BP's Other Toxic Spill

While most folks should be more than familiar with the massive oil spill caused by the fire and collapse of an oil rig in the Gulf Coast that was being operated on behalf of BP, few folks realize that the company had a major spill at a Texas City refinery that sickened many nearby residents.

For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.

Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.

Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company, seeking fines of about $600,000.

BP maintains three air monitors along the fence around the plant and two in the surrounding community, and they did not show a rise in pollution during April and May, the company said. “BP does not believe there is any basis to pay claims in connection with this event,” said Michael Marr, a spokesman for the company.

But scores of Texas City residents said they experienced respiratory problems this spring, and environmentalists said the release of toxic gases ranked as one of the largest in the state’s history.

Neil Carman of the Lone Star Sierra Club said the release was probably even larger than BP had acknowledged, because the company estimated that more than 98 percent of the pollution was burned off by a flare, an overly optimistic figure in the eyes of many environmental scientists.

He also said there were too few air monitors to accurately assess what had happened. “There are huge gaps in the monitoring network,” Mr. Carman said.

Dionne Ramirez, 29, who lives about a mile from the refinery, said she had little doubt that elevated pollution harmed her family. Not only have both she and her husband had coughs, but all three of their young sons have suffered from severe chest congestion, sore throats and endless coughing since April. Her 4-year-old had to be hospitalized for two nights because he could not stop coughing, she said.

When the news of the pollution was made public on June 4, Ms. Ramirez was irate. “I didn’t know why they were getting sick or what was going on,” she said. “They are healthy little kids.”

Texas City officials weren't notified of the problems until after the spill was over. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic materials were emitted without the local community aware of the problem or scope of the problem.

BP's actions in Texas City are similar to its actions in the oil spill disaster, where the company took shortcuts and safety protocols and procedures were not followed.

The company put profit ahead of safety to its own workers and those of the citizens around the refinery. A new report came out claiming that BP workers failed to spot warning signs at the well.

Earlier this month, BP was fined for a major fire and explosion at the facility in 2005 that killed 15 workers and injured 170 others.

OSHA issued several fines totaling $87.4 million against BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, last September over its failure to upgrade the plant. OSHA accused the company of 439 safety violations at the refinery. BP is contesting about $30 million of the OSHA fines.

The latest fine, the largest in OSHA’s history, tops the previous record of $21 million, which was also issued against BP over safety conditions at the plant. In addition to the fines, BP also faces wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits stemming from the deadly accident.

The Texas City refinery has a long history of slow response to problems at the facility and for cleaning up its act.

China Wont Clean Up Its Environmental Mess Because Of Ongoing Issues

Newsweek wonders whether China will finally take steps to clean up the multitude of environmental disasters ongoing or impending due to government inaction or complicity.

In a word? No.

China has been here before. Many times before in fact.

They were touting the closure of thousands of pollution spewing factories and coal powered plants in the runup of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Yet, one look at the skies told the tale - the air was so thick you could see it and once the Olympics were over, the skies got even worse.

The rivers throughout the country are in horrible shape as all manner of poison and pollution pollute and are a health hazard to the local ecology and make it incompatible with human consumption.

The Chinese government has instituted all kinds of flood control, and yet every year thousands of people die in floods. However, it does appear that the Three Gorges Dam has done its job on its stretch of river because flooding downstream was averted (although pollutants and garbage jammed up behind the dam and had to be removed to the tune of 3,000 tons a day).

While some of the focus of the Newsweek piece is on the flooding rains that have swept pollution into the rivers and deforestation in an effort by the Chinese government to modernize and bring the country up to Western standards of living, it ignores that the Chinese government has routinely ignored environmental protections.

The government has looked the other way repeatedly in its quest to modernize. Property rights are nonexistent and environmental concerns are so low on the list of priorities, that it will be a long time before Chinese citizens are able to see improvements in their environment.

Garbage Island Threatens China's Three Gorges Dam

China seems to be a fountain of never ending environmental nightmares and the recent flooding rains have made a bad situation worse.



The latest is from the Three Gorges Dam, where weeks of flooding rains have washed all manner of debris into rivers that congealed into a huge mass of garbage.

Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.

Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that more than 3,000 tons of trash was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.

"The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam," Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China's less-developed western interior provinces.

Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.

'Decaying'
Some more than half a million square feet had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season in July, the report said. The trash is around two feet deep, and in some parts so compacted people can walk on it, the Hubei Daily added.

"Such a large amount of debris could damage the propellers and bottoms of passing boats," Chen said. "The decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and the water quality."

The Chinese government has struggled with trying to come up with an environmental cleanup plan to limit debris and garbage entering the rivers upstream from the dam, and the failure to protect the watershed means that the dam, the locks, and the hydroelectric facilities are threatened by the debris that could jam the navigation locks or the turbines that provide power to the region.

