Eideard

In the five years before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, federal investigators documented nearly 200 safety and environmental violations in accidents on platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, describing a stunning array of hazards that resulted in few penalties.

Workers plunged dozens of feet through open unmarked holes. Welding sparked flash fires. Overloaded cranes dropped heavy loads that smashed equipment and pinned workers. Oil and drilling mud fouled Gulf waters. Compressors exploded. Wells blew out.

And yet, in their investigations of nearly 400 offshore incidents, Minerals Management Service officials failed to travel to one-third of the accident scenes, collected only 16 fines and did not investigate every blowout as their own rules require.

BP, the region’s leading offshore oil producer, reported more accidents and blowouts than any other oil company operating in Gulf waters, followed by Chevron, the region’s third largest off-shore oil producer.

BP has had at least 47 since 2005; Chevron 46, based on a Houston Chronicle review of accidents investigated by MMS in the last five years and a decade of government reports on blowouts of oil wells.

Each major oil company paid only a single fine related to violations linked to those incidents. Both Chevron and BP spokesmen defended their companies’ safety records and said their employee injury rates are low…

The Gulf’s second-ranked producer, Shell, had 22 reported accidents and has paid no related fines.

One of the biggest delays in fine collections involved BP. The company took five years to pay a fine associated with a 2002 debacle where two oil well blowouts struck the same drilling rig in three months…

In fact, agency records also show no evidence that MMS investigators visited the scene in about one-third of offshore accidents reported since 2005. In other cases, long delays in site visits were caused by unsafe conditions aboard damaged rigs, bad weather or hurricanes. But most delays and failures to go to accident sites are unexplained in reports.

RTFA. Disgusting history of corruption, inaction, complacency. Lazy, country club-bureaucrats who invent their investigations in the quiet of their offices.

The U.S. Defense Department announced Monday it was taking back responsibility for billions of dollars in pay and benefits for veterans, a task handled since 2002 by Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon’s No. 1 contractor by sales.

A switch to using government workers, prompted by Congress, will save $22 million to $25 million over the next 10 years, said Tom LaRock, a spokesman for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS).

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat who led an investigation and held hearings into the matter, said Lockheed’s performance under its contract had been marked by “mishandling, delay, poor quality and exorbitant charges.”

“This is a great day for veterans and a victory for government oversight,” Kucinich said in a statement…

Kucinich’s investigation found delays of as much as 5-1/2 years in delivering retroactive pay awards to eligible disabled veterans under legislation enacted by Congress in 2003 and 2004. He blamed government mismanagement and Lockheed Martin…

“I hope that this experiment in privatization will demonstrate to other agencies the costs, both financial and otherwise, of outsourcing the responsibilities of government,” he said.

Bush and Cheney kept their buds at Lockheed rolling in the green for providing mediocre support to our vets. These past eight years have been an exercise in corporate cronies getting payoffs – and the taxpayer getting the shaft.

Oh, yeah. A footnote to the whiners who babbled their fears about Kucinich over the span of the last couple of elections. It wasn’t the Kerrys and the McCains of this political world that led the fight to repay our vets.

Daylife/AP Photo

Thousands of buildings at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have such poorly installed wiring that American troops face life-threatening risks, a top inspector for the Army says.

“It was horrible — some of the worst electrical work I’ve ever seen,” said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that “with the buildings the way they are, we’re playing Russian roulette.”

Childs recently returned from Iraq, where he is taking part in a yearlong review aimed at correcting electrical hazards on U.S. bases. He told CNN that thousands of buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan are so badly wired that troops are at serious risk of death or injury.

He said problems are “everywhere” in Iraq, where 18 U.S. troops have died by electrocution since 2003. All deaths occurred in different circumstances and different locations, but many happened on U.S. bases being managed by various military contractors. The Army has reopened investigations in at least five cases, according to Pentagon sources.

Of the nearly 30,000 buildings the Army’s “Task Force Safe” has examined so far, Childs said more than half “failed miserably.” And 8,527 had such serious problems that inspectors gave them a “flash” warning, meaning repairs had to be completed in four hours or the facility evacuated.

He said the majority of those buildings were wired by contractor KBR, based in Houston, Texas.

Well, there’s a surprise, eh?