Posts tagged ‘oil spill’
Oil spill waste raises concerns in the gulf
Even though BP‘s busted well has stopped spewing oil, the disaster is still generating tons of soiled boom and other oily waste that federal and state laws allow to be buried at specially designated dumps, some near residential neighborhoods.
Officials in one Mississippi area, however, raised concerns about the magnitude and safety of the oil spill waste being buried nearby. On Thursday, Harrison County officials blocked it from being dumped in their community — potentially opening the door for others in the region to do the same.
County supervisors voted in June to stop BP from dumping waste at subcontractor Waste Management Inc.‘s Pecan Grove landfill in Pass Christian, Miss. When Waste Management balked, the county board commissioned independent testing of the waste and subpoenaed the company’s test results that reportedly showed it was not hazardous.
But rather than prolong the dispute, BP and Waste Management decided to stop dumping at Pecan Grove. The county, however, has continued with its waste testing and results are pending, said Tim Holleman, the county board’s attorney.
“Ultimately, I think people will raise the same issue elsewhere,” Holleman said.
A BP spokesman confirmed the agreement but defended the company’s waste management plan.
“This is industrial waste, and it’s suitable for industrial landfills,” said BP spokesman Mark Proegler. “If the localities have concerns about that, we’re certainly willing to talk with them.”
Spill waste is hauled from beaches and the ocean to more than 50 regional storage sites in all four gulf states, where it is packaged for shipment to recyclers, liquid waste processors and landfills. So far the spill has generated about 35,600 tons of solid waste.
In Louisiana, the formerly abandoned Grand Isle Shipyard has been transformed into a waste storage site, where about 150 workers pump oil from skimmer boats into storage tanks. More than 7.7 million gallons of oily liquid waste have been collected. At the docks, workers dump plastic bags of oily debris into dozens of dumpsters.
The sprawling operation is indicative of the cleanup industry that has grown out of the nation’s worst oil spill disaster. The now-capped well was spewing as many as 60,000 barrels of oil a day since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
“Typically with a spill you’d have a bell-shaped curve where you deploy the boom, recover it and go home,” said Joe Kramer, project manager with BP subcontractor Miller Environmental Services Inc. “It’s more of an ongoing operation here.”
Waste samples are tested at storage sites by BP subcontractors to ensure they are, by law, nonhazardous. Much oil industry waste is not considered hazardous under a 1980 exemption carved out of the federal law.
Oil waste can be dumped in industrial-graded landfills, which are more strictly monitored than municipal dumps but not as isolated or restricted as hazardous waste sites.
“These are the type of facilities you want this waste to go to,” said Sam Phillips, solid waste permits administrator for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. “If something goes wrong, there are things we can do to prevent it from getting into a drinking-water aquifer.”
Members of the Gulf Coast congressional delegation said they intended to hold BP accountable for the health and safety of communities where spill waste was dumped.
“Gulf Coast residents have a right to be concerned about the waste placed in their landfills, and BP and its agents should do everything they can to work with local officials to address these concerns,” said Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) after a trip to spill-affected areas this month.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said tests by BP and her agency had shown that oil spill waste was not hazardous.
“The constituents of most of it are industrial waste, not hazardous, man-made chemicals, and it’s testing that way,” said Jackson, a chemical engineer by training. To reassure residents, Jackson ordered more EPA testing last month and required BP to release more information about waste testing, tracking and disposal.
But many gulf residents still worry.
“Anything that’s man-made can fail,” Harrison County Supervisor Marlin Ladner, a Mississippi lawmaker, said of the landfills. “The rig shows us that.”
Source: LA Times
Gulf spill lacks societal punch of Santa Barbara
WASHINGTON — In 1969, Sen. Gaylord Nelson was so moved after seeing the devastation of an oil spill off the California coast near Santa Barbara that he called for a national teach-in on the environment. The following year the resulting “Earth Day” kick-started the modern environmental movement and shaped the way Americans thought about their air, water and soil.
