Published: April 19, 2012

TWO years after a series of gambles and ill-advised decisions on a BP drilling project led to the largest accidental oil spill in United States history and the death of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, no one has been held accountable.

Sure, there have been about $8 billion in payouts and, in early March, the outlines of a civil agreement that will cost BP, the company ultimately responsible, an additional $7.8 billion in restitution to businesses and residents along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true that the company has paid at least $14 billion more in cleanup and other costs since the accident began on April 20, 2010, bringing the expense of this fiasco to about $30 billion for BP. These are huge numbers. But this is a huge and profitable corporation.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP’s contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public’s faith so that it can drill more along the nation’s coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.

BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.

Before the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Tex., exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.

In at least two of those cases, the company had been warned of human and environmental dangers, deliberated the consequences and then ignored them, according to my reporting.
None of the upper-tier executives who managed BP – John Browne and Tony Hayward among them – were malicious. Their decisions, however, were driven by money. Neither their own sympathies nor the stark risks in their operations – corroding pipelines, dysfunctional safety valves, disarmed fire alarms and so on – could compete with the financial necessities of profit making.

Before the accident in Texas City, BP had declined to spend $150,000 to fix a part of the system that allowed gasoline to spew into the air and blow up. Documents show that the company had calculated the cost of a human life to be $10 million. Shortly before that disaster, a senior plant manager warned BP’s London headquarters that the plant was unsafe and a disaster was imminent. A report from early 2005 predicted that BP’s refinery would kill someone “within the next 12 to 18 months” unless the company changed its practices.

Such explicit flirtation with deadly risk was undertaken as part of Mr. Browne’s effort while chief executive to expand BP as quickly as possible. Mr. Browne relentlessly cut costs, including on maintenance and safety. Then he hastily assembled a series of acquisitions and mergers between 1998 and 2001 that added tens of thousands of employees, blurred chains of command and wrought chaos on his operations. His methods – and the demands of Wall Street – became overly dependent on quantitative measures of success at the expense of environmental and human risk.

After each disaster, Mr. Browne pledged to refresh his focus on safety, investment in maintenance and commitment to the environment. His successor, Mr. Hayward, followed suit, saying that BP’s culture had to change. But the Deepwater Horizon tragedy – which bears many of the same traits as the company’s past accidents – shows how difficult it has been for the company’s leaders to shift BP’s corporate values and live up to their promises.

The question becomes, did they try hard enough, and did the mechanisms of oversight, regulation and law enforcement work sufficiently to provide a recidivist organization the deterrent that could guarantee its compliance?

After its previous convictions, BP paid unprecedented fines – more than $70 million – and committed to spending at least $800 million more on maintenance to improve safety. The point was to demonstrate that the cost of doing business wrong far outweighed the cost of doing business right. But without personal accountability, the fines become just another cost of doing business, William Miller, a former investigator for the Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in the Texas City case, told me.

The problem then (and perhaps now) is that it is the slow pileup of factors that causes an industrial disaster. Poor decisions are usually made incrementally by a range of people with differing levels of responsibility, and almost always behind a shield of plausible deniability. It makes it almost impossible to pin one clear-cut bad call on a single manager, which is partly why no BP official has ever been held criminally accountable.
Instead, the corporation is held accountable. It isn’t clear that charging the company repeatedly with misdemeanors and felonies has accomplished anything.

At more than $30 billion and climbing, the amount BP has paid out so far for reparations, lawsuits and cleanup dwarfs the roughly $8 billion that Exxon had to pay after its 1989 spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska. And BP will very likely still pay billions more before this is finished.

And yet it is not enough. Two years after analysts questioned whether the extraordinary cost and loss of confidence might drive BP out of business, it has come roaring back. It collected more than $375 billion in 2011, pocketing $26 billion in profits.

What the gulf spill has taught us is that no matter how bad the disaster (and the environmental impact), the potential consequences have never been large enough to dissuade BP from placing profits ahead of prudence. That might change if a real person was forced to take responsibility – or if the government brought down one of the biggest hammers in its arsenal and banned the company from future federal oil leases and permits altogether. Fines just don’t matter.

Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for Pro Publica, is the author of “Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Two Years After the BP Spill, Gulf Oysters Are Full Of Heavy Metals

-By Alyssa Battistoni
| Fri Apr. 20, 2012 1:40 PM PDT

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, evidence of the spill’s ongoing impacts on Gulf people and ecosystems continues to mount. As if eyeless shrimp, toxic beaches, and dead dolphins weren’t bad enough, a new study suggests that Gulf oysters are also in trouble.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences says that oysters in the Gulf contain higher concentrations of the heavy metals found in crude oil now than they did before the spill. Using a method known-awesomely-as “laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry,” the scientists vaporized oyster shells and superheated them, causing different elements to radiate light at specific, known frequencies so they could be identified. They measured higher concentrations of vanadium, cobalt, and chromium-three heavy metals present in oil-in the oysters sampled after the spill. Even more worrisome, the team found that 89 percent of post-spill specimens displayed the signs of metaplasia, a condition in which tissues are transformed in response to stress. Oysters suffering from the condition often have trouble reproducing, which could have worrisome implications for oyster populations and the species further up the food chain that depend on them.

Scientists don’t yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people. This study is just the start of a broader effort to understand the impacts of heavy metals on Gulf ecosystems: the team is planning to conduct a similar analysis of mussels, and hopes to model the potential impacts of the spill on the Gulf food web. For now, though, the study provides more evidence that the oil spill’s effects are still being felt, and are likely to continue long into the future. The findings are particularly troubling in light of past studies indicating that the combination of heavy metal pollution and warmer temperatures is especially deadly for oysters-a fact that doesn’t bode well in an age of warming seas.

It’s yet another piece of bad news for Louisiana’s oystermen, who are still struggling to recover from the double whammy of Katrina and the BP spill, and faced with consumers afraid to eat the oysters they do manage to harvest. For many, particularly in the African-American, Cajun, and Croatian communities, oyster fishing is a tradition stretching back generations; for them, the long-term effects of the spill threaten to put an end to a way of life with a proud heritage. It’s also bad news for the state’s economy, which reaped around $300 million from oyster sales in good years before the spill. And of course, it’s bad news for lovers of the region’s iconic sandwich, the oyster po’boy.

One bright spot amidst the often-bleak Gulf Coast news comes in the form of the RESTORE Act, which has been slowly winding its way through Congress over the past year. If enacted, it would deliver much-needed funds-80 percent of BP’s Clean Water Act fines-to coastal communities and coastal restoration projects; fingers crossed that the bad news about ongoing ecosystem and social impacts will have a silver lining in the form of greater impetus for the act’s passage.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/19/deepwater-horizon-aftermath-dolphin-worth?intcmp=122

Two years after the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, BP and US authorities wrangle over how much should be paid in damages

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
Follow @suzyji
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 09.59 EDT

A dead dolphin marked with spray paint on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay in 2010. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

The dolphins are preserved in giant freezers in marine labs across America. Tagged, catalogued, carefully guarded – and suspended in liquid nitrogen for the moment when they will determine BP’s final bill for the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, which started two years ago this Friday.

The dolphins, among more than 700 that have washed up on Gulf shores since the last two years, are a crucial component of the investigation now underway to decide the cost to BP of restoring the wildlife and environment damaged by the biggest offshore spill in US history.

The carcasses were collected – on at least one occasion by armed federal officials, and generally with witnesses from BP – from marine science facilities on the Gulf coast and transported to labs across the country. Scientists are evaluating their tissue for evidence of exposure to hydrocarbons from the runaway well, as part of the lengthy process of accounting for environmental damage to the Gulf.

At its most basic, the process now consuming teams of BP and government scientists and lawyers revolves around this: How much is a dolphin worth, and how exactly did it die?
How much lasting harm was done by the oil that still occasionally washes up on beaches, or remains as splotches on the ocean floor near the site of BP’s broken well? What can be done to turn the clock back, and restore the wildlife and environment to levels that would have existed if there had not been a spill?

