Early cleanup efforts of gulf oil spill marred by communication woes, scammers

PASCAGOULA, MISS. -- Johnny Ray Harris hunted for oil in the gulf near his home for 45 days straight, radioing in coordinates to cleanup crews when he spotted large, inky patches floating in the choppy waters.

"I would call it in, but no one ever came. Not once," Harris said, sitting on his 73-foot-long shrimp boat beside a box filled with unused rubber boots, gloves and coveralls. "What a waste."

Harris is a part of BP's Vessels of Opportunity program that promised to turn out-of-work fishermen into a powerful task force, skimming and scooping up oil before it reached the shores of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida. At its peak, the program dispatched 3,200 boats at an average cost of $2,000 a day. In recent weeks, with a successful capping operation containing the spewing well, the oil company has scaled back to about 1,400 vessels.

Fishermen involved in the program and the company that runs it both say the effort -- costing $450 million so far -- has been fraught with problems. Much of the money doled out by BP probably went to opportunists rather than to commercial fishermen and charter boat operators whose livelihoods were disrupted by the spill. Harris and dozens of other fishermen said in interviews with The Washington Post that the amateur effort, which included laying and maintaining boom, failed to prevent oil from reaching the beaches, marshes and islands near their homes.

BP officials acknowledged that payments as high as $100,000 might have gone to recreational boat owners and others who enrolled multiple boats in the program and quickly seized an opportunity to cash in. But the officials said that it took time to identify problems and make needed reforms. "When a response of this size gets pulled together that quickly, things fall through the cracks," BP spokesman George Gigicos said.

Boat sales spiked in states around the gulf. And even though fishing was banned in as much as 40 percent of the water, officials saw a double-digit rise in demand for fishing licenses in three gulf states in April through July over last year's totals, according to data analysis done for The Post by wildlife officials in the four affected states. In Alabama, license sales shot up 66 percent; in Mississippi, they rose 30 percent; and in Louisiana, they went up 13 percent.

In late June, more than two months into the program, BP began asking participants for proof that their licenses had been issued before the oil spill, company officials said. The company also started a rotation system in mid-July that officials said they hope will pull in fishermen who have been passed by.

"I've been waiting by the phone for three months. I've heard nothing. I'm still not in," said Jerry Walker, who fishes for kingfish and red snapper in Louisiana. "I've been a fisherman for 40 years. I make 100 percent of my living from fishing. These guys out on the water, I've never seen any of them before in my life."

Gigicos said: "It did take some time to weed out the recreational vessels and the out-of town-vessels. It wasn't perfect at first." He added, "But for a while, our motto was 'All hands on deck.' We needed everyone we could get out there."

Fishermen and harbor chiefs describe the program's early days as chaotic and unproductive. Coast Guard planes flew overhead and spotted oil, but their crews were unable to communicate with the rag-tag bands floating beneath them. Repeatedly, boat owners in the program said in interviews that they thought they were part of a "show."

"The entire task force was on different radio frequencies," said Michael White, harbor chief in Long Beach, Miss. "I had to surf through 15 channels to find someone. From a distance, it looked good to have all those boats out there, but it was a mess."

At the height of the program, participants thought their boats would be equipped to skim oil from the surface of the gulf waters. Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is coordinating the oil spill response, said in a June 11 news briefing that BP and the Coast Guard wanted to get "the skimming equipment in the hands of the vessels of opportunity out there."

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Three books on the gulf oil spill

Just six months after BP stopped the oil that had been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, a gusher of books about the spill has begun to wash ashore. The first wave includes three very different approaches to the disaster that riveted the nation most of last summer.

How we interpret the spill is important. A 1969 spill off Santa Barbara soiled the shores, killed birds and helped give rise to the modern environmental movement. Exxon's tanker accident in Valdez, Alaska, 20 years later became another symbol of reckless disregard for the environment. What makes the BP oil spill not just shocking but also dispiriting is that it might have relatively little impact on ocean-drilling policy beyond a retooling of the regulatory bureaucracy and the imposition of a few more technological safeguards. The spill has had no effect on the world's appetite for oil, and drilling will continue because the best prospects are offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, off Africa and Brazil, in the Caspian Sea, and in the Arctic.

The recent spill received massive coverage. At the Associated Press alone, more than 40 reporters and editors were thrown into the fray; teams of reporters were mobilized at papers such as The Washington Post, the Times Picayune in New Orleans, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But even though the books under review present little if anything new, readers seeking overviews between two neat covers might find them useful.

