Skipjack wrote:I count 16 notable blowouts since 1962. (per your link) There are currently 497 offshore rigs working worldwide. If they had all occurred this year, that would be 3.2% of the total, a small number. As they occurred over a 48 year period, the number relative to the rig total is far smaller.
First off all, nobody claims that this list is complete. It is just A list.
Here is a book that talks about more than 100 blowouts:
http://www.rigzone.com/store/product.as ... 64&c_id=21
I took note of the word "Notable." I knew when I saw it that the list was not complete, however I expected it to be examples of the worst.
I know full well about blowouts. *I've* worked to install Blow out Preventers. Blowouts are not that common but they do happen. This one in the gulf is rather peculiar because it happened AFTER they sealed the hole. Normally a blowout occurs while DRILLING.
Skipjack wrote:
And even if it is only 16 blowouts, it is still infinitely more than there were oild rigs attacked by submarines in the same period of time.
Don't know if it was a submarine, or ship carried torpedoes, or even that it was attacked at all. My original thought was that it might have been sabotaged. I posted the link to the North Korean submarine story just to show that other people are thinking it might have been some sort of attack.
From my vantage point, nothing has been ruled out. The news articles about SWAT teams being sent to oil rigs in the gulf is extremely peculiar, but not in light of unknown (to us) knowledge regarding a possible attack.
I don't regard anything coming from the Huffington Post as credible. Arianna Huffington is a nut, and so are the people who write at the Huffington Post. Daily Kos probably has more credibility. They are at least up front about their partisanship.
Skipjack wrote:
Anyway, as I said before, it is very unlikely that an oil rig located got torpedoed. The oil rig is almost 10,000 miles away from north Korea. There would have been many, many more, much closer targets.
The whole assumption is just ridiculous!
It IS very unlikely, and probably didn't happen. The truth is probably very mundane, but why the blowout while they were getting ready to rig down? And why the SWAT teams to the oil rigs? Peculiar.
Skipjack wrote:
I am not saying that because I dont believe that North Korean idiots would not be capabable of doing something as stupid as that mentally anyway. However it just seems so much more unlikely than a simple accident that keeps happening on oil rigs ALL THE TIME.
Some are bigger, some are smaller. The link I posted first were bigger accidents, comparable to the current one. So I dont get why that possibility is so hard to accept. I guess that some people just always have to look for somebody else to blame, that they can shoot at, no matter what it is.
The story (fabricated or not) is the result of a long familiarity with the nutty things North Korea does. It would not surprise me at all for North Korea to do something like this. They have done weird stuff in the past. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians did something like this. They DO have a well known submarine capability. They also benefit from a spike in oil prices, which such an event might make easily predictable. Their Republican guard people are not always following orders from the central government, and they often operate independently, especially regarding attacks on the US.
In any case, i'm tired of this subject. Like Polywell, we will know when we know.
