BP Blames US

[Lightyear]

Yeah, but have triple safety shut offs that are tested & actually work.

The blowout preventers have worked flawlessly too many times to be counted.  I was in the office of a "major" offshore rig owner after one of the recent gulf hurricanes - the rig got wiped from the face of the earth but the valve functioned.  In fact this company lost two rigs in one storm - with no leakage.

If you read all of the accounts it wasn't really the valve that was to blame but a chain of failures in the capping process.  The had BP engineers recommending additional expenses and material in the capping process do to the difficulty in general with the well - senior engineers overrode these suggestions.  Whether or not this would have a prevented the explosion is not known.  The article I read was that the cost just to cap the well was well over 10 million dollars - for the cheap route.

The freeze on drilling in the gulf is projected to cost 100,000 jobs - trust me in this, these aren't minimum wage type jobs either.

[Dave W]

Dilbert's Scott Adams on investing in BP

"I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers."

[Pilgrim]

Let's keep the politicians out of this discussion, please.

Whoops!  Sorry.

[Highlander]

Sorry guys... I'm taking the gloves off here... adding a little bit of balance to find out how the boot fits when it is on the other foot...

In my not so wildest imaginings, I wonder how soon before these rather vulnerable targets will become just that... this whole affair has brought it clearly to the attention of the whole world now much damage can be done with very little effort...

As comments regarding this disaster and the long-term effects are very much to the fore (and not saying that the CEO is not "stonewalling"; perhaps best that Uwe explain how it works in court), I'd be curious to find out about the views you have regarding a poor old chap called Warren Anderson and a place called Bhopal and an event that took place in December 1984 which has still not been cleaned up which also had a critical list of problems that appeared to have been overlooked...

I think the equivalent US plant was/is in Connecticut... I believe they corrected the issues there prior to the Bhophal disaster but for some reason skimped on the UCIL plant...

Imagine such an event translated to American soil please...

Death by toxic gas exposure - the equivalent to approximately the death toll from 9/11 (no one truly knows - estimates ranged from 2500> to 15,000>) with an estimated overall toxic gas exposure in excess of 500,000 people... it is estimated that 20,000 people have died from related problems since, and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were permanatly injured by the toxic effects...

The people responsible for the 11 people who died in the the Deepwater Horizon explosion will eventually come to book, but the disaster in the Gulf pales into insignificance beside Bhopal, and the payout for those people was disgusting by comparison to the figures being bandied about at the moment...

Would you believe that the site of the Bhopal disaster has never been cleaned up... there is an estimated 400 tons of toxic material still leaking into the soil and water in wreckage of the site...

How much would it cost the American People to clean that up, only 25 years too late...

Go ahead... make their day...