About a week ago, I had written that in the middle of the night, the containment cap on the well was almost completely stopping the flow. That lasted for about a day.
A few days ago, I thought I noticed that the containment cap was rocking back and forth – just sitting on top of the BOP rather than clamped to it. Turns out my observation was correct:
CNN Story
You may remember we had a hurricane blow through the western Gulf a few days ago. While it didn’t “hit” the oil spill site, it did create large waves and strong winds. The drilling boat has thrusters to keep the boat centered over the well, and the riser is apparently jointed in the middle to give some flexibility for the ship drifting…. but it doesn’t have infinite capacity to keep from moving.
By resting the cap on the BOP, in the event of a sudden loss of control, the cap will just slip off the BOP. The worst possible outcome of this would be if the forces on the BOP from movement were to rip it from the casing – so until things calm down (say maybe in October?) they’re probably going to prefer extra leaking over more danger – plus they now have a monster ship them to skim the oil.
