the big revelation from yesterday's exploding oil platform is that these platforms catch on fire and explode all the time. as the article says "roughly 100 fires" per year are reported by the u.s. coast guard. mariner energy alone (the company that owned the platform in yesterday's incident) has been involved in 13 such incidents since 2006.
this has always been a problem. it's just that until the BP deepwater disaster happened, no one paid any attention. now that these kind of incidents have caught the public's attention, we probably will be hearing about fires and explosions every once in a while from now on, creating the impression that "all of a sudden" offshore oil drilling is prone to accidents. in fact, it's always been prone to accidents. it took an unprecedented disaster to convince the media that the public would care about this sort of thing.
