re: #17 reine.de.tout

Hey Bagua.

My husband, who is a mud engineer, tells me he sees pieces of rubber all the time; that these rubber pieces in the BOP are very thick, and reinforced, and the shearing of a few chunks of it isn’t a problem. Also, that they are designed so that pipe will move through them, so moving pipe through them was not in itself odd or unusual.

The REAL problem in this thing was in the 2nd part of the report, about the cement plugs. That second part of the report confirms the events that the Roi heard a week or so ago. The mud was the ONLY thing keeping pressure on the oil and gas and keeping it out of the riser (pipe). When they circulated the mud out before putting in the final plug - that sealed their fate.The blowout would not have occurred if they had taken the time to set that final plug before circulating the mud out, and the engineer in the 60 minutes report confirmed that.

The original plan was to do set that plug properly. It was BP who decided to do it differently to save a few days time (and money). It was BP who “won” that argument. This blowout is BP’s fault. They will continue to try to claim that it was Transocean’s fault or that the BOP was to blame. Not true. BP made the fatal decision when they circulated the mud out before putting in the final plug.

Hi my Queen, thank you for that. It certainly does look like displacing the mud at that stage set off the blow out. The guy making these allegations was a Chief Electronics technician and likely does not understand the whole process.