Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees

The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The us House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week bp launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas. —bp.com, April 28, 2010 Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark. The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ram and represents a single failure point for disconnect. Recommendation: Declare selected points on earth invisible. Affected communities have been provided with limited quantities of powdered milk and other staples. Many questions remain. Some close their eyes under water instinctively. Imagination can create a sense of peril where no real peril exists. Safety equipment tests were necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in question were wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinking into the mud was told to toss his camera to a colleague and hold extremely still. In this sense, we are our own prisoners. Investigators have salt in their hair and sand in their teeth. The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain. Barbeque billboards depict grinning pigs in aprons and toques. Cleanup crews recover thousands of plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do these images appeal to the death drive? Care should be taken to ensure the highest possible reliability from that valve. Thousands in affected communities have been evicted and live in tents. Demonstrators have prevented investigators from accessing hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World’s Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob’s bbq Buffet tells a journalist she last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp “a thousand years ago.” Items available only in limited quantities are found in Appendix C. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversity and redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will offer limited foreclosure deferments in affected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snout for air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety’s sake. If the committee may offer an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. BP’s 2010 Q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million a year ago, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However, care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix E. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1913: Diesel found dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators’ hotel toilets won’t flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich. Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbeque and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may offer an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we’ve opened there.