New scientific data undermines government propaganda

University of Georgia News Service, August 16, 2010:

Athens, Ga. – A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.

The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

Co-authors on the paper include Jay Brandes, associate professor, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography; Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences, UGA; Richard Lee, professor emeritus, Skidaway; and Ming-yi Sun, professor of marine sciences UGA.

io9, August 19, 2010:

Today scientists revealed the results of an investigation into the severity of the Deepwater oil spill. The plume of petroleum hydrocarbon chemicals measures a staggering 22 miles long, and has settled in a deep underwater layer (see photo).

The actual existence of the plume was in some doubt until a team of researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution provided incontrovertible proof. The researchers managed to catch up with the plume about three miles southwest of the original blowout location, then used a remote-controlled submarine and an underwater spectrometer to figure out its dimensions. They were able to study the plume for ten days in June before Hurricane Alex forced them from the area. It's still not known whether this was the only plume or whether others formed, and the team said at a press conference today that they would be unwilling to commit themselves either way on that point.

Their work took place roughly two months after the initial explosion, and measurements show that it the plume was approximately 1,100 meters deep (as you can see in the top image), over 35 kilometers long, 200 meters high and up to 2 kilometers wide.

Their findings showed conclusively that the hydrocarbons found in this plume could not have come from natural seepage, and that the Deepwater Horizon spill must be the primary culprit for the plume.

The Colbert Report, August 19, 2010:

STEPHEN COLBERT: I have to care about this for years? But there's going to be no footage of oil spewing from the bottom of the ocean. How can I care about something I can't see?

The ongoing propaganda to obscure a "toxic chemistry experiment"

CNN, August 6, 2010:

As the cement hardens Friday in the crippled oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, federal officials are sounding increasingly optimistic that the end is in sight in the drive to permanently seal the well.

BP finished pouring cement down the well on Thursday in an operation known as a "static kill," completing the job earlier than expected. The process took six hours.

The cement was poured on top of 2,300 barrels of heavy drilling mud sent down from a ship on the surface Tuesday, pushing oil back into the well reservoir.

Before word came that the cementing had been completed, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said the development would amount to a "significant milestone" in the long-running fight against the BP oil spill. Allen is the federal point man in the oil spill effort.

He said the cementing phase of the "static kill" operation is not the end of the process, "but it will virtually assure us there's no chance of oil leaking into the environment."

"We will have created a significant milestone and made a major step forward probably by tomorrow [Friday] when the cementing is done," Allen told reporters. Although Allen expected the job to take until Friday, BP announced late Thursday that the work had been finished.

The New York Times, August 4, 2010:

The Obama administration’s latest report on the Gulf of Mexico disaster set off a war of words Wednesday among scientists, Gulf Coast residents and political pundits about what to make of the Deepwater Horizon spill and its aftermath.

The report, the subject of an extended White House briefing, claimed that most of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil that have leaked into the gulf could be accounted for, that much of it was effectively gone already, and that most of the remaining oil was in a highly diluted form. The implication of the report was that future damage from the oil might be less than had been feared.

That suggestion was not happily received on the Gulf Coast, where people are still coping with the collapse of fishing and tourism and saw the report as fresh evidence that the Obama administration was preparing to abandon them in the same way they felt the Bush administration did after Hurricane Katrina.

Gulf residents pointed to oiled beaches, blackened marshes and dead birds as evidence that, whatever the future damage from the remaining oil, the damage already done was severe enough.

[...]

Some researchers attacked the findings and methodology, calling the report premature at best and sloppy at worst. They noted that considerable research was still under way to shed light on some of the main scientific issues raised in the report.

“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” said Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia who has led some of the most important research on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”

[...]

By a process of elimination, the researchers concluded that only 26 percent of the oil had come ashore or was still in the water in a form that could, in principle, do additional shoreline damage. And much of that was breaking down quickly in the warm waters of the gulf, the report said.

