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Massive Oil Slick Could Have Devastating Impact on Economy in Gulf States

FOXNews.com

As a massive oil slick creeps ever closer to the Gulf Coast, officials in Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi and Florida are bracing for the worst. The economic impact over miles of prime coast land has the potential to be catastrophic.

As a massive oil slick creeps ever closer to the Gulf Coast, officials in Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi and Florida are bracing for the worst. The economic impact over miles of prime coast land has the potential to be catastrophic.

Officials say the slick from last week's offshore drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico may have a devastating impact on one of the coastal states' most precious commodities — shrimp — and the entire industry that surrounds it. And state officials acknowledge that the oil's effect on travel and tourism to the area could be equally destructive.

"Common sense would tell us that if the shrimp and oyster beds are impacted, that could potentially affect one of the signature items for Louisiana — our shrimp," Louisiana's assistant secretary of tourism, Jim Hutchinson, told FoxNews.com.

About 5,000 barrels of oil a day are coming up from the seabed after a BP-operated rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and sank last week about 40 miles offshore, leaving 11 workers missing and presumed dead. Federal officials say the leading edge of the spill was expected to reach the Mississippi River delta by Thursday night.
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This is probably just a random coincidence but I wonder if anyone's considered if this could be an eco-terror attack.

Obama announces a change in national policy on offshore drilling, and twenty days later a platform explodes, creating an environmental disaster. That’s pretty interesting timing.

You have enviro-wackos who already do stuff like start forest fires to try and prove why we should save forests. Why not ones who'd dump millions of gallons of oil into an ocean to save the ocean?

Here are a few “key differences,” in the hopes that as little as possible breath and ink is wasted on this baseless comparison.

1) Katrina was not an accident, and as such, it was predictable. We must remember that what happened in New Orleans was not a natural disaster; it was entirely man-made. The state of the levees protecting the city was well-known: the Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for them, knew it, and anyone who read the Times-Picayune’s superb series on the danger posed to the city by a major hurricane due to the weak levees knew it too. The Corps’s budget for levee construction in New Orleans was slashed by Bush 14 months before Katrina, and its overall budget was cut by $71.2 million two months before the storm. Bush, as he never tired of reminding us, was Commander in Chief, and therefore bore ultimate responsibility for not fixing the levees in the four-and-a-half years he had to do so before the hurricane struck.

2) Hurricanes are forecast; the type of accident that exacerbated the spill has never happened before. Bush had days, if not weeks, to send emergency supplies to New Orleans and help with its evacuation as the storm came from the Atlantic, across Florida, west through the Gulf, and finally north to the mouth of the Mississippi. By contrast, the mechanism that’s supposed to shut off BP’s oil well has never failed before. This shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of offshore drilling, or an excuse for BP, which spent $700m on the rig that exploded and $1m a day to run it. But Bush could have prepared for the flood of New Orleans, and chose not to. It’s true that Obama could have, in general way, done more to prevent an oil spill in the Gulf, but foreseeing this disaster would have been impossible, because no such disaster of this particular type had ever occurred. Not so with Bush.

3) Bush deliberately dismantled the system for responding to disasters, both directly and indirectly. Bush directed in 2005 that FEMA “officially” lose disaster-preparedness capabilities, leaving no federal agency to perform this essential function. In January 2001, he had named a crony from Texas with no experience in disaster management to head FEMA. This guy handed the reins to Mike “Heckuva job” Brown, a college friend who also had no experience, and had been fired from his previous job for mismanagement. Brown was at the controls when Katrina came ashore. FEMA denied flood-control requests from Louisiana.

4) Bush slept, and New Orleans wept; Obama was on the case from Day 1. Here’s a timeline of the days before and after Katrina. It shows that 3 hours after first reports of levee breach, Bush was making a speech somewhere (“My Pet Goat,” anyone?) and 12 hours after, Rumsfeld was at a baseball game. The governor of Louisiana made a desperate plea for help at 8pm on the 29th; Bush went to bed that night without responding. The next day, he went on vacation. Three days later a campaign had begun to blame local officials.

By contrast, the Coast Guard was on the scene within hours of the explosion at the oil rig; the DepSec of Interior was there the next day, and coordination with local officials and with BP have been constant from the beginning.

So that ought to be enough about that.

It's not the same thing...

Here are a few “key differences,” in the hopes that as little as possible breath and ink is wasted on this baseless comparison.

1) Katrina was not an accident, and as such, it was predictable. We must remember that what happened in New Orleans was not a natural disaster; it was entirely man-made.

3) Bush .... named a crony from Texas with no experience in disaster management to head FEMA.

FEMA denied flood-control requests from Louisiana.

Bush slept, and New Orleans wept; Obama was on the case from Day 1. ....the Coast Guard was on the scene within hours of the explosion at the oil rig; the DepSec of Interior was there the next day, and coordination with local officials and with BP have been constant from the beginning.

So that ought to be enough about that.