Forty years later, the magnitude of the Gulf oil spill far exceeds Santa Barbara’s spill of up to 100,000 barrels, but there hasn’t been a comparable societal transformation.
Last week, legislation imploded in the Senate to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, derailing environmentalists’ top goal, and no national consensus has emerged to move America off oil and other fossil fuels into clean energy. Even a new more modest Senate bill, aimed at boosting energy efficiency and preventing oil spills, faces an uncertain future.
Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat who had long championed the environment, laid out the idea of a teach-in during a speech in Seattle. He wrote the speech on napkins while flying there, recalls his daughter, Tia Nelson.
The senator’s call inspired the first Earth Day, with millions participating across the country, including 2,000 college campuses and 10,000 elementary and high schools. Congress adjourned so lawmakers could give speeches. In 1970, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act into law.
Worries about air pollution, the dangers of DDT and polluted rivers from industrial wastes played a part. But the Santa Barbara spill was the catalyst. It “triggered a social movement and helped to create a new politics, the politics of ecology,” mystery novelist Ross Macdonald once wrote.
In contrast, President Barack Obama last month used an Oval Office speech to push for clean energy, but Republicans accused him of trying exploit the Gulf tragedy for political gain. The president took it from both sides, as some liberal commentators faulted him for failing to specifically back a cap on carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.
The Gulf spill is estimated between 94 million and 184 million gallons, far worse than Santa Barbara’s total. But the 10-day spill from a well blowout six miles offshore covered miles of California’s sandy beaches with a thick, oily sludge. Pictures of dead seals, dolphins and thousands of birds captured the nation’s attention.
“Santa Barbara’s psychological effect was huge, and it really got into the American mind in ways that clean air and clean water and other things had a hard time doing because they weren’t personified,” says Oliver A. Houck, who teaches environmental law at Tulane University in New Orleans. “So why hasn’t BP yet had the same transformative effect? When Santa Barbara came along it was a big deal. When BP comes along, there are so many big deals that it has a hard time competing for attention. That said, I think it’s got an enormous national play.”
The Santa Barbara spill featured its own version of Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP who angered people early on with comments such as “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” playing down the potential environmental impact.
In February 1969, Fred Hartley, the Canadian-born head of Union Oil Co., which owned the Santa Barbara well, told a Senate hearing in Washington:
“I am always tremendously impressed at the publicity that the death of birds receives vs. the loss of people in our country in this day and age.”
Noting there had been no loss of human lives from the Santa Barbara well blowout, Hartley added, “Relative to the number of deaths that have occurred in this fair city due to crime … it does seem that we should give this thing a little perspective.”
Hartley rejected calls to halt offshore drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel, citing arguments similar to those employed by opponents of the Obama administration’s moratorium. Hartley said he told Ronald Reagan, California’s governor then, that it would be like “making a decision to shut down the whole university educational system because there is a riot in San Francisco.”
Lois Capps, now a Democratic congresswoman representing Santa Barbara, was a young stay-at-home mother in 1969 who would often take her two children to the beaches there.
“It shaped my views along with everyone in the region,” she says. “It was such a devastating event. The spill was much closer to the shore, so we felt its impact sooner and more directly than this long, drawn-out affair we’re having in the Gulf.”
Capps says there has been a strong reaction in Congress to the BP Gulf spill, with dozens of hearings and several pieces of legislation making their way through the House and Senate. But it’s too early to draw conclusions about a societal shift, she says.
“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Capps says. “I think these things build like a tidal wave.”
Gaylord Nelson’s speech calling for a teach-in came eight months after the January 1969 spill, and the resulting Earth Day didn’t take place until more than a year later — April 1970. And it was not until 1981 that Congress imposed a ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s coastal waters, an action widely attributed to the memories of the Santa Barbara spill a dozen years earlier. The moratorium endured for a quarter century, until Congress lifted it in 2008.
