Im going to say its the Americans.
You could say its the british as BP is obviously a british company, but that pipeline is owned by an american franchise of BP, this i think they are responsable for it.
Whats your thoughts?
EDIT: i messed up the voting options…
BP isn’t a British Company.
Who was it, perhaps that bald guy on mock the week, Andy Parsons, who pointed out that BP used to be a British Company, but now half the board are Americans, so if we can be blamed for stuff that used to be ours…well America used to be ours, so surely we can do what we like to it anyway?
Ooooh right…
I see, So its the yanks problem?
I was under the impression it was still british, hence why every amaerican on TV is blaming the brits and saying ‘for one in out lives we need to have some responsability’
Consider the following as well:
The rig isn’t owned or operated by BP, it is owned and operated by Transocean. Transocean was originally an American company that through mergers and relocation (probably due to tax reasons) is now a registered company based in Switzerland.
They were drilling in accordance to the regulations, and all the safety precautions are no better or worse than everyone else drilling in the region.
Bhopal - Worst industrial accident in the world (excluding level 7 nuclear accidents, and there has only been one). Owned and operated by an American company. The land is still some of the most polluted in the world, and the clean up operation, compensation and prosecution of those responsible was a joke.
The Prince William Sound/Exxon Valdez oil spill was never properly cleaned up. Why isn’t ExxonMobile being force to finish this?
Demands cheap oil, this is the result.
Rather than playing the balme game, i think both contries need to help dealing with the situation. BP actually put up on there web site asking the general public for people ideas on how to deal with the situation (would provide the link but i can’t find it)
Bhopal was one of the worst incidents experienced and it’s after effects can still be seen throughout the local community today. Bhopal acutally gave rise to the assessment of third party manufactures world wide (for all indrustires). Companies, from America, uk etc started actually visiting their third part manuafactured to ensure the they were following regulations, health and saftey etc, so incidents like this wouldn’t occur again.
I blame God.
WTF was he thinking of when he created all that organic material, allowed it to rot over the millennia to transform into oil!! What a mess he made of that eh. What good has ever come from oil?
Blame can rarely be squarely (rhymes dunnit) laid at one persons feet. Always look closest at those who point the finger of blame the most loudly.
I blame the dinosaurs.
If they could have just hung on in there when that meteor hit earth 
Very true, and I have to say that I’ve gotten tired of the Anti BP and anti British tirade of more an than a few yanks on the news and FB and it’s got my goat a little.
The downside is the American media and public is very much playing the blame game. 
I think BP - as the umbrella company and ultimate contractor/operator in these type of operations has the ultimate responsibility - even if it was not initially to blame for the accident.
What is suprising is that a company that is as wealthy, large and (supposedly) sophisticated as BP did not have a plan and the attendant technical and material resources ready to swing into action to deal with a disaster like this. Instead we saw weeks of dithering and delay - while various technical solutions were designed and constructed - to deal with a problem which you might think would be quite high on a major oil companies list of possible disaster scenarios - and therefore would have been prepared for well in advance.
Why was this scenario not prepared for in advance? Was it because the cost of maintaining these systems (which might only be used once every 20 years) could not be justified to their shareholders?
If that is the case then industrial activity which has potentially such dire consequences for the planet cannot be left to companies whose bottom line is profit - either that or government has to legislate these companies up to the hilt - to ensure that the accidents don’t happen in the first place, or that the technical solutions are in place prior to the accident and that if there are no technical solutions available then they are not allowed to drill in such deep water in the first place.
This will make the cost of fuel more expensive - but perhaps that will be a good thing - as it will force us to consider alternatives to oil and will put proper investment into non-oil based sources of energy and materials.
Attaching nationality to this problem is dishonest, stupid and primitive - and a red herring designed to deflect a fair distribution of the responsibility and blame.
The ‘British’ part of British petroleum is just a historical hangover - BP is as international a business as they come.
Oil is a globalized business that involves many nationalities - and in terms of consumption it involves us all - we are all culpable in this.
