Sheffield Forgemasters and Other Solutions

The new Coalition Government of the UK (the "Lib Cons") has recently made several fairly controversial spending cuts, mostly focusing on items which the outgoing government decided to spend in the last few weeks of its existence. Some of these were indeed pure pork barrel or "scorched earth" items, but one or two were booby traps, in that something bad would genuinely happen if they were cut, as an incoming government (and Labour was expecting it to be pure Tory) could be predicted to do.

One of these was a loan of £8oM (not strictly spending, therefore) part of an overall £140M finance package to enable a company called Sheffield Forgemasters to build a 15,000 ton press capable of forging very large steel castings. (One cannot simply cast steel as if it were bronze: to have strength, the casting has to be heated up and walloped a bit.) Currently, the only firm that can cast and forge single steel components of the size required for the new generation of nuclear power stations, is Japanese. The previous government judged it to be in the public interest (and not just in the UK public's interest) for there to be more than one place in the world that could make this kind of thing. The present government doesn't think they can afford it, and are openly suspicious of all the arguments in favour of the development. (The new energy secretary is openly suspicious of anything to do with nuclear power, too.)

However, even if the government cannot play a part in funding the press, it's still in the public interest for it to be built, and if it is built and Forgemasters then have the capacity to make steel parts bigger than have ever been seen before, Medawar has no doubt that applications outside the nuclear power industry will swiftly emerge. For example; one of the green alternatives to nuclear power stations, are offshore wind turbines with a turbine diameter approaching, or even exceeding, five hundred feet.

This will require several very large steel components: the turbine blades may be carbon and glassfibre composites, but they will need to meet in a hub of quite spectacular strength and integrity, and there will need to be a corresponding bearing, too. The whole turbine mounting and generator housing will need to track the wind, which means there will have to be a mounting ring many yards wide. All of this will be on top of a steel tower, which can be fabricated by shipbuilding methods without a 15,000 ton press, but where this tower is fixed to the concrete-filled foundations at the base, there will be another high-integrity component.

Perhaps all of these things can be fabricated out of several smaller forgings, but there might well be strength added and weight saved if they can be done in one forging each.

A similar trend applies to wave and tidal power schemes: to become efficient enough to compete with nuclear power, some of them will need the benefits of scale, our existing manufacturing capacity will struggle, globally, and thereby our solutions will be shaped by the limits of what we can fabricate, and not by what we need to do to achieve our goals. Sometimes this forces people to invent better solutions, but it can equally block access to simple and straighforward solutions.

There's no real question that the steel industry has reached the stage where at least one company in the UK has to have tools of this scale, in order for them to move forward and offer designers new possibilities. The question is how, if the government won't help finance it, do we do this thing. And not just this thing, but any equivalent tooling job for the future?

In the 19th century, where a loan of taxpayer's money wouldn't even have been thought of as a solution, all manner of things were tried. Including public subscriptions to bond issues, and even just to charitable funds which had the building of a bridge or whatever as the charitable goal. The public was offered the chance to ride across the rigging being used to construct the Clifton Suspension Bridge, in return for a donation towards the ongoing building costs, and so on.

In the 20th century, public interest corporations were created for big projects, such as the building of Garden Cities at Letchworth and Welwyn. (Some purely commercial town-building efforts were total failures, others, like Jaywick Sands, got built, but without proper planning.) The most famous public interest corporation of this period, the BBC, is still with us. Although, the BBC was made possible by parliament granting it the right to extract a licence fee from any householder who received wireless or, later, television, signals. This makes the BBC a lot more independent of government than a typical state broadcaster, although it is not fully commercial. (And commercial broadcasters must either charge a subscription, or be subject to censorship by advertisers.)

More recent still, are umbrella organisations set up as companies limited by guarantee, which allow several competing companies to pool resources in their and the customer's interest, without forming a cartel that would be both unwelcome and illegal. Two noteworthy examples of this are: The London Internet Exchange and BUPA.

In effect, the former is a self-funding entity to make sure that the internet develops and keeps happening in the UK, the latter performs more or less the same task for private medicine. Paying no dividends, both have no alternative but to put any operating surplus back into the growth and development of the "business". Whoever put up the money to start this, did not get it back directly. But the members of the LINX benefit from the huge growth in internet activity which it has enabled, and members (and a lot of other parties, too) have benefited from the growth in medical practice that BUPA has facilitated. BUPA was originally set up to do the things which the state-run National health Service didn't offer. To a large degree, that's still the mission.

Although ideologically opposed by those who think that the NHS should be the only provider of health care in the country, it's hard to see how the NHS could possibly have survived the past sixty years without BUPA, because it would have had to do too many things and public finances would never have stood the strain. Although BUPA is seen as "private" medicine, it is still a public-interest company at heart and it certainly is not as rapacious as many American commercial healthcare providers.

