Texas' Governor Must Want BP and other Responsible Parties to Pay Nothing
This one goes into the WTF category. The Sun Herald reports:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry says it's not wise to speculate about what caused an explosion and massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And he's defending his use of the term "act of God" to describe the disaster.
Perry said Tuesday the phrase is a legal definition and that his point is "nobody knows what happened" at the oil rig off the Louisiana coast. The undersea well has been spewing 200,000 gallons of oil a day.
Perry is right about one thing. An act of god is a legal definition. Under the Oil Pollution Act (OPA), an act of god is one of only three defenses to liability for an oil spill. If BP, Transocean, et al. can convince a court that the spill was an act of god, then they owe nothing for the clean up and damages caused.
But don’t worry. Perry is dead wrong. According to the Environmental Law Handbook (20th ed), courts have interpreted the OPA act of god defense to be very narrow—more narrow than the common law act of god defense. The statutory language of OPA has three elements: the natural phenomenon must be: (1) exceptional; (2) inevitable; and (3) irresistible.
Like maybe a big hurricane blowing a rig over and causing a spill. Here, there was no “natural phenomenon.” There was an explosion. An Explosion is not a natural phenomenon. Or an act of god.
Governor Perry, just because something was an accident doesn’t mean it was an act of god. Come on Governor, you can’t really think that.
do we know it was an accident? The kick from the surge of the bubble was HUGE from what I have read and it may have been something that overwhelmed their controls.
Kingfish, The Oil Pollution Act is strict liability so unless one of the three defenses applies BP buys the damage. So it doesn't matter if the surge was huge or not.
As for the personal injury claims many will fall under the Jones Act which also has a strict liability basis for unseaworthiness, and I venture to say it won't be hard to prove the rig was unseaworthy even if your point proves true.