BP, not Exxon, caused the Exxon Valdez disaster

By Greg Palast
March 2014 | Read the full story at TruthDig
 
Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coastline 25 years ago today, on March 24, 1989.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez files on BP.  They would see a decades-long pattern of BP’s lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP’s worldwide oil operations.

Here’s a sample:

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Palast’s investigation of BP opens his latest film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers. Pre-release editions are available on DVD and download for a donation to Palast’s foundation for investigative reporting at http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org
And read the complete untold story of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in Palast’s Vultures’ Picnic, BBC Newsnight’s Culture Program’s Book of the Year.

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Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud
As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP’s disastrous failures, more than Exxon’s, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska’s coast.

Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.  All you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as “boom.” Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special “containment” or “skimmer” ships.

The containment ship is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don’t let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It’s against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews
There’s no sense having a fire truck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

To save money, BP’s Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment
And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP’s Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon.

Cover-Up and Threats
Did BP’s top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders’ testimony. Just two examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP’s commander of the port at Valdez, warned that “due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.”

In response, BP threatened the captain with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files. (I’ve got the letter—can’t tell you how.  Click here.)

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP’s shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP’s chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel’s phone and intercept his mail. BP’s black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP’s spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap
The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error—“drunken skipper hits reef.”

We didn’t have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients—Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate—that they wouldn’t get a dime unless we agreed not to use the “f-word”: fraud.

And BP? Who said crime doesn’t pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska’s Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million—100 percent of it covered by insurance.

The Oil is Still There
In 2010 for the U.K.’s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we kicked over some stones—and the place, two decades after the spill, smelled like a filthy gas station.

Maybe it’s time for the Obama Administration, eager to welcome BP back to plunder the Gulf, to wake up and smell the crude.

The Return of the BP Disaster, 15 months on...

Thursday, September 1, 2011 by Al Jazeera English
Oil is resurfing again not far from the location of the BP Macondo Well off the Gulf of Mexico
by Dahr Jamail


Fifteen months after BP’s crippled Macondo Well in the Gulf of Mexico caused the worst environmental disaster in US history, oil and oil sheen covering several square miles of water are surfacing not far from BP’s well.

According to oil trackers, globs of oil have been spotted near the Macondo Well
(Bonny Schumaker/On Wings of Care)

 According to oil trackers with the organization On Wings of Care who have been monitoring the oil since early August, rainbow-tinted slicks and thicker globs of oil have been visible.


"BP and NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] have had all these ships out there doing grid searches looking at things, so hopefully now they’ll take a look at this," Bonny Schumaker, president and pilot of On Wings of Care, told Al Jazeera.


Schumaker, who has logged approximately 500 hours of flight time monitoring the area around the Macondo well for oil, said during her August 30 overflight of the area "we saw the slick cover roughly 10 miles [16km] in one direction and four miles [6km] in another".


Schumaker has flown scientists from NASA, USGS, and oil chemistry scientists to observe conditions resulting from BP’s oil disaster that began in April 2010.


BP, whose Macondo well gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank to the bottom, has denied that the oil is coming from their well.


On August 18 reports surfaced that a large swath of oil sheen was reported near the site of last year's oil disaster. BP officials, in coordination with the US Coast Guard, deployed two submersibles to investigate the site.


BP said their visual inspection confirmed there wasn't any oil released from the Macondo well, and that it observed bubbles from cement ports near the site of some of its Gulf wells.


"These observations are consistent with testing and sampling performed last year that detected nitrogen bubbles, a residual byproduct of the nitrified foam used in setting the wells' surface casing cement," the company said in a statement.


Aerial survey


After the report in Mobile Alabama’s Press-Register newspaper, the Coast Guard deployed a boat to Mississippi Canyon 252, the federal block about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast where the well is located, and also conducted an aerial survey of the site by helicopter.


"Both observed nothing," said Captain Jonathan Burton, who is based in Morgan City, Louisiana.


BP, in addition, said neither a vessel it had on the scene late in the day nor a science vessel on site throughout the day reported seeing any oily sheen.


However, a reporter from the Press-Register took samples of the sheen and sent them to Louisiana State University for analysis.


Edward Overton, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University’s environmental sciences department examined data from the samples.


Overton, who is also a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contractor, told Al Jazeera, "After examining the data, I think it’s a dead ringer for the MC252 [Macondo Well] oil, as good a match as I’ve seen."


He explained that the samples were analyzed and compared to "the known Macondo oil fingerprint, and it was a very, very close match."


While not ruling out the possibility that oil could be seeping out of the giant reservoir, which would be the worst case scenario, Overton believes the oil currently reaching the surface is likely from oil that was trapped in the damaged rigging on the seafloor.


Al Jazeera asked BP to comment on Prof Overton’s findings.


