Vents: Random Acts of Venting!

[Henry Hawk]

What business did the government have issuing permits to drill in deep water without a plan for coping with an explosion and a spill? What was the Interior Department doing when it failed to demand adequate protection in the first place and a feasible plan for containing the damage if something went wrong?......

[Palehorse]

What business did the government have issuing permits to drill in deep water without a plan for coping with an explosion and a spill? What was the Interior Department doing when it failed to demand adequate protection in the first place and a feasible plan for containing the damage if something went wrong?......

Ask the guys who put them into their spots in the first place!

The fact is the industry lied to the government and the government reps took the money and looked the other way; attending meth parties and pillaging the American public and the earth in the process.

[Palehorse]

Ask the guys who put them into their spots in the first place!

The fact is the industry lied to the government and the government reps took the money and looked the other way; attending meth parties and pillaging the American public and the earth in the process.

And  what is the root cause for all this? Deregulation and governmental cutbacks in order to fund pork! It's been going on for years and it will continue despite your angst. You think voting another party or person in is going to change a damned thing?

And lets not forget that BP and their ilk are the industry experts, not the government. The government is not in the oil industry anymore, since the Shrub and Shotgun Cheney left the barn.

In March 2008, at the Minerals Management Service's lease sale, BP purchased the mineral rights to drill for oil on Mississippi Canyon Block 252, referred to as the Macondo Prospect, in the United States sector of the Gulf of Mexico, about 41 miles (66 km) off the southeast coast of Louisiana.. . .

. . .BP Plc said in permit applications for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that it was prepared to handle an oil spill more than ten times larger than the one now spewing crude into the waters off the southern United States.
"Proper execution of the procedures detailed in this manual will help to limit environmental and ecological damage to sensitive areas as well as minimizing loss or damage to BP facilities in the event of a petroleum release," the company said in its oil-spill response plan, filed with the U.S. Minerals Management Service in 2008.
The company listed as its worst-case scenario a blowout in an exploratory well 57 miles west of the disaster, in a valley on the seafloor known as Mississippi Canyon. It's about 33 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Such a blowout could have spewed 250,000 barrels a day, according to the 582-page plan.
The representations show that BP overestimated its ability to control an oil spill in waters where it's the biggest player in a Gulf energy extraction industry worth $52 billion a year, said Bob Deans, a spokesman with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.
"BP has obviously overpromised and underdelivered," Deans said. "They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don't.". .
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-31/bp-ready-for-spill-10-times-gulf-disaster-plan-says-update1-.html

[Palehorse]

Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- A history of slipshod inspections is at least partly to blame for the disaster that destroyed the drill rig Deepwater Horizon and unleashed the worst oil spill in U.S. history, a former Interior Department official says.
Bobby Maxwell worked for 22 years as an auditor and audit supervisor for the Minerals Management Service, and he said the disaster would not have happened if inspectors had done their jobs. But he said a "culture of corruption" enveloped the agency, "and it permeated the whole agency, both the revenue and the inspection side."
The Minerals Management Service, a division of the Interior Department, is the primary federal agency that conducts safety inspections and collects revenue on the more than 3,500 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Before leaving the agency in 2006, he supervised more than 100 auditors, who dig through oil company documents to make sure the federal government is getting all the royalties it's owed.
He won an award from his bosses at the Interior Department. And although not an engineer by training, he spent a great deal of time on offshore rigs, many times working alongside Minerals Management Service inspectors.
But he said that the agency was badly flawed and that investigators looking into the explosion that killed 11 workers aboard the rig in April should be asking questions about how those inspections were conducted.
"What types of inspections? Who did them? Did they give them any waivers? Was the equipment adequate? Did they think they needed a second blowout preventer? Did they demand BP put it in? MMS is responsible for that, too," he said.
As an auditor, Maxwell said, he was flown to offshore oil rigs routinely, sometimes in the company of Minerals Management Service inspectors. He says that when he was present, agency inspectors he saw were doing little real work.
"It seemed like a formal process they would go through," he said. "We showed up on the rig. They had a checklist they would run through quickly, check things off, say things like 'Hi, Joe. Hi, John. See you at this weekend's fishing tournament.' "
In May, an inspector general's report on the Minerals Management Service office in Lake Charles, Louisiana, sharply criticized a "widespread" culture of taking gifts from industry officials before 2007. Many of the inspectors joined the agency from the industry and had relationships with people in the business that originated "well before they took their jobs with industry or government," the report states.
Inspectors got paid meals and tickets to sporting events from companies they monitored; let oil and gas company workers fill out their inspection forms in pencil, with the inspectors writing over those entries in ink before turning them in; and in 2008, one conducted inspections of four offshore platforms while negotiating a job with the company that operated them, the report found.

