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ProPublica has gotten the previous EPA debarment decision maker as a whistleblower and she sure was in a mood to talk. Jeanne Pascal, a senior EPA debarment attorney for the Northwest, was forced into retirement because of a serious accident and it seems she is regretting not debarring BP when she had the opportunity. Pascal is pretty much spilling her guts to ProPublica and she has aplenty to spill.
Don't settle for these snippets. Read the whole story. It is more damning than the Frontline/ProPublica PBS program that premiered last night.
Jeanne Pascal turned on her TV April 21 to see a towering spindle of black smoke slithering into the sky from an oil platform on the oceanic expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. For hours she sat, transfixed on an overstuffed couch in her Seattle home, her feelings shifting from shock to anger.
Pascal, a career Environmental Protection Agency attorney only seven weeks into her retirement, knew as much as anyone in the federal government about BP, the company that owned the well. She understood in an instant what it would take others months to grasp: In BP’s 15-year quest to compete with the world’s biggest oil companies, its managers had become deaf to risk and systematically gambled with safety at hundreds of facilities and with thousands of employees’ lives.
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On her watch she would see BP charged with four federal crimes—more than any other oil company in her experience—and demonstrate what she described as a pattern of disregard for regulations and for the EPA. By late 2009 she was warning the government and BP executives themselves that the company’s approach to safety and environmental issues made another disaster likely.
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“They just weren't getting it,” Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of labor, told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. In the last decade, OSHA records show that BP has been levied 300 times more in fines for refinery violations than any other oil company.
“BP's cost-cutting measures had really cut into their plant maintenance, into their training, into their investment in new and safer equipment,” Barab said. “When you start finding the same problems over and over again, I think you are pretty safe in saying they've got a systematic problem.”
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The only thing she [Pascal] hadn’t done was bring down the big hammer: the EPA’s power to ban an entire company from doing business with the federal government.
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Now, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolding on her TV screen, Pascal believed such a move was finally warranted.
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“I tend to take people at face value,” she said. “One of the hardest moments of my life with BP was in the first six months of 2004 when I realized that I had been managed, and that I had been so easily manageable. They lied. I had swallowed their line hook, line and sinker.”
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By the end of the decade Pascal again began to think that the only way to make the company improve was to debar the entire corporation. “There comes a point where the events conspire to basically show federal regulators that a particular company, for whatever reason, has no intent of complying with U.S. law and regulations,” she said.
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“BP told me [Pascal] multiple times that they had direct access to the White House and they would go there.”
In a last-ditch effort, she decided to call the company’s bluff. If BP thought the Defense Department needed it so badly it would never allow debarment, Pascal would show them they were wrong.
In the spring of 2009 she called a meeting with BP’s new general counsel, Jack Lynch, at the Fairmont in Seattle to show him an e-mail her office had received from the Defense Department. In it, an official with the Defense Logistics Agency, the division responsible for BP’s fuel contracts, offered unconditional support for debarment.
“You could do anything you wanted to BP and we could deal with it,” the official, Normand Lussier, wrote, adding that he didn’t think defense concerns should play into Pascal’s judgment.
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Pascal, for what it’s worth, has finally reached her decision.
“I have to conclude that BP has a corrupt culture, and had I arrived at that conclusion while I was handling the case I would have immediately debarred them,” she said last week. “I would have just let the chips fall where they may.”
Scientist, Samantha Joy, schools the government on how to properly test for oil. Oil, oil everywhere but the government can't find nary a drop. It seems that scientists, fishermen and locals are having no problems finding BP oil in the Gulf but the government continues to embarrass itself by claiming they can't. At this point it is difficult not to conclude that the government is not being truthful or that they are working overtime to ignore oil.
If NOAA scientist, Steve Lehmann, can not conceive of how oil can end up on the bottom of the ocean I can suggest a little experiment for him. Mix up some vegetable oil and a little dishwashing detergent and dump it in a sink full of water. Come back in about a day and feel the bottom of the sink. That's what happens when you mix oil and dispersant. Lehmann has obviously missed his true calling in PR rather than science. Someone needs to tell Mr. Lehmann that just because he does not consider the oil being found "actionable" does not mean it is not there and potentially harmful.
Scientists who were aboard two research vessels studying the Gulf of Mexico oil spill's impact on sea life have found substantial amounts of oil on the seafloor, contradicting statements by federal officials that the oil had largely disappeared.
Scientists on the research ship Cape Hatteras found oil in samples dug up from the seafloor in a 140-mile radius around the site of the Macondo well, said Kevin Yeager, a University of Southern Mississippi assistant professor of marine sciences. He was the chief scientist on the research trip, which ended last week.
