Links on Friday Morning

This morning, we're in Corpus Christi for the Texas Democratic Party State Convention. We'll probably bring some updates tonight.

Here are a few links I've collected over the past few days:

New York times has another piece about lapses in oversight of the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon. The sheer ram component of the blowout preventer did not have a backup. It was a single point of failure with a single point of failure. Most rigs have two sheers, just in case a pipe joint happens to be in the way of one.

“It found 11 cases where crews on deepwater rigs had lost control of their wells and then activated blowout preventers to prevent a spill. In only six of those cases were the wells brought under control, leading the researchers to conclude that in actual practice, blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs had a “failure” rate of 45 percent.”