"Of Course It Could Happen Again" - 10 Years After Deepwater Horizon, Gutted Rules Boost Odds

[hatrack]

A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.

The blowout killed 11 workers and spewed 4m barrels of petroleum into the ocean for 87 days before it could be capped, devastating marine life and polluting 1,300 miles of shoreline. Thousands were put out of work in oil, fisheries and tourism.

But experts say an incident of similar scale could happen again and has been made more likely by the Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.

Frances Ulmer, who served on the commission and is a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said the government and industry have not made sufficient changes to prevent or respond to another mammoth spill. “Disasters like oil spills will happen again because this is an extremely high-risk operation, particularly when you’re talking about drilling for oil over a mile of water and then a couple miles down under the sea floor,” she said. “There are a lot of things that can go wrong.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/20/deepwater-horizon-10-years-later-could-it-happen-again

[Dustlawyer]

1. The true extent of the damage caused by the BP oil spill was covered up.

BP and other oil companies used their advertising leverage to kill the stories that would show what happened. BP bought up almost all of the documentaries that were made to bury them.