It just shows how primitive human beings are that when the sh1t hits the fan people start bringing nationality into things - hardly the kind of mature and sophisticated response needed to tackle this desperately serious and highly technical issue.
It seems that human evolution still has a way to go yet . . .
Industry as a whole has to take the blame. Governments will succumb to lobbying for oil rigs here or nuclear power stations there but it is the multinationals doing the lobbying. Spent some time on the beautiful Mexican coast a couple of years ago and amazed to see the amount of heavy industry right on the shore. It’s so obvious that this sort of thing is a timebomb waiting to go off. Let’s hope it wakes some of these people up to the dangers.
The US only has itself to blame. Its Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave permission for the drilling to take place but failed to require certain equipment be installed like an acoustically-controlled shut-off valve and other fail-safe mechanisms which would have prevented this.Private companies cannot be relied on to take the necessary safeguards themselves, which is why mineral drilling is usually so tightly regulated. Not so in this instance, as it has turned out, resulting in the resignation of the MMS’ Director and Associate Director for Offshore Energy, and a complete restructuring of the organisation.
If Obama wants a butt to kick, it is his own that he needs to be kicking, as he has had a whole year to sort all this out before the disaster happened. He only has himself to blame for the fact that from when he took office to when the disaster first took place, the MMS was such a useless organisation.
To be fair the BP chairman Tony Hayward didn’t help with the infantile ‘I’m a Brit and sticks and stones may break my bones’ crap.
If there was one thing that was going to wind the yanks up and put a nationalistic angle on the whole thing it was jingoistic bullshit like that.
It just goes to prove that Hayward is a provincial lightweight and not up to heading an international giant like BP - particulalry not when the company is presiding over one of the worst environmental crises in history.
I’m interested to know why it is such a problem to shut the flow off? Did they never consider that somthing like this might happen and that they might need a disaster plan or is it impossible to prevent, if anyone knows?
+1
an inline ESD valve was fitted with built in redundancy in the actuation systems, one failed due to leaks weeks before the incident, leaving one intact control system. The ESD valve failed (US manufacturer) initially, and as the hydraulic control lines are part of the umbilical bundles, they were severed when the rig went down. There may have been a possibility to connect to the ESD valve with a seperate system but this would take several months to design and build, and may not achieve anything as it was the valve that failed. There may have been complications due to the concrete dump Haliburton (american - CEO was dick cheney - former US VP!) made to secure the well, but we will wait and see in the report.
They will be using a bigger cap this weekend to contain more oil, and will be drilling a secondary well to reduce the flow further, allowing them to ‘block the pipe’ from the well - not too sure how well that will work.
It is wise to note that Royal Dutch Shell has spilt way more oil in the niger delta, but most of the engineering was also american…
Yep, and because it’s not spoiling miles of unspoilt tourist (is that a contradiction I wonder?) coastline on the south/south eastern side of the USA nobody gives a sh1t!! :crazy:
It’s high time big business took responsibility for its actions and started putting its hand in its pocket to sort out the mess that it makes all over the world. Oil companies are not alone in their blatant disregard for the people, culture and environment of the countries which they remove resources from, but they are certainly no less culpable for the environmental and social impact they have!
How about … its all our faults.
We want oil for soap and plastic and to drive cars, we accept the mercenary cut-throat corporate capitalist model that allows these gits to fight for every penny at the UTTER expense of ANYTHING ELSE, such as the environment, people’s livelihoods and communities and so on.
And we don’t hold these companies PROPERLY accountable when these sort of things happen, spo that they are forced to make sure they don’t happen again…
How many times have OIL SPILLS happened, and how many times have we bleated as populations, but then turned a blind eye until the corporations feel its ok to cut corners again and return the whole situation to a reward over consequence model once again…
You drive a bike or a car and want cheap petrol, plastics, CD’s soaps, shampoos, insulation materials and all the other stuff we get from crude, its your fault. So don’t bleat about it…
i cant believe the things still pumping out oil
Agreed, there should be global laws the cover this sort of thing, and other industries such as air planes, and shipping.
