BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward is interviewed by CNN's American Morning in the video accompanying this article. Some excellent questions were raised:
"We keep hearing that efforts to stop the flow of oil out of that well have never been tried before at this depth, which prompts the question: Why did you ever drill that well if you didn't have an adequate disaster plan in place?"
"A series of failures suggests that somewhere along the line, somebody could have done something to shut [the well] down...And the question many people have is Why wasn't it shut down at the first sign of trouble?"
Unfortunately, Hayward could only repeat the same few sentences over and over again in response, offering no answers to these important questions.
BP will reach a decision later today about whether or not to go ahead with their "top kill" procedure, which will pump 50,000 lbs of "thick, viscous fluid twice the density of water" into the leak site to stop the flow of oil. But residents of the affected areas are getting impatient, and rightly so after nearly 40 days:
""Everything is dying," one woman said at a town hall meeting held between residents, BP officials and the US Coast Guard. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
"If the thing is not fixed today, the president doesn't have a choice, and he better go in and completely take over, perhaps with the military in charge," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida."
President Obama seems disappointed in both BP and current US energy sources' resistance to weaning the country off fossil fuels, saying "We've been putting it off for decade after decade after decade, and it is about time that we said to ourselves that we're ready to make a change on behalf of the future of our children and our grandchildren."
Full article here (CNN)
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