Sixty three days after an explosion sunk the Deepwater Horizon deepocean drilling rig, oil continues to pour out of the ruptured riser pipe. BP is currently using a containment system to siphon off some of the oil spewing from the rupture pipe and hopes to contain nearly 90 percent of the flow from the broken pipe by late June. The final solution to this problem remains the relief wells that are currently being drilled but aren't expected to be completed until August.  BP announced recently that it has already spent over $2 billion on the clean up effort, and there really is no end in sight. Within that $2 billion, $105 million has been paid out to 32,000 claimants.

According to internal BP documents released on Sunday, as much as 100,000 barrels could leak into the Gulf every day if blowout preventer and well-head were removed, a figure that is a far larger worst-case estimate than BP has previously recognized.

The Minerals Management Service took yet another hit this weekend when it was discovered there were serious lapses in oversight of the rig's end of the line, failsafe device. The failsafe device within the blowout preventer is the blind shear ram, a piece of equipment that when employed is supposed to cut through the riser piper and seal the pipe closed with a rubber seal. The shear ram was deployed on the Deepwater Horizon but was never effective. Evidence has come to light that regulators were far too quick to take the industry at their word when they said that there was no way their failsafe device could fail. In fact, the MMS repeatedly declined to act on the advice of its own experts on how to minimize the risk of the blind shear failure. The MMS's inaction is even more damning considering records and interviews show that blind shear rams can be surprisingly vulnerable to failure.

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