Oil spill, the U.S. government for BP guilty of environmental disaster

The explosion of the BP platform in the Gulf of Mexico could be avoided. Among the causes of one of the greatest environmental disasters in history, there were in fact the wrong choices of managers of the oil company. Which have tended more to the need to lower costs, than to that of providing security.

These are the conclusions of the National oil spill commission, the commission charged by the White House to investigate the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, on 20 April. Disaster that killed 11 people and environmental contamination of the oil spill. "The decisions taken by BP and its partners did Halliburton and Transocean lot of time and money to companies, but increased the risk of explosion which then became a reality in the well Macondo," the report says the committee, which will be released for weeks next.

And in the face of higher risks, BP did not respond with an appropriate increase in security checks: "British Petroleum did not have an adequate system of checks to ensure that key decisions were taken in the months before the explosion from a safe point of view of engineering, "wrote the committee.

"Many of the errors of assessment and negligence in the case of Macondo may well be attributed to a single dominant problem: a bad management." After the explosion on the platform, the failure of the safety valve on which were not carried out regular controls, gave rise to an uncontrolled release of oil.

About 4.9 million barrels of oil were discharged into the sea for 106 days, reaching the coasts of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Besides the lack of routine checks, the Committee criticizes the work of concreting the shaft, carried out by Halliburton. But even here, BP is guilty of failing to conduct effective supervision on the activities and contracted to have misinterpreted the results of a test, from which one could understand that the well was not sealed properly.

The report reads: "There is nothing I do believe that the team of engineers from BP have conducted a disciplined risk factors generated by the impact of the work of overbuilding." Transocean, the Swiss company that rented the platform to the BP Deepwater Horizon, in a press release has discharged all responsibility for British Petroleum: "The procedures carried out in the final hours before the explosion have been designed and managed by engineers and approved in Bp advance by federal regulators.

" Halliburton has instead accused the committee had reviewed only a portion of the available information. The results of the Committee could now affect the litigation from the U.S. Justice Department and by private citizens against against BP and partner companies. That may have to pay billions of dollars in damages.

David Ghilotti

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