Meanwhile, heavy rains have washed all manner of chemicals into the various Chinese rivers, including the Songhua River, which was the scene of a serious benzene spill two years ago. Like that earlier spill, the current situation has meant that authorities have had to turn off the river water intakes for more than 4 million people lest people become sickened from the tainted water.

Alarms Were Inhibited On Deepwater Horizon

Not only does this Mike Williams, an engineer on the Deepwater Horizon claim that the alarms were inhibited on the Deepwater Horizon the day the oil rig exploded into the international consciousness and unleashed the worst oil spill in history, but this was normal operating procedures on the rig for more than a year prior to the explosion because the operators didn't want false alarms waking up workers at 3am.

Reporting from Kenner, La — Critical fire and gas leak alarm systems had been disabled for at least a year aboard the Deepwater Horizon because the rig's leaders didn't want to wake up to false alarms, a rig chief engineer tech told federal investigators.

"I discovered it was 'inhibited' about a year ago," said Mike Williams, the chief engineer tech who worked for rig owner Transocean aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which erupted in flames April 20, killing 11 men and starting the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
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"I inquired," Williams told an investigative panel from the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department in suburban New Orleans. "The explanation I got was that from the [offshore installation manager] down, they did not want people to wake up at 3 a.m. due to false alarm," Williams said. Williams later said the rig's captain had also agreed that the alarms were to be disabled.

Williams said he complained repeatedly about disabling the systems, from six months to three days prior to the rig's explosion. He said he told supervisors it was unsatisfactory for the alarms to be disabled, but was rebuffed.

The alarm systems could have been helpful to alert crew members of catastrophe and initiate an emergency shutdown system that could have shut down the engines -- a dangerous ignition source -- as soon as a surge of flammable natural gas surged up the oil well onto the rig.

This is damning testimony against Transocean, which owned the rig. Combine this with the the inadequate blowout preventer, and if the rig encountered trouble, it increased the risks of a disaster.

Moreover, this information will definitely be used in the inevitable lawsuits between the various parties involved, Transocean, BP, and other contractors on the job in trying to shift blame for the disaster. Transocean and BP will be shouldering the blame and liability here - and each will try to blame the other for the disaster and the ensuing liabilities. Disabling the alarms shows that the operators on the rig were more concerned about "workers not being awakened by false alarms" than security and safety resulting from proper operation and functioning alarms that might have given workers extra minutes and seconds to respond once the disaster was set in motion. A difference of a few seconds or minutes might have given the 11 workers who lost their lives in the disaster a fighting chance to make it to safe zones or rescue boats.

What Next For BP Well Disaster

Killing the well that has spewed anywhere from 100 to 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is still a few weeks away if the relief wells are progressing as indicated. The cap that was installed last week is apparently showing signs of a small leak, but that isn't worrying BP too much.



The tests to determine the well's integrity are showing a pressure that isn't where the engineers had hoped, indicating that there may be a leak somewhere else in the system or that the well itself has expelled such volumes of oil and gas that it isn't showing the pressures it had previously.

There are seeps of oil and gas in the vicinity of the damaged well, but BP says that they're unrelated. They may be right - one of the reasons that oil companies were drilling in the area was that geologists had seen signs of oil and gas deep underground and that some of it was making its way through the seafloor.

Thad Allen, the official appointed by Barack Obama to lead the government's response to the disaster, said leaks detected over the weekend did not threaten the well.

He said the seepage of gas from the seabed probably had nothing to do with the well. Oil and gas are known to ooze naturally from fissures in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking at a news conference last night, he said: "The small seepages we're seeing do not indicate at this point a threat to the well bore."

Yesterday he gave BP another 24 hours to keep the containment cap on the ruptured well closed, during a terse exchange of words between the company and the government over the handling of the crisis. Today, Allen said BP could keep the cap closed for at least another 24 hours, provided the company remained on alert for leaks.

Allen sent a stiff letter to BP on Sunday night ordering the oil giant to continue seismic and sonar monitoring around the well to try to get a better picture of what was happening now that the flow of oil had ostensibly stopped.

He said the company had an obligation to inform him of any problems within four hours of any seepage being detected.

AP has a summary of events and issues from around the region relating to the oil spill and its devastating consequences along the Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, BP is contemplating something called a static kill, which is suspiciously similar to the failed top kill and junk shots that didn't stop the well a few weeks back. BP seems to think that the lower pressures now seen on the well would enable the static kill to work.

The sooner those relief wells get done and can then pump in the concrete to kill the well, the better.

Once again this disaster points out the folly of being pennywise and pound foolish. By saving a few bucks by cutting corners to get this well done in the way it was, BP was hoping to save money and time. Instead, it will cost them tens of billions before it's over.

