2010 Sep 06

Culpable BP Oil blowout preventer raised from ocean floor

 While millions of Americans in the Gulf region snacked on succulent glazed ribs, broiled lobster tail, gut-busting potato salad with chives and Auntie Rae's velvety smooth red silk cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, workers and contractors for BP Oil were delicately bringing the defective blowout preventer from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the surface Saturday.

To the families of the eleven men who died in the rig explosion and the fishermen and business owners whose livelihoods have been terminally interrupted by the worst oil spill in history, recovery of the blowout preventer is nothing short of raising the Titanic.

According to the Associated Press---the only news organization with a print photographer and reporter aboard the salvage ship Helix Q4000---the blowout preventer is 5 and-a-half stories tall and weighs 300 tons.

It took the salvage team---under the watchful eye of the FBI---over 29 hours to lift the failed instrument from the sullied waters half a mile beneath the once pristine seas.

Like the mythical tormentor of villages, Frankenstein, indeed it is a small wonder that an anti-BP lynch mob wasn't waiting on the shores of the gulf, where the arriving failed machinery was secured and readied for transport to a NASA facility in Louisiana.

Despite extensive congressional testimony about how the oil rig exploded, scientists seem only to agree ---as reported in the Associated Press---"that explosion was triggered to an oil well's version of acid reflux: a bubble of methane gas escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before igniting."

BP Oil and well the operator of the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig, Transocean, have sworn that the blowout preventer mechanism was successfully tested as recently as April 9th; while several rig workers have come forward in media interviews and congressional testimony claiming that corners were continually cut on safety in order to increase operationally efficiencies, and ultimately profits on the extracted methane and petroleum.

Indeed shocking details are likely to be revealed, more certain still is the colossal scientific and legal war of words that is sure to begin from the competing interests of lawyers for and against BP Oil, and scientists and naturalists hell bent on reducing the likelihood of another such disaster again.

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