A link to this story was in the comments in this DK diary
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/6/8/874168/-I-dont-ever-remember-doing-thisRig-SurvivorAlthough the story is from May 27th, I missed it. Very concise withs lots of detail.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266560930780190.html?mod=rss_whats_news_usBUSINESS MAY 27, 2010 BP Decisions Set Stage for Disaster
By BEN CASSELMAN And RUSSELL GOLD
It was a difficult drill from the start.
API Well No. 60-817-44169 threw up many challenges to its principal owner, BP PLC, swallowing expensive drilling fluid and burping out dangerous gas. Those woes put the Gulf of Mexico project over budget and behind schedule by April 20, the day the well erupted, destroying the Deepwater Horizon rig and killing 11 men.
Government investigators have yet to announce conclusions about what went wrong that day. The final step in the causation chain, industry engineers have said in interviews, was most likely the failure of a crucial seal at the top of the well or a cement plug at the bottom.
But neither scenario explains the whole story. A Wall Street Journal investigation provides the most complete account so far of the fateful decisions that preceded the blast. BP made choices over the course of the project that rendered this well more vulnerable to the blowout, which unleashed a spew of crude oil that engineers are struggling to stanch.
My own editorial comment. This blowout is the predictable result of a corporate culture that makes profit and greed paramount over ocean and land habitats, the food chain, worker welfare, societal responsibility, and about a hundred other values I could cite. Death has resulted. I agree with people who describe this as a Chernobyl - a long term, man-made environmental catastrophe that may create oceanic and coastal and perhaps even inland dead zones for decades.
This is the legacy of men like Reagan and Cheney who believe like their cultural icon Gordon Gekko that "Greed is Good" and that "He who dies with the most toys wins."
Greed is NOT good. We have had enough examples of corporate greed as a serial maniac killer: "death by spreadsheet" as practiced by insurance companies when they deny benefits to the ill, death by food poisoning when our government trusts slaughtherhouses and meatpackers to self-regulate and consciously underemploys food inspectors so that e-coli, mad cow, salmonella, etc. are allowed to flourish in our food production, death by worker safety neglect when men and women get blown apart on oil rigs or buried in mineshafts or have their lungs corroded by lack of saftety gear in a hazardous clean-up, personal economic death when our wages have been stagnant for almost forty years and we can barely afford the basics of food, shelter, and transportation because the coporate overlords have decided that their bloated compensations and bonuses and stock options overide the needs of their workers and even their stockholders as they siphon off billions and billions for themselves, political death as our governmental systems of elections have been just as polluted as the Gulf of Mexico with corporate bribery and influence peddling, death of our judicial systems as well with a Supreme Court which gives the corporations the official go-ahead to proceed with same . . . and on and on.
We are literally surrounded by the stinking, smoldering detrius that can be directly attributed to corporate GREED and the lack of political will to circumvent it and protect us as citizens of this country. This will never change until and unless the human smiling faces, the Ted Bundys of the corporate world, are brought to justice and made to PERSONALLY take responsibility for the death and destruction that has resulted from their immoral,amoral,illegal drive to enrich themselves at the expense of the lives and health of the rest of the world.
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