Moon,
Thanks for the links. I was surprised to see the method used to raise and lower a man to the top of the stack on Q4000 (2:55-3:00 + 3:30-3:35). Don't they have stairs or a ladder?

Moon,
Great videos, thanks!

ps - Depends on whether they've isolated the reservoir or not. But even if the section of annulus they cut is still in communication with the reservoir it shouldn't be much of a problem. They know the max pressure they'll see and will have a sufficient mud weight to prevent a kick. Still might circ a little oil to the surface but no biggie.

Bottom line: that oil will stay in the annulus...if they do it right.

Good post.

Haha..I read that series of articles a month or two ago, funny as hell, and the comments from the readers are great too !

[EDIT]

The fire and flashes we saw coming out of the top of the ...unBOP might have been fractoluminescence , only logical explanation I can think of.

http://www.crewes.org/ForOurSponsors/ResearchReports/2003/2003-69.pdf

some among us are incapable of knowing what we do not know

But none of us are capable of knowing what we don't know that we don't know, not even the experts who know some of what they don't know. And the heck of it is, there may be folks who know things the experts don't know that they (the experts) don't know.

Caveat: The above should not be construed as support for CTs, merely a plea for a bit of provisional humility.

Unconformity,
Thanks for the interesting link.

One of the many benefits of TOD is the vetting of questions many of us would never think to ask.

When I first came here, I was also half convinced the silt storms were oil. But it only took the people here setting me straight a couple of times before I got the picture. I like to think I'm capable of learning. Thanks everyone who answered my newbie questions!

Well said and add my thanks to this site and the posters as well.

The remote location of this disaster and being inaccessible by direct human contact allowed wild ass claims by those who would gain from spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt harder to disprove or prove. More critical thinking, logic, education and patience is required for a situation like this.

Admiral Thad Allen said it well that this disaster was closer to Apollo 13 than the Exxon Valdez.

from an August 18th, 2010 interview with Charlie Rose

CHARLIE ROSE: You have said that the Gulf crisis, a, is unprecedented. We all know that. But you have also said it’s closer to Apollo 13 than the Exxon Valdez.

THAD ALLEN: That’s true.

CHARLIE ROSE: Explain that.

THAD ALLEN: Well, first of all, the source of the oil has no human access. We’re dealing with technologies that have never been used at 5,000 feet.

CHARLIE ROSE: Below the ocean surface.

THAD ALLEN: All we know that’s going on down there is what we see through remotely operated vehicles and remote sensing. So everything is a model of what’s going on down there, but what we’ve been able to capture in terms of data and video, nothing represents absolute reality you can touch...

...And we’re going to have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty with incomplete
information. And that’s never easy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrpPPV_yPY

The subject is 'God of the gaps' but it still applies if you change it to 'conspiracy theory of the gaps' or 'magic healing crystals of the gaps' or any of the fantasy-based alternatives we've invented to replace traditional religion.

"We can never know what we don't know unless we keep our minds open."

I keep telling myself that when it comes to my efforts to understand and interact with teenagers, now that I have two. It's can be both wonderful and horrifying. Much as I try to teach them, I think i end up learning more than they do.

This video, however, helps me appreciate the value there is in the teenage perspective and logic. It is something to behold. The clip also helps demonstrate how selective we are in perceiving any given situation, and how relative our concept of knowledge is. The interviewer's perception and questions come from one perspective, the kid's from another. Both know each knows what the other does not, and perhaps cannot, when it comes to their competing interpretations of the event at issue (wait for the last minute or so of the clip where the teen reveals his self-evaluation after being led through the interviewer's). This is from whence we came.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rin1_XUuVY&feature=player_embedded

Good to have an official name--Dunning-Kruger--to assign to that ignorant certitude we suffer with, and sometimes from.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

In the context of these Oil Drum, Macondo blow-out threads, the Dunning-Kruger effect aptly applies to those who incessantly post ad hominem attacks. The air of superiority in the attacks fits number 1 above, while the failure to recognize that ad hominem is an invalid form of argument fits well with number 2. Some oil industry insiders have tried to lead by example and even make gentle suggestions about appropriate discourse, but the ad hominem attackers proceed without heed which fits number 3.

Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' latest paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions to their original work, after making some attempt to test alternative explanations. They conclude that the root cause is that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve."[4]

There is some subtlety to the Dunning-Kruger effect:

[skilled people] tend to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.

and...

...94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers)...

and...

DAVID DUNNING: ...We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.
ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?
DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know...

There is a lot that remains unknown about the Macondo blowout and subsequent events.

On the previous thread I meant to indicate that neither you nor I have been able to find any evidence that foamed cement has been lab tested at the pressures found at depth in this well (12,000 psi). The rest of the conclusions (e.g 6 vs 21 centralizers is irrelevant) are mine alone.

I do note how eerily reminiscent this treatment of the recurring need to do a squeeze job on cement jobs is to the problem of o-ring erosion on the Challenger. I would recommend that all investigators read Feynmann!!!!

From Genius The Life and Science of Richard Feynmann by James Gleick

His most important contribution to the understanding of the disaster came in the area of risk and probability. He showed that the space agency and its contractors - although the essence of their decisionmaking lay in weighing uncertainties - had ignored statistical science altogether and had a shockingly vague style of risk assessment. The commission's official findings could do no better than quote Feynmann's comment during the hearings that the decison making became

a kind of Russian roulette...[The shuttle] flies [with O-ring erosion] and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it the last time...You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over like that.

Both Halliburton's and BP's engineers indicated they had done a few prior foamed cement jobs at depth (as opposed to the normal shallow cementing of the big diameter casings into the sea floor), but neither knew if foamed cement was approved for use at the 18,000 ft depth. But it seems obvious that Halliburton's research & software guys thought it was okay as it was written into Opti-Cem and appeared in Gagliano's reports! So why would the front line guys question what the big Halliburton brain trust thought was okay?

So if it fails the pressure test out in the field, we just keep doing squeeze jobs, over and over and over....

ASIDE to PhilMB - I have a casting tip for the BP Opera! Ken Salazar for this role http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpJ_IAUs8nI

It seems the other commenters missed the second requirement for the finale, being a lady (to Swift Loris et al - one out of two is a grade of 50% = F).

The reference was to the famous Dick Motta quip, "The opera ain't over until the fat lady sings."

CV,

"looks like a displacement of 85 barrels to me. Am I missing something."

---------------------------------------------

Nope.....You are spot on. I "screwed the pooch" on that one.

Sorry for the confusion.

NU

Who would have ever thought he would resurface in a broken BOP?

Naah, his "punishment" was just for show, so he could go underground--er, undersea--for a bit. He knows what happened to the drill pipe; the FBI agents have been debriefing him ever since they brought up the BOP. Look for new revelations soon.

My conjecture is that the reason all along for all of the drop-outs of the ROV feeds was Max taking over the bandwidth up upload HIS field reports.

Maybe we can start our own CT. If grilled-cheese sandwiches can show faces on them, so can BOPs!

*** begin CT ***
Okay, everyone repeat after me, "The image of Max Headroom on the BOP is proof that Max was the first reporter on the scene and lived on the BOP from late May to the time of its recovery. Max was getting first person reporting from the seafloor all along. His reports have been censored as a result of the vast media blackout surrounding the GOM."
*** end CT ***

See how easy it is to make stuff up.

BTW, in case you missed it, this is continuation of running joke between erainh2o and I started yesterday on http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6856#comment-703162

For the “serious side” of TOD, my attempt at humor aside both here and upthread, the “face on the BOP” is actually a pretty nice example of the discussion at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6856#comment-703162

Really nice article

Yezindeed, SL, and thanks for pointing it out. No wonder alcohol is taboo in Islam. Can you imagine what the Boota alarm clock would do to a hangover? Lawsy me.

Thank you for your kind reply.

I didn't see my post show up after I posted it last night even though I searched for quite a while looking for it to see if anyone would reply.

Earlier today, I did a few google searches looking for pipe joints (tool tips, etc) and from what I learned, the connecting ends are much thicker than the regular pipe lengths not only at the outer diameter, but also with a small narrowing of the inner diameter making the area of the joint much stronger than the normal pipe length.

