US oil slick triggers emergency

[dennis tooth]

Drilling underway for Canada's deepest oil well

 

 

The exploratory well in the North Atlantic, a prospect known as Lona 0-55, is set to establish a new record in Canada with water depth at 2,600 meters (8,530 feet), Chevron said. The Stena Carron drill ship is sinking the well.

 

That's one kilometer (3,280 feet) deeper than the well that was being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig before it ruptured, gushing an estimated 210,000 gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico each day.

 

Eager to avert the kind of PR disaster that has embroiled rival energy giant BP over the US oil slick, Chevron was careful to stress that for its new Canada drilling, "the primary focus of the experienced team managing drilling operations is on ensuring safe and incident-free operations during drilling."

 

The exploratory well, expected to be drilled and evaluated over several months, is located in the largely unexplored Orphan Basin, an area stretching across 100,000 square kilometers (62,140 square miles). It is some 430 kilometers (270 miles) northeast of Newfoundland's capital St. John's.

 

Local officials have also gone at lengths to reassure locals.

 

"We are confident... We're satisfied at this point in time that it is safe and prudent to continue with drilling in the Orphan Basin," Newfoundland and Labrador Natural Resources Minister Kathy Dunderdale told CBC News.

 

"If there are other steps that we can take that will give us assurance, and give the people of the province assurance about the activity on our offshore, then we are going to do that."

 

Newfoundland's premier, Danny Williams, vowed last week to recruit an independent expert to review the drilling plans.

 

According to CBC, Chevron Canada has two drill ships under contract that could drill relief wells for the Lona 0-55 prospect, which could slow any spill by relieving pressure should the well suffer a blow-out.

 

Chevron Canada Limited has a 50 percent stake in the venture. Other participants include Shell Canada Energy, ExxonMobil Canada Ltd. and Imperial Oil Resources Ventures Limited.

[Mathewbet1]

This is the worlds worse environmental disaster and it has largely been covered up by the British Government / BP. Disgrace.

[dennis tooth]

Workers aboard an exploding offshore drilling platform were told to sign statements denying they were hurt or witnessed the blast that rocked the rig, killed 11 and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, their attorneys said Tuesday.

 

Survivors floated for hours in life boats in the Gulf of Mexico following the disaster on the Deepwater Horizon, and were greeted by company officials onshore asking them to sign statements that they had no "first hand or personal knowledge" of the incident, attorneys said.

 

"These men are told they have to sign these statements or they can't go home," said Tony Buzbee, a Houston-based attorney for 10 Transocean workers. "I think it's pretty callous, but I'm not surprised by it."

 

Complete Coverage: Disaster in the Gulf

 

Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for rig owner Transocean Ltd., refused to answer whether Transocean or any company attached to the firm had supplied the statement, claiming it was inappropriate to comment on litigation.

 

"Our focus has been on the crewmembers and their families, working with all parties in the response efforts and conducting a Transocean investigation into the incident," he said Monday.

 

The men were kept for at least 10 hours at sea, then taken to a hotel on shore in Louisiana to sign the forms and be debriefed, according to Buzbee and court documents filed in lawsuits already brought by some Transocean employees. While such statements have no legal force and are a common industry practice, they are often used to attack the credibility of workers who later sue or testify in a lawsuit, Buzbee said.

 

"When I signed that I didn't care what it was. I wanted to sign the papers to do whatever I had to do so me and my wife could leave to go home," Chris Choy, a 23-year-old surviving worker said in an interview that aired Monday night with PBS' "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." "I'd been up for 40 hours and was just going through hell."

 

Choy said he tried to save Aaron Dale Burkeen of Mississippi, one of 11 workers missing and presumed dead following the explosion, before being evacuated from the burning rig to a cargo boat where he watched the rig go down in flames.

 

"One of my clients was trying to get counseling and they had them sign this form," said Kurt Arnold, another Houston-based attorney who filed suit on behalf of three workers and the widow of a deceased crane operator last week. "They were trying to get as many of these guys to sign these statements as possible."

 

Robert Wine, a BP spokesman, reviewed the statement and said it had "nothing to do with BP."

 

"We did not make our 6 employees sign anything, let alone a waiver," he said in a statement.

 

Rig workers or their families have filed at least several wrongful death or personal injury lawsuits against Transocean, rig operator BP PLC and other companies involved in the offshore drilling operation.

