BP Gulf of Mexico Rig Lacked Alarm Systems 92
DMandPenfold writes "BP's monitoring IT systems on the failed Deepwater Horizon oil rig relied too heavily on engineers following complex data for long periods of time, instead of providing automatic warning alerts. That is a key verdict of the Oil Spill Commission, the authority tasked by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico disaster."
Re:As opposed to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, surprisingly alarms have to be neither missing nor useless (by being irrelevant, hard to understand, going off for the wrong reasons, presenting wrong scenario, not correlating causes etc etc etc).
Who'd have thunk it.
Re:As opposed to... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like we've never seen this sort of thing before
"You are about to do something."
CANCEL, or ALLOW?
Re:how much did that cost (Score:4, Insightful)
I think everyone's familiar of that phenomenon regarding the alarm that cried wolf due to all the car alarms. Rarely do people even turn their head when they hear a car alarm.
Competent professionals don't do that. The problem with car alarms is that they aren't aimed at professionals, competent or otherwise, they're aimed at the general public and the mechanism they use isn't typically going to assure that anything is going on.
Competent professionals like the ones that are supposed to be running rigs should know to check them out every time and not turn the alarm off withotu ascertaining that the alarm is in fact false. Disabling an alarm should only be done when there are adequate contingency plans in place to handle if the condition happened and how they would respond.
I used to work security at a high rise and we'd often times have alarms turned off on portions of the building. It was the only way to ensure that under certain circumstances that work wouldn't cause a false alarm. It was done in a controlled way with plans in place to make sure that there was somebody keeping an eye on it while the work was being done, and that the alarms would be turned back on when they could be.
And every time that building had an alarm go off which wasn't a known cause, it was always investigated promptly. Alarms that go off repeatedly need to be fixed, not disabled.
Re:how much did that cost (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't even want to know how much tax payer money was pissed away for that "key verdict" - having worked with quite a few monitoring and alarm systems for years I can tell you that most of the time "automatic alarms" get ignored and in fact can cause worse problems when an actual real alarm does occur because of how the operators tune them out - seems like they completely missed the mark on this - the real problem is most likely where you would expect it, the people running the system - human error I am sure !
You don't even have to ignore the alarm that isn't there. But I don't think the "alert" that we're discussing is the big klaxon/flashing sign reading "OIL LEAK," or an oil pressure light with electrical tape over it. What the article indicates was missing was an automatic method of indicating that a failure was imminent. As far as the cost of determining this: learning from mistakes can be expensive. Not learning from mistakes is likely even more so.
Re:Why do they even bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a peek at the Norwegian sector. We've been doing this shit since the 70s and try damn hard to not have another Alexander Kielland...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_L._Kielland_(platform) [wikipedia.org]
The norwegian petroleum oversight is something... The regulators are ruthless when it comes to compliance and better yet... they are not directly controlled by politicians ;)
The cost of one fuckup is too much to allow people to cut corners.
I sure as hell dont in my job... and I do it for a living. When we have the option of doing it right, or doing it fast.. we pick right. Every time. I dont care if the customer is pissed at things being delayed. We do it -right-.
Re:Automation not always "better" ... (Score:2, Insightful)
A B C
1 ->-0-->--| |
| | 0
2 ->-0 | |
3 ->-0-->--0-->--|
| | 0
A, B and C are various barriers.
A = Automation (automatic shutdown on severe alarms etc)
B = Procedures (Check X before doing Y)
C = Operator Training
As you can see here an accident can only happen if -all- the barriers fail. One is enough to stop the incident.
That is the theory anyway. We dont want to replace anyone but we -do- want to add more barriers!