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“The first ten actions President Obama can take immediately to help solve the crisis in the Gulf.“
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/30/morning-bell-obamas-oil-spill-to-do-list/
Posted By Rory Cooper On June 30, 2010

[1] The oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico gets worse by the day. Oil spews from the broken well, further polluting our water and shores. The clean-up efforts drag on with bureaucratic interference, making matters worse. And what is the Obama administration doing? It continues to push for unrelated responses that will have a disastrous effect on our economy, especially the economy of the Gulf states most affected.

In fact, President Obama summoned a bipartisan group of senators to the White House on Tuesday to discuss his climate change legislation. When Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander suggested that any such energy meeting should include a focus on the oil spill and BP, Obama responded: “that’s just your talking point [2]” and refused to discuss the crisis.

Unfortunately, the American people are not hearing any of this. Day after day, blind allegiance to the president causes his supporters on the left to simply say the government is doing all that it can. The national media, prone to attention deficit disorder when a president they support is in the White House, have already moved on to a myriad of other subjects, offering only sporadic updates on the continuing crisis.

When the president answered questions following the G20 conference, not one reporter asked him about the situation in the Gulf. Not one question. When attention is paid, it is focused on BP, which is only half the story the other half being government incompetence or an ideological rigidity that prevents commonsense solutions.

The Heritage Foundation has offered a great deal of research and analysis related to the current crisis. It can be found indexed here [3]. Starting today, we will also highlight the top actions the federal government must take immediately to assist the citizens of the Gulf as they cope with this tragedy. As the government responds or acts on these actions, we will directly update this post online to reflect the news and add new actions as we deem appropriate.

Please let us know in the online comments section any other deficiencies we should be monitoring. Until this crisis is resolved, you will be able to find this post, as well as future updates [4], under our Foundry Features labeled: Oil Spill To-Do List [4]. Without further delay, here are the first ten actions President Obama can take immediately to help solve the crisis in the Gulf.

1. Waive the Jones Act: According to one Dutch newspaper [5], European firms could complete the oil spill cleanup by themselves in just four months, and three months if they work with the United States, which is much faster than the estimated nine months it would take the Obama administration to go at it alone. The major stumbling block is a protectionist piece of legislation called the Jones Act, which requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried in U.S.-flagged ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens. But, in an emergency, this law can be temporarily waived [6], as DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff did after Katrina. Each day European and Asian allies are prevented from helping us speed up the cleanup is another day that Gulf fishing and tourism jobs die. For more information on this, click here [7].

2. Accept International Assistance: At least thirty countries and international organizations have offered equipment and experts so far. According to reports [8] this week, the White House has finally decided to accept help from twelve of these nations. The Obama administration should make clear why they are refusing the other eighteen-plus offers. In a statement, the State Department said it is still working out the particulars of the assistance it has accepted. This should be done swiftly as months have already been wasted.

Take Sweden, for example. According to Heritage expert James Carafano: “After offering assistance shortly after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Sweden received a request for information about their specialized assets from the State Department on May 7. Swedish officials answered the inquiry the same day, saying that some assets, such as booms, could be sent within days and that it would take a couple of weeks to send ships. There are three brand new Swedish Coast Guard vessels built for dealing with a major oil spill cleanup. Each has a capacity to collect nearly 50 tons of oil per hour from the surface of the sea and can hold 1,000 tons of spilled oil in their tanks. But according to the State Department’s recently released chart on international offers of assistance, the Swedish equipment and ships are still ‘under consideration.’ [9] So months later, the booms sit unused and brand new Swedish ships still sit idle in port, thousands of miles from the Gulf. The delay in accepting offers of assistance is unacceptable.” For more information, click here [10] or here [11].

3. Lift the Moratorium: The Obama administration’s over-expansive ban on offshore energy development is killing jobs when they are needed most. A panel of engineering experts told The New Orleans Times-Picayune [12] that they only supported a six-month ban on new drilling in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. Those same experts were consulted by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before he issued his May 27 report recommending a six-month moratorium on all ongoing drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet. A letter from these experts reads: “A blanket moratorium is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill. We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do.”

And just how many innocent jobs is Obama’s oil ban killing? An earlier Times-Picayune report estimated the moratorium could cost Louisiana 7,590 jobs and $2.97 billion in revenue directly related to the oil industry. For more information on this, click here [13].

4. Release the S.S. A-Whale: The S.S. A-Whale skimmer is a converted oil tanker capable of cleaning 500,000 barrels of oil a day from the Gulf waters. Currently, the largest skimmer being used in the clean-up efforts can handle 4,000 barrels a day, and the entire fleet our government has authorized for BP has only gathered 600,000 barrels, total in the 70 days since the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The ship embarked from Norfolk, VA, this week toward the Gulf, hoping to get federal approval to begin assisting the clean-up, but is facing bureaucratic resistance.

As a foreign-flagged ship, the S.S. A-Whale needs a waiver from the Jones Act, but even outside that three-mile limitation, the U.S. Coast Guard and the EPA have to approve its operation due to the nature of its operation, which separates the oil from the water and then releases water back into the Gulf, with a minor amount of oil residue. The government should not place perfection over the need for speed, especially facing the threat of an active hurricane season. For more information on this, click here [14].

5. Remove State and Local Roadblocks: Local governments are not getting the assistance they need to help in the cleanup. For example, nearly two months ago, officials from Escambia County, Fla., requested permission from the Mobile Unified Command Center to use a sand skimmer, a device pulled behind a tractor that removes oil and tar from the top three feet of sand, to help clean up Pensacola’s beaches. County officials still haven’t heard anything back. Santa Rosa Island Authority Buck Lee explains [15] why: “Escambia County sends a request to the Mobile, Ala., Unified Command Center. Then, it’s reviewed by BP, the federal government, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard. If they don’t like it, they don’t tell us anything.”

State and local governments know their geography, people, economic impacts and needs far better than the federal government does. Contrary to popular belief, the federal government has actually been playing a bigger and bigger role in running natural disaster responses. And as Heritage fellow Matt Mayer has documented [16], the results have gotten worse, not better. Local governments should be given the tools they need to aid in the disaster relief. For more information on this, click here [17].

6. Allow Sand Berm Dredging: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently prevented [18]the state of Louisiana from dredging to build protective sand berms. Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser immediately sent a letter to President Obama requesting that the work continue. He said [18], “Once again, our government resource agencies, which are intended to protect us, are now leaving us vulnerable to the destruction of our coastline and marshes by the impending oil. Furthermore, with the threat of hurricanes or tropical storms, we are being put at an increased risk for devastation to our area from the intrusion of oil.” For more information on this, click here [19].

7. Waive or Suspend EPA Regulations: Because more water than oil is collected in skimming operations (85% to 90% is water according to Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen), operators need to discharge the filtered water back into the Gulf so they can continue to collect oil. The discharged water is vastly cleaner than when it was skimmed, but not sufficiently pure according to normal EPA regulations. If the water has to be kept in the vessel and taken back to shore for purification, it vastly multiples the resources and time needed, requiring cleanup ships to make extra round trips, transporting seven times as much water as the oil they collect. We already have insufficient cleanup ships (as the Coast Guard officially determined); they need to be cleaning up oil, not transporting water. For more information, click here [14].

8. Temporarily Loosen Coast Guard Inspections: In early June, sixteen barges that were vacuuming oil out of the Gulf were ordered to halt work. The Coast Guard had the clean-up vessels sit idle as they were inspected for fire extinguishers and life vests. Maritime safety is clearly a priority, but speed is of the essence in the Gulf waters. The U.S. Coast Guard should either temporarily loosen its inspection procedures or implement a process that allows inspections to occur as the ships operate. For more information, click here [19].

9. Stop Coast Guard Budget Cuts: Now is not the time to be cutting Coast Guard capabilities, but that is exactly what President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are doing. Rather than rebuilding and modernizing the Coast Guard as is necessary, they are cutting back assets needed to respond to catastrophic disasters. In particular, the National Strike Force, specifically organized to respond to oil spills and other hazardous materials disasters, is being cut. Overall, President Obama has told the Coast Guard to shed nearly 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several helicopters and aircraft. Congress and the Administration should double the U.S. Coast Guard’s active and reserve end strength over the next decade and significantly accelerate Coast Guard modernization, but for the time being, they should halt all budgetary cuts. For more information, click here [17].

10. Halt Climate Change Legislation: President Obama has placed his focus to the oil spill on oil demand rather than oil in our water. Regardless of political views, now is not the time to be taking advantage of this crisis to further an unrelated piece of legislation that will kill jobs and, in the President’s own words, cause energy prices to “skyrocket.” Less than 5% of our nation’s electricity needs are met by petroleum. Pushing solar and wind alternatives is in no way related to the disaster in the Gulf. It’s time for President Obama to focus on the direct actions he can take in the Gulf rather than the indirect harm he can cause in Congress. As Heritage expert David Kreutzer opines: “Fix the leak first, and then we’ll talk.” A crisis should not be a terrible thing to waste, as Rahm Emanuel said, but a problem to be solved. For more information, click here [20].

You can sign-up to recieve the Morning Bell in your inbox daily by clicking here [21].

Quick Hits:
Pressed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan refused to say [22] if she believes the Constitution’s Commerce Clause permits Congress to pass a law forcing Americans to eat their vegetables.
New documents reveal that Kagan manipulated the statement of a medical organization [23] to protect partial-birth abortion.
The day after the Supreme Court cleared a path to overturn Chicago’s ban on handguns, city officials began to consider new measures to circumvent [24] the high court’s ruling.
Officials in Arizona and Texas say the Obama administration’s planned National Guard deployment isn’t enough [25] to curtail illegal immigration.
Five years after Department of Homeland Security officials vowed to block the importation of radioactive materials that could be used to make a bomb, they still have not developed a plan [26] to keep bomb materials from crossing our border.

