Children's Hour... continued

Well my worse fears about the televised congressional sub committee hearings have come to pass. BP's non-English mother tongued non-executive chairman gets castigated for using the term " small people" to mean the ordinary citizen... horrors! Haywood is excoriated for saying BP is undecided as to which one or more of several technical areas [which he enumerated] caused the rupture and explosion 60 days after the event. This is from a government still investigating 2 year old financial crisis events. Its the usual theater.

BP finally put an American in charge of the spill investigation/response leaving Haywood to run the business, that's long overdue. How Waxman, Stupack etc could reasonably expected the BP CEO to be conversant contemporaneously with e mails between technical types many levels down the organization and more ludicrously to have personally intervened in the decision making on the well ignoring the organization structure is not rational.

It is yet unclear how the concerns voiced by technical personnel were settled [or dismissed] by on site operations management and the well completed in the mode it was. That is what is important in this event. Were valid technical concerns ignored by the relevant operating management, if so why? This is the key to determining whether negligence, recklessness etc was involved.

Great noise was made about the boiler plate response plans by all the major drillers being "almost identical" "xeroxed" etc. including references to dead experts and walruses. Lost in the furor was the Exxon Mobil CEO's statement that much of the form and content of the response plan were proscribed by MM Services. Various technical appendices include whatever specifics these plans contain. I am familiar with governments' dictating the content of submissions in essence relegating the individual company response to "filling in the blanks".

In the end, the pitchfork carrying politicians, local citizenry and hallowed 4th estate won the day. The industry looks cavalier, its executives insensitive and uninformed. BP looks the villain without all the pertitent facts being known. Maybe they are the villain, time will tell.