Jim Hendee to coral-list
show details 9:32 AM (28 minutes ago)
“The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been
designated the lead state agency for responding to potential impacts of
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill along Florida’s shoreline. This website
will serve as the primary location for updates and information on
response actions and impacts to the state of Florida.”
Here is the site:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050302781.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post; special thanks to Richard Charter
By Steven Mufson
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
In 1969, when people still used manual typewriters and rotary telephones, a Union Oil well blew out five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. People attacked the oil washing ashore by skimming it off the surface, dispersing it with chemicals, and soaking it up with straw and other materials.
Forty-one years and many generations of technology later, BP is attacking the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with techniques similar to those used in Santa Barbara. And just as in those days, choppy water and strong winds can make it impossible to use those tools to bottle up oil once it has leaked into open seas.
“Taking proper care of the oil and then the pollution is damn near the same as what we see today,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who spent 16 years working for Shell Oil. “We’re still chasing it around with Scott towels.”
Unlike the 1969 Santa Barbara and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills, which were close to shore and coated coastlines, the well that blew up April 20 while being drilled by Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig is much farther out and has given BP and federal authorities an extra week or more to respond to the oil leaking into the gulf.
Yet the more than 100 boats and dozens of aircraft deployed by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard have been unable to prevent it from creeping up to land and threatening the environment. “The absolute objective is to contain it in the offshore environment,” BP chief executive Tony Hayward said optimistically Wednesday. By Friday, it had started to touch Louisiana’s shores.
“From the mid-’80s, it is the same thing,” said Lois Epstein, an Alaska-based engineering and policy consultant to nonprofit conservation organizations. “At the time of the Valdez spill, we were utilizing booming and dispersants and controlled burns — the same three major techniques as now.”
The reason little has changed, said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial, is a “failure of imagination.”
“The industry says it never had a blowout,” he said, and as a result the oil “industry is not going to spend good money on problems that it says aren’t there.” But King said that “you need new technology to deal with the problems that your other new technology got you.” And he said that the federal government, instead of just collecting its royalties, should have made sure that research took place.
The most visible tool for containing the oil slick is the long string of floating plastic booms. Half a million feet of booms are on hand and about half of them have been set out so far, but they work best in calm seas.
“They presume oil is floating on the surface and the sea is still,” said Hammond Eve, a former specialist in the environmental impact of offshore drilling at the Minerals Management Service who lives just east of New Orleans. “The sea is certainly not still now. They don’t stick up very high. The waves are going right over them, the oil’s going right over them. They don’t work very well.”
Burning oil on the water surface is dramatic but of limited use. It also requires calm seas to corral oil where it’s thickest and drag it to a spot where it can be ignited with flares. Last week BP and the Coast Guard did that in what they described as a test; they burned 100 barrels of oil, a tiny fraction of what’s pouring from the well. They said later burns could consume as much as 1,000 barrels of oil, still less than the 5,000 barrels a day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates is leaking into the gulf.
Bad weather has made it impossible to do a second burn. And the technique sends thick, black clouds of smoke into the atmosphere — also bad for the environment and possibly the lungs.
BP and the Coast Guard have also used ships to skim oil from the surface of the water. This also works best in calm seas; good weather during the first week after the spill helped. By Monday morning, the oil spill response teams had recovered more than a million gallons of an oil and water mixture, but much of it is seawater. The layer of oil on the surface is thin, measured in microns in most places and as thick as 0.1 millimeters in others, so skimming is a slow process. BP’s Hayward said it has the appearance of iced tea.
BP and federal agencies have also sprayed more than 156,000 gallons of chemicals to help disperse the oil at the surface and, with the help of a robotic submarine, near the source of the leak.
“It’s a good thing,” said Eve, the retired minerals-management expert. “If you get oil on your hands, and wash in dish detergent, the nature of the oil changes. It’s not clinging to you. It’s become something with different properties so it doesn’t have the harmful impacts.”
Some of the oil breaks down in the water, and research has gone into biologically friendly agents that would speed up the work nature does in breaking down oil. But the effects of such agents are not well understood, and it isn’t clear what kind of chemicals BP is using.
Environmental groups caution that the chemicals can be harmful and disperse the oil under the surface of the water, where it causes different kinds of problems.
“Dispersants . . . are toxic to marine life and so there are trade-offs to consider,” said David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And just because humans can’t see oil on the surface doesn’t mean it’s not still in the water column, affecting marine life from plankton to whales.”