Many engineering and technological breakthroughs have come through disasters - whether it's things like building and bridge collapses, oil tanker disasters (requiring double hulls, better containment, etc.), and we can only hope that the engineers figure out better ways to shut down wells that blow out like this one other than praying and wishful thinking. It means prepositioning equipment that can deal with these kinds of disasters. It means better BOPs and a whole raft of technologies that can skim oil from waters that aren't completely still (aka everywhere other than in the safe environment of a lab).

UPDATE:
While the water in many parts of the Gulf Coast appears to be fine to the naked eye, it may not be nearly as safe as you would hope.



The petroleum counts showed higher than normal levels, but the sample from near a marina could not be measured because the sample exploded for unknown reasons. The chemist doing the tests speculated that it could have been the result of methanol, methane, or the oil dispersant used to break up the oil slicks. However, another possibility for high counts could be that oil could have been leaking from the vicinity of the marina itself. Either way, this is a situation that bears continued scrutiny.

US Not Alone In Dealing With Oil Spills and Environmental Disasters

China is dealing with a major spill in one of its major port cities, Dailan. 1,476 tons of oil spilled into the waters (the equivalent of 10,776 barrels of oil or nearly 600,000 gallons.

Nobody was hurt, but hundreds of firefighters battled flames for more than 15 hours, and state media said about 1476 tons of oil had spilled into the sea, causing a 71 square mile slick.

The clean-up operation may take five days, officials said.

Industry sources are divided on how long the port will stay shut, with some estimating between seven and more than 10 days, but officials could not give a timeframe.

"The port was sealed right after the explosion. We have a one-week contingency plan, but are hoping that the oil spill can be cleaned up as soon as possible," an oil executive told Reuters.

The incident drew the attention of top Chinese officials, including President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and security chief Zhou Yongkang, who all issued statements and instructions during the blaze. But port officials did not show up at a news conference on Monday morning, a city government official said.

Workers are using skimmers and dispersants to break up the oil slick and stop it spreading, the official China Daily said. The pollution is concentrated about 62 miles offshore.

It's small potatoes compared to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (where the new cap and tests appear to show some problems with seepage from the vicinity of the wellhead), but China's environmental disasters add up because of the sheer numbers of problems with China's lax environmental protections.

Last week, it became public that there was a major spill toxic chemicals from a copper plant that led to an outcry only after the spill reached a major river. The largest gold producer in China, which owns the copper plant, didn't disclose the leak for nine days. That was due in part to heavy rains damaging a plastic liner, but an illegal drain enabled the runoff to hit the Ting River. The company claimed that the heavy rains were responsible, but the company's conduct shows a disregard for environmental concerns.

Oil Continues Gushing From BP Well as BP and Government Struggle With Spill's Effects

What's billed as the world's largest oil skimmer is currently being tested in the Gulf near the spill site - and we may know today whether the Coast Guard and other government agencies and BP will sign off on the A Whale going into full operation.

The ship, which swallows water with oil then separates it, can skim about 21 million gallons of oil a day. That's at least 250 times the amount that modified fishing vessels currently conducting skimming operations have been able to contain, according to Taiwanese company TMT shipping, which owns the vessel.

Meanwhile, BP said Monday that the cost of its response to the Gulf oil disaster now totals approximately $3.12 billion. That includes containment, relief well drilling, grants to Gulf states, claims paid and federal costs, the oil giant said.

A total of about 550 skimming vessels were out in the Gulf on Sunday, according to a spokeswoman for the Unified Command Joint Information Center in Houma, Louisiana. But with oil still pouring into the sea at a rate of tens of thousands of barrels a day, federal authorities closed a new section of the Gulf off Louisiana to fishing on Sunday.

The A Whale could do in a day what an entire fleet of skimmers has been able to accomplish in weeks. So what's the holdup? Well, the ship doesn't separate all oil from the water. A small percentage does get through. That should be no excuse for the skimmer to go in operation since the sheer volume of this disaster demands using extraordinary means to help control the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that have harmed the Gulf.



BP says that it's spent more than $3 billion trying to contain the spill and to shut down the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. That is a fraction of the cost to the economy around the Gulf Coast effected by the destruction of sensitive wetlands and ecosystems, and the loss of jobs and livelihoods throughout the Gulf Coast.

A Whale Gets Put Through Its Paces

What's billed as the world's largest oil skimmer is being put through its paces by the US Coast Guard to see if it can do what its promoters promise. For the next 48 hours, the A Whale will be tested to see if it can process 600,000 barrels of water per day to separate out the oil slicked contaminants from sea water.

If it does work as advertised, it would be a massive upgrade to the oil gathering capabilities because the ship can work in heavier seas and process far more sea water than existing skimmers.

New Ship Skimmer May Provide Relief For Oil Containment Operations

If this ship, the A Whale, provides a fraction of what its designers claim are possible in a single day, then it would be a significant upgrade over oil containment and cleanup operations to date.

The designers claim that it could skim 500,000 barrels a day. To date, all the containment efforts have recovered 600,000 barrels.

