It's really sad to see that this same disaster is occurring 31 years after the IXTOC 1. Clearly nothing meaningful was done properly to ensure a similar disaster wouldn't happen again. 31 years is a long time for safer drilling solutions to be developed, and for some reason, they weren't. As Rachel's segment pointed out, all that has changed is pushing the problem further under water. I hope more news segments pick up on this, and start asking BP and the others involved why there hasn't been an investment into better disaster prevention methods.
Much as I hate trial-by-mass-media, there have been multiple reports making out that actually fairly reasonable
engineering solutions for disaster prevention are routinely deployed these days, including on Deepwater Horizon, and that the proximate cause of the current disaster (like Chernobyl) is human hubris ignoring or compromising those engineering solutions.
Peter
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