by Suzanne Goldenberg
BP was aware of equipment problems aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig hours before the explosion pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, a congressional hearing was told yesterday .
In a second day of hearings, the House of Representatives's energy and commerce committee said documents and company briefings suggested that BP, which owned the well; Transocean, which owned the rig; and Halliburton, which made the cement casing for the well, ignored tests in the hours before the 20 April explosion that indicated faulty safety equipment.
"Yet it appears the companies did not suspend operations, and now 11 workers are dead and the gulf faces an environmental catastrophe," Henry Waxman, the chair of the energy and commerce committee, said, demanding to know why work was not stopped.
The committee heard testimony from oil executives suggesting multiple failures of safety systems that should have given advance warning of a blowout, or should have promptly cut off the flow of oil.
The failures included a dead battery in the blowout preventer, suggestions of a breach in the well casing, and failure in the shear ram, a device of last resort that was supposed to cut through and seal the drill pipe in the event of a blowout.
"Already we have uncovered at least four significant problems with the blowout preventer used on the Deepwater Horizon drill rig," said Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who chairs the oversight subcommittee.
The examination was far tougher on the oil companies than the Senate hearings on Tuesday. BP also faced a financial sting as the White House asked Congress to approve $118m in recovery costs, to be passed on to the oil company.
While the committee accused the oil industry of failing to anticipate the dangers of offshore drilling, senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman unveiled a climate and energy bill that for the first time will put a price on carbon and require American cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Kerry said he believed the oil spill would give impetus to the American Power Act. "This a bill for energy independence after a devastating oil spill, a bill to hold polluters accountable, a bill for billions of dollars to create the next generation of jobs and a bill to end America's addiction to foreign oil."
But after eight months of careful courtship of industry and political opposition, the bill has no Republican backers after Senator Lindsey Graham, a co-author, withdrew his support last month and the immediate response from industry groups and mainstream environmental groups was guarded.
Passage of the law is seen as crucial to a global deal on climate change. The 987-page bill was carefully positioned to secure support from industry and moderate Republicans, making the final product far weaker than environmental organisations wanted.
In response to the oil disaster, the bill moderated its original support for offshore drilling, giving states veto power over projects in waters 75 miles from their shores. States that go ahead will be able to keep a bigger share, 37%, of federal revenues from drilling.
Otherwise the bill calls for 12 nuclear plants and sets aside $2bn for research into clean coal. Greenpeace condemned it as a "dirty energy bailout", with director Phil Radford adding: "It seems that after a year and a half wrangling, the only people who can be happy with this bill are the fossil fuel industry lobbyists."
The bill aims for a 17% cut in emissions over 2005 levels, the same weak target enshrined in a bill passed by the House in June last year. But the Senate version would apply to a smaller share of the US economy. Heavy industries would not be required to cut emissions until 2016.
The bill would stop the Environmental Protection Agency regulating greenhouse gases and would scrap region cap and trade systems now underway in two dozen states and Canadian provinces.
~-~=+o)x|0/X\0|x(o+=~-~
Ecosystem in Peril After Gulf Oil Spill
by Matthew Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia - With engineers giving a best-case scenario of "weeks" before the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is sealed, some scientists are warning that the region's ecosystem could face major long-term damage.
As many as 70,000 gallons of oil per day have been gushing into the waters of the Gulf Coast since an oil rig operated by British Petroleum exploded on Apr. 20. The well itself is located at a depth of about 5,000 feet, presenting formidable obstacles to efforts to shut it down.
The spill is expected to ultimately eclipse the 11-million-gallon Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It is not known how much oil could potentially pour into the Gulf before the leak is plugged.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says water sampling collected on May 1 and 2 along the Louisiana coast found chemicals associated with oil. "However, these results still indicate that water quality does not pose increased risk to aquatic life, such as fish and shellfish," the agency said in a statement.
"As of May 4, 2010, water sampling results off the Gulf Coast still indicate that water quality does not pose increased risk to aquatic life," the EPA said.
However, Riki Ott, a toxicologist who wrote two books about the Exxon Valdez spill, says she believes the scenario is far worse than officials are presenting to the public.
"BP is trying to say we're winning because oil has not hit the shoreline. That is far from the truth: we're losing. So much toxic oil is spilling every day, they're hammering it with dispersants, another toxic chemical," she said.
BP says it has used about 400,000 gallons of dispersant, which breaks down the oil, and has another 805,000 gallons on order.
"This dispersed oil is extremely toxic to young life forms," Ott told IPS. "BP is saying that it's not that toxic, not that much of a problem. That is extremely misleading because the only toxicity data [is based on an experiment where] they douse adult shrimp and minnows in static beakers of dispersant or oil for 48 or 96 hours, and count how many die or live."
"But young life forms are a lot more sensitive to toxic chemicals than adults," she said. "What we have in the open Gulf is a continuous exposure. The oil goes a mile down...It's in the whole water column."
She said that studies of dead herring after the Exxon Valdez spill found that parasites that normally lived in the fish's stomach had migrated into the muscle tissue to avoid toxic exposure, thus weakening its immune system and causing reproductive problems.
Some "99.9 percent of herring eggs exposed to oil died", she explained.
Ott added that the continental shelf ecosystem and open ocean ecosystem are linked very closely. "The shrimp that depend on wetlands and marshes for nurseries, when they migrate offshore, they become food for red snapper and grouper," she said.
"It's too much oil, too fast, not to have a pretty big impact on generations of wildlife that's in the water column. Birds eating shellfish getting sick and dying, marine mammals, land mammals getting sick and dying. You have birds feeding oiled fish to their chicks, the chicks have stunted growth," Ott said.
Meanwhile, families who depend on the fishing industry are seeing their livelihoods in jeopardy.
BP has been paying out up to 5,000 dollars in individual claims to fishermen and others who suffered economic losses. Ultimately, some estimates put the total figure for clean-up operations and damages at four billion dollars, although it could be even higher depending on when the leak is stemmed.
The Barack Obama administration has said BP and the other firms with some degree of liability should pick up the entire tab for the clean-up and damages. He is seeking 118 million dollars of emergency funding to deal with immediate costs related the spill, which BP would be expected to reimburse the government.
Orissa Arend of New Orleans, Louisiana told IPS most locals are still eating the fish, because 80 percent of it comes from areas not yet affected by the spill. The other 20 percent used to come from fisheries which have stopped producing for the time being.
New Orleanians are also concerned about the upcoming hurricane season.
"People are worried that next time there's a hurricane, instead of getting flooded with just water, we'll get flooded with disgusting oil water," Arend said.
No comments:
Post a Comment