Reply #17: It's not that it's too expensive

[localroger]

It's that it's not possible. Really, there is no such thing as 100% certainty. I'm sure the people who designed this rig were very sure such an accident could never happen. I'm sure that if they could go back in time and write a check for a billion dollars to prevent it they would happily do so. Because they would be certain that the money would be well-spent.

Instead, they had to decide whether X measure was worth the Y dollars it cost. There were actually safety features in place, which have been generally successful in the past. As for the acoustic switch everyone is harping about it's not just that it was an extra expense, it's that it was very unsure it would work either in most situations where the other measures wouldn't, and it was KNOWN to operate by accident on occasion. (In fact, it's quite doubtful even that switch would have worked; ultimately it would still have to close a fairly large, heavy mechanical valve, and when THE WHOLE DRILLING RIG BLOWS UP AND SINKS mechanisms like that often get too damaged to work. The mechanism they did have, a dead man's switch, should have closed its valve in the absence of a direct electrical signal from the surface; given that it failed, there isn't much reason to think the acoustic valve would have fared much better.) Given what was known the decisions made were sensible and defensible. In the future with knowledge of this incident I'm sure the window will slide more toward the side of prudence and new, possibly even more expensive mechanisms will be invented to head off the risk, just as the Apollo fire gave NASA a badly needed wake-up call in its day. Sometimes the price of learning is high.

Similarly, while we have IDEAS about how to cap a well 5,000 feet down, nobody has ever had to do it so we don't know how well those ideas work. The only way to test those ideas is to try capping a well 5,000 feet down. Well, we're going to learn how to do it, the sooner the better obviously. We might learn that the risk was too great and we really need to back off on deep-water drilling. Sometimes that's the lesson you learn.

I can't believe I'm defending an oil company here but this kind of criticism is really stupid. People complaining about them cheaping out and being incompetent have no fucking idea whatsoever what it takes to run an oil rig. I hate what is about to happen to the coastline of my state and yes, the company that screwed it up needs to pay, but it does not mean that they are all Simpsons rejects. They were risking billions of dollars of investment and in many cases their lives to bring what they saw as an essential resource to a world in need of it. Yes they also hoped to make a bunch of money in the deal but that's how we choose to reward people who do those things for us. If we knew a better way to reward the people who build our world they probably still would have tried it and made the same mistake.