Page 2 - Problems Inside Bp News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

We have been talking a lot on this show recently about the government's decision to start greenlighting oil wells again in the gulf of mexico after the bp disaster last year. that is news that matters to everyone in america, of course, but if you live in a town where people depend on oil rigs for jobs, then you've got a very particular interest in those decisions. i mean, if you're a roughneck in bay minette or pearlington or eunice or corpus christi government decisions about new drilling can mean the difference between shipping out for real work on a real rig or counting on an oil spill reli...

We have been talking a lot on this show recently about the government's decision to start greenlighting oil wells again in the gulf of mexico after the bp disaster last year. that is news that matters to everyone in america, of course, but if you live in a town where people depend on oil rigs for jobs, then you've got a very particular interest in those decisions. i mean, if you're a roughneck in baymoanette or paerlg-ton or eunice or corpus christi government decisions about new drilling can mean the difference between shipping out for real work on a real rig or counting on an oil spill relie...

They are flawed in a way that -- such a way that the very accidents they're supposed to stop from becoming disasters, those very same accidents can render them inoperable, can just take them out so they can't do their jobs. we knew that things could go wrong with blowout preventers. what we did not know is that if things didn't go wrong with them they still might not work. that by design some blowouts will just still happen, will just render the blowout preventers pointless. in other words, there is no fail-safe. if this thing here is the backup plan, it means there is no backup plan. we did n...

Particular should get extra scrutiny because of what happened on their watch with their equipment at deep water horizon? >> well, bp does not have a lot of best friends in this area right now. but on the other hand, i don't think that anyone thinks that all of the executives of bp sat around a board table last year and said, i know what we'll do. we'll have a big explosion and a big disaster. so it's not in their interests either to have such a terrible thing happen because it's expensive for them. and, of course, it's a dreadful thing for us on the coast. so like them or hate him, they are wh...

But lately, even the fairly ra-ra hometown papers of oil country seem to be realizing this thing with the blowout preventers could be a real problem. "the times picayune" today saying the industry and government should, quote, learn from the problems inside bp's blowout preventer and make adjustments if necessary. "the mobile press register's" editorial saying, clearly, further study is needed to make sure that the nation doesn't experience another catastrophe like the bp spill. don't take it from me. take it from them. joining us now frances coleman editorial page for the mobile press registe...