Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Climate Change and Environmental Issues BP Oil Spill

The gulf has experienced these events before and recovered very nicely.

Well, y'all is the "site" leaking ? We have the technology to examine it in detail !

The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday it is working with Transocean Ltd. (RIG) to find out whether last year's wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig is the source of oil sheens that have appeared in the Gulf Of Mexico....

A series of sheen sightings have been reported to federal emergency officials over the past several months.

Government Accountability Office (GAO) staff are likely to politely say, "No thanks" to raw oysters and even to the Southern favorite turkey oyster dressing this Thanksgiving on Thursday. GAO’s new report says government must safe guard people from illness and death by Gulf oysters but an expert for the oyster industry says GAO's report did not even include that since onset of the ongoing Gulf oil “spill” catastrophic human rights violation, a Gulf bacteria explosion has occurred from oil and Corexit carpet-bombing oysters so they need to be irradiated before sold.

Bottlenose dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, are showing signs of severe ill health, according to NOAA marine mammal biologists and their local, state, federal and other research partners.

Disturbingly, the allowable levels set by the government for the toxins in our seafood are based on health impacts for a 176 pound adult eating less than 2 medium shrimp a day. The testing is for 1 chemical out of a crude oil mixture containing thousands of chemicals. No synergistic effects are considered. This in no way protects children, fetuses, people who weigh less than 176 pounds or anyone who eats seafood on a daily basis like the folks here on the Gulf Coast....
# Why did we allow people who caused oil spill to be in charge of the clean up? Everything they did was to limit liability, not to protect the environment, the resources or the people.
# How could the government announce on August 5, 2010 that suddenly 75% of the oil had disappeared? Corporations run this country and they operate under The Golden Rule: Who holds the gold makes the rule.
# Oil companies are good at covering up spills and sinking the oil with additional chemicals, but they are no good at cleaning up spills....
# Even after the largest loss of life and oil, no laws have been changed....The government is the keeper of the record of the criminal investigation and if they settle the case, the public will never see that information. If the record is not made public in a trial, how we learn from this spill?

Evidence now implicates top BP executives as well as its partners Chevron and Exxon and the Bush Administration in the deadly cover-up ---- which included falsifying a report to the Securities Exchange Commission.
Yesterday, Ecowatch.org revealed that, in September 2008, nearly two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig had blown out in the Caspian Sea----which BP concealed from U.S. regulators and Congress.
Had BP, Chevron, Exxon or the Bush State Department revealed the facts of the earlier blow-out, it is likely that the Deepwater Horizon disaster would have been prevented.
Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.

Instead of focusing on the oft-told failures in the Gulf of Mexico, the author reconstructs the history of why such a spill happened to BP. Beginning with early misadventures in Alaska, where BP took a leading role in the mismanagement of the Exxon Valdez cleanup, Lustgarten paints an oil portrait of a multinational seemingly convinced that it can do no wrong.
With the storied oil giant stuck in neutral, John Browne, a charismatic and driven BP lifer, took the reins and drove the oil giant to find new fields and up production to fuel growth and pay for the acquisitions of two offspring of the Standard Oil trust, Amoco and Arco. In the process, human health and environmental safety are de-emphasized and ultimately placed in the hands of the same executives responsible for the bottom line, according to Lustgarten. Lethal accidents on Alaska’s North Slope and at a Texas refinery brought scorn and scrutiny to BP, but there was little done to right BP’s wrongs. John Browne is ultimately ousted not for his ownership of the industry’s worst safety record, but for a tabloid sex scandal.
Like most oil sagas, Run to Failure...has colorful characters. Chuck Hamel leads a cadre of Alaska oil whistleblowers who dare to try to keep BP and its rivals honest. Bob Malone is, relatively speaking, the Good Cop among BP executives, willing to at least speak with the likes of Hamel about the company’s mounting problems –- even while an inept sting operation tries to discredit the whistleblowers. Doug Suttles is Malone’s opposite number. The volatile and paranoid boss of BP’s Alaska operations is shipped off to the Gulf of Mexico just in time to preside over the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Jeanne Pascall is a beleaguered EPA official, aware of the company’s big problems but powerless to correct them.

What is missing is the accountability that comes from real consequences: a criminal prosecution that holds responsible the individuals who gambled with the lives of BP's contractors and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. Only such an outcome can rebuild trust in an oil industry that asks for the public's faith so that it can drill more along the nation's coastlines. And perhaps only such an outcome can keep BP in line and can keep an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster from happening again.
BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.
Prior to the gulf blowout, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil, BP was convicted of two felony environmental crimes and a misdemeanor: after it failed to report that its contractors were dumping toxic waste in Alaska in 1995; after its refinery in Texas City, Texas, exploded, killing 15, in 2005; and after it spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil from a corroded pipeline onto the Alaskan tundra in 2006. In all, more than 30 people employed directly or indirectly by BP have died in connection with these and other recent accidents.