US Government Scrutiny
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion has given new impetus to a number of Congressional Representatives to pressure the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to investigate safety practices on BP's Atlantis PQ offshore platform in the Atlantis Oil Field. A whistleblower report to the MMS in March 2009 stated, "over 85 percent of the Atlantis Project's Piping and Instrument drawings lacked final engineer-approval," as legally required. The report further stated, "the project be immediately shut down until those documents could be accounted for and independently verified." BP and other oil industry groups wrote letters objecting to a proposed MMS rule last year that would have required stricter safety measures. The MMS changed rules in April 2008 to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, allowing BP to operate in the Macondo Prospect without filing a blowout plan.
Read more about this topic: Atlantis Oil Field, Safety Practices
Famous quotes containing the word government:
“There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation’s public school system entitled “Savage Inequalities,” Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)