 

Fishermen, property owners, restaurateurs, resort companies and others have filed nearly 50 potential class-action lawsuits claiming the spill is causing or will cause steep economic losses.

 

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon has triggered a major environmental disaster because an uncapped well continues to spew at least 210,000 gallons per day into the Gulf.

[dennis tooth]

SHIP ISLAND, Miss. -- Federal wildlife officials are treating the deaths of six dolphins on the Gulf Coast as oil-related even though other factors may be to blame.

 

Blair Mase (MACE') of the National Marine Fisheries Service said Tuesday that the carcasses have all been found in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama since May 2. Samples have been sent for testing to see whether a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico helped kill the dolphins.

 

Mase and animal rescue coordinator Michele Kelley in Louisiana said none of the carcasses has obvious signs of oil. Mase also said it's common for dead dolphins to wash up this time of year when they are in shallow waters to calve.

[dennis tooth]

Hundreds of Dead Fish Wash Up on Public Beach in Alabama After Oil Sightings (Photos + Video) : TreeHugger

[dennis tooth]

There's at least 10 times as much oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico than official estimates suggest, according to an exclusive NPR analysis.

NPR's Richard Harris talks to Michele Norris on All Things Considered

[3 min 45 sec]

 

* Add to Playlist

 

 

 

At NPR's request, experts analyzed video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

 

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.

 

Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the sea-floor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

 

A computer program simply tracks particles, and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

 

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

 

Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.

 

"There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said.

 

But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low.

 

"We're talking more than a factor of 10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said.

 

At least two other calculations support him.

 

Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone says the flow is at least 50,000 barrels a day.

 

Eugene Chaing, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, got a similar answer just using pencil and paper.

 

Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark.

 

"I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he says.

 

Chiang calls the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect."

 

Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters.

 

"It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said.

 

BP disputed these figures.

 

"We've said all along that there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately," said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman.

 

Instead, BP prefers to rely on measurements of oil on the sea surface made by the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are also contentious. Salvin also says these analyses should not assume that the oil is spewing from the 21-inch pipe, called a riser, shown in the video.

 

"The drill pipe, from which the oil is rising, is actually a 9-inch pipe that rests within the riser," Slavin said.

 

But Werleley says that fact doesn't skew his calculation. And though scientists say they hope that BP will eventually release more video and information so they can refine their estimates, what they have now is good enough.

 

"It's possible to get a pretty decent number by looking at the video," Wereley said.

 

This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.

[dennis tooth]

Marine scientists study ocean-floor film of Deepwater oil leak - environmentalresearchweb

 

How Soon Did BP Know the Oil Leaks Were Releasing 70,000 Barrels Per Day and Not 5,000? : TreeHugger

[dennis tooth]

Obama slams BP, other oil executives for "ridiculous spectacle" - Monsters and Critics

[Funkasy]

This dissaster does get fairly little coverage when you think about how big it is.

[Newport]

Video: There Will Be Blame | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

[dennis tooth]

Huge underwater oil plumes found in Gulf of Mexico  | ajc.com

 

BP fails to link tube to oil leak

 

Procedures questioned at second BP rig | delawareonline.com | The News Journal

[dennis tooth]

FOCUS Information Agency

[dennis tooth]

(CBS) The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf. But it comes to many millions of gallons since the catastrophic blowout. Eleven men were killed in the explosions that sank one of the most sophisticated drilling rigs in the world, the "Deepwater Horizon."

 

This week Congress continues its investigation, but Capitol Hill has not heard from the man "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley met: Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno.

 

He says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps. The night of the disaster, he was in his workshop when he heard the rig's engines suddenly run wild. That was the moment that explosive gas was shooting across the decks, being sucked into the engines that powered the rig's generators.

 

"I hear the engines revving. The lights are glowing. I'm hearing the alarms. I mean, they're at a constant state now. It's just, 'Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.' It doesn't stop. But even that's starting to get drowned out by the sound of the engine increasing in speed. And my lights get so incredibly bright that they physically explode. I'm pushing my way back from the desk when my computer monitor exploded," Williams told Pelley.

 

The rig was destroyed on the night of April 20. Ironically, the end was coming only months after the rig's greatest achievement.

 

Mike Williams was the chief electronics technician in charge of the rig's computers and electrical systems. And seven months before, he had helped the crew drill the deepest oil well in history, 35,000 feet.

 

"It was special. There's no way around it. Everyone was talking about it. The congratulations that were flowing around, it made you feel proud to work there," he remembered.

