Project Katrina

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.”

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.

Often it is hard to notice nothing but the bad news coming out of New Orleans. But in fact there are some positive things happening on a pretty grand level as well.

As Katrina approaches its five-year anniversary, New Orleans has made enormous strides toward recovery. The city’s GDP is almost $9 billion higher today than it was in 2005, its population is about 80 percent of what it was before the storm, and city officials say the quality of public education has gone up significantly. But only one in three New Orleans residents polled by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year said their lives have returned to normal since Katrina, and 70 percent of them said they feel that the nation has forgotten the challenges they still face.

[....]

New Orleans’ already struggling economy was dealt a second and third blow by the recession and Gulf oil spill, but jobs in the city should be increasingly plentiful now that the city’s main industry—tourism—seems to be making a comeback. ABC News reports that visits to New Orleans jumped to 7.5 million in 2009–up from 3.7 million visitors in 2006– and raked in $4.2 billion dollars for the city. While the 70,000 tourism jobs in New Orleans is still well below the 85,000 jobs that existed before Katrina, this year the city reported its largest Mardi Gras celebration in 25 years.

Of course there are still problems, like 50,000 homes still in ruins, but we shouldn’t forget the strides that have been made in the past five years, awkward as they might have been.

For months a team of reporters from The Times-Picayune, PBS, and Pro Publica having been researching the numerous police shootings after Hurricane Katrina. Their findings are devastating to say the least:

In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department. It’s not clear how broadly the order was communicated.

Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to “shoot looters,” “take back the city,” or “do what you have to do” are fragmentary.

The findings of their reporting have also been turned into an hour-long Frontline special called Law & Disorder It is now running on PBS or can be viewed online here.

To say I question anything and everything a government agency or funded research facility says about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gusher, but I sure hope this is accurate:

Petroleum-eating bacteria—which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor—proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries a mystery of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone?

I pretty much slept through my high school and college science classes, so I really should comment, but there are so many things about this story that just don’t add up. But again, I really hope I am wrong.

According to the Houston Chronicle BP saved $5 million by taking shortcuts while drilling the Macondo/Deepwater Horizon well. BP stock has lost $80 billion. $20 billion placed into an escrow for damages. $2.5 billion in clean up costs to date. Solid business decision there BP.

The government has released a new estimate of the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. The new estimate is 35k to 60k barrels a day, a 50 percent increase on the high end of the range.

House Minority Leader John Boehner on This Week yesterday said he’s now in favor of lifting the cap on BP’s liability in the Gulf oil spill gusher. Though currently law makes BP responsible for cleaning up the actual oil itself, the same law limits its liability to $75 million. Senate Democrats have pushed to raise the cap to $10 billion or get rid of the cap entirely. Boehner now seems to be suggesting he’s on board.

If I’m reading this correctly, the newly installed containment device is working better then planned and sucking up a large amount of oil. But according to new data, we’re finding out that the amount still going into the ocean is as much and perhaps much more than we thought last week. As the AFP puts it:

A containment device fitted last week is now capturing 15,800 barrels a day, but the latest data suggests at least 4,200 barrels and possibly up to 25,000 barrels—more than a million gallons—are still spewing into the sea each day. At least 40 million gallons of crude have already poured into the Gulf, and perhaps double that. That is roughly four times as much as the Exxon Valdez spill off the Alaskan coast in 1989.

This is a perfect example of why not “owning” up to the flow rate from day one was so stupid on the behalf of BP. Equally as much that the White House allowed it to happen. Of course BP wanted to low-ball the numbers, cause each barrel means up to a $4,300 fine. But this should be seen as a success, one of the few the White House can claim. But since now the oil from the well is going onto a ship, and it is stupid simple to measure, there is no longer anyway BP can hide the full extent of the problem. What should be a success and a good news story for Obama, is actually an epic fail. Ugh!