Government aware of serious problems at BP well site more than two months before explosion

I don’t like Barack Obama at all.  I think he is the worst president of my lifetime.  His comprehensive incompetence is exceeded only by his wanton arrogance.  I think we are getting an excellent glimpse of how it would be if a preening master’s student with no self-awareness and a skull full of hard-left nonsense, totally unchecked by empiricism (or even practicality), ran the United States of America.

That said, I’ve been hesitant to overly blame the Obama administration for the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  There have been cheap shots to take—it’s easy to pick on how many times “day one” or “from the beginning” appeared in The One’s early rhetoric on the matter, for example—but by and large, I haven’t taken them.  Go ahead; check.  The Search box is to the left.

No, it’s BP’s problem.  It’s a classic low-probability, high-consequence one.  Almost all of the time, it won’t happen.  It did, and they’re trying to fix it, and in my estimation, they’re not trying to duck anything (though the overly-lawyered appearance by the CEO last week was a bad joke).

Hey, guess what little detail “they’re trying to fix it” seems to include?

What would you think if you learned that BP told the federal government on February 13 it was having trouble sealing cracks around the Macondo well, the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent gusher?

What if you learned that in early March, BP informed the government that it was having trouble controlling surges of natural gas at the site (believed to be a primary factor in the explosion), including a March 10 email from a BP executive to the Minerals Management Service supervisor in charge of the district indicating a “well control situation”?

(The rig exploded April 20.)

Bloomberg has a story here.  The article where I first learned of it—an editorial calling for the president to radically change his tactics or resign—is here.

I learned at my friend Saintseester’s site that the government refused all manner of help in the early days, essentially saying “thanks but no thanks” to Dutch offers to help clean water and what-not.  There’s also Obama’s ongoing refusal to waive the Jones Act, which is widely seen as deference to his union thugs constituency.

There were already cases to be made.

Now we learn that BP told the federal government it was having serious trouble more than two months before the explosion.  Think about the threshold for such a report to happen.  A federal regulatory agency’s job is to regulate, right?  So it’s a safe assumption that on BP’s bottom line, such an agency is to be tolerated rather than embraced, because more likely than not it’s going to act counter to profits, right?  That’s what regulation is.  If it felt great, it wouldn’t be necessary.

It’s a root canal, not a steak and an orgasm.

So we have BP dutifully telling on itself two months before the disaster, and the Obama adminstration doing…what, exactly?

“From Day One, we have planned and prepared for the worst even as we hoped for the best.” – Barack Obama, May 2

Mr. Obama, “Day One” is looking very much like February 13.

And you didn’t do jack.

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10 thoughts on “Government aware of serious problems at BP well site more than two months before explosion”

  1. Come on Bo, Obama is really concerned about this disaster. That’s why he’s spending so much time at the Gulf Course, I mean the Golf Coast. Well, at least he’s gonna kick some a$$. In the mean time the gushing continues 24/7.

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  2. What’s really tragic, and what the trilateral commission controlled media isn’t telling us, is that the Earth has an oil filled center (a secret maintained for decades to keep oil prices high!), and as rapidly as oil is gushing into the Gulf, sea-water is even more quickly draining into that same hole. In a matter of months, all the oceans of the world will have been completely drained of water and replaced by crude oil (it’s a scientfic fact that oil floats on water!). Prepare for the end days my friend! 😉

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  3. Wasn’t it about that same time that The Anointed One started to talk about how much he ADORED offshore drilling and how we should expand it? And those of us who don’t believe him at all muttered that he’d find some way to weasel out of that promise?

    Yet I’M the conspiracy whackjob.

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  4. “I don’t like Barack Obama at all.”

    Gen. McChrystal, is that you?

    Our nation is run by thugs. Clueless, grad-school thugs.

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  5. McChrystal screwed up. But, I also think the White House is overreacting.

    Daniel Foster had the best answer today. Obama should let McChrystal offer his resignation, but then refuse it. This leaves an effective and popular military leader in the field at a critical juncture. It also allows Obama to claim the high ground, because “the success of our troops trumps whatever disagreement we may have, and that is why I have refused General McChrystal’s resignation,” blah blah blah.

    It’s ingenuous and elegant, with broad appeal, which is exactly why I don’t expect our esteemed president to do that. His political tin ear is a constant. So, instead, he’ll fire him, perhaps even with a non-negligible amount of bravado.

    (Let’s not forget, he’s desperate for an ass to kick.)

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  6. I’m wondering what Army public relations dumbass gave “Rolling Stone” such access to McChrystal and the inner circle. I mean, “Rolling Stone”?!? Yeah, they usually take a very pro-military view. No danger there, Will Robinson.

    I keep seeing Ben Fong-Torres from _Almost Famous_ saying, “Groovy, General, groovy…”

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  7. Why does the media always put ‘ ‘ for emphasis around Obama’s emotions in headlines: Obama ‘angry’ about McChrystal’s remarks; Obama wants to ‘kick ass’

    Weird.

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  8. Here’s an interesting (to me anyway) aside. Starting in mid-August 2008, unsolicited copies of Rolling Stone Magazine addressed to my voting elegible daughter began showing up in my mailbox every week. Each week’s issue featured either a glowing cover story about Obama, or an equally negative story about McCain or Palin. Mysteriously, the week after the election, the free issues stopped coming. Makes me wonder how many subscriptions to Rolling Stone Magazine did George Soros purchase? And is what they did legal?

    Reply

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