Offshore Oil Safety Awards Luncheon Postponed
And it gets more ironic: CBS reports that last year BP won an award for “promoting improved medical care and evacuation capabilities for offshore facilities.”
The photo “provided by the U.S. Coast Guard shows fire boat response crews battling the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, April 21, 2010.”
I wish I had more time to write a longer post, but I’m doing a couple of interviews on this tonight, including Countdown.
By the way, Halliburton appears to have been involved in the spill. They have been named in two lawsuits by Louisiana fishermen and shrimpers, Climate Wire (subs. req’d) reports:
The oil spill is floating miles from Louisiana’s coastline, home to a huge commercial and recreational fishing industry. It comes as a particularly fragile time for fisheries, since Gulf shrimp are in their spawning season.
Louisiana claims a $2.6-billion-a-year commercial fishing industry, which provides a quarter of the U.S. seafood supply, exclusive of Alaska and Hawaii.
The two lawsuits target BP, which holds the lease to the offshore well; Swiss-based Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that exploded last week; and Halliburton Energy Services Inc., which the lawsuit says was responsible for capping the well.
I know you are shocked that Halliburton is involved.
Now what is really rich is that FoxNews and the GOP are working to spin this as Obama’s Katrina, somehow suggesting that the administration’s response was delayed.
Except, of course, in the case of Katrina, the Bush administration ignored its own administration’s weather forecasts — and ignored the videos of brutal devastation and suffering people — for days.
In the case of the spill, the reverse is true. BP basically misled everybody about the size of the spill — by a factor of 5 — and hence their ability to control it. It was NOAA — which is to say the Obama administration — that realized BP was lowballing the leak, that the problem was beyond the company’s resources, and that much broader action was needed.
The leak rate is now estimated at more than 200,000 gallons a day — which means it will exceed the Exxon Valdez disaster within 2 months. I just heard on ABC news that 400 species are threatened and that Louisiana coastline contains 40% of the US wetlands.
And, of course, the BP and the entire industry has been pushing for weaker safety regulations for a long time — HuffPost piece is here:
Click here for the proposed rule from the Interior Department’s MMS
Click here for the letter from BP objecting to the proposed rule
Finally, the BP well “lacked a remote-control shutoff switch that two other major oil producers, Norway and Brazil, require,” the WSJ reported.
The only thing this has in common with Katrina is that it is going to devastate the exact same area.
