Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Today in BP Oil Disaster: Day 57
Posted by Alex Woodward on Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 4:11 PM
- From Scott Walker's now-viral report from Grand Isle, to Bigad Shaban's tweets and photographers and videographers getting kicked off public beaches — there is a massive disconnect from Thad Allen's, Ken Salazar's and Doug Suttles' pointed, no-B.S. statements allowing media to cover what they need to cover, and the people on the ground.
- Walker spoke with media lawyer Mary Ellen Roy to answer, "Can they do that?" Short answer: No.
Tony Buzbee, a Houston attorney with a long record of winning settlements from oil companies, is representing Halliburton service supervisor Christopher Haire, who helped perform safety tests on the rig on April 20, the day of the blowout that killed 11 workers. That afternoon, Halliburton contractors performed negative pressure testing, a routine safety check that creates a sucking effect to test for leaks in a well's cement and casings. Haire helped with two negative pressure tests, both of which indicated potential problems with the well the rig had been drilling, known as Macondo. Buzbee says that statements he's taken from Haire suggest that an alleged additional test was not actually completed. Haire was injured when the rig exploded; Buzbee says his client is "focusing on his medical treatment" and unavailable for comment.
American Bird ConservancyDefenders of Wildlife
Ducks Unlimited
EarthShare
Environmental Defense Fund
Friends of the Earth
Greenpeace Fund
International Fund for Animal Welfare
National Audubon Society
National Wildlife Federation
Natural Resources Defense Council
Nature Conservancy
Oceana
For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, “top kills” and “junk shots” have failed, and a “spillcam” shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day.
Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom.
From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.
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They have admitted that the only way to prevent this from ever happening again is to stop deepwater oil drilling....... This toxic gusher is certainly frightening for us all. Did You Know? BP engineers alerted federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service that they were having difficulty controlling the Macondo well (Deepwater Horizon) six weeks before the disaster, according to e- mails released by the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I don’t think this would have happened on Exxon’s watch,” Tom Bower, author of “The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century,” said in a June 11 Bloomberg Television interview. “They’d be much more careful and much more conscious of the need to supervise subcontractors.” WELL excuse me your sainted Exxon....... and Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Let’s just take a look at a few of your past misdemeanours, and then we can consider again – if the moratorium on deepwater drilling should be lifted, and place it all firmly back into your nice clean hands! http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/06/fairy-stories-about-oil-companies.html
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