Last month the Interior Department suspended drilling on 33 exploratory wells and stopped approval of all permits.  This wasn’t a permanent suspension, but rather a time to make sure that drilling was being done safely and safety regulations were tightened.    According to White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs, President Obama feels that until we understand why this happened continued drilling is “a danger that the president does not believe we can afford”.

Sounds fair to me.  You can’t prevent a disaster if you don’t know what caused it to happen in the first place.

Well several of the companies who ferry supplies to the rigs didn’t agree.  They sued claiming that the Interior Department had no proof that further drilling was a threat.

(Do I point out the obvious here and say that they can’t yet… until they know why it happened… hence the moratorium…)

On Tuesday the moratorium was overturned by U.S. District Court Judge Martin L.C. Feldman.    In his ruling Feldman asked the court, “If some drilling equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are?  Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed, and rather overbearing.”

Ok, the courts have spoken, our legal system is fair and honest right?  We should respect the law and so on…

Not so fast.

Turns out Feldman may have had some serious interest in keeping those wells pumping oil.  According to a financial disclosure for 2008 on JudicialWatch.org, Feldman owned stock in Transocean and Halliburton.

Feldman also reported having stake in a number of energy and energy related companies:

KBR Inc
Chesapeake
El Paso Pipeline Partners
El Paso Corp
BPZ Energy
Macquarie Infrastructure
EV Energy Partners
TXCO Resources
Atlas Energy Resources
Pengrowth Energy Trust
Peabody Energy
Prospect Energy
Provident Energy
Ocean Energy

Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.

But it turns out no one did their homework because a recusal was not requested.

And while Feldman refuses to comment on whether he still owns any stock in the energy industry, his silence reveals plenty.

What are your thoughts?  Does a ban make sense or do you think it was an arbitrary move?

In late June of 2008, then presidental candidate, Barack Obama, stated “When I’m president, I intend to keep in place the moratorium here in Florida and around the country that prevents oil companies from drilling off Florida’s coasts, that’s how we can protect our coastline and still make the investments that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and bring down gas prices for good.”

Unfortunately this morning the folks who live along the Pensacola coast could no longer feel confident in President Obama’s promises. Yes he had kept drilling off of the Florida coast, but the spill in the Gulf of Mexico had made it to there anyways.

This morning Floridians awoke to nine miles of oil covered beaches.

And yet the Obama administration has only asked for a “pause” in offshore drilling, a moratorium that was overturned today by a judge who has owned stock in Transocean.

President Obama, I want to believe that you are the person I voted for. Please make this right.

The New York Times ran an article today on the failures of the blind shear rams on the Deep Horizon.

Feel free to read the article… all nine pages of it. While the reporting is fantastic and the journalists clearly worked their tails off to get this story, I can’t help but wonder, is the media still questioning why we are all having a hard time understanding this? Simplify.

So consider this the cliff notes to the lengthy article, but please in no way think I am taking credit for unearthing ANY of this information. Merely sharing it in an easier to understand format.

See we were all told deep sea drilling was safe, because the oil companies had systems to protect us; systems to keep our oceans safe, to keep their employees safe, to keep our aquatic life and the people who depend on them for their livelihood, safe!

There were many things that went wrong on April 20, but the biggest failure was that of the blind shear ram. To put it simply the blind shear ram is a last line of defense, which, when working properly, is set to slice the pipe and seal off the well, locks then move into place preventing the pistons from moving backwards, closing the well forever.

Disaster averted.

But as we all know, that didn’t happen.

Why not?

Because it seems that no one was really sure that it would ever work in the first place. The rams were a single point failure system, meaning that it took one small valve to clog for the whole system to be rendered ineffective. In fact a private and confidential study done by Transocean, the company that owned the rig, showed that these back up systems had a 45% failure rate.

Chew on that. The last line of defense to keep millions of gallons of crude oil from destroying our oceans only works 55% of the time…

Forget about repairing them even if the agency did find that there could be a possible issue. Stopping operations on a rig costs $700/minute.

Yeah, none of this makes sense to me either.

The good news is most of the rigs in the ocean have two blind shear rams on board. A back up to the back up. But not the Deep Horizon.

Why?

Transocean, and the company renting it, BP, seem to disagree on the subject.Transocean claims that was BP’s decision. BP states it was a joint one. But that wouldn’t have had room for two anyways. A point that many experts disagree with.

And the federal agency that regulates the safety of these rigs, and the effectiveness of these back up systems, Minerals Management Service, really wasn’t doing a good job of holding BP or Transocean responsible.

BP applied for, and was issued, a permit to drill last year. Frank Patton, an engineer with the Minerals Management Service issued that permit. Without ever ensuring that the blind shear ram on the Deep Horizon was functioning. In fact Mr. Patton states that in all his years of training he was never told to actually check that.

Oh… my….

Banging your head against your computer screen yet?

So who is to blame; BP, Transocean, or the governmental bodies we believe are keeping us safe?

It is easy to get caught up in figuring out how to stop the spill, how to clean it up, how to mitigate this disaster that is so beyond our scope reasoning. And we should be doing that, because it is easier to sweep it away from our thoughts and let the people in the gulf worry about it.

And so it becomes easier yet to forget the first victims, the 11 men who died on April 20, 2010. Men who were supporting families some with children and wives, some with unborn children, men whose bodies will never be recovered, simply because they were doing what most of us do every day… working.

So if you’re the praying type, say a prayer, but I think we can all spare a good thought or two to send out to those men and their families.