by Randy Rieland.
Here’s
something to fill you with confidence on the eve of BP’s risky “Top Kill”
gambit: Workers on the Deepwater Horizon
rig missed warnings that something was seriously wrong before the rig exploded.
BP itself, in a memo to a House committee, reveals that crewmen failed to heed signs
of a “very large abnormality” underwater. In fact, they apparently missed one warning
sign after another that day.
Third time’s the charm?
Or will it be three strikes you’re out? Later today, BP will try, try, try
again to—as the president put it—“plug the damn hole.” This latest attempt is the “top kill,” in which a mix of
heavy mud and cement is shot into the well to counteract the upward pressure of leaking oil and gas. If the top kill fails,
BP will move on to the “junk shot,” in which a gumbo of rope, tires, and golf balls
gets pumped into the leak. If the junk shot doesn’t work, it’s “top hat” time—the
smaller of the two containment domes will be lowered over the well to hopefully
capture leaking oil and pump it to the surface.
And if that doesn’t work, well, we’re pretty much screwed.
Now that the oil giant relented to pressure from
the feds, we can watch it all go down on the BP webcam.
That’ll
show ‘em
A criminal investigation of BP is gaining
traction. The Justice Department now says
it will give “due consideration” to charges by a group of Senate Democrats that
BP misled the feds about its ability to respond to oil spills in the Gulf of
Mexico.
And in a ratcheted-up
campaign to show he’s pissed, President Obama will announce tomorrow that federal regulators
will stop being soft touches when they inspect offshore oil rigs.
Fox, henhouse … henhouse, fox
All of which raises more
stink about a system in which regulators don’t regulate. Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times, draws parallels with the
recent banking fiasco:
As when derivatives
experts had to help unravel the derivatives debacle, now the White House is
dependent on BP to find a solution to the horror it created. The financial
crisis and the oil spill are both man-made disasters brought on by hubris and
avarice.
And The Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein says, “It’s time for the business community to give up its jihad against regulation.”
It
hardly captures the breadth and depth of these regulatory failures to say that
during the Bush administration the pendulum swung a bit too far in the
direction of deregulation and lax enforcement. What it misses is just how
dramatically the regulatory agencies have been shrunken in size, stripped of
talent and resources, demoralized by lousy leadership, captured by the
industries they were meant to oversee and undermined by political interference
and relentless attacks on their competence and purpose.
How bad is it?
You can now
place bets on which species will be the first to go extinct thanks to the BP
spill. According to gambling
website PaddyPower.com, the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle is the odds-on favorite.
Related Links:
Will BP take responsibility, or squeeze profits from Gulf spill?
Cousteau dives into ‘nightmare’ U.S. oil slick [VIDEO]
What if the oil spill just can’t be fixed?
