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I’m sitting here in Denver, watching local coverage of yet another mass shooting by a gun nut, this time in a theatre during a midnight screening of the new Batman movie. At this time, 12 are reported dead, 50 wounded. The televised scenes at the theatre and the arrested shooter’s apartment show police who are [...]

April 20th at 9:50 pm central time marked the exact time that BP’s deepwater well named Macondo blew out, killing eleven workers, destroying Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon, and putting 5 million barrels of oil into the water 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.  Most of the world has [...]

Today, the Justice Department arrested a former BP engineer on two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying hundreds of text messages that included details of flow rate calculations of their blown out Macondo well in the days immediately following the Gulf disaster on April 20, 2010, just over two [...]

When it comes to tangibly honoring great Americans, Washington tends to drag its collective feet, usually decades, before making room along the Mall for a tribute. The notable exception is the Viet Nam war memorial that was completed a mere 7 years after the war ended; the impetus to build [...]

Today, The Joint Investigation Team (”JIT”), made up of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (”BOEMRE”) (formerly “MMS”) and the United States Coast Guard issued its final report on it’s investigation of BP’s Macondo Well Blowout and subsequent oil spill that occurred on April 20, 2010. The report [...]

At this hour, rain bands are coming ashore at Nags Head, North Carolina. The main body of the storm is expected ashore between 2 and 6 am eastern time. This massive storm is then forecast to run north up the East Coast of the US, crossing Washington, DC, Delaware, New [...]

(April 23rd) Late yesterday, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation board issued a preliminary report of its findings related to causes of the Macondo well disaster that come under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard.  This report focused only on the vessel, its condition, and the actions of the crew that caused the [...]

You’ve probably heard by now that Transocean announced last week that 2010 was its “best year for safety performance” based on incident rate statistics even though their offshore rig, the Deepwater Horizon, burned down and sank during the largest blowout and oilspill in the history of the US. Eleven workers were killed in the [...]

Brazilian producer Petrobras announced yesterday that the BOEMRE ordered a halt to the startup of its Chinook/Cascade deepwater floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) facility that had just been permitted a few weeks ago.  The halt was ordered due to the failure of a buoyancy can that supports the free standing risers [...]

Yesterday, under intense questioning from the attorney for blowout preventer (BOP) manufacturer Cameron International, the project manager for Det Norske Veritas (DNV), the company who led the investigation of the BOP, admitted an error in the computer model they used to determine the cause of failure of the BOP during the BP [...]