Mister O, It’s Time To Take Command and Stop the Oil
May 2nd, 2010
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The US President has many roles and responsibilities, but one of the most important is stepping up to be the commander, leader and decision maker at times of crisis. The president has the ability to declare states of emergency and disaster areas, to allocate federal resources rapidly and to activate the military to respond to emergency situations. The President is the commander in chief of the US armed forces. He can order the world’s largest and most powerful military into action when necessary.
Before the rain had even stopped failing, President Bush was taking a lot of flack for not responding fast enough or effectively enough to Hurricane Katrina. While much may have been deserved, we now are in a situation where the president has failed to do anything, ANYTHING of substance to a major crisis that needs to be remedied as quickly as possible. There is an oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico and creating a slick that could be the worst ecological disaster in decades.
Mister President, we know you’re good at talking. We know you like to have your photo taken looking very in control. However, now is the time for action. Visiting the region and giving speeches are not going to fix this. Photo ops with fishermen in the area and big promises of compensation from the deep pockets of debt-ridden Uncle Sam are not going to cut it either. We need action. We need action now, and means something that the Government is not generally used to doing – acting like something other than a paperwork-laden, lumbering, clumsy bureaucratic giant. Don’t talk, don’t promise, JUST DO IT.
What you need to do is mobilize every asset that the government has that could be of use in closing this wellhead and stopping the oil flow. That must be the number one priority. While the slick may already be disastrous, it is nothing compared to what it will be if that well is not plugged NOW! As long as that well is open, the spill will get progressively worse. Every agency that can help or even has the potential to help must be mobilized. The fact that they are not already is unacceptable.
Here is what you need to do but should have already done by now:
- Getting that well plugged is critical and it needs to be done ASAP. And who do you call when you need something critical done ASAP? You call in the military. You’ve got the world’s greatest bluewater force at your command. Put the US Navy in charge of capping the well and containing the slick. Have the project commanded centrally by a fleet admiral. All others involved need to report to the Navy. Have the navy start moving their assets into the area.
Figure out exactly what is going on down on the sea floor. Every piece of debris, every pipe coming off the well and the topography of the area. Have the navy immediately begin to map the area extensively using high resolution sonar and photograph the debris and the wellhead to assess its condition using ROV’s. Order the deployment of the Navy’s special operations ROV’s and submarine capabilities for surveying the area. The Avenger Class Mine Countermeasures ships also have excellent high resolution sonar and ROV capabilities and could be in the area rapidly. The US Navy Scorpio RV system would also be invaluable and could reach the area rapidly and possibly directly begin work on the wellhead.-
It is likely that the wellhead will need to be modified or somehow repaired or closed, possibly needing to a new hydraulic valve welded on or a the hydraulic rams forced closed. What is needed is a group which is equipped to preform salvage and repair work at extreme depths. Ideally, it should be a group that is experienced and trained in preforming critical underwater work on with imperfect conditions, improvised solutions and time constraints and be able to mobilize and begin operations on extremely short notice.Luckilly, the US has that. Call in the Deep Submergance Unit – Deep Submarine Rescue, Naval Air Station North Island.
If there is anyone in the world who can weld a cap onto a broken piece of pipe at 5,000 feet of depth, they can. They are prepared to have their state of the art deep submergence vehicles and ROV systems to any place on the face of the earth on 48 hours notice.
- Putting together a long term solution to this problem and assuring that the well is capped properly will require major marine engineering capabilities. Bring in the Seabees.
There you go – put the navy in charge. Organizations like BP may still have equipment and know-how that can help get this under control, but the Navy needs to be the one in charge. This needs to get done NOW. This is no job for a civilian government agency. Get the best naval engineering in and use the assets of the submarine rescue unit to provide the ROV’s and deep salvage capabilities on short notice.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Good Science, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 2nd, 2010 at 5:15 pm
I have always wondered too why these disasters are not being managed by navies or coast guards, and it’s not just in the US that this is true, but rather just about everywhere. Why there is not a pool of expertise in these institutions to deal with this is surprising, to say the least.
