jimbob wrote: ↑Mon Feb 20, 2023 2:11 pm
Interesting observation by Oliver Alexander
https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status ... 04744?s=20
The ship laying the pipeline was involved in a storm that altered its track 50m from the first explosion.
He speculates that it caused damage that caused the first blast as genuine damage and which precipitated the moving forward of the two later blasts before any inspection could find their explosives.
Interesting, but I note from his Twitter bio that he's an analyst with a passion for OSINT; he isn't an expert on laying of marine pipelines.
If a pipe-laying vessel is about to be hit by a storm, the normal procedure is to lay the pipe on the seabed with a suitable end-cap and retrieval system, and the vessel moves off the line of the pipeline and hunkers down for the storm; this is so that if anything goes wrong and the vessel sinks/things are damaged and fall overboard, they don't fall directly onto the pipeline.
Once the storm has blown over, the end of the pipe is retrieved, and the pipe-laying continues. But, because there is now a discrepancy in the way the pipe has been laid, the first couple of welds of new pipe onto the laid pipe are done very carefully. If there was pressure from the client to get on with the laying (quite common) then there is also pressure from the client's Quality Assurance side to make sure that the integrity of the welds aren't compromised. For most commercial clients the QA side wins this battle.
It isn't that there aren't additional/different stresses in the pipeline due to the storm, but every effort is made to minimise these stresses and keep them within the pipeline design. The vessel certainly doesn't move off station with the pipeline still attached, nor does it become incorrectly laid, because there are procedures for this and it's a relatively normal occurrence.
I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether Russia's QA systems would outweigh any commercial lay-rate aspects, but Allseas (who own the Pioneering Spirit) do have a reputation as one of the world's best to uphold and would carry out their own QA checks regardless of the Client clamouring for an increased lay-rate to make up for lost time.