And a 2008 inspector general's report found that regulators in the agency's Denver, Colorado, office received improper gifts from energy industry representatives and engaged in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations with them.
Maxwell worked out of the Denver office during that period and traveled to the Gulf region frequently. He is now in the fifth year of a whistleblower lawsuit he filed against the Kerr-McGee Oil Co., claiming that the firm cheated the Interior Department and the U.S. Treasury out of tens of millions of dollars in revenue from the company's oil concessions in the Gulf.
The company, which has since been acquired by Anadarko Petroleum, denies the accusations. A federal judge in Denver is hearing that lawsuit, and should he win, Maxwell will stand to gain about $6 million in whistleblower fees.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has publicly criticized some Minerals Management Service inspectors, saying they had a "cozy relationship" with oil company executives and workers. He has announced plans to split the agency into separate energy development, enforcement and revenue collection divisions, saying they have conflicting missions.
In a statement issued to CNN, the Interior Department says that real change -- "systemic and not cosmetic" -- is coming to the service.. . .

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/06/08/govt.whistleblower.on.bp/index.html?hpt=T2

[Henry Hawk]

so the Government IS JUST as guilty....

[The Troll]

so the Government IS JUST as guilty....

  Yes, they sure are.  The Republican control leader and staff that controlled the oil companies under your little George W.  With their money under the table, vacations, booze, and whores.  Your Republicans weren't watching shit.  Just taking money.

The Troll    

[Palehorse]

Did you know that in the human body there is a nerve that connects the eyeball to the anus?

It's called the Anal Optic Nerve, and it is responsible for giving people a shitty outlook on life.

If you don't believe it, pull a hair from your ass and see if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye.

[The Troll]

Did you know that in the human body there is a nerve that connects the eyeball to the anus?

It's called the Anal Optic Nerve, and it is responsible for giving people a shitty outlook on life.

If you don't believe it, pull a hair from your ass and see if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye.

  May be that's what the Twins have.  The Anal Optic Nerve disease.  They sure have an shitty outlook on life and want everybody else to join in with them.  I heard someone say "that's shit for brains".   

[me]

  May be that's what the Twins have.  The Anal Optic Nerve disease.  They sure have an shitty outlook on life and want everybody else to join in with them.  I heard someone say "that's shit for brains".   

Haven't looked in the mirror lately have ya Troll?   

[Palehorse]

I wish you two would just go ahead and mate and get it over with! 

[me]

I wish you two would just go ahead and mate and get it over with! 

 

[Palehorse]

 

Oh. . . I see. . . at your umm. . . age. . . the joy is all in the courtship eh? 

[me]

Oh. . . I see. . . at your umm. . . age. . . the joy is all in the courtship eh? 

Forget courtship...at my age you just go for the gusto.......  

[The Troll]

Forget courtship...at my age you just go for the gusto.......

  You know she might clean up.  Get her hair fix, shave her legs and put a new flea collar on each one of them and shave her armpits and strong deodorant.

A nice dress, some shoes if you can get them over the calluses on them from going bare foot so long.  A whole lot of make up, put a sack over her head and take her out to a nice dark movie.

   I might try it once if I had a lot of    The Troll 

[me]

  You know she might clean up.  Get her hair fix, shave her legs and put a new flea collar on each one of them and shave her armpits and strong deodorant.

A nice dress, some shoes if you can get them over the calluses on them from going bare foot so long.  A whole lot of make up, put a sack over her head and take her out to a nice dark movie.

   I might try it once if I had a lot of    The Troll 

You could do all of the above, well leave out the dress and the shaved legs, and I could use a sack and a flag on you and it still wouldn't be enough for me to even think about it so don't sweat it.