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May 2nd, 2010 at 5:20 pm
And get oil all over that shiny equipment?! Never! It’s best kept in a warehouse with a fresh coat of wax waiting for photo ops!
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May 2nd, 2010 at 5:58 pm
DV82XL said:
They actually do have some level of expertise and response equipment for oil spills. You might remember the Persian Gulf War of 1991 saw a huge amount of oil dumped and the US Navy and other Navies were the biggest part of the recovery effort to both try to clean it up and recover as much of the oil as possible.
The US Navy has many asserts that can be used in oil spill containment and recovery. For one thing it’s clear that sabotage or intentional spilling can be a weapon of war. Remember too, there has been experienced gained in the Gulf at the oil terminals. Besides combat vessels they have a lot of fleet oilers and mobile fuel terminals which could be used to help store and transport the oil to shore for processing and get it out of the water. That’s not even to mention the ships that could lay boom or track the spill.
The Navy is responding to this in some of the ways mentioned. They have salvage and deep water experts getting involved. See here: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/04/navy_oilspill_042910w/
I’ve read the news stories though, and it sounds like the Navy is “assisting” or that they somehow a secondary thing that is just putting their hat into the ring to offer some help. I agree with buzz. They shouldn’t be an assistant. Put them in charge!
Who is in charge of this operation, by the way? I don’t see any agency or command authority actually running it. It seems like there are a lot of players who are working more or less like a mob.
The Navy might be just the kind of authority they need now. They also might want to think about calling in some of our allies, even if that means we have to pay them for leasing out their time and equipment, because I know the Germans have some very capable oil recovery ships. The fact that the Navy so often works with other countries might come in handy too.
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May 2nd, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Good ideas, but I can think of a lot of reasons why that is probably not going to happen.
It is not a politically good thing. Obama has never really been super pro-military. He also would probably like this oil spill to be as big as possible because if it is it means that he can spend the next year looking good about spending money cleaning it up. No matter what happens and how bad it is he will not get blamed but BP will, which is good for him because it can mean more regulations and he ran on an anti-business anti-corporation platform and can use this as proof.
I do not think he would want the military to look good or for the situation to not be a huge deal. The bigger a deal it is the worse BP looks and he can just say there was nothing anyone could do because of BP.
Why do you think he has taken almost no action but has traveled there for photo ops?
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May 2nd, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Well I’m no fan of Obama, but I’d like to hope he would not intentionally make the oil spill worse for political reasons. I doubt it would really gain him anything and it certainly cold backfire.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 8:55 am
What is going on is the payback for decades of the government failing to properly regulate actvities. Instead of inspecting the rig they rely on self inspection and reports. Instead of checking the hardware first hand they rely on consultants (paid by industry) to certify everything is ok. Instead of stockingpiling equipment and training to conduct repairs they require that industry have consultants available. If the consultants can’t deliever there is no backup.
This is not about republicans or democrats – it’s about trying to look tough on the cheap so they can spend money elsewhere.
You cannot contract out safety.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 9:24 am
I do not believe that Obama is drawing this out strictly for political points. However I believe he thinks that BP can clean this up on it’s own which is better for him politically. There is a very very fine difference between the two. I also think we forget what he ~has~ done which is to charge the Attorney General to begin organizing the law suits to pay for the clean up.
I think this is very much a case of getting caught with his pants down and that he did not expect this to be this serious this soon. A shame that we are the ones paying for it, litterally.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 11:08 am
What would be really interesting would be a look at oil releases like this vs natural oil seepage (one of the arguments for offshore drilling was to reduce the pressure and shut down those seeps, IIRC). I’m not sure where I would get the data on natural seepage rates, though.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 11:48 am
There are those wondering if this event will be this generation’s Three Mile island. We can only hope. Devastation at the magnitude of this spill at TMR and it’s a good bet that nuclear energy would have been buried so deep that that my great-grand children’s generation wouldn’t think of building a NPP.
But this isn’t going to happen to oil. We will accept that one of the world’s most productive fishery will be all but destroyed for the foreseeable future and that some of the most beautiful coastlines in the world will be damaged, and carry on as if nothing happened.
