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BP’s spill response plans found filled with errors

Officials making it up as they go along, analysis says



By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, TAMARA LUSH and HOLBROOK MOHR

ASSOCIATED PRESS

VENICE, La. — Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP’s 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.

Under the heading “sensi­tive biological resources,” the plan lists marine mammals in­cluding walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the gulf.

The names and phone num­bers of several Texas A&M University marine life special­ists are wrong.

So are the numbers for ma­rine mammal stranding net­work offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

BP’s 582-page regional spill plan for the gulf, and its 52­page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are rid­dled with omissions and glar­ing errors, based on an Associ­ated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along.

The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill­fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an un­controlled leak and vastly overstate the company’s pre­paredness to deal with one.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in an e-mail Wednesday that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., have asked for a criminal investiga­tion of some of BP’s claims.

Worst case: Being ill-prepared

In its Deepwater Horizon plan, the British oil giant stat­ed: “BP Exploration and Pro­duction Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substan­tial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan.”

In the spill scenarios de­tailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds es­cape serious harm; beaches re­main pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents.

| BP’s proposed method to cal­culate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally ac­cepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

| The gulf’s loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida’s south­ern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn’t mentioned in either plan.

| The Web site listed for Ma­rine Spill Response Corp. — one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill — links to a defunct Japa­nese- language page.

And although BP officials and the federal government have insisted they have at­tacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn’t apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the re­sponse.

Examples of how BP’s plans have fallen short:

BEACHES WHERE OIL WASHED

up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from con­tamination because BP prom­ised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore — a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.

BP asserts that the com­bined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks — and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami’s satellite sensing facility.

Only a fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed.

REGARDING WILDLIFE — birds, sea turtles or endangered ma­rine mammals, BP’s site plan also has proved too optimistic. Although the exact toll on the gulf’s wildlife may never be known, the effects clearly have been devastating.

PERHAPS THE STARKEST ex­ample of BP’s planning fail­ures: The company has insist­ed that the size of the leak doesn’t matter because it has been reacting to a worst-case scenario all along.

Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak has grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble — to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And contain­ment domes, top kills, top hats.

Missing the obvious

Although a disaster as dev­astating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can’t be solved in advance, or even foreseen, BP’s plans do not anticipate even the most obvious issues, and use moun­tains of words to dismiss prob­lems that have proven over­whelming.

In responses to lengthy lists of questions from AP, officials for BP and the Interior Depart­ment, which oversees oil rig regulator Minerals Manage­ment Service, appear to con­cede there were problems with the two response plans.

“Many of the questions you raise are exactly those ques­tions that will be examined and answered by the presidential commission as well as other in­vestigations into BP’s oil spill,” said Kendra Barkoff, spokes­woman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. She added that Salazar has undertaken trans­formational reforms of MMS.

Said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo of Robert, La.: “We ex­pect that a complete review of the regional response plans and planning process will take place as part of the overall in­cident investigation so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improve­ment.

“Thus far, we have imple­mented the largest spill re­sponse in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impact­ed shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, un­precedented and will offer us much to learn from.”