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It’s now been over three weeks since BP’s oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. These have been hectic weeks for all concerned, no doubt, but the paucity of information available to the public is, at best, discouraging.

How much oil is flowing / has flowed into the Gulf of Mexico? 

The figure we keep hearing is 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons per day. After 23 days, that adds up to 4,830,000 gallons. A week into the spill, there was speculation that the rate of flow might actually be 25,000 barrels (or 1,050,000 gallons) per day. If that’s true, then 24,150,000 gallons of oil are now in the gulf, a spill more than twice as large as the Exxon Valdez. Recent news reports stress that no one knows how much oil is flowing, but everyone seems to accept the 5,000 barrels per day figure. We know from past experience that oil companies tend to minimize the amount of oil spilled and, unlike a tanker spill, there is no finite amount of oil that can be spilled in the worst case scenario.

Why are we just now seeing images of the leak?

Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been working at the site of the spill since the first days after the rig sank. They transmit photos and video to their operators at the surface. Of course, the ROV operators have their hands full, but surely these images must have been passed along to the Coast Guard and other federal agencies that are – we’re told – in charge at the scene. Surely we understand why BP might be slow to release these images, but one would hope the federal government would have more respect for the public’s right to know what’s happening in a publicly owned resource.

Why is the federal government continuing to exempt offshore oil rigs from environmental standards?

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Thanks to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), we learned late last week that the Minerals Management Service has granted categorical exclusions to 27 offshore rigs since the Deepwater Horizon exploded. “Categorical exclusions” mean that the projects do not have to pass the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Categorical exclusions were built into the law for projects that clearly have limited environmental impact, like hiking trails, not oil rigs capable of wiping out entire ecosystems.

And by the way, what would have happened had CBD not blown the whistle?

Speaking of other rigs, what’s up with the other 3,000-plus rigs in the Gulf?

At Wednesday’s hearing in the House Energy Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) revealed the “fail-safe” blowout preventer had: 1) a dead battery in its control pod; 2) a leak in its hydraulic line; 3) a “useless” test version of a key component; and 4) a cutting shear that wasn’t strong enough. We have no reason to think other oil companies are more devoted to environmental protection than BP, so why should we not expect this to happen again and again and again? How do we know it won’t? Why should we think the federal government is providing adequate oversight?

Why did BP not have emergency plans ready in advance?

BP has already tried – and failed – to put a containment dome on the biggest leak. We all sat around for days while BP fabricated the dome on shore. If such domes – ineffective as it proved to be – are the best response for such leaks, why are they not pre-made and standing by on every rig? Now we sit and wait as BP fabricates a “top hat” plug. (Memo to BP: why don’t you start work on Plans D and E now instead of waiting for your latest contraption to fail?) Perhaps Plan D is the famous “junk shot,” in which BP will attempt to inject shredded tires, golf balls and knotted rope into the well. That’s 21st century technology? The best you can do? Golf balls and shredded tires? This is why we cannot afford to drill in the ocean. This is why we especially cannot allow incompetents to drill in the ocean.

What’s going on with the environment?

We’ve seen press releases from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about taking samples in the gulf, but we haven’t seen what the results are. True, science does not move at the pace of the 24-hour news cycle, but NOAA should have something to tell us. What concentrations of oil are they finding at various depths? How far from the wellhead are they finding oil? (It would help establish an estimate of how much oil has leaked so far.)

What about the EPA? The oil spilled is light crude, which contains low-molecular weight volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In acute exposure, VOCs lead to headaches, nausea, vomiting and upper respiratory inflammation. Like the NOAA, the EPA is testing for VOCs, but where are the results? After 9-11, EPA infamously told people the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. It wasn’t. Now they’re not telling us anything. I suppose it’s an improvement, but not much.

When will gulf residents begin to see restitution?

This spill happened at the worst time of year. Everything that swims, flies or crawls in the Gulf of Mexico is laying eggs and raising their young right now, if they can. Many of the commercial and sport fishing seasons were about to kick into high gear when the fishing grounds were closed. People are out money right now. They need help paying their May bills. And don’t tell me fishermen can get work from BP towing booms back and forth across the gulf. That’s like being invited to attend the funeral of your livelihood, your father’s livelihood and what you had hoped would have been your children’s livelihood.

In the Exxon Valdez spill, Exxon kept the damages case tied up in court for 20 years (and got the verdict reduced to ten cents on the dollar). Twenty percent of the Valdez plaintiffs died before they received compensation. Will BP’s executives be as heartless as ExxonMobil’s? Will the Department of Justice stand by and watch as gross injustice is done? Does the federal government respond to citizens or corporations that make campaign contributions?

Why is the Department of Justice not investigating all the legally specious forms BP and Transocean are pressuring people to sign?