Of course, that 26 percent equals more than 53 million gallons of oil, five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

“One way of looking at it is to say that 26 percent of the world’s largest oil spill is still out there,” said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society. “And that is a lot of oil.”

ProPublica, August 2, 2010:

It’s been two weeks since BP last applied dispersant in the Gulf, and every major newspaper seems to have a piece on how BP received exemptions to apply dispersant on the surface nearly every day.

The latest tide of dispersant stories comes after Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., sent a strongly worded letter [PDF] to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, in charge of the spill response, noting that despite the EPA-Coast Guard directive requiring BP to “eliminate the surface application of dispersants” except in “rare cases [PDF] when there may have to be an exemption,” the exemptions were routine, and requesting them became little more than a formality. This is evidenced by the fact that the Coast Guard approved the use of dispersants 74 times over 54 days, the letter pointed out.

ProPublica, August 5, 2010:

Those who’ve followed the Gulf spill coverage know that early on in the BP disaster, before there was any real public discussion of the potential health and environmental trade-offs, BP began spraying dispersants in the Gulf with the knowledge and approval of the EPA and the Coast Guard.

How exactly those dispersants came to be approved was the subject of a hearing today before a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee.

As we’ve reported, the EPA already had a list of authorized dispersants on the National Contingency Plan Product Schedule. To get on that list, manufacturers must submit information on a dispersant’s effectiveness and toxicity.

[...]

The EPA does make clear that just because a product is on the authorized list does not mean it can automatically be applied to an oil spill—it needs additional approval. But what today’s hearing revealed is that none of those additional layers of approval compared the toxicity of different dispersants or tried to distinguish which dispersants might be preferable.

So when the spill occurred, a team of government agencies and state officials (also known as a regional response team) "preapproved" the EPA's entire list of dispersants—once again, without evaluating the toxicity of individual dispersants. The Coast Guard’s federal on-scene coordinators then gave BP the final nod to go ahead and apply one of the products, Corexit, in the Gulf.

Lisa Suatoni, National Resources Defense Council, August 4, 2010:

This week, the EPA released an additional round of research findings on the dispersant used in the Gulf Oil Spill.

[...]

The first round of EPA laboratory testing found that the dispersants were less toxic than the southern Louisiana crude itself and that they displayed similar toxicities to one another. The second round of EPA testing found that the dispersant/oil mixtures had similar toxicities to southern Louisiana crude itself and similar toxicities to one another (with the exception of the dispersant brand Nokomis/oil mixture which was more toxic to the shrimp than oil alone).

[...]

In a statement to the press about these research results, Dr. Paul Anastas said that ‘while more needs to be done, the picture is becoming clearer’ that dispersants were an ‘important tool in this response.’

[...]

But while it may be tempting to conclude that the use of dispersants during this catastrophic oil spill was a good idea, we urge the federal government not to hasten this evaluation and rush to judgment.

The unprecedented and widespread application of dispersants in this oil spill was a grand experiment. Given the scale of this spill, its position offshore, and the severe and long-lasting impacts of oil to salt marsh ecosystems, the rational was clear and defensible.

However, as the most recent National Research Council panel on the topic concluded in 2005, much remains unknown about the efficacy and impacts of chemical dispersants. And as a consequence, careful and thorough study of these factors is imperative.

The Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 2010:

The public summary of a new federal report on the fate of the oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon explosion and blowout suggests that close to half the oil from the disaster may still lurk in some form in the ocean, sand, and sediment.

Earlier today, President Obama's environmental adviser, Carol Browner, told NBC's "Today Show" that "the vast majority of the oil is gone. It was captured. It was burned. It was skimmed. It was contained. And mother nature did her part" through bacteria breaking down oil.

But the "vast majority" includes dispersed oil. The summary released Wednesday does not make clear the rate at which bacteria are degrading that oil. Researchers are still trying to assess this process – especially in the deep ocean, where much of the remaining oil is thought to be.

[...]

Some in the marine science community are looking askance at the report, in essence a preliminary estimate.

