Apparently BP went with the riskier, cheaper method of drilling – perhaps because they were in a hurry.
Free marketers are big on defending the big corporations because frankly someone has to. They aren’t evil, but they are beholden to their holders and not to the public at large. In the case of disasters, the public at large has a stake and maybe that’s where the government needs to step in an be a part of discussions. Perhaps by making sure safety measures and disaster fixes are ready and in place BEFORE disaster strikes.
Do we go with plan A which is extra risky, but if it works we save 1 billion and 5 months?
Or do we go with plan B which is less risky, will cost a lot more and take more time?
Ok – lets do plan A, but we’re going to need X,Y,Z in place to pass government guidelines.
That’s where the government can potentially be a good thing. BP’s interest is not coastal wetlands. Mine is.
Oh – yeah, the government isn’t really working for my interests either.
Turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in 1994 drafted plans for responding to a major Gulf oil spill, a response called “In-Situ Burn.”
Ron Gourget, a former federal oil-spill-response coordinator and one author of the draft, told the Times of London: “The whole reason the plan was created was so that we could pull the trigger right away.” The idea was to use barriers called “fire booms” to collect and contain the spill at sea — then burn it off. He believes this could have captured 95 percent of the oil from this spill.
But at the time of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the federal government didn’t have a single fire boom on hand. Nor is there any evidence that the government required BP to have any clear plan to deal with a massive spill. How is this OK?
It’s all money and maybe I’m the hard one for caring more about the natural disaster occurring than for the ability for the poor to afford to heat their homes, but frankly I think we have a lot of wiggle room on the price of oil whereas those animals have got no where to go.
Karl Rove on Obama’s “Katrina”.
All I can say, is that I’m just happy — risky or not — that it appears that maybe this thing has been capped and maybe we can get back to figuring out how to fix the coastal issues….
I am too. (but I was talking about the drilling maneuver not the capping maneuver as the risky bit)