For one of the nastiest substances on earth, crude oil has an amazing grip on the globe. We all know the stuff is poison, yet we’re as dependent on it as our air and water supplies — which, of course, is what oil is poisoning. Shouldn’t we be technologically advanced enough here in the 21st Century to quit siphoning off the pus of the Earth? Regardless whether you believe global warming is threatening the planet’s future, you must admit crude is passé. Weaning ourselves off crude will hopefully be the crowning achievement that marks the progress of humankind in the 21st Century.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 11:53 am
I agree with Post #3 more than most of what has been said here, but everyone needs to keep in mind that political issues can and will be distorted in every-which direction. If Obama clearly starts to spend the money to clean up the spill ASAP to limit damage, you will find Fox News headlines about a bailout for oil companies that deserve to fail. If he spends the time to find out what the industry is already doing to fix it and how he can best help cleanup, the Huffington Post will have a half dozen articles discussing why it’s an awful decision to leave it up to the corrupt and inept morons who caused the problem in the first place (as well as articles over-estimating the already huge amounts of damage that will be done, heavily sourced by Greenpeace).
It’s probably impossible to keep every ideology happy in this situation. In fact, if Obama is truly pragmatic and making the right decisions, he’ll probably piss off everyone just a little. I’d hate to say it, but this post feels really off-topic for this blog – seems to have veered from the science-heavy region.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 1:49 pm
well you have to work at 5000 ft depth in an area where you cant see ****: the water is full of oil and little particles from the seafloor due to the turbulences, resulting in a viewing distance of maybe a few centimeters , even with strong lights. on the one hand you have the navy experts in their submarine with experience on welding things in water but certainly not on oil wells who cant see **** and on the other hand experts from bp working everyday on oil wells with their robotic probes which are especially designed for such work and well they cant see **** either.
since both of them can’t fix the leak , the idea of putting something huge just over the crack sounds much more promising to me
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May 3rd, 2010 at 1:54 pm
The only relation between the Navy and an undersea oilhead breach is “the Navy has submarines and it’s underwater”.
They’re not in charge because it’s not their job, not remotely, any more than the Army comes in to cap out a burst oilhead on land.
(If it helps, here’s a partisan-opposed-to-the-President source claiming that the response is actually correct so far. Which seems plausible to me both factually, and as a “he doesn’t carry water for the Democrats, so if he’s saying the President’s doing okay on this he probably really is” factor.)
Given the natural seepage of perhaps 140,000 tons of oil a year into the Gulf, we might not need to be in fullbore panic mode just yet.
(At about 7 pounds a gallon, and assuming 2 million gallons of spill [rough estimates so far], that’s 14 million pounds, or 2000 tons. Say we double that estimate to be conservative, double it again for delays in capping, and it’s 8,000 tons of oil from start to finish. That’s about 3% of the yearly natural seepage in the Gulf, for this incident, as a rough napkin estimate.
Now, that’s over a few days, and in one spot, not over a year and spread throughout the gulf, but it’s not like the ecosystems there aren’t used to oil being present at all.
This is a more reasonably a moderate problem, not a complete and unmitigated disaster requiring Massive Emergency Response Powers The Moment It Was Known.)
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May 3rd, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Sigivald said:
You are selling the navy very short on their deep sea operations and expertise.
Apparently you’re unaware of some of the things they’ve done with ROV’s and deep submergence craft for things like intercepting telecommunications cables, salvaging part of a Soviet submarine, recovering lost H-bombs off the coast of Spain, laying down deep listening equipment, rescuing crews of stranded submarines and so on.
hgnnn said:
No…
You might want to look here:
http://www.depletedcranium.com/4551846015_608996aa31_o.jpg
Or here:
http://www.depletedcranium.com/608-APTOPIX_Oil_Rig_Explosion.sff.standalone.prod_affiliate.81.jpg
There is no time to fabricate the big box to sink on top of all the leaks. That will take weeks, maybe months. The blowout preventer needs to be triggered and if that can’t be done they need to cut off the pipe and attach a new hydraulic ram valve or clamp it shut.