Some of the pictures I saw indicated that the metal in the area of the joint was more than twice the normal pipe thickness.

Inserting one pipe end into another further increases the thickness of the metal which the shear would have to cut. The difference appears to be more than three normal pipe thicknesses at the low end and may possibly as much as or even more than five pipe thicknesses at the high end.

The extra thickness combined with the extra hardening to resist the wear from assembling and disassembling would make it much harder to cut the drill pipe in that area. If the pipe was falling when the shears are activated, it is very possible that the thicker part could hang up in the shears.

One of the pictures I saw showed two incerases in the joint thickness and it is very possible that the uppermost thick portion could be stopped above the shears top edge while the slightly lower thick portion may fall right where the cutting edges would be.

I did see where there are sensors available which will detect the extra thickness at the joints so that the drillers would be able to calculate exactly where the joints were within the BOP and/or thereabouts.

I don't know if under extereme emergency conditions one would even bother to figure out where the joints were located due to the necessity of immediately cutting the pipe.

CV, Thanks again for your reply and also the PDF which does contain the exact info I was wondering about. According to that report, the shears are NOT expected to be able to handle the tool joints, collars, upsets, etc that may be on the pipes.

The BOPs should be designed to allow the pipe to descend slightly and rest on hangoffs before cutting the pipe.

Paragraph 3.4 fully explains the problems involved and also how some automatic shears aren't capable of determining the location of the joints or able to reposition them to avoid them landing in the shear area. That report also further discusses the sensors checking for the joints and how they should function.

Obviously, the BO blowout was a true emergency and maybe the shear was handled by a 'panic button' and the automatic repositioning didn't happen or couldn't happen under the conditions the ram was activated.

According to that report, the industry is fully aware of the inability of the shears to handle the 'joints' and the newer equipment is supposed to be designed to reposition the pipe when the joints are in the shear area.

Thee is another consideration which is the spacing between the various rams, shears, hangoffs, etc and the lengths of the various joints. It is possible for a pipe to settle down on the hanoffs but due to excessive joint or collar length the joint itself may still protrude into the shear path.

I realize that most of the oil patch vets fully realize all these pitfalls, but newcomers or other outside observers like myself do find it helpful to understand the complications which arise even under 'routine' circumstances let alone emergencies like the BP blowout.

Wiki's reliability

Just want to point out that generally speaking (although not in this case), you can glean something about the process of putting together a particular Wikipedia page by looking at the Discussion section (click on the Discussion tab at the top). Especially for controversial topics, there can be a great deal of back-and-forth among the parties collaborating on the page, and often you can get some idea of their respective agendas from the debate. This may help in evaluating the quality of the information. (Or it may not, but it's at least worth a try.)

Indeed. At the coal mine, I held the license of "Shot Firer". That's coal's equivalent of powder monkey. Having that license proves that you are capable of doing everything exactly right with an inspector watching. It does not prove the licensed man will do things right when working for real. For instance, sometimes you get a missed hole, a hole that didn't go off when the blast was fired. There's a "right" way to deal with that... and there's an easy way. 'Nuff said?

Licensure is permission to keep doing the the thing that requires the license.
You screw up and lose your license, you don't pull a paycheck doing that thing anymore.
This responsibility for certain conduct and knowledge is laid squarely on the shoulders of the license holder.

Just ask drivers who've lost their licenses. Or doctors. Or lawyers. Or plumbers. Or paramedics. Or nurses. Or electricians. Or any other professional or skilled occupation that requires a license. If you screw up and lose that permission slip to operate in that field, you go home and find some other job. End of story. The training and skill standards set for licensure are designed to established a common professional standard.

This has little to do with being forced to follow other peoples' rules -- the rules are established for everyone's safety and protection by professional groups and sanctioned by the state or federal governments (or both).

You're damned right licensing provides opportunities, including to chance to get paid.
But it also provides an opportunity to screw up and lose that opportunity through making the license holder responsible for his behaviors.

