"I hear one message. And the message is, don't blame me. Well, shifting this blame does not get us very far," Republican Senator John Barrasso said as the Senate sought answers to what triggered the environmental disaster.

Three weeks after the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and sank the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform, leaving its uncontrolled well to gush millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, the executives had no answers.

BP America chief Lamar McKay, whose firm leased the rig, cited "anomalous pressure test readings" before the explosion and pointed to the failure of a key piece of safety equipment maintained by the platform operated, Transocean.

"Why did Transocean's blowout preventer, the key failsafe mechanism, fail to shut in the well and release the rig?" McKay testified in the room where lawmakers investigated the oceanliner Titanic's sinking a century earlier.

Transocean chief Steven Newman said a "blowout" -- an uncontrolled surge or oil or gas up the well -- could have blown debris into the blowout preventers meant to be a rig's last line of defense against such a crisis.

But Newman pointed the finger at Halliburton, saying the oil services company was responsible for the well's cement casing, a temporary cement plug in the top of the well, all meant to serve as barriers to a blowout.

"There was a sudden catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing, or both. Without a failure of one of those elements, the explosion could not have occurred," Newman told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Halliburton's chief health, safety, and environment officer, Tim Probert, said BP was ultimately responsible for all of the work done on the rig and that his firm had met BP's instructions and industry practice.

And Probert said Halliburton had never set the final cement plug because the catastrophe occurred as Transocean was doing work on the well.

"I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together," Senator Lisa Murkowski, the panel's top Republican, told the executives, warning of a public backlash against offshore drilling.

"Then not only will BP not be out there, but the Transoceans won't be there to drill the rigs and the Halliburtons won't be there to provide for the cementing," she cautioned.

At an afternoon hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar told the same executives that they resembled a group of children who have knocked their baseball through a neighbor's window and were refusing to take the blame.

Moments before the morning session began, two groups of demonstrators took aim at BP, some with black teardrops painted on their faces in quiet protest, another calling out "BP kills wildlife, BP kills people, BP kills the planet."

And moments after it ended, some of them chanted "hey, hey, Lamar McKay, how many fish did you kill today?"

Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the energy committee, blamed "a cascade of failures" he assigned to technical and human flaws for the crisis, which he likened to the Titanic and the space shuttle Challenger explosion.

"If this is like other catastrophic failures of technological systems in modern history -- whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, Three Mile Island, or the loss of the Challenger -- we will likely discover that there was a cascade of failures: Technical, human, and regulatory," he said.

F. E. Beck, a professor of petroleum engineering, said it appeared barriers designed to control a "kick" -- when explosive natural gas enters the wellbore -- had failed, ultimately causing a "blowout" when gas flowed uncontrollably to the surface and ignited.

Beck played down concerns that the deepwater well might have tested the outer limits of the oil industry's abilities, saying it was "a very difficult well" but "not the most difficult well the industry has drilled by any means."

Elmer Danenberger, a former government regulator of offshore drilling, agreed with one senator that the disaster resulted from "a failure of systems."

McKay said his firm had a team of 40 staff investigating the disaster and promised BP would "pay all legitimate claims" for economic damages, including above a legal ceiling of 75 million dollars.

"Liability, blame, fault, put it over here," BP America chief Lamar McKay told a key Senate panel holding the first hearing into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, gesturing as though pushing something to one side.

"We are the responsible party," he said, declining to comment on a push by some lawmakers to raise the cap to 10 billion dollars.

The undersea well has been spewing an estimated 210,000 gallons per day into the Gulf of Mexico.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News