The full story is here.

The vessel's billionaire owner, Nobu Su, the CEO of Taiwanese shipping company TMT Group, said the ship would float across the Gulf "like a lawn mower cutting the grass," ingesting up to 500,000 barrels of oil-contaminated water a day.

But a number of hurdles stand in his way. TMT officials said the company does not yet have government approval to assist in the cleanup or a contract with BP to perform the work.

That's part of the reason the ship was tied to pier at the Virginia Port Authority's Norfolk International Terminals Friday morning. TMT and its public-relations agency invited scores of media, elected officials and maritime industry executives to an hour-long presentation about how the ship could provide an immediate boost to clean-up efforts in the Gulf.

TMT also paid to fly in Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, to get a look at the massive skimmer.

Overton blasted BP and the federal government for a lack of effort and coordination in their dual oil-spill response and made a plea to the government to allow the A Whale to join the cleanup operation.

"We need this ship. We need this help," Overton said. "That oil is already contaminating our shoreline. We've got to get the ship out there and see if it works. There's only one way to find out: Get the damn thing in the gulf and we'll see."

TMT officials acknowledged that not even they're sure how well the new skimming method will work, noting that it appeared to perform well in limited testing last week.

The system would enable the ship to take in 500,000 barrels of oiled water a day, and separate out the oil from water within that quantity. Since this ship is the size of a large oil tanker, it is substantially more capable of handling the open seas and higher volumes of liquids than other skimmers currently in operation.

Can it live up to the expectations of the designers? Even if it does 25% of what's claimed, that represents a significant upgrade over what is currently available.

So, what is standing in the way of deployment? Is it red tape and requirements that the ship release water that is devoid of all oil? Coast Guard requirements? A combination of factors? Well, it would require special EPA dispensation because it wouldn't completely remove all the oil from the water.

We're already dealing with worst case scenarios up and down the Gulf Coast, and a skimming system that eliminates a great percentage of the oil it comes in contact with is substantially better than not having that system in place - and working in conjunction with other systems would enable far greater control and containment of the spreading oil slicks and plumes.

BP Admits It Never Follows Federal Law On Blowout Preventers

BP has admitted that it doesn't follow federal law on certifying blowout preventers with the Minerals Management Service. Ever.

On the issue of the blowout preventer's capabilities, [Sen. Chuck] Grassley [R-Iowa] asked BP to show that it is in compliance with the Code of Federal Regulations Chapter 30, Section 250.416(e), which requires oil companies to provide the Minerals Management Service with proof that the massive safety devices they use to close off wells are "capable of shearing the drill pipe in the hole under maximum anticipated surface pressures."

The company responded that it applies for permits to drill oil wells "in accordance with the process prescribed by MMS officials," but goes on to say that it was not "MMS practice" to require anyone to comply with that particular section of the law.

"I find it very disturbing that BP asserts that the 'practice' in oil drilling is to avoid current laws designed to keep our beaches safe," Grassley responded in his letter. "And I am outraged that MMS is looking the other way."

Now, BP is trying to shift the blame for that on to the MMS, but the fault rests with BP. They are mandated to certify those preventers and have repeatedly failed to do so. Claiming that the MMS doesn't have a procedure for certification doesn't cut it.

It is the failure of the blowout preventer that has contributed heavily to this oil spill disaster. Had the blowout preventer worked as it should have, the oil flow would have likely been stopped - leaving the spill to be much smaller than the ongoing impact.

Also, if BP is shirking its certification requirements, are the other oil companies operating offshore doing the same? If not, why are they not doing so - what's the difference between the management styles and safety standards involved. These are questions that go to liability and culpability for the management that allowed drilling to occur under less than optimal conditions and with a disregard for safety and standard procedures in the oil industry.

There's also differing accounts on whether an oil services company, Schlumberger, withdrew their workers from the Deepwater Horizon rig because of unsafe conditions, or whether BP requested they leave after deciding not to do certain work on the casing that would have added $8-12 million to the well operations, but improved safety. One report claims BP sent them home:

The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20. Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.

BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig.

However, other reports seems to indicate that Schlumberger (SLB) quit the rig and evacuated its employees because they considered the rig unsafe because the rig was not meeting its stringent safety standards.

SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the “company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.

The Congressional report seems to back the former account (that BP was done with SLB's services), and not the one that has SLB quitting the rig because of safety concerns.

BP Sets Aside $20 Billion For Spill Compensation

British Petroleum is putting aside $20 billion for spill compensation. This is a down payment on the damage, and will in no way be sufficient to compensate all those damaged by the oil spill. A 3d party administrator will probably be along the lines of the victim compensation fund set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to handle claims by victims of the attacks and run by Kenneth Feinberg.

I'm not surprised that Feinberg's name is showing up here.

