BJ- in regard to your question, "..what kind of a team do we have up there", I have watched the NR's about the deep drills pretty carefully, and as a result, I am not surprised by these problems. After the blockade ended and the second drill got delivered and assembled, one item that was mentioned was that new crews needed to be hired to run the deep drills. So we have a "new team" up there. AFAIK, Noront is the first company in the RoF to deploy deep drills, so these new teams would need to be imported, trained from existing crews, or trained fresh... probably a mix of these options.

I think that seeing the bluntness of the attribution of what went wrong with the drilling is a clear indication that *nobody* at Noront is happy with this situation, and they are publicly flogging their drilling contractor to do better. I take it as Noront's "shot across the bow" at the contractor to shape up, or...

The crews will learn or be replaced. I know that I sure as heck wouldn't want to be working in close proximity to a deafeningly loud piece of gear that could maim or kill me in a heartbeat if I made a tiny mistake. My mind fair boggles at the thought of the amount of torque that drill must generate to move 1km+ of pipe in a rock tube.

W.r.t. BP, those oil platforms lease out at $1M/day... and it took them 3 years to drill that 5-mile-deep hole. That's over $1B in platform leasing alone, not including the labor. Suffice it to say the drillers on the oil platforms are top-notch because the industry can pay their freight. Patience, man. All this will pass, and then we'll have our assays.