Studies Suggest MMS knew Blowout Preventers had 'Critical' Flaws (Oil Spill)

Christian Science Monitor ^ | 6/17/2010 | Mark Clayton

[Qbert]

Government regulators have said that the failure of the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer April 20 was unforeseeable. But studies conducted for federal regulators in MMS or with their participation show that blowout preventers were known to have 'safety critical' vulnerabilities.

The federal agency charged with setting safety standards for offshore oil exploration failed to act on at least four warnings about vulnerabilities in subsea blowout preventers, the critical safety device that failed to shut down the Gulf oil spill when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20.

Each of those four design flaws – detailed in three studies conducted for the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) during the past decade – threatened the ability of blowout preventers in deep water to function in an emergency.

Yet the flaws did not result in federal safety alerts or tougher standards for blowout preventer (BOP) manufacturers, say experts familiar with the MMS response to such findings.

[Snip]

But MMS’s lack of action in spite of warnings about the flaws, three of which have not been previously reported, points to a long pattern of ignoring rather than fixing known safety threats, the experts say.

“Were BOPs designed to fail and did MMS know this? Yes, some of their key people knew,” says Robert Bea, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the expert reviewers of President Obama’s 30-day offshore oil-exploration safety review. “Did BP know?” he adds. “Yes, some of their key people knew. Did the industry know? Yes, some of their key people knew.”

So what exactly did the MMS and industry officials know about the BOPs’ vulnerabilities and when?

[Eva]

I forgot to address your comment about “cleaning house”. There is no cleaning house when the regulators are all union bureaucrats who are part of the liberal “green agenda”. The bureaucrats are simply complicit in the BP politicization.

For instance, the local activists an planning board in our county were determined to take control of the rural farms and property owners because they think that domestic animals are the cause of global warming. Their plan was to form storm water districts and charge the rural property owners a per square foot of impervious surface charge to make expensive changes to storm water drainage. The problem was that there was a huge commercial area in the water shed that would have more than covered the expense, so BP came up with the idea of submitting phony maps that left out all the commercial areas. The local politicians and activists (including land use lawyers) jumped on it and almost got it done. They knew what they were doing was illegal, but the lefties didn’t care. The end always justifies the means.