A University of California, Berkeley, professor known for blaming the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina will issue a report in December that will most likely blame BP PLC and Transocean Ltd. for April's Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Robert Bea, who has worked with BP, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, NASA and others to help with crisis management and training, has assembled a 60-person panel to discover whom to point fingers at for the explosion and subsequent oil spill. He previously has put out a paper asserting that oil blowouts could be avoided by crisis management.

"I think the paper was probably read by two people and never implemented," he said. Bea added the Deepwater Horizon disaster could have been avoided if rig workers had reacted to warning signs in the hour before the explosion.

Bea built levees in Florida with the Army Corps in 1950s and lived in the state in 1965 when his house was destroyed as Hurricane Betsy hit the Gulf Coast. His criticism of the Katrina response, the hate mail from which gave him post-traumatic stress disorder, came partly as a result of that.

Bea said that few people seem to care about the potential for disasters that are often preventable.

"We're not doing anything positive," he said. "It almost has to be a zero-sum game. It's scary and discouraging" (Matt Krupnick, Contra Costa [Calif.] Times, Sept. 27). -- AP