Drill, baby, Dr…::kaboom::

Via Avedon, Suburban Guerrilla’s Susie Madrak comes up with this wonderful fact (from AMTI’s (a SAIC company) Rigzone):

The Gulf of Mexico is estimated to have as much as 31 million pounds of UXO [unexploded ordnance] lining its floor.

Read the whole of Susie’s article.

Now, in fairness, as one of her commenters points out, that’s almost certainly not the cause of the current debacle. BP had drilled into the oil deposit. If there were ordnance, they probably would have hit it when they first hit seabed. So, while one can’t absolutely rule out stray WW I artillery shells or WW II mines as a cause, it’s about as likely a cause as a North Korean torpedo.

Still. If Interior did not even review the application, it means they didn’t even consider the risks.

One of the links that Susie posts is this:

Two of the latest directives from the Minerals Management Service indicate a growing concern about Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) located in close proximity to deepwater exploration and development sites within the Gulf of Mexico (NTLs 2006-G12 and 2007-G01)

Now, this is unsourced and I haven’t been able to find those directives. However, the following cute little map shows that BP was indeed drilling very near ordnance disposal areas: