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In hindsight, if BP had removed the 5,000-foot-long tangle of riser pipe from its damaged Gulf well in the early days of the spill, a new blowout preventer or cap could have been installed, shutting down the well perhaps within weeks instead of months, according to both the federal incident commander and petroleum engineers.

“I think that is one thing we will look at,” retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said during a recent interview with the Press-Register editorial board. “Obviously what finally worked was cutting the riser pipe. ... If we had elected to cut the riser pipe we might have been able to do it much quicker.”

Two issues apparently stayed the government’s hand in attempting an early fix. One was the now largely discounted notion that the riser pipe, which once connected the well to the doomed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, was somehow limiting the flow of oil. Company and federal officials also feared that there were underground fractures in the well itself.

During Allen’s first national news conference on May 1, the Press-Register asked about the possibility of cutting the riser pipe off, then either crimping it with hydraulic shears or installing some type of cap.

“There are some plans in place that are being evaluated, where the pipe could be crimped or potentially just cut off and a new blowout preventer placed above it,” Allen said at the time. “Both those scenarios ... are being looked at right now. They are a higher degree of difficulty, and there is more risk associated with that than with any of the current mitigating efforts.”

In the recent interview, Allen said the federal government and BP decided not to cut the riser off, instead adopting “the doctor’s policy of first do no harm.”

“The new BOP would have required cutting the riser off and going to an uncontrolled flow,” Allen said. “BP’s position, concurred by our science team, was to take the most low-risk option. We could have assumed a more aggressive course.”

BP did not return calls seeking comment.

Philip Johnson, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said engineering textbooks are essentially composed of episodes in which engineers failed to make the right choices for various reasons. The effort to cap the leaking Gulf well is likely to be remembered the same way, he said.

“I bet they are feeling ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda.’ I would say there was an overabundance of caution. The fact is, it would have been hard to make the situation worse than it was,” Johnson said. “Early on, I looked at the riser as an opportunity to catch the oil, not as a problem. I was wrong about that. So were they.”

The damaged riser limited what BP could do in terms of collecting the oil flowing into the Gulf, engineers said, because it meant any solution involved trying to catch multiple leaks in jagged and bent pipes.

The world watched oil gush for a month as BP fabricated its first containment dome, which failed a matter of hours after being positioned on the sea floor.

The riser was also the attachment point for the “straw,” a 6-inch pipe inserted into the 24-inch riser. That was a fix that some have likened to installing a cocktail straw into a gushing fire hose.

Neither effort managed to catch more than a small fraction of the oil that flowed from the well.

Bob Bea, a University of California engineering professor, said Allen was probably right, that the fix could have occurred much quicker. But at that time, Bea said, no one knew if there were weaknesses in the deeper parts of the well.

“It was not known if ‘surface capping’ would just move the blowout deeper” to places where it would be more difficult to control, he said in an e-mail to the Press-Register.

But UA’s Johnson said he remains puzzled as to why BP didn’t immediately attempt to unbolt the broken riser and attach some kind of collection system.

“Why did they bother to cut the pipe with the diamond saw and all that? Why not try to unbolt it in the first place? That’s what they did in the end to install the new cap. There was a flange there you could have attached anything to,” Johnson said. “I would say there was a series of missed opportunities.”