With an election year looming and the race between the president Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is the closest it has been brought to the public’s and especially those that follow the Liberal party philosophies that the Obama administration was responsible for waiving safety checks for the BP contracted rig that the Switzerland company Transocean owned.  That rig was Deepwater Horizon, the rig that was responsible for spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Saying this however, it wasn’t apparently the first time that the Obama administration has waived safety checks for rigs wanting to go offshore and begin new drilling projects. Before a rig can go out drilling it needs to pass a number of safety and regulation checks and from then on, it needs to undergo monthly safety checks for the first 40 months which equivalents to the first three years of the rigs operation.  Out of the three years of safety checks that were supposed to take place on the Deepwater Horizon it seems that approx… 25% of safety checks were nowhere to be found and eventually were discovered that they had not even occurred.

Scarily enough, it seems that the oil ship Deepwater Horizon was not the only drilling ship to have its safety checks waived as it turns out the Obama administration has been responsible for waiving another twenty-six new offshore drilling projects.  One of the reasons that the Obama administration have given for their comment is that the ships have been given an exemption as they do not represent those ships and oil rigs that need the final stamp of approval for drilling operations. However, one more argument exists and that is the need with USA to develop its own oil reserve to meet its ever growing need of oil. At the same time the sensitivity of the political uncertainty related to the Iran issue, also make it necessary for Americal to develop its own oil fields to the extent possible. That urgency sometimes is in the core for the Governments to be relaxed of safety issues. But the high price that has to be paid in such a situation has become crealy visible in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill.