Halliburton officials knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.Note that this story broke soon after BP's Macondo well began gushing, but most people (including me) forgot about it. This isn't Halliburton's first trip down the "our faulty cement caused an undersea oil blowout" lane:
If "cementing" is the cause, it could spell new troubles for Halliburton, whose work was also suspected in a well explosion that took place last August in the Timor Sea near Australia. It took 71 days to fully cap and contain that spill, according to Australia's Sunday Times. The official investigation is still ongoing, but cementing was the main area of investigation, the head of the inquiry has said.This doesn't let BP off the hook, of course. British Petroleum cut a shitload of corners in drilling the well, but that was to be expected, as BP is a company that has a long and storied track record of cutting corners, poisoning the environment and getting its workers killed. Halliburton's shitty cement was apparently one of the factors involved in the spilling of hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but it by far was not the only one.
Of course, if you follow the line of the Confederate party and the Teabaggers then you'd think that if we only removed those pesky regulations, then none of this would have happened, right? (It's time for your Thorazine!)
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