Trace Adkins, who spent nearly a decade working in the oil fields before beginning his singing career, calls the recent moratorium in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico due to the BP oil spill “ridiculous.”
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting oil leak, a six-month ban on deepwater drilling was put into effect.
Adkins, who spent six years working on rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, told CNN's Anderson Cooper, "Safety was always the No. 1 priority for us. We had safety meetings continually. It was just a routine thing. And, yes, anybody from a roustabout up to a tool pusher had the responsibility to point out anything that they saw that they thought was unsafe."
Adkins places the blame for the spill on TransOcean, the company that operated the Deepwater Horizon.
"There had to be a company man that was pressuring and forcing somebody, you know, at TransOcean, to do something that they probably didn't think was safe, and somehow, somebody's objections got overridden, and that's unfortunate," Adkins said.
Adkins likens the moratorium to “kicking a man when he’s down.”
"I don't know how many tens of thousands of wells have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico since we've been doing it. But how many times have you heard about this happening? I think that's a pretty good track record, you know. And to punish American companies for something that a British company did. ... This moratorium is not going to stop anybody else. It's not going to stop British companies. It's not going to stop anybody else," Adkins said.
Source: CMT.com