Without licensing and regulations in many fields and areas across society, many of us would be dead much sooner and would have much, much lower standards of living. Speeders keep speeding until they grow up, get killed or maimed or get so many points taken off their LICENSEs that they lose them. Companies that operate outside of regulatory structures risk getting caught and fined. When government regulation enforcement fails, you see what can happen as reflected by our thriving, ever-growing, strong economy right now. Just because everyone appears to be doing it, doesn't make it right. That kind of opportunistic herd mentality gets everyone killed eventually.

Safety is what happens when people have internalized the regulations and have enough professional skill and depth of knowledge to understand why the regs exist in the first place. Of course, being licensed also assumes that the license holders are in possession of the strength of character to act ethically within their profession.
For years to come, rig hands and engineers will do things slightly differently because of the Macondo blowout.

As for the license part, I'll happily do heart surgery on your loved one if the price is right. Who needs a stinking license?! Let the markets set the rate!
derp.

I caught it this morning before the link went down. It hasn't been edited.

In Joye's previous post, they had not located a deep plume, but she still expected to. Does this post indicate that they have given up on plume hunting? Terry Hazen said recently that the deep plumes are pretty much gone. Also, Joye hasn't said anything this trip about methane--I will post a question at her blog.

Regarding the sedimented oil, allow me to repeat some info that I posted a month ago. A retrospective oil budget for the Ixtoc spill estimated that 20% of the original material was beached or sedimented. There were two main processes, reduction to tar and deposition of plankton feces. The latter may contain dispersed oil droplets, partly metabolized or not depending on what kind of animal swallowed them. These pellets sink readily and will be colonized by bacteria that continue to break the oil remnants down. So the oil floc that Joye mentions may be mostly plankton poop and bacteria, with bits of tar. Incidentally the various flocs and dirty foams being observed around the Gulf may contain some hydrocarbons of biogenic, rather than petrogenic, origin. Bacteria and plankton can synthesize certain alkanes and other HC, and there's a ton of bacterial refuse out these, as I posted below.

Then, tar: tar falls out disproportionately in inshore waters, where it gathers sediment and becomes heavier than water. Offshore tar will eventually weather to the point that it sinks, but I don't know how long that takes. Anyway, this could be one reason why they found more oily sediment near shore.

Thanks, Gobbet. Wow, fascinating to see how long it takes all this bacterial carrying-on to settle back down to something near normal.

After noticing a transcription error in this interview -- "flock" for "floc" -- I decided to look up "floc" to confirm that it really means what I thought it did: Yep, the word refers to flakes of stuff coming out of suspension in a liquid.

Good. Sure woulda confused me to have to visualize a "flock of flakes" as anything but Glenn Beck followers.

Sigh. How can they compare environmental damage if they can't compare the environment? There's just nothing about Alaska that's comparable to the GOM. Well, yeah, I guess there is: The spills both happened in water. :-/

I took up the topic because it seemed outrageous that the operation was so ineffective. Later I learned that open-water skimming is always ineffective. If they picked up 4% or so of the oil, that's par. The rated capacity of skimmers has no bearing on real-world performance. The fabulous Dutch skimming arms didn't seem to make much difference.

As far as I can tell, BP ran the skimming operation reasonably well. They set up vessels offshore as downloading stations and had a workable dispatching system. I did witness one fiasco on video where a big CG vessel was sent to an area where the only oil was too weathered to be picked up with that particular skimming technology. Men and women in hazmat suits worked in blazing heat all day on a deck slathered with petro-peanut butter and didn't capture anything.

Toward the end, when they had an extensive fleet of big skimmers working around the wellhead, they were probably making some inroads, but light oil spreads so fast on warm water that skimming just can't do much.

The significant innovations were not the Costner centrifuges nor the A Whale, but three inventions by local tinkerers. One was the Big Gulp. but it came along too late to be used much. It is the only thing I heard of that can deal with oil at any stage of weathering. Then the HORD rack-and bag system for collecting tar and mousse--seems like that could still be useful. Finally a small, cheap front-end pad skimmer for cleaning up sheen. This was developed by a guy in Alabama and manufactured in MS, again, maybe too late. I would like to hear more about what happened with these three good ideas.