Wednesday’s proposed $7.8bn settlement between BP and more than 100,000 people suing for economic damages due takes the oil company a step closer to consigning the spill to the past. BP is moving towards a settlement with the federal government and the governments of Louisiana and Mississippi. It could also face criminal charges.

But arguably the most difficult negotiation still lies ahead as BP and the federal government try to establish how much damage was done to the environment as a direct result of the oil spill, and how much the company will have to pay to set things right.
“It is extraordinarily difficult to monetise environmental harm. What dollar value do we place on a destroyed marsh or the loss of a spawning ground? What is the price associated with killing birds and marine mammals? Even if we were capable of meaningfully establishing a price for ecological harm, there is so much that we do not know about the harm to the Gulf of Mexico – and will not know for years – that it may never be possible to come up with an accurate natural resource damage assessment,” said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former head of the justice department’s environmental crimes section.

“The best the government can do is negotiate for a sum that is large enough – in the billions of dollars – to cover all possible restoration costs.”

Those familiar with the process say compiling the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, setting the price tag and strategy for restoring the Gulf environment, will continue at least throughout 2013.

“Everything about this case is more challenging due to the scale and due to the uncertainty about the long-term effects,” said Tom Brosnan of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, which is leading the federal government’s damage assessment effort.

So far there are more than 100 NRDA investigations, or work plans, trying to assess the ecological damage done when more than 4 million barrels of oil entered the Gulf of Mexico.

The first step is to establish cause, Brosnan said. “The onus is on us to prove that if an animal is sick or dies that the oil actually caused it.”. Then BP and the government must agree on the value of what was lost – an exercise that is routinely conducted with sea birds killed by oil spills but never before for dolphins.

“That’s one of the most vexing aspects,” said a lawyer familiar with the process, calculating the value of a creature beyond its direct role in the human economy. He acknowledged a charismatic mega fauna, like the dolphin, is probably worth more than a humbler animal, but he declined to offer a dollar figure.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that BP pay a dollar amount for each dolphin lost, Brosnan said. But the numbers are important in determining how to restore dolphin populations to levels they would have reached had there never been a spill in the first place. “You need to analyse what you have to do to get the dolphins back,” said Brosnan.

The immediate task, however, is establishing what was lost. “You start to put together a story, that given these factors what do we think the adverse impacts on dolphins could be. Is it inhalation of the oil fumes? Is it eating contaminated goop? Is it skin exposure? Is it that their prey gets taken out?”

Aside from the dolphins, government scientists, closely shadowed by experts working for BP, are studying the effects on creatures as tiny as zooplankton and as massive as manatees. They also hope to draw on the findings of more than 150 other studies into the effects of the spill.

The scientists are starting at a tremendous disadvantage, however. Conservationists worry that a dearth of data about the Gulf before the spill will work in BP’s favour when it comes time to figuring out the bill.

Arriving at a mutually agreed figure for damages may come down to the dolphins. “They do make a sentinel species,” said George Crozier, recently retired as the director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. “They are not only at the top of the food chain, but they eat all of the fish that they eat. That means they have greater potential to be exposed.”

As large marine mammals, they also broke through the surface of water coated with a thick scum of oil and they inhaled the fumes from the giant fires used to burn off the oil.
But figuring out how many dolphins died or how they did so is bound to be a subject of contention between BP and the federal government. It’s hard to even agree on a number.

Scientists do not know how many distinct dolphin populations there were in the Gulf before the spill. They generally agree that the 700 dolphins that have stranded in the last two years represent only a fraction of the animals that have died in the same period of time. But what fraction? Wildlife biologists often work on the premise that for every carcass that washes ashore, there are more than 10 dolphins whose bodies are never recovered.
However, a study published last month of earlier dolphin strandings in the Gulf of Mexico said the true figure for dolphin deaths due to the oil spill could be 50 or even 250 times higher. So 700 dolphin carcasses, now stored at freezers awaiting analysis, could represent a true death toll of up to 175,000 of the animals.

