BP’s Oil Spill Response Plan Nothing More Than a Sick Joke

If you are up for some light reading, you might just want to read some of the 583-page text of BP's Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico that was submitted in June 2009 to federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service. These government officials must either have not paid much attention to what they were reading, were paid-off by BP, or were simply incredibly incompetent when they rubber-stamped BP's application to drill in the Gulf. BP's plan includes the following red flags that indicate that they obviously had no idea how to stop a catastrophic leak once they had created one:

• In the plan BP promises to protect sea lions, seals, sea otters, and walruses even though NONE of these animals live anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico.
• A Japanese home shopping site is listed as one of the "primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region for rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis."
• Requires that BP's representatives shall never make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal."
• States that in a "Worst Case Discharge" situation, BP has the "personnel, equipment, and materials in sufficient quantities and recovery capacity to respond effectively to oil spills from the facilities and leases covered by this plan, including the worst case discharge scenarios."

As stated in the first sentence of this post, BP's Response Plan is merely "light reading" with no concrete or detailed planning on how to prevent an ecological disaster if a spill should occur. All that BP wanted was to DRILL, BABY, DRILL and unfortunately our government was only too willing to oblige...