re: #128 reine.de.tout

Well, here’s the thing.
Drilling has been going on for decades by responsible companies and here and here have been no events like this one.

So - punish them all because BP tried to take a shortcut that backfired on them? BP should be accountable for this; not the companies that do things properly.

What troubles me is not that, I agree we can raise standards and punish BP. The problem is that this incident demonstrates that we are not able to quickly contain an accident, nor are the current state of the art BOPs foolproof.

There needs to be a new design with real fail-safes which prevent a blowout even after an accident or mistake, and the ability for reliably shut off by a submersible robot should one still occur.

We are pushing the envelope in deep water drilling and robotics, but we are not properly prepared for damage control. It was all seat of the pants and nothing was ready to be deployed.