After the accident, BP CEO Tony Hayward said of blowout preventers in general: "It's unprecedented for it to fail." Yet the AP review turned up instances where preventer seals have failed outright, ...

Cutoff valves like the one that failed to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster have repeatedly broken down at other wells in the years since federal regulators weakened testing requirements, according ...

NEW ORLEANS -- Until the Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010, killing 11 men and setting off a three-month oil gusher, most of us never heard of a blowout preventer. Now, this 400-ton, four-stories ...

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--When things go wrong in an offshore oil and gas drilling project, the blowout preventer is the last line of defense to keep an accident or unexpected event from turning into ...

The same fatal flaws that ailed the blowout preventer lurking below the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig are just as prevalent today as they were on April 20, 2010, when a gas bubble exploded and ...

Accurate conclusions about what caused the blowout of BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and the massive spill that followed will have to wait for a key piece of equipment to be raised from the ...

These steel monsters known as blowout preventers or BOPs _ sometimes as big as a double-decker bus and weighing up to 640,000 pounds _ guard the mouth of wells. They act as the last defense to choke ...