Add to this an F?><ed up casing design, totally screwed up cement job that the client ordered, & a screwy set of instructions for the day’s work from the Houston office & you’re getting warmer.
Absolutely correct. This was a flawed design but BP’s public relations people and the oil lobbyists in general are trying to pass this off as something that happened because it was uncharted territory, like a trip to Mars or something. I’ve heard deepwater drilling equated with going to the moon on news reports. Bullshit, the engineering principles of Archimedes, Bernoulli and Pascal still apply, we’re on the planet earth for God’s sake we know how things work here. It’s a matter of pressure, volume, force and a little basic material science. Drilling a hole in the bottom of the ocean is NOT rocket science, we’ve been doing this for years quite successfully and we learned from shallow to deepwater what was acceptable and what was not.
This was negligence, plain and simple. The fact that there was no containment contingency plan just shows the audacity of the oil company, in this case BP, though it could have been any of them.