Imagine my shock. I saw this about an hour ago, and it looks new, so I wanted to share.
Gulf oil rig's blowout preventer had leak, Rep. Henry Waxman says.
Say what?
This posted a little while ago at NOLA.com:
Rep. Henry Waxman says that his committee's investigation into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill reveals that a key safety device, the blowout preventer, had a leak in a crucial hydraulic system.
The California Democrat said in a hearing Wednesday that the investigation also discovered that the well had failed a negative pressure test just hours before the April 20 explosion.
Meanwhile, the LA Times has this as a headline:
Gulf oil spill: Rep. Henry Waxman focuses on Halliburton cementing job
OK, so whose fault does he think it is? Well, it's hard to tell, isn't it?
"Before, during or after the cement job, an undetected influx of hydrocarbons entered the wellbore," Waxman said. "What this means is that there was a breach somewhere in well integrity that allowed methane gas and possibly other hydrocarbons to enter the well."
Waxman said the well did not pass a crucial pressure test below the blowout preventer, and that a high pressure reading inside the well likely meant there was an incursion of natural gas.
"According to James Dupree, the BP senior vice president for the Gulf of Mexico, the well did not pass this test. Mr. Dupree told committee staff on Monday that the test result was "not satisfactory" and "inconclusive." Significant pressure discrepancies were recorded.
And according to this WaPo blog (yeah, yeah, I know ;)), Bart Stupak appears to be even more vocal in this critique:
In a devastating review of the blowout preventer that BP said was supposed to be "fail-safe," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said in a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the device was anything but fail-safe...
snip
Stupak said that the committee investigators had also uncovered a document prepared in 2001 by the drilling rig operator Transocean that said there were 260 "failure modes" that could require removal of the blowout preventer.
"How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" Stupak said.
And CNN, natch, is leading with a nice, helpful fingerpointing away from Halliburton quick to headline this as BP's fault:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- BP knew of problems with an offshore well hours before it exploded last month, spilling millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a House committee chairman said Wednesday.
OK, so we've been asking in comments in Something the Dog Said's terrific Rec List diary, and now I'm asking here--whose desk does this stop on? BP bears ultimate responsibility, but who kept rushing this thing along?
Someone gave the go-ahead with this drilling, which was bad enough. If they did it anyway after a crucial test failed, that desk--and the person in it--needs to be identified.
And I don't mean some low-level schlub gets plastered on every medium with video for the next year, presented as The Fall Guy, because low-level schlubs don't make these kinds of decisions. Bigger heads need to roll. And forget fines--if we're going to have to endure Corporate Personhood, then Corporate People who do this kind of damage should have their Corporateness revoked.