 

Williams worked for the owner, Transocean, the largest offshore drilling company. Like its sister rigs, the Deepwater Horizon cost $350 million, rose 378 feet from bottom to top. Both advanced and safe, none of her 126 crew had been seriously injured in seven years.

 

The safety record was remarkable, because offshore drilling today pushes technology with challenges matched only by the space program.

 

Deepwater Horizon was in 5,000 feet of water and would drill another 13,000 feet, a total of three miles. The oil and gas down there are under enormous pressure. And the key to keeping that pressure under control is this fluid that drillers call "mud."

 

"Mud" is a manmade drilling fluid that's pumped down the well and back up the sides in continuous circulation. The sheer weight of this fluid keeps the oil and gas down and the well under control.

 

The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long.

 

Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.

 

With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.

 

"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.

 

Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called "mud."

 

"We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe," Williams explained.

 

That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars.

 

"We were informed of this during one of the safety meetings, that somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million was lost in bottom hole assembly and 'mud.' And you always kind of knew that in the back of your mind when they start throwing these big numbers around that there was gonna be a push coming, you know? A push to pick up production and pick up the pace," Williams said.

 

Asked if there was pressure on the crew after this happened, Williams told Pelley, "There's always pressure, but yes, the pressure was increased."

 

But the trouble was just beginning: when drilling resumed, Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged.

 

Down near the seabed is the blowout preventer, or BOP. It's used to seal the well shut in order to test the pressure and integrity of the well, and, in case of a blowout, it's the crew's only hope. A key component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe.

 

Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

 

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams told Pelley.

 

And, Williams says, he knew about another problem with the blowout preventer.

 

The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

 

Transocean tells us the BOP was tested by remote control after these incidents and passed. But nearly a mile below, there was no way to know how much damage there was or whether the pod was unreliable.

n the hours before the disaster, Deepwater Horizon's work was nearly done. All that was left was to seal the well closed. The oil would be pumped out by another rig later. Williams says, that during a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted.

 

"I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said 'Well my process is different. And I think we're gonna do it this way.' And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge," Williams said.

 

On the day of the accident, several BP managers were on the Deepwater Horizon for a ceremony to congratulate the crew for seven years without an injury. While they where there, a surge of explosive gas came flying up the well from three miles below. The rig's diesel engines which power its electric generators sucked in the gas and began to run wild.

 

"I'm hearing hissing. Engines are over-revving. And then all of a sudden, all the lights in my shop just started getting brighter and brighter and brighter. And I knew then something bad was getting ready to happen," Williams told Pelley.

 

It was almost ten at night. And directly under the Deepwater Horizon there were four men in a fishing boat, Albert Andry, Dustin King, Ryan Chaisson and Westley Bourg.

 

"When I heard the gas comin' out, I knew exactly what it was almost immediately," Bourg recalled.

 

"When the gas cloud was descending on you, what was that like?" Pelley asked.

"It was scary. And when I looked at it, it burned my eyes. And I knew we had to get out of there," Andry recalled.

 

Andry said he knew the gas was methane.

 

On the rig, Mike Williams was reaching for a door to investigate the engine noise.

 

"These are three inch thick, steel, fire-rated doors with six stainless steel hinges supporting 'em on the frame. As I reach for the handle, I heard this awful hissing noise, this whoosh. And at the height of the hiss, a huge explosion. The explosion literally rips the door from the hinges, hits, impacts me and takes me to the other side of the shop. And I'm up against a wall, when I finally come around, with a door on top of me. And I remember thinking to myself, 'You know, this, this is it. I'm gonna die right here,'" Williams remembered.

 

Meanwhile, the men on the fishing boat had a camera, capturing the flames on the water.

 

"I began to crawl across the floor. As I got to the next door, it exploded. And took me, the door, and slid me about 35 feet backwards again. And planted me up against another wall. At that point, I actually got angry. I was mad at the doors. I was mad that these fire doors that are supposed to protect me are hurting me. And at that point, I made a decision. 'I'm going to get outside. I may die out there, but I'm gonna get outside.' So I crawl across the grid work of the floor and make my way to that opening, where I see the light. I made it out the door and I thought to myself, 'I've accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I made it outside. At least now I can breathe. I may die out here, but I can breathe,'" Williams said.

 

Williams couldn't see; something was pouring into his eyes and that's when he noticed a gash in his forehead.

