The fault was not BP's, but Transocean's, who built the blowout preventer, installed it and assured it's safety (whom BP will be suing later), but BP is the one taking the responsibility and working to fix the crisis. BP is working feverishly to solve the problem, but it is obviously a technological problem (too much oil and gas escaping pressure --- the mother of all gushers), which no one has an answer for yet. BP has put together a giant response center, 470 engineers and managers from 70 companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and Petrobras, as well as government agencies, working 12-hour shifts around the clock. They have all the experts from all the oil well emergency teams there on location who have had the experience of stopping oil gushers and emergencies (such as Kuwait, which took four months to stop). They have assembled a flotilla of hundreds of ships and other craft to place booms and put out dispersants and vacuum up oil slick and try to ameliorate beach and wetland damage. This is a mammoth effort which honestly is beyond anything ever previously done to attack any oil spill or leak. Who could have anticipated this? The oil industry has had a successful record of a remarkable 14,000 deep wells in the Caribbean for the past 20 years. That's 14,000 with problems all solved as they happen and one that is out of control. Who could have known? Really no one. No one had ever seen enormous pressure like this with this kind of compressed gas (which is the reason the conventional fixes haven't worked). It is really sort of a freak of nature... kind of like unleasing a monster in some science fiction movie, except we have no super hero to fix it with super powers. The pressure is too great for a drilling mud fix (worked on all previous gushers) and the compressed gas when it rises caused sea water to freeze blocking lines. This is a technological nightmare and the lack of a solution isn't because the world's best deep sea oil drilling scientists (assembled by BP) aren't puzzling to find the answer.
So, BP didn't cause it, however they have mounted a herculean effort to solve it. Sometimes technological problems are not solved easily. Getting angry at BP is like getting angry at the cancer research centers around the world for not curing cancer... they are trying hard, but sometimes the answers just aren't there. Currently 20% of the oil consumed in United States comes from deep sea rigs in the Caribbean... so deep sea rigs down there are something we all will have to deal with for a while. There are risks involved which we all share.
It may be that the additional drilling (which is a giant task involving hundreds of people going on now, to be finished by August) may be the only answer. Hopefully that will work and we will be able to thank BP for the amazing job they have done in the face of an irresponsible media whipping the masses into an unwarranted panic.
