[THS] !!!! Greg Palast: Slick Operator: The BP I`ve Known Too Well

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truthout.org/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well59178

Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well

Wednesday 05 May 2010

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

photo

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the
cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the
party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly
the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does.
And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the
Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon
platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil
Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the
government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is
that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation,
BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP
prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap.
And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a
"boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or
disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the
ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll.
They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department,
even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that
was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's
job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time,
oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from
helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also
certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours
sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and
federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef
in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And
Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams,
replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to
control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a
drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been
contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of
shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and
response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too
little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding
seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep
waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know
how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel
Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on
those platforms; now, he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called
him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were
afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said
the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had
already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules.
This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic.
While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes
love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald
Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of
Clinton's deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the
skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings
on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the
government do something to stop it?"

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the
way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month
that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional
equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan
Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who
warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and
Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I
printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is
between Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn's my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that
the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to
communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in
too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it
blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," said Becnel.
Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is
lying. Someone's lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced
prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.