At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but unfortunately it’s true.
It was just a year ago this month that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and touching off one of the greatest environmental disasters in history. Now comes word that BP will resume deep water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico beginning this summer.
Even sadder, this news was reported first by the European news agency Reuters, the Sunday Times of London, and another British newspaper The Guardian. As of this morning, no major American news outlet had yet reported it. Why?
Who do you see paying for the evening news? It comes courtesy of BP buying time for those commercials featuring happy yokels talking about what a great job the company has done cleaning up the mess and handing out money.
A few other stories never made it to the evening news … BP stock went up when it spread the word that it wouldn‘t be paying out as much in damages as it had said it would. That was reported in the Financial Times, another British news outlet, but never made it to the news here. And then there was the small matter of the “missing” laptop that had the claims information for thousands of claimants. Hey, anybody can make a mistake. We all know how easy it is to lose a laptop.
Back to the drilling.
According to the people who are supposed to be regulating offshore drilling, everything is all better now.
Since February 17, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has granted eight of these permits. Bureau director Michael Bromwich told The Guardian the permits were issued because of the “industry’s ability to satisfy the enhanced safety requirements.”
That’s comforting. The investigation into the Deepwater Horizon explosion found that BP and the other companies involved pressured workers to take safety shortcuts to speed the project along. The Justice Department, by the way, is “considering” manslaughter charges in the case. No sense rushing things, I suppose.
It gets more bizarre.
The Swiss company Transocean, which was building the rig for BP, announced this week that it was handing out bonuses to its executives for their “exemplary” safety record. The company also reported an $800 million loss in the last quarter of last year. That merited a $375,000 bonus for CEO Steven Newman.
Go figure.
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