Your error is the same error that the oil companies made, which is an over-reliance upon fallible Blow-Out Preventers. The BOP’s were repeatedly advertised to the decision-makers and the public as “infallible”. That’s a crock and any engineer worth their salt knows it. All human technology is fallible and the BOP’s are more fallible than many ‘last line of defence’ systems.

By analogy. Suppose you carelessly drive straight for a wall, hit it, and your air bag fails to deploy. Your face gets messed up due to hitting the dashboard, worse than had the air bags deployed.

Who is responsible? The air bag manufacturer or automobile manufacturer for making (presumably) faulty equipment? Or you for carelessly driving towards the wall?

BP carelessly drove towards the wall and put all their proverbial eggs in the BOP basket. That’s a mistake they should pay for.

Why do you continue to blaim the driver when it has been repeatedly proven beyond all possible and reasonable doubt that the breaks simply didn’t work? Unless anyone wants to claim here that all the other oil multinationals were testing their BOPs 100 times more often than BP?

Here’s some info about deep water corals. They grow more slowly than tropical corals because they don’t have zooxanthellae that live on them and feed them.

– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

http://www.safmc.net/ecosystem/HabitatManagement/DeepwaterCorals/tabid/229/Default.aspx
http://coris.noaa.gov/about/deep/

we MUST switch to electric. period.

So… yeah. Just because nothing gets reported doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use common sense to estimate the catastrophy.

One drop of oil poisons (read: makes health damaging to all living things) ONE THOUSAND LITRES of water. Many drops of oil poison many thousand litres of water. Gallons a second over the course of nearly half a year… will poison… many many litres of water.

Suggesting that there can be doubt about the spill being absolutely horrible and killing millions of plants and animals (and in the future humans, namely ALL clean-up workers… yes, without a lot of medical attention they will all die from the long-term damages of the same chemicals ALL helpers of the Exxon Valdez died from after a few years without compensation for their families).

tl;dr: If anything dies anywhere in the Gulf… or a few thousand mile radius around the borehole… then BP will be the most obvious culprit.

Perhaps the dying coral itself weakened the wellhead and *directly* caused the leak. It can’t be proven not to have contributed.

Without BP, we might never have known about this dangerous subsurface hazard! All hail BP, saviour of the seven seas, for clearing the oceans of this scourge!

How much do you want to bet that while BP will pay a large fine, they will make no admission of guilt or fault. Vague statements will be issued that “mistakes were made”. People were severely spoken to, policies were rewritten, and all parties were not made aware of the situation at the time. Or so they will claim.

In short there will be no satisfactory resolution for anyone. Every involved party will be pointing the finger at everyone else. No one will stand up and say “I turned Up when I should have turned Down. That was my responsibility.”

In the end the average citizen will simply stop hearing about the story, and will wonder ‘I hope the oil companies learned their lesson in the Gulf. Whatever happened there?’