Disasters

"Transocean, owner of the drilling rig that caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico three weeks ago, has asked a Houston federal court to limit its liability for the resulting oil spill to $26.8 million, a small fraction of the anticipated damages from the accident."

"A bill to increase the liability cap for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion was defeated Thursday by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska."

"There's at least 10 times as much oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico than official estimates suggest, according to an exclusive NPR analysis."

"The Gulf of Mexico oil spill could grow even more disastrous if the looming hurricane season churns up towering black waves and blasts beaches and crowded cities with oil-soaked gusts, experts warned."

"President Obama put his weight today behind legislative efforts to lift liability caps for oil spills."
 

"Federal investigators are likely to file criminal charges against at least one of the companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico spill, raising the prospects of significantly higher penalties than a current $75 million cap on civil liability, legal experts say."

"A House energy panel investigation has found that the blowout preventer that failed to stop a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil."

"As the companies involved in the construction, leasing and operation of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig try to pin blame on one another for the explosion and subsequent spill, the litigation resulting from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico also keeps getting messier."

At a Senate hearing, executives of the oil-industry firms involved in the Gulf spill all agreed that the disaster was somebody else's fault.

"Powerful puffs of natural gas, called kicks, are a normal occurrence in many deep-ocean drilling operations. But one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico."