Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Louisiana Oil Rig Fire / Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

roachboy · 05-03-2010, 01:01 PM

this is a really interesting blog post via mit press.

http://mitpress.typepad.com/mitpress...roduction.html

the main text is from this guy:

Quote:

Thomas Beamish a sociologist at the University of California Davis(...) [who] wrote his 2002 book Silent Spill about a California oil spill that went unattended for 38 years.

here's one of the main points..it's a little long, but i think it explains a whole lot about the way in which the spill unfolded, particularly in the first few days.

Quote:

Oil spill response: slow, halting, and secretive

As is typical of the government and industry, crises spawn post-hoc reaction in a way that symptoms of a crisis seldom do. Yet it is in attending to the symptoms that a crisis may be averted, mitigated, or at the very least eased. I do not mean this to be a superficial remark: the emphasis on reaction— and delayed reaction at that — rather than proaction is reflected in the law and oil regulation as it currently exists.

I don’t mean to imply the Gulf spill was caused by government regulations, but the nature of our current system of industrial self-regulation, coupled with the punitive form post accident response takes, engenders unanticipated consequences. Primary among them: very slow, guarded, and secretive response to signs of crisis.

Why? In part because of the structure of regulation itself. Unlike conventionally conceived forms of law enforcement that are predicated on a belief that violators will do everything within their power to avoid getting caught, oil industry regulators — such as the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and the Coast Guard — are almost completely dependant on the violator — or, in this instance, the oil operator — to self report. This is partly a matter of expertise, but it is also codified in laws such as the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 that stipulates self-regulation and self-reporting as the trigger for emergency response. When any entity, from a mom and pop gas station to a multi-national corporation, spills more than a barrel of petroleum (about 42 gallons), the onus is on them to report that spillage before it damages a waterway or significant resource. Only when spillage is known to exceed 10,000 gallons (about 240 barrels of oil) can the authorities legally set up an incident command structure, abrogate private property, and compel the offending operator to respond. As I noted in Silent Spill, “Perhaps punishment [for violations] coupled with self-reporting [requirements] represents the worst of [all regulatory] worlds” (p. 77). It certainly does not grease the wheels for a quick and cooperative response.

This painfully protracted response characterized the Gulf spill, which is now two weeks in the making. The explosion occurred on April 20. On April 22, BP Inc. claimed the oil on the ocean’s surface to be “residual oil” from the explosion, fire, and sinking of the offshore rig. Over the next week, BP expressed confidence that they had everything under control. In all of this, the Coast Guard and MMS, while initially sending three coast guard cutters, four helicopters, and one spotter plane to rescue injured workers, remained totally dependant on BP and its subcontractors—Transoceanic, Haliburton, and Cameron—for information, technology, and advanced planning — and thus response. Not until the scope of the leaks had been ascertained and BP asked for assistance did regulators step in and step up their response. (It should be noted that the term “leak” is misleading: Oil is currently spewing forth from a 5”-6” diameter pipe under 70,000 psi at a rate of 200,000 gallons a day.)

Industry priorities exposed

The lack of a coherent response plan and the post-hoc manner of response are also revealing. The response to the Gulf spill exposes a set of industry priorities— those of the oil producers but also those of the regulators and lawmakers who propose, create, and enforce regulations. While it may come as no surprise that the industry’s and Mineral Management Service’s main priorities lie with greater levels of oil production, that concern does not presuppose a de-emphasis on safety and environmental compliance or accident preparation. Some numbers might clarify my point. While BP has spent heavily on PR to rebrand itself as the “green energy company” ($200 million in 2000 on rebranding campaign), and grossed some $52 billion in 2009, actual human and environmental safety seems to be a low priority, as reflected in their track record over the past half-decade. In 2005, their Texas City Refinery disaster claimed 15 workers who died in an explosion that was the culmination of a series of smaller accidents. In 2006, the Prudhoe Bay shutdown, reflecting poor infrastructural maintenance and pipeline corrosion, resulted in an estimated 267,000 gallons spilled. And in 2007 the Prudhoe Bay toxic spill involved some 2000 gallons of methanol. All of these incidences, upon further investigation, have been attributed directly or indirectly to BP’s cost-saving measures such as cutting back on maintenance and safety costs to improve the company’s bottom line.

And while I’m unwilling to say that the blowout in the Gulf was itself the result of this ethic, I am of the mind that spill response has been heavily influenced by a set of priorities BP shares with other industry producers.(...)

it's probably simplistic to blame any single element in this chain of unfortunate arrangements around an unfortunate reality, which is drilling in the ocean at all, one which is the obvious condition of possibility for the *really* unfortunate reality in the gulf at the moment.

but the basic point above is that the regulatory system relies on industry self-reporting: so the delay in undertaking a government response is due to the way bp chose to deal with the situation---both at the level of "crisis management" in terms of brand protection (the "green" oil producer would have this sort of "problem" under control right away as a function of their "deep and abiding" committment to the Environment (tm)) and at another level, which is how that brand-protection intersected with what bp knew at the corporate level as that intersected with what bp (and others) knew on site---and when they knew it.

fact is that the oversight, such as it is, presupposed that bp was in a position to know what was happening. they didn't for about a week, right? and then a few days after that, they asked for help from the government, which acted reasonably quickly. so the canard about katrina seems wholly misplaced.

there's more but i gots to go.

[[i moved a couple sentences around at the start of this to smooth it out after i deleted the earlier post about the same blog]]