um, the pipe burst out. its a hollow column of rock.
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Mauro Lacy <[email protected]> wrote:
> I can't believe they can't stop the oil spill after more than six weeks.
> At this point it sounds like something intentional to me.
>
> Don't they know about mechanical vices?
>
> As they have access to the base of the leaking pipe, a powerful enough
> mechanical vice can be used to slowly compress the pipe, until closing it.
> The mechanical vice will be remotely operated and put into place, of
> course. They can test the special equipment on the ground all that is
> needed, until satisfied, to be almost certain that it will work.
> I don't understand why they stick to using methods whose results are
> relatively unpredictable, instead of focusing in a single well designed
> method with a high probability of success from the beginning.
>
> Mauro
>
> On 06/03/2010 04:20 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
>> Jon Stewart on the Daily Show quoted an interview
>> with BP managing director Bob Dudley, conducted
>> by George Stephanopoulos. Apparently, in the last
>> 3 years, BP's facilities have been cited by OSHA
>> for "760 egregious, willful safety violations." This compares to:
>>
>> Sunoco 8
>> ConocoPhillips 8
>> Citago 2
>> Exxon 1
>>
>> See:
>>
>> http://www.columbusalive.com/live/content/features/stories/2010/06/03/the-daily-show-the-spilling-fields.html
>>
>> This does not surprise me. When you look into the
>> history of severe industrial accidents and
>> catastrophes such as the Titanic sinking, the
>> Challenger explosion, and the accidents at Three
>> Mile Island or Brown's Ferry, you usually find
>> precursor events such as smaller accidents or
>> close calls. You find incompetence or criminal
>> mismanagement. You might say that accidents don't happen by accident.
>>
>> Here is an example of a close-call that should
>> never have happened, and an example of muddled
>> thinking in upper management. Before the
>> Challenger exploded, the o-rings on the Space
>> Shuttle tank partially eroded in previous
>> launches, something they were never expected to
>> do, or designed to do. Quoting Feynman, "What Do
>> You Care What Other People Think?," p. 244:
>>
>> . . . in flight 51-C, it was noted that the
>> erosion depth was only one-third of the radius.
>> It had been noted in an experiment cutting the
>> ring that cutting it as deep as one radius was
>> necessary before the ring failed. Instead of
>> being very concerned that varia負ions of poorly
>> understood conditions might reasonably create a
>> deeper erosion this time, it was asserted there was "a safety factor of
>> three."
>>
>> This is a strange use of the engineer's term
>> "safety factor." If a bridge is built to
>> withstand a certain load with觔ut the beams
>> permanently deforming, cracking, or break虹ng, it
>> may be designed for the materials used to
>> actually stand up under three times the load.
>> This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain
>> excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or
>> weaknesses in the material that might have
>> unex計ected flaws, et cetera. But if the expected
>> load comes on to the new bridge and a crack
>> appears in a beam, this is a failure of the
>> design. There was no safety factor at all, even
>> though the bridge did not actually collapse
>> because the crack only went one-third of the way
>> through the beam. The O-rings of the solid rocket
>> boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was
>> a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not
>> something from which safety could be inferred.
>>
>> There was no way, without full understanding,
>> that one could have confidence that conditions
>> the next time might not produce erosion three
>> times more severe than the time before.
>> Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into
>> thinking they had such understanding and
>> confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations
>> from case to case. A mathematical model was made
>> to calculate erosion. This was a model based not
>> on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting. . . ."
>>
>>
>> [This gives empirical curve fitting a bad name . . .]
>>
>> - Jed
>>
>>
>>
>
>