Sheffield Forgemasters, meanwhile, is not the first British manufacturing company to face difficulties funding the new tooling needed to get from the products of the past, to the products of the future. BSA and other motorbike manufacturers were in the same bind in the nineteen seventies, because to compete with the new Japanese motorbikes, they needed, not just new models, but entirely new ways of making them. Other marques had the same trouble, the British Motorcycle Industry didn't so much "nearly die" as die. Yes, it exists again and a state-of the-art factory makes new Triumph bikes, but this is a rebirth, it was not a survival. Yes, every company involved should have anticipated change and put money aside, but there are two problems with this:

Money put aside within a profit-making company always gets used for something else, or it gets eyed up by the taxman.

Anticipating change is a full time occupation and the people running the company in the here and now, simply cannot also anticipate changes of this scale until they happen. The signs can be hard to spot, and those behind the changes may be keeping them secret for commercial advantage, as the Japanese were.

If there were a non-profit making company limited by guarantee, set up to ensure that British manufacturing industry gets the major tooling investment, research and development that it needs, then capital put into it won't come back as dividends, but it won't be taken by the taxman, either, as the investment vehicle is not for profit. And it can have "anticipating change" as an objective named in its articles and as the full time job of its directors. Charging companies a licence fee for using tooling that it funds, or helps with research and development, would in time give it an income stream to make it independent of direct funding inputs from its members. It might be called "British Industrial Tool Exchange" (BITX) or something similar.

Give people the tools, and they can do the job.
We face all kinds of environmental problems in the near future requiring engineering solutions, one immediate example is bound to be an oil well Blowout Preventer that is two orders of magnitude more robust and reliable than the existing types, which differ only in scale and ancillary equipment from those of the early 20th century. A Blowout Preventer is the way it is, largely to make all the components possible, preferably easy, to make (by the standards of East Texas around 1911.) Paradoxically, to make it simpler and more reliable, we will need ways of making components in one piece that are currently several, and perhaps in sophisticated cam shapes where currently they are simple pistons and cylinders. The Blowout Preventers of the future will be simpler in operation, but more complex in manufacture.

This Was The Week

This was the week when President Obama, having got tougher with "British" Petroleum every day for a month, got so tough that America now has no goal except getting tough with BP.

This was the week when Exxon, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and Mobile all claimed that they never spilled any oil and even if they did, they had really brilliant plans for cleaning it up that were so much better than BPs. A weary congressional committee chairman, possibly the only sane man left in American politics, pointed out that they had, in fact, practically identical contingency plans to BP. (Probably all commissioned from the same consultancy firm, if the truth were known.)

This was the week when an organised campaign to "seize BP's Assets" really took off, with millions signing up to it without asking if it was in fact organised by Transocean's publicists...

This was the week when blaming people for an accident took precedence over fixing the problem.

This was the week when an American president demanded, with menaces, a $20bn downpayment on a crisis that has cost $1.6bn so far and will probably actually cost, at most, $8bn.

This was the week when some Americans seriously started to believe that BP had managed to crack the Earth's crust open and that the entire Gulf Coast would be evacuated in consequence.

This was the week when America started a "war on oil slicks", using all the language of a Blitz which no American has known, to describe an accident that's being patiently fixed, when America's politicians allow, bit by bit, by the very people they are competing with each other to castigate.

This was the week when the managers of China's Sovereign Wealth Funds, calm and sober men more powerful than everyone on Capitol Hill put together, decided that Greece was actually a safer place to invest in than the United States, a conclusion that the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund reached last month.

Transocean, the Pointed Finger and Why The Blowout Preventer Probably Failed

President Obama's jihad against BP, really got going when BP started to ask questions about how all four stages of a four-stage blowout preventer could fail. This was when they were accused of "pointing the finger" and have had fingers, not to mention the presidential boot, in their face every moment since then.

The blowout preventer was supplied and installed by Transocean, but made by a separate American engineering company. Probably, elsewhere in the world Transocean would have a Briitsh, Dutch or Malayasian company make this item to a common specification. It weighs 140 tons and no-one wants to ship one too far if a competent manufacturer is close at hand. The competence of the manufacturer in this and other cases seems not to be at issue.

However, despite having about half of the drilling contracts in the Gulf of Mexico over the last few years, Transocean account for around three quarters of the accidents, and more than one of those has involved the partial failure of a blowout preventer. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is remarkable because the failure was complete, and it led to a cascade of problems on the rig itself, which is what killed the (11) human beings. Better rig design could have avoided these deaths, if not the oil spill, and Medawar is still somewhat concerned that the oil spill is seen as worse than the cost in human life.

Another fact, with multiple pertinencies for Deepwater Horizon, is that in 2006, Transocean was served with an Improvement Notice by the UK's Health and Safety Executive. This link is to the HSE's page, explaining very clearly, exactly what an improvement notice is.

The HSE Inspector can only issue an improvement notice if:
The company is in some way breaking health and safety law (in a way that would allow it to be brought to a criminal trial if an accident had already happened.)
The Inspector can describe what it is the company must do, within a given time, to comply with the law and avoid prosecution.
It's a way of getting companies (and, incidentally, government departments and police authorities) to avoid accidents, before someone is hurt, rather than punishing them afterwards. Failure to comply with an improvement notice will lead to prosecution.

