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Comment by jorgem | Hacker News Reader

Most people think it's just a long pipe going down there, and you can put your thumb in it.

Most people think they should have this "cap" on stand-by on every drilling rig out there.

and considering the massive risk to other people's property, I'm not sure that's unreasonable. Obviously, they'd need to cost it out, but I mean, they appear to take some pretty massive risks with other people's property.

I guess if the reparations from BP are fair, the right thing should happen (e.g. they should keep those domes on hand if that is cheaper than paying out the reparations every 10 years or however often this sort of thing seems to happen.)

Surely most people would think they should actually make shutoff valves that actually work. Though clearly a lot more needs to be invested in disaster prevention.

They do, in theory. The Blow-Out-Preventer, basically an automatic cap, it installed in-line on every well currently being drilled.

Yes, it failed but there is no guarantee that "this cap" will succeed in the case of another BOP failure.

I still think the industry should put together a consortium that develops and builds such equipment and keeps it ready to go in the event of deep-water well failures like this. Seems like a lot of trial and error and onsite improvisation and engineering were done after the disaster. If it had been done ahead of time, then we may well have gotten to this point perhaps weeks sooner. A lot of oil might not have been spilled.

It better be federally mandated. Lord knows the industry won't do it on their own. Case in point: BP oil disaster.

That blow out preventer was federally mandated. As was the dead backup battery.

The thing about mandates is they are easy to write. It's the enforcement that has the problem. If you look at every airplane crash, exclude pilot error and rare weather events, you will find the remainder were due to lax maintenance. Federally mandated lax maintenance.

Maybe we need to clue in the insurers? If I were writing insurance for a blowout, I'd want a petroleum company to be in the consortium I described. Hell, I'd help run it! I'd make damn sure they were doing rigorous research and engineering. (And hardware testing!)

If a private company had built such a cap and kept it on standby, they could have probably sold it to BP for over $20 billion.

I'm a liberal, but I really don't like reading or watching liberal biased news constantly. It's as uninteresting and un-though-provoking as watching conservative shows all day.

That said, Rachel Maddow compared this gulf oil spill to the gulf oil spill of 1979 by using news clips from then, and the sad part is, the new technology we used for this spill is the exact same technology they used back then. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

"Most people" don't think about it at all. Disclosure - long BP

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