What's to Blame for the BP Oil Spill?

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So who or what's to blame?

Ideology is not the cause of this spill. The risk inherent in deep water drilling was not well managed in this instance. Too many corners cut. Not enough attention paid to the particular conditions that prevailed just before the blow out.

ruveyn

That's not a very good poll.

BP took shortcuts and drilled deeper than they were supposed to.

Also, government regulations helped cause this too. If environmental laws didn't require oil companies to drill in 5000 feet of water it would have been easier to fix.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Can you show me this law?

It was caused by an exploding oil rig.

I would say poor engineering decisions that made the cutoff valve useless in this situation, combined with lax regulatory enforcement on the part of the Obama administration, as evidenced by failures to inspect the rig on schedule. I suspect the poor regulatory enforcement was due to appointing people for their political views rather than for their expertise.

Do you drive a car?
Are you going to get out there and help clean up the mess you helped make, or are you going to go on the internet and complain about it?

What's to blame?

An unfortunate combination of the wrong circumstances under the right conditions to trigger an unprecedented disaster.

A well deeper than normally used, poor maintenance of the blowout valve which caused it to fail, careless safety record of the rig above which led to it blowing up, corrupted ineffective regulatory system that should have prevented the previous, and no plan to deal with a leak if the blowout valve failed for some reason.

You don't even need to drive a car. You all share share a portion of the responsibility as this has occured in the course of fueling the greedy, corpulent lifestyle that your nation enjoys. Normally, it would be someone else's beaches you'd be polluting in some far-off third-world dictatorship whose population were given no opportunity to complain. Now it's on your own doorstep many of you are looking to blame anyone but those who really are culpable. On top of that your president's political posturing resembles that you'd expect from Robert Mugabe, not the leader of the "free world".

the phrase, "the chickens have come home to roost" sounds right about now.

Another Gulf oil spill: Well near Deepwater Horizon has leaked since at least April 30

The Deepwater Horizon is not the only well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the last month.

A nearby drilling rig, the Ocean Saratoga, has been leaking since at least April 30, according to a federal document.

While the leak is decidedly smaller than the Deepwater Horizon spill, a 10-mile-long slick emanating from the Ocean Saratoga is visible from space in multiple images gathered by Skytruth.org, which monitors environmental problems using satellites.

Federal officials did not immediately respond when asked about the size of the leak, how long it had been flowing, or whether it was possible to plug it.

Skytruth first reported the leak on its website on May 15. Federal officials mentioned it in the May 1 trajectory map for the Deepwater Horizon spill, stating that oil from the Ocean Saratoga spill might also be washing ashore in Louisiana.

The only other mention the Press-Register was able to find of the spill in federal documents occurred in a May 17 transcript of a U.S. Coast Guard media conference. In that transcript, Admiral Mary Landry said that she was unaware there was another drilling rig leaking oil in the Gulf.

Officials with Diamond Offshore, which owns the drilling rig, said that they could not comment on the ongoing spill and referred the Press-Register to well owner Taylor Energy Co., which hired Diamond. Taylor Energy officials did not return calls seeking comment.

Saturday, the Southwings environmental group flew over the Ocean Saratoga with photographer J. Henry Fair of Industrial Scars.com and returned with photos that appear to show a large oil crew boat pumping dispersants into the water at the spill site.

"It appeared the crew boat had barrels of dispersant on board," said Tom Hutchings of Southwings, a volunteer organization of pilots who monitor environmental problems from airplanes.

Henry Fair said that his photos show a large hose coming off the boat and disappearing into the water with several buoys tied to it. It was unclear how far the hose extended underwater.

"I see a hose going over the side. The boat was not moving, but it was making a wake, disturbing the water a lot," Fair said. "I see a glossy slick that one would usually identify as petroleum, and it goes a long way away."

Officials at the National Response Center said that the spill had been reported, but would not say when it began. The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.

"We accidentally discovered this spill looking at the Deepwater Horizon images. The question is, what would we see if we were systematically looking at the offshore industry?" said John Amos with Skytruth.org. "Is this an aberration, or are things like this going on all the time? That's why we are calling for public, transparent monitoring everywhere offshore drilling is going on in U.S. waters."


http://blog.al.com/live/2010/06/another ... ll_ne.html

"No oil has leaked from the Diamond Offshore rig Ocean Saratoga, the company says in response to a mistaken interpretation of operations at the site made by an unidentified aircraft. The semisubmersible is contracted to Taylor Energy Co. for P&A operations in the Gulf of Mexico following platform damage during Hurricane Ivan."
http://www.offshore-mag.com/index/artic ... zon12.html
"In the wake of yet another possible oil spill in the Gulf region, the United States Coast Guard has decided to launch an investigation into the dark waters surrounding Taylor Energy Corporation's Ocean Saratoga rig, resting only 40 miles away from the Deepwater Horizon rig."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/0 ... 04812.html
"Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. (NYSE:DO) today confirmed that there have been no leaks of hydrocarbons from the semisubmersible drilling rig Ocean Saratoga. The rig is under contract to Taylor Energy Company LLC and engaged in the process of plugging and abandoning wells damaged when a Taylor Energy production platform was toppled during Hurricane Ivan in 2004."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Diamond-O ... l?x=0&.v=1
http://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+ ... 13249.html
http://www.streetinsider.com/Downgrades ... fshore+(DO)+Confirms+No+Leaks+of+Oil+from+Ocean+Saratoga+Drilling+Rig/5713340.html
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site ... ewsLang=en

Humans.

It is not the first time something like this has happened with BP. They need to maintain their equipment better.

BP, Halburton and associated corporations who had charge of drilling the well and maintaining the apparatus. They all did a sh***y job. And I hope the courts will make them pay the people who suffered from their slipshod practices.

ruveyn