The notice in question related to Transocean's failure to test blowout preventers. Transocean appears to have complied with the notice within the time set by the Inspector and thus complied with UK law. The accident rate in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this improvement in its performance was entirely local to UK jurisdiction. IE: the company now knew that its normal practice wasn't good enough for the UK, but took no steps to learn from the notice and make their American operation safer too.

Medawar will get onto the technical implications in a moment, but there's an important pertinency of jurisdiction here: The relevant American authorities have been complaining, but not loudly, because Mr Obama wants BP to bear all the blame, that because Transocean is registered in Switzerland and its ships and rigs are registered as maritime vessels in the Marshal Islands, they had no power to inspect them. Actually, they had no duty to inspect them annually, but the US Coastguard as the same powers as the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, to inspect any vessel, as the occasion demands, that is passing through their waters or visiting their ports, for basic seaworthiness. They have the same power to arrest any vessel, too, until defects are made good.

However, the transfer of responsibility for oil-rig inspections from the UK's Department of Energy, to the HSE, as recommended by the Cullen Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster, gives the HSE complete jurisdiction over any rig or vessel carrying out work in UK waters, or on a licence issued by a UK authority. If American authorities had paid attention to the Piper Alpha disaster, other than to assure themselves that no American faced criminal proceedings over the 167 dead, as per the State Department's standard operating procedure, then they would have had nearly a quarter of a century's grace in which to ensure that some Federal or State authority had the same jurisdiction over the offshore drilling industry in American waters as the HSE does in UK waters. That they didn't, may owe something to "industry lobbying" but there is no evidence that BP was a party to such lobbying. BP are not on record as having opposed any regulatory effort to improve safety in the UK or Norway (they have sometimes suggested more constructive alternatives to some ideas) and Medawar suspects that they wouldn't have opposed such efforts in the USA, had they ever seriously transpired, which they did not.

Transocean, on the other hand, has links to a very heavy lobbying outfit run by a former Democratic Congressman, Bill Brewster. This investment seems to have paid off for them, so far.


Now for the pertinent technical implications:

The 2006 improvement notice was over a failure to test blowout preventers. This cannot have been a failure to test that they had been manufactured properly, or the HSE would have served the notice on the manufacturer and not Transocean! However, it is impossible for the manufacturer to ship a blowout preventer to its customers, in a fully-armed state where it would function immediately on arrival. It could not be transported without incident in the "armed" state and it certainly couldn't be safely handled on the rig and installed on the oil (or gas) well in that state.

The installer, Transocean or their sub-contractors, must prepare the equipment for installation when it arrives on the rig, test that they have done this correctly, and then install it. Then they must prepare it for operation after installation, and again, test that this has been done properly and that the device will work. Not carrying out this chain of actions properly was what earned Transocean the improvement notice in 2006.

In practice, what happens is that the equipment leaves the factory with covers fitted over every hole, and with some kind of pin or bolt immobilizing everything that can move.
Some parts may be packed with grease to protect them in transit, some fluid reservoirs may not be filled. It leaves the factory in a state which allows it to be transported and which will protect all its working parts from corrosion or incidental damage.

When equipment is on the rig, as much of this stuff is taken off as can be done safely, and any working fluids are loaded, protective grease is removed and where appropriate, replaced by whatever working lubricant is required. This procedure is documented in detail, and although complicated, is no more complicated than it needs to be. Someone signs a worksheet to show that everything required at that stage has been done. There will be an agreed test procedure that verifies, as far as possible, that everything that has been released so far, will work as intended.

Then the equipment can be lowered into the sea and installed, by divers or robots depending on how deep the ocean floor is. These days, robots are used more and more, even in relatively shallow waters, because there's no such thing as a completely safe deep sea industrial dive. Once the equipment is installed, it can be armed for operation and any remaining covers removed to allow pipes to be connected, etc. Then there's another test procedure before anyone can pack up and go home, or move the rig onto the next oilfield. (Transocean were apparently under pressure from their next customer to finish working for BP and move the Deepwater Horizon onto their oilfield.)

Because this happens towards the end of what may have been a months-long operation, even if the operation over-runs by just a few days, these final preparation and test procedures of the blowout preventer are more likely to be performed under pressure of time than the actual drilling work. This may explain why so many of Transocean's accidents have involved blowout preventers, not because these are necessarily flawed, but because they have to be installed with the end of the job in sight and management openly staring at its watch.

Now, the way in which the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer failed, completely, in all its stages, isn't consistent with some of the normal causes, such as a foriegn body, defective parts, etc. There are four stages; two, or even three, defective parts do not cause all four stages to fail, and a foreign body would have to be many feet long to affect more than one stage.

If there was an environmental cause, such as temperature or pressure jamming the equipment completely, then this would have been discovered years ago when similar equipment was tested after proper installation at a similar depth. This is another reason why the HSE likes the tests to be done each time: to gather information on how far this kind of equipment can be relied upon in general, as well as to ensure that each installation is as safe as it can be.