He named a political ally, Janet Napolitano, primarily because she was a woman

Oil Options Weighed as Obama Travels to Gulf
BY LESLIE KAUFMAN and JOSEPH BERGER
Published: May 2, 2010

NEW ORLEANS — As President Obama traveled to Louisiana on Sunday for a first-hand briefing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, federal officials in Washington said they were putting their hopes on drilling a parallel relief well to plug the unabated gusher. Drilling such a well could take three months.

“The scenario is a very grave scenario,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said on the NBC news program “Meet the Press.” “You’re looking at potentially 90 days before you get to the ultimate solution, which is drilling a relief well 3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor. In that time, lots of oil could spread.”

After arriving in New Orleans by midday, President Obama was expected to travel by helicopter to Venice, La., for a briefing with Coast Guard officials.

The slick, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore, was creeping into Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough waters hampered cleanup efforts. Oil could hit the shores of Alabama and Mississippi on Monday.

The spill was set off by an explosion on April 20 at the Deepwater Horizon rig in which 11 workers were killed. Two days later, the rig sank leading to the first visible signs of a spill.

The objective of drilling a relief well parallel to the original rig would be to pour cement into the damaged well and plug it. Efforts to turn off the ruptured well by using remotely operated underwater vehicles working a mile below the surface have failed so far.

The president and chairman of BP America, Lamar McKay, told ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday that another possible solution — placing a dome over the damaged well, effectively capping it — could be deployed in six to eight days. He defended his company’s response as “extremely aggressive,” but he acknowledged that fail-safe mechanisms on the rig that were designed to prevent an oil spill had not worked as predicted and that a “failed piece of equipment” was to blame for the spill.

On Saturday, officials in charge of the cleanup said that a new technique in battling the leaks 5,000 feet beneath the sea showed promise.

Among the various weapons employed against the gushing crude has been the distribution of chemical dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil. The new approach involves the deployment of the dispersants underwater, near the source of the leaks. Officials said that in two tests, that method appeared to be keeping crude oil from rising to the surface. They said that the procedure could be used more frequently once evaluations of its impact on the deepwater ecology were completed.

Those experiments at the wellhead of the collapsed Deepwater Horizon oil rig were just one sign of the frantic efforts to contain the estimated 210,000 gallons a day still leaking 11 days after the rig exploded and sank.
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Last year the Obama administration granted oil giant BP a special exemption from a legal requirement that it produce a detailed environmental impact study on the possible effects of its Deepwater Horizon drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico, an article Wednesday in the Washington Post reveals.

Federal documents show that the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave BP a "categorical exclusion" on April 6, 2009 to commence drilling with Deepwater Horizon even though it had not produced the impact study required by a law known as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The report would have included probable ecological consequences in the event of a spill.

The exemption came less than one month after BP had requested it in a March 10 "exploration plan" submitted to the MMS. The plan said that because a spill was "unlikely," no additional "mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources." BP also assured the MMS that any spill would not seriously hurt marine wildlife and that "due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected."

Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Post that the Obama administration's exemption effectively "put BP entirely in control," adding, "The agency's oversight role has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum's self-serving drilling plans."

In fact, BP's self-assessment of the potential for a disaster reproduced that of federal regulators. In 2007, under the Bush administration, the MMS carried out three studies of the potential environmental impact of deep sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including one that pertained specifically to the area where Deepwater Horizon was ultimately deployed, known as "Lease 206." The MMS determined that a "deepwater spill" would not reach the coast and would not exceed 4,600 barrels.

The most conservative estimates now put the Deepwater Horizon spill at about 72,000 barrels and counting. The real figure could already be as high as 350,000 barrels, about 75 times the MMS's worst-case-scenario prediction. In closed-door congressional hearings on Tuesday, BP executives admitted that the well could begin to emit as many as 60,000 barrels, or 2.5 million gallons, a day. At such a pace it would eclipse the size of the Exxon Valdez spill every five days.

The Obama administration's delivery of a special exemption for Deepwater Horizon in April 2009 is the latest in a litany of examples that reveal the close collaboration between the MMS and BP.

Only 11 days before the explosion, BP requested a broadening of the April exemption, and in a separate letter dated September 14, 2009, a BP vice president for operations in the Gulf, Richard Morrison, requested that the Obama administration not put in place new guidelines that would have required audits of its rigs every three years. "We are not supportive of the extensive, prescriptive regulations as proposed in this rule," Morrison wrote. BP favored voluntary self-regulations, which, Morrison said, "have been and continue to be very successful."

As late as March 2010, the MMS approved new deep sea oil drilling operations for another Gulf lease, referred to as "215." The approval cited the safety of other drilling operations, including Deepwater Horizon's Lease 206. (http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PDFs/2010/2010-003.pdf.)

At the end of March, Obama announced a dramatic expansion of offshore drilling in Florida's Gulf waters, the Atlantic seaboard, and the northern waters of Alaska—basing himself largely on MMS claims that new drilling poses no major risks to the environment.

