Who Is to Blame for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill?

On April 20th, 2010, methane gas from an underwater well at the Gulf of Mexico shot up under high pressure and out of the drill, expanded and then exploded, causing 11 workers missing and never found.   On the afternoon of the April 22nd, 2010, a large oil slick began to leak through the former rig site, and after an unsuccessfully attempt to cap the well, BP, the oil company which proposed the drill, announced that a damaged wellhead was “a very serious spill” leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.   An estimate by the Riser Insertion Tube Tool is between 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day, the largest oil spill in US history.   The US government has named BP responsible for the spill, and another common name for the spill is “BP oil spill”, but was it only the fault of BP?   I believe that there were multiple parties that could do something before it happened and should be held responsible for the spill, include the Minerals Management Service, Halliburton, a multinational engineering firm, and BP, the operator of the rig.
The well was in the boundaries of the United States, so obviously, something could be done by the United States Federal Government, especially the Minerals Management Service.   According to the article “Leaking Oil Well Lacked Safeguard Device” from The Wall Street Journal, the oil well spewing crude in the Gulf of Mexico was lacking a remote-control shut-off switch, called the acoustic switch, used in two other major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, as last-resort protection against underwater spills.   The US doesn’t mandate the use of an acoustic switch on offshore rigs, which directly resulted in the lack of it on the Deepwater Horizon.   If the device was used, the crew could attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself was damaged or evacuated.   So why did the US not require the device?   Studies show it is because they question the device was capable of cutting through the pipes.   If the...