Article printed from The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/30/morning-bell-obamas-oil-spill-to-do-list/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/oil-spill-cleanup-10-6-23.jpg

[2] that’s just your talking point: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/06/gop-sen-to-obama-you-cant-talk-energy-bill-without-talking-bp.html

[3] here: http://www.heritage.org/Issues/Energy-and-Environment/Sources-of-Energy/Fossil-Fuels/Offshore-Oil-Drilling/Oil-Spill

[4] future updates: http://blog.heritage.org/tag/oil-spill-to-do-list/

[5] Dutch newspaper: http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=542R5JNH&word=jones+act%29

[6] can be temporarily waived: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/08/to-save-the-gulf-send-the-jones-act-to-davy-jones%E2%80%99-locker/

[7] here: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/06/Why-Wont-Obama-Waive-the-Jones-Act

[8] reports: http://http://finance.yahoo.com/news/US-accepts-international-apf-4104246595.html?x=0&.v=2

[9] the Swedish equipment and ships are still ‘under consideration.’: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/143488.pdf

[10] here: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/24/flooded-with-help-but-oil-spill-cleanup-still-flailing/

[11] here: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/22/our-government-slowed-down-the-gulf-cleanup/

[12] New Orleans Times-Picayune: http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1276064428189870.xml&coll=1

[13] here: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/22/moratorium-one-of-many-obama-oil-spill-mistakes/

[14] here: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/28/giant-cleanup-ship-met-with-puny-response-from-bureaucrats/

[15] explains: http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/09/fed-up-with-bp%E2%80%99s-lack-of-response-one-florida-county-wants-cleanup-reins/2/

[16] documented: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/04/Federalizing-Disasters-Weakens-FEMA-and-Hurts-Americans-Hit-by-Catastrophes

[17] here: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/06/Stopping-the-Slick-Saving-the-Environment-A-Framework-for-Response-Recovery-and-Resiliency

[18] prevented : http://www.wdsu.com/news/23997498/detail.html

[19] here: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/23/feds-continue-to-block-oil-spill-cleanup/

[20] here: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/06/Fix-the-Leak-First-and-Then-Well-Talk

[21] here: http://www.paramountcommunication.com/heritage/index.aspx

[22] Elena Kagan refused to say: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjY5MmQ4ODg4NDhlZTMxNmQ1NjZiMTYwYjAzNWQ1N2Y=

[23] manipulated the statement of a medical organization: http://blog.heritage.org http://article.nationalreview.com/437296/kagans-abortion-distortion/shannen-w-coffin?page=1

[24] new measures to circumvent: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703374104575337231393794888.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

[25] National Guard deployment isn’t enough: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703374104575337362109092700.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

[26] still have not developed a plan: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/29/AR2010062905085.html

Click here http://www.therightscoop.com/

...and scroll down to: Bobby Jindal Gives Most Blistering Comprehensive Report On Federal Response To Gulf Oil Spill
http://www.therightscoop.com/bobby-jindal-gives-most-blistering-comprehensive-report-on-federal-response-to-gulf-oil-spill

<>

BP-gate All the money has flowed to Obama, the Congress, and the Ayer’s family. Fancy that.
This source is mostly up to date as of June 2010 (check link from time to time for updates): http://www.nachumlist.com/bp.htm

Issa Report Highlights Government Incompetence and Double Talk in Gulf Oil Spill

Posted By Mike’s America On July 2, 2010 bttt
http://www.floppingaces.net/2010/07/02/issa-report-highlights-government-incompetence-and-double-talk-in-gulf-oil-spill/

Day 74

I also want to stress that we are working closely with the Gulf states and local communities to help every American affected by this crisis. Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill. But as President of the United States, I’m going to spare no effort to respond to this crisis for as long as it continues. And we will spare no resource to clean up whatever damage is caused. And while there will be time to fully investigate what happened on that rig and hold responsible parties accountable, our focus now is on a fully coordinated, relentless response effort to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the Gulf.
– President Barack Obama, May 2, 2010.

For two weeks now the Obama Administration has distracted Americans from the growing disaster in the Gulf. First, the firing of General McChrystal and then the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Kagan. But as the oil continues to gush from the Deep Horizon well questions continue to mount about the government response. Slicks miles offshore headed to land and not a skimming boat in sight. Readers have seen the photos of oil stained beaches and dead or dying wildlife and asked “why isn’t more being done.” http://mikesamerica.blogspot.com/2010/06/miles-of-oil-and-no-government-action.html

Darrell Issa (R-CA) the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been looking into the matter and recently published this 16 page report . It reads like a catalog of incompetence and political c.y.a. when what is really needed is leadership and command from the top on down.
http://republicans.oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Reports/7-1-10_OGR_Report_-_How_the_White_House_Public_Relations_Campaign_on_the_Oil_Spill_is_Harming_the_Actual_Clean-up.pdf

Key Findings in the Issa Report:

- Officials on the ground dispute key White House assertions about the number and timeliness of assets deployed in the Gulf. Local officials describe White House outreach efforts as more focused on stopping bad press than on addressing the disaster at hand;

• The White House’s assurances that there are adequate resources are at odds with the reality on the ground, where those on the frontline of the spill express significant frustration over the lack of assets. Local complaints are supported by the fact that the White House waited until Day 70 of the oil spill to accept critical offers of international assistance. Local workers and boats could have been assisting more with the clean-up if the Federal government had provided them with needed supplies and equipment;
• While the White House has tried to use the delay in finding a visible leak to explain its early silence on the oil spill, Transocean officials and Coast Guard documents from the scene of the oil spill reveal clear and early indications of a substantial oil leak days earlier than White House accounts;
• The failure of Administration officials to quickly waive laws preventing necessary foreign assets from reaching the Gulf and other regulations are hampering efforts to clean-up and limit damage from the oil spill. Local officials feel the federal government is making the perfect the enemy of the good in cleanup efforts;

• Local officials strongly dispute President Obama’s insistence that the federal government – and not BP – has been in control since day one. One Coast Guard Admiral told congressional investigators that decisions on the ground are made through a “consensus-based” process with BP. In practice, the Federal Government is not in charge of oil spill response efforts through a command-and-control approach;
• Local officials strongly believe the President’s call for a drilling moratorium will significantly compound the economic damage caused by the oil spill and will actually increase risk associated with future offshore drilling projects.

However, the detail in the report is even more troubling:

The White House blog details a number of assets deployed in the region to combat the spill. This includes vessels, boom, and dispersant. The number of assets claimed, however, does not appear to match what is actually in the field. Parish officials maintain that the thousands of vessels cited in the blog are non-existent. One senior official refers to them as “phantom assets.” When asked to elaborate, he explained that when he asks the federal government to provide the location of its assets, it either refuses or cannot do so.4 Daily helicopter search grids performed by the Parish sheriff’s department confirm to him that very few of the assets claimed are deployed.

This is corroborated by Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who shared a similar story with investigators. BP and Coast Guard provided Mr. Nungesser with a map of the Gulf allegedly pinpointing the exact locations of 140 skimmers cleaning up oil. Sensing that the chart may have been somewhat inaccurate, Mr. Nungesser requested a flyover of the assets for verification. After three cancelled trips, officials admitted to Mr. Nungesser that only 31 of the 140 skimmers were ever deployed. The rest were sitting at the docks. According to Mr. Nungesser, the chart appeared to have been fabricated.
…
The doublespeak surrounding the existence of vessels and the availability of boom to clean up oil in the water, as well as a belief that BP and the federal government are disregarding the priorities of local communities, have incensed Parish officials. LaFourche President Charlotte Randolph told committee staff that “we would have liked to have played offense. Would like to have made an effort to collect at the site instead of the shoreline.” This belief is echoed by a Jefferson Parish official who, within days of the explosion, warned BP and the Coast Guard that oil was rapidly approaching and requested that they deploy equipment to prevent it from reaching shore. The local official told committee investigators that, “they all said ‘don’t worry about it.’”

“Don’t worry, we’re from the government and we are here to help!” Famous last words!

Issa’s conclusion speaks for itself: http://views.washingtonpost.com/climate-change/post-carbon/2010/07/issa_report_questions_administrations_spill_response.html?hpid=moreheadlines

“These testimonials from the people who are on the frontlines of this crisis have brought to light a bureaucratic quagmire that is exacerbating the response and clean-up effort– in a post-Katrina world, this is unimaginable and unacceptable,” Issa said in a statement. “The evidence on the ground suggests that the White House has been more focused on the public relations of this crisis than with providing local officials the resources they need to deal with it.”

NewsBusters.org http://newsbusters.org/node/39839/print

White House Enacts Rules Inhibiting Media From Covering Oil Spill

http://newsbusters.org
By Noel Sheppard
Created 07/03/2010 bttt

The White House Thursday enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what’s happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that evening, “The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.”

He elaborated, “Now, in order to get closer, you have to get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans. You have to call up the guy. What this means is that oil-soaked birds on islands surrounded by boom, you can’t get close enough to take that picture.”

As the segment continued, Cooper expressed disgust with this rule repeating several times, “We are not the enemy here” (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t Cubachi [1] via Hot Air [2]):

VIDEO: http://newsbusters.org/node/39839/print

ANDERSON COOPER, HOST: But we begin, as we do every night, “Keeping Them Honest”.

This time, however, we’re not talking about BP. We’re talking about the government, a new a rule announced today backed by the force of law and the threat of fines and felony charges, a rule that will prevent reporters and photographers and anyone else from getting anywhere close to booms and oil-soaked wildlife and just about any place we need to be.

By now, you’re probably familiar with cleanup crews stiff-arming the media, private security blocking cameras, ordinary workers clamming up, some not even saying who they’re working for because they’re afraid of losing their jobs.

BP has said again and again that’s not their policy. Yet, again and again, it has happened. And we have seen it. But that’s BP.

And now the government apparently is getting in on the act, despite what Admiral Thad Allen promised about transparency just nearly a month ago. Here is what he said back then.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ADMIRAL THAD ALLEN (RET.), NATIONAL INCIDENT COMMANDER: I have put out a written directive — and I can provide it for the record — that says the media will have uninhibited access anywhere we’re doing operations, except for two things, if it’s a security or a safety problem. That is my policy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Uninhibited access, unless it’s a security or safety problem.

Well, the Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.

Now, in order to get closer, you have to get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans. You have to call up the guy. What this means is that oil-soaked birds on islands surrounded by boom, you can’t get close enough to take that picture.

Shots of oil on beaches with booms, stay 65 feet away. Pictures of oil-soaked booms uselessly laying in the water because they haven’t been collected like they should, you can’t get close enough to see that. And, believe me, that is out there.

But you only know that if you get close to it, and now you can’t without permission. Violators could face a fine of $40,000 and Class D felony charges.

What’s even more extraordinary is that the Coast Guard tried to make the exclusion zone 300 feet, before scaling it back to 65 feet.

Here is how Admiral Allen defends it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN: Well, it’s not unusual at all for the Coast Guard to establish either safety or security zones around any number of facilities or activities for public safety or for the safety of the equipment itself. We would do this for marine events, fireworks demonstrations, cruise ships going in and out of port.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: So, this is the exact same logic that federal wildlife officials used to prevent CNN on two occasions from getting pictures of oiled birds that have been collected, pictures like — like the — well, that we’re about to show you which are obviously deeply disturbing, pictures of oiled gulls that we just happened to catch. Suddenly, we were told after — after that day we couldn’t catch it anymore. So, keeping prying eyes out of marshes, away from booms, off the beaches is now government policy.

When asked why now, after all this time, Thad Allen said he had gotten some complaints from local officials worried people might get hurt. Now, we don’t know who these officials are. We would like to. But transparency is apparently not a high priority with Thad Allen either these days.

Maybe he is accurate and some officials are concerned. And that’s their right. But we’ve heard far more from local officials about not being able to get a straight story from the government or BP. I have met countless local officials desperate for pictures to be taken and stories written about what is happening in their communities.

We’re not the enemy here. Those of us down here trying to accurately show what’s happening, we are not the enemy. I have not heard about any journalist who has disrupted relief efforts. No journalist wants to be seen as having slowed down the cleanup or made things worse. If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I would move.

But to create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away boom and boats, that doesn’t sound like transparency. Frankly, it’s a lot like in Katrina when they tried to make it impossible to see recovery efforts of people who died in their homes.

If we can’t show what is happening, warts and all, no one will see what’s happening. And that makes it very easy to hide failure and hide incompetence and makes it very hard to highlight the hard work of cleanup crews and the Coast Guard. We are not the enemy here.

We found out today two public broadcasting journalists reporting on health issues say they have been blocked again and again from visiting a federal mobile medical unit in Venice, a trailer where cleanup workers are being treated. It’s known locally as the BP compound. And these two reporters say everyone they have talked to, from BP to the Coast Guard, to Health and Human Services in Washington has been giving them the runaround.