"We can tell you that we recently sent a remote operated submarine down to inspect the Macondo well cap and the relief well cap," Tom Mueller, a press officer for BP America told Al Jazeera, "Both are intact and show no evidence of any oil leak. So no oil is leaking from the Macondo well."


Mueller said it is possible the oil is from natural seeps, "but that is not known yet".


BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster is, to date, the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersants to sink the oil, in an effort the oil giant claimed was aimed at keeping the oil from reaching shore.


The dispersants are banned in at least 19 countries, including the UK.


Sightings of the oil continue as independent groups continue to monitor the situation.


Phantom islands


Oil has been surfacing all over the northern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico for several weeks now, according to residents.


Reports of slicks that meander for kilometers and huge expanses of oil sheen that look like phantom islands are becoming common again.


Fresh oil, only slightly weathered, has been washing ashore in areas hit hardest by last year’s disaster. These areas include Breton Island, Ship Island, the Chandeleur Islands, and northern Barataria Bay, Louisiana.


BP has reactivated its Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) Program to handle clean-up operations.


Natural oil seepage has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico for millennia, making it possible that these could cause new sheens. But scientists said their location, this close to the Macondo well, is intriguing.


There are some explanations beyond natural seeps, including the possibility that oil has been leaking from the broken riser pipe that connected the Deepwater Horizon to the well itself.


Another possibility is that heavier hydrocarbon constituents could have settled on the bottom during the disaster, and as bacteria have broken them down, lighter-density hydrocarbons are now slowly making their way to the surface.


The most troubling possibility is that the oil is leaking out of the ground beneath the capped wellhead, a situation that could be impossible to stop.

US Taxpayers Liable For Gulf Clean Up Costs; BP, Transocean, Halliburton off the Hook

Unbelievable! Court Rules US Taxpayers, Not BP Or Transocean, Are Liable For Gulf Oil Spill Clean Up Costs

Alexander Higgins - June 18, 2011

US District court has dismissed over 100,000 lawsuits brought against BP And Transocean to pay for oil spill clean up costs and environmental damages caused to the Gulf of Mexico from the BP Gulf Oil Spill. The court ruled that injury stopped the moment the well was sealed and the Federal Government, aka The US Taxpayer, is now liable for clean up costs along with any damages caused by deficiencies of the cleanup of the Gulf Of Mexico.

The US District Courts have ruled that since oil is no longer flowing from the Macando Well BP and Transocean are not liable for cleanup costs and damages from the BP Gulf Oil Spill since the “well has already been sealed and the injury has already been committed”.

In the ruling the court goes on note that Federal Government is in charge of the oil spill clean up efforts. Thus any damages related to the cleanup are now the burden of the Federal Government, meaning the US Taxpayer.

The ruling means that Taxpayers are not only liable for the clean up of the BP Gulf Oil Spill but it also means that any damages caused by deficiencies of the clean up in the Gulf is now also the responsibility of the US Taxpayer.

The lawsuits against BP have been bundled into separate packages with all of the lawsuits pertaining to BP’s liability for cleanup costs and environmental damages being dismissed with this ruling.

Activists Post reports :

BP wins a big one in oil spill litigationSabrina Canfield
Courthouse News Service
Friday, June 17, 2011

NEW ORLEANS – Ruling in favor of Transocean and BP, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed third-party environmental claims in a giant pleading bundle in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation, saying the fact that the oil flow has stopped makes those lawsuits irrelevant.

“The injunction at this stage would be useless, as not only is there no ongoing release from the well, but there is also no viable offshore facility from which any release could possibly occur,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier wrote. “The Macondo well is dead, and what remains of the Deepwater Horizon vessel is on the ocean floor, where it capsized and sank in 5,000 feet of water.

“Moreover, BP and the agencies comprising the Unified Area Command have been and are cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. An injury is not redressable by a citizen suit when the injury is already being addressed.”

Judge Barbier is overseeing the massive, consolidated oil spill litigation, which has been divided into “bundles,” based upon the nature of the claims.

In instances where claims in the D1 bundle pertain to how the oil is being cleaned up, Barbier ruled that even if he allowed those claims to go forward, the claimants are not directly involved in the cleanup, so a ruling in their favor would not affect how the cleanup is progressing.

“The D1 defendants do not unilaterally direct the cleanup activities in the Gulf; such activities have been under the control of the National Incident Commander, Federal on-Scene Coordinator, Unified Area Command, and the Coast Guard in cooperation with other federal agencies. Thus, plaintiffs cannot show that an order from this court would actually resolve [to the defendants for] any potential deficiency in the ongoing cleanup,” Barbier wrote.

“In order to prevail on their claims for injunctive relief, plaintiffs must demonstrate an ongoing violation of various statutes on which plaintiffs’ claims for relief is based. Because the Macondo well is dead and is no longer discharging oil, plaintiffs’ only claims are confined to seeking environmental citizen suit injunctive relief of a prospective nature to stop noncompliance in the form of a continued release of oil. Thus, the citizen suit claims brought by the plaintiffs are moot, because no future-orientated injunction can provide any meaningful relief for plaintiffs in terms of stopping discharges that already concluded in mid-July 2010.”

Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operated by BP, exploded and burned 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010, killing 11 and setting off the worst oil spill in history. [Hundreds of] Millions of gallons of oil were spilled in the next 87 days.

More than 100,000 people have filed lawsuits seeking damages from the spill.
The lawsuits dismissed on Thursday belonged to the D1 pleading bundle.
D1 bundle claims were filed by third-party organizations that alleged environmental damages under the Clean Water Act; the Endangered Species Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act; and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act.

This was the first ruling arising from issues addressed during a May 26 hearing on the defendants’ motions to dismiss particular bundles.

Claims with varying types of damages were included in more than one bundle, depending on type of claim.

In dismissing the D1 claims, Barbier said the claims could still be heard if they seek damages for violations other than environmental claims.

“To the extent that plaintiffs assert claims under general maritime law and/or state law, the court will consider those claims separately when it addresses the pending motions to dismiss the B1 bundle master complaint,” Barbier wrote.

During the May 26 hearing, Barbier indicated that he might find the claims asserted in the D1 bundle were moot.

“The fundamental argument is that this is all moot because the well is sealed,” Barbier said.

During the hearing, Ervin Gonzales, of the plaintiff steering committee, said the cleanup has not been adequate and “the environment is suffering.”

Greg Buppert, an attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, told Barbier at the hearing that “the Endangered Species Act is not linked to the well spill; it is linked to the take of species.”

In response, Barbier cited the federal government’s investigation of the spill. Federal attorneys have said that criminal charges will be filed if the investigation turns up evidence of willful negligence by the defendants.

Because of the continuing investigation, the government has tried to keep certain issues undercover. For instance, autopsy results of the hundreds of dead baby dolphins that have washed up along the Gulf Coast have been kept private, and independent scientists have not been allowed to conduct their own autopsies.
“Isn’t that what the federal government is doing?”  Barbier asked on May 26. “It sounds like you think they may not do it right.”

Later that day, Barbier told Buppert: “It’s speculative right now. You’re surmising that somebody is going to do something that you don’t like.”
Attorneys did not immediately return calls for comment.

Unbelievable. Shocking. The may need the entire congress to send twitter pics exposing themselves to distract the masses from this one. I guess the Judge believed that all of the oil magically disappeared from the Gulf the moment the well was sealed, just like the Federal Government told us it did. Never mind that fact that scientists reported the Feds confiscated the data of the underwater plumes and told the scientists to shut up about their research. Never mind the feds tried covering up the first plume that was discovered. You do remember that  massive 22 mile long plume larger than the size of Manhattan don’t you?
 
And even after the Feds said they couldn’t find the  oil the massive slick in the Gulf could still be seen from space. Then there were the fisherman that the Feds told to shut about the discovery of oil in Gulf seafood. Yep the damage, that all ended when the well was sealed, if what even sealed. Regardless of that debate that fact still remains that massive underwater lakes of oil are still in the Gulf and will remain there for years.

But none of that matters to our fascist government. Widespread sightings of oil washing up all over the Gulf continue to this very day. In fact NOAA has just recently confirmed a widespread “unexplained sickness” and lesions in sea life all across the Gulf that the Feds are desperately trying to keep a lid on.

That wouldn’t have anything to do with the almost 2 million gallons of the neurotoxin pesticide Corexit that was sprayed into the Gulf to limit BP’s cleanup costs for the Gulf.
Oh, the irony. Would BP have sprayed all of those toxins into the Gulf if they knew that the Federal courts would just let them off the hook for the clean up costs? The Feds would have never of needed to lie about the lethality of Corexit because the public couldn’t handle the truth.

The Irony. The Fascism. The Greed. The Corruption.

BP Anniversary: Toxicity, Suffering and Death

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English
The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster has caused the biggest chemical poisoning crisis in US history, experts say.

by Dahr Jamail - Al Jazeera

April 20, 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of BP's catastrophic oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, causing oil to gush from 5,000 feet below the surface into the ninth largest body of water on the planet.

 Medical and toxicology experts have told Al Jazeera that the oil spill has triggered environmental and human health disasters that will likely span decades.
(Erike Blumenfeld/Al-Jazeera) At least 4.9 million barrels of BP's oil would eventually be released into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped 87 days later.

It is, to date, the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersants to sink the oil, in an effort the oil giant claimed was aimed at keeping the oil from reaching shore.

Critics believe the chemical dispersants were used simply to hide the oil and minimise BP's responsibility for environmental fines.

Earlier this month Transocean Ltd, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon, gave its top executives bonuses for achieving what it described as the "best year in safety performance in our company’s history". Transocean CEO Steve Newman’s bonus was $374,062.

