BP accused of ‘carpet-bombing’ toxic dispersants during clean-up

BP accused of ‘carpet-bombing’ toxic dispersants during clean-up


H. Josef Hebert and Michael Kunzelman As
BP inched closer to permanently sealing the blown-out oil well in the
Gulf of Mexico, congressional investigators railed against the company
and Coast Guard for liberal use of toxic chemicals that helped disperse
the oil, but at unknown expense to sea life.The Coast Guard
routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of the
chemical per day to break up the oil in the Gulf, despite a federal
directive to use the dispersant rarely, the investigators said. The
Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the
Environmental Protection Agency order, according to documents reviewed
by the investigators. Only in a few cases did the government scale back
BP's request.Representative Edward Markey, D-Mass., released a
letter Saturday that said instead of complying with the EPA restriction,
“BP often carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the Coast
Guard allowed them to do it.”BP has worked “hand in hand” with
the Coast Guard and EPA on dispersant use since the spill began in
April, a company spokesman said Sunday.“Furthermore, we've
complied with EPA requests regarding dispersants, which are an
EPA-approved and recognized tool in fighting oil spills,” spokesman
Daren Beaudo said, declining to elaborate.The EPA and the Coast
Guard ordered BP on May 24 to cut the use of chemical dispersants by 75
per cent. The EPA said in a statement that the company slashed its use
by 72 percent through mid-July, when engineers placed a cap on the
leaking well.“While EPA may not have concurred with every
individual waiver granted by the federal on-scene coordinator, the
agency believes dispersant use has been an essential tool in mitigating
this spill's impact, preventing millions of gallons of oil from doing
even more damage to sensitive marshes, wetlands and beaches and the
economy of the Gulf coast,” the agency said in a statement.A spokesman for the Coast Guard did not return calls seeking comment.The
chemical dispersant was effective at breaking up the oil into small
droplets to be consumed more easily by bacteria, but the long-term
effects to aquatic life are unknown. That environmental uncertainty has
led to several spats between BP and the government over the use of
dispersants on the surface and deep underwater when oil was spewing out
of the well.BP's apparently generous use of dispersants helps
explain why so little oil has been spotted on the surface recently, said
Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for
Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.Whether
the benefits of dispersants outweigh the possible risks is a “debatable
point,” he said. They've protected the Gulf Coast's fragile wetlands
from heavier bands of oil but are capable of killing shrimp and crab
eggs and larvae.“That's a debate with no right answer,” he said.State
waters closed by the spill have slowly reopened to fishing, most
recently in Florida, where regulators on Saturday reopened a 23-mile
stretch of Escambia County shoreline to harvest saltwater fish. The area
was closed June 14 and remains closed to the shrimp and crab harvesting
pending additional testing. Oysters, clams and mussels were never
included in the closure.In Alabama, the Department of Public
Health lifted all swimming advisories for the Gulf of Mexico. BP chief
operating officer Doug Suttles planned a boat tour of recovery efforts
Sunday off Venice, La.A temporary cap has held the gusher in
check for more than two weeks, and engineers were planning to start as
early as Monday on an effort to help plug the well for good. The
procedure, dubbed the static kill, involves pumping mud and possibly
cement into the blown-out well through the temporary cap.If it
works, it will take less time to complete a similar procedure using a
relief well that is nearly complete. That effort, known as a bottom
kill, should be the last step to sealing the well.Before the
static kill can take place, however, debris needs to be cleared from one
of the relief wells. The debris fell in the bottom of the relief well
when crews had to evacuate the site last week because of Tropical Storm
Bonnie.Companies working to plug the disaster for good are
engaged in a billion-dollar blame game. But the workers for BP,
Halliburton and Transocean say the companies' adversarial relationship
before Congress isn't a distraction at the site of the April 20 rig
explosion, where Transocean equipment rented by BP is drilling relief
wells that Halliburton will pump cement through to choke the oil well
permanently.“Simply, we are all too professional to allow
disagreements between BP and any other organization to affect our
behaviors,” Ryan Urik, a BP well safety adviser working on the
Development Driller II, which is drilling a backup relief well, said in
an e-mail last week.The roles of the three companies in the kill
efforts are much the same as they were on the Deepwater Horizon, the
exploratory rig that blew up, killing 11 workers. The Justice Department
has opened civil and criminal investigations, hundreds of lawsuits have
been filed, and congressional investigators are probing the blast and
its aftermath.BP is trying to move forward from the disaster,
which sent anywhere from 94 million to 184 million gallons of oil
spewing into the Gulf, announcing once the cap was finally in place that
its vilified chief executive, Tony Hayward, would be leaving in
October.

I'm not adding the spaces on that bloody wall...

Thats a big wall.