“The objective of dispersant use is to enhance the amount of oil that physically mixes into the water column, reducing the potential that a surface slick will contaminate shoreline habitats or come into contact with birds, marine mammals, or other organisms that exist on the water surface or shoreline,” said a report by the National Academy of Sciences. “Dispersant application thus represents a conscious decision to increase the hydrocarbon load (resulting from a spill) on one component of the ecosystem (e.g., the water column) while reducing the load on another (e.g., coastal wetland).”
Now BP, with the approval of the Coast Guard, is trying to magnify that effect by applying dispersants underwater. They said that method seemed promising.
Once the oil spill hits shore, new complications will arise. The Louisiana wetlands could act as sponges, soaking up the oil and damaging the plant life there.
Many environmentalists fear damage to the wetlands, which also help protect New Orleans from hurricanes.
The Alaskan shore where the Valdez spill took place was rocky, and cleanup crews hosed down the rocks, killing organisms that lived there and driving some of the oil into soils out of sight. Some critics said leaving the rocks alone might have been better.
The Coast Guard’s Web site says: “Natural recovery is often misunderstood; in sensitive environments active cleanup activity may cause more harm than allowing the oil to slowly degrade naturally, as disturbance by activity can drive oil below the surface causing significant damage.”
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050510a.html
Special thanks to Richard
Charter Consortium News
The troubles of oil giant BP are not limited to its Gulf of Mexico operations, where a deadly blast aboard a drilling rig two weeks ago ruptured an oil well 5,000 feet below the sea’s surface and triggered a massive oil leak that is now the size of a small country.
By Jason Leopold
May 5, 2010
Editor’s Note: A common thread through recent disasters – the Wall Street financial collapse, the fatal West Virginia coal mine explosion and the huge oil spill from one of BP’s offshore rigs – has been a lack of effective government oversight.
Indeed, over the past three decades as Republicans and the Right expanded their power (often allied with pro-corporation Democrats), big companies have acted with growing confidence in putting profits before safety, as Jason Leopold notes in this guest article about other BP violations:
The oil conglomerate is also facing serious charges from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that it “willfully” failed to implement safety measures at its Texas City refinery, the third largest in the country, following an explosion that killed 15 employees and injured 170 others five years ago.
OSHA found BP to be in violation of more than 300 health and safety regulations and, in 2005, fined the company $21.4 million, at the time the largest in OSHA’s history. In 2007, BP paid a $50 million fine and pleaded guilty to a felony for not having written guidelines in place at the refinery and for exposing employees to toxic emissions.
BP was placed on three years’ probation and the Justice Department agreed not to pursue additional criminal charges against the company as long as BP agreed to undertake a series of OSHA-ordered corrective safety measures at the refinery. BP also settled with the victims’ families for $1.6 billion.
Several investigations launched in the aftermath of the refinery explosion concluded that BP’s aggressive cost-cutting efforts in the area of safety, the use of outdated refinery equipment and overworked employees contributed to the blast.
John Bresland, chairman of the independent U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB), said the blast occurred “when a distillation tower flooded with hydrocarbons and was over-pressurized, causing a geyser-like release from the vent stack. The hydrocarbons found an ignition source [a truck that backfired] and exploded.”
Bresland, whose organization spent two years probing the circumstances behind the explosion, said CSB’s investigation “found organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation.”
“Our investigation team turned up extensive evidence showing a catastrophe waiting to happen,” Bresland said on March 24, the fifth anniversary of the refinery explosion. “Cost-cutting had affected safety programs and critical maintenance; production pressures resulted in costly mistakes made by workers likely fatigued by working long hours; internal audits and safety studies brought problems to the attention of BP’s board in London, but they were not sufficiently acted upon. ”
Failure to Comply
Since the settlement, according to OSHA, BP has not only failed to comply with its terms but has knowingly committed hundreds of new violations that continue to endanger its refinery workers.
“When BP signed the OSHA settlement from the March 2005 explosion, it agreed to take comprehensive action to protect employees,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in a statement last October. “Instead of living up to that commitment, BP has allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue unabated.”
“The fact that there are so many still outstanding life-threatening problems at this plant indicates that they still have a systemic safety problem in this refinery,” added acting Assistant Labor Secretary for OSHA Jordan Barab.