"In Too Deep," by Bloomberg News journalists Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald, opens with a brief account of the blowout, then moves on to BP's history, starting in Iran during the 1950s, when the U.S. and British governments overthrew the democratically elected regime for fear that it would hurt foreign oil interests. The authors shift quickly into more recent BP history, describing the enormous and lasting impact of former chief executive John Browne. Browne not only engineered giant mergers with Arco and Amoco, he also helped lead BP into post-Soviet Russia, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

An intellectual, an engineer and a politically savvy executive with passions for art and opera, Browne guided the company into deep-water exploration in the gulf. He is credited with recognizing that the size of the discoveries in deeper water was increasing, not leveling off.

The book also profiles lower-level BP geologists who figured out where to find the likeliest prospects. A striking chart shows that BP's average cost to add a barrel of oil to its proven reserves was lower than any other major oil company's, and a tiny fraction of current prices.

Yet Browne was also a relentless cost-cutter who squeezed money out of operations that should have invested more in maintenance and equipment. The authors blame BP culture for a focus on personal rather than process safety, for leaks in the company's Alaska pipeline, for an explosion at its Texas City refinery and for the gulf blowout.

In this account, Browne's successor, Tony Hayward, who resigned in the wake of the spill last year, was the unfortunate inheritor of the company Browne built. Chosen in part because he wasn't flashy - the board of directors was weary of Browne's celebrity - Hayward lacked the skills to manage this environmental and public relations disaster.

In "Blowout in the Gulf," William R. Freudenburg, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara who died late last year, and Robert Gramling, a sociology professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, concentrate on the regulatory framework that failed to prevent the accident. They compare offshore-drilling regulation to airline regulation and discuss whether regulation might be better handled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. They examine cleanup techniques and the prolonged and futile efforts made in Valdez. A sign of how their perspective differs from that of Reed and Fitzgerald: The two reporters write that Hayward's parting pay package was not "huge" so that "there would be no reward for failure." Freudenburg and Gramling call Hayward's $17 million package a "golden parachute."

The authors make solid points about the way the U.S. government has allowed big oil companies to march into public waters, about how the much-admired interstate highway system contributed to a fateful boom in U.S. oil consumption and about the way Americans ravenously consume oil and gas today. "Despite our habit of referring to oil 'production,' the reality is that the twentieth century was an unprecedented exercise in oil 'destruction,' " they write. "The oil was actually produced during the time of the dinosaurs."

Bob Cavnar brings an insider's view to "Disaster on the Horizon," but not one the industry will like. Cavnar has spent three decades, first on a rig and later as a chief executive, working for drilling companies in Texas, Louisiana and offshore areas. But he has a dim view of many industry practices and blogs about them for the Huffington Post.

Here, he focuses on the oil rig disaster itself and what caused it, constructing a narrative based on extensive testimony at hearings, newspaper accounts and his own experience. He makes a strong case that the spill was caused by human error. "An older engineer taught me, years ago, that wells actually talk to you," he writes. "In the hours leading up to the disaster, the Well from Hell was screaming at the crew that it was going to blow out, but nobody could understand the language it was speaking." And he notes that in deep water, "bad situations can escalate very quickly into catastrophes."

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Academic scientists say oil from gulf spill is not going away quickly

Academic scientists are challenging the Obama administration's assertion that most of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico is either gone or rapidly disappearing -- with one group Thursday announcing the discovery of a 22-mile "plume" of oil that shows little sign of vanishing.

That plume was measured in late June and was described Thursday by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The biggest news was not the plume itself: For weeks, government and university scientists have said that oil from BP's damaged well is still underwater.

(Photos: The oil spill cleanup)

The news was what is happening -- or not happening -- to it.

The scientists said that when they studied it, they saw little evidence that the oil was being rapidly consumed by the gulf's petroleum-eating microbes. The plume was in a deep, cold region where microbes tend to work slowly.

"Our data would predict that the plume would still be there now," said Benjamin Van Mooy, a Woods Hole researcher.

(Gulf driller to light up cigar after job is done)

Their research came after a week in which other scientists had taken issue with the government's portrait of where all the oil went. On Thursday afternoon, Jane Lubchenco, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's administrator, defended the government's work, saying it was done by the "best scientific minds" and reviewed by outsiders.