We’re not talking about a CIA station here. We’re talking about a medical trailer that falls under the authority of, guess who, Thad Allen, the same Thad Allen who promised transparency all those weeks ago.

We are not the enemy here.

Actually, Anderson, to this administration, anyone trying to tell the truth to the American people is the enemy.

Maybe if folks like you would have accurately reported the background of Barack Obama when he was running for president he wouldn’t have assumed you were going to continue to misrepresent and ignore facts for his benefit after if he got elected.

To anyone with even a lukewarm intelligence quotient, this was an eminently foreseeable consequence of the media treating candidate Obama like a rock star. If they had acted like journalists back then instead of groupies, maybe they’d be treated with more respect today.

Now that some press members actually want to act like reporters again and aggressively try to cover what’s going on in the Gulf Coast, the White House must feel somewhat spurned by his previously complicit press thereby necessitating rules to keep them from getting close to the truth now that they mysteriously seem interested in reporting it.

Of course, those on the other side of the aisle are not at all surprised, for like so many of the promises this man made during the campaign, we didn’t believe his most transparent administration in history pledge either.

Maybe in the future media won’t allow their love for a candidate to make them so gullible and compliant, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/07/03/white-house-enacts-rules-inhibiting-media-covering-oil-spill

Links:
[1] http://cubachi.com/2010/07/02/first-amendment-being-eroded-as-seen-on-cnn-and-bp-oil-spill/
[2] http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/02/cnn-the-feds-are-trying-to-block-media-coverage-of-how-bad-the-oil-spill-is/

From The Heritage Foundation

Oil Spill Response is “Stuck on Stupid”

http://www.thewoodwardreport.com/#/oil-response-stuck-on-stupid/4542342200

If you only listened to President Obama, you wouldn’t even know an oil spill is occurring in the Gulf. He hasn’t spoken publicly about the oil spill since June 22 when he announced it was on a laundry list of items discussed at a cabinet meeting. Before that, on June 16, he spoke briefly after negotiating his secret liability deal with BP. Other than those two instances, the president hasn’t spent another public moment focusing on the spill since he began fighting the “battle” against “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” from the Oval Office four weeks ago.

The media not only haven’t asked him a question about the crisis, they have been complicit in its degradation, allowing the president to ignore the plight of his fellow Americans without journalistic oversight. In less than two weeks, we’ll hit Day 100, and the media will regain focus for the arbitrary and news-friendly date, but what will they cover on Day 101? And imagine BP manages to cap the leak – as we all pray occurs – without the streaming video of oil gushing, how much attention will the national media and the president give to the remaining environmental and economic crisis?

The Heritage Foundation sent a team of experts to Louisiana last week to see first-hand the crisis and the coordinated response. Based on earlier reports, our expectations were low. However, the federal government’s involvement turned out to be so much worse.

The first thing we actually heard from every single Louisianan we spoke with had nothing to do with the capping or cleanup of the oil — it was the devastating impact of the Obama drilling moratorium. Legally, the moratorium has been struck down in two major court decisions, yet the administration continues on, trying to reshape it to survive future hearings, and creating the necessary uncertainty for a de facto moratorium to exist anyway.

As Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) said: “We have very serious concerns that the Department of Interior is going to announce a second moratorium. As members of the court pointed out today during the hearing, despite the injunction against the original moratorium, we currently have a de facto moratorium because of uncertainty from the Department of Interior.”

You would think the seafood industry would support the ban on drilling, since oil is now threatening their way of life, but not so. In fact, the shrimpers and fishers are some of the biggest advocates for ending the ban so the Louisiana economy does not suffer any more, and so more jobs aren’t lost. As one official told us, first the fisherman had to figure out how to pay his bills. Now his brother’s family is going hungry. President Obama needs to categorically end his assault on the economy of Louisiana. Now is not the time for politics.

Ironically, royalties from offshore drilling in Louisiana are designated by the state constitution to pay for critical infrastructure protection and coastal restoration. The longer this drilling moratorium continues, the longer Louisiana has to wait to protect itself from future disasters. Eric Smith, an energy expert at Tulane University, pointed out that the moratorium also increases the risk of a spill because that threat increases every time you start and stop operations. Smith also pointed out that putting two to three independent safety inspectors on each rig, paid for by the oil companies, would be a low-cost alternative to the moratorium.

Offshore platforms are already leaving the Gulf, and many more are marketing their services elsewhere. Once they leave, it may be years, if not decades, before they return. And if they do return, it will be at added cost due to the potential for more broken contracts.

The second item we heard most often was that unnecessary federal permitting delays were making environmental and economic protection impossible. The marshes, waters and estuaries make up a complicated eco-system that protects south Louisiana from flooding and prevents oil from reaching inland. Yet, without the ability to build rock jetties, dykes and sand berms, the environment is going unprotected. Why? Because the left absurdly believes the protective measures might cause long-term damage, despite assurances that all measures are temporary, could be removed, and BP would pay for it. Ignoring this crisis in favor of a mythical one 30 years away must end, today.

Local officials are positive that plans they have had in place for years will work, and that shallow water vessels exist that minimize potential long term impacts. In the last ten years, these same communities have helped build 700 acres of new protective marsh. President Obama needs to listen to their input and stop the delays.

We also discovered that response crews are being prevented from working at night or for more than 20 minutes out of every hour. And apparently, those 20 minutes an hour aren’t even in shifts, but total stoppages. Louisiana fishermen are no strangers to working at night, or long hours. BP could easily afford the GPS, maps and lights needed to extend work hours. But so far, the daily response time to this crisis is simply unbalanced to the disaster itself.

If you’ve seen the broken well, you know that the oil spill itself isn’t taking mandated breaks. President Obama needs to explain what is preventing a 24/7 response and what actions he can take to change that; if his hands are tied, he needs to ensure the manpower can be tripled to make up for the ineffective labor schedules.

We also saw many other areas where the federal government is simply making matters worse. President Obama’s commission examining the spill has no industry or local expertise, but is instead loaded with environmentalists searching for a justification to institute cap and trade energy taxes.

We saw how entrepreneurs are being discouraged from offering solutions, and when offered, are met with months of red tape. We observed a claims process begging for transparency. Overall, we witnessed the need for a strong political leader that can be held accountable for the keystone-cop federal effort.

Ineptitude. Incompetence. Inattention. We heard these themes consistently as we traveled across the Gulf, but perhaps the best description came from a local Louisiana official who told our team that the federal response was “stuck on stupid.” Indeed.

Success As BP Places Cap Over Oil Well
Sky News ^ | July 13th 2010 bttt| Damien Pearse
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2551535/posts

Not so fast.

Daddy hasn’t plugged the hole yet.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2551535/posts?page=51#51

BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Results as the Testing Begins - and Open Thread

Posted by Heading Out on July 16, 2010 - 10:30am [bttt]

The picture that everyone has long been waiting to see became available after 3:25 pm (Eastern) this afternoon, when BP closed the choke lines on the 3-ram stack, and oil stopped flowing into the Gulf.

The process started on Wednesday evening, after a delay during which the Admiral gave permission for the process to start, and held the press conference that I reported on yesterday.

There's more… (1700 words and lots more pictures and charts) HERE

Lack of dolphin deaths a marine mystery

BP Oil Spill: Clean-Up Crews Can't Find Crude in the Gulf
By JEFFREY KOFMAN - BURAS, La. July 26, 2010

([bttt NOTE: Click above title to access the hot links within this article])

Excerpts:

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there's one problem -- they're having trouble finding it.

At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

Today, ABC News surveyed a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen. ...

Salvador Cepriano is one of the men searching for crude. Cepriano, a shrimper, has been laying out boom with his boat, but he's found that there's no oil to catch. ...

Even the federal government admits that locating the oil has become a problem.

"It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find," said National Incident Cmdr. Thad Allen.

Skimmers Pick Up Less Oil

The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.

Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but

experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.

"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

Experts: Gulf of Mexico Oil is Breaking Up

The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean's surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.

..."

Lots of details HERE

To: rightwingintelligentsia
“I think I recall Rush saying early on in this disaster that nature would deal with this spill in its own way, and he was excoriated for it. Evidently, Rush was right again.” ~ rightwingintelligentsia

Let’s rehearse it, shall we?:

[...]

April 29, 2010 RUSH: Our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer has just sent me something. I’ve been wondering about this. He must have been reading my mind. We’ve got 5,000 barrels a day being spilled from the rig, and Dr. Spencer looked into it. You know, we’ve talked of this before. There’s natural seepage into oceans all over the world from the ocean floor of oil and the ocean’s pretty tough, it just eats it up. Dr. Spencer looked into this. You know the seepage from the floor of the Gulf is exactly 5,000 barrels a day, throughout the whole Gulf of Mexico now. It doesn’t seep out all in one giant blob like this thing has, but the bottom line here is: Even places that have been devastated by oil slicks like... What was that place up in Alaska where the guy was drunk, ran a boat aground? (interruption) Prince William Sound. They were wiping off the rocks with Dawn dishwater detergent and paper towels and so forth. The place is pristine now.

You do survive these things. I’m not advocating don’t care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy, but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there. It’s natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is. (interruption) Well, the turtles may take a hit for a while, but so what? So do we! Hell, remember that story we had at the beginning of the show: The barred owl that flew into the windshield of the Wentzville, Missouri, fire truck, and they got to the fire and the thing was still hanging on out there. It had a broken wing and they took it to some animal veterinary sanctuary or hospital or something. Just give it a pain pill! Why not? That’s what they had for us, and we don’t even launch ourselves into the windshields of fire trucks

[...] Here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=102#102

<>

[...]

05/13/2010 RUSH: How many weeks have we been waiting for the entire southern coast and the East Coast of Florida to be drenched in oil? We’re supposed to by now have seen thousands of dead birds and pelicans, all of it covered in black gold, and so far, so far it’s not an event. I know it still could be, and I know the media is hoping it still will be, but it isn’t yet. I mean there’s one dead dolphin, they found some sea turtles, but they don’t know why. We don’t have dead birds yet. We don’t have any of that. Now they’re talking about it going to Texas. ....

Oil naturally seeps int the gulf all the time. Check this photo out, by NASA form May 13, 2006! The streaks you see are NATURAL OIL SLICKS...........

[....] Commentary and photos here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=119#119

<>

[...]

04/30/2010: RUSH: Halliburton poured the cement. You wait, Halliburton’s going to be brought up to Washington for show trials. Democrats have wanted that since the Iraq war. If they can blame this on Halliburton (laughing) and say that Cheney somehow approved the project, even as an ex-CEO, oh-ho-ho, they may not even need Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

[...] Here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=82#82

<>

05/03/2010 Rush on the timeline:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=93#93

<>

“This was a problem we ran into with Ixtoc, we never found the oil,” McKinney said.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=139#139

<>

Madcap environmentalism is partially to blame for the massive oil spill in the Gulf. ~ Dr. Zero
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=104#104

34 posted on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 10:57:51 AM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2559636/posts?page=34#34

Washington Post:
Oil in gulf is degrading, becoming harder to find, NOAA head says.