Just about the only thing (short of highly competent sabotage) that can credibly immobilize all four stages of a blowout preventer, is something, the only thing, that is designed to immobilize all four stages: the safety devices (bolts) that are fitted at the factory to make it safe for transport and installation.

The blowout preventer failure was key to the whole disaster, and to any immediately effective remedy for the oilspill. Because BP had the whole power and fury of the US Government turned on them the moment they started to ask Transocean to account for this, BP have been working blind ever since, although there are ample circumstantial grounds for them to suspect, that if their supplier, Transocean, made an error, that was where it would be. BP may be held responsible, but it is deeply irrational to both deny them any right to inquire how other companies may have contributed to the disaster, and to make them fix it all none-the-less.

And even if BP have to guarantee that clean up costs will be met, it's not in the public interest to deny them the right to recover some of those costs from other companies that made mistakes, because that just gives those companies, however well represented they are on Capitol Hill, a free pass to commit mistakes and cause accidents in the future.

It is time for BP to act on suspicion, even if the White House is determined to deny them the evidence, and try, so far as is possible, to repeat the post-installation arming procedures for the blowout preventer, that Transocean should have done, regardless of what any surviving worksheets say was done or not. With the oilspill collection cap in place, not all of the stages are still accessible, but even if one stage could be activated, the amount of oil being spilled could be dramatically reduced.

And but for President Obama's heavy-handed, highly partisan and frankly bigoted intervention, that might have been possible a few weeks ago, which would have saved the vast majority of the oil that has been spilled, though sadly, none of the blood.

It is very obviously true that nobody in American politics now actually wants BP to succeed in stopping the spill, by doing something which they might have done a month earlier but for American politics.

Reality of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

After weeks of unrelenting efforts by President Obama to pretend that the "worst ecological disaster in American history" is a British plot against the American people. (He pronounces "British Petroleum" the way someone in a pointy white hood would pronounce a word meaning "member of the African-American community".) Some more facts emerge:

There was a worse oil spill, Itxoc 1 on the Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, which American politicians, media and public appear to remain unaware of to this day. 150,000,000 barrels before it was capped, according to BBC Newsnight, which may have meant gallons, see comment below (they read off autocues: a BBC script would have the right thing written on it ) Other sources state something like 9,000,000 barrels over ten months. Flow rate estimated somewhere from the same as, to double that, of Deepwater Horizon, which has already been cut by more than half and should be sorted within another two months, so even if flow rates the same, it cannot be more than a third as bad as Ixtoc 1, which is rated as the third worst oil spill in history.

After the Amoco Cadiz disaster on the French coast, in 1978, the American owners didn't pay a cent in compensation until forced to, by legal action from the French Government, in 1990. BP were settling reasonable claims from ordinary citizens within a fortnight: Presumably, Mr Obama must think they should have paid in advance of the disaster? The Deepwater Horizon leak would have to go completely uncapped for 90-120 days to equal the amount of crude spilled by the Amoco Cadiz. Although the French succeeded in getting compensation, Medawar is not aware of anyone in the (British) Channel Islands getting any change out of Amoco at all, although Herm in particular suffered a lot of contamination. Medawar remembers that every shop on Guernsey at the time ran out of lighter fuel, as this was the only available solvent that got the stuff off people's skin. Most annoyance they'd suffered since the Nazi occupation.

19,000 barrels is roughly one sixth of the average daily amount of crude that American companies have spilled as a matter of routine (hence, no clean-up) in the Niger Delta for the past twenty years. It's only bad when the oil hits American beaches, not when it's in an African town's drinking water and soaking into their fields. The far right in America were trying to pretend, during the elections, that President Obama was rather more African than African American. If Obama was even 1% African at heart, this murderous hypocrisy would haunt him, but it does not.

All of these spills put together are smaller than the 1991 spill in the Arabian Gulf during the first Gulf War. The fishermen of Dubai, at least, were still in business the last time Medawar wandered past and someone attempted to sell him counterfeit mineral water. (Nice try.)

The Daily Mail reports that one television crew from New York sat in a bar in Louisiana bitterly complaining that they'd been forced to spend several days in a boat until they got an oil slick that looked scary enough to be broadcast. Which will put older British readers in mind of the TV Newsroom satire "Drop The Dead Donkey". (The clip is from : Series 2, episode 1. The relevant bit is 15-16 minutes in.)

America, meanwhile, is no longer an economic superpower, far less the "hyperpower" of some fevered political imaginations in Washington DC, and it will do well to even survive the rest of this very troubled century without allies. Having the President go on TV every other night to reiterate his contempt of the ally whose soldiers have been fighting along side America's in Afghanistan for nine years now, is sending a clear and strong message to ALL of America's allies that it's probably best not to bother.

