BP Rant

As an engineer, I've been alternately baffled and angry that it took so many attempts to plug the leaking well.

I understand that the BP engineers were under a lot of pressure to get a solution in place quickly and efficiently, but it's shocking that they wouldn't know what the conditions were under water. They knew what the conditions were when they drilled the well in the first place - why was that knowledge all of a sudden gone when it came time to plug the hole?

If they only failed once, and within a few days of the initial leak, this would be somewhat understandable. However, it has taken 40+ days and more than 4 attempts to date before they pseudo-contained the leak.

If this was any other company (the one I work for included), they would have lost customers and heads would roll. This is not the case at BP simply because they are the largest oil company and it really seems like they geniunely do not care.

While there are obviously many lessons to be learned from this oil leak - and indeed the short-term history has been drastically altered by this event - I find the engineering aspects to be the most fascinating. Based on the fact that it took so many half-assed attempts to clog the leak - before settling on a method that actually increased the oil output for a couple of days - it appears that there is much more emphasis on building oil wells than there is on preparing for disaster recovery.

Luckily, there are very few oil leaks. But it is still astonishing to me that there isn't more effort directed at what to do if one does occur - pretty much every other high-availability, high-risk organization has some sort of contingency plan and it is a shame that BP did not have one.