The Super Scorpion can move large items. It also has the ability to be fitted with cutters and saws. The unmanned deep submergence system has the ability to precisely place equipment underwater.
BP is using commercial ROV’s that are fairly small and not designed for heavy work.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 5:54 pm
They never should have bought that blow out preventer at Wal Mart.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 7:39 pm
No, I’m actually aware of all of those operations. Honest!
But, for instance, re. the Soviet sub salvage, the Glomar Explorer took two years to build especially for that task!
The Navy doesn’t have underwater well-capping technology and trained personnel lying around waiting (nor is it clear that they should; if any Government body should, it’d be the Coast Guard), so they really have nothing to do with this at the moment.
Likewise, the fiber optic cable taps were long-term projects with lots of lead time and practice in advance; not “the Navy should do something about this thing that happened just this week!”.
The Navy does all sorts of very technical and skilled things underwater, and I don’t short that. But those things all have lots of advance planning and require significant training.
The context of the post sure seemed to suggest that the Navy could “just deploy and do something” on no notice.
I don’t believe they can; all of the examples are either complex and daunting tasks that had months or years of prep time and training or relatively simple things (picking up a large hunk of metal that happens to be a nuclear bomb); underwater well-capping is much more like the former than the latter, as far as I understand it.
Salvaging an H-bomb is something they could probably do reasonably easily with no special leadup… because it’s just a heavy thing.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I think this could be compared to Apollo-13. There’s little time, there’s not a lot of preparation for this. Something is going to have to be improvised as soon as possible. It may be jury-rigging something out of parts that are not intended to do this.
The Navy and especially the deep submarine rescue unit have equipment that can work at this depth. They have big, dexterous ROV’s. They don’t just have one or two, they have several. They have underwater cutting devices. They have devices designed to clamp to things under water, turn bolts, open hatches.
I say take everything we have out there and all the best people we have and try anything and everything anyone can think of, because that’s all we have.
It may come down to being as inelegant as tearing the cover off a manual, duct taping it to two canisters of lithium hydroxide, putting the whole thing in a sample collection bag when a section cut out, sticking a hose from a space suit into it and jamming it into a port that it does not quite fit perfectly into.
Those hydraulic rams need to be activated if they can. When all else fails and a piece of equipment won’t operate when you turn the knob, sometimes the only course of action you have left is to give it a good hard kick and then try again.
The reason the Navy needs to be in charge of this is that they’re the one of the only parts of the government that does not royally suck at what they do.
The NRC can’t regulate the nuclear industry worth a bucket of warm piss. HUD can’t develop urban areas worth a bucket of cold piss. NASA periodically blows up astronauts and crashes probes because they use the wrong unit. FEMA is so stupid they ship truckloads of blankets to Louisiana in the middle of the summer and order tons of frozen food but don’t arrange for freezers so it all gets wasted.
That is why it HAS TO BE THE MILITARY. It’s the one and only sector of the federal government that does not consistently do a horrible job at everything it does. The military actually employs some people who are not wholly incompetent at everything they do. They don’t fail more often than they succeed. Regardless of the technical skills or measures needed, we simply can’t let non-military government entities work on this.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 8:52 pm
While I don’t agree with the media premise that all government sucks – I do know that having the Navy on site could not possiably HURT. How would having the resources there be a problem?
Why do we assume that private contractors can majiclly do a better job in a situation that does not involve a free market? Thier goal is billable hours after all.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Chris Brown said:
It’s not the media. I have come to this conclusion primarily based on my interactions with the government and government agencies.
Actually, I have said this before: I find it amazing that the government works at all. It’s so incompetent and so incapable that I’m really just floored that the mail gets delivered and that government buildings are actually heated in the winter, because someone actually managed to maintain the furnace and pay the gas bill. The fact that the government is capable of doing anything at all is amazing.
So really the big thing to me is not that the government works so badly but rather that it ever works at all.
Chris Brown said:
Nobody should confuse “government contractor” with true private sector work. Granted, they’re not technically part of the government, but government contracts encourage incompetence and assure contractors generally don’t do good work or inexpensive work.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 9:53 pm
(quote)
The fact that the government is capable of doing anything at all is amazing.
