Oil Rig Missed Inspections Before Explosion

Obama's comment to Politico, blaming Congress for not being responsive to something he did not request is ridiculous. After the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress studied the problem and set up more regulation on the oil industry. The administration at the time "studied" the problem and recommended steps to reduce the effect of any future spills. How did all this attention work?

The Government regulations and agencies had no effect on either preventing the spill or protecting our shores. They are a bunch of inept bureaucrats and should not exist. All Obama will propose are more regulations to be ignored and more taxes to siphon off for his pet projects to buy votes and consolidate his "green" support.

Excerpt: The BP rig that sparked America's biggest oil spill in history missed 16 required inspections in the years leading up to the deadly April explosion that killed 11 workers and sent crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

That's according to newly released government inspection reports that show the Deepwater Horizon rig was only surveyed six times in 2008, even though the government requires drilling rigs to be inspected every month. In total, it missed 16 checks since January 2005.

The inspections that did occur found no problems on the rig, and the most recent safety violation was recorded as far back as 2007. One report dated three weeks before the April blast, excerpted by the Los Angeles Times, noted that the blowout preventer was functioning properly, without any mention of problems with surges of natural gas flowing up the drill column – the glitch that experts believe led to the disastrous April 20th explosion.

"It appears that the Deepwater Horizon experienced dangerous gas 'kicks' before the April 20 disaster," David Pettit, a senior attorney and drilling expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the LA Times. "It is hard to understand why MMS did not learn about this potentially deadly problem" before the explosion.

"I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said, 'We need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill,' there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said, 'This is classic, big-government over-regulation and wasteful spending,'" Obama said in an interview with Politico. Read "Oil Rig Missed Inspections Before Explosion" here.