Shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, we reported that the Minerals Management Service canceled its annual “Safety Award for Excellence” luncheon, which—rather embarrassingly—included BP as one of the finalists for a 2010 safety commendation. The SAFE event was never held, and MMS never did get around to announcing a winner. Now Energy & Environment reports that the Department of Interior has scrubbed the evidence of BP’s finalist-status from its website.
You can see here that BP is no longer listed as a finalist in the “High OCS Activity Operator” category. E&E got this screenshot of what the page used to look like, however:
The SAFE awards don’t have a particularly solid record, so perhaps its understandable that they’d want to hide BP’s nod. One of the 2009 award recipients was Deepwater Horizon-owner Transocean. But Interior has been trying to send MMS down the memory hole entirely. Last month they announced that they were changing its name to the “Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement,” which is substantially more complicated but doesn’t conjure the memory of sex, drug and oil parties and, oh yeah, the giant Gulf disaster.
