Company executives and top drill hands on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig argued for hours about how to proceed before a BP official made the decision to remove heavy drilling fluid from the well and replace it with lighter weight seawater that was unable to prevent gas from surging to the surface and exploding.And this is the result. To save a couple bucks for the company, BP risked ruining America's Gulf coastline and costing taxpayers potentially hundreds of billions. And this time, they rolled snake eyes.
One employee was so mad, the rig's chief mechanic Doug Brown testified, that he warned they'd be relying on the rig's blowout preventer if they proceeded the way BP wanted.
"He pretty much grumbled, 'Well, I guess that's what we have those pinchers for,' " Brown said of Jimmy Harrell, the top Transocean official on the rig. "Pinchers" was likely a reference to the shear rams in the blowout preventers, the final means of stopping an explosion.
Brown said in sworn testimony on Wednesday that the BP official stood up during the meeting and said, "This is how it's going to be."
Never forget.
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Who took responsibility for this though? I believe that was BP.
Until they actually screw someone over you have little to no grounds to complain about responsibility. They've accepted it and surpassed the federal mandate and have paid hundreds of millions of dollars so far in an effort to contain.
Should it have happened? No
Will we learn from this? Yes
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