 

"I didn't know if it was blood. I didn't know if it was brains. I didn't know if it was flesh. I didn't know what it was. I just knew there was, I was, I was in trouble. At that point I grabbed a lifejacket, I was on the aft lifeboat deck there were two functioning lifeboats at my disposal right there. But I knew I couldn't board them. I had responsibilities," he remembered.

 

His responsibility was to report to the bridge, the rig's command center.

 

"I'm hearing alarms. I'm hearing radio chatter, 'May day! May day! We've lost propulsion! We've lost power! We have a fire! Man overboard on the starboard forward deck,'" Williams remembered.

 

Williams says that, on the bridge, he watched them try to activate emergency systems. "The BOP that was supposed to protect us and keep us from the blowout obviously had failed. And now, the emergency disconnect to get us away from this fuel source has failed. We have no communications to the BOP," he explained.

 

"And I see one of the lifeboats in the water, and it's motoring away from the vessel. I looked at the captain and asked him. I said, 'What's going on?' He said, 'I've given the order to abandon ship,'" Williams said.

 

Every Sunday they had practiced lifeboat drills and the procedure for making sure everyone was accounted for. But in the panic all that went to hell. The lifeboats were leaving.

 

"They're leaving without you?" Pelley asked.

 

"They have left, without the captain and without knowing that they had everyone that had survived all this onboard. I've been left now by two lifeboats. And I look at the captain and I said, 'What do we do now? By now, the fire is not only on the derrick, it's starting to spread to the deck. At that point, there were several more explosions, large, intense explosions," Williams said.

 

Asked what they felt and sounded like, Williams said, "It's just take-your-breath-away type explosions, shake your body to the core explosions. Take your vision away from the percussion of the explosions."

 

About eight survivors were left on the rig. They dropped an inflatable raft from a crane, but with only a few survivors on the raft, it was launched, leaving Williams, another man, and a crewwoman named Andrea.

 

"I remember looking at Andrea and seeing that look in her eyes. She had quit. She had given up. I remember her saying, 'I'm scared.' And I said, 'It's okay to be scared. I'm scared too.' She said, 'What are we gonna do?' I said, 'We're gonna burn up. Or we're gonna jump,'" Williams remembered.

 

Williams estimates it was a 90-100 foot jump down.

 

In the middle of the night, with blood in his eyes, fire at his back and the sea ten stories below, Williams made his choice.

 

"I remember closing my eyes and sayin' a prayer, and asking God to tell my wife and my little girl that Daddy did everything he could and if, if I survive this, it's for a reason. I made those three steps, and I pushed off the end of the rig. And I fell for what seemed like forever. A lotta things go through your mind," he remembered.

 

With a lifejacket, Williams jumped feet first off the deck and away from the inferno. He had witnessed key events before the disaster. But if he was going to tell anyone, he would have to survive a ten-story drop into the sea.

 

"I went down way, way below the surface, obviously. And when I popped back up, I felt like, 'Okay, I've made it.' But I feel this God-awful burning all over me. And I'm thinking, 'Am I on fire?' You know, I just don't know. So I start doin' the only thing I know to do, swim. I gotta start swimmin', I gotta get away from this thing. I could tell I was floatin' in oil and grease and, and diesel fuel. I mean, it's just the smell and the feel of it," Williams remembered.

 

"And I remember lookin' under the rig and seein' the water on fire. And I thought, 'What have you done? You were dry, and you weren't covered in oil up there, now you've jumped and you've made this, and you've landed in oil. The fire's gonna come across the water, and you're gonna burn up.' And I thought, 'You just gotta swim harder.' So I swam, and I kicked and I swam and I kicked and I swam as hard as I could until I remember not feelin' any more pain, and I didn't hear anything. And I thought, 'Well, I must have burned up, 'cause I don't feel anything, I don't hear anything, I don't smell anything. I must be dead.' And I remember a real faint voice of, 'Over here, over here.' I thought, 'What in the world is that?' And the next thing I know, he grabbed my lifejacket and flipped me over into this small open bow boat. I didn't know who he was, I didn't know where he'd come from, I didn't care. I was now out of the water," he added.

 

Williams' survival may be critical to the investigation. We took his story to Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Last week, the White House asked Bea to help analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident. Bea investigated the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster for NASA and the Hurricane Katrina disaster for the National Science Foundation. Bea's voice never completely recovered from the weeks he spent in the flood in New Orleans. But as the White House found, he's among the nation's best, having investigated more than 20 offshore rig disasters.

