And further, MMS kept issuing them permits at the drop of a top hat. They should have stopped everything in March when they knew they did not have control of the well! They should have ordered a crisis review. But neither bp nor MMS did that.
This is totally not a surprise. Criminal negligence here. Wow. You have to read the article.
BP engineers were concerned and knew almost a year ago that the casing could collapse, that one of their own engineers had seen before.
the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
"This would certainly be a worst-case scenario," Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. "However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur."
BP violated their own safety policies!
They did not adhere to their own design standards!
Way back in June of last year they knew of serious faults in their DH well. They were worried then about the casing and the BOP!
We now know this from their own documents. But they did not tell Congress about that when they recently testified.
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Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week. The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.
The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of "well control." And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.
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Near the bottom of the story we find that MMS approved a permit within ten minutes after bp submitted it.
The permit was awarded even though bp had just told MMS, "we apologize" for not telling you earlier about the kind of casing we are using here. It was an "inadvertent" error. But bp didn't tell them how worried they were about the casing's design.
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Less than 10 minutes after the request was submitted, federal regulators approved the permit.
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I don't know what to say. I am horrified by such fraud and malfeasance.
UPDATE: Thanks for rec'ing this up. I hope the media talks about this on Sunday shows, but if not eventually they will have to address this horrible negligence and malfeasance.