“I think we’re going to see a really significant response to what happened in the Gulf played out over time,” says Sarah Chasis, ocean initiative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I think it’s going to affect people’s consciousness, thinking, the way they approach issues for a long time.”
There are signs this is starting to happen. An Associated Press poll last month found that 72 percent of Americans rated the environment as extremely important or very important — up from 64 percent in May and 59 percent in April.
Actor Ted Danson, a board member for the international ocean conservation group Oceana, says the focus has until now been stopping the leak.
“I am hopeful. I think the time will come,” Danson says. “Oil is a very, very powerful lobby. And the basic feeling out in the world, and I think mostly created by people whose interests are in oil, is that alternative energy is a very sweet, kind, loving thought, but certainly its day has not come. We need oil.”
James “Bud” Bottoms, a Santa Barbara resident who co-founded “Get Oil Out” in 1969, says the Gulf spill reminded him of those days.
“The same thing happened here,” says Bottoms, now 82. “We stood there on our banks and saw our harbors and beaches black, about two or three inches of thick goo. We stood here and cried along our beach. We thought our lives were over here in Santa Barbara.”
Bottoms penned a children’s book in 1969 called “Davey and the GOM,” which wasn’t published until 2008. “GOM” stands for “Giant Oil Monster.”
It’s also the acronym the offshore drilling industry and government regulators use for something else: The Gulf of Mexico.
Source: MSNBC
Oil-eating Whale or ‘white elephant’?
The fancifully named A Whale, a seagoing behemoth converted into what its owners are calling the world’s biggest oil skimmer, is being billed as a cleanup hitter in the effort to prevent millions of gallons of oil spewing from BP’s ruptured well from ever reaching shore.
TMT, the Taiwanese company that owns the massive ship, estimates that it can suck as much as 500,000 barrels of oily water a day through its “jaws” — six ports cut into each side near its bow — and remove much of the crude through a “decanting” process using internal separation tanks.
“In the final stage, the filtered water can be returned to the ocean while the heavy oil residue is transferred to tankers for storage and final disposition,” TMT says in promotional materials outlining what it calls “the best solution to the Gulf of Mexico spill crisis.”
It will float across the Gulf “like a lawnmower cutting the grass,” effectively doubling the skimming capability of the oil response effort, CEO Nobu Su told reporters last week in Norfolk, Va., during a stopover at which company officials revealed what they hope will be the A Whale’s new mission.
But before the 1,115-foot-long ship with the big blue whale on funnel has even undergone testing, some experts are questioning whether it can fulfill those lofty expectations.
“I don’t think the concept is that bad, but I don’t see how in this situation it’s going to be a significant player,” said Dennis Bryant, a former Coast Guard officer who worked on implementing regulations required by the Oil Pollution Act
of 1990 before retiring and starting a maritime consulting business in Gainesville, Fla.
“In a case like the Exxon Valdez spill, where you had a lot of oil on the surface in a confined area, a vessel like this could have gone in and sucked up a whole lot,” he said. “But in the Gulf, where the oil is pretty well dispersed over a vast area, I don’t see how it’s going to make a large dent.”
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California alternative energy legislation gets broad backing
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is spurring California legislators and conflicting interest groups to settle past differences and adopt the nation’s toughest renewable energy law to reduce the state’s dependence on oil and serve as a model for other states.
The effort is supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is eager to burnish his environmental legacy before leaving office in January even though he vetoed a similar bill last fall.
Both the governor and the Democrats who control the Legislature want to require privately and publicly owned electric utilities to generate one-third of their power from wind, solar and other clean sources by 2020.
After last fall’s veto, Schwarzenegger issued an executive order unilaterally imposing the 33% renewable standard. But Democrats denounced the action as mainly symbolic because it does not bind future governors.
This year, Democrats came back with a compromise bill, which has its first legislative hearing Thursday in the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee.