Update: The Governor of Mississippi has stated that so far, the press coverage , and Federal Government hype, of the oil spill has done his state more economic damage than the spill itself.
People may argue with him, but the presentation has indeed been more in the spirit of Damien Day than Lord Reith.

Transocean, the Invisible Culprit

At least someone is beginning to realize that there's something profoundly fishy about a company, based in Houston, Texas for all practical purposes, being registered in Switzerland for tax and administrative purpose, and having its rigs registered in the Marshal Islands. But Obama still thinks that BP is the only permissiable culprit, which must take all the rage, all the blame, all the hate, all the while it is expected to do all the work necessary to actually rescue the situation. BP are trying all the possible options in logical order of preference: why not stop sreaming dementedly in their ear and threatening them while they get on with this? Meanwhile, Transocean is doing nothing except trying to melt into the shadows....

Could it be, that Mr Obama knows that Transocean is probably mostly to blame, but that it's so much easier for him to grab the assets of a British company than a Swiss one? Especially when the shareholders, hidden behind all the Swiss secrecy, are mostly Americans.

If a company has something to hide, it doesn't generally register in London or Cardiff.

Chains of Containment, Chains of Evidence and the Broken Chain of Expertise

The failure of BP's "Top Kill" procedure to stem the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, does have one positive aspect, because of what the next option on the list entails (they are working through the options in the order of "time taken to get ready for them" so that the leak will eventually be stopped by the quickest means that work, no matter how often Mr Obama leads the nation in a ten-minute hate of BP in the meantime.)

That next option is to cut the existing well head and blowout preventer clean off the well, lift it clear (it weighs about 140 tons) and clamp a replacement over the clean-cut pipe. This will, hopefully briefly, result in a much increased flow, so doing it after trying the top kill is probably sensible as at least some of the heavy mud may still be in the well to slow the flow. This is essentially what was eventually done (in shallower water) with the well under the Piper Alpha platform. So it shouldn't be scorned: this is a standard procedure, novel only by virtue of the depth, which is true of everything that's been tried so far.

This procedure removes that 140 tons mechanism from the chain of containment and transfers it to the chain of evidence. However, this equipment was supplied by Transocean and may remain their property, so BP doesn't necessarily have a legal right to do anything other than lift it clear of the immediate area in which they are working. Since the current political and legal situation: BP paying all the bills, taking all the blame and being hated by everyone in the United States, is preferred by Transocean and Halliburton executives to anyone remembering that they had a role in all this, if it is left up to Transocean and Halliburton, that evidence will either stay on the seabed, or it will be removed to Transocean's yard in Houston and never see the light of day again.

There needs to be a court order waiting for the moment that the blowout-preventer ceases to be part of the containment chain and becomes available as evidence. If the Federal and State Governments don't want the key evidence to break surface, Medawar suggests that the families of the thirteen men who died, get their lawyers on the case.

It isn't just about blame, liability or even justice: proper forensic and technical examination of the apparently-failed equipment is vital to understanding how and why it failed, and without that, there is no possibility of conducting this kind of operation safely in the future. And if American offshore oil reserves cannot be exploited at all, which seems to be the political mood if safety cannot be guaranteed, then America's near future is one of subservience to Moscow, where the Russian president is already gleefully talking to the Russian press about BP going into liquidation. BP, by remarkable coincidence, owns the only significant part of Russia's oil and gas industry not already under direct ownership by the Russian state, or oligarchs connected to United Russia.

Whatever failings this episode has exposed in BP, the evident weaknesses of the US Government are more glaring and more serious. The defining characteristic has been officials asserting their authority and politicians exercising their power. And absolutely none of them know what they are doing. America may hate BP, but BP has some clue as to what to try and in what order.

In the absence of expertise, power and authority lead swiftly to humiliating farce. Which brings us to the broken chain of expertise:

If someone wanted to destroy the major Western powers, or make them subservient to something more Eastern in nature, it could be a viable strategy to simply chip away at the availability of expertise to the American, British, French and Canadian governments over a period of years. In America, this could probably be achieved by persuading conceited officials and politicians to "shoulder aside" the experts, in Britain and France there seems to be an astonishingly high death rate amongst specific kinds of expert, and in Canada, one or two very rich men with obscure agendas are engaged in making phoney, doctored, "expertise" available to Federal and Provincial governments, particularly in the area of anti-terrorism and subversion.

Which brings us back to the crying need for a proper inquiry into the death of Dr Timothy Hampton, and so many others. And there must be an objective, technical examination of the apparently-failed equipment from Deepwater Horizon. Things have reached the stage where any call for objective consideration of the evidence is scorned and denounced by the Whitehouse as a weaseling attempt by BP to shift the blame. The truth matters a lot more to the future than the President sounding fierce. If the Obama administration continues to wield power and authority without expertise, America has only a few years left.

