"As gulf drilling nears, a warning; Engineers’ report cites oil firms’ attitude on safety" December 15, 2011|By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - BP and the other firms drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico lacked the proper safety attitude to handle the large risks of deep-water drilling, leading to the many bad decisions behind the nation’s worst offshore spill, a panel of engineers said yesterday.
Despite better safety practices, the engineers worried that those improvements could fade without new steps. They pointed to NASA and how lessons that the agency learned after the 1986 Challenger disaster eventually dimmed, leading to the 2003 Columbia disaster.
The report’s release coincided with the government’s announcement of the results of the first auction of offshore oil leases off the Gulf of Mexico since the April 2010 spill. The leases attracted $337.7 million in winning bids for 191 tracts in the western gulf off the coast of Texas....
For tracts that will net the oil companies billions.
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