Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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this was a consequence of the revisions in estimates of amounts leaking into the gulf:
Quote:
BP presents new oil capture plan
By Ed Crooks in London and Harvey Morris in Houston
Published: June 14 2010 15:26 | Last updated: June 14 2010 15:43
BP has presented the US authorities with a new plan for capturing more of the oil leaking from its ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico, which it says will have the capacity to trap up to 53,000 barrels per day by the end of the month.
However, the company has warned that it cannot guarantee to collect all the oil escaping from the well, and that the operation will create concerns over safety by working “significantly beyond both BP and industry practice”.
The plan and the company’s concerns were set out in a letter to US Coast Guard Rear-Admiral James Watson, the federal government’s on-scene co-ordinator.
Over the weekend, he gave the company 48 hours to provide details of additional containment capacity, after government scientists again raised their estimate of the volume of oil gushing from the well.
After some signs of recovery last week BP shares again resumed precipitous falls on Monday. They were down almost 10 per cent in late afternoon trading in London at 353p.
The Coast Guard now believes the rate is about 35,000 barrels per day, compared to its previous figure of 12,000-19,000 bpd. The US government’s initial estimate was just 5,000 bpd.
President Barack Obama flew to the Gulf region on Monday for his latest visit to see the effects of the spill.
The administration said on Sunday that it wanted an independent third party to administer a fund, paid for by BP, that would be set aside to meet claims by victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
Mr Obama is expected to announce details of the fund on Tuesday night.
Setting up the fund could mean a compromise between the administration’s determination to see that all justified claims are met and BP’s fears that it could be forced to meet unlimited claims.
BP’s board will hold a teleconference on Monday at which it is likely to agree some form of suspension of the company’s dividend.
One option is that the payment could be put into the new fund and later released to shareholders once all claims for damages have been met. The dividend could also be placed in a separate fund, or paid in shares instead of cash.
Mr Obama is expected to meet Carl-Henric Svanberg and Tony Hayward, BP’s chairman and chief executive respectively, on Wednesday.
Explaining the decision to call for an independent overseer, Thad Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the federal response to the crisis, said that administering claims was not a core function of an oil company and the government wanted an outside party, so far unnamed, to be put in charge.
BP oil spill
A BP clean-up crew shovels oil from a beach at Port Fourchon, Louisiana
FT In depth: News, comment and analysis on the spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the US coast
David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, said BP would be called on to pay money into an escrow account to cover compensation to thousands of Gulf coast residents and businesses that claim to have lost income as a result of the spill. He did not specify the size of the fund, however.
Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Adm Allen indicated that the proposal for an administered fund did not reflect concerns about the financial health of the company, whose share value has been severely damaged by the crisis. “Our assumption is BP is a going concern.”
Mr Axelrod said that Mr Obama would make a televised address on Tuesday after touring affected areas in the Gulf. “We’re at a kind of inflection point in this saga,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
On Tuesday, the chief executives of the world’s biggest international oil companies will testify that the BP oil spill “was preventable’’, publicly distancing themselves for the first time from the UK company.
Adm Allen said that he was expecting BP’s response to his latest demands for a revised plan to cope with the latest higher estimates of the amount of oil leaking from the well.
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FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - BP presents new oil capture plan
here's a new interactive map that gives a good idea of where the oil currently is:
ERMA
and this a rather dis-spiriting glimpse of what cleaning up on the coastline means in june:
Quote:
Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently
By MIREYA NAVARRO
GRAND ISLE, La. — On a beach where the sea breeze reeks of oil, about a dozen workers stoically shoveled contaminated sand into plastic bags on a recent afternoon, while others lolled on chairs and beverage coolers under a white tent nearby, chatting and dozing against the tent’s poles.
But there was a logic to the latter group’s inactivity. Cleanup crews have come up against a foe even more unyielding than the spill in the Gulf of Mexico: the heat.
Officials with BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, say that the gulf region’s soaring temperatures have slowed the work because of added measures to protect more than 18,000 workers on land and at sea across four states from the scorching sun.
With the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account, at 110 degrees or more in some locales, at least 100 workers have had heat-related illnesses, some of which required hospitalization, said David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor.
Mr. Michaels said the department had assigned more than 20 inspectors from OSHA to watch over workers on boats and beaches and at about 20 cleanup staging areas from Louisiana to Florida.
“This is potentially a life-threatening situation,” he said. “OSHA has been concerned about this from the very start. I’m not saying that BP is doing a terrible job, but we’re concerned and we’re vigilant.”
The most vulnerable are the workers on beaches like the one on this barrier island, some 112 miles south of New Orleans. Parts of the seven-mile beach, lined with vacation homes on stilts, resemble military construction sites, with snaking orange booms, portable restrooms and cruising Bobcat loaders and National Guard Humvees.
Out in the open, workers in groups of 10 to 15 — mostly men but also a few women — labored in white protective suits or T-shirts and jeans and accessories like sunglasses, straw or floppy hats, plastic gloves and rubber boots.
Depending on temperatures and whether the workers wear the bulkier protective clothing needed for handling oil, they may work for 20 minutes and rest for 40, or the other way around, a BP spokesman, Ray Viator, said.
Security personnel prevented reporters from approaching workers on the beach, but some of them, approached later, said they were able to cope with the heat because of the long breaks and the availability of water and sports drinks. Some said they drank up to 30 bottles a day.
“You need it,” a 21-year-old worker from Raceland in Lafourche Parish said on his way to his motel room after his shift. (He declined to be identified out of concern that he might jeopardize his cleanup job.) “I’m used to the heat, but it’s so hot that in 20 minutes you’re exhausted. One day, we worked for 15 minutes and took a break for 45. They said the heat index was 116.”
All the same, the sight of workers resting under canopies has caused some grumbling among residents angered by the loss of beaches, fishing, seafood and livelihoods.
Thomas Himel, 51, a home improvement contractor who was painting a beachfront home near the cleanup operations here, said he had run into workers who “actually care about the situation and how it’s hurting us” and others who he felt were taking advantage of the disaster.
“They already have people with itchy eyes,” he said, suggesting that some workers were weighing personal injury lawsuits. “Some people are fully into that.”
The health risks from the heat alone are undisputed, said Laura Leckett, a nurse with West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, La., who has been running a first-aid tent here since May 31. Ms. Leckett said she had treated about 50 of the workers for heat-stress symptoms like headaches and muscle cramps.
“They feel sluggish,” she said. More serious symptoms can include rapid breathing, unresponsiveness and disorientation.
But some of the workers said the money they were making made the risks worthwhile.
A 28-year-old worker who said he had traveled here from Dallas said he was making $15 an hour scooping up oil at sea.
The worker from Raceland, a technical school student, said he had worked here three weeks so far for $12 an hour — enough to persuade him to postpone his studies so he could work on the cleanup for at least a year.
Still, he said, the gravity of the devastation is not lost on him.
“The more we clean it up, the more oil washes on the beach,” he said. “It’ll take more than just shovels.”
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Under a Withering Sun, Spill Cleanup Workers Must Break Frequently - NYTimes.com
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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