"This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation," Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press. "There are sweeping assumptions here."

Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, August 5, 2010:

The federal government is now painting a rosy picture of the Gulf spill, reporting Wednesday that much of the oil has miraculously disappeared. The folks at the New York Times bought in, proclaiming, "US Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk."

But the oil isn't gone. More than 100 million gallons of it—at least nine and a half times more oil than the Exxon Valdez dumped—remain at the surface or dispersed undersea. And the government is still keeping crucial information about the extent of the damage a carefully guarded secret—from everyone except BP.

National Wildlife Federation, August 4, 2010:

In an open letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and BP CEO Robert Dudley, nine prominent scientists and marine researchers expressed concern over reports that BP is asking scientists to sign confidentiality agreements in connection with findings related to the Gulf oil spill, and asked for "full and prompt" release of information assessing the damage with a special emphasis on "key data relating to wildlife mortality and injury."

"We are greatly concerned with reports that BP is requiring confidentiality agreements in research contracts with scientists, which would preclude them from releasing any of their findings for a three year period," the letter said. "Failure to disclose this scientific information in a timely manner hides critically important information from the public -- the owners of the natural resources at risk."

"Just as the unprecedented use of dispersants has served to sweep millions of gallons of oil under the rug, we're concerned the public may not get to see critical scientific data until BP has long since declared its responsibility over," added Dr. Bruce Stein, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate director for wildlife conservation and global warming, and one of the letter's signers. "Reported three-year confidentiality agreements in contracts between BP and researchers makes transparency that much more imperative to avoid perceived conflicts of interest or allegations of obfuscation. Do we really want scientists forced to choose who to share their data with – BP or the public?"

[...]

“From day one, BP has been sluggish and selective in releasing vital environmental data. BP needs to open the books on everything, no exceptions. And the Obama administration needs to do a better job enforcing the directive it issued requiring BP to make data public,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation. “BP is mounting a PR campaign suggesting that the environmental damage of the spill is over when we know that they have dumped millions of gallons of toxic dispersants to sink the oil out of sight, turning the Gulf into a toxic chemistry experiment.”

Where is all the oil?: "a three-dimensional catastrophe"

AFP, July 27, 2010:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — With BP's leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?

For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge.

A cap stopped the flow on July 15 and now, thanks to frantic efforts to skim and burn the crude on the surface, the real difficulty is finding the oil rather than cleaning it up.

Some 150 reconnaissance planes fly constant sorties from Florida to Texas noting any oil sitings, while flat-bottomed boats trawl the marshes for lumps of tar too large to biodegrade.

"What we have is an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil and the challenge is to find out where they are at right now because they are widely dispersed," said US spill chief Thad Allen.

Pressed further on the patches, Allen relented: "Maybe patches is a misnomer on my part. What we're seeing are mats, patties, small concentrations, very hard to detect, but they're out there.

"What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it."

Mac McClelland, Mother Jones, July 28, 2010:

I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said. By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre—the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos—is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."

If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal. As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.

It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.

Rocky Kistner, National Resources Defense Council, July 26, 2010:

The well is plugged for now, but Louisiana coastal residents and their beloved wetlands are still hurting. Hardly anyone I’ve met here thinks the crisis is over. The good people of Sportsman’s Paradise are still wary of eating fish they pull out of these fertile waters, no matter what kind of spicy Cajun sauce they mask it with. It didn't help today that National Incident Commander Thad Allen said there were “hundreds of thousands of patches of oil” still in the Gulf and that tar balls and other impacts will be present for “a long, long time.”

Recreational fishing here in Louisiana has been open for a week and a half, which surprised many people after BP's blown out undersea well spewed out a solid plume of oil for 87 days. You’d think that anglers would be back out in force when Louisiana's most important recreational activity was suddenly available again. But Ryan Lambert, a director of the Louisiana Charter Boat Association, says business is still lousy. No one is calling and no one is booking trips except the oldest of customers. Why?