“One needs only to look to the Gulf of Mexico and the tragedy and what happens when you just rely on oil,” Schwarzenegger said at an alternative fuel summit last week. “It is shameful how desperate and how dependent we have become on fossil fuels.”
With images of gushing crude and oil-covered birds dominating TV screens, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, Susan P. Kennedy, said environmentalists, utilities generators, labor unions and other industry groups that waged war over last year’s bill now are meeting at least weekly and are closing in on a deal.
“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “There’s always been a consensus around the goal. It’s simply a matter of identifying what the obstacles are in the implementation.”
For Full Article Click HERE
Spill-related measures advance in Congress
A congressional stampede to pass oil spill legislation gathered momentum Thursday as a Senate committee voted to impose tougher penalties on water polluters, and lawmakers unveiled a comprehensive bill to strengthen environmental and safety rules on offshore drilling.
The measures expected to move forward in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout also include a rewrite of decades-old maritime liability law and a tightening of ethics rules for officials who oversee offshore drilling.
“The incident is a game-changer in the way we manage America’s offshore energy resources,” said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), who introduced the measure to strengthen off-shore drilling regulations.
The flurry of activity came as alarm continued to mount on the Gulf Coast. A mass of tar balls swept into the Mississippi sound, a biologically rich area surrounding Mississippi’s barrier islands. And Florida officials closed a quarter-mile section of the popular Casino Beach in Pensacola Beach after thick masses of oil washed ashore.
“It’s pretty ugly — there’s no question about it,” said Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.
It is unclear whether Congress will pass a series of individual measures or wrap legislation into a sweeping energy bill that would also seek to boost renewable resources and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
That legislation, which had passed the House but stalled in the Senate before the oil spill, is backed by President Obama and many Democrats as a way to address global warming. But it is opposed by the oil industry and other businesses, along with most Republican lawmakers who say it will boost energy costs.
The lack of consensus was evident Thursday as lawmakers broke into partisan finger-pointing over the administration’s efforts to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.
Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, accused the administration of “putting ideology over scientific integrity” in imposing the moratorium. During a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, he also attacked the presidential commission that is investigating the rig explosion as “stacked with people who philosophically oppose offshore exploration.”
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who was testifying before the committee, shot back: “There is nothing political about this. It’s an issue about safety and making sure that we’re protecting the environment.”
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BP’s new plan risks worsening oil spill
The risky maneuver, part of an attempt to contain the gusher and divert the oil through a pipe to the surface, could begin Monday or Tuesday.
Administration and BP officials on Sunday sought to shift attention from last week’s failed attempt to choke the well by focusing on expectations that a new cap could divert much of the leaking oil from the fragile ecosystem of the gulf.
But behind those assurances was the frank admission that the disaster response has fallen back to containment and surface cleanup, not closure, until a relief well reaches the gushing well bore in August and enables engineers to install cement plugs.
“We’re now going to move into a situation where they’re going to attempt to control the oil that’s coming out, move it to a vessel, take it onshore,” White House energy advisor Carol Browner told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Obviously that’s not the preferred scenario. We always knew that the relief well was the permanent way to close this.… Now we move to the third option, which is to contain it.”
Browner and BP Managing Director Bob Dudley said a tighter fit and use of warm fluids could prevent a repeat of the first containment effort, which was clogged when methane hydrates congealed inside a containment dome, blocking the flow to the surface and making the dome buoyant.
“If it’s a snug fit, then there could be very, very little oil. If they’re not able to get as snug a fit, then there could be more,” Browner said of the new cap. “We’re going to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”
Dudley, in his round of appearances on Sunday’s talk shows, expressed greater confidence in the new cap.
“We feel like the percentages are better that we’ll be able to contain the oil,” he told Fox News. “The question is how much of the oil will we be able to contain and the objective is to try to collect the majority through this vessel.”