Deepwater Horizon and the Unlearned Lessons of Piper Alpha

The Piper Alpha oil and gas platform disaster in the North Sea, which killed 167 men, was largely the product of two things:
1/Badly-planned maintenance, so that two components of the safety chain were being worked on at the same time. (You don't necessarily make things safer by doing lots of maintenance: the Royal Navy Icebreaker, HMS Endurance, was nearly sunk by a sea valve being improperly refitted after unnecessary "maintenance". You make things safer by careful and intelligent planning of maintenance, so that necessary things get done in a safe sequence, by people with the right expertise and the correct tools.)

2/ Mid-life modification of a simple, albeit large, oil production platform, into a mixed oil and gas production platform also acting as collector for other fields. This is what turned a small fire into a sequence of explosions leading to the total destruction of the platform (and a fast rescue boat launched by a standby ship).

This is where lessons were learned in the North Sea, but, surprisingly, given that the disaster cost an American company more than a billion pounds, those lessons seem not to have been even heard of outside British jurisdiction.

As first built, the Piper Alpha rig was as safe for its intended purpose as the technology of 1976 (when it was floated) allowed. There were four modules, with the most dangerous activities happening in the module furthest from the "populated" module which contained crew quarters, and the control room. There were also firewalls in all the right places, but these were intended to contain oil fires, and were not blast walls, which are needed where gas explosions are likely.

The modifications, to allow for gas production and the gathering of gas from other rigs for onwards transfer, brought pipes and control valves next to the rig's control room. The first relatively small fire and explosion effectively took out the control room, which meant that the only damage-control action taken was to activate the emergency stop. This shut off, for a while, most of the flow of gas and oil from its various sources (and this was complicated as there were lots of sources coming onto the one rig) but emptying the pipes near the fire would have required a complex series of actions, and an authorizing intelligence to command them. The control room had already gone. Fairly quickly, the fire burst these various full pipes, releasing more fuel to the fire and causing further bursts and explosions, one compared by witnesses to a tactical nuclear explosion. All of which was happening immediately next to the populated module. Although described as a "blowout" by the media, the sequence was the reverse of this, with an accidental leak on the rig leading to a chain of damage that eventually took the cap off the well as the rig sank.

It isn't known for certain what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, but whatever happened, the President of the United States has been from the outset adamant that BP are completely and solely responsible for it. BP did not own the rig and were not, therefore, in complete control of its configuration and equipment. Most of the permanent equipment being installed from and for the rig, including the blowout preventer, were supplied by the rig's owners, the Swiss company Transocean. Unlike Piper Alpha, this was an exploration rig, intended to be used at many different sites, to set up for a production rig to follow. This is why it was owned by a subcontractor and not an oil company.

Even a company as big as BP, does not have enough work to occupy such a rig full time for its useful life, and there would be competition concerns if BP owned and had control of, an asset also used by its competitors. To a large extent, BP using a rig it didn't own and didn't fully control, was the product of America's cherished anti-cartel laws, (copied in Europe) which were originally designed to curb the power of Standard Oil, Standard Bank and the Rockefeller family.

It is still possible that the truth of the "blowout" and catastrophic oil leak on Deepwater Horizon, is that the pipeline between the rig and the blowout preventer on the sea bed, was damaged when the rig sank, as with Piper Alpha. The big and frightening oil leak, is probably the consequence of the accident and not its cause. The cause was most probably something smaller; a surge of high pressure gas in the drillpipe, which burst into the air and made the same sort of initial explosion, in the same sort of place, as that on Piper Alpha.

The cause of the gas release is different, but the scale probably wasn't all that different at all, and Transocean had nearly a quarter of a century to read the Cullen report on Piper Alpha and ensure that their rig wouldn't succumb to a similar chain of cascading failures. Which is precisely what it did do.

There's no way that anyone can build a rig to withstand the sort of near-nuclear event that finally destroyed the Piper Alpha platform. But that was the biggest of a cascading sequence of fires and explosions, that could have been contained nearer the beginning. It is possible to build rigs that preserve the control room equipment and staff for long enough to fight back (which is why the control rooms in nuclear power stations are well protected). It is possible to design rigs where the personnel are not concentrated near the area of greatest risk. It is basic common sense to concentrate thought and investment on containing failures as near to the start of the chain as possible.

In this instance, BP didn't do any of this, because it was quite literally not their business. It was Transocean's business, as a rig designer, owner and operator. But in his zeal to punish BP to the utmost, the President of the United States is effectively absolving Transocean of all liability and all blame. Which means that Deepwater Horizon won't be the last rig to re-enact the Piper Alhpa disaster, because he's removing the incentive to do something about it, from the people who have the capability and the opportunity to provide safer rigs, and transferring it to their customers.

One of the lessons learned a quarter of a century ago in the North Sea, was to transfer responsibility for safety issues in the industry from the Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive. A screamingly obvious move, which has just been half-copied by the US President, a quarter of a century late, largely as an exercise in lining up the existing safety authorities as alternative scapegoats in case attempts to pin it all on BP should fail.

It is baffling and worrying, to British observers, to see all the rage and anger about the Deepwater Horizon accident, centre on the oil spill and not the thirteen men who died.
Thirteen dead is a disaster, one hundred and sixty-seven dead is a catastrophe.

