http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7134583.ece
How many more rigs are out there, with all the craftsmanship of this one?
How many accidents like this are out there waiting to happen, all because someone shot the odds.
BP will be taken off the Gulf clean-up operation if the US government decides that its performance is not good enough, Ken Salazar, the US Interior Secretary, said yesterday.
“I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading,” Mr Salazar said after visiting BP’s US headquarters in Houston. “We are 33 days into this effort and deadline after deadline has been missed.”
President Barack Obama’s administration is facing growing public and political pressure to take full charge of the oil spill containment operation as criticism of BP grows. “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately,” Mr Salazar said, but he did not specify at what point this would occur or what might be the trigger for it. He added that BP had agreed to pay clean-up costs beyond the $75 million liability limit set by current US law.
BP was also accused yesterday of agreeing to keep a test valve on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which later exploded, despite knowing that it would increase the risk of accidents.
The rig’s owner, Transocean, wrote to BP in 2004 to confirm an agreement that Transocean would keep the test valve on the safety device known as a “blowout preventer” rather than replacing it with a permanent and more effective “variable bore ram” that could have halted the oil flow, according to a letter leaked to the Washington Post.
A representative of BP reportedly signed a copy of the letter,