At the administration’s insistence, Browner said, BP is drilling a second relief well in case the first fails to reach the well. The drilling could have the same challenges that the blown-out well faced — loose formations that caused a loss of drilling fluid, and at least one case of a pipe segment getting stuck, along with expensive instruments inside it, that had to be abandoned, according to BP documents.
In BP’s new effort, robots would use a diamond saw to cut the leaking and crumbled riser pipe cleanly from atop the failed blowout preventer and then install a cap to allow much of the oil to be pumped up to a ship on the surface.
Dudley told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the pipe was not restricting much flow, so severing it should not greatly increase the volume of oil spouting from the well.
“There may be a small increase,” he said. “But we should not expect to see a large increase, if any, by cutting this off and making a clean surface for us to be able to put this containment vessel over it.”
Dudley said on ABC’s “This Week” that BP “learned a lot” from the earlier containment failure, and this time it plans to pump warm seawater and methanol down the pipe to prevent the gases from freezing.
Browner said on CBS that Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a team of scientists on Saturday essentially put a halt to BP’s attempt to cap the spewing well with a process known as “top kill,” which injected drilling mud and other materials to try to counter the upward pressure of the oil. The administration team worried the increasing pressure from injecting heavy drilling mud could worsen the leak.
Drilling experts have warned that high-pressure injections could cause a catastrophic collapse of well pipes and leave an open crater that would be impossible to cap.
Asked whether U.S. officials told BP to stop the three-day-long top kill attempt, Browner said, “We told them of our very, very grave concerns” that it was dangerous to continue building up pressure in the well.
Meanwhile, BP chief Tony Hayward, on a tour of a company staging area in Venice, La., sought to refute multiple reports from scientists that vast plumes of oil from the spill are spreading underwater.
Hayward said BP’s sampling showed “no evidence” that oil was massing and spreading across the gulf water column. “The oil is on the surface,” he said. “Oil has a specific gravity that’s about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity.”
Scientists from the University of South Florida, University of Georgia, University of Southern Mississippi and other institutions have detected what they believe are vast swaths of underwater hydrocarbons, including an area about 50 miles from the spill site and as deep as 400 feet.
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Gulf oil spill: BP cuts pipe, clearing way for cap
Robots using giant hydraulic shears finished cutting away the pipe atop a BP well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, clearing the way for a cap to be placed over the well on Thursday in an effort to contain the 45-day-old spill.
Cutting away the riser pipe is “a significant step forward,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said at a briefing Thursday morning. “The challenge now is to seal that containment cap over it.”
Robot subs start to cut
Allen said the shears used in the cutting did not give the clean edges that officials had hoped for, which could make it more difficult to fit the cap tightly over the pipe. The shears were used after a diamond-edged saw got stuck Wednesday while cutting through the pipe.
“This is an irregular cut. It will be a bit more challenging” to tightly seal the cap over the ragged-edged opening through which oil is gushing, Allen said.
The cap was already suspended over the area and would be lowered into place within hours, he said.
The cap is intended to contain, not stop the flow of oil, but the tighter the cap, the more oil will be contained.
The spill is not expected to be fully controlled until August at the earliest, after two relief wells are completed.
In the meantime, the oil continues to spread, with the upper edge of the spill approaching Florida and 37% of gulf waters closed to fishing.
Hurricane season, which began June 1, poses a major problem to workers trying to finish the relief wells, something Allen acknowledged was a concern. He said officials had to face the possibility that a major storm would force a halt to work on the relief wells.
For article click HERE
New Ways to Drill, Old Methods for Cleanup
As hopes dim for containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon, more people are asking why the industry was not better prepared to react.
Members of Congress are holding hearings this week and demanding to know why the federal Minerals Management Service did not force oil companies to take more precautions. Environmentalists are saying they tried to raise the alarm to Congressional committees that the industry had no way to respond to a catastrophic blowout a mile below the sea.
Local officials in the gulf are beginning to ask, “What was Plan B?” The answer, oil industry engineers are acknowledging, was to deploy technology that has not changed much in 20 years — booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants — even as the drilling technology itself has improved.
