Lines from the Reports of the Investigative…

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.

Source: Poetry (October 2010)