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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Overseer of BP fund gets his hands dirty

In June, President Obama tapped lawyer Kenneth R. Feinberg, 64, to oversee the $20 billion account funded by BP to compensate victims of the Gulf Coast oil spill, making him the nation's most famous mediator.

Every week, Feinberg leaves his Pennsylvania Avenue office, where the walls are adorned with dozens of pictures and news articles chronicling his work, to spend time with fishermen and others who make their living off the coastal waters.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, the Brockton, Mass., native, who also oversaw the government's Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, talked about the task ahead as he wraps up emergency claim payments and moves on to making final payments to victims. Excerpts follow:

Have you met one-on-one with people who were affected by the spill?

I've sat down personally with hundreds of people. I've had town hall meetings throughout the gulf with thousands of people. You can't do this from Washington. You have to go down there, and that's what I've been doing.

Why have the claims skyrocketed in the past two weeks?

People are getting paid. The payments are generous. People are saying, "Let's file a claim; we might get paid too." We don't know yet how many of them are legitimate.

What problems are you experiencing with processing emergency claims?

There are 25,000 claims with absolutely no documentation. Thousands of them say things like, "My neighbor got paid; pay me too." Or they say, "I fish off the gulf to eat. Send me grocery money." There are 50,000 of them with woefully inadequate documentation.

What was wrong with the BP claim centers? Why did they need to be replaced by your operation?

The BP claim centers served their purpose. It was an emergency bandage approach. Sometimes it went to the right people; sometime it went to the wrong people. I know of situations where they paid people who were in desperate straits. I've seen in many cases BP paid claimants and the payments appear to be fraudulent.

When it comes to final payments, you are counseling people to take the money. Some are suspicious of whether you are looking out for their best interests, since BP is paying your firm [Feinberg Rozen LLP] $850,000 a month to run the program. What do you say?

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With BP's know-how and U.S. authority, the Macondo well was plugged

It was awkward from the start, this marriage of necessity between BP and the federal government. The government had ultimate authority; BP had the technology to plug the Macondo well. Something known as the National Contingency Plan called for a "unified command" in which government officials would issue orders and make pronouncements but BP would do the most crucial work and be the "responsible party."

People got confused. Who was in charge, really? The well kept gushing; everyone looked bad. Reporters asked top officials why the government didn't simply take over. But we're in charge already, the officials said.

The fact is, the two sides formed a team, weird as that might be at times. That is true today, still, with the Macondo well looking rather dead -- choked by a mile of cement -- but not yet terminated to everyone's satisfaction.

Government scientists and BP engineers have been devising a complex endgame. Before Macondo receives a conclusive dose of mud and cement at its base via a relief well, engineers want to take the old, damaged blowout preventer off the wellhead and replace it with a new blowout preventer. That will delay the "bottom kill" until after Labor Day, according to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander.

BP engineers and the government scientists come from different cultures. In general, the engineers want to plunge ahead, and the scientists want to go slower.

"We helped them see that there are dangers lurking here, and there and everywhere," Energy Secretary Steven Chu told The Washington Post. "The Department of Energy is in charge of the nuclear arsenal. . . . This is no messing around. In our culture, you want to make sure that nothing can go wrong."

The Obama administration has claimed credit for turning an uncontrolled calamity into something managed and mastered. The response to the disaster would have been different, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said after the well had been plugged with cement, had the administration not "pushed at every step of the way" for BP to "do things more comprehensively and faster."

BP has stayed clear of that debate.

"I've got a philosophy that when you're in the middle of the response, you stay focused on the response. When the response is over, that's a good time to analyze how the response went and decide what could have been done better," Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, said recently.

But the broader truth seems to be that BP and the government have overcome their natural antagonism to create a functioning partnership. The two sides had testy moments, but again and again they found a path to agreement. When Allen was asked whether a recent pressure test was conceived by the government scientists or the BP engineers, he replied: "It's hard to say anymore, we've been together so long. Some of these conversations start around the coffeepot."

The government needed BP because the company had the tools to plug the hole. BP benefited from the outsider perspective of government scientists and needed officials of the Environmental Protection Agency to run interference on such contentious issues as the use of chemical dispersants, a subject on which BP was viewed as having zero credibility.

Keeping everyone moving in the same direction has been Allen, perhaps the least-excitable person in American public life. Allen said in a recent interview that his goal was to "produce unity of effort" and added, "You can't do that by polarizing, or creating conflict, or getting caught up in a personal agenda or getting too excited about things."

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Development in once-rural areas put populations closer to natural gas pipelines

On Sept. 9, a 30-inch natural gas pipeline exploded in the suburban community of San Bruno, Calif., creating a 2,000-degree fireball that killed eight people, destroyed 37 homes and left more than 60 people injured. A gaping crater replaced homes at the center of the blast.

Could it happen here?

A pipeline rupture of approximately the same magnitude did occur not far from the Washington area a couple of years ago, but with less-dire consequences.

On Sept. 14, 2008, a 30-inch span of the Transco pipeline ruptured in Appomattox County, Va., creating a fireball that destroyed two homes and caused five injuries. Twenty-three families were evacuated.

The Appomattox explosion was larger than the explosion in San Bruno, but it occurred in a less-populated area, said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a watchdog organization based in Bellingham, Wash.

The Appomattox rupture was caused by corrosion of the 53-year-old pipeline, which had been inspected three months earlier by a "smart pig," a computerized scanning device that travels through a pipeline searching for dings, dents or corrosion, but had not yet been repaired. Transco's owner, the Williams Cos., paid the U.S. Transportation Department a $952,000 fine, replaced 2,500 feet of the pipeline, "smart pigged" all of its pipelines in Virginia, and performed pressurized water tests to validate the repairs.

Aging pipelines - and growing populations in the once-rural areas where pipelines were routed decades ago - have increased the risks associated with ruptures throughout the United States.

"The average transmission pipe is 50 years old," Weimer said. "If you put a steel pipe in the ground 50 years ago, you can have problems. It's not the same strength as steel today, and it doesn't have the anti-corrosive coating. But the more important factor is how the company has operated and maintained the pipes."

Some of the largest interstate pipelines in the United States run through the Washington area. The massive Transco pipeline, which consists of three and four parallel pipelines of 30 to 42 inches each, runs through Culpeper, Fauquier, Prince William, Fairfax, Montgomery and Howard counties on its way north from the Gulf of Mexico and shale resources in Alabama to supply natural gas up the East Coast to New York City.

One of the largest import facilities for liquefied natural gas in the United States is at Cove Point in Calvert County. Tankers travel up the Chesapeake Bay to deliver gas from abroad; from Cove Point it is distributed via transmission pipelines throughout the region.

Columbia Gas Transmission also runs major gas pipelines across the western edge of the metro area. Washington Gas taps into these resources with 200 miles of high-pressure transmission pipelines, which run through every county in the metro area and even beneath the Mall. The pipelines connect to a 26,000-mile web of smaller distribution pipelines, typically three-quarters of a foot to one foot in diameter, where the pressure is reduced so the fuel can enter homes and businesses.

Digging up trouble

The majority of pipeline incidents in the D.C. metro area, however, are not from the large transmission pipelines. In fact, there haven't been any incidents on the 20 miles of 24-inch transmission pipelines in the District (most of which date to the 1960s) "as far back as anyone can remember," said Betty Ann Kane, chairman of the D.C. Public Service Commission.

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