http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html
May 30, 2010
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES
This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.
HOUSTON — The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.
“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.”
Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak — severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser — could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.
“This is obviously a difficult situation,” Ms. Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “but it’s important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.” “We have been directing BP to take important steps,” including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.
The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled. But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that the administration must move in quickly with “decisive force and demonstrate that it’s doing everything that it can do.”
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on “Meet the Press,” again criticized the administration’s efforts, saying: “We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency.”
The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.
BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days. “According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday. Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.
But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, appearing on “This Week,” also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided “an end point” in August. The failure of the most recent effort — known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it — has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.
“We honestly do not know,” Mr. Dudley said on “Meet the Press.” “We’ve always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil.” “The one thing about this method that we’re about to go into — it will and should measure the majority of the flow,” he said.
Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was “issued without an actual flow measurement.” If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.
After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.
In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.
The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.
Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned, and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.
BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.
Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP’s next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent. “Then it just makes the situation worse for longer,” he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, John M. Broder from Washington and Jackie Calmes from Chicago.
Protesters demonstrated in Jackson Square in New Orleans on Sunday against BP and the handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and cleanup.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html
May 30, 2010
Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency
By JOHN M. BRODER and MICHAEL LUO
WASHINGTON — As President Obama and his top aides were convening a series of meetings that led to the announcement in March of a major expansion of offshore oil drilling, the troubled history of the agency that regulates such drilling operations was well known.
Mr. Obama, shortly after taking office, had assigned Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to clean up the agency, the Minerals Management Service. The office’s history of corruption and coziness with the industry it was supposed to regulate had been the subject of years of scathing reports by government auditors, lurid headlines and a score of Congressional hearings.
But the promised reforms of the agency were slow to arrive, and the subject of the minerals service never came up at the meetings leading to the new drilling policy, according to a senior administration official involved in the discussions. “I don’t recall a conversation on how the offshore drilling and M.M.S. issues overlapped,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations involving the president.
Defending the new policy on April 2, less than three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama emphasized the safety record of offshore operations.
“It turns out, by the way,” he said, “that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Minerals Management Service has come under intense scrutiny, and Mr. Salazar moved this month to essentially disband the agency, splitting it into three parts.
On Thursday, he asked for the resignation of the head of the service, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, and named an interim successor on Friday.
But the question remains why Mr. Obama — and members of Congress charged with oversight of the agency — did not come to grips with its obvious problems before the accident occurred.
The answer may have as much to do with the workings of business as usual in Washington and the long-entrenched influence of the oil industry in Washington politics as it does with anything more sinister.
Political expediency may have played a role. In pushing offshore drilling, Mr. Obama was hoping to placate the oil industry and its supporters in Congress, who were demanding increased access to the outer continental shelf in exchange for their possible support for broader climate change and energy legislation that Mr. Obama wants.
That focus apparently eclipsed any concerns about the minerals agency, especially since at the time no oil rig had exploded and sent hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf.
The breadth of the expansion stunned oil industry representatives, who were expecting a much more restrictive policy accompanied by tough new safety and environmental rules. They were prepared to attack the new policy; instead, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main lobby, praised it.
“We saw the president’s announcement as a positive development,” said Jack Gerard, president of the institute, “a recognition that oil and natural gas play a critical role in our energy future.” But there had been warnings for years from government auditors about the Minerals Management Service, including revelations just before Mr. Obama took office that agency personnel had accepted gifts, drugs and sexual favors from oil company representatives.
Shortly after he was appointed in 2009, Mr. Salazar visited the agency’s Denver office and declared at a news conference that he was the “new sheriff in town” who would bring significant changes. He issued new ethics guidelines and eliminated a controversial royalty program. But it is now clear that he did little else, focusing his energies elsewhere, for example on offshore wind projects.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he should have paid more attention to the problems at the service and moved more quickly to correct them. At M.M.S., Ken Salazar was in the process of making these reforms,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “But the point that I’m making is that, obviously, they weren’t happening fast enough.”
For lawmakers on the Congressional committees that oversee the agency, there was also little to gain politically in taking it on. Many of those committee members come from states where the energy industry is important. And members also draw an outsize share of oil industry contributions.
Members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, for instance, have taken in an average of about $52,000 from individuals and groups associated with the oil and gas industry this election cycle, compared with $24,000 for others in the Senate, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, an ardent foe of offshore drilling who in 2008 introduced unsuccessful legislation to impose new ethics and disclosure guidelines on employees of the minerals service, said that the industry played a powerful role in shaping the agenda on energy legislation, and that overhauling the minerals service obviously was not on that agenda. “They’ve got every interest in the world to have a cozy relationship with the regulators,” he said of the oil companies. Still, Mr. Nelson added, the failure of his bill was more a function of poor timing. He proposed it toward the end of the legislative session, and in the rush to complete other business after the presidential election, it had no chance. And, he said, the fact a Democratic administration was coming in reassured him that changes were coming.
The unusual structure of the agency has also helped thwart efforts to overhaul it, despite its problems. Established in 1982 by Interior Secretary James G. Watt, it was created by secretarial order, not legislation, a set-up that some lawmakers said made Congress pay less attention to it.
And because it is financed by the $13 billion a year it collects in oil royalties, it largely escapes the kind of scrutiny that other regulatory bodies get in the appropriations process.
Serious concerns about the agency were raised as early as 2006, when Representative Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, led the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a series of hearings on problems in deepwater oil leases during the Clinton administration that freed companies from paying billions of dollars in royalties.
Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, testified at those hearings about a culture of “managerial irresponsibility and a lack of accountability” at the agency.
But Mr. Issa recalled in an interview last week that he had trouble getting his fellow committee members, both Democrats and Republicans, to attend the hearings, because the agency operated in relative obscurity and its problems were not of intense interest on Capitol Hill.
“It was kind of lonely,” he said. Two years later, the department’s inspector general released new reports of misconduct, this time accompanied by more attention from the news media and outrage in Congress. Both the House and Senate held hearings. Several lawmakers, including Mr. Issa, Mr. Nelson and Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, introduced bills to fix the minerals service.
But none of the measures went anywhere. Mr. Rahall drew parallels with the regulation of the coal mining industry, where changes often occur only after tragic accidents. “It’s unfortunate that it takes such before we enact safety legislation,” he said.
Griff Palmer contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31cleanup.html
May 30, 2010
Cleanup Draws Critics Over Speed and Care
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
PORT FOURCHON, La. — By dawn, the beach here looks like the staging area for a B-movie invasion. As semi rigs unload equipment and dozens of all-terrain vehicles buzz up and down the sand, young men in blinding white protective suits listlessly shovel globs of rust-colored oil in the heat.
Operations here are just the forward tip of a growing army of cleanup workers, already thousands strong, that is advancing along hundreds of miles of Louisiana shoreline to combat the oily sludge that began washing up heavily here about two weeks ago.
Yet the cleanup effort is drawing some criticism as it unfolds on the beaches, in the bayous and in the marshes.
Environmentalists accuse workers of running roughshod over wildlife and delicate grasses. Conversely, state and local officials are worried that the crews are not doing enough, fast enough. And most agree that the effort has been wildly uneven.
Here in Port Fourchon, vehicles have not only flattened sand dunes, one of the few lines of defense against erosion by the gulf waves, but have also plowed through nesting sites of the least tern.
“There is a lot of collateral damage out there,” said C. Cathy Norman, who manages the nine-mile beachfront here and 35,000 acres of marshland behind it for a local trust. At other points along the Louisiana coast, some officials complained that the companies hired by BP, which bears heavy responsibility for the cleanup, were not adequately supervising their workers.
On the western end of Grand Isle, where crews filled thousands of bags with oily debris before President Obama’s visit on Friday, local residents cited a dead dolphin that had been buried rather than removed and about a dozen large redfish, dead and still covered with oil, that had been thrown into the grasslands. All dead wildlife are supposed to be bagged and counted. But local officials said incidents like the tossed redfish are perhaps unavoidable in such a large undertaking done mostly by a newly hired and quickly trained labor force.
Cleanup workers on the beach the day the president arrived declined requests for interviews, saying they had been instructed not to speak to reporters. “I need this job,” explained one man who asked not to be named. Some local officials complained about delays in the crews’ arrival. In Plaquemines Parish, home to the Mississippi River Delta, the companies hired by BP to clean up the marshes have been slow to respond, sometimes waiting a week to 10 days after oil has been spotted in the marshes to attack the problem, officials there said.
