BP Hearing - What The Traditional Media Did Not Report

BP Hearing - What The Traditional Media Did Not Report

by Something the Dog Said

The coverage of the Senate Energy and Work Place Committee hearing yesterday has been rather predictable; the three witnesses from the three companies that are involved in the Deep Horizon drilling rig explosion were always going to point at each other when the question of who is at fault for the explosion and massive ongoing spill of crude oil into the source of 20% of the nations commercial fishing, the Gulf of Mexico.

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Sen. Barbra Boxer (D-CA) was relentless in hammering the President of BP America on the discrepancy between what they said in their application and what has happened. BP had asked for an expedited permit to drill this particular well. Part of the accelerated process was to allow them to skip doing their own Environmental Impact Statement. The rules set by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) allowed them to use the EIS from for the whole Gulf instead of performing their own, if the MMS okayed it.

One of the things that BP said is that even if there was a spill they had the technology to handle it so there was very little chance of oil getting to the shore or impacting fishing. Sen. Boxer pointed out that having said that then, they are now telling anyone who will listen that because the well is in such deep water they don’t know how to cap it. Every technique they are using has never been used at these depths.

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Perhaps the most important exchange of the day was when Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asked each of the executives if they could guarantee that a disaster like this would not happen again. All of them said that they could not guarantee that a major spill like this would not happen again. This is really the point that should be brought up again and again and again.

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