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BP
Buzzards in the Pipelines Sightings from The Catbird Seat ~ o ~
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Brown pelicans and gulls fly in front of oil booms along the shoreline at Pass a Loutre, La., where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico Friday, April 30, 2010. Wildlife in the region is vulnerable to the looming oil spill from last week's collapse and spill of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
March 3, 2011
For BP Oil Spill Claimants in Gulf,Needs Haven't Been MetKen Feinberg, Gulf Oil Spill Pay Czar, Under Fire For Slow Claims Process By MATT GUTMAN and JENNIFER METZ
When the money ran out, shrimper Darla Rooks gave up her apartment and moved in with her daughter. One of an unprecedented half a million BP claimants, the Louisiana shrimper and oyster harvester has spent her life on Gulf waters -- she even got married in her fishing boots. Now she's swimming in red tape. "We're starving to death," she said from her daughter's home in Mississippi, which she and her husband were renovating – adding a room for themselves. "We're having to move in with our families and rely on our families, it's humiliating, my daughter just got married, six months back… " she said. "We count on our living to supply us with what we need. We know no other way." So far, the $20 billion Deepwater Horizon disaster compensation fund, headed by Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg, has paid about $3.6 billion to 170,000 claimants, the vast majority of which have been emergency payments of a few thousand dollars. But claimants, from shrimpers in Louisiana to hotel owners in Florida, complain the compensation process has been too slow and that their needs have gone unmet. And what Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility has offered is a pittance compared with what many feel they deserve. Of the 8,200 claimants that have been offered final compensation, only 2.5 percent have accepted it. For those like Rooks, filing for a claim means miles of overwhelming paperwork. "It will never get done," she said. "I can never give them what they want. This can go on for 20 years. What they just gave me ... I'm owed more than that." FULL STORY AND MUST WATCH VIDEO!
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 November 8, 2010
Spill panel: No evidence ofsaving $ over safetyAssociated Press
WASHINGTON – The BP oil rig explosion and spill wasn't about anyone purposely trading money for safety, investigators on a special presidential commission said Monday. Instead it was more about seemingly acceptable risks adding up to disaster. Investigators at the commission's hearing outlined more than a dozen decisions that at the time seemed questionable but also explainable. It was how those cascaded and crashed together that fueled catastrophe. Yet there was no evidence of a conscious decision on the BP rig to do things on the cheap at the expense of safety, investigators stressed several times. Likewise, representatives of the companies involved in the disaster denied that corners were cut because of cost. Critics — including a top academic, a congressman and people on the Gulf Coast — are balking at what they see as something close a free pass for BP's history of cost cutting. In the first nonpolitical and independent investigation of the disaster, commission officials say they aren't excusing BP at all, but pointing out there was no clear single decision that came down solely to money. "Anytime you are talking about a million and a half dollars a day, money enters in. All I am saying is human beings did not sit there and sell safety down the river for dollars on the rig that night," said commission chief attorney Fred H. Bartlit Jr. That doesn't mean that a general culture of cost cutting wasn't an issue, added commission co-chairman Bob Graham, the former Florida senator and governor. Graham wrapped up the day by saying he was worried that there was "a compulsion to get this rig completed in that April 19-April 20 timetable." And panel co-chairman William K. Reilly said in an interview after the hearing that BP does deserve a good share of blame: "A lot of the key decisions were in fact made by BP." He said that while it might look as if the commission wasn't concerned about the culture of cost cutting at BP, it will address that broader corporate problem in the future. Monday was more about what immediately led to the disaster. Halliburton Co., which had the crucial job of cementing the well, was on the hotseat as much as BP on Monday, clashing more often with investigators than the oil company. And the commission still hasn't dealt with the blowout preventer, a key instrument, because it is still being examined. No written report was issued on Monday. Bartlit, the panel's chief investigator, revealed in a letter last month that testing on cement mixtures similar to those used in the well showed that the formula was unstable before the blowout, but BP and Halliburton used it anyway. Bartlit said the companies should have reconsidered the type of cement used in the well. Cement is an essential barrier to preventing blowouts. Led by commission investigators, BP Vice President Mark Bly said Halliburton officials were slow about testing and results. Several times during the hearing, BP and commission investigators found themselves agreeing on blaming Halliburton. So far, the inquiry into the April 20 rig explosion — which killed 11 workers and dumped 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — is echoing investigations into past technological disasters, such as space shuttle explosions. If there is one large problem, it is the way that all sorts of small decisions become a cascade of failures that short-circuit normal safety features. Not everyone agrees. One of the nation's top technological disaster academics said the spill commission — appointed by President Barack Obama — was a "cover-up" from the White House. Charles Perrow, a Yale University professor who wrote the disaster sociology classic "Normal Accidents" said the investigation was overlooking BP's track record of disasters that have come after cost cutting. "There's a long history of dollars versus safety at this organization," Perrow said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. He referred specifically to BP's 2005 Texas City oil refinery explosion in which federal officials cited a culture of cost-cutting at the expense of safety. In 2006, BP's lack of leak detection caused a massive pipeline spill, the largest on Alaska's North Slope to date. Reilly, chief of the federal Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, told the AP he went into the investigation expecting to conclude that safety was traded for dollars but didn't find that to be so. Instead, what investigators found was "a series of first challenging situations" and some choices that could go either way compounded by "hard to explain decisions." "And they add up to a disaster," Reilly said.... CONTINUED AT: July 23, 2010