Not only did he handle the victim compensation fund for the 9/11 attack, but he was again called on to administer the sick workers fund (once that gets approved by the members of the class). He also got called on to handle executive compensation following the Wall Street meltdown and ensuing hot air from Congress over executive pay.

He's real good at what he does and is generally seen as reasonable and fair in determining awards.

But to put the $20 billion in perspective, $20 billion is the amount that was thrown around in the days after 9/11 to pay for the rebuilding efforts. That severely underestimated the costs there too.

In fact, the costs for Louisiana alone may top $100 billion although it is unlikely that they will ever recoup those losses. Florida, Alabama and Mississippi would similarly see serious losses - and if the spill reaches out into the Atlantic, other states could see massive losses.

And that doesn't touch on the international liabilities if the oil damages coastlines of other countries along the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

The Oil Spill Disaster Claims Another Victim?

Is President Obama the latest victim of the oil spill? After his speech last night, it appears that he's still not getting it.

We know that BP is going to be forced to compensate all those injured by the spill and that they're going to be held responsible for the cleanup and associated costs. We've known that since day 1 (when the question of who was involved and responsible was addressed - and that litigation between all potential parties would spell out liabilities after the spill was contained and cleaned up). We know that there are going to be lawsuits - there inevitably are when you have these situations.

What exactly did we learn that was new last night?

Not much.

The President didn't cause the blowout and leak. That's all on BP - as is the clean up costs and compensation to those who have been injured by the spill. Admonishing BP again isn't helpful as we already know he's annoyed with the company; we all are.

Where the President is failing is making sure that everything that can be done to expedite the cleanup and to minimize further damage is actually being done. He was short on specifics and media outlets around the nation seized on this in their overnight editorials.

Estimates for the size of the spill and the amount still gushing from the damaged well continues to increase.

When you hear that X,Y, and Z are available to provide mitigation, but aren't known or familiar to those in charge, or that equipment overseas can be used but for existing fed laws, or that there's manpower needs to clean beaches, yet the beaches remain damaged, that looks real bad for the President and the staff responsible for dealing with this environmental disaster.

The President had to give a speech to update everyone on what he's doing, but what he said is that even weeks after the spill, the government still isn't getting the job done (because of the aforementioned lack of bringing those resources to bear).

That's where and why the President is getting failing marks.

Individual governors (MS, LA, AL, FL) have repeatedly communicated their needs for assistance. In particular, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has demanded construction of temporary barriers to prevent the influx of oil into sensitive wetlands, but has been repeatedly delayed by the red tape at the federal level.

The president should be demanding Congress pass waivers to enable those measures be taken. Expedite cleanup and mitigation - that's what the Gulf Coast wants and needs.

The nation doesn't want to hear how wind turbines will somehow prevent future occurrences down the road when the current mess is still ongoing. They certainly didn't want to hear about cap and trade - and President Obama wisely didn't explicitly bring that up last night for fear that Democrat reelection chances would be squashed in November.

The nation wants to know how the government will assist in the cleanup efforts and prevent the oil from damaging beaches up and down the Gulf Coast more than they already have.

Where is the how in last night's speech?

Smearing With Oil

Even as the Deepwater Horizon oil slick continues washing ashore all along the Gulf Coast and there's no end in sight to the oil gushing from the damaged riser, politicians are doing what they do best - smearing each other and engaging in all manner of hyperbole.

Here's what we know.

The oil rig disaster and oil slick are not equivalent to 9/11.

It's not even close President Obama.

It's a different kind of disaster, but when you start tallying the toll - in the billions of dollars and the environmental damage to the Gulf Coast, it still isn't even close. Not when you compare it to the terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, resulted in a massive government reorganization of national security and created new bureaucracies and sent the US into a war in Afghanistan along with setting the stage for the war in Iraq, there really is no comparison.

It was a bad analogy, and it shows that he is out of touch. Heck, even comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina or Rita would be a poor one because of the loss of life involved.

This disaster also isn't the President's "Iran hostage crisis".

This is a disaster in its own right, and the blame falls squarely on BP and the operators of the rig. They cut corners and there were all kinds of problems before the explosion tore the rig apart and the resulting firefighting efforts resulted in the rig sinking and tearing apart the lines to the surface allowing massive amounts of oil to spill.

The President, in addition to making multiple visits to the region where he can look serious and ponder the situation thoughtfully in photo opportunities before jetting back to the comfort of the White House, must make it absolutely clear that he will make sure that the oil companies not only prepare for oil spill disasters, but that oversight will be improved.

Moreover, the President could improve matters by pushing for a temporary (or permanent) cessation of the Jones Act so that foreign flagged ships could be used to help clean up the spill. There are ships specially designed to deal with spills in Europe that can't be brought in to assist here because of that Act; a temporary freeze would help with the spill control and recovery.

Cleanup efforts continue to be haphazard and not taking into account the resources that are available around the country that could be brought to bear. That's a problem that the Administration must respond to.