“Everyone’s still afraid of the oil,” Lambert says. “We all know it’s still out there.”

Lambert says BP approached him recently to organize three big fishing tournaments to boost people’s confidence that fishing is finally back. He declined. “I don’t want to be part of a PR effort so BP can reduce its liability.” There are too many unanswered questions, he says. Like many other fishermen, he fears the impact of tens of millions of gallons of crude spewed into the ocean will have devastating consequences. No one knows what the new normal will be—or when it will come.

For now, lots of locals in the area are wondering just what’s in the water. Local fishing guide Sal Gagliano is especially worried about the million plus gallons of chemical dispersants that BP used to break up the oil on the surface. Gagliano says state fishing authorities told him to avoid fishing in areas where he sees oil. But he knows there’s a lot of oil under the surface. He thinks dispersants have been used excessively to knock the oil down into the water column and to the ocean floor, where food for the Gulf’s fisheries could be dramatically impacted. “Where did all the oil go?” he asks. “Everyone knows it had to go somewhere. So my phone’s not exactly ringing off the hook.”

St. Petersburg Times, June 9, 2010:

A day after a University of South Florida scientist announced that BP refused to provide researchers a sample of its oil, two elected officials criticized the company and called on it to cooperate.

U.S. Rep Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, met with two BP executives Wednesday afternoon and urged them to give USF the necessary samples, a spokeswoman said.

David Hollander, a chemical oceanographer leading USF's study, said a sample of the BP oil is vital in scientists' attempts to link clouds of subsurface oil in the gulf to the oil spewing from the destroyed Deep Horizon rig.

Castor confronted BP vice president David Nagel and BP spokesman Ray Dempsey with Hollander's statement, and the executives said it must have been miscommunication, Castor said.

They said they'd make sure a sample got to USF, Castor said.

ProPublica, June 30, 2010:

BP had previously refused to provide oil samples to scientists who needed them to perform chemical "fingerprinting" tests that would more clearly establish origin--and as of last week, we weren't sure if those scientists had received the samples yet.

Apparently, they hadn't until last Friday.

In all, it took three weeks and criticism from several Florida lawmakers before the company finally handed over oil samples to scientists from the University of South Florida, reported the St. Petersburg Times.

University of South Florida News, "Subsurface Oil Clouds From BP Well", July 23, 2010:

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (July 23, 2010) – University of South Florida researchers have definitively connected clouds of degraded underwater oil found in the northern Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon well through a chemical fingerprinting process.

The confirmation by USF chemical oceanographer David Hollander is the first direct scientific link established between the subsurface oil clouds – commonly known as “plumes” – and the massive BP spill. Scientists had gathered ample circumstantial evidence to link the subsurface oil to the Deepwater Horizon well, but had lacked a definitive scientific link until now.

Hollander’s findings came after extensive rounds of testing involving water samples gathered during a May 22-28 cruise of the R/V Weatherbird II to the northern gulf, against samples of oil provided by BP in June.

“What we have learned completely changes the idea of what an oil spill is,” Hollander said. “It has gone from a two-dimensional disaster to a three-dimensional catastrophe.”

[...]

The BP oil samples were obtained after a meeting between company officials and U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor.

[...]

Researchers from across USF’s College of Marine Science are now conducting exhaustive work on determining what impact the spill, the subsurface degraded oil and the heavy use of chemical dispersants may have for marine life and the Gulf’s ecology.

Media suppression to "hide failure"

Mac McClelland, Mother Jones, June 22, 2010:

Last week, Drew Wheelan, the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association, was filming himself across the street from the BP building/Deepwater Horizon response command in Houma, Louisiana. As he explained to me, he was standing in a field that did not belong to the oil company when a police officer approached him and asked him for ID and "strongly suggest[ed]" that he get lost since "BP doesn't want people filming":

[Video embedded here]

Here's the key exchange:

Wheelan: "Am I violating any laws or anything like that?"

