Five Key Failures of BP

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article that identifies -- and describe in detail -- five key actions by BP in the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon that led to the blow-out:

1. Well design

2. Insufficient 'centralizers'

3. Failure to run a key test

4. Improper mud circulation

5. Failure to secure wellhead

The House Energy and Commerce panel’s letter to BP's Mr. Hayward concluded that “time after time it appears BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense.”

Go read the article to get the details.

This list is a good start. A NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) style investigation is needed to get to the bottom of the failure. And then rules put in place to prevent similar lapses and shortcuts. The current six month moratorium by Obama on deep see drilling is not reasonable. The NTSB will ground all planes that it has reason to believe suffer from a problem shared by an accident, but they don't ground all planes. Obama's moratorium is more grandstanding than rational. Only those drilling activities that show the same lax attitudes towards safety as BPs should be shut down. Otherwise, the critics of Obama are right: this moratorium is a second blow that will probably be a bigger hit economically than the original spill.

What I don't understand is that no heads have rolled at the MMS (the head Liz Birnbaum resigned). The regulatory agency failed miserably. Obama shuts down all drilling but does nothing to shake up a scandal-ridden, incompetent, inactive MMS? What sense does that make?