Re: OK, here's a risk analysis question for you ...

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

>        "The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said
>        on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to
>        calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the
>        response effort, and it might even detract from the response
>        effort."
Not to mention the harm it will cause BP when it comes time for the
civil and criminal suits. It sounds like BP is vastly under-reporting
the rate of flow. Perhaps, in part, due to Department of Justice
lawyers: "Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday he was
dispatching a team of lawyers to New Orleans to monitor the oil spill
and that the Obama administration would vigorously enforce
environmental laws."
(http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63T42P20100430).

Exxon played the US court system in the Valdez eco-disaster. It will
be interesting to see if BP can match Exxon's 'judicial gamesmanship'.
I imagine BP has already begun to bribe members of the US Congress, or
increasing the amount of the bribes (err, 'PAC contributions'), in
preparation for future preceedings.

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 08:35:58PM -0400, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> > Anyway, the best estimates I've seen came from a random Slashdot post, which
> > actually cited some checkable mathematics (
> > http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1651510&cid=32201876):
>
> I checked it, and while I'm able to reproduce the calculation, I'm not
> able to reproduce the numbers: my results are an order of magnitude and
> change larger.  There could be any number of reasons for that: I might
> have botched the math, or a units conversion, or chosen significantly
> unrealistic values for some of the other parameters required (like
> viscosity or fluid velocity).  Or my fluid mechanics may be rustier
> than I thought.
>
> But that's, I think, just one more reason why we should be dispensing
> with all these estimates in favor of a direct measurement: the Pitot tube
> method should yield a value for total fluid discharge accurate to better
> than 1%.  However:
>
>        BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed
>        to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would
>        give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really
>        gushing from the well.
>
>        "The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said
>        on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to
>        calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the
>        response effort, and it might even detract from the response
>        effort."
>
> Source:
>
>        Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
>        http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hp
>
>
> Yes, as I'm sure we'll all well aware, one of the last things anyone
> should want to do when tackling an engineering problem is to have a
> reasonably accurate idea of its size.
>
> ---Rsk
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