This oil spill and BP's response (or lack thereof) has raised my BP

I don't know why more people aren't outraged with what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico. I guess I feel personally collected because my family is from Louisiana and I spend a few weeks a year in New Orleans and consider it my second home. I keep up with the news online from the Times-Picayunne and on a blog maintained by Jared Serigne. The pictures and videos alone are upsetting and add to that the fact that 11 people lost their lives because of a companies failure to ensure that safety mechanism were in place, this is downright right outrageous!

Photo credit: National Geographic

Photo credit: Daniel Beltra/Reuters

BP has a Twitter account setup to inform people of the steps they're taking to correct this problem which doesn't seem like a whole lot because all the oil is still gushing into the Gulf. It would be almost laughable if this event weren't so tragic. I took the time since the incident occurred on April 20, 2010 to read through any and all info I could find on BP.  I ran across their 2009 Sustainability Review and found three items at the very beginning that really disturbed me, especially because if they were true I wouldn't be writing this post.

Today I read the transcript of BP America's president, Lamar McKay's, testimony to the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. And all I can say is now I'm even more outraged. If you visit BP's website they go on and on about how they research prior to drilling and how safety and the environment is their number one priority. I call BULLSHIT on that because they're a company like any other company and we all know the number one priority is revenue! Well, McKay, said all the right things, but all I have to say is words without action are worthless. He seems to have a ton of questions too, the same ones I find my self asking:

First, what caused the explosion and fire on board Transocean’s Deepwater

Horizon?

Second, why did Transocean’s blowout preventer – the key fail-safe

mechanism – fail to operate?

Of course McKay and BP are not going to be taking the blame for this. They're trying to dump that on Transocean who they hired to drill the well. Transocean also owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon rig. and as McKay puts it "Transocean, as owner and operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, had responsibility for the safety of all drilling operations." If that isn't deflection I don't know what is.

This is a story of failure. A corporations failure to properly protect it's employees and the environment and that same corporations failure to have the proper safety protocols and redundancy in place to minimize damage and loss of life.

In his closing remarks McKay went on to say:

No resource available to this company will be spared. I can assure you that
we and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event, and emerge

from it stronger, smarter and safer.

It's unfortunate that the Gulf Coast of the US had to be the classroom that this lesson was taught in. There are thousands of people who make their livings fishing those waters, there are generations of people who have fond childhood memories of frolicking in those waters and there are those who where dragged kicking and screaming during their summer vacations against their will to Breton Island and ended up marveling in the beauty of the Gulf Coast.

The cost to the environment cannot be associated to a dollar amount. The damage is irreversible and will affect our planet for generations to come. BP better get their shit together and get it together soon. While the people of the Gulf Coast are welcoming, cordial and accommodating we don't take well to people mucking up our waters.