Tagblowout preventer

One more reason that offshore drilling remains such a threat

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Will America ever get a hands around the problems with offshore oil drilling? There was a brief moment after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010 when the scenes of devastation — oiled birds, massive slicks invading the precious marshlands of the Gulf and its sandy white beaches — made you think that the government would finally make drilling safety a significant priority. Of...

The GOP practically asks for another Deepwater Horizon

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The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf five years ago sure exposed a lot of holes in the current system. By that, I certainly mean holes in our system of environmental regulations, as BP was allowed to get away with all kinds of risky cost-cutting maneuvers during the drilling process, right up to the explosion that killed 11 people and spewed more than 4 million barrels of crude oil into...

My LA Times op-ed: “5 years after BP spill, little has changed to protect Gulf of Mexico”

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Today, on the actual 5th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, I published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, voicing my dismay not only at the current state of the Gulf of Mexico but over the complete failure to take the necessary steps to make sure this never happens again. Here’s an excerpt: The Obama administration, for its part, has been a lot more aggressive about awarding new...

Bombshell government report says flaw could cause another Deepwater Horizon

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Another catastrophe similar to BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and spewed 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, could very well happen because of a major flaw in offshore oil-rig technology that federal regulators are just learning about now, four years after the disaster. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board revealed yesterday in a new, major...

4 years later, Obama and the feds risk another BP-sized catastrophe

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Sunday will mark the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, which started the massive oil spill that has harmed the Gulf to this day. Anniversaries are a difficult thing. I can only imagine the pain that the family and friends of the 11 rig workers who were killed, not to mention the scores of Gulf cleanup workers who became ill, must feel this of year. At the same time...

Past lessons unlearned, Gulf drilling is at all-time high

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I guess this falls in the category of “now they tell us,” but BP essentially admitted in court this week that the 2010 oil-spill disaster might have been much less worse if the company had taken a simple safety precaution ahead of time: If BP already had a capping stack of the type it eventually used to close the erupting oil well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, it could have ended the...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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