And (surprise, surprise) I already knew from several sources that Halliburton was. It's actually NOT surprising, since Brown and Root made its fortune off oil pipe on the Gulf long before becoming a subsidiary of Halliburton.

As to the comparison, I wasn't trying to compare the legality of it, only the magnitude. Calling this a "leak" is a bit of an understatement, both in terms of effect and cause. "Leaks" don't typically result in a dozen fatalities. Every discussion I've heard of how it started uses words like "explosion" so calling this a "leak" is a bit of an understatement; if it's gushing thousands of gallons a day, my bathtub faucet doesn't "leak" that much. That was what I was trying to illustrate with the tire analogy; a "leak" is like "oh, look at that, my tire's flat; I didn't even know I had a leak. " This is more along the lines of "yeah, the airbag totally deployed, and that helped (some. )" For the sake of argument, however, I think "extremely stupid both legally and health wise" are very much on the table.

Oh, and in digging around for some hard data on this I found a rather extensive list of BP accidents that, among other things, revealed they can tell you EXACTLY how long it's been since Texas City exploded: Seems they were the cause last time; go fig....