for years to come. joining us now is bob cavnar. he s a 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry. he s currently the ceo of luca technologies, which is in the natural gas industry. before that he was president and ceo of an oil and gas drilling exploration firm called milagro exploration. he s also author of the book disaster on the horizon: high stakes, high risks, and the story behind the deepwater well blowout. bob cavnar helped us explain and understand that disaster as it was happening, as we reported it here on msnbc. bob, it s nice to see you again. thanks for joining us tonight. great to be with you, rachel. thank you. the interior department has gone to great lengths to assure us that the permits they re handing out now are the result of new safety measures that the oil industry has implemented since the bp disaster. we tried to get a hold of additional documents laying out what all those safety measures
inspection happened right now it would find essentially a defective or at least poorly effective piece of equipment? what that inspection would find is superficial issues like hydraulic leaks, lines that weren t connected, those kinds of things. but inspecting an unreliable device that has a design flaw built into it doesn t change the function and doesn t change the lack of function if something goes wrong and it fails during a blowout. bob cavnar, 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, author of disaster on the horizon about the bp disaster. bob, thank you very much for your time tonight. really appreciate it. happy to be with you, rachel. thanks. you know, in political science they always say in political science they always say, they caution you to say don t make public policies based on disasters. don t overreact to one in a million events. yeah, what s worse, doing that or having a one in a million event and then not reacting to it at all? it s just astonishing.
worse in my view. because of the moratorium and all the questions being raised about offshore production. i do think this is going to raise a lot of issues on the regulatory side. there are incidents that happen, spills or small spills and small incidents. when you have fire and when you have people in the water, you ve got a problem. i think we need to look at what those regulations are before we go forward. bob cavnar, thank you very much for your insight tonight. happy to join you, rachel. coming up on countdown, keith dismantles the case being made by republican political adviser mark mckinnon we should be missing the good old days of george w. bush. coming up, one governor s race already weird, ascended to magnificently strange heights. please stay with us.
you have enough anomalies, you have a trend. the timing of this could not be worse in my view. because of the moratorium and all the questions being raised about offshore production. i do think this is going to raise a lot of issues on the regulatory side. there are incidents that happen, spills or small spills and small incidents. when you have fire and when you have people in the water, you ve got a problem. i think we need to look at what those regulations are before we go forward. bob cavnar, thank you very much for your insight tonight. happy to join you, rachel. coming up on countdown, keith dismantles the case being made by republican political adviser mark mckinnon we should be missing the good old days of george w. bush. coming up, one governor s race already weird, ascended to
this will not be done until we do the bottom kill. wait, there s more. oil industry expert bob cavnar warning us engineers might regret cementing the well from above too soon. with today s procedure, he said bp sealed off the only way it has to tell what s really been going on below the surface. something it will want to know when the company intercepts the blown-out well with the relief well. if any part of the well in between the cement plug above and relief wells below has ruptured, they will have no way of gauging the pressure to find out whether or not that has happened. that the well hasn t been killed from the top, the clean upstill to follow, doesn t stop the administration from saying the long battle in the gulf is far from over. president obama repeating his claim today at a ford plant in chicago, returning to the phrases he used at similar events recently, like made in america and number one again.