BP, Transocean, Halliburton will blame one another for spill
Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig fritz
The Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig shortly before it collapsed into the Gulf of Mexico on April 22. | Courtesy of Jon T. Fritz / MCT
By Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Top executives from three companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster will face a barrage of questions on Tuesday from angry senators eager to make it clear they intend to hold someone responsible for a blowout that killed 11 and continues to spew 210,000 gallons of oil each day into the Gulf of Mexico
But
it's also clear the three companies will have another source of finger-pointing — each other.In testimony released Monday before the first of Tuesday's two Senate hearings, the executives, from BP America, which owned the well, Tansocean Ltd., which owned the rig, and Haliburton, a contractor on the rig, blame other companies for the as-yet-undetermined cause of the explosion.
In his testimony, submitted to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lamar McKay of BP said the company wants to answer two questions at the root of the disaster: What caused the explosion and fire, and why did the blowout preventer fail? He makes it clear Transocean owned the blowout preventer.
"The systems are intended to fail-closed and be fail-safe; sadly and for reasons we do not yet understand, in this case, they were not," McKay is to testify. "Transocean’s blowout preventer failed to operate."
That directly counters Transocean CEO Steven Newman's statement.
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