President Obama also has to address how the 6-month moratorium on oil drilling wont affect the livelihood of tens of thousands of oil workers along the Gulf Coast who rely on the oil rigs for their living (and which produces significant revenues for those states as well).

The President is scheduled to make a public speech on television tonight where he'll outline the ongoing plans to deal with the oil spill.

The spill is now washing ashore in four states along the Gulf Coast - Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi.

Demanding new federal legislation to require an oil spill compensation fund that can be used for spill control and mitigation would be a good idea - and that a portion of the spill fund requirements go to research and development of new anti-spill technologies, better blow out preventer systems, and improved stockpiling of equipment. Clearly the lessons learned by the Exxon Valdez disaster didn't go far enough - and the liability caps need to be increased to reflect inflation since it was enacted.

BP's Top Kill Appears To Be Stemming Oil Flow Into Gulf; UPDATE: Top Kill Halted

It appears that British Petroleum's efforts to seal the leaking wellhead with a top kill of mud is working. Once the pressure reaches zero, the mud being used to stem the flow will be replaced with concrete, sealing the well.

Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.

Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well has run out of the fluid, or "mud," and that a second ship is on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress.

"We'll get this under control," he said.

Allen also said that later today, an interagency team will release a revised estimate of how much oil was flowing from the well into the Gulf before the "top kill" effort began. The Coast Guard has estimated the flow at 5,000 barrels a day, but independent estimates suggest that it was much higher – perhaps tens of thousands of barrels a day.

They're busy pumping mud into the damaged wellhead so as to choke off the flow and will continue doing so until they think that they've stemmed the flow - and will then replace the mud with concrete to cap the well. If this works, it will stem the flow of new oil into the Gulf, but doesn't do anything to deal with the ongoing mess from the millions of gallons that have already flowed into the Gulf.

In the years since the Exxon Valdez, how come scientists and researchers haven't come up with better ways to deal with oil spills than containment booms and skimmers? Is there no better technologies that can clear the oil spills? Dispersants are being used in some areas, and the federal government doesn't want them used because of the toxic effects, even as they were previously approved. Other areas have seen crews burning off the oil, which exchanges one form of pollution for another (and which leaves one wondering whether it would have been better to leave the Deepwater Horizon burning so as to minimize the spill damage in the Gulf rather than attempt to fight the fire that ended up sinking the rig and damaging the riser and related parts to cause multiple leaks down to the wellhead.

Out of disasters come the opportunity for new tech and techniques to deal with such messes. Let's hope that the oil industry gets the lesson and that Congress does the right thing too (and on that I'm not hopeful).

Congress should do what it should have been doing all along in increasing the liability caps for years to account for inflation - and required that not only that skimmers and booms be present in the Gulf, but that BOPs and other shutoff technologies be better tested and required. Moreover, special consideration must be paid to deep water drilling sites, where the pressures and technologies must be much more robust than surface or near surface sites.

UPDATE:
Even as the good news about the top kill continues to filter in, reports of discovering another undersea plume of oil from the well show just how difficult it is to get a handle on the amount of oil that leaked from the damaged well.

The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school, says the thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet. He says it's more than 6 miles wide.

The report also indicates that the plume may be the result of using dispersants on surface oil.

UPDATE:
The head of the Mineral Management Service that has oversight responsibilities for offshore wells resigned. Earlier reports had indicated that she had been fired, but it's clear that there was pressure for her to be canned.

UPDATE:
BP has halted their attempt at a top kill because pressure flows indicate that there are additional leaks that have to be stemmed before they can seal the well. That's not good news and can delay shutting down the flow. It means that the oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico and add to an already estimated 230,000 barrels that have done so thus far.

Gulf Coast Oil Slick Threatens Wildlife and Livelihoods as BP Moves To Stop Leak

Oil continues to seep out of several cracks in a wellhead more than 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. BP is hoping a device can be lowered down to the site of the leaks that would siphon off the oil and quench the flow that threatens wildlife and livelihoods throughout the Gulf Coast.

In its efforts to minimize the widening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP will deploy a large structure in the next 6 to 8 days to capture leaking oil. Here's how it works.

Called the Subsea Oil Recovery System, the 125-ton structure is designed to be placed over the largest source of oil leaking 5,000 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The system collects the leaking oil and pumps it through a funnel and pipe to a tanker at the surface, which stores it and ships the oil to shore.

The structure is a 40-foot tall concrete chimney that conveys leaking oil to a ship on the surface, the Deepwater Enterprise. Once there, oil is separated from water and stored until the ship can return to shore, where it is offloaded and shipped to an on-shore terminal.

The ship is capable of storing 139,000 barrels of oil, processing it at a rate of 15,000 barrels per day. BP hopes it will be able to collect as much as 85 percent of the oil leaking from the sea floor.

