Update: News reports are BP has finally
shut down the blowout after 85 days of chaotic crisis. Now the process of completing the relief well and filling it with drilling mud resumes to permanently close off the bore hole. The
Deepwater Horizon disaster will live in infamy as this nation's worst environmental disaster. May there never be one that exceeds it's memory.
{14.07.10} We all want the spill in the Gulf to be finally plugged. That means we want BP to succeed in the remote control efforts to shut the well down. But the sudden and abrupt
halt to operations means trouble.
US Person has been posting
{5.07.10} about the worse case scenario--a lack of well bore casing integrity--that would make any effort to cap the well from the top useless. Pressure testing with the new capping stack in place may have indicated such a lack of integrity. As a
progress evaluation is underway, the well spews crude unabated into the sea killing wildlife and making humans sick.
Assuming the capping is eventually successful, there remains myriad questions about the response to the April 20th explosion aboard the platform
Deepwater Horizon. The most pregnant one is why it took a major international oil company with enormous assets and tens of billions in revenues every year
3 months to shut down a blowout. Granted the
Macondo #1 well is a mile down, but BP assured the US government such a blowout event was unlikely despite knowing a contrary reality. The company operates over 20,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone, so it should know the real risks and be prepared. It was
NOT. So the question becomes why the federal government as landlord of the OCS did not know its tenant was unprepared to effectively shut down a deep water well quickly and minimize damage to the environment? Or, why is the government allowing an apparently reckless operator with a checkered regulatory history to control the crisis response? The
commission appointed by
Forty-four needs to find definitive answers to these questions. Otherwise alleged "communists" like
US Person will simply ascribe the disaster to arrogant state capitalism.