Then there is the matter of conclusively linking the deaths to BP oil. The current dolphin die-off – the longest yet – began a few months before the oil spill, and scientists have speculated that some deaths may have been caused by a dolphin version of measles, or by a one-time flush of cold water down the Mississippi after a freak snowstorm.

Noaa released preliminary findings last month that appeared to strengthen evidence of a link between dolphin deaths and BP oil in an area off coastal Louisiana.

They drew urine and blood samples and conducted ultrasounds on 32 live dolphins from Barataria Bay, an area that was heavily oiled in the spill, and concluded the animals were underweight, anaemic and had low blood sugar.

Campaigners say the findings plus two other studies underway of coastal dolphin populations are critical to establishing the long-term effects of the oil spill.

“It’s circumstantial but it’s as circumstantial as finding a room full of dead people and a guy holding a canon,” said Michael Jasny, who works in the marine mammal programme of the Natural Resources Defence Council. “The circumstantial evidence is very, very strong.”

However, the preliminary studies failed to convince BP – especially when there are billions involved. A BP official said there were “multiple potential causes” for the dolphin deaths.
“Recent reports about the health of dolphins in Barataria Bay appear to be based on NRDA data that has not been fully analysed and is still undergoing important quality assurance and validation procedures,” the official said.

For the moment, however, the company and the federal government are working co-operatively on the damage assessment. BP paid $14bn to clean up oiled marshes and beaches. It pledged $1bn for immediate use on restoration projections, and $500m for environmental research.

The co-operation makes it likely BP and the federal government can avoid a law suit. It could also help unlock money for full-scale restoration projects sooner. Officials on both sides were hopeful the damage assessment could be complete some time in 2013.

The joint effort is troubling for some campaigners, who fear that BP and the federal government are working to wrap things up before the full impact of the spill is truly understood. “So much of what is going on is really black box. It’s just negotiations between scientists and lawyers,” said Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

For Immediate Release: Friday, April 20, 2012
Contact: Clean Ocean Action, 732-872-0111

Public Hearing set for Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 1pm at Atlantic City Convention Center

Sandy Hook, NJ – On Friday, April 27th, in Atlantic City, the United States Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM), is holding the last in a series of East Coast hearings on their recent proposal to blast airgun arrays from Florida to the Delaware Bay searching for offshore oil to drill. The hearing will be held at 1pm in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center.

These “seismic surveys” involve towing airgun arrays behind survey ships, regularly and repeatedly blasting sound waves through the ocean and deep into the ocean floor to pinpoint locations of sub-seabed oil and gas deposits. While the industry term “airgun” suggests an innocuous impact, these surveys generate intense marine noise pollution that propagates over vast areas of the ocean potentially causing significant damage to marine life and marine ecosystems. In addition to the exploratory tactic’s danger to marine life, it is the first step toward oil drilling in the Atlantic Ocean – which threatens our clean ocean economy and community.

Sandy Hook-based ocean advocacy organization Clean Ocean Action (COA) is calling on New Jersey’s citizens to attend the public hearing (which is the only one scheduled for New Jersey), on April 27th at 1pm, in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center to voice their opposition to these proposed seismic surveys. COA is a coalition of environmental, fishing, civic, and community based organizations that come together to combat ocean pollution and ocean industrialization. The groups have been working with a national coalition to keep the Atlantic Ocean oil-drilling-free.

“For the first time in over 25 years, the Atlantic Ocean is under the gun,” said Cindy Zipf, Clean Ocean Action’s Executive Director. “We must not sacrifice the region’s vibrant, clean ocean economy as the mainstay of the Atlantic seaboard-it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The Administration is searching for oil in all the wrong places under the pretense of reducing gasoline prices”

Federal studies show if oil was found, it would take decades for oil production to come online, and even then would reduce gas prices by only $0.03 per gallon. However, there is no requirement that oil and gas found in the U.S. must stay here, and could be exported overseas.