VIDEO - 100 Days

Time Mag Shocker: Rush Limbaugh Might Have Been Right About Oil Spill By Noel Sheppard Created 07/29/2010 - 09:27
Newsbusters ^ http://newsbusters.org/node/40431/print

Time magazine reported Thursday that Rush Limbaugh might have been right about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico not being the environmental disaster that everyone warned.

In an article [1] surprisingly titled, “The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?”, author Michael Grunwald first insulted the conservative talk radio host:

The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill - he calls it “the leak” - is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Yet, in the very next paragraph, Grunwald shockingly changed his tune:

Well, Rush has a point. The Deepwater explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far - while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago - it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds - but so far, less than 1% of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins - but, so far, wildlife response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of any mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And, yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes - a real slow-motion ecological calamity - but, so far, shorelines assessment teams have only found about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. [...]

Marine scientist Ivor Van Heerden, another former LSU prof who’s working for a spill response contractor, says “there’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good - I think they lied about the size of the spill - but we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts,” says Van Heerden, who, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid out of BP’s spill response funds. “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.” [...]

LSU coastal scientist Eugene Turner has dedicated much of his career to documenting how the oil industry has ravaged Louisiana’s coast with canals and pipelines, but he says the BP spill will be a comparative blip; he predicts that the oil will destroy fewer marshes than the airboats deployed to clean up the oil. “We don’t want to deny that there’s some damage, but nothing like the damage we’ve seen for years,” he says.

Interesting. So Limbaugh might not only have been right, but Time is willing to report that?

Somebody pinch me.

On the other hand, there may have been something else far more revealing in this piece for it did conclude with some politics:

The good news does suggest the folly of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s $350 million plan to build sand berms and rock jetties to protect marshes and barrier islands from oil. Some of the berms are already washing into the Gulf, and scientists agree that oil is the least of the problems facing Louisiana’s coast, which had already lost over 2,000 square miles of wetlands before the spill. “Imagine how much real restoration we could do with all that money,” Van Heerden says. (Watch TIME’s video “Oil Spill Anxiety on the Bayou.”)

Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups all have obvious incentives to accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So did the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines; those oil-soaked pelicans you keep seeing on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the healthy pelicans I saw roosting on some protective boom in Bay Jimmy. Even Limbaugh, when he wasn’t downplaying the spill, was outrageously hyping it as “Obama’s Katrina.”

So, Grunwald felt the need to take a swipe at a popular Republican governor that was doing his darnedest in this crisis to protect his state as opposed to what America saw from the White House.

But maybe most important were the references to Obama, for this could be the real motivation behind this piece.

After all, the President’s poll numbers have truly plummeted since this leak started, and Democrats are now facing serious losses in the upcoming midterm elections.

With about three months to go before Election Day, if the media can make it appear that this spill wasn’t the environmental disaster they warned, maybe Democrat losses won’t be so bad in November.

Of course, this isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be great news for the region and our nation that the catastrophe-loving press tremendously exaggerated the crisis and that Gulf states will end up far better off than feared.

But wouldn’t it be just like the Obama-loving media to now do their utmost to turn these lemons into lemonade for the Party they support.

On a related note, as this piece strongly pointed out how resilient Mother Nature is - much as conservatives like Limbaugh and George Will state on a fairly regular basis - maybe the other conclusion from this episode should be that such resiliency has also been witnessed over the millenia with regard to the constantly changing climate and will continue to be so.

As such, maybe press members and the Democrats they take marching orders from should lay off the global warming hysteria - or is that asking for too much logic from these people?

Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/07/29/time-mag-shocker-rush-limbaugh-might-have-been-right-about-oil-spill

Links:
[1] http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2007202,00.html
[2] http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_042910/content/01125113.guest.html

bttt

Also posted here:
Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010 10:06:07 AM by Sub-Driver
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2561025/posts

NYPost
August 2, 2010

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/where_all_the_oil_went_EY42ebjiCypEAbGPPGdQtM

Where all the oil went

The New York Times devoted a big chunk of its front page one day last week to noting that much of the spilled BP Deepwater Horizon oil has “dissipated.”

Most of it, in fact.

And to scant noticeable ill-effect — at least so far — relative to the apocalyptic rhetoric attending weeks of televised video footage that showed oil rushing from the ocean floor.

It’s not clear how much oil actually spilled; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute expert Dr. Judy McDowell estimates that between 96 million and 184 million gallons made its way into the Gulf before the leak was capped two weeks ago.

That’s a lot, right?

Well, maybe not.

Even at the high range, the leakage represents less than 20 percent of the capacity of the Central Park Reservoir — some 1 billion gallons.

And the Gulf of Mexico is considerably larger than the reservoir: It holds some 643 quadrillion gallons of water, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency — or 4.43 billion gallons of water for each gallon of escaped oil.

“The oil spill is definitely blown out of proportion,” said McDowell last week, with a laugh, a day after returning to Woods Hole from the Gulf Coast.

Because the oil entered the water a mile beneath the surface, she said, it will separate and dissipate on the way up.

Which tends to explain the Times’ inability to find much oil last week.

And why maybe nobody ever will — unless perhaps if a huge hurricane churns up the Gulf this summer and pulls plumes of oil to the surface.

But even then, according to McDowell, the worst that can be expected is merely a light “oiling” of the surface and some beaches. The volume of the escaped oil versus the volume of the Gulf itself will determine that outcome.

None of this is to suggest that the Deepwater Horizon explosion was anything other than an unmitigated disaster.

Yet it was not the Apocalypse, either.

An estimated 21 million gallons of crude oil seep naturally into the Gulf each year — and has for eons. Not surprisingly, Nature has devised strategies for dealing with it.

Again, Deepwater Horizon isn’t the same thing.

But modern civilization depends on the extraction and exploitation of petroleum — an inherently dangerous undertaking.

Accidents are going to happen.

The alternative?

The lights go out around the world.

bttt

Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USN04225621

U.S. says vast majority of BP spill oil gone

8:11am EDT 08/04/2010

* Containment, burning, skimming methods successful

* Browner: “this is an important turning point”

* Remaining oil said to be diluted

(Adds Browner quotes)

WASHINGTON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - The vast majority of oil from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico is gone, President Barack Obama’s energy adviser said on Wednesday, and the remaining oil reportedly does not pose a serious threat.

The U.S. government will release a report that says scientists had determined that containment, burning, and skimming measures worked in dealing with the oil spill, said Carol Browner, energy and climate change adviser to President Barack Obama.

“The good news is that the vast majority of the oil appears to be gone,” she said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show. “That’s what the initial assessment of our scientists is telling us.”

The scientists said about 25 percent of the oil had not been captured or evaporated and there still would be some tarballs washing up onshore but the government would make sure those were cleaned up as quickly as possible, Browner said.

“We do feel like this is an important turning point,” she said.

Browner’s comments came as BP said it had reached “a significant milestone” in its effort to permanently plug the well, which has spewed millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Crews pumped heavy drilling mud into the well and now will try to seal it with cement.

The New York Times said the government report was expected to say that what is left of the oil is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk.

Most is light sheen at the surface or dispersed below the surface and federal scientists believe it is breaking down rapidly, the newspaper reported.

The report on the spill, by federal scientists with outside help, is the result of an effort to determine the total volume of oil released and to figure out where it went, the Times said. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was the lead agency on the report, the newspaper said. (Writing by Tabassum Zakaria and JoAnne Allen; Editing by Bill Trott)

<><>//<><>//<><>

“Energy czar Carol Browner epitomized the secretive dealings of these offices when she advised auto industry executives this month to “to put nothing in writing, ever” about their meetings with her.”

Excerpted from:

CZAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACES

By MICHELLE MALKIN
July 26, 2009 bttt

New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_dDqMGmqqGr1qHfhulIUqkN;jsessionid=9D3BD45BB4CCF51D4980837FCC7DCE5D

If you can’t beat ‘em, czar ‘em. This is the standard operating procedure in Obama World. The time-honored Senate confirmation process proved to be a dangerous landmine for one too many of the president’s picks. But the White House found the perfect cure for Obama Nominee Withdrawal Syndrome: Avoid future debacles by circumventing the nomination process altogether.

So far, czars have been installed in at least 35 posts through presidential executive orders that require no Senate approval. No Senate review, no questions. No questions, no problems.

The Obama administration has created a two-tiered government — fronted by Cabinet secretaries able to withstand public scrutiny (some of them, just barely) and then managed behind the scenes by shadow secretaries with broad powers beyond congressional reach. Bureaucratic chaos serves as a useful smokescreen to obscure the true source of policy decision-making. Energy czar Carol Browner epitomized the secretive dealings of these offices when she advised auto industry executives this month to “to put nothing in writing, ever” about their meetings with her.

While past administrations dating back to the Nixon era have designated such “super aides,” none has extended the concept as widely as Obama has. Currently, 35 out of 44 current “czar” slots are presidential appointments. They are among the highest-paid staffers at the White House. Most of Obama’s key czars have Cabinet counterparts already in place.

It’s not just the unprecedented quantity of White House-appointed bureaucratic commissars that galls. It’s their shockingly compromised ethics and integrity. Here are three of Obama’s most interest-conflicted, superfluous, and criminal czars and czarinas:

Nancy DeParle, Health Czar

Former Kansas Democrat Governor Kathleen Sebelius won Senate confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary. But the real power lies with with newly-created health czar Nancy-Ann Min DeParle. Her official title: Director of the White House Office for Health Reform.

DeParle ran the behemoth Medicare and Medicaid programs under Bill Clinton. She parlayed her government experience into a lucrative private-sector stint. Over the past three years, she made nearly $6 million from her work in the health care industry. Despite President Obama’s loud denunciations of the revolving-door lobbyist culture in Washington, DeParle’s industry ties didn’t bother the White House.

She served as an investment advisor at JP Morgan Partners, LLC; sat on the board of directors at Boston Scientific Corporation; and held directorships at Accredo Health Group Inc., Triad Hospitals (now part of Community Health Systems), and DaVita Corporation. In all, she sat on at least 10 boards while advising JP Morgan and working as managing director at a private equity firm, CCMP Capital.

From 2002 to 2008, while holding all those titles, DeParle also served as a member of the government-chartered Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC), an influential panel that advises Congress on what Medicare should cover and at what price. Last month, former MedPAC member DeParle cozily announced that Obama was “open to making recommendations of [MedPAC] mandatory unless opposed by a joint resolution of Congress.”

Obama famously signed an early executive order requiring appointees to pledge not to participate “in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to any former employer or former clients” for a period of two years from the date of his or her appointment. But it’s hard to imagine any health care reform-related issue that won’t involve one of DeParle’s former employers, clients, and corporate boards in the health care industry. She earned at least $376,000 from Cerner Corporation, for example, which specializes in health information technology. As health czar, DeParle has unmeasured clout in directing $19 billion of federal stimulus money earmarked for, yes, health information technology.

Last week, a Washington, D.C. citizen watchdog filed suit to force the White House to disclose which health care lobbyists and executives it had met with this year to discuss insurance takeover legislation. White House counsel Greg Craig refused to disclose which administration officials attended the meetings. But at least two of the industry visitors have ties to DeParle. William C. Weldon is chairman of Johnson & Johnson, which paid DeParle $7,500 for a recent speech. Wayne Smith is chief executive of Community Health Systems, which merged with Triad Hospitals - where DeParle served on the board of directors. DeParle’s options were converted to cash payments worth $1.05 million.

