Project Katrina

The $20 billion fund set up by BP to pay restitution to the economic victims of its Gulf of Mexico disaster is likely to remain mostly untouched, the man hired by the oil giant to handle the payments says. “I’ve used just over $4 billion,” BP’s victim fund administrator Kenneth Feinberg told the London Telegraph. “I don’t envision a flood of new claims.”

Months or years from now when an analysis of the claims are analyzed, and well people are paying attention then they are now, how much you want to find that BP made the process almost impossible. Underpaid people. You name it.

Via the always wonderful ProPublica:

The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money. Some people profiteered from the spill by charging BP outrageous rates for cleanup. Others profited from BP claims money, handed out in arbitrary ways. So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames—”spillionaires” or “BP rich.” Meanwhile, others hurt by the spill ended up getting comparatively little.

In the end, BP’s attempt to make things right—spending more than $16 billion so far, mostly on claims of damage and cleanup—created new divisions and even new wrongs. Because the federal government ceded control over spill cleanup spending to BP, it’s impossible to know for certain what that money accomplished, or what exactly was done.

As always the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

From the Associated Press:

In sleepy Ocean Springs, Miss., reserve police officers got Tasers. The sewer department in nearby Gulfport bought a $300,000 vacuum truck that never sucked up a drop of oil. Biloxi, Miss., bought a dozen SUVs. A parish president in Louisiana got herself a deluxe iPad, her spokesman a $3,100 laptop. And a county in Florida spent $560,000 on rock concerts to promote its oil-free beaches.

In every case, communities said the new, more powerful equipment was needed to deal at least indirectly with the spill.

In many instances, though, the connection between the spill and the expenditures was remote, and lots of money wound up in cities and towns little touched by the goo that washed up on shore, the AP found in records requested from more than 150 communities and dozens of interviews.

Most everybody, if they even just skim the news, is aware that New Orleans changed dramatically after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, but the national media has largely overlooked one of the city’s most  stunning changes. Before Katrina hit New Orleans had an African American mayor, police chief, district attorney, and black majorities on the city council and the school board. Or put another way, the elected leaders reflected the majority of the residents. Today, though still a vastly African American city, New Orleans has a white mayor, district attorney, police chief, and white majorities on the city council and the school board. Justin Vogt at the Washington Monthly has a very interesting and insight article, A Time Against Race, that talks about how this occurred and how things are working out. Really a must read.

Peter Willcox is the Captain of the Greenpeace ship M.V. Arctic Sunrise. Heck he was the Captain of Rainbow Warrior—in command when operatives of the French intelligence service attacked and sunk the ship in 1985, killing one crew member. So when I heard, via Balloon Juice, he as in the area accessing the damage and writing about it, well I was kind of curious. He has a lot to say on BP’s use of Corexit and what his team found. Really needs to be read in full.

Corexit is mostly what BP has used on the spill.  There are a few things to know about Corexit.  One is that is was banned in U.K. over ten years ago because it is so toxic, as in poisonous to humans and sea life. According to the label on the product, it will irritate the eyes, it is not to be inhaled, and it can cause harm to red blood cells, your kidney and liver.  The OSHA data sheet states: component substances have a potential to bioconcentrate, that human health hazard is acute.  Nice stuff.

Also, according to EPA data, Corexit ranked far above other dispersants for toxicity, and far below other dispersants in effectiveness in handling Louisiana crude.

Corexit was also used on the Exxon Valdez spill.  Now read carefully: Almost all the clean up workers who worked on the Exxon Valdez spill are dead.  According to CNN, who made efforts to warn the people of the Gulf about Corexit, the average lifespan of an Exxon Valdez spill worker is 51 years.  That’s almost 30 years less than that of the average American.   There were 11,000 people involved with the Exxon Valdez spill.

Towards the end of his post he concludese, “I have seen many ugly situations during my life. Many of them, like the U.S. Government’s purposely experimenting on Marshall Islanders to study the effects of radiation, I have partly shrugged off because they happened so long ago (50 years in that case). But the BP spill and its effects on the people of the Gulf are happening now. Today. And tomorrow, and for the next 20 years. There are people there who need help right now.”

