Oil executives shift blame at Senate hearing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/11/AR2010051102231.html?hpid=topnews

Three big oil and oil service companies all pointed fingers at one another for blame in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in testimony Tuesday at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

While saying that it was too early to make a final determination of the cause of the April 20 blowout that started the spill, the companies stressed one another's failures.

BP America President Lamar McKay stressed the failure of the blowout preventer owned by rig operator Transocean. "The systems are intended to fail-close and be fail-safe," McKay said. "Sadly and for reasons we do not yet understand, in this case, they were not."

But Transocean chief executive Steven Newman said the blowout preventers "were clearly not the root cause of the explosion." He said they might have been damaged by debris made of cement and steel casing material blown upward because of other failures.

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... but that none of the parties involved were prepared to deal with it if/when it DID happen, which it did.