OSHA then imposed a record $87 million fine against the company, surpassing the previous record – also against BP – in 2005.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to questions as to whether BP’s alleged failure to comply with its settlement agreement would expose the company to further criminal charges. However, last October, Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Houston, said the Justice Department “will take all appropriate actions to ensure the plea agreement is not violated.”
Some of BP’s new violations have already resulted in additional fatalities at the refinery, according to OSHA.
On July 22, 2006, OSHA said a contractor was crushed between a “scissor lift and a pipe rack.” On June 5, 2007, another contractor was electrocuted “on a light circuit in the [refinery’s] process area.” On Jan. 14, 2008, an employee was killed when the top head of a pressure vessel blew off. On Oct. 9, 2008, a contractor was hit by a front-end loader and died from his injuries.
BP has vehemently denied OSHA’s charges and has formally contested the proposed penalties.
“We continue to believe we are in full compliance with the Settlement Agreement … we strongly disagree with OSHA’s conclusions,” said Texas City Refinery Manager Keith Casey. “We believe our efforts at the Texas City refinery to improve process safety performance have been among the most strenuous and comprehensive that the refining industry has ever seen.”
BP says it invested $1 billion on safety and operational improvements at the refinery and believed it had more time to fulfill its commitments under the settlement agreement, according to a letter that BP attorney Thomas Wilson sent to OSHA. BP may end up fighting the charges in federal court.
Still, as highlighted in a January 2007 report issued by a panel chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker III, systemic issues related to BP’s process safety were not limited to its Texas City refinery, but rather were widespread.
In 2007, BP had entered into a settlement with OSHA over safety issues at the Husky refinery in Toledo, Ohio, a 50-50 joint venture between BP and Canadian-based Husky Energy, Inc.
During an inspection last September, OSHA found that BP was in compliance with the earlier agreement but discovered “numerous violations at the plant not previously covered” by the settlement.
In March, OSHA issued a new set of charges against BP in March for “willful” violations at Husky, “including 39 on a per-instance basis, and 20 alleged serious violations for exposing workers to a variety of hazards including failure to provide adequate pressure relief for process units,” issues that appear to be identical to those that led to the Texas City explosion in 2005.
“OSHA has found that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its refineries,” Solis said. “There is no excuse for taking chances with people’s lives. BP must fix the hazards now.”
Also notable about the nearly two dozen alleged violations at Husky was that one matches allegations leveled against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis without a majority of the necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal law.
Atlantis is the world’s largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans. The whistleblower said BP was risking a catastrophic oil spill even worse than the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded and sank two weeks ago.
Last night, NWF held a national virtual town hall that drew over 9,000 sportsmen/women to hear and discuss the impacts of the BP oil disaster on hunting, fishing and wildlife habitat in the Gulf Coast. Bob Marshall, outdoor staff writer for the New Orleans-based Times Picayune and conservation editor-at-large for Field and Stream joined Larry Schweiger, CEO of National Wildlife Federation for the successful event.
For audio of the town hall, visit www.vanishingparadise.org
Following press release was sent broadly to the media.
~Corey
BP Oil Spill Draws Thousands of Concerned Sportsmen to Virtual Town Hall
Washington, DC (May 5, 2010) – A virtual town hall hosted by National Wildlife Federation tonight drew over 9,000 hunters and anglers concerned about the tremendous ecological and wildlife impacts of the BP oil spill along the Gulf Coast. The area is a draw for hunters and anglers nationwide and often called a “Sportsman’s Paradise.”
Louisiana’s coast sustains one of the world’s largest fisheries, produces the largest catch of redfish, hosts up to 20 percent of the nation’s wintering waterfowl and is home to more than 400 species of birds, fish and wildlife. The whole Gulf Coast is bracing for what could be the worst oil spill in America’s history.
NWF has a team on the ground in Venice, Louisiana, leading boat tours of the region and has served as a focal point for volunteer activism and media inquiries. Leading the team is NWF President and CEO Larry Schweiger who spoke about what he’s witnessed over the last several days.
“With a huge volume of oil flowing in the Gulf of Mexico unabated, we clearly have an epic catastrophe unfolding,” Schweiger said. “The greatest coastal wetland system in America is at the height of spring wildlife nesting season. It now faces what may be the largest oil spill in the nation’s history. It is hard to imagine a more dire situation.”