It will be several days before they can lower the device to the sea floor and in the meantime, the environmental damage is starting to be tallied as oil slicks start to come ashore.

China Delays Reporting Yet Another Environmental Disaster

China's environmental record reeks and yet we're supposed to believe that they're serious about curbing carbon emissions? They can't even honestly report massive oil spills on their largest and most important river in a timely fashion.

China’s state-run news media said late Saturday that a “large amount” of diesel oil had leaked out of a pipeline last Thursday in Shaanxi Province.

The government has not explained why the report of the spill was not released until late Saturday. But Xinhua, the official state news agency, said the leak was caused by construction work and that a crew of 700 people was struggling to contain the damage from about 150,000 liters, or about 40,000 gallons, of diesel oil.

The damaged pipeline belongs to the China National Petroleum Corporation, one of the country’s state-owned oil giants and the parent company of PetroChina. The company said Saturday that it had shut down the pipeline and that “much of the leaked oil and polluted silt has already been taken away.” But government officials in Shaanxi province said on Saturday that oil has been detected far downstream from the leak and warned local residents not to use water in the region.

The oil pipeline, which transports oil from northwest China to central parts of the country, was damaged and released oil into the Chisui River and Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River, according to Xinhua.

It's not the first time a chemical spill has imperiled millions of people who rely on China's many rivers for potable water. In December 2005, a benzene spill forced millions of people downstream of the leak on the Songhua River to find alternative water sources, and the spill worked its way into Russia before it was fully contained. Yet the Chinese authorities responsible didn't report the leak to those downstream for days.

China's reporting of these environmental disasters and its reckless disregard for human lives that it puts at risk must change. It needed to change after the Songhua disaster, and it still needs to change.

China's attitude towards the environment must change; it imperils not only those living in China, but the rest of the world with its ever increasing emissions of all manner of gases and particulates.

The Not So Green Face Of Green Tech

While the outcome of using rare earth elements may be technologies that are able to more efficiently create electricity, the process to obtain them is about as destructive to the environment as one can get. In fact, because much of the mining of these elements takes place in China, the destructive nature of the mining and refining operations is done with little care for the environment.

Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.

On a recent rainy afternoon, Zeng Guohui, a 41-year-old laborer, walked to an abandoned mine where he used to shovel ore, and pointed out still-barren expanses of dirt and mud. The mine exhausted the local deposit of heavy rare earths in three years, but a decade after the mine closed, no one has tried to revive the downstream rice fields.

Small mines producing heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium still operate on nearby hills. “There are constant protests because it damages the farmland — people are always demanding compensation,” Mr. Zeng said.

“In many places, the mining is abused,” said Wang Caifeng, the top rare-earths industry regulator at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China.
“This has caused great harm to the ecology and environment.”

There are 17 rare-earth elements — some of which, despite the name, are not particularly rare — but two heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, are in especially short supply, mainly because they have emerged as the miracle ingredients of green energy products. Tiny quantities of dysprosium can make magnets in electric motors lighter by 90 percent, while terbium can help cut the electricity usage of lights by 80 percent. Dysprosium prices have climbed nearly sevenfold since 2003, to $53 a pound. Terbium prices quadrupled from 2003 to 2008, peaking at $407 a pound, before slumping in the global economic crisis to $205 a pound.

China mines more than 99 percent of the world’s dysprosium and terbium. Most of China’s production comes from about 200 mines here in northern Guangdong and in neighboring Jiangxi Province.

China is also the world’s dominant producer of lighter rare earth elements, valuable to a wide range of industries. But these are in less short supply, and the mining is more regulated.

The quest to locate supplies of these materials around the world often takes prospectors to countries that have no regard for the environmental consequences of mining and illegal mining is rampant.

The companies that rely on these materials have no way to know how much of the materials come from licensed mines or how much is done at illegal mines that use all manner of acids to leach the rare earth elements from the rocks; and those acids pollute the soil and taint the surrounding water.

The biggest user of rare earth elements in coming years may actually be wind turbines, which are made more efficient using these elements.

So, what are considered green tech on first blush are anything but given that the destructive means under which they are obtained is anything but environmentally responsible. Once the supply chain is included, the green tech is considerably less green.

China's Unending Quake Nightmare

Even though the massive Chinese earthquake occurred nearly a month ago on May 12, the Chinese people in the Sichuan region are living with the dangerous after effects that are just as frightening.

There are dozens of rivers that had been dammed by debris and mudslides, many of which threaten hundreds of thousands of people living downstream. One in particular was blasted by the Chinese military to relieve the strain and reduce the possibility that the dam would burst sending torrents downstream without warning.

This particular effort flooded part of a ruined city, sweeping all manner of debris into the surging muddy torrent. All that debris is going to end up somewhere, and when it does finally settle, it could result in severely damaged river habitat, affect drinking water, and the navigability of the river.

