Stopping the flow?

[Dean]

I realize we are talking about a mile under the sea, but I do not understand why capping this sucker is so difficult. I wish there was somebody who would answer what appear to be the obvious questions from a plumbing/engineering perspective...

I can't find any stills or at least as easily as video, so take a look at this.

YouTube

YouTube

Why they tried to use ROV mounted circular saws and then eventually used the shears to cut the pipe baffles me. A chain cutter or similar is what I thought was the preferred method for cutting large diameter pipe, or some device that clamps to the pipe and then circles it with some sort of cutter. With a clean cut, you could thread the pipe maybe, design a seal for it, or whatever. They just replaced a reduced flow kinked piece of pipe with a tweaked higher flowing one.

Why they just don't unbolt that flange and bolt a valve, new BOP or whatever on top of it.

Or if you can't unbolt it, at least it is a known diameter and solid, so design something to seal to it and clamps below it.

[cody]

I'm with you. I was just telling Amanda last night that they should thread the pipe and screw on a cap. Or maybe use a slip joint. How can it take so long to cap a pipe? Even if it was on asteroid, it seems like there's been enough time to get there and do it.

[ScottyS]

Haha, obviously there are a lot of technical considerations to working robotically at that scale at that depth that those of us who are fairly handy or have even worked on large industrial mechanicals cannot fully appreciate. Or, it's all just a conspiracy, man.

The fastest and most effective method would simply be to stuff Al Gore and Michael Moore into the opening headfirst with instructions to swallow as much of the crude as possible.

[cody]

^Awesome.

[Kevin M]

Originally Posted by cody

I'm with you. I was just telling Amanda last night that they should thread the pipe and screw on a cap. Or maybe use a slip joint. How can it take so long to cap a pipe? Even if it was on asteroid, it seems like there's been enough time to get there and do it.

Well, there's your problem. Nobody's made a movie about underwater pipe-capping. Screenwriting and pre-production takes time you know.

[Dean]

Originally Posted by ScottyS

Haha, obviously there are a lot of technical considerations to working robotically at that scale at that depth that those of us who are fairly handy or have even worked on large industrial mechanicals cannot fully appreciate. Or, it's all just a conspiracy, man.

The fastest and most effective method would simply be to stuff Al Gore and Michael Moore into the opening headfirst with instructions to swallow as much of the crude as possible.

The latter is funny, and I have a respect for the challenges, but there is a bloody butt flange right there!!!

The big cutter just seems like it was dumb and severely limited their future options. Assuming they have a saw that works at that depth, how tough can it be to engineer a rig that clamps to the pipe and acts as a track/guide to cleanly cut the pipe.

And if they don't have the tools and ability to manipulate, cut, flange/thread, cap a live pipe at that depth, then they have no bloody business drilling there in the first place. Relying on something you put in at the top of the well before you started or early on in the drilling process no matter how cool/redundant it is without an alternate manual/brute force method is pretty naive.

Where are the guys that design methods for fixing leaks in submarines and large navel ships?

Call MacGrubber!

[Kevin M]

There should be a small engineering department added to the regulatory bodies for this drilling. Their job is to inspect the way the drilling is done and look for problems that could cause big spills. Drilling stops until these hypothetical b0rkage has a repair plan in place.

[ScottyS]

Honestly, I imagine that most of the problem lies with the fact that the multi-billion-dollar mechanical platform that has all of the capabilities to do the work is no longer "in position". Having to deal with this scenario without the platform in place was not thought through.

Think of it like.....the Space Shuttle gets up into position to deploy a pair of comm sats out of the bay, and as soon as the doors open, the robotic arm refuses to respond and all of the tooling attachments in the bay go haywire. Now the astronauts have to deploy the sats using gloved hands and Gerber multi-tools. And Come-Alongs. Good luck with that.

[Kevin M]

In other words, they crashed the ambulance?

[Dean]

No, the Fire Truck is burning.

Still, there has to be somewhere they can mock this up and engineer the right solution. Kind of like the Apollo 13 air scrubber or capsule startup routine. Put a 30,000 barrel/day water pump on the mock up and go do it in shallow water first.

The cutter was just a BFH stupid move.

[Nick Koan]

Furthermore:

YouTube

YouTube

[AtomicLabMonkey]

This entire event is utter fucking clownacy. A string of bad decisions made in the name of cost cutting and speed, which led to total catastrophic failure, which led to exponentially greater cost and downtime for them. Not to mention, you know, the entire gulf being fouled with oil.

Originally Posted by BP official e-mail

Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine.

Some supervisor actually said that. The only way justice could be served there is if they died in the rig explosion.

Morons.