Federal Investigators Hold Hearings to Get to Bottom of Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

Posted in BP British Petroleum,Deepwater Horizon,Environment,Government,Gulf Coast,Maritime Law,Transocean on August 23, 2010

HOUSTON, TX – Federal investigators will again try to question witnesses on the Gulf Oil Spill in the fourth of a continuing series of hearings by the joint panel of the U.S. Coast Guard and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly the MMS – Minerals Management Service) in Houston, Texas on August 23, 2010.

Capt. Hung Nguyen speaks during the Deepwater Horizon joint investigation hearings. Photo credit: Brett Duke / The Times-Picayune

The hearings are being carried out in an effort to get to the bottom of the worst oil spill in U.S. history and the events that occurred prior to the disaster on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig owned by Transocean and leased to British Petroleum at the time.

The hearings are being conducted to get to the root causes of the disaster.

In Monday’s hearing in Houston, the panel intends to question key witnesses from BP, Transocean and Halliburton to narrow down what happened in the incident.

In an article by Brett Clanton at the Houston Chronicle website regarding the previous hearings, testimony revealed that “there were warning signs about dangerous conditions in the Macondo well before the April 20 blowout.”

The article goes on to point out that there are still “unanswered questions about the exact sequence of events that led to the blowout.” Questions such as:

1. “Why a giant stack of sea floor valves, called a blowout preventer, failed to seal off the well once it started gushing oil” and
2. “How BP’s design and oversight of the well may have contributed to the disaster.”

There ia also an article in the Washington Post website about the hearings in Houston. In the article, the author, David S. Hilzenrath, goes on to say that the Federal Investigators want to “call witnesses who can address alleged shortcuts in the drilling of the BP oil well, problems with the failed blowout preventer and the confused scene after an explosion on the rig.”

Clearly, there are critical unanswered questions that are key in understanding what happened before the incident in order to prevent a similar incident from recurring in the future.

Still, it is a challenge for investigators to get witnesses to testify at all. In the previous hearings last month, some witnesses canceled at the last minute and one witness invoked his right to remain silent according to the Fifth Amendment.