So really the big thing to me is not that the government works so badly but rather that it ever works at all.
—
Well based on my expeirance with the military they are much better then your average agency at coming up with roadblocks and ways to keep good ideas from getting done. I do manage a small agency (7 employees) and we balance our budget every year and in 8 years have never asked for more money (we are fee funding and don’t get any tax dollars). We get all our desks and chairs from the stack of stuff soical services tossed out because it’s “too old.” We don’t follow the normal model.
___________________
(quote)
Nobody should confuse “government contractor” with true private sector work. Granted, they’re not technically part of the government, but government contracts encourage incompetence and assure contractors generally don’t do good work or inexpensive work.
These are true private sector contractors. BP is paying them – not uncle sam. BP can hire whoever they want. Most of them – like Helly-burndown (halliburton) get all thier free spending cash from the feds, but BP is free to inovate with faster-better-cheaper.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 10:11 pm
drbuzz0 said:
As a government contractor, I resemble that remark.
The military accomplishes some amazing things, but all too often it seems that the strategy is the same as with the invasion of Normandy. How do you dig out a heavily entrenched and fortified German force? Keep throwing troops at the beach until they’re landing faster than the Germans can shoot them. Replace the word “troops” with “money” and you have the military’s general strategy. Ditto for most other government functions.
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May 3rd, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Chris Brown said:
I disagree. If a soldier or sailor is told to do something, they are required to actually do it. They can’t say “Uh, that’s not in my job description and I think it could be dangerous. I want to get my union representative involved” or just not do it at all and yet never be fired.
It’s all but impossible to do anything about a government employee who doesn’t do their job. I most government agencies, if you slack off and don’t do what you should, they can’t usually even fire you. The military has courtmarshals. There also is no union to prevent them from telling soldiers or sailors what to do.
Members of the military have to work when they’re on duty. They can’t demand more breaks or say that they can’t be held overtime. They don’t arrive at work at 11 am and leave at 3 PM.
If you had the assclowns who work at the IRS or the DMV or most other government agencies working on submarines, they’d all implode because the idiots would forget to close the ballast tank valves. In general, if you’re dealing with things like high explosives, supersonic jets and tanks there’s a requirement that most of your workers not be borderline retarded, which can’t be said for most of the federal government.
Have I ever mentioned how I feel about the government?
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May 3rd, 2010 at 10:30 pm
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May 3rd, 2010 at 10:59 pm
well, that’s 30% better than most agencies…
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May 4th, 2010 at 6:23 am
Odd-ball devil’s advocate type question:
Given that the spill is about 40 miles off the coast, does the area count as within US national waters? If it technically counts as international waters then deploying the US Navy may require a severe amount of paperwork.
Not that anyone would object, of course, but it doesn’t come under the likely classifications of things like “responding to direct distress calls” or “risk of loss of human life” which I would expect are possibly enshrined in UN regulations.
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May 4th, 2010 at 11:11 am
“The NRC can’t regulate the nuclear industry worth a bucket of warm piss.” – drbuzz0
That’s not the impression that I get at all. I’d say that the NRC has done a hell of a job in pushing operating nuclear power plants to constantly outdo themselves. No other energy generating industry has a remotely close capacity factor compared to nukes, and nukes have significantly more complicated designs and technical restrictions. I find it hard to believe that the nuclear power industry spontaneously decided to try that much harder than (for example) the coal industry and that said positive change wasn’t prompted by strict regulations and intrusive inspectors.
If you try, I’m sure you can come up with specific instances of bad things being missed, but to say that the NRC is failing at their goal of regulating the industry is an absolute stretch. Similarly, pointing out individual failures of other government agencies amounts to nothing more than anecdotes. You have to look at the overall results of the agencies. I can’t speak for every other agency you listed, but I strongly feel that you have mislabeled the NRC.
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May 4th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Read it and weep:
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/fire_boom_oil_spill_raines.html
Via: ,i>Pharyngula
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May 4th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
DV82XL said:
Well what that tells me is the agency had a plan to deal with the problem – but congress or the white house refused to fund it. The folks who develop the plans almost never are given the funds to implement them. I would not blame the planners, but the electeds who gambled and lost.
