The linked article has some interesting information, if true. Unfortunately a lot of the information presented is a statement from a Congressman, who while he may be a fine upstanding person, does not have credentials or work experience (outside of legislative committees) in this very complex and specialized field of engineering.

Much of the information presented seems to be out of context, like the 260 failure modes reference. Safety critical engineering always identifies lots of failure modes, ideally all of them, then you assign probabilities to the modes and evaluate the impact. Based on probabilities and impacts you build in redundancy, mitigations, or other means of addressing the failures until you meet the safety criteria.

Nothing is 100% failsafe. Airliners are statistically the safest way to travel and have lots of safety critical systems. These systems have a design criteria of less than one catastrophic failure (loss of airplane etc.) per 1x10^9 hours of flight. This is mandated by government regulation. I don't know what the criteria for oil field equipment is or what if any regulations exist. I suspect there are few if any and most of the current practices are the industries attempt at self regulation / best practices. It would be interesting to see what sort of safety analysis / fault trees exist for the BOP and offshore oil equipment.

oh, just FYI - not personally a fan of the oil companies or some of their practices, just trying to add to a constructive discussion.

- Eric