Did Oil Industry Ignore Problems with Equipment Meant To Stop Spills?

May 5, 2010 — -- Oil industry insiders are awash in theories about what caused the massive explosion and spill that continued to spoil the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday, but increasingly they are harboring fresh doubts about a once-trusted fail-safe of offshore drilling.

Known as a blowout preventer, or BOP, the five-story-tall, 900,000-pound concrete contraption has always served as a critical backstop for oil rigs. Rig operators believed that if something went wrong, and oil started gushing from an open well, the blowout preventer's giant hydraulic pistons and shears would clamp shut a gushing well.

"I think that's what's bothering everybody," said Randall Luthi, the former director of the U.S. Minerals Management Service, who now serves as president of the National Ocean Industries Association. "Why didn't the blowout preventer work the way it was supposed to work?"

The failure of the blowout preventer after last week's explosion on the BP-leased Transocean Horizon deepwater rig could turn a tragic, but manageable incident into one of the worst spills in U.S. history, Luthi said.

While the oil industry has always touted the blowout preventer as a key to its ability to drill offshore without great risk to the environment, Senator Maria Cantwell, D.-Wash., says that BP's portrayal of this kind of failure as unprecedented does not stand up to examination.

"There is clear evidence that the oil industry has been well aware for years of the risk that blowout preventers on offshore rigs could fail," said Cantwell in a statement to ABC News on Wednesday.

Cantwell, the chairwoman of two key Senate Commerce and Energy Committee subcommittees with oversight over the offshore drilling, said her staff has found extensive documentary evidence demonstrating the problems with blowout preventers.

"Despite frequent failures, industry assumed the preventers were fail-safe and, as a result, had no back-up plan for responding to a catastrophe like the one now unfolding in the Gulf."