BP has plans to restart deepwater drilling on 10 wells in the Gulf of Mexico this summer after being granted permission by US regulators.

Meanwhile, marine and wildlife biologists, toxicologists, and medical doctors have described the impact of the disaster upon the environment and human health as "catastrophic," and have told Al Jazeera that this is only the beginning of that what they expect to be an environmental and human health crisis that will likely span decades.

The demise of gulf vertebrates

Less than four months after the disaster began, very large fish-kills began to appear along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

On August 18, a team from Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia released a report that estimated 70-79 per cent of the oil that gushed from the well "has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem". More recent studies estimate that figure could be closer to 90 per cent.

Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has "great concern" about the fish kills over the last year, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

In recent months, more than 290 corpses of dolphins and their newborn have washed ashore in the areas of the Gulf most heavily affected by the disaster, along with scores of dead endangered sea turtles.

"If we use several models to see what is going on, the sea turtles and neo-natal dolphin deaths, the impacts of the dispersed oil are lingering", Cake told Al Jazeera. "The oil is out there and still coming onto our shores".

On May 20 of last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told BP it had 24 hours to find a less toxic alternative to its dispersants, but the EPA's request was ignored.

Then on May 25, BP was given a directive by the EPA to scale back their spraying of the Gulf of Mexico with dispersants. The US Coast Guard overlooked the EPA's directive and provided BP with 74 exemptions in 48 days to use the dispersants.

A March 1987 report titled Organic Solvent Neurotoxicity, by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), states:

"The acute neurotoxic effects of organic solvent exposure in workers and laboratory animals are narcosisanaesthesiaia, central nervous system (CNS) depression, respiratory arrest, unconsciousness, and death."

The dispersants are banned in at least 19 countries, including the UK.
Cake’s assessment for sea turtle and dolphin populations in the Gulf is bleak.

"The two models of the turtles and dolphins indicate that something is drastically wrong in the marine environment, that I believe point towards the demise of these vertebrates in the Gulf."

Underscoring his concern, a new study published in Conservation Letters this March reveals that the true impact of BP’s oil disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated.

The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed since most carcasses sink before they are spotted.

Cake believes the National Marine Fisheries Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been remiss in determining the cause of the deaths.

"In the year since the spill began, NOAA admits to doing no tissue sampling, which to me is scientifically incredible, for if you have forensic samples, you are bound by protocols to have them analysed right away so they do not degrade, unless your purpose is not to know what is killing these dolphins", he said.

In February the Obama administration, via the National Marine Fisheries Service, issued a gag order to force marine scientists who were contracted to document the spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples to keep their findings confidential.

Bleak prognosis

Dolpins and sea turtles can be considered the canaries in the coalmine in the Gulf since they are at the top of the food chain and directly reflect what is happening to the marine environment in which they live.

Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has "great concern" about the fish kills over the last year, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

"Adult dolphins systems are picking up whatever is in the system out there, and we know the oil is out there and working it’s way up the food chain through the food web and dolphins are at the top of that food chain."

Cake explained: "The chemicals then move into their lipids, fat, and then when they are pregnant, their young rely on this fat, and so it’s no wonder dolphins are having developmental issues and still births".

Since last fall, Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has been conducting tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.

"Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline", Subra told Al Jazeera, "We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation."

Cake, who lives in Mississippi, said:

"In the past months we’ve lost the young of the year population of dolphins in this area. We are not seeing any young of the year dolphins in the Mississippi and Alabama coastal area. The question is, for us as humans, could we withstand a similar impact if all our children were born dead because of environmental pollutants? I would say we could not."

It has been more than 31 years since the 1979 Ixtoc-1 oil disaster in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, and the oysters, clams, and mangrove forests have still not recovered in their oiled habitats in seaside estuaries of the Yucatan Peninsula.

It has been over 21 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska, and the herring fishery that failed in the wake of that disaster has still not returned.

From a biological oceanographer’s perspective, we are still in the short-term impact stage of BP’s oil disaster. Cake, who is 70-years-old, said:

"I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover. Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades."

Toxic chemicals 'in the air'

Two-year-old Gaven Tillman of Pass Christian, Mississippi, has been diagnosed with severe upper respiratory, sinus, and viral infections. His temperature has reached more than 39 degrees and he has been sick since last September.

"He has been seen by nine different doctors and had twenty-four doctor & ER visits," Shirley Tillman, his grandmother and former BP oil cleanup worker told Al Jazeera, "Some of his diagnoses include severe inflammation of his upper sinuses, upper respiratory infections, ear infections, sore throats, headaches, fever, vomiting & diarrhea."

Both Shirley and her husband Don's blood tested positive for chemicals from BP's crude oil, but now Gaven's blood has tested positive as well.

