[Timo]

Regarding rats, i had an interesting similar experience a few years back, but with racoons, instead. My next door neighbor is the Queen Goddess Icon of hoarders. The house is not habitable, but my neighbor still owns it and lives in aretirement community. The house has become a giant storage locker, indested with rats, and mice, and racoons, and opossums, and probably a few brand new species of verimin to the planet. Well, those racoons ripped a long tear into our roof, unbeknownst to us, until it rained. My wife and i hired a live trapper to catch as many racoons as possible using live traps, and re,locate the critters to some other place outside the City. Good, we thought. We don't have to kill them to get rid of them. However, we subsequently learned that even if racoons are relocated, they usually always starve to death because their entire environment has changed, and what they've always learned about how and where to acquire food has gone poof! Take an urban 'coon and put it into the country, and there are no sewers, no trash cans, no compost piles, no food tossed out the windows of moving cars. They lack the abilities to adapt to a new environement fast enough to survive. That does make me feel bad about causing their deaths, but short of simply releasing them into someone else's neighborhood to continue to cause damage to other people's homes, what else is there to do?

Maybe if there was some oil involved, i'd feel better about killing the urban wildife.

[ROCKMAN]

Once again having regs that are not closely monitored and enforced won't prevent accidents. A sadder report for me than I first thought: had not seen the names before. Worked with Corporal years ago. At some point fines just aren't enough of a deterrent...someone needs to go to jail IMHO. From Rig Zone:

The explosion and fire that killed three workers last year on a Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations production platform resulted from the failure of Black Elk and contractors to follow Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) safety regulations. Ellroy Corporal, Jerome Malagapo, and Avelino Tajonera were killed in the incident, which also resulted in serious injuries to others and the discharge of pollutants into the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

BSEE Director said that the failures that resulted in the workers’ deaths “reflect a disregard for the safety of workers on the platform and are the antithesis of the type of safety culture that should guide decision-making in all offshore oil and gas operations.”

The panel cited specific safety failures, including:
•No hazard identification
•Conducting “hot work” without taking required safety precautions
•Failure to isolate hydrocarbons inside an oil tank
•Ineffective communication among contractors
•A climate in which workers feared retaliation if they raised safety concerns

[Plantagenet]

... having regs that are not closely monitored and enforced won't prevent accidents.... At some point fines just aren't enough of a deterrent...someone needs to go to jail IMHO.

Exactly right.

Same sad story on the BP Macondo rig. The feds shouldn't be in the business of giving BP or other oilcos exemptions from safety and environmental regs and shouldn't look the other way if equipment isn't maintained to the level of being 100% safe. Safety regulations should be strictly enforced.

[Timo]

Not being in the offshore oil biz, this is actually an honest question based on personal ignorance of the regs you're referring to. Is it possible that even the federal safety regs, if accurately followed, wouldn't have saved those who died, or avoided the calamity that followed? I'm only wondering if these types of accidents are simply unavoidable due to our own ignorance of what we're doing, using new technologies without a proven history of infalability. It's pretty clear that everyone involved was willing to take unnecessary risks to accomplish their aims. I only wonder if those regs would have been sufficiently adequate to guarantee safety, 100%. Factoring in human error, i suppose not, but that just gets me back to our dependence on new technologies with unproven track records. Is it even possible for humanity to draw a line, and commit ourselves to only pursuing sensible activities? Are there any risks that we're not willing to take if there isn't money waiting for us at the other end?

[ROCKMAN]

Timo – Following the regs and applying common sense would eliminate many of the accidents. Unfortunately often not following the regs and mechanical failures are not the primary problem. Just poor decisions. I had a similar accident about 20 years ago. Had a crew cleaning an “empty” oil tank on an offshore platform. “Empty” because
even after a tank is drained there is still enough volatile material left in the metal to be dangerous. So we had fans running so the vapors wouldn’t accumulate in the tank. A very simple and easy solution. The the crew took a lunch break at midnight. Turned the portable lights off in the tank…very good. Turned the fans off…very bad. Cameback from lunch, turned the lights back on which threw a spark igniting the vapor and blew the bottom out of the tank. Forunately no serious injuries and no pollution.

The regs required the fans to be ventilating the tanks while the hands were working on it. But there were no regs about venting the tank before turning on the lights. At some point you just have to count on common sense to fill in any gaps in the regs. And as is often said common sense isn’t that common. And then add efforts to cuts costs, keep the boss happy and there you go: most of your accidents.

[Newfie]

While I work in a different industry I see similar issues. Regulations themselves do very little. FINES, even low, get action. Also, there needs to be some regulatory oversight agency with authority and balls to issue the fines.

[Subjectivist]

It has been three years since the spill, I had just kind of assumed they had drilled a new well by now and were back in full production. Is there some kind of regulatory hold up or is it just not safe?

[ROCKMAN]

Sub – I’m not sure what the current status of the field is. But there wasn’t anything particularly dangerous or unsafe about that reservoir. Thousands have similar reservoirs and many with much higher pressures have been safely developed in the GOM. But there is that emotional overhang from the blowout that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation out there. The problem wasn’t the Macondo reservoir…it was BP.

