The folks that built the well and platform, who made the mistake that caused the explosion, and the folks who failed to quickly seal/stop/contain the leak are c

The folks that built the well and platform, who made the mistake that caused the explosion, and the folks who failed to quickly seal/stop/contain the leak are clearly at fault. I think the issue is whether if a company thinks it is smart enough to start a deep sea oil drilling operation (BP/Transocean/Halliburton) that it should also be smart enough to have a tested plan in place to quickly seal a leak -- at any depth they operate it. The argument being if they want to build a well that would be too deep to stop a leak like this, and yet, somehow not too deep enough to build the well in the first place, that they should not build the well there, period. For example, one of my assumptions based on the physics/engineering I do know is that it should be possible to build a simulated leak contraption, at that depth. And then they could run experiments where they try to stop the leak. Since it would be a controlled experiment they could have control valves to turn on/off the flow of oil (or whatever alternate liquid they use), but the key element is that the contraption has a part where it just gushes out thousands of barrels of the oil-like substance, under conditions as close to a real leak as possible. Test, measure, do post-mortems, tweak and fine-tune their plans and gadgets. Then, disseminate a plan, train people, have tools and gadgets cached reasonably nearby all such wells they operate, and be able to move in and take decisive action to seal the leak within the first few days. "Go big" if necessary to seal it. Just do it, quickly, because time is of the essence. Have backup procedures also in place, ready to go, with all necessary gadgets and trained folks nearby and ready to go quickly. I do also assume that a company that makes billions in profit each quarter would have enough money to do all of this. I'm mad at them and I am willing to point a finger because I find it really hard to believe they could not have done much better. The combination of brainstorming failure scenarios, testing, planning and having billions of dollars to spend on tech and people should have taken them a lot farther, I think. I just don't buy this "we have enough brains and money to build this thing, but not enough brains and money to fix it when it goes bad" argument. The first buys the second, as a general rule. And they've had plenty of time to prepare for the second.