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Saturday, August 12

You can't spell Wrong without W: Regulations

It started with news of the BP oil spill and resulting pipeline shutdown.

BP said it discovered corrosion so severe that it will have to replace 16 miles of pipeline at the huge Prudhoe Bay oil field. The news Monday put pressure on prices at the pump during the peak summer driving season and prompted the government to consider dipping into its emergency stockpile.

By last night, the reasons were clear--BP did no maintenance on their pipelines. And, this multinational corporation took no action to protect the American land over which this oil flows. In fact, the government had to order BP and other oil companies to inspect their pipelines.

BP discovered corrosion in the transit lines only after the U.S. Transportation Department ordered their inspection following a spill of up to 270,000 gallons in March. It was the biggest spill in North Slope history, and has become part of a criminal investigation into the company's Alaskan operations.

This calls into question the entire regulatory scheme W and the GOP have been chanting for years, that government regulation of corporations is the problem, and that corporations can be trusted with regulating themselves.

In fact, they can't.

The last time the pipelines were cleaned, using a so-called "scraper pig" - a device that is pushed through a pipe to clean it out - was in 1992.

Holy crap! 14 years without cleaning? So, what caused this cleaning, you ask? Certainly, it is not BP's sense of responsibility, as this company has failed numerous times in recent years to protect America, and has been fined for numerous safety and health violations, including a refinery explosition that killed 15 American workers. No, it was a new Federal Regulation that found the problems.

After a major spill on one of BP's three North Slope feeder lines last March, federal officials became concerned about inadequate testing and possibly a wider corrosion problem and ordered the company to conduct a "smart pig" test within three months.

In other words, more regulations were needed.

But, even these were insufficient, as BP fought compliance:

But the company said it could not meet the deadline in part because it was responding to a federal grand jury investigation into the March spill and that "it was working to determine the volume of solids likely to be encountered" in the lines, according to federal officials.

In mid-June, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., pressed the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration on why the required pig tests were not being conducted.
Three weeks later, the agency's chief, Thomas Barrett, and two senior officials traveled to the North Slope.
"We came away with significant concern about BP's progress" in dealing with the sediment that had built up in the pipelines and were hinder the testing, Barrett recently wrote Dingell.
"The presence of significant volumes of sediment and sludge in the lines poses a risk of further corrosion and interferes with internal inspection operations that are useful in detecting pipe anomalies," Barrett continued.
Then, BP Alaska officials came up with new estimates that lowered the amount of sludge believed in the lines, and told federal officials the material no longer prevents pigging the lines. BP had tried to use the pig tests in 1999 but did not complete the process, according to Dingell's investigators.
Last May there was believed to be up to a foot of sludge in some parts of the 30-inch diameter lines.
"It is appalling that BP let this critical pipeline deteriorate to the point that a major production shutdown is necessary," Dingell, the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Monday

Yes, the Federal Government could not trust this multinational corporation which made $7.3 Billion in profit in the first 3 months of the year to perform maintenance that was required by the government, let alone to voluntarily perform such mantenance.

This shows that W's and the GOP's entire philosophy about corporate regulation is completely backwards from reality. In fact, government must regulate corporations, as they clearly will not protect America or American citizens without strict regulations, no matter how much money they have to protect us.

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