BP's disastrous environmental record

Oil companies often engage in a "green offensive" that usually turns out to be an exercise in public relations, surpassed only by the "clean coal" commercials on t.v. According to my son with his Green Peace background, BP actually earned itself a "green" reputation (as compared f.ex. to Exxon, still blackened by the Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska). In the Week in Review section (NYT 6-6-10) there's an article, entitled "Even With a Cleanup, Spilled Oil Stays With Us," on the lasting effects of the Exxon Valdez spill that reminded me of my son's pictures taken on the 10th anniversary of the event. About 100 tons of oil is still in the beaches there and 2 years ago when we were in Resurrection Bay, miles to the West of the Sound, you could see a broad black line where the oil was deposited 21 years ago.

Whatever BP has done to earn its "green" reputation has been offset by the poor maintenance of its Alaskan pipeline that was the result of wilfully negligent maintenance. Poor maintenance was also the cause for the explosion at its Galveston refinery (that cost the life of several workers). And now there is more loss of life in the explosion and sinking of one of its drilling platforms 50 miles off the Louisiana coast (where other human activity all along the Mississippi River already created a large "dead zone" in the Gulf).

Oil spills always remind me of the early 1940s when my mother would take me on a summer day to visit her niece whose husband was a shrimper on the Dutch coast. Eventually the German occupiers closed the beaches (and the dunes) as they began to build their famous Atlantic Wall against and Allied invasion. But until then the beach where my cousin fished remained open. Sometimes a large oil slick, both viscous and vicious, from a torpedoed ship would foul the beach and I was told to get into clean water, for example between two sand banks at low tide. But being only 10 or 11 that was easier said than obeyed and once I came out pretty gooey. I was marched back to my cousin's and washed with soft green soap on the sidewalk in front of her house. Very embarrassing for a naked boy and amusing to most neighbors, except a worried old woman who warned that my skin might come off (her husband had been an oiler on a merchant ship). My mother was less worried, for once when I was three I had opened a barrel of tar in her dry-goods store and it took her, she oft repeated, about half a day to get the stuff off. "He's lucky, he's got a thick skin."

I waited about a month before continuing this blog [and kept on inserting info afterwards] because it turned out that from the very beginning the information released by BP and echoed by government spokesmen was far from complete. Thus the insertion of items from different dates. It now appears that BP engaged more in PR "damage control" than in the actual control of the physical damage to the Gulf which is and will be for a long time, a socio-economic and environmental catastrophe in spite of the fact that 2,5 million feet of booms were being laid almost immediately. Evidently these booms are not very effective as crews are cleaning beaches and serious amounts of oil have entered the marshes. One environmentalist reported on CNN that in places there was more oil inside the booms than outside. Some 22,000 people [when Obama visited on 5/28 BP sent in some workers dressed in colorful, Latin looking holiday outfits caught by the camera in what looked like make belief cleaning of a not very dirty beach - it was shown again on June 2 and it still looked phony, but BP learned its lesson and in a whole page advert in the NYT of June 30, it showed local people in everyday dress, but still on a very clean beach and none of them looking very hard working], 1,150 vessels are at work and almost one million gallons of dispersants have been used. In spite of the experience with the "long ago" Torrey Canyon spill in SW England, the dispersant used now is only slightly less toxic than the oil. Dispersant sounds fine, but it merely spreads the oil rather than remove it. And unlike spills from wrecked tankers, the oil gushing from the well in the Gulf only partly arrives at the surface and much is mixed with the sea water down below well out of sight and thus also not subject to the degrading effect of the sun. Does anyone know how long this oil remains in the water or if it could be filtered out or before it is carried off by underwater currents?

Among the dribbles of information that become available are the accusations by knowledgeable people (workers on the rig)that BP once again disregarded warnings and took shortcuts in maintenance procedures. It appears that those decisions were made by fairly high up company officials who apparently still live in the pre-pipeline and explosion company culture of "don't bother, nothing is likely to happen and if it does we can take care of it and let's not stop the pumping;" changes at the very top have, it seems, had very little effect. [The NYT, 5-30-10, has more specific info about earlier worries about "key links in the chain that led to disaster" and an engineer warning of a "worst-case scenario" which he had actually witnessed elsewhere. The phrase "worst-case scenario" probably made BP think everything was ok.] Under the weekly rubric "The Way We Live Now", NYT Magazine (also on 6-6-10), David Leonhardt links this oil disaster to the recent financial crisis in an article entitled "Underestimating Risk," which argues that because some disaster had not happened before it's difficult to imagine the results and thus there's no urgency in preventing it. But drilling accidents happen regularly (which is why there was a blow-out preventer) and therefore it's inexcusable - for BP - to dismiss warning signs. Ironically this mornings ad in which Tony H. was saying once again that BP will be responsible for the clean-up, etc., he was being followed without a break by the line in which Toyota announced that every one is entitled to safety and that is Toyota's first concern. And to think that almost the first English words I learned was the motto, I think of the KLM, "Safety first,"(which having seen it written I pronounced "safetti" until my father corrected me) followed by "Narrow Escape" the name that my brother painted in 1945 on our neighbors tugboat that had never been detected by the German occupiers.Now there is no escape because safety comes in second after the bottom line.

