Interior Secretary Ken Salazar acknowledged that the government did not have adequate standards in place for the devices that are supposed to prevent blowouts on off-shore oil rigs. The blowout preventer on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig drilling for BP, which exploded and sank on April 20, failed allowing the endless flow of oil into the Gulf water.
Congressional investigators have found that the BOP suffered from leaking hydraulic fluid, a dead battery and an inadequate design. “The answer is no,” Salazar said in response to a pointed question from about the government standards on the device. “I think there is additional work that should have been done on blowout preventers.”
Blowout preventers are massive devices that sit at the top of a well and are designed to slam pipes shut in the event of an emergency. However, they cannot shear thick sections of pipe.
A House investigation found last week that the device on the Deepwater Horizon suffered from multiple problems that may have prevented it from working correctly a mile beneath the Gulf. The U.S. Government is now a defendant in the oil spill litigation. The National Law Journal reports, “As lawsuits over the BP oil spill mount, a group of conservationists and fishermen have a new target: the US Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service. A lawsuit has been filed in federal court against the federal agency.
The suit — Gulf Restoration Network and Sierra Club v. Salazar — charges that the agency violated federal law by exempting oil companies that drill in the Gulf of Mexico from disclosing blowout and worst-case spill scenarios as well as plans for dealing with them before approving the companies’ offshore drilling plans.
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
