The BP Story So Far. . . Follow

I wasn't aware of the unwritten rule that there can be one, and only one, point of contact on either side between the government and BP.

You don't think Obama should be talking to Hayward on more big picture, strategic subjects while others in his administration talk to the lower level technical guys about technical details?

Of all the things I can think of to use the military for, this ranks up there on the list of "stupid".

Mostly because, to the best of my knowledge, the US Navy does not have much in the way of deep-sea unmanned capability. That'd be the department of universities doing research on deep-sea life.

Edited, Jun 10th 2010 4:48pm by MDenham

Why do you want the government running the oil industry too?

I know for a fact that the Navy has had high resolution remote and man piloted undersea systems for at least the last 20 years. I know a guy who helped design and build it and did trials with the Navy in St Croix testing the equipment out and getting the contracts to build more. Those systems were specifically designed to be able to find things like lost torpedoes and submarine bits (like reactors), repair (or patch into) underwater deep sea communication bundles, and use computer aided laser imaging enhancement methods to allow for even automatic and potentially autonomous location of objects with a non natural shape on the bottom of the ocean at depths far greater than 5 thousand feet.

That was 20+ years ago Joph. Don't freaking try to tell me that we can't find a leaking pipe on the bottom of the gulf and get a really good idea of exactly what's going on with it without having to outsource to some private organization. You get that we've been using subs to tap into underwater cables for 40+ years, right? None of this is even particularly secret stuff.



I wasn't talking about repairing the leak, although I'm quite sure we do have the capability to do more than just throw explosives at it. Regardless, I was responding to the statement that the government couldn't have known how bad the leak was because BP was giving them false information. There was nothing preventing us from obtaining our own information on this. Our government either just choose not to do that, or did do it and is sitting back and letting BP lie to the public so that (as I stated earlier), they can blame BP when everything goes wrong.




What expertise? The expertise is held by the contractor in both cases. Are you telling me that the US can't find anyone other than BP who can look at images of the leak and make a calculation as to how bad it is? There's no one else on the planet with that expertise? I guess BP is the only company in the world that operate drill rigs and underwater oil wells and whatnot and no one who's been trained to make those sorts of assessments has ever left the company. Doesn't that seem a bit far fetched?


Heck. They could have made sure BP got those guys to put gear in the area on day one and insisted that they be given access to the direct feed of data on the leak so as to be able to make their own assessments. I'm sorry. The whole "We didn't know how bad it was because BP didn't tell us" argument is weak. The government should never have been in the situation of relying on BP and BP alone to make that assessment in the first place. What happened was willful ignorance on the part of the government in this case. Again, I can only assume that the reasoning is that the less they knew directly, the more they can shift the blame onto BP. If they did have the same data as BP at the same time, they couldn't claim that BP mislead them, could they?


Sorry. That's lame to the extreme.



That's funny Joph. You don't know how funny that is.

Looks like hobbit to me.

The anti-Obama crowd is going on and on about "he should have assembled a team of experts" - the question is, though, who? The only people who do deep sea oceaneering that aren't already working for the oil industry are the ones that do it for the love of the subject, i.e. poor college professors, most of whom can't simply abandon their schools at the drop of a hat since they're teaching classes and gearing up for finals in April.

Real "experts" don't just sit around waiting for their expertise to be needed. They have day jobs - even the ones that get paid to go on TV as "experts" in their subjects actually do stuff other than go on TV.

The few that have been working on it have been doing so since the spill first started, or at least as soon as they got permission to change their research project funding from whatever it was slated for to the oil spill.

A team of experts, REAL, experts, was assembled in about one month, which is pretty damn good considering. And they still can't come up with anything better than what BP has already tried.

Badgered;

Believing BP's estimate was naive, certainly, as oil companies consistently lie in these situations, but I have no reason to believe Obama has been disingenuous, especially as your explanation for him being so makes no sense. I'd say it was a mistake, but one without cost.

I have to say, fuck BP. I'm sorry, but when a single company can have 760 "willful & egregious safety violations" over the last 3 years, it's pretty obvious they don't give a shit about safety.

Especially when you consider that when you compare them to their competitors, Sunoco & Conoco Phillips had 8 each, Citgo had 2, & Exxon had 1. Link & Videos.

This is the worst man made ecological disaster of all time & what's worse is that we should have seen it coming.

Edited, Jun 11th 2010 12:35am by Omegavegeta

I was just wondering...is there any estimate of the size of the oil reservoir that is currently draining into the Gulf? How much more could escape?

No. If you really want experts, you can get experts pretty darn fast.

And for the record, the BP "help line" was more for show than anything else.

Make payments quicker as opposed to waiting for the end of each month to start cutting checks. BP has now agreed to start doing this so there ya go.

If there's any truth to the story that they lose more oil in Nigeria every year than has so far come out of the Deep Water Horizon hole, then this is totally false and evidence that the outrage over the gulf spill is purely politically motivated.