The Deepwater Horizon accident is a terrible lesson in not testing backup plans. Yes, it is probably impossible to test the various way of trying to stop a well under exact conditions (i.e. with a gushing well), but the constant refrain of “this has not been tried at this depth” is deeply disheartening. That’s like hearing from your operations team that they have only ever practiced restoring a single development machine and never anything in the production environment. At this point I am wit...

The Deepwater Horizon accident is a terrible lesson in not testing backup plans. Yes, it is probably impossible to test the various way of trying to stop a well under exact conditions (i.e. with a gushing well), but the constant refrain of “this has not been tried at this depth” is deeply disheartening. That’s like hearing from your operations team that they have only ever practiced restoring a single development machine and never anything in the production environment. At this point I am wit...