Medawar would also like to debunk one particular bit of hype about the Deepwater Horizon accident: it is not the worst ecological disaster in American history, not by miles:
the Oklahoma dust bowl was the worst ecological disaster in American history, and it was caused by US government policy to encourage farmers to convert permanent pasture into arable cropland. (Wheat is better for speculating with than beef and dairy products!) There is now pressure from so-called "environmentalists" to revive this policy, supposedly because cows cause climate change. The University of Cranfield has recently published a study showing that pasture is one of the most important carbon sinks in agriculture, and the UN has determined that species protection is more important than fighting climate change. But the real argument against any systematic conversion of pasture to cropland, is contained in the Woody Guthrie song about the dustbowl, genuinely America's worst ecological disaster of all time:

"So Long, it's been good to know yer".



Update, September 2016.
There is a book, "Fire in the Night" available as an E-book, which gives an accurate and honest full account of the Piper Alpha disaster. Medawar isn't aware of anything quite like it for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Now that Hollywood has done its usual thing, the odds are against the full unbiased truth ever getting established in the public's mind. "Fire in the Night" by Stephen McGinty.

 

Serial Murderer Nicknames

This morning, a Mr Stephen Griffiths referred to himself as the "Crossbow Cannibal" when politely asked for his name by the clerk of Bradford Magistrate's Court. There need be no complicated analysis of his motives for vile murder, then: it was all a calculated attempt to gain the world's attention.

The media, if they have any sense, will restrain themselves and never, ever, call him by the name he has invented for himself. Neither should they refer to him as the "Pathetic Twat" because his kind of oxygen thief is capable of deriving glory even from that.

The only proper and safe way to refer to this man is as "Mr Stephen Griffiths" and with a careful and polite emphasis on the "mister". Anything else will feed the fantasy he inhabited when he allegedly killed three, and possibly many more, defenceless young women.

And when he is in prison, only the parole board needs to remember his name at all. And the fact that "Outraging Public Morals" normally carries a life sentence in its own right and not merely as an aggravating circumstance to murder. If there is even a fragment of substance behind Mr Griffith's self-assumed nickname, then that charge is inevitable.

David Kelly and Timothy Hampton, No Democracy Without Truth

Before the Liberal Democrats started to flirt with Lord Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to keep the Labour Party in power, they had promised, like the Conservatives, to order a full and properly-constituted investigation and formal inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. All we really know about this is that the public has not been told the truth and that many senior Labour figures, including Alistair Campbell, have more to hide, and more to fear, on this issue than any other. The so-called "Coalition of all the losers" will guarantee that the truth about David Kelly remains hidden, and the Liberal leadership will find that gagging any voice of conscience on their backbenches is the price of their part-share of power. Dr Kelly gave good service to the United Kingdom and to the world. He deserves a lot better than this!

And if we're not being told the truth about the death of Dr David Kelly, we are still not being told anything about the screamingly suspicious death of Dr Timothy Hampton, (who trained as a biochemist and worked with Dr Kelly before moving into the field of geophysics and nuclear weapons testing). What we know, but were evidently not supposed to discover, is that the Austrian Police have tried so hard not to discover the truth, that they must surely already know what it is and that their political masters will not like it. Their attempt to burn all the clothes and personal possessions from Dr Hampton's body: the main repository of evidence about what happened to him, was both suspicious and contemptible Yet no British official, so far, has attempted to secure a proper investigation into the matter. The United Nations, in whose building he died, is also remarkably averse to any sort of truth coming out.

Although a lot of people expect that truth to be that Dr Hampton had discovered something important about nuclear tests in Korea, Iran, or Israel, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that the UN is the world's most corrupt bureaucracy and that there might be a much baser reason for Dr Hampton's murder than life or death global issues to do with nuclear weapons tests. Either way, only the truth can defeat the purposes of those who conspire in secret.

Deepwater Horizon and Obama's Misdirected Lynch Mob

Long before any of the facts about the Deepwater Horizon accident became known, President Obama led the American people in pinning all blame and liability upon British Petroleum Plc, who had leased the rig to drill on a site they had a licence for. (The process of getting a licence involves paying money to Federal and State governments).

The rig was owned and operated by the Swiss company, Transocean, and the actual work directly involved in the accident was being done by the sub-contractor, Haliburton, a name that ought to be recognized by anyone who has an interest in political scandal and corruption in the United States, or Iraq.

Under American law, BP carry all the liability, because they own the licence on the well. Placing the moral blame on them as well, is typical Chicago politics. But if anyone is actually looking for the intrinsic cause of this and other oil-industry accidents in the United States, it is precisely this:

The liability for the environmental and economic damage caused by an accident, is carried by the exploration licence holder and not the owners and operators of the massive and specialized equipment being used, or their sub-contrators. This takes a powerful incentive to be careful, vigorously enforce safety regulations and invest in the very best equipment and training -and places on the company that doesn't directly own and control the men and equipment at risk of accident. Those who actually are responsible for the day to day operations of the rig and long term investment in its structure and equipment, are sheltered, by their paying customer, from the consequences of careless, cost-cutting and incompetence.