“Noise pollution caused by exploration and development would negatively impact fisheries and marine life,” said Sean Dixon, Clean Ocean Action’s Coastal Policy Attorney. “The BP Oil Disaster shows how devastating blow-outs and spills can be to tourism and fishing industries.”

“The sonic airgun testing for oil and gas reserves is a proven destroyer of marine life, causing serious ecosystem problems to all marine life within hundreds of miles of the testing. Marine mammals are especially prone to damage due to their sensitive sonar and face serious permanent harm and outright death from this testing. The endangered right whale’s migratory route runs the whole of the US east coast causing outright fishing bans at times and vessel speed restrictions, yet BOEM wants to blow out their eardrums. Nothing good can come from this testing or the oil and gas drilling that will surely follow,” added Jim Lovgren of Fishermen’s Dock Co-op in Point Pleasant. Fishing catch rates in some cases have been shown to decrease by 40-80% over thousands of square kilometers around a single airgun array.

“The draft Environment Impact Analyses fails to address a number of biological concerns affecting marine fishes as well as potential conflicts with scheduled sportfishing tournaments involving hundreds of recreational vessels,” stated Bruce Freeman, marine fisheries biologist. “In addition, potential conflicts with divers and associated safety concerns have not been recognized.”

“I am totally against offshore seismic exploration because of the dangers it poses sea creatures. The blasts will disorient fish, and have been linked to marine mammal strandings,” said Jeff Hoffberger, from the Surfrider Foundation, and a certified volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine. Proposed seismic surveys could interfere with the endangered and vulnerable North Atlantic Right Whale’s migration route through the Mid-Atlantic and calving off the Southeast coast.

Clean Ocean Action is urging people to attend and sign up and testify on April 27th at 1pm, in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center.

To request to speak at the public hearing, you can email Mr. Gary Goeke, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, at GGEIS@boem.gov or call at (504) 736-3233. For more information or to plan on attending, call 732-872-0111 or visit www.cleanoceanaction.org.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.miamiherald.com/oilspill/

INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS
* Gulf coast habitats
* Methods to contain leaks
* How slick might spread
* Oil political money
* Understanding effects

Experts: Another BP-style Gulf blowout all too possible
Much more needs to be done to lower the risks of another offshore oil disaster like the BP blowout two years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, the presidential commission that investigated the disaster reported Tuesday in its first progress update. – 5:10 AM ET

Senate approves plan to send BP fines to Gulf restoration
The Senate approved a highway bill Wednesday that includes a long-sought provision for the Gulf Coast: A guarantee that 80 percent of the fines collected from the April 2010 BP oil spill – an amount that could reach $20 billion – would be distributed for coastal restoration to the five states along the Gulf of Mexico: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama.

Restore Act measure to boost BP cleanup could receive vote today
The House is expected to vote later today on an amendment pushed by Gulf State lawmakers to dedicate 80 percent of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to a trust fund for coastal restoration of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

Restore Act measure to boost BP cleanup passes House
The House approved an amendment Thursday pushed by Gulf State lawmakers to dedicate 80 percent of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to a trust fund for coastal restoration of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

Cuba shows U.S. its response plans in case of oil spill
As Cuba prepares to embark on a new round of exploratory offshore drilling, U.S. officials are slightly more enlightened about the island nation’s plans in the event of a catastrophic oil spill on the scale of last year’s Deepwater Horizon explosion.
NOAA: BP oil spill may have contributed high mortality rate of dolphins
NOAA officials called a national media briefing Thursday and said that the BP oil spill could have played a role in the high number of dolphin deaths in the northern Gulf since 2010.

Oil spill fund chief says he welcomes oversight
The administrator of a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill said he welcomes an independent audit of how much money has been paid out and what calculations were made to arrive at those payouts.
Following complaints from Gulf, Congress seeks audit of BP oil spill fund
Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida, unhappy with the handling of the $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate victims of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, won Senate approval Friday for an independent audit of the organization.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/oilspill/#storylink=cpy

Special thanks to Richard Charter