Who's Responsible for Gulf Oil Disaster? Plenty of Blame To Go AroundCartoonist Bill Keane had a recurring gag in his "Family Circus" comic strip in which a mother tried to discover the source of some household disaster. Who broke the vase? Who tracked mud into the living room? Who made a mess in the kitchen? "Not me," the four children would each reply, as a ghostly figure labeled "Not Me" floated ethereally nearby. Something very similar played out in real life this week, as a pair of congressional hearings plumbed the causes of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Who's to blame? "Not us," said an executive from BP America, which owns the well that's now spewing out of control. "Not us," said executives from Transocean, which owns the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon that exploded and sank. "Not us," said executives from Halliburton, the giant oil-services company that was plugging the well with cement when a bubble of methane surged up the drilling column, triggering the explosion. The implication, of course, is that no one — least of all the people asking the questions — bears ultimate responsibility. That's nonsense. Over the last decade, with the blessing of Congress, the U.S. Minerals Management Agency gradually shifted responsibility for offshore drilling safety to the oil industry. A Wall Street Journal investigation showed that the agency, part of the Interior Department, repeatedly delayed implementing important safety rules — often under pressure from the oil industry. Deaths and serious accidents are substantially more common on U.S. offshore drilling rigs than in other major oil-producing countries.
Meanwhile, the number of wells inspected for safety problems has fallen sharply, to 760 in 2009, from 1,292 in 2005, the Journal reported. A decade ago, the federal government asked the industry for recommendations on how to prevent problems with cement that can allow natural gas to bubble to the surface and explode — the exact scenario that caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Those recommendations have yet to be received, and the agency has yet to write safety rules. In 2000, the agency issued a safety alert saying that it expects drillers to have backup systems to activate blowout preventers in an emergency. But it never checked to see if drillers had complied. They hadn't. Last June, the agency issued a similar alert. It has yet to write rules requiring backups. In the Gulf disaster, hydraulic fluid leaking from a loose coupler interfered with the blowout preventer's operation. A battery had gone dead in one of two control pods designed to engage the system automatically in the event of an emergency. Even more telling: A crucial piece of the blowout preventer had been removed and replaced with a dummy part meant to allow testing of the system. It should have been replaced before the device was used. The agency's hands-off approach to safety didn't happen in a vacuum. It's the fruit of a bankrupt political philosophy that holds that government regulation always is wasteful and unnecessary. No need to dictate and mandate, the philosophy's adherents say. Companies will act responsibly because it's in their best financial interests to do so. That worked no better in the Gulf of Mexico that it did with the financial meltdown. BP, Transocean and Halliburton all are at fault for the Gulf oil disaster. But so is Congress, for its longstanding failure to exercise proper oversight. REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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