“They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling. “So what we have now is some equivalent of a fire drill with paper towels and buckets for cleanup.”
For years, major oil companies, as well as the Minerals Management Service, played down the possibility of an uncontrolled blowout on the sea floor, arguing that safeguards like blowout preventers were practically foolproof.
In November, Walter D. Cruickshank, deputy director of the Minerals Management Service, told a Senate committee that an undersea blowout and massive spill that had occurred in East Timor last year was highly unlikely in the Gulf of Mexico because of tighter United States regulations. All wells had safety devices to shut off the flow in emergencies, he said.
At the same hearing, a BP vice president, David Rainey, promoted the oil companies’ “blowout preventer technology, which includes redundant systems and controls” and told senators that “contrary to popular perception, ours is a high-tech industry.”
What government regulators and industry officials did not foresee in the Deepwater Horizon disaster last month is that the rig would sink and that robots would not be able to stanch the flow of oil at such depths, even though a consultant hired by government regulators in 2003 had warned that they were unreliable.
“This is the first time the industry has had to confront this issue in this water depth, and there is a lot of real-time learning going on,” BP’s chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, acknowledged at a news conference Monday. “The investigation of this whole incident will undoubtedly show up things that we should be doing differently.”
Once oil was flowing into the water, the methods of dealing with it have changed little in decades, environmentalists say. Tenting spills with giant upside-down funnels has been done in shallower waters, but until last weekend, it had not been tried in deep water. The first attempt failed.
“The oil industry went off the deep end with a new kind of risk, and they didn’t bother to build a response capability before they had a big disaster,” said Richard Charter, an advocate with Defenders of Wildlife who studies offshore drilling.
The heart of the industry’s plan to contain the oil falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, a nonprofit organization formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster. It is maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil companies.
Judith Roos, a vice president of Marine Spill Response, said the majority of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then,” she said.
Steve Benz, president of the corporation, said his group had no budget for research.
In the last three years, however, the company has added C-130 planes to spray dispersants. On this, the company says, it is ahead of the regulatory curve.
Allison Nyholm, a policy adviser with the American Petroleum Institute, said the industry had done extensive experiments with improving skimmers, booms and dispersants. Some booms are fire retardant and allow burning on the water, for example, while others actually absorb oil.
She noted that blowout scenarios were rare and needed to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
“One of the best tools is how you bring the best professionals together to respond to the spill,” Ms. Nyholm said. “It is not the dispersant or the boom or the burn, it is how quickly can you get the right people together.”
Yet Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and frequent consultant on big oil spills, said the oil companies could have had some version of the containment dome ready before the spill, rather than building one after it happened.
“It is like building the fire truck when your house is on fire,” Dr. Steiner said.
Engineers who work on rig structures said such prefabricated containment domes would not be practical. They said that each dome would have to be tailored to the spill, so there was little sense in making one beforehand.
Jeffrey Short, a former scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works for the environmental group Oceana, said it was clear that the industry was not willing to pay for enough boats and booms to enclose such a fast-growing spill.
“It’s just really hard to corral something that’s expanding at that rate,” Dr. Short said. “Ultimately it’s an investment challenge. How much money are you willing to spend on an event that happens infrequently?”
Several environmentalists also said the industry should have predicted that a blowout of this magnitude would eventually happen. John F. Amos, a former geologist for oil companies who now runs an organization that tracks oil spills using satellite images, told Congress last fall that the undersea blowout in East Timor was a warning. It leaked for 10 weeks before crews managed to drill relief wells. “Blowouts are surprisingly regular occurrences,” he said. “But ones that lead to catastrophic spills like this are quite rare.”
Jerome J. Schubert, an engineer at Texas A&M who has written extensively about undersea drilling, found in a 2005 study that “blowouts will always happen no matter how far technology and training advance” and that there were no foolproof safeguards to stop them. The study, co-written by Samuel F. Noynaert and financed by BP, found that blowouts in undersea wells had occurred at a steady rate since the 1960s despite improvements in technology.
