How do you prevent oil spills from happening again in the future?

Answer 1

Prevention

• Seafood Sensory Training- in an effort to detect oil in seafood, Inspectors and regulators are being trained to to sniff out seafood tainted by oil in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure the product reaching consumers is safe to eat.
• Secondary containment - methods to prevent releases of oil or hydrocarbons into environment.
• Oil Spill Prevention Containment and Countermeasures (SPCC) program by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
• Double-hulling - build double hulls into vessels, which reduces the risk and severity of a spill in case of a collision or grounding. Existing single-hull vessels can also be rebuilt to have a double hull.

Answer 2

I wish I had a simple answer. At present there are major investigations on going:

1) House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce

2) National Academy of Engineering

3) Joint investigation by Minerals Management Service and US Coast Guard

4) White House Special Investigation

5) BP Internal Investigations

BP has taken the initiative in breaking down the problems that occurred as: 1) Well integrity failed, meaning there was opportunity for oil to flow into the wellbore 2) Flow was not recognized in time to take preventative actions 3) Blowout preventer failed to actuate 4) Emergency disconnect system was activated too late, and failed.

Further it seems that the action taked by BP to displace the drilling mud with seawater made things worse.

So a sequence of events occurred which prior to the accident were thought to be highly unlikely. There will be at the completion of these investigations, numerous recommendations. Procedures for identifying adequate cementing and working blow out preventers will receive, I believe, the most scrutiny. BP stated they would retrieve the blow out preventers from the ocean floor after the well has been capped (mid August).

Answer 3

By actually introducing some safety protocols for the situation. The companies haven't dealt with anything like a major pipeline leak before so they got complacent and didn't bother. The companies could also work on better ways of capping pipelines with some of their billions.

Answer 4

stop using as much oil