Despite Obama’s lip service to transparency, the public is in the dark about which assets DeParle has divested and how many times, if any, DeParle has recused herself from policy matters and meetings. Czardom has its privileges.

Adolfo Carrion, Urban Czar

Former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr., the nation’s “urban czar” is a man in Obama’s own image: Son of immigrants. Charismatic. Ambitious. And embroiled in pay-for-play scandals that would make the Chicago political machine proud.

Carrion’s official title: Head of the White House Office of Urban Affairs. But doesn’t the president already have a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? Yes. That spot went to Harvard grad and former Clinton HUD official Shaun Donovan, who moved up from his role as New York City commissioner of housing and development. Grievance groups, however, were miffed that the HUD job didn’t go to a racial or ethnic minority. (Donovan is white; HUD is a notorious bastion of cronyism of color.) Enter Carrión.

As a reward for turning out the Latino vote, Obama gave Carrion the unprecedented power to shower federal dollars on urban areas and coordinate urban policy across several bureaucracies. In practice, the job empowers Carrión to carry out the kind of pay-to-play schemes that sullied his tenure in the Bronx on a nationwide scale. It’s Obama-approved old school patronage dressed up as the new urban renewal.

As Bronx Borough president, Carrion took tens of thousands of dollars in donations from real estate firms just before and after the developers snagged lucrative deals or crucial zoning changes for their projects. In turn, he made millions in public tax dollars available to his cronies. And Carrion rubber-stamped three housing projects for an architect whom he hired to renovate his City Island Victorian home. It is illegal for an elected official to accept such a gift, but Carrión failed to pay the architect until after he was tapped for his urban czar post. The White House shrugged.

Similar arrangements involving home renovation freebies from corporate suitors resulted in multiple criminal convictions for entrenched Alaska GOP Senator Ted Stevens and forced the resignation of Republican former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. But there was barely a peep from the Beltway’s clean government types about Carrión’s smelly deals. He is also a lavish spender - squandering nearly $20,000 on a teleprompter, junkets to San Juan, and $50,000 on a going away party for himself. Viva la Hope and Change.

Vivek Kundra, Technology Czar

Who thinks putting a shoplifter in charge of the entire federal government’s information security infrastructure is a good idea? The Obama White House has complete confidence in Vivek Kundra, the 34-year-old “whiz kid” named Federal Chief Information Officer in March 2009 despite his criminal history. As first reported by Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com, Kundra was convicted of misdemeanor theft. He stole a handful of men’s shirts from a J.C. Penney’s department store and ran from police in a failed attempt to evade arrest. Kundra was a 21-year-old adult at the time of his attempted thievery and attempted escape from the police. From the White House’s pooh-poohing of the incident as a “youthful indiscretion,” you might have thought the digits in his age were reversed.

Whitewashing the petty thief’s crimes, Obama instead effused about his technology czar’s “depth of experience in the technology arena.” As the nation’s CIO, Kundra “will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.” But the aura of security and openness was further thrown into doubt in March when an FBI search warrant was issued at Kundra’s office. He was serving as the Chief Technology Officer of the District of Columbia before moving over to the White House.

During the transition, two of Kundra’s underlings, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, were charged in an alleged scheme of bribery, kickbacks, ghost employees, and forged timesheets. Kundra was put on leave for five days and then reinstated after the feds informed him that he was neither a subject nor a target of the investigation. Team Obama emphasized that Kundra had no idea what was going on in his workplace, which employed about 300 workers.

But if his claimed ignorance is supposed to exonerate Kundra, what does it suggest about his ability to police government technology operations across the entire federal government? And what responsibility and oversight exactly did Kundra have over the indicted employees in his office?

Veteran D.C. newspaper columnist Jonetta Rose Barras reported that Acar “was consistently promoted by his boss, Vivek Kundra, receiving with each move increasing authority over sensitive information and operating with little supervision.” The raid was no surprise to city and federal watchdogs, who had identified a systemic lack of controls in the office. Now, Kundra promises to create “a culture of accountability and innovation” in order to prevent “theft and fraud.” The anti-crime prevention strategy of Obama’s technology security chief: Takes one to know one.

The czar explosion illustrates the first law of political physics: As government grows, corruption flows. Unchecked, these super-bureaucrats have the power to wreak major havoc on the economy and our lives. Who will stop them?

Michelle Malkin is author of the new book “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies” (Regnery).

WaPo: Chemical dispersants used in gulf oil spill don’t hurt seafood safety, FDA says

Washington Post ^ | August 6, 2010 | Lyndsey Layton
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080603185.html

In a letter sent in response to questions from Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of seafood said that chemicals used to break up the slicks are not as dangerous to human health as the oil itself.

FDA scientists do not believe that the chemicals accumulate significantly in the tissue of fish and shellfish, and so, even if the fish absorb the chemicals through gills or other ways, the fish do not retain them, Jeanne Ireland, FDA’s assistant commissioner for legislation, wrote to Markey. That means they do not pass up the food chain to humans and are not considered a public health concern, according to the FDA.

BP sprayed 1.8 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit on the surface of the gulf and, for the first time, at the wellhead a mile underwater. Dispersants were last used July 19, four days after BP temporarily capped its leaking well.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...

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Also posted here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2565810/posts

Some accurate comments:

The specific dispersants used in treating the current oil spill have been used for many years and previously approved by earlier administrations.

9 posted on Friday, August 06, 2010 12:22:31 PM by thackney

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If a person does the research, you would find that people don’t have any problem wearing clothes or eating off dishes that have been washed in exactly the same “chemicals” contained in the dispersents.

12 posted on Friday, August 06, 2010 12:42:07 PM by Species8472

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Never let the facts get in the way of a good histeria.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to eat Gulf of Mexico Seafood as I have done for the last couple months (actually decades).

13 posted on Friday, August 06, 2010 12:48:11 PM by thackney

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BP Links Compensation to Continued Drilling In The Gulf

http://www.wkrg.com/gulf_oil_spill/article/BP-Links-Compensation-to-Continued-Drilling-In-The-Gulf/912930/Aug-12-2010_12-03-am/

Published: Wed, August 11, 2010 - 6:40 pm bttt
The $20 billion victims’ compensation fund established for the Gulf oil spill may use revenue from BP’s oil and gas drilling as collateral, according to details released Wednesday by the White House.

The government watchdog group Public Citizen criticized the arrangement as a conflict of interest, arguing that it gives the government a financial incentive to encourage BP to keep drilling offshore.

BP has already made a $3 billion initial deposit, announced Monday. The company must pay $2 billion more this year and continue in installments of $1.25 billion, according to the trust documents released Wednesday.

The trust calls for a collateral fund to ensure that all the necessary money will be available if something happens to the BP subsidiary that established the trust. Details must still be negotiated, but the trust documents say that unless a different agreement is reached, BP will agree to give the trust first priority to production payments from the company’s U.S. oil and gas production as collateral.

Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, said that securing the compensation fund with drilling revenue “is wildly inappropriate, as it will make the government and BP virtual partners in Gulf oil production. ... It will give the government a financial incentive to become an even bigger booster of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf.”

The trust fund was negotiated by the Justice Department. A department spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.

The trust is to be administered by two independent trustees, with claims being processed by Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s pay czar.

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More –› Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
http://www.wkrg.com/gulf_oil_spill/article/BP-Links-Compensation-to-Continued-Drilling-In-The-Gulf/912930/Aug-12-2010_12-03-am/

» Live Oil Spill Cam
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» Dispersant / Corexitby (AP) WASHINGTON

‘Rig Row’ in Pascagoula is home to drilling towers idled by moratorium

Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 8:45 PM bttt Updated: Wednesday, August 11, 2010, 9:46 AM

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/08/rig_row_in_pascagoula_is_home.html

The Gulf Recovery Obama Does Not Want to See

August 13th, 2010 at 9:14am bttt

Next week, for the fifth time since July, the first family will board Air Force One for yet another luxury vacation, this time to an exclusive Martha’s Vineyard estate that rents for up to $50,000 a week. But before they head north, the Obamas will first grace Panama City, Fla., with their presence this weekend for what is being billed as a “solidarity vacation to the Gulf Coast.” While in Florida, the President is expected to meet with local business leaders to discuss the effects of the spill before departing on a cross-country trip around the United States including stops in Los Angeles and Seattle to raise cash for Democrats and a stop in Wisconsin at a renewable energy factory. Not on the agenda? Any meetings with oil workers in other Gulf states who are now unemployed thanks to President Obama’s Gulf oil drilling ban.

If the President really wanted to see the economic damage his policies are causing in the Gulf, he could first stop in Pascagoula, Miss., where idle oil rigs in the Signal International shipyard have formed an eerie floating ghost city that locals have dubbed “Rig Row.” Instead of being deployed at sea where they could be creating wealth for this country and jobs for Gulf residents, these rigs are wasting away idly in port as a direct result of President Obama’s oil drilling moratorium – a moratorium that when first issued on just deep sea rigs, a federal judge ruled was “arbitrary and capricious.” Undaunted, the Obama administration doubled down, issuing a broader oil drilling injunction that is killing even more jobs than the first ban.

Gulf residents are extremely unhappy with these policies. An ABC News poll found that Gulf Coast residents disapproved of President Obama’s oil drilling moratorium by a 60-38 point margin. The issue has also dominated the hearings of President Obama’s own oil spill commission who, when they first convened, said they would spend no time investigating the rationale, effectiveness or impact of the oil ban. But faced with passionate opposition at hearings in New Orleans, former Florida Gov. and Sen. Bob Graham (D) and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly (R), have done a 180-degree reversal. Last week the commission sent a letter to the Obama administration demanding a detailed justification for the ban by August 23. The commission shouldn’t hold their breath: the President is on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard until August 29.

Why is President Obama so eager to see Florida recover but doesn’t have the time of day for the other Gulf states? Eric Smith, a professor at the Tulane University business school, told FOX News: “The administration is in thrall to the environmental community, unfortunately, and as a result, they’re playing that card, and I think to try and slow up, or increase the cost of, hydrocarbons. I don’t blame them for doing that; I just think that’s the reality….After the [1989] Exxon Valdez accident, after the [1969] Santa Barbara accident, we certainly did study the accidents to figure out what went wrong and then take some corrective action. But we didn’t shut down the industry in the meantime.” The Obama oil ban isn’t about safety, it is about permanently shrinking our domestic oil production capacity as quickly as possible.

More Here

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/243665/our-real-gulf-disaster-lou-dolinar
Lou Dolinar

August 12, 2010 4:00 P.M. bttt

OUR REAL GULF DISASTER

From the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of NR.

Four months after the Deepwater Horizon spill which President Obama called the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” the oil is disappearing, and fisheries are returning to normal. It turns out that this incident exposed some things that are seriously wrong in the world of oil and I don’t mean exploding wells. There was a broad-based failure on the part of the media, the science establishment, and the federal bureaucracy. With the nation and its leaders looking for facts, we got instead a massive plume of apocalyptic mythology and threats of Armageddon. In the Gulf, this misinformation has cost jobs, lowered property values, and devastated tourism, and its effects on national policy could be deep and far-reaching.