Technician: Deepwater Horizon warning system disabled
By David S. Hilzenrath
KENNER, LA. -- Long before an eruption of gas turned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig into a fireball, an alarm system designed to alert the crew and prevent combustible gases from reaching potential sources of ignition had been deliberately disabled, the former chief electronics technician on the rig testified Friday. Michael Williams, an ex-Marine who survived the April 20 inferno by jumping from the burning rig, told a federal panel probing the disaster that the alarm system was one of an array of critical systems that had been functioning unreliably in the run-up to the blowout. Williams told the panel that he understood that the rig had been operating with the gas alarm system in "inhibited" mode for a year to prevent false alarms from disturbing the crew. He said the explanation he got was that the leadership of the rig did not want crew members needlessly awakened in the middle of the night. If the safety system was disabled, it would not have been a unique event. Records of federal enforcement actions reviewed by The Washington Post show that, in case after case, rig operators paid fines for allegedly bypassing safety systems that could impede routine operations. Computers used to monitor and control drilling operations intermittently froze, to the point that the problem became known as "the blue screen of death," Williams said. Despite attempted repairs, the issue remained unresolved at the time of the blowout, Williams said. Earlier in the drilling operation, one of the panels that controlled the blowout preventer -- the last line of defense against a gusher -- had been placed in bypass mode to work around a malfunction, Williams said. Williams said a colleague told him that an inspection of the rig in the spring, shortly before the disaster, found extensive maintenance problems. The colleague said "that we were going to be in the shipyard a lot longer than anticipated because the rig was in very bad condition," Williams said. The rig was owned by Transocean, the company that employs Williams, and was operating under contract to BP. An attorney for BP, Richard Godfrey, added to the picture by reading from a September 2009 BP audit during his questioning of Williams. He read a litany of findings that included problems with bilge pumps, cooling pumps, an alarm system related to the rig's hospital and an emergency shutdown panel on the bridge. A fire and alarm system was found to have its "override active," Godfrey said. Altogether, the September audit identified 390 issues that needed addressing, Godfrey said. Williams said the fire and gas system was "a wreck" when he took over his job in 2009, and trying to improve it was a constant battle. Every member of the Deepwater Horizon crew had the authority to stop operations if they had safety concerns. Despite his unease, Williams said he never exercised that power. In days of testimony here by a parade of witnesses, that has been a recurring theme. Williams said that when he discovered that the alarm system was "inhibited" he reported it to supervisors, and they informed him that orders were to keep it that way. In the event of a gas leak, the rig was equipped to shut down vents that could transmit the gas to the engine rooms, where it could ignite. But there was no guarantee the system would work. When it was accidentally triggered once, Williams said, the suction from the engine was so great that it pulled a fire door off its hinges. On the night of April 20, Engine No. 3 appeared to have exploded, Williams said. Questioned by Transocean lawyer Edward F. Kohnke IV, Williams said he has filed a lawsuit over the disaster. Williams also said that, when he gave a statement in the presence of the Transocean lawyer before retaining a lawyer of his own and filing suit, he did not mention the problems he discussed at Friday's hearing. Williams, who was injured in the explosion, was taken by helicopter from a rescue ship to a Louisiana hospital. Transocean lawyers interviewed him in a Kenner hotel about a day after the blowout, said his attorney, Scott R. Bickford. Transocean said in a statement that the Deepwater Horizon's general alarm system was controlled by a person on the bridge "to prevent the general alarm from sounding unnecessarily." Transocean provided part of an April inspection report that found "no [gas] detectors either in fault or inhibited condition, other than units being serviced." U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, co-chairman of the investigating panel, asked if Williams's experience pointed to a systemic maintenance problem. "There's never enough time," Williams said. Getting replacement parts contributed to the delay, he said. "Turnaround was horrible," Williams said. "I waited on parts for a year." The main problem was that some parts were no longer manufactured, Williams said, and Transocean had to have them custom-made. The Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, until recently called the Minerals Management Service, are conducting the hearing. In other testimony Friday, an expert consultant to the investigating board said that based on available data, it appeared that the Deepwater Horizon conducted four faulty integrity tests on the well in the hours before the blowout. The fact that the test was apparently attempted four times indicates that someone on the rig was concerned, said John R. Smith, an associate professor of petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University and a consultant to the board. "None of the four tests were an acceptable test," Smith said. Apparently, when BP concluded the tests, hydrocarbons were already flowing up the well, said Smith, an industry veteran. Going on the assumption that at least one of the tests was successful, BP prepared to wrap up its work on the well by removing heavy drilling fluid from the hole. The fluid serves as a damper on the well, and removing it eliminated a counterweight to a potential gusher.  Play Video ABC News – Dolphins Beached on Gulf Shores
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