Massive oil spill was foreseeable. 117 blowout preventer failures in a two year period.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/oilr-m03.shtml

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Oil is now flowing into the Gulf at a rate of as high as 25,000 barrels a day due to the explosion and the subsequent failure of a blowout preventer (BOP), which is designed to plug the well in the event of an emergency. The BOP is still not responding to attempts to close it.

Neither the company nor the government had in place any backup plans in the event of a failure of the BOP. Options currently being considered to plug the well will take weeks or months to implement and may not be successful.

“We’re breaking new ground here,” said Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen. “It’s hard to write a plan for a catastrophic event that has no precedent, which is what this was.”

But was a failure of the BOP really unforeseeable?

A 1999 report from the government’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), leaked by Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, found that there were 117 BOP failures in a two-year period in the late 1990s.

While none of these failures resulted in a spill at the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon, they clearly demonstrate the fallibility of BOPs. One crucial difference is that the other BOP failures occurred in shallower waters.

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ON EDIT: Fixed typo.

If the relief well fails, won't it just increase the amount of oil leakage?

If the second well is designed like the first one that failed, why do the geniuses in charge believe it won't fail as well?

Why am I not optimistic?

Why do I have the feeling that they are just trying any hare-brained scheme to get the public to believe that they know what they are doing?

Supposedly the rig collapsed/exploded because the pressure pushing the oil up was greater than what they anticipated.

Setting off a charge might just enlarge the hole if it failed to plug it.

You would think that would throw massive red flags to management and regulators to require improvements to the BOP design.

Leave it alone! You'll get a scar!

nt