"We expected to find BP’s toxins in our bodies after working in the VOO [Vessels of Opportunity] program," she added, "But we did not expect our two-year-old grandson to test positive for having them too, with levels higher than ours. He has not been to the beach and has not eaten any seafood. Therefore, it is in the air."

Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist, and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera that: "The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol.

Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber", she continued, "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".
"They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses."

"For example, 2- butoxyethanol [in BP’s Corexit dispersants] is a human health hazard substance; it is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders", Ott said.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitization, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage. They are teratogenic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic.

Since last July, Al Jazeera has spoken with scores of Gulf residents, fishermen, and clean-up workers who have blamed the aforementioned symptoms they are experiencing on the chemicals from BP's oil and dispersants.

"I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body,” 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera.

Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.

"At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good,” he said, "I’ve been extremely sick ever since.”

According to chemist Bob Naman, these chemicals create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil.

"I’m scared of what I’m finding," Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, added, "This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe."

Aguinaga’s health has been in dramatic decline.

"I have terrible chest pain, at times I can’t seem to get enough oxygen, and I’m constantly tired with pains all over my body,” Aguinaga explained, "At times I’m pissing blood, vomiting dark brown stuff, and every pore of my body is dispensing water.”

And Aguinaga's friend Vallian is now dead.

"After we got back from our vacation in Florida, Merrick went to work for a company contracted by BP to clean up oil in Grand Isle, Louisiana,” Aguinaga said of his 33-year-old physically fit friend. "Two weeks after that he dropped dead."

Problems will continue

Most of the human blood Dr Subra has tested has toxic chemicals present at levels several times higher than the national average.

"Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and Hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP crude oil", she said. "We are finding these in excess of the 95th percentile, which is the average for the entire nation. Sometimes we’re finding amounts five to 10 times in excess of the 95th percentile."

Ethylbenzene is a form of benzene present in the body when it begins to be broken down. m,p-Xylene is a clear, colorless, sweet-smelling, flammable liquid that is refined from crude oil and is primarily used as a solvent.

Al Jazeera asked Subra what she thought the local, state and federal governments should be doing about the ongoing chemical exposures.

"There is a lack of concern by the government agencies and the [oil] industry,” She said, "There is a leaning towards wanting to say it is all fixed and let us move on, when it is not. The crude oil is continuing to come onshore in tar mats, balls, and strings."  "So the exposure continues. There is still a large amount of crude in the marshes and buried on the beaches. As long as that pathway is there for exposure, these problems will continue quite a long time into the future.”

Dr Mike Robicheux is a doctor in Louisiana who has been treating scores of people he says are being made sick from BP’s toxic chemicals.

Robicheux says new patients from the exposure are coming into his office daily, and believes that the broader medical community across the Gulf Coast are either unwilling or unable to deal with the crisis.

Robicheux, who has appealed to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for help, said:

"The medical community has shut this down...They either don’t understand or are afraid to deal with it properly because they are afraid of the oil and gas industry."

"This is the biggest public health crisis from a chemical poisoning in the history of this country," Robicheux told Al Jazeera, "We are going to have thousands of people who are extremely sick, and if they aren’t treated, a large number of them are going to die."

Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily & dead months after BP spill

(BP and the govt--including the White House--continue to lie to us about the clean up effort, the safety of the Gulf, the safety of the seafood, etc. People are sick and dying down there. BP's legal settlement asshole tries to screw everyone out of their claims against BP, and with very little effort beyond an occasional PR photo op and photoshopping old images to look current, BP hasn't done what is required to minimize the damage from their monumental screw-up. It's that and the collusion with the govt and lying about every aspect of the spill that solidifies Americans' distrust of corporations and the govt. It's why people are protesting--the corporate/govt mob control everything, and we're sick of it.--jef)

Sunday, Feb 20, 2011
Less clean-up/recovery than expected has occurred since spill, as life on parts of Gulf floor has been decimated

By SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press 

 

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.

At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."

The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that "most of the oil is gone." And a Department of Energy scientist, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a "fairly fast" job of eating the oil. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Terry Hazen said his research differs from Joye's because they looked at different places at different times.

Joye's research was more widespread, but has been slower in being published in scientific literature.

In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles. Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change. Much of the oil she found on the sea floor -- and in the water column -- was chemically fingerprinted, proving it comes from the BP spill. Joye is still waiting for results to show other oil samples she tested are from BP's Macondo well.

She also showed pictures of oil-choked bottom-dwelling creatures. They included dead crabs and brittle stars -- starfish like critters that are normally bright orange and tightly wrapped around coral. These brittle stars were pale, loose and dead. She also saw tube worms so full of oil they suffocated.

"This is Macondo oil on the bottom," Joye said as she showed slides. "This is dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads."

Joye said her research shows that the burning of oil left soot on the sea floor, which still had petroleum products. And even more troublesome was the tremendous amount of methane from the BP well that mixed into the Gulf and was mostly ignored by other researchers.