Officer: "Um...not particularly. BP doesn't want people filming."

Wheelan: "Well, I'm not on their property so BP doesn't have anything to say about what I do right now."

Officer: "Let me explain: BP doesn't want any filming. So all I can really do is strongly suggest that you not film anything right now. If that makes any sense."

Not really! Shortly thereafter, Wheelan got in his car and drove away but was soon pulled over.

It was the same cop, but this time he had company: Kenneth Thomas, whose badge, Wheelan told me, read "Chief BP Security." The cop stood by as Thomas interrogated Wheelan for 20 minutes...

ProPublica, July 2, 2010:

A photographer taking pictures for our articles about a troubled BP refinery [1], was detained Friday while shooting pictures in Texas City, Texas.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said that shortly after arriving in town, he was confronted by a BP security officer, local police and a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. He was released after the police reviewed the pictures he had taken on Friday and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information.

The police officer then turned that information over to the BP security guard under what he said was standard procedure, according to Rosenfield.

No charges were filed.

Rosenfield, an experienced freelance photographer, said he was detained shortly after shooting a photograph of a Texas City sign on a public roadway. Rosenfield said he was followed by a BP employee in a truck after taking the picture and blocked by two police cars when he pulled into a gas station.

According to Rosenfield, the officers said they had a right to look at photos taken near secured areas of the refinery, even if they were shot from public property. Rosenfield said he was told he would be "taken in" if he declined to comply.

Newsweek, May 26, 2010:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials—working with BP—who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The New York Times, June 9, 2010:

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

ACLU.org, June 28, 2010:

We've heard countless stories of journalists trying to cover the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico being denied access in one way or another. Whether they're trying to fly over the spill to take photos, gain access to the oil-covered beaches, or take pictures of the dead animals washing ashore, a "media clampdown" continues despite federal government assurances that access is "uninhibited."

[...]

The ocean and coasts have already taken a beating from BP. Local law enforcement shouldn't allow the First Amendment to take a beating too.

Raw Story, July 4, 2010:

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."

[...]

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill.

"Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June.

In defending the new rule, Allen told reporters that he got "complaints from local officials" about the safety of people near cleanup efforts.

[...]

[T]he rule seems on its face to be just the latest attempt to reduce media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has now attained the status of worst accidental oil spill in history.

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches. On Friday, a photographer from ProPublica was detained by police and BP officials after taking photos of a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas.

Cooper compared the latest effort to prevent access to the oil spill to similar efforts during Hurricane Katrina.

"Frankly it's a lot like in Katrina, where 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 ... that makes it very easy to hide failure, and hide incompetence."

Reason Magazine, Hit and Run Blog, July 6, 2010:

This is looking a lot like Barack Obama's Katrina after all. Not because the president was too slow to respond, as the first people to throw around the "Obama's Katrina" phrase meant by it, but because his team has been recreating the centralized, authoritarian approach that marked the last administration's response to the hurricane. Even the most ridiculous PR moments of the Katrina cleanup are being echoed today. As Mark Twain supposedly said, history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

The destruction of lives and a "nightmare well"

CNN, May 31, 2010:

"The first thing to say is I'm sorry," Tony Hayward said when asked what he would tell people in Louisiana, where heavy oil has already reached parts of the state's southeastern marshes.

"We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back."

Bloomberg, March 5, 2010:

BP Plc Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward received a 41 percent pay increase last year, after the company produced more oil and gas than Exxon Mobil Corp. for the first time.

Hayward was paid 4.01 million pounds ($6 million) in cash and shares compared with 2.85 million pounds in 2008, the London-based company said in its annual report published today. The figures don’t include his pension fund, which is worth about 2.7 million pounds.

Associated Press, May 31, 2010:

"I was just sitting here thinking our way of life is over. It's the end, the apocalypse," said fisherman Tom Young of Plaquemines Parish on the coast.

