PHOTO BY TED JACKSON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Oil appears on beaches -- Sea birds take flight on the beach at Elmer's Island Thursday, May 13, 2010.

Seven hours of data missing from Deepwater Horizon prior to explosion
May 13, 2010, 10:35PM

A “black box” can reveal why an airplane crashed or how fast a car was going in the instant before an accident. Yet there are no records of a critical safety test supposedly performed during the fateful hours before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. They went down with the rig.

This is starting to look more and more like a criminal investigation.  Read more here.

If you are wondering why the cleanup and leak stopping efforts seem to be “solutions” invented on a day by day basis, that’s because they are.  BP had no workable solutions for stopping a catastrophic leak of this kind,  despite their assurances to the U.S. government before it happened that they did. That in itself should be a crime.  Read what the WSWS has to say about the mistake of leaving the fixes to BP below.

Gulf oil spill compounded by BP’s control of “cleanup”
By Tom Eley , WSWS
13 May 2010

The Obama administration’s decision to leave BP in control of its Deepwater Horizon spill site and in charge of cleanup efforts has seriously compounded the original disaster, testimony from workers, experts, and recent press accounts reveal.

Since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana, BP has commanded all cleanup efforts and exercised total control over the spill site, blocking critical information from the public. The Obama administration, which exempted BP from producing environmental impact studies and oil spill contingency plans for its Gulf drilling operations, has no organized approach for addressing the spill, which is growing at a conservatively-estimated rate of 220,000 gallons per day.

Leaving BP to monitor its own cleanup activities is in keeping with Washington’s steady deregulation of industry and finance in the US over the past three decades. The same “free market” nostrums that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster are now providing the operating principle behind the cleanup. This approach has greatly exacerbated the disaster.

The spill has continued to spread on the surface, but the damage below may be more severe. Four-inch diameter tar balls have reached the shores of eastern Alabama, just miles from the Florida border. Six dead dolphins were found washed ashore in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and more dead turtles, fish, and soiled birds have been found.

Because of BP’s “proprietary” control of the drilling site 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast, it is impossible to even estimate the size of the spill. BP refused to make available underwater footage of the oil [...]