Joye and three colleagues last week published a study in Nature Geoscience that said the amount of gas injected into the Gulf was the equivalent of between 1.5 and 3 million barrels of oil.

"The gas is an important part of understanding what happened," said Ian MacDonald of Florida State University.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco told reporters Saturday that "it's not a contradiction to say that although most of the oil is gone, there still remains oil out there."

Earlier this month, Kenneth Feinberg, the government's oil compensation fund czar, said based on research he commissioned he figured the Gulf of Mexico would almost fully recover by 2012 -- something Joye and Lubchenco said isn't right.

"I've been to the bottom. I've seen what it looks like with my own eyes. It's not going to be fine by 2012," Joye told The Associated Press. "You see what the bottom looks like, you have a different opinion."

NOAA chief Lubchenco said "even though the oil degraded relatively rapidly and is now mostly but not all gone, damage done to a variety of species may not become obvious for years to come."

Lubchenco Saturday also announced the start of a Gulf restoration planning process to get the Gulf back to the condition it was on Apr. 19, the day before the spill. That program would eventually be paid for BP and other parties deemed responsible for the spill. This would be separate from an already begun restoration program that would improve all aspects of the Gulf, not just the oil spill, but has not been funded by the government yet, she said.

The new program, which is part of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment program, is part of the oil spill litigation -- or out-of-court settlement -- in which the polluters pay for overall damage to the ecosystem and efforts to return it to normal. This is different than paying compensation to people and businesses directly damaged by the spill.

The process will begin with public meetings all over the region.

BP Gulf Cleanup is a Failed Lie; Beaches Unsafe and Unclean

Wake Up America You are being lied to!
Gulf of Mexico beaches still soaked in oil and dispersant despite BP PR campaign commercials claiming a successful clean up
 

Allen: 'Impossible to lead cleanup efforts' without BP

By Vivian Kuo, CNN, August 20, 2010

(CNN) -- The government's point man in charge of the response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill said it is "impossible" to lead cleanup efforts without cooperation from BP.

Speaking from Washington's National Press Club Friday, retired U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said, "You can call it trust, you can call it cooperation, you can call it collaboration."

He referred to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, a law that established the burden of payment on the "responsible party" -- in this case, BP.

"It is very hard for the public to understand that a responsible party that is clearly responsible for the event itself could somehow be cooperative in the response to the spill. But as a matter of fact, since 1990, that's exactly the way we've conducted oil spill response in this country."

"The very notion of cooperating with BP in this response has met with universal disapproval," he said, adding that he and others in the Coast Guard who have worked on previous oil spills have had to manage that "paradox" of the law's requirements.

"The current response model assumes the responsible party will work with the federal on-scene coordinator and local state entities to achieve unity of effort and effective spill response. It's been challenging at times to create that unity of effort given sometimes what appears to be the rejection of the notion [by] the general public," Allen said.

The admiral delivered the remarks after providing an update on the status of BP's ruptured well. If all goes as planned, the "bottom kill" operation to permanently plug the ruptured underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico could be completed by the week after Labor Day, he said.

Thursday, Allen authorized BP to replace the existing blowout preventer on the well with a new one. That removal will require close supervision by government scientists, BP engineers and joint investigation teams -- all of whom will want to examine the device closely to gain insight into what happened during the explosion on April 20 when the oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers, and later sank. The government estimates some 4.9 million barrels of oil subsequently gushed into the Gulf, 800,000 of which was captured by surface ships.

The well was capped July 15, stopping the flow of oil, and a "static kill" operation two weeks ago further plugged it with cement and mud from above. The "bottom kill" operation is believed to be a permanent fix, in which the well will be intercepted by a relief well and the ruptured well will be plugged from below.

Allen told reporters Friday that officials are in the midst of conducting an ambient pressure test to determine whether the pressure in the top of the well matches the pressure outside the well. That test is expected to be complete Saturday morning. If no anomalies are detected, BP will conduct a "fishing experiment" to try to pull out the drill pipe through the top of the well, Allen said. If both steps are successful, he will then have to issue another go-ahead to remove the existing blowout preventer and replace it with a new one.

When asked about studies issued earlier this week that appear to be at odds with conclusions the government arrived at two weeks ago stating that 74 percent of the oil released from BP's leaking well has been captured, removed or broken down, Allen said the results were "based on a set of assumptions." He said after accounting for the amount of oil burned, skimmed, dispersed and evaporated, the remaining number is what scientists believe remains in the Gulf.

The University of Georgia said in a release earlier in the week it estimates 70 to 79 percent of the oil that gushed from the well "has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem." But Allen and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane Lubchenco have said the UGA study was based on a different set of parameters.

"As a simple sailor, I'd say let's calm down and look at the data," Allen said Friday.
Additionally, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution issued a study Thursday that detailed finding an oil plume from the Deepwater Horizon spill that was at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the Gulf surface back in June. Allen said he discussed the study results with Lubchenco and that they had known about the plume.