 

"Mr. Williams comes forward with these very detailed elements from his viewpoint on a rig. That's a brave and intelligent man," Bea told Pelley.

 

"What he's saying is very important to this investigation, you believe?" Pelley asked.

 

"It is," the professor replied.

 

What strikes Bea is Williams' description of the blowout preventer. Williams says in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well.

 

"According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, ‘Look, don't worry about it.' What does that tell you?" Pelley asked.

 

"Houston we have a problem," Bea replied.

 

Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.

 

"So if the annular is damaged, if I understand you correctly, you can't do the pressure tests in a reliable way?" Pelley asked.

 

"That's correct. You may get pressure test recordings, but because you're leaking pressure, they are not reliable," Bea explained.

 

Williams also told us that a backup control system to the blowout preventer called a pod had lost some of its functions.

 

"What is the standard operating procedure if you lose one of the control pods?" Pelley asked.

 

"Reestablish it, fix it. It's like losing one of your legs," Bea said.

 

"The morning of the disaster, according to Williams, there was an argument in front of all the men on the ship between the Transocean manager and the BP manager. Do you know what that argument is about?" Pelley asked.

 

Bea replied, "Yes," telling Pelley the argument was about who was the boss.

 

In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.

 

Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps."

 

"It's a matter of going faster," Pelley remarked.

 

"Faster, sure," Bea replied.

 

Bea said BP had won that argument.

 

"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.

 

"It doesn't look like it," Bea replied.

 

To do it BP's way, they had to be absolutely certain that the first two plugs were keeping the pressure down. That life or death test was done using the blowout preventer which Mike Williams says had a damaged gasket.

 

Investigators have also found the BOP had a hydraulic leak and a weak battery.

 

"Weeks before the disaster they know they are drilling in a dangerous formation, the formation has told them that," Pelley remarked.

 

"Correct," Bea replied.

 

"And has cost them millions of dollars. And the blowout preventer is broken in a number of ways," Pelley remarked.

 

"Correct," Bea replied.

 

Asked what would be the right thing to do at that point, Bea said, "I express it to my students this way, 'Stop, think, don't do something stupid.'"

 

They didn't stop. As the drilling fluid was removed, downward pressure was relieved; the bottom plug failed. The blowout preventer didn't work. And 11 men were incinerated; 115 crewmembers survived.

 

And two days later, the Deepwater Horizon sank to the bottom.

 

This was just the latest disaster for a company that is the largest oil producer in the United States. BP, once known as British Petroleum, was found willfully negligent in a 2005 Texas refinery explosion that killed of its 15 workers. BP was hit with $108 million in fines - the highest workplace safety fines in U.S. history.

 

Now, there is new concern about another BP facility in the Gulf: a former BP insider tells us the platform "Atlantis" is a greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon.

 

Ken Abbott has worked for Shell and GE. And in 2008 he was hired by BP to manage thousands of engineering drawings for the Atlantis platform.

 

"They serve as blueprints and also as a operator manual, if you will, on how to make this work, and more importantly how to shut it down in an emergency," Abbott explained.

 

But he says he found that 89 percent of those critical drawings had not been inspected and approved by BP engineers. Even worse, he says 95 percent of the underwater welding plans had never been approved either.

 

"Are these welding procedures supposed to be approved in the paperwork before the welds are done?" Pelley asked.

 

"Absolutely. Yeah," Abbott replied. “They’re critical."

 

Abbott's charges are backed up by BP internal e-mails. In 2008, BP manager Barry Duff wrote that the lack of approved drawings could result in "catastrophic operator errors," and "currently there are hundreds if not thousands of Subsea documents that have never been finalized."

 

Duff called the practice "fundamentally wrong."

 

"I've never seen this kind of attitude, where safety doesn't seem to matter and when you complain of a problem like Barry did and like I did and try to fix it, you're just criticized and pushed aside," Abbott said.

 

Abbott was laid off. He took his concerns to a consumer advocacy group called Food & Water Watch. They're asking Congress to investigate. And he is filing suit in an attempt to force the federal government to shut down Atlantis.

 

"The Atlantis is still pumping away out there--200,000 barrels a day, and it will be four times that in a year or two when they put in all 16 wells. If something happens there, it will make the Deepwater Horizon look like a bubble in the water by comparison," Abbott said.