To get an idea of the scale of misinformation involved, consider how many of the most widely reported narratives about the spill ones that have woven their way into the national consciousness have turned out to be dubious. Some examples:

East Coast beaches are threatened. Everyone got the wrong idea about the magnitude of the spill from the very beginning. Simply put, while terrible, it was never going to be as big as most thought it would be. The spreading of this East Coast–beach meme was a joint operation of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the media. In June, NCAR produced a slick computer-modeled animated video that showed a gigantic part of the spill making its way around the southern tip of Florida and up the East Coast. Oil covered everything from the Gulf to the Grand Banks. “BP oil slick could hit East Coast in weeks: government scientists,” dutifully reported the New York Daily News. CBS News, MSNBC, and many other media outlets chimed in in the same vein. The video was wildly popular on YouTube.

But then the government, in the form of a more senior bureaucracy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), disavowed the scenario.

In fact, according to Chuck Watson of Watson Technical Consulting a Savannah, Ga., firm specializing in computer modeling of the effects of hurricanes, seismic events, geophysical hazards, and weapons of mass destruction the simulation was bogus from the very beginning, because it ignored important conditions in the Gulf. Furthermore, says Watson, the media never took account of how diluted the oil would be once it hit the Atlantic: The bulk of the theoretically massive spill the video shows amounts to roughly a quart of oil per square mile. Watson claims flat-out that NOAA was “gold digging” for grants; there’s probably more federal research money floating around the Gulf than there is oil. “There is a feeding frenzy with people trying to get funding for their specialty,” he says.

Giant plumes of oil. By mid-May, oil was still comparatively scarce in the Gulf. Disappointed, the media began trying to figure out where it had gone. Marine researchers were drafted to provide the answer. Diluted oil was being found beneath the surface; but how diluted, no one was sure, and there was nothing vaguely resembling peer-reviewed literature.

Still, news reports implied or asserted that “enormous oil plumes” were waiting, like submerged monsters, to rise and attack unsuspecting beaches and wetlands. The New York Times summed up the media consensus on May 15: “Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.” The article quoted Samantha Joye, a marine-sciences professor at the University of Georgia, as saying that this oil was mixed with water in the consistency of “thin salad dressing.”

According to the Washington Post, James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, reported “a plume of oil in a section of the Gulf 75 miles northwest of the source of the leak. Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball.” The Post said that this showed the oil might slip past containment booms and pollute beaches and marshland.

But late in May, NOAA did a study that was far less alarming. It found weak concentrations of oil in the area surrounding the Deepwater Horizon site: 0.5 parts per million, maximum. The median was a little over 0.2 parts per million. As with the “giant” spill that threatened the East Coast, that’s barely above the threshold of detection. And by late July and early August, BP, the federal government, and some independent researchers were saying they couldn’t find any plumes at all. “We’re finding hydrocarbons around the well, but as we move away from the well, they move to almost background traces in the water column,” said Adm. Thad Allen, the administration’s point man on the spill. Some 75 percent of the oil released is gone and that’s based on new estimates that put the spill rate at the high end of earlier projections.

As with the bogus doomsday model, industry experts say the giant-plume threat was greatly overstated by scientists and further blown out of proportion by the media. According to Arthur Berman, a respected petroleum expert at Labyrinth Consulting Services in Sugar Land, Texas, the theory flunks basic physics. “Oil is lighter than water and rises above it in all known situations on this planet. The idea of underwater plumes defies everything that we know about physical laws and has distressed me from the outset about these unscientific reports.”

It also ignores the Gulf’s well-known ability to break down oil. Berman points out that the Gulf has for millennia been a warm, rich ecological gumbo of natural oil seeps, oil-eating bacteria, and marine life that subsists on the bacteria. His research, he says, suggests that the spill represents at most four times as much oil as seeps into the Gulf naturally in a year in other words, it is eminently digestible by the native ecosystem.

Berman and Watson are contributors to The Oil Drum, a group blog written by and for people in the energy business. The website has been debunking many of the extreme scenarios surrounding the spill. Most of its contributors are proponents of “peak oil” theories, and thus are skeptical of oil’s future and eager to explore alternatives. The oil industry has come to a sorry pass when its skeptics are its most credible defenders.

The Corexit threat. No aspect of the spill response has been more controversial than the widespread use of Corexit, a family of detergent-like compounds that break up oil, hence the name “dispersant.” Once broken up, oil evaporates, and is also easily eaten by bacteria. Dispersion turns thick, ugly slicks into widely distributed droplets, minimizing damage to beaches and sensitive wetlands. Massive application of dispersants is the reason the spill disappeared so quickly; but it’s important not to spray the dispersants directly on living things, like marshlands or coral.

Corexit has faced a variety of criticisms. Some say it is absolutely toxic, even more so when mixed with oil, and blame it for illness, including cancer, among spill workers in Alaska and elsewhere. They claim it’s been banned in Britain because it’s poisonous. They also suggest that Corexit is more dangerous and less effective than alternative dispersants, and has been used because BP has a financial interest in the firm that makes it. While this full-blown Corexit fear has been the province, for the most part, of green blogs, a few such allegations have made their way into mainstream publications like the New York Times, as well as recent congressional hearings.

The reality is that enough of anything will kill you, but that the amount of Corexit in the Gulf is highly diluted. As for the British ban on Corexit, it was based not on toxicity, but on the product’s slipperiness: Because the island nation is surrounded by a rocky, ecologically sensitive coastal environment, its version of the EPA makes sure all the small creatures that live there can cling safely to their rocks. If oil or Corexit gets on a rock, the humble limpet, the official guinea pig, loses its grip, so Corexit failed the tests. It is approved for application to spills in open water.

Even the EPA, which tries to ban basically everything but prune juice, has always approved of Corexit under tight supervision. The EPA weighed in with new findings at the beginning of August: It said that Corexit was “similar” in toxicity to other dispersants, and that there was no evil synergistic effect when Corexit was combined with oil. To the extent we need to worry about subtle, long-term environmental problems, the issue of residual oil is 100 times more important than Corexit.

Senior scientist Judith McDowell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a marine biologist who recently returned from the Gulf, says she isn’t entirely comfortable with the compound. But “given the situation in the Gulf,” she says, “given the massive amounts of oil and the human-health consequences at the well site, they had no choice.” She adds that dispersants should not be used with all spills. “It’s a trade-off when one wants to protect shoreline habitats, but you shouldn’t apply dispersants in all situations.”

All this misinformation comes at a serious cost. Even if the administration quickly rescinds its ban on offshore drilling (cost: 50,000 jobs, more than $2 billion in lost wages), as appeared likely in early August, the economic impact of the spill and the paranoia surrounding it will be huge. Potential visitors and customers are scared.

The real-estate company CoreLogic, as quoted by Bloomberg, says property values could fall by about $3 billion over the next few years along the Gulf, and as much as $56,000 for some houses.

A trade group, the U.S. Travel Association, said the tourism industry in Florida alone could stand to lose up to $18.6 billion over the next three years from the BP oil spill, even though the well has been capped.

There are dozens of anecdotal reports that no one is buying Gulf seafood, even in areas unaffected by the spill. Gulf Coast shrimpers and fishermen are in a tough spot: On one hand, as more areas of the Gulf are declared safe, they presumably won’t be able to collect compensation from BP or the government and will have to get back to work; on the other, no one’s buying their catch. Given the public fear of toxins in food, this problem could last a long time.

Even if the drilling ban ends, regulatory uncertainty will exact a huge cost from oil firms and their shareholders. Some insider reports suggest that oil assets in the Gulf are already being disposed of at fire-sale prices.

What’s especially unfortunate here is that all the misinformation connected to overreaction to the spill may have had a serious influence on President Obama and his advisers leading, for example, to the Gulf drilling ban and an overly strict regulatory approach. This is a tough sell for conservatives, many of whom are looking for evil purposefulness, rather than delusion, in the administration’s policies. But think of it this way. We have the most liberal administration in history, and it is composed of people who lack the reflexive skepticism that conservatives apply to the mainstream media and left-wing blogs. Spend enough time following the reporting and blogging on Deepwater Horizon, and you come to realize that the administration’s behavior in the crisis likely wasn’t based on a cynical master plan; rather, the administration was overwhelmed by sheer panic about the magnitude of the potential disasters, outlined by its most loyal supporters, that it thought it faced.

Lou Dolinar is a retired columnist and reporter for Newsday. He is currently in Mobile, Ala., working on a book about what really did happen in the Deepwater Horizon spill.

First, this comment on the Popular Mechanics article entitled “Investigative Report: How the BP Oil Rig Blowout Happened “ posted below:

To: wolfpat

And we do much the same in the oil industry (study past failures of many kinds for lessons learned and apply them).

The article is correct in some areas such as Normalization of Deviance and BP’s cowboy culture.

It is dead wrong about the integrity of the industry or the regulators or the generalization that nobody knew how to handle a deepwater blowout... I assure you, many did and do know how to handle a deep water blowout. Plans had been submitted to MMS, BP, state and federal governments within a week of the blowout to cap the well in almost the same way it was capped 60 days later. They were ignored. The whole event became a political and media spectacle.

Those who have been in this industry for decades sweat bullets and are a continuous thorn in the side of anyone who wants to take shortcuts. Some have taken the responsibility in the industry as keepers of the license to operate and the CEOs of just about any company worth their salt knows what this means... loss of access to resources, death of the company and maybe even the industry. We were around to see the nuclear industry die and some of us even saw the Santa Barbara Channel spill and what that did.

It is also dead wrong in statements such as, “... The same offshore techniques and equipment that worked in shallow hydrocarbon formations seemed to function fine at ever greater depths...” This is pure crap. The author demonstrates his ignorance since the fact is that we have learned that almost nothing works in deepwater the same as it did in lesser depths. Dramatic changes have been required and have been made... they are above the ability of some to manage. They are dang sure above the ability of a trainee to supervise.

The famous Dr. Bea from Stanford knows less about deepwater drilling than I do about brain surgery. He has set himself up as a self proclaimed expert and is a pitiful grand stander. He is a former Shell Oil facilities engineer. The article quotes a few civil engineering professors. Civil Engineers are fine fellows for building structures and such but are rendering opinions outside their area of practice when it comes to deepwater or any other kind of drilling... in most states this is something the state board of registration for engineers finds worthy of prosecution.

The number of “blowouts” is over-stated since the criteria in the Podio and the MMS Studies included many minor instances and production leaks. The author paints a picture of reckless operations, this is wrong.

Anything done wrong will go wrong. Nothing is idiot proof... ever but this disaster was preventable. A good investigative reporter would be able to say why. BP violated at least 18 separate accepted oil field standards of practice. It was a sloppy operation that was poorly engineered and even more poorly led.

The BP report is a whitewash designed to sway public opinion in preparation for a civil jury trial. Where they could, BP has placed blame on others directly or shared blame but never taken full responsibility for anything. BP will sue Halliburton and Transocean in an attempt to stack the deck against criminal proceedings by DOJ that will attempt to pin gross negligence on BP. The best defense is a good offense and BP have started theirs. If BP are found guilty of gross negligence, and in my view they should be, it should mark the end of the company.

BP can say anything but at the end of the day there is only one name on the permit to drill and only one party held accountable for all the actions on the well... BP.