Alabama Local News, June 23, 2010:

FORT MORGAN, Ala. -- An Orange Beach, Ala., charter boat captain shot and killed himself this morning just before his vessel was scheduled to set out to take part in oil cleanup and protection efforts, investigators said.

William Allen "Rookie" Kruse, 55, was found dead on the flying bridge of his boat, The Rookie, at the dock at Fort Morgan Marina just before 7 a.m., Baldwin County Deputy Coroner Rod Steade said.

"He had just let his deckhands off the boat and sent them to get something," Steade said. "He was going to meet them at the fuel dock. They heard a pop and when the boat didn't come around, they went back and found him."

Tim Dickinson, "The Spill, The Scandal and the President", Rolling Stone, June 8, 2010:

[A]fter the president's press conference, Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its "best estimate" acknowledged. That same day, the president's Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher's output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group's minimum estimate. The upper range was not included in their report because scientists analyzing the flow were unable to reach a consensus on how bad it could be. "The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."

The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days. "That's what the plume team's numbers show too," Crone says. A source privy to internal discussions at one of the world's top oil companies confirms that the industry privately agrees with such estimates. "The industry definitely believes the higher-end values," the source says. "That's accurate – if not more than that." The reason, he adds, is that BP appears to have unleashed one of the 10 most productive wells in the Gulf. "BP screwed up a really big, big find," the source says. "And if they can't cap this, it's not going to blow itself out anytime soon."

[This article is a must-read.]

The Wall Street Journal, Washington Wire, June 21, 2010:

How do you toughen a regulatory agency under fire for laxness and coziness with the industry it regulates? If you’re Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, you rename it.

The Mineral Management Service is no more. As of today, the agency in charge of overseeing offshore oil exploration–and the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig–will be known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. That’s the Bureau of Ocean Energy, or BOE, for short.

The New York Times, June 16, 2010:

[Credit where credit is due.]

The $20 billion fund announced on Wednesday will be administered by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the lawyer and mediator who ran the fund for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and has emerged as a troubleshooter on issues like executive compensation and resolving claims for asbestos and Agent Orange victims.

While acknowledging that oil is likely to continue spewing from the well for perhaps months to come, Mr. Obama was able to throw something of a lifeline to desperate coastal residents worried about meeting payrolls, mortgages and shrimp boat payments.

Under the famous portrait of a charging Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, administration and company officials haggled over last details in an extraordinary White House meeting that went more than four hours, double the time scheduled, and was punctuated by breaks as each side huddled separately. Finally, participants said, Mr. Obama sealed the deal in a private, 25-minute session with BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg.

CBS News, June 14, 2010:

BP hoped to drill the well in 51 days for $96 million. But things ran way behind schedule and over budget, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

Leasing the Deepwater Horizon cost BP a million dollars every two days. The day of the explosion, the rig was already 43 days late for its next job.

Investigators say that may be why BP took so many risks. Like choosing a cheaper well casing over a safer option that would have cost $7 to $10 million more.

One BP colleague emailed another: "This has been [a] nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."

The New York Times, June 20, 2010:

The chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee released an internal BP document on Sunday showing that the company’s own analysis of damage to the well bore resulted in a worst-case estimate of 100,000 barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico each day. The chairman, Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, said the document provided a sharp contrast to BP’s initial claim that the leak was just 1,000 barrels a day. Mr. Markey said that when the document was made available to Congress, BP said that the leak was about 5,000 barrels a day and that the worst case was 60,000 barrels. “Considering what is now known about BP’s problems with this well prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, including cementing issues, leaks in the blowout preventer and gas kicks,” Mr. Markey said in a statement, “BP should have been more honest about the dangerous condition of the well bore.”

NPR, May 14, 2010:

The volume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig may be at least 10 times higher than previously estimated, NPR has learned.

The U.S. Coast Guard has estimated that oil was gushing from a broken pipe on the Gulf floor at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.

But sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday by the oil company BP shows that the true figure is closer to 70,000 barrels a day, NPR's Richard Harris reports.

