Tony Hayward talks up his own brilliant safety record and blames the disaster on “multiple equipment errors.”

For all that the BP Oil Disaster is in fact a disaster there is a little ray of sunshine in the oil clouded waters (if you’ll allow me to mix a metaphor or two). One of the things which have been missing in our nation for too long has been effective oversight by the Congress. The magnitude of the disaster has finally woken our legislators up to fact that they can and must call those who are damaging our nation to testify and to testify over and over if that is what it takes to get to the truth.

From the start of this catastrophe BP has obfuscate, soft peddle, and generally (if you will pardon the pun) muddy the waters around what led up to the disastrous explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon rig. As the information from the Congressional investigation has come to light the reasons are fairly clear why BP took the actions it did. For all of their protestations of “safety first” the reality is that BP has a culture that values the bottom line over all things. Worse the culture at BP is all about the current quarters bottom line, with no ability to balance the potential long term costs of cutting corners to save money right now.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

One of the powerful effects of Congressional hearings is to give those who are part of the company or industry under scrutiny a chance to really see who they work for and with. For the most part we all know of things that are done in our work place that make us vaguely uncomfortable. Most of the time we just shrug and think “I can’t really do anything to change this, and if I speak up too much I could lose my job” and go on, hoping that our small acts of cowardice don’t result in disaster.

*Network* the movie was released in 1976. It was a true movie then. It is a true movie now. I can only hope that this movie affects the new generations the way it affected our generation. But I truly hope that we learn the lesson this time so we can stop getting the repeat lessons.

Transocean toolpusher Jason Anderson told his father that he was fearful because BP was straying from proper procedures in order to speed up the job. Jason wrote a will, put his affairs in order, told his wife that if anything happened to him Transocean would take care of her, then he went back to work on the Deepwater Horizon where he was killed in the explosions that sank the platform.

From the New York Times:

Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week.

The report, which describes inappropriate behavior by the staff at the Minerals Management Service from 2005 to 2007, also found that inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry.

In Obama’s weekly radio address on Saturday, May 22nd, Obama selected former Sen. Bob Graham & former head of the EPA William K. Reilly to head a commission to investigate the BP oil disaster. Both have good beltway environmental credentials. They also both consider nuclear energy to be part of the solution to getting off dirty carbon energy that is contributing significantly to climate change.

BP, Massey Energy and Tessoro are all using their safety award plaques like shields to deflect accusations of recklessness. The disconnect between safety prizes and dead workers has enabled these corporations to characterize the three explosions at their facilities in April that killed 47 workers as accidents, random events for which no one really is to blame. That’s why these pseudo-safety awards are so destructive. No agency or association should ever again deceive the public or delude workers by handing awards to corporations that fail to accomplish comprehensive hazard avoidance by meeting the standards of process safety management.

Wrongdoing by BP matches with the Oil Pollution Act’s exceptions to the $75 million cap on damages.

See what happens when you have college educated stooges running our off-shore drilling.

SNL Mocks BP, Transocean and Halliburton for Their Leak Containment Failures