Tag: Deepwater Horizon

They often want to do better, but somehow can't seem to pull it off. Christine Bader lists six reasons why they fail.

"This boat is a 28-footer," said Runyon-Harms. "The one Cory was sailing around on in Florida was a 40-footer."

How does the "war on terror" end? It could end with the crisis in Ukraine. To quote Secretary of State John Kerry, "what comes after the war on terror is the '19th century.'”

Like any good -- or bad -- Secretary of the Interior, Colorado’s Ken Salazar will leave Washington in a few weeks with a long list of both friends and enemies. Thing is though, they’re pretty much the same friends and enemies he had when he got there.

A new report issued by The National Academy of Engineering, a government-created nonprofit, concludes that the lack of regulation and ineffective safety-management practices that led to BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have not been fully remedied — leaving communities in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana potentially vulnerable to another oil spill.

Colorado Fourth-District Republican US Rep Cory Gardner is filling his campaign coffers for 2012 as he did in 2010 by leaning heavily on oil-and-gas industry donors. He raked in $370,000 in the quarter that just ended. That's the most of any candidate for federal office from Colorado and topped his take in previous quarters by roughly $100,000. One of every ten dollars Gardner brought in last quarter came from oil and gas, and this quarter the percentage is higher, coming in at roughly 12 percent. That notable campaign finance record paired with the high-profile pro-drilling and environmental-regulation-rollback positions he has taken mark out the freshman congressman as an aspiring top-level advocate for oil and gas on the Hill.

Though BP has continued to deny that any of its gulf wells are leaking oil, a large-scale oil slick reported in the area is worrying Gulf Coast watchdogs. Concerns abound that the oil could spell trouble for area fisheries, especially since reports of dead dolphins have persisted in recent days.

Reports of a spreading oil slick near British Petroleum’s Maconda well about 40 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico have local residents and area scientists concerned. BP has yet to confirm or deny the reports and mainstream media outlets have so far avoided investigating the story.

A recent report by OpenSecrets shows that several high-profile lawmakers (including GOP Reps. Vern Buchanan and Connie Mack of Florida) dumped their stock in BP and Transocean following last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Both Republicans and Democrats gave up significant portions of their holdings in the companies, according to the analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

President Obama’s May directive to triple the number of people working to stop the Gulf oil spill may have actually hindered the government’s response. The Coast Guard, in the days after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, kept track of the government’s response to the spill on a “simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.” The White House denied a request by government scientists in the weeks after the spill to release worst-case oil flow rate scenarios to the public.