The Plutocracy must be served. Judge Feldman ruled knowing the Executive Branch would appeal the decision.
His operative words were "explicitly justify." It is corruption. Feldman doesn't read the newspapers or watch the news? He doesn't know what is going on? No, sure he does, but, he is going to make the Executive Branch of the USA 'dance on the head of a pin' with the verbiage of the moritorium.
..."We will immediately appeal to the 5th Circuit," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "The president strongly believes, as the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice argued yesterday, that continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened…potentially puts the safety of those on the rigs and safety of the environment in the gulf at a danger that the president does not believe we can afford right now."...
The argument that employment is being lost and oil companies are losing income is completely irrelevant. BP is liable for all those losses. All of them, including the losses of other oil companies. This is ridiculous and outrageous. There are eleven people dead and those deaths mean absolutely nothing to Feldman. To Feldman this is all a game of who types better and more explicitly.
It's Louisiana, where corruption is a way of life.
President Obama did what was correct to protect lives and secure the understanding of what occurred.
You know, the petroleum industry is required to drill a relief well at the same time they are drilling the main well. Why? Because the North Atlantic has FREQUENT fires on their rigs. FREQUENT. By that MEASURE ALONE, the Petroleum Industry is putting lives at risk. Their neglegence in this instance is OBVIOUS and yet a Louisiana District Judge has no backbone to stand up to them.
The worst oil disaster in the North Seas was the Piper Alpha which was operated by Occidental Petroleum. The disaster occurred in 1988 after the platform began to pump methane in greater quantities than oil. There were 167 human lives lost with a financial loss of $3.4 billion, without the gushing oil.
There is a very long history of explosions and deaths of people working the rigs. BP has an abysmal safety record. It is a fact. These explosions happen frequently enough to say the Petroleum Industry does not care or do they even want to care about what ACTUALLY occurs when these rigs explode WHEN there is HIGH METHANE content from the drilling.
For a USA Judge to simply dismiss the Executive Branch concerns regarding poor safety track records and eleven deaths while an entire coastline becomes economically handicapped for decades to come, in my opinion is gross malpractice by Feldman.
Another Example:
BP's Disaster: No Surprise to Folks in the Know
Andrew B. Wilson: Anyone Who Understood the Corporate Culture Could See This Coming a Million Miles Away
...Only it wasn’t an explosion. A gas line had ruptured-allowing thousands of pounds of pressurized gas to escape at supersonic velocity. That caused a thunderous sonic boom. Debris from the burst pipe and its cladding rained down, adding to the impression that “an artillery shell had just hit the platform.” The escaping gas quickly formed a huge and potentially lethal cloud around the rig. Now the threat of an actual explosion was very real. The smallest spark would detonate more than a ton of methane gas.
No one died or was even hurt that day on Forties Alpha, thanks in part to high winds that helped to disperse the gas after about 20 minutes of extreme danger to the platform and its crew of 180 people. But Houston, the number two in command aboard Forties Alpha, knew full well what could have happened. “Unlike a similar incident on the ill-fated Piper Alpha platform,” he observes, referring to an earlier accident in the North Sea, “the gas did not ignite, so what could have been a major disaster for myself and everyone else on board was averted by sheer luck.”...
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/22/opinion/main6605248.shtml
Immediately after the Deepwater Horizon blew up, there was another platform in Venezuelan waters that was pumping nothing but methane and it exploded and sunk as well. The Petroleum Industry is out of control. The disaster of the BP rig is the event to stop the clock on 'luck' in order to come to understand the devastating consequences of poor insight and management by these companies. Feldman is completely "W"rong. He removed the purpose of the moritorium and sought to place Executive Authority as a 'volley' to the order. It is pure unadulterated corruption.
Feldman's words are hideous in their content as well.
...Judge Martin Feldman called the Deepwater Horizon spill "an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster."...
He tries to cover up his 'bate and switch' routine by appearing to understand the 'human tragedy' better than anyone else. Please, this is such garbage, the ruling belongs in the nearest land fill.
Rig: ODECO Ocean Odyssey Semi-Sub
Date: 22 September 1988
Location: Shearwater Field, Block 22, UK Continental Shelf
Operator: Arco (now a subsidiary of BP)
...At around 1130 hours, a rapid rise in casing pressure was seen, with substantial mud returns and the presence of gas vapour at the rotary table. With the bit at 13200 feet, the circulating pressure was not great enough to prevent a gas influx into the well and the well began to flow. The control room operator was then alerted to a gas kick and all rig crew were ordered to lifeboat stations as a precautionary measure. At around 1255 hours, the first explosion occurred and the four remaining crew on the drillfloor evacuated to lifeboats. The well was not shut in completely with the lower rams. At around 1305 hours, catastrophic choke hose failure caused by the uncontrolled flow of aggressive fluids through the choke hose led to the release of large quantities of gas and caused fires both on the rig and on the surface of the sea beneath the rig....
http://home.versatel.nl/the_sims/rig/o-odyssey.
