September 14, 2011

Today in Deepwater Horizon Updates

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A report by the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, says that everyone—BP, Halliburton, Transocean—is to blame for the April 2010 explosion that caused the second-largest oil spill ever and ruined a lot of lives along the Gulf Coast. The findings aren’t particularly surprising; a presidential commission reached the same conclusion earlier this year.

Also, miles of tar balls and tar mats have appeared on Louisiana beaches after a tropical storm churned them up. This is also not particularly surprising, since BP was doing such a totally awesome job of cleaning the oil up when it first spilled. Workers are being dispatched to take care of the new mess posthaste.

But this is news: A refreshing dose of honesty from BP, which last year was insisting, along with a weirdly and tragically complicit media, that the oil was all gone. Said BP spokesman Curtis Thomas, explaining why they already had so much manpower ready to deploy for cleanup: “We knew this was coming.”

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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