Sorry I can't post a link

Can you give us the ten-cent version? What does Popular Mechanics think happened?

This what your thinking of?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/how-the-bp-o...

NAOM

Have we been reading the same blog?

And a lot of people in here don't work in the oil industry. Who has been approving BP? Certainly no one who has much of a following here!

Yeah, well. If you walk in here with a bucket of sawdust, claim it's a Redwood and accuse everybody who doesn't believe you of being a BP shill, it doesn't go down well here. Since you wrote

every other report, person or entity which has something to say is presumed alarmist, opportunist or a CT nut

I'd have to conclude that 1) you've been reading selectively or 2) that you've got a bucket of sawdust.

Whatchu' talkin bout,Willis?

You seem to be revisiting your premise of Sept. 1st from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6909/712269

To me, it seems that NOTHING here gets "rubber-stamp of approval;" be it info from BP or anyone else.

Pig,

Large publicly owned corporations are rapacious by nature, and their only goals are to profit and grow. If an LPOC appears to be acting decently, it is because the LPOC believes this appearance will be good for its bottom line. LPOCs behave responsibly toward society at large only insofar as they are made to do so by governments or consumers. BP has been more irresponsible than the oil industry average. I hope they are nearly destroyed by this incident, as it will be a good object lesson for the industry.

However, BP has been on its best behavior during the spill and cleanup. The reason for this is that the oil spill legislation provides that their penalty will be affected by the degree of cooperativeness and effort in containment, cleanup, and remediation. So they are doing everything the government asks them to, including coughing up $20b for damages and $360m for Louisiana's crazy berm project. They have spent billions on containment and cleanup. I haven't seen much wrong with their behavior since the blowout or their public statements, apart from Tony Heyward's astonishing gaffes, for which he was fired.

So I think a lot of the claims of lying and malfeasance are out of line. For example, no matter how many times people claim BP lied about the flow rate, it's not true. All the flow rate estimates were from the government. The fact is, nobody had much of a clue about the flow rate until the pressure was measured at the end. So what lies would you point to apart from Heyward's gaffes? What wrongful behavior in containment and cleanup that can't be explained by incompetence? (There are 30,000 people working on this project, and hardly any of them had prior experience in dealing with a large spill. The project leaders had no experience in this type of management.)

People who care about the truth will correct falsehoods, even when those falsehoods attack somebody they don't like (BP in my case.)

Maybe the issue here is that you simply refuse to learn from other people?

You have an _opinion_ and simply refuse to let facts get in the way.

bearpig,
Do you happen to know Brian A. Rich from Los Angeles? :)

$5 says it'll be Corexit within 90 minutes.

I blame Pete Seeger.

I'm not quite prepared to fold quite so easily, and I suspect that a few others won't either.

What's the phrase?

"When the goin' gets tough, the tough get goin""

TOB - Actually, to my great surprise, shallow water permits are back in process many months sooner than I expected. The feds cancelled the old environmental audit requirements and I expected months before the new ones were drafted. But they've been posted and new permits have already been appoved with the new guidelines. No platforms have been shut down and no one I know producing on the shelf have such expectations. Currently all platforms are subject to periodic inspections and I've seen no change in safety requirements. Of course, rules can change.

==Rumour has it...==

Well, another rumor has it that Republicans will spread all manner of evil lies and innuendo to discredit any Democratic President that is even remotely progressive. You folks have libeled and maligned every Democratic Commander-in-Chief from FDR to Obama, without pausing for breath or considering the consequences to the nation. All the while whining how you are the victims of the liberal conspiracy to destroy this nation. Opposing any government program that benefits the working people - Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment insurance, you name it. Braying about the deficit while cutting taxes on the super-rich. Predicting the coming of "socialism" and "destruction" of American economy every time a sensible program is enacted or a mild regulation on unbridled greed is passed.

Don't you every get tired of this $hit?

"This is Cap and Trade through Presidential fiat. The US economy will be devastated."

Please tell me which economy will be devastated?

What is this "economy" of which you speak?

