Just remember this - the failures there were not inevitable, they were the result of the drillers' failure to follow their own standards.
Correction: One driller. The one known by all of the other companies as the one who'd cut all safety corners. And the regulators knew it too.
The actions taken to remedy the blowout were a well-known list. You start drilling relief wells while simultaneously trying other things because the wells take a finite amount of time to drill.
And having a foreign company drilling in the Gulf was all set up by the SEC refusing the Texaco/Chevron merger years before. Texaco had to be backed out of merging with Chevron into the arms of another foreign company, Shell. BP realized they could profit in the U.S. and started their own buying spree.
No one I've ever talked to who ended up working for either BP or Shell found the experience "enjoyable". BP is particularly well-known in the industry for firing people for tiny accounting errors and keeping employees in constant fear of their jobs. That simply can't ever be a safety culture.
The published ... Not just private... Safety record of BP in the Gulf is awful. Our government instead of dealing with the problem, decided against two court orders and a contempt of court charge, to shut down all the drillers.
The folks I've talked to have said they would have never used seawater in the well to save money as BP did -- their companies would have tankered out mud. Now their workers in the region are now cut off from the one thing they need to help themselves rebuild -- their jobs.
And yet Petrobras got a quid pro quo of new drilling permits for Brazil in the Gulf from our government this week that coincided with the President's visit? Petrobras drills while what's left of the U.S. drillers who do it right, sit and wait for a political wind change. And of course, BP will get to drill again then, too.
BP management is the problem. Shell isn't far behind. And Petrobras? Why them? It all makes little to no sense to those in the industry.
But then again, this is "big bad oil" where things like the Gaviota terminal in California never got completed after millions spent, due to environmental concerns, so the tankers have to come into L.A. Harbor instead, putting far more coastline at risk. The shippers had it right, the sentiment from the public was wrong. But if they say that, they're "evil". As if they don't have human beings on staff who know what they're doing and actually care.
Problem is, in the Gulf, if other companies knew the risks BP regularly takes, and operate within the rules, while BP somehow avoids or buys off their regulators, how does the rest of the industry get control of a rogue low-safety, high-profit foreign company drilling wells the rest wouldn't drill or would drill differently?
You could see how ****ed off the other company's execs were at BP in the Congressional hearings/witch hunts. That wasn't just that day, I hear.
