So much for British Petroleum’s forecasting. Just last year the firm claimed that it was “unlikely” that its Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico would ever generate a major spill. Even if one did occur, “no significant adverse impacts” were likely, BP said, because of the rig’s distance from shore and modern cleanup techniques.

The April 20 explosion that destroyed the rig and killed 11 workers has shattered that assurance. What Florida Gov. Charlie Crist calls an “underground volcano of oil,” spilling nearly 800,000 litres a day, now threatens Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Wetlands and beaches are in harm’s way. So are sea mammals, migratory birds, fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs.

U.S. President Barack Obama calls it a “massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” It could take months to fix, and surpass the 1989 Exxon Valdez 40 million litre spill.

As Canadians ponder this wreckage some question whether our own Arctic and offshore drilling safeguards are adequate.

In the Commons on Monday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper insisted they are. He described the spill as “horrific,” and vowed that Ottawa will continue to enforce relatively “stronger” policies to protect workers and the environment. The Conservatives seem alert to the political risk, at least, of letting oil and gas drillers call the shots.

The Deepwater Horizon crisis comes as BP Canada and other firms have been lobbying the National Energy Board to relax safety regulations in the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a highly sensitive zone. The NEB now wants to grill them about the Gulf disaster and its implications here. That, too, is a good thing.

Canadian rules require firms to drill a “relief well” in the same season as the original well, as a safeguard against leaks. Drillers can use relief wells to plug leaking pipes. But BP Canada and other major energy companies are telling the NEB that they can’t complete relief wells in the short Arctic drilling season, and they say that modern preventive safety engineering makes relief wells unnecessary.

That argument would be more persuasive if technology hadn’t failed so spectacularly to avert the Gulf disaster.

BP plans to lower a huge concrete-and-metal box to the seabed, over the broken pipe, to capture and siphon off the oil to a barge on the surface. The backup plan is to drill a relief well to plug the hemorrhage. That ought to tell the NEB what it needs to know.