In just a few months, the slabbed will mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the spin of the scheme that transformed the hurricane into “the Great New Orleans Flood”: 
“The word game started with water – lots and lots of water – lifted by Katrina’s powerful winds, waves became walls of water – collapsing with such force water went further inland than shown on any flood map. New Orleans, the Big Easy, became the only bowl it never wanted and, those playing the word game began calling Katrina, the windstorm, the Great New Orleans Flood.”
The slabbed have now been slicked but spin is spin, even when it’s the “big drill down spin” – and just as the best place to hide a needle is a haystack of needles, the best place to hide a leak is in an oil rig that’s bleeding like a stuck pig.
The Sunday Times (London) sets the stage for the “big drill down spin” with BP warned of rig fault ten years ago:
BP faces fresh questions over the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill after it emerged that problems with the type of equipment that led to the disaster were first reported a decade ago.
In June 2000, the oil giant issued a “notice of default” to Transocean, the operator of the rig that blew up last month. The dispute was over problems with a blowout preventer, a set of iron slabs that should close out-of-control wells. It failed on the Gulf of Mexico rig, triggering the explosion and oil spill.
Transocean acknowledged at the time that the preventer did “not work exactly right”. The rig in question, the Discover Enterprise, was unable to operate for extended periods while the problem was fixed. The preventer was made by Hydril, now owned by GE’s oil and gas arm, and Cameron International, a Houston company. Cameron also made the preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded. Its preventer was fitted at about the same time BP was complaining of problems with its sister vessel.
BP’s past problems with the preventer emerged as a giant oil slick, fed by the uncapped well, began lapping the coast of Louisiana…
Notice the way the Sunday Times (New York) slips in the mention of three leaks as it does the BP spin in BP Describes Race to Fix Well as Obama Warns of Oil Damage:
BP was leasing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded on April 20. Two days later, it collapsed into the gulf, and the oil began leaking. BP, working with an array of government agencies and private companies, has been unable to stop the flow of crude from the well.
Bob Fryar, the company’s senior vice president for operations in Angola, who was brought to a command center in Houston for the engineering effort, said that on Monday, BP hoped to install a shut-off valve on one of the three leaks. That may stop some of the oil flow, Mr. Fryar said.
But the biggest leak, at the end of the riser pipe, which Mr. Fryar said was the source of most of the spewing oil, cannot be shut off this way. The company intends to address that leak by lowering a containment dome over it and then pumping the oil to the surface. That effort is still at least six days away, Mr. Fryar said. Another containment dome, for the third leak, which is on the riser near the wellhead, would follow two to four days after the first.
Crooks and Liars puts all together and reveals the “big drill down spin” in BP Exec: Who Could Have Known? It’s Not Our Rig! Etc. IT’S NOT OUR FAULT! Continue reading “Slicked and Slabbed”