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A Republican controlled Congress...hmmm, maybe this was Newt's Contract to Destroy America.U.S. Minerals Management Service peeled-back testing requirement in 1998 under the Clinton Administration
new procedures and rules may be needed, including certifying blowout preventers by an independent group of experts. He also said the agency may revise its peeled-back testing requirement of 1998, when it replaced a weekly regimen with biweekly pressure tests...
...In 1999, right after that rule change, an MMS-commissioned report by a research group identified 117 blowout preventer failures at deep-water rigs within the previous year. These breakdowns created 3,638 hours of lost time a 4 percent chunk of drilling time.
In 2004, an engineering study for federal regulators said only 3 of 14 new devices could shear pipe, as sometimes required to check leaks, at maximum rated depths. Only half of operators accepting a newly built device tested this function during commissioning or acceptance, according to the report.
"This grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout," the report warned.
Two years later, a trade journal's article still noted that shearing preventer's "may also have difficulty cutting today's high-strength, high toughness drill pipe" at deep wells.
You partisan hacks crack me up. I can't believe some are foolish enough to believe that the Republicans are any more indebted to big business than the Democrats are, or visa versa.
Time and time again its proven that both parties make fools of all of you.
You partisan hacks crack me up. I can't believe some are foolish enough to believe that the Republicans are any more indebted to big business than the Democrats are, or visa versa.
Time and time again its proven that both parties make fools of all of you.
So your argument is that the republicans are just as corrupt as the democrats?
A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.
In the survey, commissioned by the rigs owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.
Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance, according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.
At nine years old, Deepwater Horizon has never been in dry dock, one worker told investigators. We can only work around so much.
Run it, break it, fix it, another worker said. Thats how they work.
According to a separate 112-page equipment assessment also commissioned by Transocean, many key components including the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves had not been fully inspected since 2000, even though guidelines require its inspection every three to five years.
The report cited at least 26 components and systems on the rig that were in bad or poor condition.
Early warning systems on the Deepwater Horizon rig had been switched off, a federal investigation has been told.
Michael Williams, a chief technician at Transocean, the firm that operated the doomed rig for BP, told a federal panel in New Orleans that alarms had been disabled to prevent workers being woken up by false alarms.
He said he had protested to his supervisor, Mark Hay, a year before the explosion that destroyed the rig, but was told the alarm system had been "bypassed" on Transocean's "entire fleet".
