The blame-game is in full swing as the US Congress begins hearings on the massive oil spill that threatens sensitive marshes and marine life along the US Gulf Coast.
Executives of the three companies involved in the drilling activities that unleashed the environmental crisis have been trying to shift responsibility to each other in testimony that was scheduled to be given at separate hearings yesterday before two Senate committees, even as the cause of the rig explosion and spill has yet to be determined.
Lawmakers were expected to ask oil industry giant BP, which operated the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig 80km off the Louisiana coast, why its drilling plans discounted the risk that such a catastrophic pipeline rupture would ever happen, and why it assumed that if a leak did occur, the oil would not pose a major threat.
The morning hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and afternoon session before the Environmental and Public Health Committee were the first chance lawmakers have had to question company executives publicly about the April 20 rig fire, attempts to stop the flow of oil and efforts to limit the damage.
Copies of testimony, obtained by reporters on Monday, brought into the open differences of opinion between the companies caught up in the accident and its legal and economic fallout.
A top executive of BP, which leased the rig for exploratory drilling, focused on a critical safety device that was supposed to shut off oil flow on the ocean floor in the event of a well blowout but “failed to operate.”
“`That was to be the fail-safe in case of an accident,” Lamar McKay, chairman of BP America, says in testimony, pointedly noting that the blowout protector — as well as the rig itself — was owned by Swiss-based Transocean.
Of the 126 people on the Deepwater Horizon rig when it was engulfed in flames, only seven were BP employees, McKay said.
But Transocean chief executive Steven Newman wants to place responsibility firmly on BP.
“Offshore oil and gas production projects begin and end with the operator, in this case BP,” Newman was to say, according to the prepared remarks.
To blame the blowout protecters “simply makes no sense”because there is “no reason to believe” that the equipment was not operational, Newman said.
Newman also cites a third company, Halliburton, which as a subcontractor on the rig was encasing the well pipe in cement before plugging it — a process dictated by BP’s drilling plan.
Halliburton executive, Tim Probert, also due to attend the hearings, planned to assert that the company’s work was finished “in accordance with the requirements” set out by BP and to accepted industry practices.
He says pressure tests were conducted after the cementing work was finished to demonstrate well integrity.
Both BP and Transocean are conducting separate investigations into what went wrong.
In Louisiana, the Coast Guard and the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service were to begin two days of hearings yesterday on the cause of the explosion.
The list of witnesses scheduled to testify includes a Coast Guard search and rescue specialist, crew members from a cargo vessel that was tethered to the Deepwater Horizon rig and two Interior inspectors.
In other developments the Environmental Protection Agency gave the go-ahead on Monday to use oil dispersing chemicals near the sea bottom where the oil is leaking, although the agency acknowledged that the ecological effects of the chemical are not yet fully known. Two tests have shown the procedure helps to break up the oil before it reaches the surface.
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