BP Could Have EASILY Contained the Gulf Oil Spill AND the Exxon Valdez Spill ... But They Were Too Cheap to Do It → Washingtons Blog
BP Could Have EASILY Contained the Gulf Oil Spill AND the Exxon Valdez Spill ... But They Were Too Cheap to Do It - Washingtons Blog

Saturday, May 8, 2010

BP Could Have EASILY Contained the Gulf Oil Spill AND the Exxon Valdez Spill ... But They Were Too Cheap to Do It


In a new expose, award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast shows that BP was largely responsible for the Exxon Valdez spill:

In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

***

Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

***

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

Palast also shows that BP could have easily contained the Gulf oil spill, but was too cheap to do so:

Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

Due to it's cutting corners, BP has caused many other disasters as well (and see this).

But like the Wall Street giants, BP uses its political muscle to escape regulation. And it looks like nothing is changing.

Update: AP is now covering this story. as well.

7 comments:

  1. One wonders if this were 1948 and the country involved were the Soviet Union, what approach Josef Stalin may have taken to an industry management failure of this description?

    Andrei Vyshinsky

    ReplyDelete
  2. Greg Palast is just simply not a credible reporter. Booms would have had little effect on oil comming from 5,00 feet down. Wave action was breaking it up on the surface and washing over the booms. At this point the exact cause of the blowout is unknown and Palast is sure not going to understand it from an engineering standpoint.

    I wonder if, when he has an oil change, he follows those five quarts to ensure there is no resulting pollution from his activety. Isn't he the one ultimately responsible for the disposal of his own waste?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am looking at the evidence that a catastrophic oil spill -has occurred. I am unconvinced of this on the public evidence.

    I see a large amount of hysteria about a few pictures, a big explosion, a few deaths, some questionable satellite pictures, and a great deal of press speculation about the ecology, -but very little in the way of evidence of a massive oil spill on anyone's beaches.

    This is NOT Katrina. It's not Exxon Valdiz.

    It looks to me to be much more a "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinski."

    Sure, there's an oil spill.

    There is a huge upside for Obama, the oil industry looking to drill all the coastal waters, Wall Street, and the interests of slime and greed at large, -should this whole "disaster" suddenly prove Obama's greatest day in saving the planet like the SuperMan he is continually being portrayed to be.

    And the supposed mystery about the stock market drop? Well, that fits in very neatly, because if the stock market is going to SOAR on the news that SuperMan has saved the Gulf, it had to be driven down the-way-it-was -first.

    I'm not convinced than that this isn't just another Swine Flu-like concoction of the propagandists.

    Where's the BEEF? No, there likely will be no beef, just more bull-crap to obfuscate reality.

    ReplyDelete
  4. 'I see a large amount of hysteria about a few pictures, a big explosion, a few deaths, some questionable satellite pictures, and a great deal of press speculation about the ecology, -but very little in the way of evidence of a massive oil spill on anyone's beaches.'

    what a moron !!! - are u a BP, Wall St., Big oil shill or just a hick ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. The comments so far reflect fully the insanity of the American people and why they deserve everything they have coming. Enjoy your oil "spill" and the economic outcome. I'll be sure to buy lots of American goods with my strong Canadian dollar.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Simple surface barriers cannot contain suboceanic oil plumes that depend on currents at depth.

    That being said, BP could have capped the well early on, but chose oil recovery as their top priority. They only ramped up efforts to stop the
    water intrusion, when slicks reached the shoreline.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Greg is very credible... its BP you should be doubting. Go to these sites for info http://www.flashpoints.net/
    http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/18/headlines#1
    There is a huge coverup. the university researchers are saying they are finding 10 mile long rivers of oil in layers down to 2000 feet headed to Fl. Wake up folks. BP needs to be shut down.

    ReplyDelete

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