BP
lborkowski | May 20, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
It's now a month since the Deepwater Horizon well exploded, and the oil continues to flow. By official count, the response now involves 27,400 civilian and military personnel, 11,000 volunteers, more than 1040 boats, dozens of aircraft, and multiple offshore drilling units.
As more and more people become involved, health and safety precautions for responders are becoming increasingly important. "How many lessons have we not learned from the Exxon Valdez experience and how many mistakes are being repeated in a worse way?" asks Mark Catlin, who has set up a Facebook group…
dblum | May 20, 2010 Today, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would require BP to use a less toxic (and more effective) chemical dispersant than the brand used so far. I wish, I wish, I'm always wishing for these actions to sparkle with government intelligence and initiative.
But it's obvious that the EPA was responding to pressure created by media reports, starting with a first class piece of research from Greenwire and by resulting Congressional inquiries. In fact, the EPA appears to have stood passively by while BP dumped more than half a million gallons of the chemical dispersant…
lborkowski | May 19, 2010It's only right that BP bear the cleanup costs in the Gulf - but their cleanup responsibilities shouldn't interfere with federal agencies doing their jobs. Two recent news accounts paint a disturbing picture of federal employees taking orders from the multinational corporation that's turned an already hard-hit part of our coastline into a disaster zone.
McClatchy Newspapers' Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof report that BP has released little information about how much oil is gushing out of its damaged well, and it will not make public the results of air sampling for cleanup workers. As…
lborkowski | May 18, 2010Although most of us are focusing on BP because of the oil rig explosion and gushing well in the Gulf, it's also important to consider the company's safety record at its refineries. Because I keep track of workplace disasters, I knew that BP had earned the distinction of having the worst refinery death toll in the industry. Until I read the results of a new Center for Public Integrity investigation, though, I had no idea just how much worse BP's refineries are compared to their industry peers.
Jim Morris and MB Pell report that when the worst safety violations identified by inspectors over the…
lborkowski | May 16, 2010We're delighted to welcome journalist Elizabeth Grossman as a new writer for The Pump Handle. Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Scientific American, Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, Grist, and the Huffington Post. Chasing Molecules was chosen by Booklist as one of the Top 10 Science & Technology Books of 2009 and won a 2010 Gold…
cmonforton | May 15, 2010A month after the March 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, a small team of public health experts prepared a report identifying the potential health hazards and making strong recommendations for protective action for the cleanup workers. The team included Eula Bingham, PhD (former OSHA chief), Matt Gillen (now at NIOSH), Mark Catlin (now at SIEU), Don Elisburg, and Jane Seegal. The team had been assembled at the invitation of the Alaska Commissioner of Labor after concerns were expressed
"about whether the cleanup workers' health and safety have been adequately protected. Among other things,…
ddobbs | May 14, 2010
A Times story this morning reports that, according to both documents and scientists in the US Minerals Management Service (MMS), the MMS routinely silenced safety and environmental warnings from staff in order to grant permits for even huge, high-risk drilling permits, including the BP rig that blew.
It's a good (and nauseating) story, and I'm tempted to say it's timely. Yet this story would have been a lot more timely before the rig blew, no? As I read it, I wondered why I had not read it weeks ago, when the Obama administration started proposing an expansion of drilling off US coasts.…
dblum | May 7, 2010 Let's start with some slightly, okay, more than slightly depressing numbers: Since the devastating explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig almost three weeks ago, more than 1.7 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and more than 250,000 gallons of chemical dispersant have been sprayed onto that spill in an effort to contain the damage.
Everyone agrees that it's the enormous slick of oil that we should really worry. But in the last week, questions have also been raised about the cleaning chemicals flooding into the Gulf. Although the amount pales, as they say,…
illconsidered | May 3, 2010A = $6.08 billion
B = $75 million
Profits for the single last quarter for BP were 6.08 Billion dollarsevil>. Under current US law, their total liability for non-cleanup and containment damages is .075 Billion dollars.
Would any free market supporters like to defend this thinly veiled example of corporate welfare?
See also Things Break for some early estimates of how bad the worst case scenario could get, including implications for the entire US economy.
Like Katrina, global warming did not cause this disaster. But also like Katrina, it is an excellent illustration of issues relating to…