Rush to Judgment On BP's Oil Spill Fault?

Here is an important story from the Center for Public Integrity raising questions about the government's role in contributing to the oil spill disaster earlier this year.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list.

“The joint investigation is absolutely looking into that, and whether it contributed to the sinking,” Capt. Ronald A. LaBrec, the Coast Guard’s chief spokesman, told the Center.

Read it all here.

As a society, we want instant answers. We have instant access to information via the Internet and (slower usually) television and radio. The lessons we should learn from the Shirley Sherrod incident and the beer summit incident and others is that all the facts are usually not instantly available.