The Washington Post reports:

The “blowout preventer” from BP’s Macondo well—which infamously failed to prevent this summer’s spill—has begun its transition from sub-sea equipment to federal evidence.

The 450-ton device was removed Friday afternoon from the Gulf of Mexico floor and attached to a long section of pipe that will be used to haul it 5,000 feet to the surface, according to a statement from retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, the federal government’s point man on the BP oil spill.

The FBI and multiple other Federal investigators are waiting on the shore for the device to arrive, where it will undergo the mechanical equivalent of an autopsy. The results should be interested.

I’ve always felt months and years later as we look back on this we’re going to find it was a cluster fuck beyond comprehension. This makes me think I am correct at levels I’ve not even considered:

In hindsight, if BP had removed the 5,000-foot-long tangle of riser pipe from its damaged Gulf well in the early days of the spill, a new blowout preventer or cap could have been installed, shutting down the well perhaps within weeks instead of months, according to both the federal incident commander and petroleum engineers.

“I think that is one thing we will look at,” retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said during a recent interview with the Press-Register editorial board. “Obviously what finally worked was cutting the riser pipe. [....] If we had elected to cut the riser pipe we might have been able to do it much quicker.”

Recently today news broke of another fire on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. This one on the Vermilion Oil Platform. Details are not clear and the information is sketchy at best. But as of now major media outlets are reporting:

• Vermilion Oil Platform 380 is anchored approximately 100 miles off the Louisiana coast.  It sites in  340 feet of water, Bureau of Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz told the the AP.
• Coast Guard Petty Officer Matthew Masaschi told ABC News that Mariner Energy, the owner of the platform, had reported evidence of a “slight oil sheen” near the platform measuring “one nautical mile by 100 feet.”
• The AP is reporting that a clean-up operation would be comparatively easy since shallow-water spills do not require the use of “remote-operated vehicles access equipment on the sea floor” that were required for the Deepwater Horizon.
• The Vermilion had 13 crew members, all of whom are accounted for. There is one reported injury.
• Schwartz, the Bureau of Energy Management spokeswoman, told the AP that there were “maintenance activities underway” on the oil platform and that the platform was not producing oil or gas at the time of the explosion.
• A press release from platform owner Mariner Energy said Vermilion was producing both oil and gas as recently as last week. The press release said, “During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate.”

UPDATE: In an about face from what the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said earlier today, Gov. Bobby Jindal is now saying that there were “seven active production wells on the platform,” according to a AP story. Jindal said all the wells have now been shut down successfully.

UPDATE II: As of 5:30 p.m. ET, the Coast Guard is backing away from earlier reports of a mile-long oil slick near the site of the Vermilion platform. Mariner Energy told the Washington Post there is no slick, and the Coast Guard said it has not been able to confirm its earlier claim that there was a sheen on the water.

Here is something worth your time. Deep Sea News has put together a three part series on the science (which there isn’t a whole lot of) of oil dispersants. It is interesting on many different levels, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it explains why we know so little.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle—once you’ve perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How Effective Are Dispersants On Real Oil Spills?

Part 2: How Toxic Are Dispersants?

Part 3: Do Dispersants Really Promote Degradation Of Oil?

Today the New York Times has a somewhat detailed look “behind the scenes” highlighting the tension between BP executives and government employees as they tried to cap  the well.

But interviews with BP engineers and technicians, contractors and Obama administration officials who, with the eyes of the world upon them, worked to stop the flow of oil, suggest that the process was also far more stressful, hair-raising and acrimonious than the public was aware of.

[....]

Looking back, administration officials said that they became concerned that BP could not handle the crisis and that at crucial junctures the company made serious errors of judgment. “There was an arc of loss of confidence,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “I was not comfortable they knew what they were doing.”

Those on the industry side saw it differently. “The only benefit I see is they actually challenged us to a level of detail and communication,” Mark Mazzella, BP’s top well-control expert, said of the government scientists who stepped in to supervise the effort. “They didn’t offer anything that changed anything we actually did.”

A decision by Energy Secretary Steven Chu to turn to BP’s competitors for advice was viewed as an insult by many at the company, said a technician who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter.

I expect as time passes we’re going to see more and more of these type of stories and I expect it was much, much worse then this initial story indicates.