That means the oil spilling into the Gulf has already far exceeded the equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

The analysis was conducted by Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry. Harris tells Michele Norris that the method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. That means the flow could range between 56,000 barrels a day and 84,000 barrels a day.

Another analysis by Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 20,000 barrels a day and 100,000 barrels a day.

Even the most conservative of those estimates is much higher than what the Coast Guard has so far said.

"Alexander Higgins Blog", June 11, 2010:

There has been speculation about the Blow Out Preventer leaning, which is why BP robots have been driving around with “inclometers”.

Today that is confirmed as I have recorded video footage of BP taking “bullseye” readings.

CNN, May 30, 2010:

The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.

Houston Chronicle, June 21, 2010:

Money-saving measures BP took while designing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have dogged efforts to bring the massive oil spill under control.

Documents released by congressional investigators show that modifications to the well design BP made last year included a reduction in the thickness of a section of the casing — steel piping in the wellbore

The modification included a slight reduction in the specified thickness for the wall of a 16-inch-diameter section of pipe toward the bottom of the well, according to a May 14, 2009, document.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, commander of the response to the blowout and oil spill, has confirmed reports that concern about the strength of the casing led officials to stop efforts last month to plug the well from the top by injecting drilling mud and cement in a procedure called a top kill.

Another proposed spill control method, placing a blowout preventer on top of the one that failed in the original April 20 blowout, also was abandoned over concerns about well integrity. A blowout preventer is a system of shears and valves installed as a last line of defense against loss of well control.

[...]

Marvin Odum, president of Houston-based Shell Oil, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell, told the Houston Chronicle last week that the integrity of the well casing is a major concern. Odum and others from the industry regularly sit in on high-level meetings with BP and government officials about the spill.

If the well casing burst it could send oil and gas streaming through the strata to appear elsewhere on the sea floor, or create a crater underneath the wellhead - a device placed at the top of the well where the casing meets the seafloor - that would destabilize it and the blowout preventer.

The steel casing used in oil wells is strong, said Gene Beck, petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, but pressures deep in a well are powerful enough to split strong steel pipe or "crush it like a beer can."

[...]

[T]he longer the well flows uncontrolled the more likely it is that the well casing could be damaged or the blowout preventer damaged further. Sand and other debris that flows through the pipes at high velocity can wear through metal over time, said [Director of geoscience programs at the University of Houston Donald] Van Nieuwenhuise.

Mother Jones, quoting an anonymous comment at The Oil Drum, June 16, 2010:

"It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo."

Government-corporate failure exposed and laid bare

The New York Times , May 29, 2010:

NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.

President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009:

We will restore science to its rightful place...

The New York Times, May 19, 2010:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

The New York Times, May 24, 2010:

In a tense standoff, BP continued to spray a product called Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday to break up a vast oil spill despite a demand by federal regulators that it switch to something less toxic.

The Environmental Protection Agency had set a Sunday night deadline for BP to stop using two dispersants from the Corexit line of products. The oil company has defended its use of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the agency used to estimate its toxicity.

At a news conference Monday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response” and had ordered the oil giant to take “immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants.”

WDSU-TV, New Orleans TV station:

LAFITTE, La. -- More and more stories about sick fishermen are beginning to surface after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fishermen are working out in the Gulf -- many of them all day, every day -- to clean up the spill. They said they blame their ailments on the chemicals that BP is using.

One fisherman said he felt like he was going to die over the weekend.

"I've been coughing up stuff," Gary Burris said. "Your lungs fill up."

Burris, a longtime fisherman who has worked across the Gulf Coast, said he woke up Sunday night feeling drugged and disoriented.

[...]

Burris said that when he went to a doctor after feeling ill on Sunday, the doctor told him his lungs looked like those of a three-pack-a-day smoker, and Burris said he has never smoked.

The Washington Post, May 26, 2010:

Members of Congress from both parties sharply criticized the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service on Wednesday, a day after the release of a report showing that the agency's inspectors routinely took gifts such as college football tickets from the companies they were supposed to be policing.