September 14, 2005 12:00 AM (Published in the July 2005 issue)
LOCATION: TEXAS CITY, TEXAS
EVENT: OIL REFINERY EXPLOSION
DATE: MARCH 23, 2005
...As workers restarted a component of the unit, abnormal pressure built up in the production tower, and so three relief valves opened to allow highly volatile gasoline components to escape to the 10 x 20-ft. "blowdown" drum. But so much fuel flooded into the drum that its capacity was rapidly exceeded. Liquid and vapor shot straight up the 113-ft. vent stack, into the open air.
Witnesses saw a cloud of vaporizing fuel geyser out of the stack and cascade to the ground. One person reported hearing a desperate call crackle over a handheld radio. "What is this? Stop all hot work! Stop all hot work!"
But too much equipment was running to shut it all down. As vapors were sucked into its engine, an idling pickup at the base of the tower began to rev up, according to witnesses. A worker raced to turn it off, but he was too late. Somewhere in the cloud of fumes, perhaps in the truck's engine, a spark touched off the gas and ignited a firestorm....
...BLOWDOWN
Texas City knows industrial facilities and their dangers. Often referred to as "Toxic City," it is home to four chemical plants and three refineries. The sprawling BP complex, built in 1934, is the third largest of 149 petroleum refineries nationwide. At night it glows like a forested landscape of steel Christmas trees, strung with flickering safety lights. Since records were kept in 1971, there have been at least nine other accidents at the refinery that injured or killed workers, but the explosion on March 23 was by far the most destructive....
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/1758242
Fifth anniversary of BP Texas refinery explosion-have we learnt any lessons?
By Sam
Mar 24, 2010
Mar 24, 2010- Five years ago, terrible explosions rocked BP’s Texas refinery complex that resulted in several fatalities and injuries. The question that is now being raised is, whether any lessons were learned from this by manufacturing companies in general and hydrocarbon processing companies in particular? Apparently not many, as evidenced by the several accidents that took place in refineries and chemical complexes after this accident....
...The CSB issues the following statement from CSB Chairman John Bresland:
Five years ago today, at about 1:20 p.m., a series of explosions rocked the BP Texas City refinery during the restart of a hydrocarbon isomerization unit.
Fifteen workers were killed and 170 others were injured. Many of the victims were working in or around work trailers located near an atmospheric vent stack. The explosions occurred when a distillation tower flooded with hydrocarbons and was over- pressurized, causing a geyser-like release from the vent stack. The hydrocarbons found an ignition source and exploded.
I urge everyone in the oil refining industry to take a moment today and think about that tragic loss of life and the severity of so many injuries which continue to afflict workers five years later.
Today would be an appropriate time for company management to pause and personally pledge to do everything in their power to prevent this kind of catastrophic accident from happening at their refineries. And in my view it would also be appropriate for BP to recommit to safety in a way that builds on the steps it has taken in the aftermath of the Texas City tragedy.
In the CSB’s final investigation report issued two years after the accident, we found organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation. It was the most comprehensive and detailed investigation the CSB has ever done. Our investigation team turned up extensive evidence showing a catastrophe waiting to happen. that cost-cutting had affected safety programs and critical maintenance; production pressures resulted in costly mistakes made by workers likely fatigued by working long hours; internal audits and safety studies brought problems to the attention of BP’s board in London, but they were not sufficiently acted upon. Yet the company was proud of its record on personnel safety.
I urge everyone involved in operations and safety programs at refineries to take time to visit the CSB’s BP investigation web page, review the key findings in the report, and ask “Is any of this happening at my facility?” I also recommend taking a lunch hour to view with your colleagues the CSB Safety Video “Anatomy of a Disaster”, an extensive examination – with computer animation – of the factors that caused the BP tragedy.
http://industrialplantsafety.com/anniversary-bp-texas-refinery.html
The point is, the Petroleum Industry does not care, nor do they want to care. They make so much money that fines and bad publicity means nothing to them. The only entity standing the way of citizens' deaths and this industry is the government and Feldman is a prime example of corruption at the core of the power of industries that are allowed to control economic dynamics. Money is truely more important than human life and this is more proof of it.
Feldman is well bought and paid for whether it is 'stupid ideology' over economics or some 'moronic idea' that the President is supposed to have the power to protect citizens over their right to work. That is an oxymoron considering Louisiana is a 'will to work state' whereby employees have to rights anyway. The entire situation is pure corruption from top to bottom and it is CULTURAL CORRUPTION at its worst.
"Cultural Corruption" is what Republicans rely on to achieve elections and re-elections.
BP Faces Record Fine for ’05 Refinery Explosion
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: October 30, 2009
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced the largest fine in its history on Friday, $87 million in penalties against the oil giant BP for failing to correct safety problems identified after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers at its Texas City, Tex. refinery....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/business/30labor.html
$87 million in fines is just a 'speed bump' in the bonus scale to any CEO. It means absolutely nothing to the Petroleum Industry or their stockholders.
THINK GREEN, THINK LOCAL and save your lives. It is up to us !!!!