Bob Marshall, Times Picayune outdoor staff writer and conservation editor-at-large for Field and Stream spoke about his personal connection to the Gulf Coast and his alarm at what may be in store.
“This river of oil is still flowing out of the Gulf [and] these toxins will stay in the marsh mud for years,” said Marshall. “We need your help to turn this around.”
Coastal Louisiana was already in trouble prior to the spill. Levees built for flood control have straight-jacketed the Mississippi River. Instead of spreading nutrient-rich sediment that builds and sustains the delta and surrounding wetlands, the sediment funnels into the Gulf of Mexico. Canals dredged for navigation and oil gas extraction have carved up the once-vast coastal wetland system. The canals accelerate saltwater intrusion, destroying the protective cypress forests and replacing brackish and freshwater wetlands with degraded salt marshes.
Coupled with sea-level rise caused by global warming, Louisiana is losing the equivalent of about two football fields of land every hour. Schweiger made clear that restoration of Coastal Louisiana and a clean energy future would be priorities NWF would aggressively pursue.
For audio of the town hall, visit www.vanishingparadise.org and interviews contact NWF.
# # #
The National Wildlife Federation is America’s largest conservation organization inspiring Americans to protect wildlife for our children’s future.
Immediate Release: May 5, 2010
Contact:
Tony Iallonardo, senior communications manager, 202-797-6612, iallonardot@nwf.org
NWF’s mission is to inspire Americans to protect wildlife for our children’s future.
Corey Shott
Global Warming Legislative Representative
Phone: 202-797-6632 | Fax: 202-797-6646 | shottc@nwf.org
National Wildlife Federation
National Advocacy Center
901 E St, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20004
Subject: Jakarta Post – Unocal Deepwater Drilling Spill
Unocal accused of covering up offshore oil spill
Source: Jakarta Post, October 01, 2002
By Fitri Wulandari
Jakarta
An environmental non-governmental organization accused U.S. oil company Unocal of covering up an offshore oil spill at its West Seno deepwaterJaka well in the Makassar Straits early this month, saying the company was slow in giving out information about something that could clearly threaten the ublic and harm the environment.
Meanwhile, Unocal claimed that it had no ntention of covering up the incident but was waiting until a thorough study on the incident had been
completed so that clear information would be vailable. According to the Mining Advocacy Network (JATAM), the incident ccurred on Sept. 5 at the Ranggas 6 well, around 75 kilometers out in the akassar Straits. But Unocal only issued a news release about the incident n Sept. 27. “Unocal
is covering up this offshore oil spill incident,” Aminuddin, JATAM media and public relations manager, said in a press release distributed late
last week.
He said the West Seno project could be the start of a disaster for the environment and people around Tanjung Santan beach. JATAM also said that the West Seno project had violated the law as it failed to involve the local community in its environmental impact assessment.
The West Seno project is the first deepwater oil field in Indonesia. It is located in the Makassar Straits, about 190 kilometers northeast of
Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. The offshore oil field lies in waters of between 732 meters and 1,000 meters in depth. The field was first discovered in 1997 and it is hoped to start oil production in 2003. The project is expected to generate more than US$1 billion in taxes and revenue during its lifetime.
Satria Djaya, Unocal’s manager for communications and government relations, rebuffed the allegation saying that it was not an offshore
oil spill but rather oil sheen. However, he did admit that the sheen was first observed on Sept. 5. Oil sheen is a thin layer of hydrocarbon
which looks like an oil spill when observed from afar. He added that the company had reported the oil sheen to the government
shortly after it was discovered. “The sheen was first observed on Sept. 5, and we reported it to the State Implementing Body for Upstream Oil and Gas Activities (BP Migas) and the Directorate General of Oil and Gas (MIGAS) on Sept. 7, as well as to the Kutai Kartanegara and East Kutai regency administrations,” Satria told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
Satria argued that it took time to release information to the public as underwater research was needed to make sure the sheen did come from West Seno. “The research concluded that there was a tiny leak in the casing but we are working to repair it. We released the information as soon as we found out about this,” he argued. According to Satria, Unocal had sent samples of the oil sheen to the U.S. to determine whether it posed a threat to the environment.
JATAM called on the government to suspend the project saying that it could pose threats to the community and environment. “The evidence shows that for thirty years Unocal has been causing environmental damage and misery to the people in East Kalimantan,” Aminuddin said.