[Seventy percent service, military-industrial, investment Ponzi scheme, banking/theft industry, government captured by corporation who write the regulations which go unenforced, elderly retirements devastated, public infrastructure in decline, giant pipelines flowing with cash leading directly from the treasury to Wall Street firms and government contractors, ongoing permanent wars on the other side of the planet. Please specify which economy you mean.]

America has become a country of bilkers. Everyone needs a hook, a scam, a scheme, a game, a way to relieve others of their dollar bills and the supply of dollar bills is dwindling.

Did it occur to you to walk up to any of these "mysterious" people and ask them what was going on?

Did you take pictures? Did you get water samples? Did you ask anyone else about this? Did you ask the people involved what they were doing? Did you track the boats back to a dock? See anything on the docks? Did you call a reporter?

There are loads of explanations for white foamy streaks in the sea and none of them have anything to do with recent spraying of Corexit. However I would not be surprised if boats were not taking opportunity to clean and pump their bilges under cover of the spill.

The brown lines in the sand could well be traces of oil and buried oil. Incoming tides tend to bring in fresh sand that covers surface oil.

If anyone is spraying dispersant it is completely illegal and if caught would lead to huge fines. Dispersant in the clean seawater looks milky white, when used on oil it is light brown.

When you see something suspicious, I would suggest contacting Mobile Baykeepers. They have a lot of resources available from what they told us at a meeting held here recently.

Granted, there is a lot left to do. I don't think anyone doubts that. I think we're all in agreement that the risk isn't over until the P&A process is properly completed.

However, with a new BOP in place, they now have additional options that didn't exist previously that provide new opportunities to do things with a more favorable risk posture. Also, there is a second barrier in place (a functioning BOP) in addition to the cement plug which adds another measure of safety.

With a BOP in place with a known pressure rating, some of the risks associated with the RW intercept alluded to by the Thadmiral are lessened.

The celebrations starting Friday were about the milestones reached Friday and over the weekend. You may think I have a low bar for reasons to celebrate (I indeed may), but I though this milestone was noteworthy and justified some celebration as damn good news ahead of the remaining important work; now a bit less risky.

Thanks, pseudonym. I expressed surprise that the annulus is known to be full of oil.

I wonder if I'm alone in being puzzled by how BP knows that to be the case.

CV

manbearpig54,
I read a book called "Terror in the Name of God".

On one page it says,
"Some scholars believe that a "natural-resource curse" prevents oil-rich countries from achieving viable democracies."

Bush had the cia and state department psychological profiles on Putin going in. The only way for Bush to play Putin was to flatter him. That Bush looking into Putin's soul nonsense was pure psychological and political theater. When Bush looked into Putin's eyes, Bush probably saw an amoral abyss unlike any he's ever encountered in the patrician circles of his native oligarchy.

Well Syncro, I think they have a different definition of "foolproof" than I do. I've seen many instances where something passed inspection and then was allowed to crumble after the inspectors were gone. But yes, the mining industry has had to labor under both state and federal inspections for decades. It does help, no question about it. Everyone tries just that bit harder if they know an unannounced inspection could happen at any time.

Oooooops. Quite a find, snakehead.

But. But. But, it's a Culture of Safety!

I don't think you will find anyone to argue with you on that. Agreed here, anyway.

snake -- just a light hearted shot at the CT folks: last week I heard a report that some beach goers felt an oily sensation on their arms after being sprayed with sea water mist. Could have been oil from the BP well. But given my Irish heritage I always lay on the sun screen at the beach. And I always dislike that oily feel when I rub my arms. A silly point but it might rate up there with the initial reports from FL that "thunder began sounding different after the BP spill." That's still my personal favorite though.

shaepton - As best as I understand the situation it's a messy bit of joint responsibility. The drillers are responsible for maintaining their equipment, including BOP's as per gov't regs. And operators are responsible for confirming compliance. And the MMS/Coast Guard are responsible for inspecting/certifying the equipment. Add to that a system that allows exemptions/delays/wavers and it can be difficult to ID the point of failure. But, at the end of the day, the equipment belongs to the drilling contractor. The rig/crew/environment are protected by this equipment. The drilling company is, and always will be IMHO, the primary responsible party.