Not that far out I guess. To my knowledge, most rigs that get in trouble seem to go down. Well that is trouble enough that it makes news, I am sure little stuff happens all the time. But catastrophic failure seems like that of a plane, the forces at play tear and burn it with such ferocity these is little you can do to stop it. Most of those places are not only dealing in crude, but in gases, and once that starts burning out of control I don't know if it is even possible to suppress.

Gotcha.

Hey GSF, good to run into you.

Try this one on.

The accompanying article attributed the capsizing of the rig to multiple errant boats destabilizing the rig by indiscriminate pumping or spraying salt water onto the rig to fight the fire.

What article?

My apologies, sir.

N E W B I E !

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2286/

I will get this down yet. Thank you for your help.

Moving this video to chicchorea's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Sounds like someone is attempting to shift blame from the myriad of other problems. I can understand looking into this to see how it could have been handled better, but blaming anyone for possibly damaging/sinking a burning structure....and one that is so fully engulfed in flames that multiple boats aren't able to extinguish it in the process.....is nuts. Unless those people got on board this oil rig and started the fire in the first place, I don't see the point of trying to shift attention onto their efforts to put it out as a bad thing.

The alternative to let it burn itself out would have resulted and just as likely may have resulted in this rig sinking due to temperatures causing metals to fatigue/warp and other things just simply explode from having massive temperature changes due to the fueled fire taking place on much cooler water.

The only thing this investigation could possibly benefit from is that it may allow them to stand a chance to extinguish fires like this in the future, but it looks to me like there's a bit of a campaign here going to try to blame the Coast Guard for BPs failures to take the time to properly close off a well resulting in much more than just a burned up rig but the deaths of people, and the resulting oil spill killing off countless wildlife and creating potential (more likely than not in my opinion) long term health problems for everyone exposed.

And there is the underlying problem of the government regulations being too lax when it comes to oil drilling where as other countries require relief wells to be in place before disaster strikes. Non-existent oversight.......no requirement for oil cleanup R&D.......just a policy of make as much money as you can off government contracts and hope nothing goes wrong so people won't look at hard at all of us.

The coast guard is featured in a much better light on shows like "The Biggest Catch" where a boat has catastrophic failures and these guys have to go out to save their asses from a fiery, freezing, drowning, etc death. Or when they have their specials and show the coast guard and such rescuing people from rooftops after hurricane Katrina and developing new techniques on the spot to be taught as part of the training after it's all over.

Blaming the coast guard is just an attempt to shift blame off BP and regulations committees/politicians in bed with them. It's akin to blaming the police department for 9/11 or the fire department for being unable to deal with large radioactive contamination. Who expects some crazy bastards to create the conditions for catastrophic failures and not let anyone know what the hell they did before it's too late to act on it? Some do, but you'll run out of funds trying to prepare for everything and you'll go crazy trying to predict them all. So you do the best you can and punish the people who CAUSED the problem, not the people who were unawares of it until it's exploding in their face. That's just ass backwards.

I concur with many of your observations, BP's complicity is well established. Some of your observations, however, well are rather far reaching perhaps.

I beg to difference that the CG is being scapegoated. Rather, that it is laudatory they show such willingness to objectively access their performance towards betterment as well as illustrative as to their current capabilities.

Likewise, the article enclosed addressing the firefighting efforts and their undesirable effects provides interesting possibilities to insights and I have found no such reasons presented, here or elsewhere, to discredit or devalue them.