10 posted on Saturday, September 11, 2010 6:24:43 PM by Sequoyah101
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2587468/posts?page=10#10

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Investigative Report: How the BP Oil Rig Blowout Happened
Popular Mechanics ^ | SEPTEMBER 2, 2010 | Carl Hoffman
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/how-the-bp-oil-rig-blowout-happened

Posted on Saturday, September 11, 2010 5:34:34 PM by Hojczyk
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2587468/posts

Three Mile Island, Challenger, Chernobyland now, Deepwater Horizon. Like those earlier disasters, the destruction of the drilling rig was an accident waiting to happen. Here, engineers in the growing science of failure analysis identify seven fatal flaws that led to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and draw lessons on how to prevent future catastrophes.

By Carl Hoffman

Picture: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/Wj/deepwater_horizon_01_0910-md.jpg
Deepwater Horizon burned for a day and a half before sinking in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22. Polaris

April 20 was a triumphant evening for British Petroleum and the crew of Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon. Floating 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5000 feet of water, the oil rig was close to completing a well 13,000 feet beneath the ocean flooran operation so complex it’s often compared to flying to the moon. Now, after 74 days of drilling, BP was preparing to cap the Macondo Prospect well until a production rig was brought in to start harvesting oil and gas. Around 10:30 in the morning, a helicopter flew in four senior executivestwo from BP and two from Transocean, to celebrate the well’s completion and the rig’s seven years without a serious accident.

What unfolded over the next few hours could almost have been written as a treatise in the science of industrial accidents. As with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial core meltdown in 1979, the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the space shuttle Challenger disintegration in 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosions and fi re that same year, there is never one mistake or one malfunctioning piece of hardware to blame. Instead, the Horizon disaster resulted from many human and technical failings in a risk-taking corporation that operated in an industry with ineffective regulatory oversight. By the time the blowout came, it was almost inevitable. “It’s clear that the problem is not technology, but people,” says Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the university of California–Berkeley. “It was a chain of important errors made by people in critical situations involving complex technological and organization systems.”

Bea and other engineers subject catastrophes like Deepwater Horizon to the science of failure analysis for good reason: Studying industrial disasters can lead to understanding the root causes behind every accident, which is the critical first step toward improving safety and preventing future big bangs. If we learn from mistakes, failure can drive innovation, both technical and organizational. “A lot of intelligence came out of Three Mile Island,” says Larry Foulke, former president of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct professor at the university of Pittsburgh, knowledge that led to improvements like better control-room ergonomics and the standardization and accreditation of industry-wide training programs.Since Three Mile Island, there has not been another major accident in the U.S. nuclear industry.

The following lessons drawn from forensic engineering should spur changes in the oil industry and government agencies that will lead to better risk assessment, more useful regulatory oversight, safer operating procedures and rapid crisis response. The blowout was a punishing lesson: 11 workers were killed and 17 injured in the accident itself. The resulting oil spill damaged the economy and environment of the entire Gulf Coast. But out of this calamity can come changes that will reduce the chances of such a tragedy occurring again, not just in deepwater drilling but in other high tech, high-risk industries as well.

Success Breeds Complacency

A simple but counterintuitive fact led to the Horizon disaster: wells, even ones drilled in deep water, had worked most of the time, just as the space shuttle and chemical and nuclear plants had functioned successfully, in some cases for decades. Although underwater drilling is complex and challenging, there are 3423 active wells in the Gulf of Mexico, 25 in water deeper than 1000 feet. Seven months before the blowout and about 250 miles southeast of Houston, the Horizon had drilled the world’s deepest wellan astounding 35,055 feet.

What was impossible just a few years earlier had become seemingly routine as BP and Transocean banged out record firsts on the farthest frontiers of technology and geography. The same offshore techniques and equipment that worked in shallow hydrocarbon formations seemed to function fine at ever greater depths and higher pressures. The offshore rush was on, and nothing was going to stop it. “when you think you’ve got a robust system,” says Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke university, “you tend to relax.”

Other industries have lapsed into the same sense of false security. “By the time of Three Mile Island,” Foulke says, “the nuclear industry had not had a major mishap in 25 years. when you get an attitude that nothing bad happens, it leads you to believe that nothing ever will. “

It’s called hubris, and it set the stage for the Deepwater disaster. “In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill,” read the exploration plan that BP submitted on March 10, 2009, to the u.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), which then managed and regulated offshore drilling, “it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry-wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses . . . “

That was nonsense. Although offshore blowouts occur frequentlythere were 173 in the Gulf of Mexico alone from 1980 to 2008there had never been one in deep water. In fact, neither BP nor any of its competitors had “proven equipment or technology” or any backup plan for a catastrophic failure at great depth. “The industry has not developed an oil spill plan for the low probability, high- consequence event when everything fails,” says Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the university of Texas.

Promoters Can’t Be Enforcers

Oil and gas leases are the federal government’s second largest source of revenue, after income taxes. Before the blowout, the responsibility for leasing federal mineral rights and collecting revenue from those leases belonged to the MMS. The MMS clearly placed its mandate to promote drilling ahead of its role as a safety cop. (After the disaster, the Interior Department disbanded the service and created the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, with an investigative arm to root out misconduct and complacency.) In the MMS era, oil companies were referred to as partners, and MMS officials routinely received cash bonuses for meeting federal deadlines for offshore leasing. Although the Bureau of Land Management has a similar relationship with the oil industry, says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the consequences of a blowout on shore are much less severe. “The roots of the MMS,” Ruch says, “were to facilitate the work of its partners and to collect revenueand the national policy was to increase revenue.”

Just 60 MMS inspectors oversaw rigs in the gulf. They examined oil spill response plans that were often boilerplate reproductions from one well to another. BP’s response plan for the gulf referenced seals and walruses , which aren’t found in that body of water, referred to a home-shopping network in Japan and listed scientists who were dead. No one noticed. The inspectors, Ruch says,” just made sure the companies checked the right boxes.” Since much of the drilling data necessary to complete environmental reviews was proprietary, MMS scientists were not allowed access to exploration and drilling details . when BP made repeated last- minute changes to its drilling plan in the days before the blowout, the MMS approved them all, often within minutes. “That’s what happens,” Ruch says, “when the government is dependent upon industry for its expertise.”

Picture:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/e8/deepwater_horizon_02_0910-md.jpg
On April 21, 2010, rescue vessels in the Gulf of Mexico battle an inferno on the Deepwater Horizona fire fed by oil and gas spewing from a well that blew the previous day 18,000 feet below the deck of the drilling rig. Polaris

A Cowboy Culture

For years BP had prided itself on taking high-risk jobs in politically sensitive countries such as Angola and Azerbaijan and for pushing the limits of technology in the remotest reaches of Alaska and the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico”the tough stuff that others cannot or choose not to do,” according to former BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward. within the industry, the company was notorious for its cavalier approach to safety. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from June 2007 to February 2010, BP’s refineries in Texas City, Texas, and Toledo, Ohio, accounted for 829 of 851 industry-wide safety violations identified as “willful” by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). These were refineries, not oil rigs, but they demonstrate what OSHA describes as “plain indifference to . . . employee safety and health.”

And Deepwater was not BP’s first significant spill. In 2007, BP Products North America paid a criminal fine of more than $60 million for violating federal environmental regulations in Texas and Alaska, including a 2006 spill on the North Slope of Alaska that resulted from BP’s failure to address pipeline corrosion . The 200,000 gallons of crude that spread across the tundra formed the largest spill on the North Slope. Here’s how Steve Arendt, a vice president of ABS Consulting and an industry expert who worked with the Chemical Safety Board’s investigation panel on BP’s 2005 Texas City refinery fire, describes the BP corporate culture: “‘we have the matter in hand.’ It might be a northern European cultural thing, but BP was convinced that the Texas City accident was a one-off, rather than something systemic and pervasive. They were arrogant and proud of the systems they had in place . They were in denial.”

Executives of other oil companies told Congress that BP’s well plans were outside industry norms. “It certainly appears that not all the standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place,” said John S. Watson, chairman of Chevron. Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell, concurred: “It’s not a well that we would have drilled in that mechanical setup.”

The MMS had implemented a voluntary safety and environmental management program for the offshore industry In 2009, when the MMS tried to make the program mandatory, much like the OSHA regulations that govern onshore drilling, the industry objected so vigorously that the program died. “The regulations are fine as they stand,” says Terry Barr, a Lakewood, Colo.–based petroleum geologist who has spent over 30 years in the oil and gas industries. “But there’s an honor systemand this is where the industry is so unhappy with BP. when you send your paperwork to MMS, that’s a recipe for what you’re going to do, and you have to honor that. And 99 percent of the time, people follow what they say they are going to do. That was not the case in this well.”

Blowing on the Dice

Oil and methane gas in deep geological formations are under tremendous pressureinsert a straw and up they shoot. The deeper the well, the higher the pressure, more than 9000 psi in wells 20,000 feet deep. During drilling, mineral- weighted mud pumped down the well lubricates the drill string and fl ushes rock chips to the surface. Most importantly, the dense mud’s hydrostatic pressure keeps the fl uids in the formation in check. Mud is, in fact, the primary line of defense against a blowout.

If oil, gas or water enters the well during drilling because mud weight is too low, the well is said to “kick.” (Transocean testified before Congress that the Macondo well had kicked several times.) If the well is fractured or the cement bond between the casing protecting the drill string and the rock wall of the well isn’t tight, gas bubbles can roar up the drill string or the outside of the casing and reenter the casing at its overlapping joints. Even if the methane doesn’t come to the surface, it can “push the mud into the formation” with such power it fractures the hole and creates a leak, says Philip Johnson, professor of civil engineering at the university of Alabama.

What happened on the Horizon falls into the category of low-probability, high-consequence events that author Nassim Nicholas Taleb dubbed black swansa common term in the Middle Ages for an impossibility, since at the time all swans were thought to be white. “The human perception of risk is an affective, subjective business,” says David Ropeik, an instructor at Harvard and author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts. A classic black swan was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet union in 1986. The reactor had no containment domeengineers deemed the safety feature unnecessary because a meltdown was simply thought to be so unlikely. The design fl aw, compounded by operator error, poor training and a lax attitude toward safety, contributed to an explosion that released widespread nuclear radiation. “Assessing risk is not a fact-based process of clear reason,” Ropeik says, “and subjective feelings always play a larger role than the facts.”

Neither the oil industry nor the MMS addressed the added risks of drilling in ever more challenging environments. “There was a lack of a sense of vulnerability within the industry,” says safety expert Arendt. “The gulf was one of the last cowboy environments, and the industry was blinded by its good performance.” Robert Bea adds: “Because BP and the MMS believed that the potential consequences were ‘insignificant,’ they were not prepared for the failures associated with the Deepwater Horizon’s operations, both in prevention and containment.”

Normalization of Deviance

At the root of BP’s choices was what Bea calls the normalization of deviance. The company had long grown used to operating at the margins of safety. It regarded red flags as normal, and those red flags cropped up repeatedly on the Macondo well, with the frequency accelerating in the four days before the blowout.

