BP TOLD the US Congress yesterday its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was caused by the failure of a crucial safety device made by another company.
In turn, that company, Transocean, said BP was in charge, and that a third company that poured concrete to plug the exploratory well did not do it correctly.
Halliburton, the third company, which was plugging the well in anticipation of future production, said it was only following BP’s plan.
The blame game emerged as the US Senate began a hearing into the oil spill which has been contaminating water in the Gulf of Mexico for three weeks and threatens sensitive marshes and marine life from Louisiana to Florida.
Executives of the three companies, testifying before the Senate energy and natural resources committee, acknowledged investigators have yet to definitively pinpoint the cause of the well explosion on April 20 or why the oil was not contained. But they spent little time before trying to shift responsibility for the environmental crisis to each other.
In opening the hearing, Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman, the committee’s chairman, said that the failures that led to the explosion and spill needed to be examined closely so new safety measures can be imposed.
He added: “I don’t believe it is enough to label this catastrophic failure an unpredictable and unforeseeable occurrence.”
The hearing marked the first public questioning by members of Congress of executives of BP, which owned the exploratory well and was the overall operator; Swiss-based Transocean, which owned the drilling rig and key well safety equipment; and Halliburton, which worked on sealing the well for future oil production. BP and Transocean are conducting separate investigations into what went wrong.