[ROCKMAN]

And now it's turning into an international poker game between governments:

Reuters – The British government has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to review appeals court rulings against BP Plc over a 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill that produced one of the largest class actions in American history. In a friend of court brief, the UK government said lower court rulings raise grave international concerns by undermining confidence in the "vigorous and fair resolution of disputes." The filing said BP, which has "gone to great lengths to restore the Gulf Coast", was now being required to pay large sums to others who were not injured by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The London-based oil major is appealing lower court decisions within the last year that it believes wrongly require it to compensate claimants who suffered no injuries from the spill.

The British government said treatment meted out to BP undermined the fairness and trust necessary for international commerce. The United States and Britain conduct more than $200 billion in trade each year, and UK businesses are responsible for 17 percent of all foreign direct investment in the United States, according to the filing. In a separate statement, BP said the government's petition emphasizes the importance of fair and consistent application of law. BP argued that the Fifth Circuit's decisions, if allowed to stand, will fundamentally alter class action law and discourage companies from settling complex cases. It also said the decisions will likely discourage companies from investing in the United States "if companies are exposed to liability for losses they did not cause. Separately, a Louisiana court ruled last week that BP was "grossly negligent" and "reckless" in the spill, a move that could add nearly $18 billion in fines to more than $42 billion in charges.

[vox_mundi]

Dispersant used to clean Deepwater Horizon spill more toxic to corals than the oil

The dispersant used to remediate the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is more toxic to cold-water corals than the spilled oil, according to a study conducted at Temple University. The study comes on the eve of the spill's fifth anniversary, April 20th.

In this collaborative study between researchers from Temple and the Pennsylvania State University, the researchers exposed three cold-water coral species from the Gulf to various concentrations of the dispersant and oil from the Deepwater Horizon well. They found that the dispersant is toxic to the corals at lower concentrations than the oil.

The researchers' findings, "Response of deep-water corals to oil and chemical dispersant exposure," were published online in the journal Deep-Sea Research II.

Approximately five million barrels of crude oil escaped from the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010, and nearly seven million liters of dispersants--chemical emulsifiers used to break down the oil--were used to clean it up. Normally applied to the water's surface, the spill marked the first time that dispersants were applied at depth during an oil spill.

"Applying the dispersants at depth was a grand experiment being conducted in real-time," said Erik Cordes, associate professor of biology at Temple, who has been studying Gulf of Mexico coral communities for more than a decade. "It was a desire to immediately do something about the oil coming out of the well, but they really didn't know what was going to happen as a result."

Following the 2010 spill, Cordes and his collaborators discovered several damaged Gulf coral populations that were coated with a dark colored flocculent slime that was found to contain oil from the spill and residues from the dispersants.

[Tanada]

As usual when humans try and fix A problem by supplying B solution they cause B to become a problem in addition to A.

[dohboi]

Or as Eric Sevareid put it a bit more trenchantly a good while ago: "The chief cause of problems is solutions."

As we have ever bigger problems which seem to call for ever bigger 'solutions' (geo-engineering, anyone??--where is Graeme these days, anyway??), I think this should become the motto of the post-post-modern age.

[dissident]

It's the arrogance of assuming some techno "fix" is necessary and right for the job. There is a massive blind spot about chemical production, use and pollution that seems to never go away. Every industrial chemical is treated as innocent until proven guilty and it is only ever treated as guilty if there is a long line of victims in its wake. This is total rubbish policy vis a vis chemicals. All of them have to be treated as guilty until proven innocent. Only the non-radioactive noble gases are truly inert. Any compound involving carbon, hydrogen and anything else attached to it (e.g. chlorine, nitrogen, etc.) is almost by definition going to disrupt the biochemistry of living organisms.

I can see some smart a** invoke sugar as a counter example to the above. BS. We have evolved to use this obviously active chemical. We have not evolved to use or tolerate industrial solvents and the rest of the polyaromatic hydrocarbons spewed out by industry.

[GHung]

Oklahoma explosion: Trump wants to eliminate the agency probing oil rig deaths

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is probing last week's deadly blaze in Quinton, Oklahoma, about 100 miles south of Tulsa. Five workers died in the explosion.

The agency is modeled after the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and investigates chemical accidents. It has four board members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Although it doesn't have regulatory powers, it provides safety recommendations to plants, regulators and industry and labor groups.

It's one of dozens of agencies the Trump administration proposed to eliminate in the White House's $4.1 trillion full-year budget for 2018. Last year, the board had an $11 million budget and a staff of around 40. ....

..... The board has issued 800 safety recommendations since it launched. It investigated the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 and caused a three-month oil spill. The agency found in 2012 that BP did not mitigate risks of a major accident prior to the spill.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/29/news/ch ... -stack-dom

[ROCKMAN]

Ghung - "Athough it doesn't have regulatory powers, it provides safety recommendations to plants, regulators and industry and labor groups." Sounds like a good way to save a little money by eliminating such a group. Part of my responsibility in my last gig was safety issues. I didn't need 4 guys sitting 1,200 miles away giving me recommendations. Especially since they probably spent or no time on the ground. Take the big dog for example: the BP Macondo blowout. Everyone in the oil patch knows what went wrong: BP followed a very risky procedure and did not make sure the rig crew was not monitoring the situation closely enough. A procedure I've not witnessed in 40 years in the oil patch. And despite digging everywhere I knew I could not find any indication the federal govt has banned that procedure. But may these 4 yahoos (or a different group of yahoos) have RECOMMENDED that procedure ever be followed again.