Project Katrina

As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico unfolds the question has quickly become who is to blame. BP? Transocean? Well how enter Vice President’s Dick Cheney former firm Halliburton. Why don’t I find it strange they happen to be in the middle of this:

Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.

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In a statement Friday, Halliburton said “it is premature and irresponsible to speculate on any specific causal issues.” The company had four employees stationed on the rig at the time of the accident, all of whom were rescued by the Coast Guard.  “Halliburton had completed the cementing of the final production casing string in accordance with the well design,” it said. “The cement slurry design was consistent with that utilized in other similar applications. In accordance with accepted industry practice … tests demonstrating the integrity of the production casing string were completed.”

It will be months or even years before we know who is to blame for all of this (outside of BP), but my early money is on Halliburton. Their recent history of getting their employees killed to save a few bucks is pretty stark.

Via the New York Time (emphasis added):

The magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon disaster seems to be finally sinking in with investors. BP’s stock plunged more than 8 percent Thursday in American trading in an otherwise strong day for stocks. Since the accident, the American depositary receipts of the company have fallen about 13 percent, closing Thursday at $52.56.

For Tony Hayward, who has led BP for the last three years, the accident threatens to overshadow all of the efforts he has made to burnish the tattered reputation of the company after a refinery explosion in Texas in 2005 and a pipeline leak in Alaska in 2006.

As Mr. Hayward said to fellow executives in his London office recently, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

I wonder if Mr. Hayward has never asked himself that question with respect to his annual salary, which Forbes puts at nearly $5 million. But let me help Hayward out. The reason you deserve this is you cut corners to make an extra buck. You lied to the Federal government. And you don’t really care much about safety or the environment. That is how this happened and why you deserve everything you get and then some.

I don’t think anybody watching these events unfold would find this remotely surprising:

An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control with a faint sheen washing ashore along the Gulf Coast Thursday night as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.

The spill was bigger than imagined—five times more than first estimated—and closer. Faint fingers of oily sheen were reaching the Mississippi River delta, lapping the Louisiana shoreline in long, thin lines.

“It is of grave concern,” David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. “I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

The oil slick could become the nation’s worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life. Thicker oil was in waters south and east of the Mississippi delta about five miles offshore.

Of course the Exxon Valdez was a tanker. It had a finite amount of oil that could spill. Deepwater is a rig that has tapped a reserve that has countless billions of gallons of oil. Mark my words. By the time this is done it will eclipse the Valdez many times over.

The search for the 11 missing workers was called off days ago, but the oil well they left behind continues to gush  more than 40,000 gallons of oil a day. The oil slick is estimated to cover 28,600 square miles of the Gulf. In hopes of restricting further spread the Coast Guard will, you’re going to love this, set fire to the sea.

The U.S. Coast Guard prepared to set fire Wednesday to portions of a growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico to keep the pool of crude away from sensitive ecological areas in the Mississippi River Delta.

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“It’s a historically proven technique, and it has multiple preventative safety measures in place to ensure that that burn area remains controlled,” said Lt. Cmdr. Matt Moorlag, a Coast Guard spokesman.

We are assured that multiple safety measures, no doubt as effective as the ones to prevent explosions on the Deepwater Horizon in the first place, will be put into place to ensure the “controlled” burn can be, well controlled. No matter how many safety measures are taken, there are serious doubts that burning the slick will be effective:

Ed Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University  who’s studying the oil spill, questioned whether burning would work.

“It can be effective in calm water, not much wind, in a protected area,” he said. “When you’re out in the middle of the ocean, with wave actions, and currents, pushing you around, it’s not easy.”

He has another concern: The oil samples from the spill he’s looked at shows it to be a sticky substance similar to roofing tar.

“I’m not super optimistic. This is tarry crude that lies down in the water,” he said. “But it’s something that has got to be tried.”

This is turning into a total cluster fuck faster then even I’d imagined.