Oil-Spill Investigators: 'This was an Entirely Preventable Disaster' - Daily Comet

photo credit USCG

Just the headline breaks my heart.

Deep down I think we all knew it, but now it's proven. We could have avoided this. All of the death of marine life and all of the hardships of the people of the Gulf coast were avoidable.

"BP failed to keep a close watch on work done by the cement contractor at its doomed Macondo oil well, even though an audit had spotlighted problems with the firm, Halliburton Co., three years before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to the presidential oil spill commission."

The "root technical cause" of the BP blowout last April was found to be a "failure of the cement that BP and Halliburton pumped to the bottom of the well."

"The commission previously documented concerns about the stability of the nitrogen-injected foam cement used to seal the Macondo well before BP temporarily stopped work at the site. [Well sites are first drilled, then temporarily stopped in order to attach rigs.] A faulty cement job could allow channels or vulnerabilities for natural gas and oil to escape a well during the time between when it is drilled and when it is later hooked up to a production facility.

In 2007, BP commissioned an audit of Halliburton's work on a separate project that concluded the contractor's cement foam slurry had a tendency to become unstable.

'BP's own cementing expert described the "typical Halliburton profile" as "operationally competent and just good enough technically to get by,"' the report said."

Halliburton has not yet accepted the investigation's results.

Halliburton isn't the only one to blame, however. Accountability was spread across all companies involved including BP and Transocean. A combined lack of attention to warning signs, faulty equipment and poor communication caused this terrible disaster - all of which were entirely preventable.

Full article here (Daily Comet)