The Chinese military had been concerned that the dam would simply give way, creating a wall of water crashing through the valley below where some 250,0000 people have been evacuated to safer ground. The authorities have said that if the dam breaks, up to a million people could find themselves in the path of flood waters.

Television footage showed a surge of muddy water sweeping trees and vehicles before it as it flowed through lower-lying parts of Beichuan in a broad loop, spilling into side streets.

Chinese authorities have told former residents of Beichuan that the town will be abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. It was one of the worst hit in the quake and some 15,000 people died there. Many of its buildings were wrecked or damaged. The overall official death toll from the earthquake — the worst in a generation — was almost 70,000.

Witnesses downstream from Beichuan said the water flowing from the dam had turned into a broad, fast-flowing stream hundreds of yards wide at Mianyang, which is home to some of those evacuated from Beichuan.

Chinese authorities insisted that the situation had not slipped out of control, Reuters reported from the region.

“The flow downstream has increased dramatically, but the dam hasn’t collapsed,” Zhou Hua, spokesman for the lake relief operation, told Reuters. “The channel has widened but this isn’t a collapse. “So far everything is happening within expectations. As things are, we don’t expect to have to evacuate any more.”

But many former residents took the torrent as the final confirmation that they would never return to homes, stores and other businesses.

While the need for evacuations has been lessened, the problems will continue in China for some time to come.

UPDATE:
5 million homeless, and the hits will keep on coming.

The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 233

We owe the workers at Ground Zero more than being simply the new liquidators. Instead, we get CYA and spreading the blame around by former EPA head Christie Todd Whitman, who was grilled over her agency's handling of events following 9/11, particularly her statements about air quality in the days and weeks following the collapse of the towers.

There are many workers who worked on the pile and in and around Ground Zero who are suffering a variety of respiratory ailments, and many are attributing those ailments to the time spent in and around Ground Zero.

Whitman, of course, denies that the EPA misled the public, and then turns around and claims that others were responsible for sending mixed messages - Rudy Giuliani being one. She claims that Rudy didn't do a good enough job of requiring firefighters and others working at the site to wear protective garb.

Whitman blames former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his staff for not adequately protecting police officers, firefighters and other workers at Ground Zero.

Whitman claims that the city should have made the workers wear respirators. She says her agency called the mayor's staff daily and was frustrated when the workers didn't wear them.

But Giuliani, who is now running for president, disputes Whitman's claim. A deputy mayor of his is calling Whitman's remarks "revisionist at best."

Those working at the pile didn't have access to the respirators in the early going because of the numbers involved, but as work progressed on the site, some workers took to not wearing them because they were hot and uncomfortable. At some point, there is personal responsibility for those at the site, but the government also owes the workers a duty of care that has not been followed.

Whitman also says that she was making distinctions between those working on the Pile and those who lived and worked nearby - as proximity being a key factor in exposure.

The problem is that the EPA did mislead the public about the air quality in Lower Manhattan in the days and months following the attacks. Anyone who walked through the area could not help but note the sickly metallic odor emenating from Ground Zero as the fires continued to burn deep inside the pile and the smoke continued to rise from the ashes for weeks afterwards. The ash and pulverized materials from the collapsing towers covered everything, and scientists are still trying to analyze the materials to determine long term risks and hazards.

The EPA also misled about the small number of samples that showed unsafe levels of asbestos in the air. It turns out that the large number of samples were taken from apartments that had already been decontaminated:

The Government Accountability Office report says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to disclose that 80 percent of air samples taken to test the safety of 4,000 lower Manhattan apartments were taken after the residences had been professionally decontaminated, The New York Times reported Thursday.

So, based on those numbers, thousands of others living in the area opted not to clean their residences, believing that they were not at risk. Lovely.

China's Malfeasance Know No Boundaries

If they're not destroying the environment one toxic spill at a time, or shipping food stuffs for pets or human consumption that are laced with toxic chemicals, they're shipping endangered species for human consumption.

According to the local media, the cargo included 31 pangolins, 44 leatherback turtles, 2,720 monitor lizards, 1,130 Brazilian turtles as well as the bear paws. Photographs showed other animals, including an Asian giant turtle.

All of these south-east Asian species are critically endangered, banned from international trade and yet openly sold in restaurants and markets in China's southern province of Guangdong, which is famous for its exotic cuisine.

The accidental discovery highlights the negative impact that the growing power of Chinese consumption is having on global conservation efforts.

The rapacious consumption of resources by China isn't confined to food. Energy demands are pushing the price of oil ever higher, and China isn't afraid to make deals with the scum of the earth to obtain oil. That means making deals with the likes of the Sudanese government and Nigeria and Iran. Cheap oil and the need to protect their deals means that the Chinese will prevent UN action against those regimes on human rights grounds, such as the Darfur genocide. For those who love to tout no blood for oil, you'd be hard pressed to find a translation into Chinese. They have no problem with that trade.