(Transocean accuses BP of withholding data)

"We remain confident in our assessment," she said.

The Woods Hole research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, provided one of the most detailed pictures yet of what this oil is doing under the surface.

The scientists said that, using a robot submarine that zigzagged across the deep gulf, they found a plume of oil droplets that was as tall as a 65-story building and more than a mile wide. The plume, whose droplets were so small that the water appeared clear, extended off to the southwest of the well, 3,600 feet deep.

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Freak accident or frontier enterprise? Deep-water drilling is still a big unknown.

BP's internal report on the causes of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, released earlier this month, summarized the calamity as the result of eight separate breaches of physical and operational barriers, any one of which could have, and should have, stopped the unfolding disaster. The blowout, in the BP scenario, was very much a freak event. A long shot.

A graphic in the report showed the barriers arrayed like eight slices of Swiss cheese. All the holes, the report states, "lined up" to enable the blowout:

"[A] complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident."

There is a different, and simpler, way to describe what happened: They weren't careful enough.

For the can-do culture of petroleum engineers, this catastrophe should heighten respect for the way bad things can happen to what looks like proven technology. Oil drilling is a risky business, and deep-water drilling is riskier still. Depth matters. And as the industry went deeper, it didn't commensurately increase its safety margin -- or prepare for the worst-case scenario.

On land, on sea, in the air, in space, in our laboratories, on our farms, we are surrounded by technologies of increasing complexity, all of them vulnerable, at some level, to catastrophes of human origin. Engineers do amazing things, but they aren't always as smart as they think, nor their systems as robust as they seem on paper.

The more complex the job, the more potential infiltration points for gremlins.

"We believed that the blowout preventer was the ultimate fail-safe mechanism," BP CEO Tony Hayward testified before Congress in June, bringing to mind the captain of the Titanic, believing that his ship was unsinkable.

Charles Perrow, in his seminal book on technological disasters, "Normal Accidents," writes, "We have produced designs so complicated that we cannot anticipate all the possible interactions of the inevitable failures; we add safety devices" -- think blowout preventers -- "that are deceived or avoided or defeated by hidden paths in the system."

His argument is that such accidents, though rare, are integral characteristics of the system, with its interlinked components. That's what happened here.

The pivotal moment came late on the afternoon and into the early evening of April 20. The Horizon crew conducted two pressure tests to look for any signs of hydrocarbons flowing in the well, which had already been cemented. For reasons that remain somewhat murky -- most of the key figures either have refused to testify or died in the explosion -- the BP "company man" and the Transocean crew decided that the results of the pressure tests were benign.

As in many industrial accidents involving complex technology, they were trying to interpret something they couldn't see directly -- what was happening below the bottom of the sea. The critical hardware, the blowout preventer, was a mile deep.

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Oil spill commission questions BP's response plan

The two chairmen of the president's Oil Spill Commission, which is conducting an inquiry into the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, expressed skepticism Monday about claims from BP and government officials that initial underestimation of the flow rate of the Macondo well had no impact on the response to the spill.

"It's a little bit like Custer. He underestimated the number of Indians that were on the other side of the hill and he paid the ultimate price for that," said former senator Bob Graham, speaking at a news conference with his co-chairman, William Reilly.

The flow rate of the blown-out well sparked great controversy at the height of the crisis. The Coast Guard initially pegged the leak at 1,000 barrels a day, then upped that to 5,000 barrels, using both government and BP estimates. But the actual rate initially was 62,000 barrels a day, according to scientists in the government-backed Flow Rate Technical Group.

A persistent question is whether BP and the Coast Guard calibrated their initial response plans, at the surface and at the sea floor, to handle the smaller amount of gushing oil. Representatives of both, appearing Monday at a commission hearing at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, denied that they made such a mistake, saying they went all-out with every available resource.

"We literally threw everything at it," said Doug Suttles, BP chief operating officer for exploration and production. Coast Guard Capt. Edwin Stanton echoed those remarks.

But Graham said at the news conference that the commission has information suggesting that some of the deep-sea technology used to fight the leak, such as the "top hat" containment cap, was premised on a smaller flow.

There was also new information on how the erroneous flow estimate came to be early in the crisis. Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University physical oceanographer, testified Monday that BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan, a 567-page document dated 2008 that covers the Gulf of Mexico and is famous for its provision for saving walruses that do not live in the gulf, contains an incorrect statistical formula for estimating the size of a spill.

