Alot of the problems are and have been known by BP. In this case these particular problems are due to corrosiveness in the pipeline and that there is a threshold before there is a mandatory point of repair. In this particular section for this particular corrosion I believe it was 80%. In other words the corrosiveness level hit 81% thus the policy of BP at that point was to shut it down. There are several steps that are routinely taken for on going maintenance including pumping lots of anticorrosion chemicals through the line to slow down the corrosion process. Additionally they have monitors along the lines, take xrays and other steps for checking the rate of deterioration.
With that said I cannot help but to agree with rankandfiles last paragraph…