"We knew at the time they had located it. We actually dispatched NOAA boats and have had NOAA boats out there looking for hydrocarbons in the water column in and around the well head" but that "locating these things in perpetuity and tracking them is an ephemeral task." It's extremely "difficult" to track hydrocarbons as they travel and break down, Allen said.

While 22 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's federal waters remain closed to fishing, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission opened all state inshore and offshore territorial waters to recreational angling, including charter boat angling Friday.

The LWFC also voted to submit a letter urging the FDA and NOAA to expedite the required testing to re-open commercial fishing areas previously closed due to confirmed reports of oil. Previous to the opening, approximately 862 square miles, or 11 percent of saltwater areas of the state, remained closed to all recreational fishing due to the impacts from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

New Outrages Keep Gushing From BP

by Jim Hightower | Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

With BP's well capped and CEO Tony Hayward exiled to Russia, perhaps you thought that surely there will be no additional revelations about BP to enrage you. But now comes this: prison labor.

In its national PR blitz to buff up its image, the oil giant has loudly been boasting that it has hired devastated, out-of-work local people to handle the clean-up. Many have been hired, but the people themselves say not nearly enough. The Nation magazine now reports a big reason for the shortfall - BP has been using inmates to do much of the shoveling and scooping to remove oil from Louisiana beaches.

In the early days of the cleanup, crews suddenly appeared wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with bold red letters spelling out, "Inmate Labor." Investigative reporter Abe Louise Young writes that the sight of prison laborers outraged the local community, so they were removed.

Not the inmates, the uniforms. Now they wear BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots with no prison markings, and they are moved to and from the job in unmarked white vans. No officials with BP or the feds could or would tell Young how many inmates are being used or what they're being paid. However, a local sheriff's official told Young, "They're not getting paid - it's part of their sentence."

But guess who is getting paid for this convict labor? BP. It's getting paid by you and me. Under a little-known tax provision passed during the Bush regime, corporations can get a "work opportunity tax credit" of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire.

And that's not all we're subsidizing. For example, BP, which rented the drilling rig from Transocean Corp., used a special tax break to write off 70 percent of the rent it paid. Seventy percent! This added up to a savings of $225,000 a day for BP.

Also, back in 1999, Transocean deliberately moved its corporate address offshore in order to dodge its tax obligations to our country. It relocated from Houston to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland - slick moves that have allowed the giant corporation to avoid paying $1.8 billion it owed in U.S. taxes.

No industry gets the absurd array of subsidies that Big Oil now enjoys - subsidies at every stage of its operations, including the ones used by BP and Transocean to search for oil in our public waters. As one political leader put it in 2005, "With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to the oil and gas companies to explore."

That was George W. Bush talking! Five years later, oil is $80 a barrel and the industry is pocketing record profits - yet the giveaways continue.

Again and again, BP has promised that it would pay all cleanup costs for the mess it made. Now, however, the British-based oil giant has quietly told investors that it expects to get a $10-billion subsidy from Uncle Sugar to help cover the costs.

Say what? Not only did the company's top executives assure us that this whole god-awful mess would be on their dime, but so did our top government officials. As President Obama flatly declared in May, "We will demand they pay for every dime they owe for the damage they have done." Even Rep. Joe Barton - the GOP gooberhead who so obsequiously apologized to BP's CEO for America's insistence that he set up a corporate fund to compensate victims - was forced to backtrack and say that, of course, he expects BP to pay the tab.

So what is this $10 billion hit on us taxpayers? It's another little corporate gotcha that lobbyists quietly got tucked into our tax code, allowing huge firms to grab a credit for up to 35-percent of their losses. The damages and cleanup being paid by BP, says one tax expert, are "just another cost of doing business," so they qualify for all applicable corporate breaks. After all, says another expert, while BP said it would pay the costs of the cleanup, it "never promised that it would not seek any deductions" to recoup those costs from American taxpayers.

Tricky, huh?

BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers

(Sure! White House says all the oil is gone! Why the hell not fire them?!?!?--jef)

***

By Mac McClelland| Fri Aug. 6, 2010 10:18 AM PDT

New BP CEO Bob Dudley wasn't kidding when he announced last week that it was time for the company to scale back oil-spill cleanup operations. In fact, by the time he'd said that, the responder force had been drawn down by about 25 percent.

On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since. Included in this tally are some Coast Guard and National Guard staff, but BP and subcontractors comprise the vast majority. (I've been trying to get the exact breakdown from the Coast Guard for four days, but to no avail, and BP said it didn't have it on hand, though the Coast Guard has told me it just reports BP's numbers.) In Grand Isle, Louisiana, cleanup workers (none of whom can be named; you know this drill by now) say their coworkers were either told to go home for Tropical Storm Bonnie and then never called back or fired in a massive and sudden drug test.

"Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn't get the further notice," one supervisor told me. "Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was 'Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.' This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It's the first time BP tested us."

A BP spokesman told me that all its subcontractors are required to drug test their cleanup employees and allow BP to do random checks itself; it just happened to do one of those checks last week. But the cleanup workers believe the company's motivation was to fire a bunch of people fast. Maybe it's because they're conspiracy theorists. Or maybe it's because the subcontractors had long had openly lax substance-abuse standards. "Most of those people had never been drug tested before," the supervisor told me. "I worked for two different subcontractors that didn't test me." He also pointed out that the local bar's parking lot is nightly full of company cars and drunk guys who drive them; one cleanup worker I met had a picture in his phone of beer cans in the cupholders of cleanup vehicles in broad daylight. "They wanted to get rid of people, and drug testing was a good way to do it. I used to supervise 30 guys; now I've got 10."

The scaleback is set to continue. Supervisors say they're supposed to break down to just a "skeleton crew" by the end of September, so hopefully the media myth that there's no more oil anywhere comes true. "Everything still changes day to day," the supervisor told me. "You don't know when a bunch of oil's gonna pop up."

BP not looking for oil, not cleaning oil, not paying for the lives they've destroyed

(BP isn't cleaning up the oil and they are not paying those whose lives they have ruined, those whose livelihoods they have taken away. Watch this and tell me it doesn't piss you off when it's done.--jef)

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Obama warns of tough economic times after oil spill

So, the economy was recovering until the oil spill? Riiiight.

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Obama warns of tough economic times after oil spill
By North America correspondent Kim Landers

United States president Barack Obama is warning that the economic impact from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will be "substantial".

Mr Obama is trying to reassure Gulf coast residents that they will get through the oil spill crisis, but he warns there are tough times ahead.

"What is clear is that the economic impact of this disaster is going to be substantial and it's going to be ongoing," he said.

The official in charge of the US government's response to the oil spill, Thad Allen, says a cap on the ruptured oil well is collecting 11,000 barrels of oil a day, and that could soon increase to 20,000.

But he says the effects of the spill will be felt for a long time.

"Dealing with the oil spill on the surface ... will [take] years," he said.

The oil slick has now reached the shores of four states.

BP's clean up costs have now topped more than $1.5 billion.

Oil tax increase to help pay for oil spill clean up

Oil tax increase to help pay for oil spill clean up
May 24, 2010
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Responding to the massive BP oil spill, Congress is getting ready to quadruple—to 32 cents a barrel—a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

The tax is levied on oil produced in the U.S. or imported from foreign countries. The revenue goes to a fund managed by the Coast Guard to help pay to clean up spills in waterways, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

The tax increase is part of a larger bill that has grown into a nearly $200 billion grab bag of unfinished business that lawmakers hope to complete before Memorial Day. The key provisions are a one-year extension of about 50 popular tax breaks that expired at the end of last year, and expanded unemployment benefits, including subsidies for health insurance, through the end of the year.

The House could vote on the bill as early as Tuesday. Senate leaders hope to complete work on it before Congress goes on a weeklong break next week.

Lawmakers want to increase the current 8-cent-a-barrel tax on oil to make sure there is enough money available to respond to oil spills. At least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico since a drilling rig exploded April 20 off the Louisiana coast.

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have said they expect BP to foot the bill for the cleanup.

"Taxpayers will not pick up the tab," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday.

BP executives told Congress last week they would pay "all legitimate claims" for damages. But the government needs upfront money to respond to spills, as well as money to pay for cleanups when the responsible party is unable to pay, or is unknown. Money spent from the fund can later be recovered from the company responsible for the spill.

The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund has about $1.5 billion available. Under current law, only $1 billion can be spent from the fund on a single incident. The bill would increase the spending limit to $5 billion.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the tax increase was hastily put together, without adequate study, to help pay for an unrelated bill. The tax increase was unveiled Thursday, without any congressional hearings to study its impact.

Even with the tax increases, the bill is projected to add $134 billion to the federal budget deficit.

"I have seen no analysis on how this would impact energy security, how this would impact domestic production, how this would impact the overall economics in the country," said Christopher Guith, vice president of the chamber's energy institute. "There hasn't been any sort of deliberation on this."

The American Petroleum Institute has not taken a position on the tax increase, though a spokeswoman said Congress should study the ramifications before acting.

"We understand we need to have an insurance policy in order to cover people in the event of a spill," said the spokeswoman, Cathy Landry. "At the same time we need to have a vital oil and gas industry."

The bill does not address a federal law that caps liability at $75 million for economic damages beyond direct cleanup costs. Democratic Senators tried to pass a bill last week that would have increased the cap to $10 billion, but they were blocked by Republicans.

The oil industry says such a high cap would make it difficult, if not impossible, to insure oil rigs.

BP said Monday its costs for responding to the spill had grown to about $760 million.