The MMS is, even by the standards of Washington, openly in the embrace of the oil industry. A September 2008, Inspector General's report revealed that MMS regulators had for years accepted gifts and money—and even drugs and sex—from the same oil industry executives they were ostensibly tasked with monitoring. The Obama administration's rubber-stamping of "self-regulation" for the oil industry makes clear that while the top political appointees at MMS have changed since the Bush years, the policies have not.

As more details emerge, it is becoming increasingly clear that federal regulators under both the Bush and Obama administrations ceded enforcement of legally-mandated safety and environmental regulation to the oil industry, while providing governmental approval for unproven methods. It is these policies that led directly to the deaths of eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon and the environmental catastrophe overtaking the Gulf of Mexico.

The Obama administration's and BP's protestations that the Deepwater Horizon disaster were unforeseeable are lies. In fact, not only had scientists and environmentalists warned for years that an uncontrollable spill from a deep water oil rig was likely, sources in the Bush and Obama administrations had made similar warnings.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sharply criticized the very MMS studies that Obama used to approve the Deepwater Horizon site, it has been revealed. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which supports whistleblowers among federal employees, published a memo sent by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco in October 2009 to the Department of the Interior ridiculing MMS assessments of drilling operations.

Among other comments, Lubchenco called the MMS studies "understated and generally not supported or referenced, using vague terms and phrases such as 'no substantive degradation is expected' and 'some marine mammals could be harmed.' This is particularly problematic for expanding oil and gas production."

The internal warnings go back as far as 2004. The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported the contents of a study, commissioned and reviewed by the MMS that year, which raised serious doubts as to whether blowout protector mechanisms—the equipment that failed to seal the Deepwater Horizon well after its piping ruptured—could even function in the deep sea. The devices were simply untested under such oceanic pressures. The study warned that “this grim snapshot illustrates the lack of preparedness in the industry to shear and seal a well with the last line of defense against a blowout” in deep water.

Obama's decision to disregard scientific evidence is not the result of a mistaken policy, however. It is the result of definite class interests.

According to a report from the Center for Responsive Politics, BP gave more campaign donations to the Obama campaign in the 2008 election cycle than to any other politician—$71,000 in all—though in total it gave slightly more to Republican candidates. BP also took the step of hiring the Podesta Group, the lobbying firm headed up by Obama confidant John Podesta and his brother Tony, paying the firm $720,000 since 2008. All told, BP has spent just shy of $20 million on federal lobbying over the last two years.

The close working relationship between BP and the Obama administration has continued even in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The administration’s first reaction to the explosion was to reiterate its support for lifting moratoriums that currently block thousands of miles of US coastline from drilling. “The president still continues to believe the great majority of that can be done safely, securely and without any harm to the environment,” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on April 23, three days after the explosion. “I don’t honestly think [the disaster] opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last."

Obama has since ordered a "30 day review" before new permits are issued, but this is a patently hollow gesture since no new permits are up for consideration in the coming month. In a bid to lessen mounting popular outrage, administration officials have combined this meaningless review with tough talk about holding BP financially liable for the spill's damages.

In fact, a law passed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Oil Pollution Act, caps at $75 million oil firms' total liability for economic and environmental damages to private parties. This reactionary piece of legislation, disguised as an effort to protect the environment, passed the US House by a vote of 375-5 and the Senate by acclamation before being signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, a former oilman.

The markets on Wednesday signaled their confidence that a deal will be worked out to protect BP, with its share values increasing by 1.5 percent and a London financial analysis firm upgrading its stocks to "buy."

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned.

Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC News.

Strickland, who also serves as Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, was in the Grand Canyon with his wife Beth for a total of three days, including one day of rafting. Beth Strickland paid her own way, Obama administration officials said.

The Stricklands departed for the Grand Canyon three days after the leaks in the Deepwater Horizon pipeline were discovered. Ultimately, after the government realized that the spill was worse than had been previously thought, officials decided that Strickland was needed in the Gulf so Strickland was taken out of the Grand Canyon by a National Park Service helicopter.

I see the GOPers are still smarting over how poorly Bush handled Katrina. It's not the same thing folks.

I see the GOPers are still smarting over how poorly Bush handled Katrina. It's not the same thing folks.

Federal regulators let BP avoid filing blowout plan for Gulf oil rig
By The Associated Press
May 06, 2010, 12:52PM
Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.

The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren't practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region.

The blowout rule, the fact that it was lifted in April 2008 for rigs that didn't fit at least one of five conditions, and confusion about whether the BP Deepwater Horizon project was covered by the regulation, caught the attention of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Salazar said Wednesday that he understood BP was required to file plans for coping with a blowout at the well that failed.

"My understanding is that everything was in its proper place," said Salazar.

But an AP review of government and BP documents found that the company had not filed a specific comprehensive blowout plan for the rig that exploded April 20, leaving 11 workers dead and spewing an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day.

Instead, a site-specific exploration plan filed by BP in February 2009 stated that it was "not required" to file "a scenario for a potential blowout" of the Deepwater well.
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A rule change over two years ago? Gosh how did that darn Obama somehow managed to make Bush do that!

WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.

“Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”