Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

Comment: This is how regulations are being enforced, so can we guess that Uranium Mining and Milling in VA will be handled the same way. Remember, the lobbyist for the Uranium Company is passing out money to VA leaders like candy influencing their votes. No to uranium mining and milling!

Posted: May 5, 2010 10:19

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team.

Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations.

BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities.

Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy.

The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally.

A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."

In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency.

First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

 According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe.

Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill.

Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms.

 But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

Read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html