BP is out today with it's own tell-all account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
WASHINGTON — The oil giant BP said Wednesday in its internal report that a series of failures involving a number of companies ultimately led to the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“No single factor caused the Macondo well tragedy,” BP said in a statement about the report. “Rather, a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties led to the explosion and fire which killed 11 people and caused widespread pollution in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year.”
BP's report was prepared by a team of about 50 people, most of them BP employees. More than anything else, its goal appears to have been pointing the finger towards contractors, like Transocean, for culpability. BP's intention is not so much to get them off the hook in the court of public opinion, but rather to strengthen their case before a court of law.
As if to prove that fact, Transocean is already pushing back:
This is a self-serving report that attempts to conceal the critical factor that set the stage for the Macondo incident: BP’s fatally flawed well design. In both its design and construction, BP made a series of cost-saving decisions that increased risk — in some cases, severely.
So now we've got two of the biggest oil companies in the world pointing fingers at each other for causing the biggest oil spill in American history. And their doing it for their lawyers.
I guess the good news is that it is yet another reminder that what we really need to do is eliminate our dependence on oil, right?