In an e-mail, BP told us the Atlantis crew has all the documents it needs to run the platform safely. We also wanted BP's perspective on the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

 

The company scheduled an interview with its CEO, Tony Hayward. Then, they cancelled, saying no one at BP could sit down with "60 Minutes" for this report.

 

In other interviews, Hayward says this about Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon: "The responsibility for safety on the drilling rig is with Transocean. It is their rig, their equipment, their people, their systems, their safety processes."

 

"When BP's chief executive Tony Hayward says, 'This is Transocean’s accident,' what do you say?" Pelley asked Professor Bea.

 

"I get sick. This kind of division in the industry is a killer. The industry is comprised of many organizations. And they all share the responsibility for successful operations. And to start placing, we'll call it these barriers, and pointing fingers at each other, is totally destructive," he replied.

 

Asked who is responsible for the Deepwater Horizon accident, Bea said, "BP."

 

We went out on the Gulf and found mats of thick floating oil. No one has a fix on how much oil is shooting out of the well. But some of the best estimates suggest it's the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every four to seven days. Scientists are now reporting vast plumes of oil up to ten miles long under the surface.

 

The spill has cost BP about $500 million so far. But consider, in just the first three months this year, BP made profits of $6 billion.

 

There are plenty of accusations to go around that BP pressed for speed, Halliburton's cement plugs failed, and Transocean damaged the blowout preventer.

 

Through all the red flags, they pressed ahead. It was, after all, the Deepwater Horizon, the world record holder, celebrated as among the safest in the fleet.

 

"Men lost their lives," survivor Mike Williams told Pelley. "I don't know how else to say it. All the things that they told us could never happen happened."

[dennis tooth]

Oh dear:

 

Monkeyfister

[WaltonRed]

Heard the latest whacko theory?

 

A Massive gas bubble has been created under the water and when it pops a Tsunami will sink America.

[dennis tooth]

Yeah wackos. Interesting word.

[dennis tooth]

I see what you mean now, not quite the same thing, the oilis now leaking from the sea floor itself in loads of different places are you referring to this by any chance:

 

YouTube - ROV films oil leak coming from rock cracks on seafloor.

 

(Kiss the Nice Pelicans (and the nice Gulf of Mexico) Goodbye

 

This video by a BP romote vehicle cam, shows oil blowing out of cracks in the seafloor around the outside of the wellhead and blowout protector--proof positive that the oil has broken through the well's casing, and making it much more difficult to plug the well, plus virtually guaranteeing that the amount of oil entering the Gulf waters is going to increase dramatically--maybe exponentially. So far, BP and the government are not talking about this disaster.)

 

The most important part of this clip is the first 15 seconds. It shows oil seeping from a circular crack in the seabed. the seep is pulsating in a simlar fashon to the oil leak we have all seen being release from the riser. You can see where the methane hydrate has eroded from the area where the oil is seeping.

[Funkasy]

if the rig wouldn't have exploded, would this happen anyway ? oil leaking from different places ?

[dennis tooth]

BP oil spill live feeds: watch them all - Channel 4 News

[Stu Monty]

Joe Barton: the Republican who apologised to BP | Richard Adams | World news | guardian.co.uk

 

Some seriously fucked up shit. I mean, even if you are getting shitloads of contributions from oil companies, as the man clearly is, it's still a humogously retarded thing to do in the current climate. You know you've fucked up when the Republican party wail on you immediately after you've done something that attacks Obama and defends the oil business.

[dennis tooth]

Sad innit Stu, there is still hope though, this region spawned the dinosaurs extinction we might get an ELE.

 

Busta Rhymes can't be wrong.

[Red Mist]

(CBS) The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf. Blah, blah, blah....

Are you an article-bot of some kind? What's with all these damn news articles?

[WaltonRed]

I wasnt on about that Dennis no.

 

YouTube - Pt 1/2 Giant Gas Bubble Found Around Bp Oil Well Spill -- Tsunami Warning!!

[Section_31]

New Orleans drops 'anti-British' ad campaign for fear of upsetting UK tourists | World news | guardian.co.uk

 

 

The New Orleans tourism ad campaign has been cancelled after a Guardian article poked fun at it. Photograph: New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau

 

Pathetic. This is the kind of shit which gets me down about all our fawning 'special relationship' bullshit. As far as the Americans are concerned, you're only as popular as the last time you did what they said.

[Mendoza]

Don't worry, Hooters girls are on the case

 

[YOUTUBE]RnAVdMSz3tQ[/YOUTUBE]