The British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion occurred on April 20, 2010 in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. After the explosion, the rig leaked 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf for 86 days until it was successfully capped off. The vast amount of spilled oil damaged countless miles of coastline, killed over 4,500 animals (birds and other sea mammals), thousands upon thousands of fish, corals and other types of ocean life. The full extent of the damage will never be known. .
Unfortunately, BP is lying to the public; refusing to take responsibility for their actions in the disaster, especially after their CEO resigned, not wanting to further deal with the situation. BP should finish what they started, and enable the Gulf Coast of Mexico, as well as the surrounding states, to become a safe environment once again. .
BP is at fault for this disaster for several reasons. One major reason is before the explosion even occurred because BP was never prepared if anything were to go wrong undersea; their plans were nonexistent. Carl Safina, educated at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in Stony Brooke, New York, wrote an article entitled "The 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Well Blowout: A Little Hindsight. In this article Safina states, "In a region full of oil rigs and warehouses full of hardware, nowhere was there a device for shutting off a leaking pipe 1 mile deep" (Safina 2). .
With a deep-water rig the size of BP's in the Gulf of Mexico, equipment should have been readily available incase of a sudden incident in which the rig would need to be shut off. Safina describes the only equipment available was similar to the equipment used for shutting of rigs in the 1970's; however, the technology in the oil drilling industry has far exceeded that, and equipment from the 1970's only has the capability of containing small spills inside harbors, not large spills miles under the ocean (Safina 3).