On the whole military aspect of this – correct me if I am wrong but the Coast Guard is now a branch of the Armed Forces and no longer in “Trasnportation” correct? In any case they have the military command structure that was widely hailed a few posts back – but have been doing a very poor job in responding to this event (like they did not know there was a leak for 5 days).
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May 5th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
“salvaging part of a Soviet submarine,”
I read that book! Tom Clancy rocks!
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May 5th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petro-calamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers.
These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, were carried out only five times, with the last one occurring in 1979. There was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.
Happily, with a track record like that, “the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%,” KP writes. “The Americans could certainly risk it.”
Via True/Slant:Julia Ioffe’s Moscow Diaries
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May 5th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Chris Brown said:
It’s part of the Department of Homeland Security. A great job they did on Katrina, eh?
DV82XL said:
If it’s an underground explosion, wouldn’t that mean drilling into the sea bed many hundreds or thousands of feet? That would defeat the whole purpose of doing something quickly.
However, if it were possible to conduct a blast on the sea floor, without weeks of intensive boring, then that could be much more useful.
I’m not sure if the US would stand a nuclear blast though. I mean, just think of the scaremongering it would cause! Every shrimp, fish and crab caught in the Gulf region would be called “radioactive and dangerous to your children” and people would show that they could detect radiation from them with a geiger counter (which you can anyway, nuclear blast or not) and proclaim that the area would be unusable for billions of years!
As a practical matter, if an explosive method of shutting off the leak were to be used, it would have to be something like a hundred tons or so of ANFO or TNT piles up on the sea floor and set off. ANFO is the way to go for bulk cheap explosive, but I’m not sure if it’s ever been used at that depth. It would have to be sealed in water tight containers. I guess that could be doable. As long as it is packed tightly enough, pressure shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
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May 5th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Of course that is exactly what would come down (along with Mr.O’s presidency, one would think)
The Russian shots to stop blow-outs, were by reading between the lines of what records are available in English on their ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosions programs, more boy-with-a-hammer, than anything useful. However I do believe the US has a ‘last ditch’ plan to use nuclear demolition when all else fails in this situation.
But I suspect the Russian press is enjoying seeing the Americans in trouble, and implying that they could handle it better with nukes.
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May 6th, 2010 at 6:45 am
As another Mr. O, would I be out of line to ask for a mortorium on calling President Obama, Mr. O? Perhaps Pres. O?
Or just PO?
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May 6th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
A Teacher said:
I’ve always been partial to B.O.
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May 21st, 2010 at 12:09 pm
well i have to revise my comment: bp is absolutely unsuitable for this job because they have no interest in stopping the oil spill. They only want to keep the cost for themselves as low as possible , with a maximum fine of 75 million $ there isnt much to do. So whats left is pr, which includes dilluting the oil so it stays in the deep sea and keeping journalists away from the beaches. the navy would have been a far better choice even though they woundnt get more than these 75 million bucks from bp. But this is still cheaper than the harm that bp is causing to the economy and enviroment
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May 21st, 2010 at 10:56 pm
hgnnn said:
BP has had some very serious infractions before, including such things as a major judgment against them after a fatal accident at a refinery that was caused by gross negligence.
I’m so fed up with this, I think it’s come to the point where the amount of money they should pay should be limited only by the full assets of BP. As one editorial stated “We need to consider capital punishment for the ‘corporate person’” Meaning dissolve the company and seize all the assets that are worth anything. Send some of the executives to jail, the worst of them for life without parole. (Think Enron)
At this point, they should be made an example of.
There’s a way to make sure this never happens again. If it is shown that a company that does not take proper precautions to prevent this will face the ultimate punishment, even seeing executives forfit all their property and spend the rest of their lives in a 6 by 8 cell bending over for a 600 pound murderer named Tinker Bell, they’ll be sure to triple-check their blowout preventers.
UG..
Maybe that’s my disgust talking.
Damn I just wish they were held to the same standards as the nuclear industry and had a big fat fund like Price Anderson to pay for any damages.
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