Offshore Drilling Safety Reforms Still Needed
Attorneys Kurt Arnold and Jason Itkin of the Houston maritime law firm, Arnold & Itkin LLP, say the federal government and oil industry have been too slow to act on improving offshore worker safety.
One year after the deadly BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig fire and explosion, reforms are still needed to provide better safety for offshore workers, Houston maritime injury attorneys Kurt Arnold and Jason Itkin recently observed.
“On the whole, I don’t think you can say that offshore workers are much safer today than they were one year ago,” said Arnold, speaking on the anniversary of the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster. “There are still many important steps that need to be taken, especially with the design, inspection and maintenance of blowout preventers.”
According to the Houston Chronicle, a four-month investigation concluded that one cause of the disaster was the failure of a blowout preventer to cut through a drill pipe that had been dislodged during the incident, which would have sealed off the leak.
A Shell Oil Co. engineer told the newspaper that one way to address such a failure would be to require that blowout preventers have at least two sets of pipe-cutting components, or shear rams.
“We still have no regulation requiring that blowout preventers have multiple shear rams that would help to prevent another tragedy like the Deepwater Horizon,” Itkin said. “The oil rigs in the Gulf and other American waters clearly are not as safe as they could be.”
An article in a recent issue of the Shreveport Times pointed out that, despite more than 150 bills being introduced in Congress since last April to improve oil rig safety and enhance government oversight of the offshore oil drilling industry, no major legislation had yet passed.
“There has been a lot of talk about protecting offshore workers, but unfortunately, the action hasn’t matched the rhetoric,” Itkin said.
In the year since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Houston maritime accident lawyers have worked to protect the rights of injured Transocean workers and Gulf Coast businesses seeking redress for injuries caused by the Gulf oil spill.
Arnold said that he hopes new requirements for blowout preventers and other safety reforms are enacted before the next anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
“The bottom line is that these maritime workers are doing a job that is vital to our nation's energy needs and we cannot have them unnecessarily risking their health and safety,” Arnold said. “We owe them a safer work environment.”
Arnold & Itkin LLP attorneys serve clients in Texas and throughout the nation, handling maritime injury and many other types of complex cases.
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