Lawmakers unloaded about their concerns during a hearing by the House Natural Resources Committee on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The hearing followed the release of a memorandum by another panel, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, that described an internal BP investigation into the Gulf oil spill. The internal probe points to a series of equipment failures, mistakes and missed warning signs that led to the blowout and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to lawmakers briefed by the company.

[...]

In the first of a series of oversight hearings by the House Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over offshore oil and gas drilling, lawmakers grilled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on reports of misconduct at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Interior Department agency that regulates offshore drilling while also collecting revenue from it.

[T]he report adds to a growing portrait of the Minerals Management Service as corrupted by industry: Many inspectors, the inspector general found, were already friends with industry officials. Some had worked in the oil and gas business before their stint in government and would again. One official inspected four platforms owned by one company at the same time he was negotiating for a job at that firm.

The result, the report found, was regulation that often looked less than rigorous. One confidential source, it said, told investigators that service inspectors let the oil and gas companies fill out their inspection forms -- in pencil. Then an inspector would trace over their writing in ink.

The New York Times, September 10, 2008:

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

The New York Times, December 17, 2008:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Interior Department, Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, will inherit an agency demoralized by years of scandal, political interference and mismanagement.

He must deal with the sharp tension between those who seek to exploit public lands for energy, minerals and recreation and those who want to preserve the lands. He will be expected to restore scientific integrity to a department where it has repeatedly been compromised. He will be responsible for ending the department’s coziness with the industries it regulates. And he will have to work hard to overcome skepticism among many environmentalists about his views on resource and wildlife issues.

Environmental advocates offered mixed reviews of Mr. Salazar, 53, a first-term Democratic senator who served as head of Colorado’s natural resources department and as the state’s attorney general. Mr. Salazar was not the first choice of environmentalists, who openly pushed the appointment of Representative Raul Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who has a strong record as a conservationist.

Oil and mining interests praised Mr. Salazar’s performance as a state official and as a senator, saying that he was not doctrinaire about the use of public lands. “Nothing in his record suggests he’s an ideologue,” said Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association. “Here’s a man who understands the issues, is open-minded and can see at least two sides of an issue.”

The Rocky Mountain News, January 15, 2009:

Sen. Ken Salazar faced a veritable love-fest during his confirmation hearing to become Interior Secretary today.

[...]

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., tried to break the mood, saying the hearing was “on its way to becoming a full-fledged bouquet-tossing contest.”

Wyden pressed Salazar on his commitment to reversing “politically-tainted judgments” made in the name of science during the Bush administration, and he pressed Salazar to “drain the swamp” and fix the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service.

The Washington Post, Post Carbon, May 25, 2010:

A group of several dozen conservation groups and scientists -- including more than 30 who urged President Obama not to appoint Salazar in the first place -- are now calling for his resignation.

WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group based in Santa Fe and Denver, has begun circulating a letter calling on Obama to fire Salazar on the grounds that he has failed to restore scientific integrity to the Minerals Management Service and the Interior Department as a whole.

Noting that 36 of the signatories had sent a letter in January 2009 urging Obama not to appoint Salazar to the post, the environmentalists write: "The intervening 16 months, unfortunately, have confirmed that Mr. Salazar will not fulfill your administration's promises to safeguard the environment in this country or globally. Rather, Mr. Salazar has either embraced or failed to reform many of the destructive policies of the previous administration."

[...]

Noting that Salazar had planned to clean up MMS, the activists write, "Today we know that real reform at MMS never happened. MMS continued its reckless lack of oversight of the oil and gas industry, this time in the form of rubberstamping off-shore oil and gas development."

ThinkProgress, May 29, 2010:

The administration has been keeping an ecological criminal in charge of the crime scene during a national crisis. Seventeen nations have offered assistance — but “the final decision is up to BP” to accept it, according to the State Department — and only Canada, Mexico and Norway have been allowed to help so far.