Hi Folks - a long time since I posted. I have been following your collective musings regularly though and thank you all for them. The blame game is now on. As the wheel spins, we might ponder a couple of posts alcor came up with months ago as company man and he “debated”. Hayward is none the poorer and now “has his life back” as is the way with these slippery guys at the top.
I’m left entirely puzzled about the lack of analysis of Kent and his team in the press and even in quality debate. 3 days in and every tin-pot web-site had somebody saying bolt another BOP on top of the first one, then turn the valve to “off”. The perceived wisdom of the experts was based on the little information that came from the specialist team. I watched and re-watched, Kent told me in his very convenient video, all plans to cap the well at the sea-floor were off.
Conclusion - any valving arrangement at that point would be useless as integrity was lost, below the BOP.
We all worried and winced as the gusher gushed, day after day, month after month. We watched as ROV’s bodged their way around the sea floor. Tubes were inserted in other bent bits of tube and some oil was collected. There were caps that didn’t fit properly. There were big scissors and diamond cutters that didn’t. There were new caps that still did not fit properly. There were 2 pipes, where there should have only been one. It was all so painful. Then in the final course of events, they unbolted the remains of the riser and then bolted on a new valve and gradually closed down the flow.
Hold on - why didn’t that happen on day 8 ? Instead of this being the most devastating leak in the history of oil recovery it could have been a serious incident. Instead of devastating the livelihood of many thousands it could have been in the 10’s or 100’s.
Standing back, this is an engineering failure in the most extreme sense. I thought that failure was due sometime into the future. The failure was actually that the experts had not done the obvious. The failure was in that decision not to proceed with closure of the well immediately above the BOP straight away. What were the motives that caused that initial decision and why did it take so long to reverse that decision ?