A series of delays added to the pressure on managers to ignore warning signs. Though drilling had begun on Oct. 7, 2009, using a different rig, the Marianas, that rig was damaged in a November hurricane. It took three months to bring in the Horizon and resume drilling. The well was scheduled for 78 days at a cost of $96 million, but the real target was 51 days. BP urged speed. Mike williams, Transocean’s chief electronics technician, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he heard a BP manager saying, “Let’s bump it up, let’s bump it up.” But in early March that increased drilling speed fractured the well, forcing workers to backtrack 2000 feet from the then-13,000-foot hole, plug the cracked section with cement, and carve a new path to the hydrocarbon-bearing formation, or pay zone. “Operations were faster and cheaper,” Bea says, “but not betterthe operation records clearly show excessive economic and schedule pressures resulting in compromises in quality and reliability.”

Those compromises began piling up on April 9, when the well reached its final depth of 18,360 feet below the rig 1192 feet below the last cemented steel casing. A well is drilled in sections: Roughnecks bore through rock, install casing to line the hole, pour cement into the gap between the casing and the surrounding rock, and repeat the process with ever-narrower casing. To secure that final section, BP had two options: Run a single string of casing from the wellhead to the well bottom, or hang a liner from the last section of casing already installed and cemented, and then slide in a second steel liner tube called a liner/tieback. The tieback option cost $7 million to $10 million more than the single string, but it was far less risky, providing double barriers to gas fl owing up the outside of the pipe. According to Congressional investigators, an internal BP document that appears to date from mid-April recommended against single string casing . Nevertheless, on April 15 the MMS approved BP’s request to amend its permit application, which claimed that using the single string made “the best economic case.”

Although single strings are common in shallow water, they are rarely used in deepwater exploration wells like the Macondo where high pressures exist and the geologic formation is not well known. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that BP used the cheaper, riskier single string method in the gulf far more than other operators.

As casing is lowered, metal collars called centralizers position the pipe in the middle of the well bore to ensure an even cement job that contains no spaces where gas can squeeze through. On April 15, BP informed Halliburton’s account representative, Jesse Gagliano, that BP was planning to use six centralizers on the final 1192 feet of casing string. Gagliano ran a computer analysis of a number of cement-design scenarios to determine how many centralizers would be necessary: He found that 10 would result in a “moderate” gas fl ow problem; 21 would reduce the potential gas fl ow problem to “minor.” Gagliano recommended that BP use 21 centralizers. Gregory walz, BP’s drilling engineering team leader, wrote to John Guide, BP’s well team leader: “we have located 15 weatherford centralizers with stop collars . . . in Houston and worked things out with the rig to be able to fly them out in the morning . . . we need to honor the modeling to be consistent with our previous decisions to go with the long string.”

Guide objected: “It will take 10 hrs to install them . . . I do not like this and . . . I [am] very concerned about using them.” On April 16, Brett Cocales, BP’s operations drilling engineer, e-mailed Brian Morel, another BP drilling engineer: “But, who cares, it’s done, end of story, will probably be fine and we’ll get a good cement job . . . So Guide is right on the risk/reward equation.”

On April 17, BP informed Gagliano that it had decided to use only six centralizers. Gagliano then ran a model based on seven centralizers and reported to BP on April 18 that the “well is considered to have a severe gas flow problem.” If BP installed the additional centralizers, it would cost an estimated $41,000 per hour for the completion delay. BP went with the six centralizers.

After a well is cemented, drillers routinely run a cement bond log, an acoustic test that measures how well the cement has bonded to the casing and surrounding formation. On April 18 a crew from oil services contractor Schlumberger flew out to the rig to perform the test. But BP told the crew it wasn’t needed and flew them off the rig on the morning of April 20. Gordon Aaker Jr., a failure analysis consultant with the firm Engineering Services, told the House committee investigating the blowout that it was “unheard of” not to perform this routine test on a single casing well. He called BP’s decision to skip the cement bond log “horribly negligent.” BP did not respond to requests for comment.

Picture: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/il/deepwater_horizon_03_0910-md.jpg

Two days after the blowout, a robot sub attempts to seal the runaway Macondo well. Polaris

Shifting the Burden of Proof

The events of the week preceding the blowout point to what Allan J. McDonald, author of Truth, Lies and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, calls switching the burden of proof, a reversal that leads to a kind of bureaucratic illusion. The closest analogy is the space shuttle, a system so complex and dangerous that a coldly factual analysis would show the spacecraft presented a risk almost too high to tolerate. During the Challenger accident investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman asked NASA for its failure rate. The answer: one in 100,000. Feynman was incredulous, pointing out that this meant a shuttle launch every day for 300 years with only a single mishap, when the demonstrated failure rate was between one in 25 and one in 60. “NASA’s figures were totally baseless,” McDonald says, “and were just backed into as a number that was acceptable to Congress.”

McDonald, who is the former director of Morton-Thiokol’s space shuttle solid-rocket-motor project, says that the company’s engineers knew there was a problem with the shuttle boosters’ O-rings. The seals, which kept blistering gases from escaping the motors, could turn brittle and leak in temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, the temperature in Cape Canaveral was 36 degrees.

But the company managers pressed forwardthe mission had already been postponed six times because of weather and mechanical problemsand engineers were left having to prove the components would fail. “It’s a trap,” McDonald says. “Is it safe enough to fly? is the correct question, not that you have to prove it will fail. If you can’t prove that it will fail, then there will be zero failure rate!” If a system never fails, he explains, then why bother spending time and money on safety? That inversion of logic “changes the burden of proof, and that is a fatal mistake.” Thiokol’s engineers ultimately relented. The shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after launch.

By the time Halliburton’s Gagliano ran his models about gas flow and centralizers for the Macondo well, everyone but the drilling engineers was operating in a haze of justification and rationalization. Gagliano showed there might be gas leaks, and gas leaks increase the risk of a blowout. But the models didn’t prove that a blowout would occur.

Deepwater wells have one final line of defense: the blowout preventer (BOP), a five-story tower of valves atop the well bore that can, in principle, lock down and shut off a runaway well. The Macondo BOP, however, was severely compromised. One of its pipe ramshorizontally opposed plates that clamp around the drill pipe to block methane and fluids rising through the BOPhad been swapped out for an inoperable test version. The conversion is common in the industry, decreasing testing and operation costs but increasing risk.

Investigators also found that one of the BOP’s control pods had a dead battery, making it unable to receive the “deadman” signal from the pod. This last-ditch control triggers a shear ram that severs the drill pipe, shutting down the well. Even with a charged battery, the shear ram may not have workedone of its hydraulic lines was leaking. MMS regulations are clear: If there is a BOP “control station or pod [that] is not functional” the rig must “suspend further completion operations until that station or pod is operable.” Eleven days before the blowout, the BP representative in charge on the rig noted the leak in a daily operation report and alerted the home office in Houston. However, BP did not shut down completion operations, initiate repairs or inform the MMS.

Even a fully operational BOP has design flaws. A shear ram’s blades can’t sever the joints connecting the 30-foot sections of drill pipeand joints make up 10 percent of the string. In fact, internal Transocean documents show that when it bought this particular BOP in 2001, the company identified 260 separate ways it could fail. During a Congressional hearing, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., asked: “How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?”

Broken Chain of Command

By April 20, with the untested cement sheath in place on the final 1192 feet of casing, workers prepared to seal the Macondo well and move on to the next drilling job. A dispute arose during a planning meeting around 11 am11 hours before the rig exploded. Accounts vary: One Transocean worker testified that BP wanted to replace the protective column of drilling mud with lighter seawater before closing off the well; Transocean strenuously objected but eventually relented. Other witnesses say the argument was whether to conduct a negative pressure testa procedure that reduces pressure in the well to see if gas and oil entereven though it was not part of the drilling plan.

The argument revealed the inherent conflict on the rig. BP, which was paying Transocean $500,000 daily to lease the Horizon, wanted to move as quickly as possible. With its costs covered, Transocean could afford to focus more on safety and well control. Safety expert Arendt believes some of the problems are systemic to offshore drilling. “Onshore, you have one plant owner and, normally, one large contractor to deal with,” he says. “Offshore, you have the lease holder, the platform owner, the drilling contractor and one or two critical drilling and well service contractors. This creates the potential for mixed messages and a conflict between economic versus safety priorities.”

Transocean conducted two negative-pressure tests; BP’s Don Vidrine and Transocean’s Jimmy Harrell, the two companies’ top officials on the rig, deemed them to be successful, and preparations began to install a cement plug to seal the well. At 7:55 pm, BP engineers decided that the plug was holding, so they told Transocean workers to open the BOP’s annular valve to pump seawater into the riser to displace the mud, which was piped to the Damon B. Bankston, a supply ship tethered to the rig. At 8:58 pm, drill-pipe pressures increased. At 9:08, with pressure continuing to build, workers stopped pumping.

Here, there were eerie echoes from the Union Carbide chemical plant spill in Bhopal, India, which killed an estimated 20,000. In Bhopal, water leaked into a tank containing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate, setting off a deadly chemical reaction. Workers in the control room watched pressure build in the tank, but never shut the system down as three backup systems failed, and the deadly gas spread over a densely populated village.

Remarkably, after a 6-minute hiatus, workers on the Horizon resumed displacing mud with seawater, despite the slew of signalskicks and pressure spikesthat warned something was wildly wrong. “Normally, on any well,” says the University of Texas’s McCormack, “if you have a problem, you stop and solve it.”

At 9:31, once again the workers stopped pumping seawater; at 9:47 monitors detected “a significant pressure buildup.” A few minutes later, methane coursed from the drill pipe, transforming the rig into a giant unlit blowtorch. From the decks of his supply ship, Capt. Alwin Landry saw “mud falling on the back half of my boat, kind of like a black rain.” Then came a green flash and a white liquid a frothy mix of mud, water, methane and oilboiling out of the derrick. First Mate Paul Erickson saw “a flash of fire on top of the liquid” and then watched men jump from the rig, as a distress call came in. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! The rig’s on fire! Abandon ship!”

“The scene was very chaotic,” rig worker Carlos Ramos told The Wall Street Journal. “People were in a state of panic . . . There was no chain of command, nobody in charge.” Throughout the rig, workers struggled to reach the two usable lifeboats. Some yelled to lower them, some wanted to wait for more workers, others simply leaped into the sea 75 feet below.

On the bridge, Capt. Curt Kuchta argued with a subsea supervisor over who had the authority to hit the Emergency Disconnect System to activate the shear rams, thereby sealing the well and detaching the rig from the riser. It took 9 minutes to activate the system, not that it mattered the BOP failed. The Horizon was never disconnected, oil and gas continued to surge up from below, feeding an inferno that soon engulfed the rig. Although the vessel had muster stations and emergency plans, crew members had never practiced safety drills without warning to simulate a real disaster.

In the end, 11 men died, the disaster cost BP billions, and the environment of the Gulf of Mexico may be irrevocably altered. President Obama’s ambitious plans to open up vast areas to offshore drilling have been shelved. But worst of all, says Ford Brett, president of Oil and Gas Consultants International, the blowout “wasn’t an accident in the traditional sense, like when someone just hits your car. It was an accident that was totally preventable.”

Tags: oil, louisiana, petroleum, off-shore drilling, technology, bp, worst-case scenario
Oil Rig Explosion Was Likely a Blowout
Where Giant Oil Rigs Are Born
Popular Mechanics’ Deepwater Horizon Ongoing Coverage
The State of Oil Spill Cleaning Technology
Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Capsizes, Spills
Weighing the Downsides of the Drilling Moratorium

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