The media has reported that Transocean, which owns the now-sunken Deepwater Horizon, tried to force the survivors to sign waivers promising not to sue Transocean for damages before they were allowed to leave the hotel they were brought to after their rescue. Alabama Attorney General Troy King had to step in and stop BP from distributing waivers to Alabama coastal residents, in which they would promise not to sue BP for damages in return for a small sum of cash. BP tried to get fishermen to sign gag orders, preventing them from speaking to the media, if they wanted work helping with the cleanup. I’m told most of these documents won’t stand up in court, but its not just about court, it’s the intimidation factor of predatory corporate attorneys going after victims in their hour of maximum anxiety.

Congress needs to hear loud and clear from all of us: No more drilling. Clean energy now! Why on earth would we ever consider letting Big Oil endanger more of our coastal communities and ecosystems?

Now that BP’s jury-rigged contraption to contain its massive Gulf of Mexico oil spew has failed, the company's only resort is to continue pumping massive amounts of dispersant into the water near the wellhead, in an attempt to — what exactly?

The dispersant goes by the trade name "Corexit." It's supposed to be a pun on the words "corrects it." Marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick Steiner says “Corexit” is called “Hidez-It” by insiders because its purpose is not to correct but deceive.

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Oil is toxic to marine life. Dispersant is toxic to marine life. Together, their toxicity exceeds the sum of their parts. The people running the spill response for BP are geologists, but what needs protection in the gulf is not geology, it’s biology.

One active ingredient in Corexit is 2-butoxyethanol, which in laboratory tests has been shown to reduce fertility, increase embryo deaths and increase birth defects in animals. Animals are the primary marine inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another ingredient is propylene glycol, which you may know as anti-freeze or airplane de-icer. It has high biological oxygen demand, or BOD. This means that as it degrades in the water, it removes oxygen via biological processes. The more propylene glycol in the water, the less oxygen for plankton and fish.

In all, Corexit acts like a surfactant, the same thing that’s in your dish or laundry soap. The oil is more attracted to the surfactant than to the water it’s floating in. The oil forms globules and sinks to the bottom. This is a boon for BP, because it creates less of a photogenic oil slick on the surface of the gulf to be filmed by television news crews.

As we’ve seen in Prince William Sound in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez spill, oil that sinks to the bottom tends to be re-suspended in the water column by storms and with the frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll see BP’s oil belched back up — with damage to the environment — for generations to come.

Why would anyone in their right mind pour chemicals that poison and suffocate fish into an oil spill that already threatens their lives? I think BP executives — in their long and sorry string of explosions, spills and mishaps — have demonstrated clearly that they are not in their right minds.

I’ll hazard a guess, though. The fewer dispersants you use, the more dead, oily birds and turtles you’ll have washing up on shore. The more dispersants you use, the more dead fish you’ll have — some of which will wash up on shore, many of which will sink to the bottom of the gulf and never be seen again. I imagine the PR department at BP prefers dead fish to dead birds and turtles.

If, when the lawsuits come, the plaintiff attorneys show up in court with plastic bags full of dead, oily sea birds, the jury is likely to award a bigger verdict than if the plaintiffs show up with plastic bags full of dead fish. Fish just aren’t as cute as birds. So I imagine the legal department at BP also prefers dead fish to dead birds.

Of course, what do shore birds eat? Fish and shrimp and other marine life. And if you kill a good portion of the marine life, it inevitably follows that the species that depend on that marine life for sustenance will also die. Just make sure they don’t get oily doing it.

Twenty-one years after Exxon’s huge spill, 20 of the 30 most affected wildlife species have not yet recovered.

People ask me: “Is BP doing enough?” My answer is that there is no “enough.” The tools we have to respond to oil spills are orders of magnitude too small to combat the damage they do. We can’t fix oil spills; we can only prevent them. And we can only prevent them by not drilling in the ocean.

I'm down at the oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico — or what for now is the Gulf of Mexico. Rick Steiner, a marine conservationist and oil spill expert, flew over the Gulf Wednesday morning and said, "It's not the Gulf of Mexico any more. It's the Gulf of Oil."

Rick's been helping governments respond to oil spills for the past 30 years (an unusually prescient career choice). A resident of Cordova, AK he found a spill in his front yard in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

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“Right after the Valdez spill, someone told me, ‘Lawyers still to be born will be litigating this spill.’ I laughed at him, but he was right. It’s been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over.”

The fact that people who lost their livelihoods in the Exxon spill waited 20 years before they saw a nickel of compensation from Exxon is not happy news here, but Rick pulls no punches and gives straight answers. It’s as welcome — and as rare — as a cool breeze in Louisiana.

“The executives at BP must be reading the Exxon spill response playbook because they’re doing exactly what Exxon did,” he said. For those of you without access to the oily inner sancta, the playbook’s rules are these:

1 — Understate the amount of oil spilled.