And where they have acted, the workers have at times trampled on flora and fauna as they deployed large absorbent pads to sop up the oil, the parish president, Billy Nungesser, said in an interview. “I classify it as a sloppy cleanup,” he said. Some other parish leaders echoed his criticisms. In Terrebonne Parish, oil has fouled the delicate marshes on Timbalier Bay, Lake Felicity and Lake Barre, which are important spawning grounds for brown shrimp.
“Not only was the response not adequate, but the cleanup wasn’t adequate,” the parish president, Michel Claudet, said. “The oil goes into the marsh, and they would send 15 guys in who would trample on the marsh to get it out.” But Mr. Claudet said contractors working for BP stepped up the number of cleanup crews working in his region late last week, recruiting unemployed people in Houma and New Orleans for $12 an hour. The response time is improving, he said.
He also welcomed the assignment of a Coast Guard officer to each parish last week to be a go-between with BP, saying it had helped improve coordination. BP and the Coast Guard say that their biggest challenge is explaining to eager and desperate residents why some oil is being left instead of being mopped up.
“We are walking a real fine line between getting the oil removed and irreversibly harming the environment,” said Rear Adm. James Watson, a deputy federal on-scene commander.
The National Audubon Society, which owns beachfront property west of Port Fourchon, recently posted signs warning contractors not to act without its approval, said Paul Kemp, a vice president of the group. “We hope that will forestall the zealous cleanup folks from working without supervision.” Dr. Kemp said he hoped the size and inaccessibility of many of the marshes would protect them. “The only saving grace is that they can’t get to most of the beaches,” he said of the workers. But that is changing swiftly, too. On Saturday, in response to criticisms from eager parishes, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, announced that they hoped to move 2,200 workers into the more inaccessible areas of the marsh using tent camp bases and floating hotels.
“It’s scary,” said Angelina Freeman, a coastal scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who has been making boat inspections off the marsh area off Pass a Loutre. “You are seeing lots of wildlife disturbance.” Some environmentalists assert that BP’s contractors seem more worried about giving the appearance of cleaning up than about cataloging the damage and taking care not to disturb the ecosystem more than necessary.
“The larger reason for these efforts seems to be to make it seem that they are doing everything they can,” said Joseph Smyth, a spokesman for Greenpeace, “when, tragically, there isn’t much that can be done to clean up a spill of this size and nature.” The avoidable damage is what bothers Ms. Norman, the beachfront manager. She has brought in her brother, Don Norman, a wildlife toxicologist, to evaluate the harm that the oil and the cleanup are doing to birds here.
He said he had seen the all-terrain vehicles that roam up and down the beach spin through nesting colonies and had even witnessed the occupants honking at baby Wilson’s plovers for fun. “Nesting season will be over soon,” he said, sighing. “And that is a good thing.”
Chris Bickford for The New York Times
C. Cathy Norman, who manages the beach at Port Fourchon, La., for a local trust, and Don Norman, a wildlife toxicologist.
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/science/earth/31hurricane.html
Hurricane Season Raises New Fears By KENNETH CHANG
As oil continues to gush from a broken well into the Gulf of Mexico, officials and scientists are worrying that the environmental disaster could be compounded later this year by a natural one.
The hurricane season starts Tuesday and runs through November, and forecasters expect one of the most turbulent seasons ever. If a hurricane rolled over the spill, the winds and storm surges could disperse the oil over a wider area and push it far inland, damaging the fragile marshlands.
“It would very definitely turn an environmental disaster into an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Brian D. McNoldy, a tropical storms researcher at Colorado State University. Specific predictions are impossible to make because the effects would depend on the path, strength and speed of a hurricane, as well as the size and location of the oil spill when the storm arrived. Because of the counterclockwise rotation of hurricane winds, a storm passing to the west of the slick would tend to push the oil to the coast, while a storm passing to the east would drive the oil away from land.
The winds churn water down only a few hundred feet, so a hurricane would probably not have a major effect on the large plumes of oil believed to be accumulating deep underwater.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting 14 to 23 named storms this season, of which 8 to 14 will turn into hurricanes and 3 to 7 of those will grow into major hurricanes with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour.
Last month, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State issued similar predictions: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes.
The Colorado State team, Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, said there was a 43 percent chance that at least one hurricane would make landfall in Louisiana this year, based on the higher number of storms and the historical pattern of hurricane paths. (The atmospheric administration does not predict where the hurricanes will head.)