“The best safeguards don’t always work,” he said.
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BP says progress in effort to contain oil spill
Energy giant BP was making some progress on Monday with its efforts to contain the oil gushing forth from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, But the stakes are high amid fears of an ecological and economic calamity along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Investors have already knocked around $30 billion off BP’s value and its share price will be closely watched this week.
After several tough weeks, this is shaping up to be another rough one for the company. A U.S. Labor Department official told the Financial Times that BP has a “systematic safety problem” at its refineries.
“BP executives, they talk a good line. They say they want to improve safety,” Jordan Barab, a senior official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told the paper.
“But it doesn’t always translate down to the refineries themselves. They still have a systematic safety problem.”
Last year U.S. regulators slapped a record $87.4 million fine on BP for failing to fix safety violations at its Texas City refinery after a deadly 2005 explosion.
BP reported limited success at containing the oil flow on Sunday but a skeptical Obama administration downplayed it.
After other attempts to contain the spill failed, BP succeeded in inserting a tube into the well and capturing some oil and gas. The underwater operation used guided robots to insert a small tube into a 21-inch (53-cm) pipe, known as a riser, to funnel the oil to a ship at the surface.
Not all of the oil was being trapped, however.
“This is a good step forward,” said Satish Nagarajaiah, professor in civil and mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, but he said the siphon tool is unlikely to capture more than 15-20 percent of the oil.
Click HERE for article
Dolphin, turtle deaths eyed for links to oil spill
(Reuters) – Scientists are examining the deaths of at least six dolphins and over 100 sea turtles along the U.S. Gulf Coast in recent weeks to see if they are victims of the giant oil spill in the region, wildlife officials said on Thursday.
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All of the deaths are being looked at as possible casualties of the oil gushing unchecked since April 20 from a ruptured wellhead on the floor of the Gulf off Louisiana because of their proximity in time and space to the spill.
But none of the dolphins or turtles examined showed any obvious visible signs of oil contamination.
Necropsies — the animal equivalent of autopsies — are being performed, and tissue samples analyzed to determine if oil ingestion caused the deaths. The results are expected to take about two weeks.
“So far we have not seen any relationship with the deaths of either the turtles or the dolphins to oil,” Dr. Moby Solangi, head of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, told Reuters TV in Gulfport, Mississippi.
But Solangi added it was only a matter of time before the spilled oil began affecting the dolphin population. “There is no question that the oil is in their habitat,” he said.
Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said scientists were investigating the deaths of six dolphins and 117 sea turtles along the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida since April 30.
Sources close to the Gulf’s wildlife spill-response teams put the number of dolphin deaths at seven.
Either way, federal wildlife officials said dolphin and turtle mortality seen since the oil rig explosion off Louisiana last month is not unusually high for this time of year.
TOO SOON FOR CONCLUSIONS
A few of the deaths were ruled out as spill-related because they occurred before the spill or were animals that were known to have been sick or injured beforehand, the sources said.
Solangi said dolphins were at the top of the aquatic food chain in the ocean and also acted like the “canary in the coal mine” in that their experience and behavior can give advance warning to humans of impending disasters and catastrophes.
Wildlife officials have expressed particular concern for the well-being of sea turtles in the Gulf following the spill because all five species that inhabit the region are endangered, and it is their spring nesting season.
On a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, NOAA officials said it was still too early to draw firm conclusions from the latest wildlife casualties in the Gulf.
“We don’t have definitive information for most of the … (animals) that have been found,” said Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.
Impacts on bird life has been relatively light to date, according to wildlife specialists.
“So far, relatively few birds have been brought in with oil on their feathers,” said David Ringer of the National Audubon Society, who put the number at between 12 and 20.
“The birds that have been brought in are birds that catch fish in open waters” and would have come in contact with oil there, he said.
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