2 — Understate the environmental damage caused by the oil.

3 — Overstate the effectiveness of your company’s response.

4 — Try to buy off the locals with tiny amounts of money (BP is offering $5,000 each to coastal residents in Mississippi) in exchange for waivers promising not to sue for damages.

5 — Slap gag orders on anyone doing business with the corporation. (Fishermen who want work from BP in the cleanup efforts have to agree in writing not to speak to the media. The gag orders are legally meaningless; it’s the intimidation factor that counts.)

Following the guidance of point three, BP has strung miles of bright orange boom everywhere there’s a TV camera. As if booms are some kind of magic wand. Booms are useless unless skimmers pick up the oil they collect and no one has seen any skimmers. Beyond that, the oil from the spill is bubbling up from a mile below the ocean. By the time it gets to the surface, it’s so thoroughly mixed with water it just slips under the booms.

Nonetheless, BP had a couple hundred shrimp boats on the gulf Wednesday, trolling booms back and forth. It’s not an oil spill response, it’s Response Theater. As Rick points out, in the best of circumstances (and we’re very far from that in the gulf) only ten percent of the oil is ever recovered. In the Exxon spill, after $2 billion, three summers with 1,000 boats and 13,000 workers, only five to seven percent of the oil was recovered.

One worry here is that the massive spill — which may spew oil for many weeks to come — will slip around the Florida peninsula and be carried up the east coast by the gulf stream. At the Exxon spill, which entailed a heavier grade of crude in the much more closed Prince William Sound, the oil was carried 800 miles down the Alaskan coast. There are several countervailing currents in the gulf, at all depths and of
course, this oil is moving at every depth the gulf has. No one can predict where it will go.

“There’s never been a successful response to a marine oil spill. Ever,” Rick says. “We’re addicted to oil and like any addict, we are taking larger and larger risks to get our fix and the consequences are more and more disastrous.”

So what’s the solution? Break the addiction. We have to stop drilling in the ocean. The results are too catastrophic. Instead of reading from cue cards prepared for him by oil lobbyists, Barack Obama has to shift our government’s energy policy to privilege efficiency and clean renewables over fossil fuels. And Congress must ensure that any legislation aimed at dealing with global warming does not contain any giveaways to dirty fossil fuels, period. Not only will that prevent the next marine tragedy, but it’s our only chance of arresting global warming before we burn our species off the planet.

The weather along the Gulf of Mexico finally cleared today, but with the wind backing around to the north and east, the spill remains out to sea.

Retired University of Alaska marine conservation expert Rick Steiner joined us today.  He's worked on oil spills around the world, most significantly on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound Alaska. 

Rick says that the fact that this spill emanates from the bottom of the gulf (5,000 feet down), where the water temperature is approximately 1 degree Centigrade (and the oil is hot) means that by the time the oil reaches the surface, it has thoroughly mixed with water and therefore does not appear to be the kind of gruesome slick that is so famous from previous disasters.

It's a PR boon to BP that this is so, because it means that the oil spill remains hidden from public view.  It does not, however, mean there is not a tremendous environmental tragedy unfolding.  As we speak about this, we need to make that point clear.  It's not just about what we can see from shore and that BP has been proactively taking steps to keep the damage hidden.

The dispersant being used at the wellhead – tradename “Corexit,” is nicknamed by Rick “Hidez-it” because the real reason it is used is to keep the damage out of sight.  He points out that oil is toxic to wildlife, dispersant is toxic to wildlife, but the toxicity of the two combined is greater than the sum of the parts.

A fisherman we spoke with also noted that if dispersants are used, it saves BP money because they can hire fewer fishing boats – at $1,500 per day each – to skim oil.

As we noted last night, when dispersants are not used, the oil comes ashore and kills birds, when it is not used, it stays in the water column and kills fish, but it's worth noting that killing fish means killing birds eventually because of, y’know, that whole food web thing.

On another BP front, we hear that BP is demanding that fishermen who they hire in the cleanup sign gag orders, agreeing not to talk to the media.  Rick says it’s one of the many similarities to the Valdez spill.  BP’s reading from the playbook Exxon wrote.

The rules are:

1 – Understate the amount of oil spilled and environmental damage done.

2 – Overstate the effectiveness of the oil company’s response (or more accurately, the oil company’s “response theater”).

3 – Try to buy off the locals for a pittance in exchange for waivers that they will not sue.

4 – Get as many people under a gag order as possible.

We are warning the locals that it took 20 years of court battles to get Exxon to pay damages to the people of Prince William Sound and that the final settlement was only one-tenth of the original award.

Rick said, “Right after Valdez, someone told me, ‘Lawyers still unborn will be litigating this spill’ and I laughed at him.  Well, it’s been 21 years and the litigation is still not finished, so he may be right.”

 

--Mark