A hopeful speculation is that the oil might not be all bad news and that it might sap the storm’s energy. In 1966, a husband-and-wife team of federal hurricane researchers, Joanne and Robert H. Simpson, speculated that spraying an insoluble liquid like oil onto the ocean might even be a way to combat hurricanes by cutting off the evaporation that feeds energy into the storm. But in a fact sheet issued last week, the atmospheric administration noted that hurricanes span 200 to 300 miles wide, much larger than the current size of the spill, and doubted that the oil could have much effect on the strength or path of a storm.
Hurricane winds would also minimize the evaporation effect.
A few years ago, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a laboratory experiment to look at the flow of heat from water to air under different conditions, they, almost as a lark, followed up on the Simpsons’ suggestion. They applied fatty alcohols onto the water, and at very low wind speeds the alcohols did suppress evaporation.
“But when the winds get up to gale force or so, the surface gets torn apart,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at M.I.T. “We just didn’t see any effect at high wind speeds.” Conversely, other effects could intensify a storm, Dr. Emanuel said. By reducing evaporation, the oil could be heating the gulf waters, similar to a person wearing a rubber suit on a hot day.
Warmer water could then mean more energy to power a stronger hurricane, Dr. Emanuel said. But he said it was unclear what was actually happening, because the oil sheen fools satellite measurements of water temperature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon1.html
May 30, 2010
Questions About the Gulf
BP’s latest failure to plug the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is one more crushing disappointment to Louisiana’s beleaguered people, one more strike against the company and one more signal to President Obama to redouble efforts to contain and clean the spill.
BP now pins its hopes — and those of the country — on yet another containment strategy, its fifth since the April 20 explosion. It does so amid mounting public anger and a report in The Times on Sunday that the company may have violated its own safety standards by ignoring warnings about design flaws in the well. These disclosures add to the growing list of questions that must be addressed by the special commission President Obama has appointed to examine the root causes of the spill and recommend ways to prevent future catastrophes.
Here are others:
WHAT HAPPENED, AND WHY Five weeks after the blowout, there is no clear picture of the fatal sequence of events. Gas somehow escaped up the well, then exploded, collapsing the rig. The blowout preventer — a giant set of valves on the ocean floor — failed to work, and oil began spurting into the gulf at a rate recently estimated at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. The total spill now exceeds the estimated 250,000 barrels that leaked from the stricken tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989. The public needs to get an honest accounting of the spill’s size, and BP’s word is not enough since it has to pay for the cleanup.
A joint Interior Department-Coast Guard investigative committee in Louisiana, and numerous Congressional panels, have been seeking clarity. Their search has not been helped by industry grandstanding and finger-pointing, with BP blaming the rig operator, Transocean, for the faulty blowout preventer.
It is also unclear which company was calling the shots on the rig, and there have been ominous suggestions that BP short-circuited standard drilling procedures to cut costs.
THE RESPONSE The questions about whether BP and the government responded quickly enough, and with the right weapons, could fill a book — and probably will. Both parties seem to have underestimated the size of the spill, and neither had a coherent underwater response plan in place. Though the oil industry had experienced blowouts at shallower depths, BP’s disjointed response suggested it had given little thought to the possibility of a blowout at 5,000 feet.
Partly as a result of laws passed after the Exxon Valdez, industry and the Coast Guard were better prepared to deal with the oil when it hit the surface. But the techniques — the controlled burns, the skimmers, the booms, the dispersants — were little more sophisticated than they were in 1989. Why no progress? And why was there only one dispersant available (and a toxic one at that) made by one company, Nalco?
REGULATORY FAILURE Much has been said — including by President Obama — about the incestuous relationship between the oil industry and its chief regulator, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which routinely ignored basic environmental laws and its own rules to fast track drilling permits.
But while these were terrible failures, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s promise to reform the agency is overdue, it is hard to believe that other agencies in Washington, and even the Congressional oversight committees, were not also culpable.
NEW WEAPONS One outside-the-box question that looms large is whether the federal government should now develop its own capacity to deal with a huge blowout. As things stand now, industry has all the equipment and experience. In an interim report to the president on Thursday, Mr. Salazar suggested the creation of a kind of parallel technological universe in which government would have the robots, the coffer dams and the other tools necessary to help control a big blowout.
That could be expensive, but Mr. Obama indicated on Friday that he had been thinking along the same lines. As well he should be. The images from the last month — Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away — has been deeply disheartening.
Special thanks to Richard Charter and Vivian Newman