re: #302 ~Fianna

You had me up til here, and even with this, I’m only going to quibble slightly. It’s not even a matter of the assets. It’s a matter of “responding effectively” - it doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot of thought put in to response - effective or not - to a blow-out of this magnitude.

Please correct me if I’m wrong on this, because other than what I’ve read here, I’ve only been following consumer-media coverage of this issue, but BP’s problem in capping this well isn’t an asset issue, it’s a lack of planning and engineering issue.

The problem is that BP stated in its application to the MMS that it had the assets available to handle a 100,000 bbl/day blowout. That was obviously a flat out lie. This is probably a a 50-65,000 bbl/day blowout and they are obviously incapable of stopping it until the offset relief wells are capable of a bottom kill.

The whole regulatory environment of “we’ll just trust these guys to do the right thing because it is in their best economic interest to do so” has been shattered. The paradigm is obviously flawed. Time to get some teeth into regulatory oversight.