Still more disquieting is the revelation that there has been no research and thus no innovation in the technology of prevention. All research is concerned with "spill response" or disaster containment since the Exxon Valdez (that could clearly be attributed to one man, the alcoholic captain) and other spills, including the regular "minor" spills at drilling platforms from pipelines (some 11,000 barrels on average per year). Some of that "spill response" research is paid for out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund maintained by the industry. No doubt this is laudable, but it seems a tacit acceptance that oil spills are an accepted risk. And why do prevention research if you believe that "nothing is likely to happen" or you rely on some other company's "automatic blowout preventer technology" (and how was that tested on deep water wells?) It was also revealed that the blow out preventer's reliability was less than 50%!!! In the Cong. hearing with the 5 CEO's they four others said that they could deal with spills, but their documents show that theirs are almost identical copies of BP's. Don't they know their lies are going to be found out?

The environmental catastrophe has become a reality and even the British CEO, Tony Hayward, of BP has finally admitted this. Oil is daily shown to penetrate the marshes and oiled animals are found dead in many places. There is of course no telling what is going on below the surface, for ex. on nearby deep sea coral reefs. Everyday more sq. miles are closed to fishing and cleaners are having health problems from breathing fumes of the floating oil they try to capture.

The financial cost, not to mention the emotional pain of the people, of this ongoing spill can only be estimated. BP's paper losses (the decline in the price of its shares) are enormous and its pay-outs to local businesses and for the cleaning will be very very large. All of this will be paid for by BP's customers and other oil/gas users, by the tax payer who has to make up for BP's reduced tax bill and in a general increase in the price of food, etc. And in spite of all the talk that BP will pay all legitimate claims and the cleanup will not cost a dime for the American taxpayer (in a commercial where Hayward is shown against the background of a clean beach being cleaned by more holiday dressed people), there will be long term residual costs long after experts and courts have decided that the clean-up is complete or BP is bankrupt and taken over.

Today (June 9) the Media talk about some more imprecise information from BP, this time about the amount of oil that still spouts out after the cap was placed on the well while some is siphoned off; the estimates are now close to 40,000 barrels or about an Exxon Valdez every 10 days or so. Also: a Reuters' Newsbreak calls for the resignation of Tony H. as well as of the Chairman of the Board [who was appointed last January after a successful stunt at Swedish telecom, expecting the new job would be "smooth sailing"]. But why only those two? After all who was responsible for the choice of Tony, who looks like a nice enough guy to be the public face. He's a trained geologist, but apparently has no inkling of what oil drilling is all about. Then there is a report in today's NYT about scientist sampling the water miles away from the well to see if there are "plumes" of oil floating below the surface (which Tony said there weren't). They found the more poisonous parts of the oil in plumes at various depths well below the surface.

June 16: Obama's speech predictedly received according to which talking heads people listen to, but then almost all of the t.h. complained about O's too slow response and of course the NYT's editorials were critical also and today it's not too happy either. But today's meeting with BP execs and the possible 20 billion fund has turned opinions as people feel they will be indemnified. Perhaps. I'm afraid that big interests will manage to get the lion's share. Also in the news is a new estimate of the oil gushing into the Gulf, maybe as much as 60,000 barrels/day or an Exxon Valdez every 4 days.

The hearings this week in the House (6-16), incl. the travesty of Mr. Barton's apology to BP - and his still more pathetic retraction at the urging of his leadership who didn't want a too public image of stupidity and greed, even though Reps Bachman, Spence and the like are using the same terms in their anti-Obama soundbites - showed that there a few "wise legislators." For these hardened ideologues R. Emanuel's "Never let a crisis go to waste," comes in handy. Tony H. used the legalese equivalent of the Fifth Amendment (and was removed from his job in the Gulf by BP the next day) but could not deny the long cost cutting and resulting failures that was spelled out in documents. But this week also clearly shows that Minerals Management section of the Interior Department continued in its lax oversight, etc. after its scandalous practices were well known, even under Secr. Salazar, who as a Republican from Oklahoma was closely connected to that bureau's personnel.

It's pretty clear that the Oil Companies, like the Wallstreet financial firms (and whoever else, habitually misrepresent the facts in the documents required to obtain government approval, licenses and whatever and in spite of Enron, etc. they get away with it.

And of course, all resulting costs are ultimately born by the consumer at large even if the most immediate cost is born by the families on the Gulf Coast (and that not only in jobs lost - perhaps for a very long time - but also in emotional insecurity. I was really shocked by an interview with a late-middle age shrimper who said:"What can I do? I don't know how to write and I can't read." It brought home the disgrace of the total disconnect between corporate decision making (and its callous disregard of its consequences)and the life of those who are ultimately at its mercy.

The preliminary reports issued in Sept. 2010, by the President's own select committee indicate that the Obama Admin. too was lowballing the damage and even tried to prevent independent scholars from publising their findings. The Adm. was alo eager to agree that the Gulf "was clean" and the oil dissipated, while in fact much of the oil had sunk to the bottom. Not very hopeful if the pronouncements at the top are sabotaged down the line (if that's what happenend).

March 22, 2011: Because of the nuclear disaster in Japan and that government's reluctance to provide information (not unlike the case of Three Mile Island) the US govt's poor record in this BP oil catastrophe came to mind. And today the NYT published in its Science Section an interview with a marine scientist whose study group discovered the gas plumes that remained below the surface and whose existence was denied. The members of the study group were dismissed as poor scientists because "they had talked to the press before having published a [scientific] paper."
The interview also deals with the lasting impact of the catastrophy on the ocean floor which looks "like a graveyard." Meanwhile BP has been plastering the t.v. since early 2012 with scenes of pristine beaches and other info that shows all is well and good now, just "cme on down."