The formula in the BP plan underestimates the thickness of black oil on the surface of the sea by a hundredfold, MacDonald said. As a result, BP's "best guess" for the leak as of April 27 was 5,768 barrels, close to the 5,000-barrel estimate initially produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MacDonald made headlines early in the crisis when he said that his own scrutiny of satellite images of the slick produced a leak estimate of 26,000 barrels a day minimum. He told reporters Monday that he did not take evaporation into account, and thus the real flow had to be higher yet.

MacDonald said that most of the oil remains in the gulf. This oil "is a highly durable material that resists further dissipation," MacDonald concluded. Referring to the spill as a kind of uncontrolled experiment, he wrote in his prepared testimony that there could be long-term damage to productivity and biodiversity in the gulf: "[W]e must remember that this experiment was performed on an ecosystem that was already badly damaged" by overfishing, coastal runoff and low oxygen levels.

Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, said in a written statement citing MacDonald's findings, "From Day One, BP and the government have lowballed the volume of the oil in the water and minimized the current and future impacts of this disaster."

Earlier, Graham pressed Suttles about why the company overestimated its ability to handle a massive spill when it applied for a permit in 2009 to drill the ill-fated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Suttles said he was not involved in the creation of the company's Oil Spill Response Plan.

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BP lawyers say Gulf of Mexico oil spill size is overestimated by government

BP lawyers have said that government estimates of the size of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are too big, perhaps by as much as 20 to 50 percent, signaling a dispute that will determine how many billions of dollars of fines BP will have to pay under the Clean Water Act.

The BP attorneys made their comments in an Oct. 21 meeting with staff members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, Priya Aiyar, one of the commission lawyers, revealed at a hearing Friday.

The oil giant, in a paper submitted to the presidential oil spill commission, also took issue with one of its draft reports. BP said that the assertion that "a consensus is emerging that roughly 5 million barrels of oil were released by the Macondo well is both premature and inaccurate."

BP said that the estimates by the Energy Department and an inter-agency group "appear biased toward the maximum amount of oil that could have been discharged, rather than the amount of oil most likely to have been discharged."

Penalties for spilling oil start at $1,100 a barrel and can rise to $4,300 if negligence is proved.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a sharp critic of the company, said in a letter Friday to BP chief executive Bob Dudley that "BP's new claim that the spill is much smaller than previously thought flies in the face of multiple lines of evidence, and raises questions whether this is a scientific finding, or a litigious position."

The oil company said that government and other academic experts did not properly take into account factors such as temperature differences, the amount of natural gas mixed in, and partial blockages from bent pipes, partial closure of the blowout preventer and from debris.

The company said that the flow rate had increased over time as impediments to the oil were cut away or eroded by the tremendous force of the oil and gas.

BP said that it was still too soon to reach a final conclusion about how much oil leaked from the Macondo well after a blowout sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 people. While the government's group left a margin of error of 10 percent, BP said it "believes the range of uncertainty is substantially greater."

The government has estimated that 62,000 barrels a day initially gushed from the Macondo well after the blowout, later dropping to 53,000 barrels as the reservoir was depleted. But the flow rate has been a subject of dispute from the early days of the spill, when the government estimated that 5,000 barrels a day were leaking into the gulf. Later, BP was collecting 25,000 barrels a day, and oil was still gushing into the gulf.

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BP names Dudley as CEO, announces $17 billion loss

BP gave investors a glimpse of its future Tuesday, one that will feature a new American chief executive, slimmed-down operations, and $32.2 billion or more in payments to clean up and compensate people affected by the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In announcing its second-quarter earnings, the London-based oil giant tried to walk a line between reassuring bankers and investors about its vast assets and financial strength, and avoiding the appearance of being a rich, powerful company insensitive to the plight of the Gulf Coast.

"We have much to do to make it right," BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said in a conference call with investment analysts Tuesday, referring to the spill. But he added that BP's directors are also "determined to restore value to our shareholders."

In mapping out plans to pay for damage and cleanup, BP said it will sell $25 billion to $30 billion in assets over 18 months, shedding about 10 percent of its oil and natural gas output. That should enable it to shrink its outstanding debt and reinstate dividends next year for shareholders while still covering payments to the massive escrow fund for spill damage claims.

