not oil, it’s mud”
I knew that was bullshit the second I read it.
MaximusNYC - May 30, 2010 | 1:08 am · Link
“Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.”
The Raven - May 30, 2010 | 1:26 am · Link
Finish the relief well. In parallel, get an ecological assessment going. Stop further drilling. Start on remediation. Start Al Gore’s crash “get us off fossil fuels” program.
What to do isn’t complex. Finding the will to do it is going to take a miracle.
Damn, not even food for corvids.
TenguPhule - May 30, 2010 | 1:54 am · Link
Executing a BP excutive every 10 days the oil keeps spilling will work wonders for willpower.
Uriel - May 30, 2010 | 3:52 am · Link
@goatchowder:
Don’t know if I’m the first to mention it, but for the record: when you suddenly notice just how surprisingly long ago a shared cultural reference took place, the polite thing to do is to SHUT THE HELL UP.
All of us who were roughly Matthew Broderick’s age at the time will thank you profusely.
Basilisc - May 30, 2010 | 3:58 am · Link
OK, time for Plan L.
bob h - May 30, 2010 | 7:27 am · Link
And we should not forget the true villains in all this-Wall St. In all likelihood, BP threw caution to the winds and and took shortcuts on this capping job because they were under pressure to meet analysts “expectations” for quarterly earnings.
MBSS - May 30, 2010 | 11:43 am · Link
Today we see the results of this system run amok. Executives at our most respected companies hire people at near-slave wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops. Oil companies wantonly pump toxins into rain forest rivers, consciously killing people, animals, and plants, and committing genocide among ancient cultures. The pharmaceutical industry denies lifesaving medicines to millions of HIV-infected Africans. Twelve million families in our own United States worry about their next meal. The energy industry creates an an Enron. The accounting industry creates and Anderson. The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest went from 30 – 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995. The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that or less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to ever person on the planet.
And we wonder why terrorists attack us?
Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief has a corollary: that those who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.
john perkins “confessions of an economic hit man”
barack obama is the new face of empire. he is not substantially different than the last face. the corporations that own us decided that it might be more palatable and economically advantageous to have a muslim name and dark face to metaphorically disarm the middle east before we continue our unalloyed assault on them for resources, along with the rest of the world. he would have not gotten this far unless he was amiably disposed to this task.
barack obama believes in the gospel of greed. he is still willing to drill. he still believes in wall st. he is sending kids to war. we are a nation of sociopaths. immune to the cries of the world. wrapped up in thread counts and gliding on travertine tile, while sipping expensive imported coffee, we are fixated on trivialities and tripe. we are complicit and bought off with cheap gas and cheap trinkets from china. for the greatest and wealthiest society in the history of the world we sure have a lot of depression, drug use, suicide, and starvation. and the world spins on. war rages. the imf and world bank extort developing nations. we grab all the natural resources we can get our greedy hands on and have the audacity to insist that this is helping other countries. our oceans despoiled. our jungles razed. the air fouled. as we pop a pill and worship at the altar of gnp and dow.
vote democrat, vote republican. it is of little use. the sickness has infected most all of us: greed.
it is time to drive a stake through the heart of it all. endless growth. unjust war. justifications for a environment shit on and ruthlessly exploited. it is time to take stock and find what is truly valuable.
we must end all war.
we must scale back our resource use and protect our earth.
we must disown neo-liberal economics and the neo-feudalism they promote.
we must look after the entire world and all the people as if they are our brothers and sisters, which they are.
this is why i am a green. this is what i believe.
Derek - June 1, 2010 | 8:34 pm · Link
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Maybe you were joking, but 5,000 feet is too deep for humans to go.