Oil Execs' Refrain: Don't Blame Me, Blame Him

As expected, the leaders of the oil and oil service companies involved with the Gulf oil spill attempted to shift blame onto one another at a Senate hearing today. Executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton each blamed the other companies' work for the blowout, the Washington Post reports. BP's Lamar McKay told the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that while his firm owned the well, Transocean was responsible for the blowout preventers that failed to stop the leak.

Transocean's Steven Newman said that the devices "were clearly not the root cause of the explosion"—he blamed Halliburton, which was contracted to seal the well with cement. "The cementing sub-contractor is responsible for ensuring the integrity of the cement," Newman said. Halliburton's Tim Probert, for his part, said that BP and Transocean mismanaged the sea floor drilling operation, of which their cement capping was only a small part.
(More Deepwater Horizon stories.)