"It's still going to be the second-largest oil and gas producer among international oil companies," said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. "Smaller than Exxon Mobil but bigger than Royal Dutch Shell."

In a sign of how difficult it will be for BP to turn the page on the crisis, however, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) lashed out Tuesday at the company for concealing its estimates of the rate at which oil had flowed into the gulf. Markey released a letter from BP Chief Operating Officer Douglas Suttles to the Coast Guard in early July in which Suttles estimated that oil was pouring forth at a rate of 53,000 barrels (2.23 million gallons) a day.

The BP briefing for investment analysts was a somber one, as Svanberg announced that the board had picked Robert Dudley, a BP managing director and former Amoco executive, to replace chief executive Tony Hayward, a British geologist who had spent his entire career with BP. Dudley, 54, who grew up in Mississippi and spent summers boating with his family in the Gulf of Mexico, will become the first foreigner to lead the century-old company.

"Today is a very sad day for me," Hayward said. "I love the company and everything it stands for." He said, however, he realized that for BP "to move forward, particularly in the United States, it should do so under new leadership."

Hayward's compensation package includes a pension valued at about $17 million and a severance of $1.6 million, or a year's salary.

Without costs from the spill, the company would have declared a profit of $5.6 billion for the second quarter. Spill charges turned that into a $17.2 billion loss.

The appointment of Dudley, who will take charge Oct. 1, comes at a turning point in the calamity. After gushing for three months, the damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped for the past 12 days. Kenneth Feinberg, the master for the $20 billion escrow fund, is taking over the task of scrutinizing and processing claims and proposing settlements.

Still, Dudley's task will be immense. Congress is set to raise liability limits for oil spills and to impose tougher regulations on offshore drilling. Some lawmakers want to prevent BP, the largest producer of oil and gas in the United States, from acquiring new federal leases. The Justice Department is investigating criminal charges against the company, which could complicate its ability to do business with the federal government or bid for leases.

Asked how BP would be viewed in five years, Dudley said in "a perfect world" people would realize that "BP met its commitments to restore the Gulf Coast and as a result of that BP has restored its reputation" and it would be allowed to grow its U.S. business. He said, "Five years from now, I hope that people look back and say that was a quite incredible response to a quite tragic accident."

Although BP's provision for claims and cleanup is unprecedented in size, some analysts questioned whether it is big enough. If found to be "grossly negligent" in the way it was drilling the Macondo well that exploded on April 20, BP could wind up paying an additional $12 billion in fines alone and nearly twice as much overall, said Gheit of Oppenheimer.

BP's chief financial officer, Byron Grote, said that in calculating the size of anticipated federal fines under the Clean Water Act, BP assumed that it was not guilty of negligence. By doing so, it pegged its fines at $1,100 per barrel spilled. If found negligent, BP would have to pay $4,300 a barrel. It would also have to pay 100 percent of the fines, while Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui, its partners in the lease, would not have to share the cost of the penalties.

Critics in Congress decried the company's failure to say precisely how much oil it thinks has spilled into the gulf. Hayward said only that BP had used a number around the middle of published estimates, which most recently have been 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

In addition, BP's financial statement reflected an offsetting tax benefit from lower earnings. Because the reserve for claims is deducted from profit, BP will not pay $9.9 billion in taxes that it would have otherwise owed.

Bracing for unknown costs, BP also said that it would shrink its outstanding debt to $10 billion to $15 billion, from its current $23.2 billion.

Dudley assumed his new title with modesty. He said he has the "greatest respect" for Hayward.

"I did not seek out this job," he said in a conference call with journalists. "I was asked to step into these shoes."

But in Washington, some people were ready to bid good riddance to Hayward, who had aggravated public anger by saying he wanted his "life back" and by going sailing on his yacht on his return to England after weeks on the gulf coast and in Washington.

"While it's now happy sailing for Tony Hayward, rough conditions will persist in the Gulf of Mexico for years to come because of his failed leadership," Markey said. "The new leaders of BP will have an uphill climb to correct the legacy left by Hayward, indelibly inked by the disaster in the gulf."

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System Ninja Portable 3.0.0

Clean up and remove unwanted files System Ninja is a program for cleaning your computer of unwanted junk that constantly slows your entire system down. Apart from the useful file cleaner, the program also has a Startup Manager, Process Manager and P3P Registry History cleaning tool.

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