There does not appear to be a single public figure in the United States capable of understanding why this is not merely unjust, but exposes the American economy, environment and people to risks which equal or exceed those so horribly realized by placing liability and responsiblity in the banking system in the wrong places.

If you want things to be done right, you have to get the responsibility and liability in exactly the right place.
At the very least, when companies such as Transocean and Haliburton mislead their customers over safety, (to the extent of hosting a party onboard for the customer's executives to celebrate the alleged safety record on the day of the accident) they should lose the shelter against liability provided, under American law, by those customers.

And if you want to learn lessons from complicated accidents involving equipment a mile down in the Ocean, it really is best not to allow politicians to stand in front of cameras and proclaim the conclusion of any investigation before it even starts.

President Obama is going to destroy BP as a lesson to others, if he can. And then some other company, possibly even an American-owned one (as the wiser foriegn investors all flee) will suffer a similar or worse accident because the intrinsic cause in the liability environment is neither understood nor addressed by American lawyers and politicians.

Is Electoral Reform a Smokescreen Issue for Electoral Fraud?

The Daily Mail reports, that there are no less than fifty criminal investigations ongoing across the United Kingdom, into abuse of postal votes and other fiddles relating to this Thursday's election.

And yet, all the comment forums are full of blather about different voting systems, and whether anything but "proportional representation" can be considered democratic. Medawar wonders whether all of these voices are knowingly trying to draw our attention away from a much more basic issue: is someone, nationally (or even on a European scale?) organizing all the separate little voting fiddles? Because someone adding an extra seven fictitious electors to a single household, doesn't affect the price of fish in the slightest. Even swinging one whole constituency, doesn't avail anyone of anything very much. But an organized programme to sway fifty key constituencies, is quite another matter.

No doubt, it will be impossible to link this to the national organization of any political party. But unless one is involved, somewhere, it is not possible to see how the necessary coordination could be achieved, and it's even harder to see how any benefits could accrue to those committing a very serious crime, for which Crown Courts do not fail to hand out custodial sentences.

This link is to an article by the Independent reporter mentioned in the Mail articles, as being assaulted when trying to locate and interview one of those involved in this.

Strategic Stalking

This link is to the MoD's Global Strategic Trends page, which allows you to download the current issue of that report (and fill in a feedback form if you wish.)

It's about one hundred and sixty pages, although not exactly small print, so it's not a casual read. But it does give some insight into why some groups might want to target and harass other groups in society.

The report predicts both resource wars and ethnic conflicts, although it's pretty clear to Medawar that the main driver of ethnic conflict is when a powerful elite tries either to harness an ethnic group in order to control a natural resource, or to destabilize and perhaps deport or even exterminate an ethnic community in order to remove them from control of resources. This could well be the sort of thing that's behind the organized stalking of native American leaders, journalists and artists that Terri Hansen has reported. It definitely is what's behind the relentless ethnic persecution of non-Burman ethnic groups in Burma, especially as the Karens control some areas of the countryside, despite enormous pressure, and other deceased ethnic groups had a strong presence on geographically-viable trade routes into neighbouring countries. (The extraction route is as important as the resource in many cases, nowhere more so than in Burma. Burma only looks small on the map because it is between India and China: it's a large country with an awful lot of natural barriers in it, so a small tribe living on a navigable river will inevitably become a target for the regime's genocide programmes. Venuzaela's (unfounded) claims to territory in Guyana are motivated as much by the need for routes to extract natural resources as the resources themselves, Guatamala's claims to Belize are entirely so motivated, as Belize has less of everything than Guatamala, save for access to the Caribean and therefore the Atlantic.)

In some cases, parties wanting to exploit resources may attempt to boost the position of an ethnic minority that happens to live in the right region, or is in the process of moving into it. But in the long run, this is as hostile to that community's interests as immediate persecution, because whoever is displaced or disadvantaged by this now has a reason to cooperate with some rival power-broker who wants the favoured ethnic community out of the way.

So, if one political grouping seems very hostile to the Saami people in Northern Scandinavia, for example, and their rivals seem "sympathetic", the attentions of both political groupings are probably unhealthy in the long run.

In any case, a read of the strategic trends document, and it is frequently updated, may help Cornflakers develop the right kind of insight to understand why some really bizarre things are being done, by the authorities or powerful persons unknown, in a number of countries.

The 2007-2036 version of this document was more focused on the risks posed to global stability by very rich individuals than the current draft seems to be, but that's a change of emphasis not a change of fact: that sort of "Goldfinger" oligarch is a real risk, and it's interesting to see that even the MoD recognized that risk, albeit nearly forty years after Ian Fleming and Len Deighton!

Strategic understanding is an essential part of any sort of intelligent activism against genocide and other human rights abuses. Know why, know who, know how, and perhaps you can make an effective case against it all.