AP IMPACT: BP spill response plans severely flawed By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, TAMARA LUSH and HOLBROOK MOHR, Associated Press Writers Justin Pritchard, Tamara Lush And Holbrook Mohr, Associated Press Writers VENICE, La. – Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005. Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf. The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service. BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one. "BP Exploration and Production Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan," the oil giant stated in its Deepwater Horizon plan. In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster. Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., says there are "3,000 acres (of wetlands) where life as we know it is dead, and we continue to lose precious marshland every day." There are other wildly false assumptions. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume based on the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher. The Gulf's loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida's southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn't mentioned in either plan. The website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp. — one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill — links to a defunct Japanese-language page. In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds will be cleansed of oil. And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn't apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the response. This week, after BP reported the seemingly good news that a containment cap installed on the wellhead was funneling some of the gushing crude to a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new new set of plans mostly aimed at capturing more oil. The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cap, using a special incinerator to burn off some of the recaptured oil and bringing in a floating platform to process the oil being sucked away from the gushing well. In other words, the on-the-fly planning continues. ___ Some examples of how BP's plans have fallen short: • Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore — a claim that in retrospect seems absurd. "The vessels in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively," one of the documents says. BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks — and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between. The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as saf