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

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 08:54:49AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> On Mon, 17 May 2010 06:11:21 EDT, Rich Kulawiec said:
> >     "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."
>
> Hand me the tin foil will ya?
>
> Anybody else wondering if the reason they're resisting is because they
> already sent a pitot tube down there, got the numbers, and realized that
> if the numbers were known, they'd be looking for a good criminal defense
> lawyer?

Well, yeah: I'm unaware of any scientific or engineering problem where
increased knowledge of the size and scope of the problem was detrimental
to attempts to solve it. [1]  Mueller deserves, I think, an Ignobel Prize
nomination for applied doublespeak in ardent defense of his masters.

(And people wonder I call them "spokesliars": if all that was necessary was
for corporations to tell the truth, they wouldn't hire professional liars.)

And y'know what?  I'll bet that BP has already done this measurement.
They'd just about have to in order to figure out if any of their
proposed/deployed solutions had a chance in hell of working: they would
at *least* have to know the volume to within an order of magnitude.
And I'll further bet that having done so, they know that under no
circumstances can they possibly allow that number to get out.  Consider:
if it was *lower* than the long-since-outdated hastily-constructed Coast
Guard 5000 bbl/day number, they would be bleating it like sheep at every
press conference.

---Rsk

[1] Heisenberg notwithstanding.
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