

BP Knew of Deepwater Horizon Problems 11 Months Ago - prosa
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?pagewanted=all

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seldo
This article was posted (and extensively discussed) yesterday in the comments
on the other Deepwater Horizon story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389647>

The WSJ also has a lot more detail on how the rig was being run prior to the
accident:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266560930780190.html)

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jared314
All of this is hindsight. Every piece of equipment has "problems". It is just
a matter of how many failures happen at once. A bit like airliners.

~~~
jameskilton
A valid point, but I would hesitate to agree with this until someone can put
together the numbers of how many rigs fall under this "it's a problem, but
it's not a risk so go ahead anyway"

In terms of the Horizon, the reports I'm hearing basically state that _every
single major safety device_ on the well fit this category.

~~~
ars
I have a few numbers. Almost 1 billion wells have been drilled, and about
100,000 offshore wells.

~~~
anigbrowl
I saw you mention this yesterday. Can you cite your source for this? I find it
a little hard to believe there is (or has been) one oil well drilled for every
~6 people on earth.

~~~
ars
Thank you for challenging me, because while in my head I thought "million", I
wrote down "billion", and I feel like an idiot for doing that.

~~~
anigbrowl
No problem :-)

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ck2
Just wait until their deepwater Atlantis fails, it will make the Horizon
failure look like a puddle.

[http://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-sues-to-
stop...](http://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-sues-to-stop-
atlantis-bp-rig-from-operating)

Half of it's critical systems that were installed were not reviewed or tested.

------
retube
I posted this yesterday, but it didn't get picked up on. It appears that the
Niger Delta experience a Deepwater Horizon every single year....

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390246>

Direct link: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-
niger...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-
niger-delta-shell)

------
binspace
I just hope for all of our sakes that this is the final nail in the coffin of
industry self-regulation. It does not work when it is against your interests
to be safe; after all, we love to take risks.

I also hope that America begins to realize that large corporations rarely have
the interests of the population in mind. There needs to be checks and balances
here.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Excellent. So let's talk about regulating all these dot com companies...

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silentOpen
Name a dot-com with $1bn+ in liability and we can talk about regulating it.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I see. It's all those _other_ people that need to be regulated. Got it.

~~~
Vivtek
This is a pretty straw-mannish argument. It's clear to me that if a company is
big enough that its irresponsible actions can cause this much harm, it should
be regulated. (I note you haven't actually named a dot-com with more than a
billion in liability.)

 _Capitalism is not a suicide pact._

~~~
waterlesscloud
I see nothing here that explains why dot coms should not be regulated.

~~~
Vivtek
I see you've shifted your argument. What happened to "Right, just the _other_
guys should be regulated?"

I'm not sure what's not clear about the notion that large risk should be
regulated. If a company is capable, due to size or what have you, of harming a
large number of people due to malice or incompetence on the part of its
corporate governance, then sanity demands it should be regulated.

However, small companies should be regulated as little as possible. I mean,
assuming you want a working economy. I'm not sure you do - actually, I'm not
sure _what_ you want, but from the standpoint of pattern recognition of your
strawman attacks, I'd assume you want to regulate _all_ business as little as
possible.

Where I suspect we differ is the degree of "possible".

In my opinion, any business that can destroy hundreds of miles of coastline
for other people while still having a banner profit year? Yeah, that should
probably be regulated, since the Invisible Hand ain't gonna do it. Look up the
Tragedy of the Commons sometime; you might find it instructive. (Or perhaps
not. It's hard to tell how honestly you're approaching this.)

~~~
waterlesscloud
There's no shifting here. It's the same topic.

The original subject was that large corporations can't be trusted to regulate
themselves. But of course that's exactly what we're doing with the large dot
coms. They're minimally regulated, certainly in comparison with the oil
industry, which is in fact highly regulated.

Why do we trust large dot coms to regulate themselves? Because we think their
leadership is somehow more trustworthy? Are they just naturally better people?
On what basis do we make that judgement?

If Apple or Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google had malicious, greedy,
or incompetent leadership do you not believe they could cause massive harm?
Sure, it wouldn't make ugly pictures on tv (or would it? I can imagine ways in
which it could), but that doesn't mean the potential damage is any less real.
Why do we trust them to regulate themselves?

If you trust present leadership, what about the next generation, those that
are just MBAs from the same schools that turned out the leadership of BP,
Shell, and Exxon?

So, again, why do we think they shouldn't be regulated?

~~~
Vivtek
Ah. "Large" dot-coms. Well, I think your intuition tells you that "large" dot-
coms are also capable of incurring public liability that is not held in check
by their nominal liability. I'd argue that it's improbable that Apple or
Google could do damage to the public on quite the scale that BP or Goldman-
Sachs or Enron managed, but you could well be right.

But I think you really need to think about regulating _risk_ , not classes of
company - except insofar as classes of companies are in fact associated with
certain categories of risk. Apple will not be causing a vast oil spill.
Microsoft - well, Microsoft _might_ be capable of destroying the global
financial markets, but probably not as directly as AIG.

I consider the category of "dot-com" to be entirely orthogonal to this
question. It's the risk, not the company. And moreover, it's instances where
the risk to the public is far larger than the risk (or cost) to the company in
the worst case. That's where regulation has to adjust the balance.

For instance, Google could accidentally deny email to about 176 million people
at once, and that could arguably cause some damage. They could choose to stop
offering free email with no notice. You could argue that this would cause them
enough ill will that they wouldn't do it - but that argument clearly doesn't
work for BP or the financial giants. So you might have an argument there.

~~~
waterlesscloud
It's almost in the definition of a dot-com, large and small, that the impact
of any particular action they take is greater than the cost of that action to
the company. That's why tech startups are so appealing.

But if you have such leveraged benefits, you also have such leveraged risk.
The same leverage that lets a small team create great value also puts them in
a position where they can cause great harm.

I used large dot coms because there was some insistence in the thread that
regulation was only worth talking about with large companies. A red herring,
of course, since the mom and pop corner dry cleaner is a regulated business,
and for the common good. Size isn't really an issue.

The difference is that it's almost a tautology that dot coms have influence,
good and bad, far out of proportion to their size...

