Last night on C-Span I saw members of the Coast Guard and some politicians interrogating an engineer from BP. It was embarrassing because the examiners only exposed their total ignorance of the high technology and the dynamics involved in deep sea drilling. I mention this not to exculpate BP from any blame they might have but simply to point out that the interrogators were so without any specialized expertise that they couldn’t even frame intelligent questions. And obviously what the engineer told them was completely beyond their capacity to understand. IMHO, what we need to have is a group of experts with the technological knowledge to objectively find out what really happened so we learn to prevent such a catastrophe in the future - not a bunch of grandstanding people and politicians who don’t know what they’re talking about.
The only panel that would make sense, was a peer panel from the other offshore companies. I have to admit, that even though I have been in the business for 35 years, I have only had about 5 years in the offshore, and that was a long time ago. I certainly could outdo a bunch of stupid congressmen, but I am no match for the current engineers in the gulf. Therefore, a Peer Panel Inquiry from qualified offshore operators would be very helpful. My experience has been that even though people in our industry are competitors, that they go above and beyond to help.