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Federal officials have said that most of the oil has evaporated or been devoured by oil-eating microbes. Last week, Steve Lehmann, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a top science adviser to the Coast Guard, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that his agency has not found any oil on the seafloor.
"The concept of a big slick of oil sinking to the bottom is kind of an anathema," he said. "We have not found anything that we would consider actionable at 5,000 feet or 5 feet."
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Part of the discrepancy between federal and academic scientists may come from how NOAA scientists lower the multi-ton machinery used to collect the samples, known as a "multiple corer," into the sea, said Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine sciences professor who was one of the first to discover oily sediment in the seafloor.
Lowering the multiple corer too fast could disrupt the fine sediment on the seafloor and disperse oil particles, she said.
"These are really fine layers," Joye said. "If you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to find oil."
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Clif Nunnally, a doctoral student and manager of the deep sea biology lab at Texas A&M who was on the Arctic Sunrise, said he gathered sediment samples 6 miles north of the well site that clearly had oil in them.
"There's definitely oil there," Nunnally said. "Now it's a matter of getting all the samples up and determining what the impact is on the animals there."
Greenpeace nails BP on oil they found during research mission. Instead of waiting weeks to get oil fingerprinting done for large numbers of samples Greenpeace sent in a single sample to get a result ASAP. Caz Taylor found oil contamination in blue oysters early on. Greenpeace is to be commended for funding her continued work and that of the 20 independent scientists who worked aboard Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise during her three month Gulf research mission.
Greenpeace said Monday it disagreed with official statements that most of the oil from the BP PLC spill is gone from the Gulf of Mexico and added that it has a laboratory test to confirm crude from the disaster sits on the seafloor.
"We're still seeing a lot of oil out there," John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace, said during a news conference to mark the end of a three-month expedition by the group's Arctic Sunrise vessel. "It's on the surface, it's in the sediment, it's in the water column and it's hundreds of miles away from the spill site."
The Arctic Sunrise spent three months looking for oil and marine life in trouble after it arrived in the Gulf following the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Over that period, the Greenpeace vessel also helped about 20 scientists conduct a variety of oil spill research, Hocevar said.
More government schooling from another scientist, Paul Sammarco. Dr. Lubchenco, head of NOAA, is a marine ecologist. That makes it nearly impossible to justify NOAA's inability to find oil as being other than willful. One wonders what tricks they have used to not find dispersed oil which they should have found with the canisters.
Dr. Sammarco and a team from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) sampled waters two months after BP plugged its crippled well.
He was astonished at what he found, samples that roughly mirrored the official estimates of NOAA scientists taken weeks earlier at the height of the spill and far closer to the spill site.
"I kept looking at the data and looking at the data and asking, 'why are they the same?'" Sammarco said. "They shouldn't be the same."
The NOAA scientists had worked in waters just a couple miles from BP's Macondo well, whereas the LUMCON research vessel was in Terrebonne Bay, 50 miles northwest of the spill site and seven weeks later.
NOAA used a tried-and-true method of dropping canisters to various water depths.
However, an underwater video shot by a LUMCON researcher weeks after the spill showed globs of oil were visible in the water column with the naked eye.
"The canisters, they're really good for what they're designed to do," Sammarco said, to sample something that has dissolved in the water column.
He believes the NOAA team missed the oil globules.
"Let me put it this way," Sammarco says of the use of canisters, "be really easy to miss it, piece of cake to miss it."
Louisiana wetlands continue to be plagued by oil. Dr. Sammarco is calling for more testing given what a critical role the wetlands play in local lives.
In Lafourche, parish spokesman Brennan Matherne said crews were focusing on cleanup on Fourchon Beach, which was pummelled with heavy oil for months during the spill. Oil seeped under the beach sand there, and Matherne said crews are painstakingly digging the oil from beneath the beach sand, washing it and returning the cleaned sand to the beach. Cleanup is also ongoing on Timbalier Island in Lafourche, which took heavy hits of oil. Some wetlands in western Lafourche took oil, but they’ve been ringed with absorbent boom to keep oil from escaping.
Albert Naquin, chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, said residents have been concerned locally about oil left in the area’s marshes, including some oil in nearby Lake Raccourci at the Lafourche-Terrebonne border. The parish requested that Coast Guard officials and cleanup teams reinvestigate the area.
Russell Dardar, a Pointe-aux-Chenes resident, said locals are still finding fresh oil coming ashore. He’s also worried that older oil is continuing to damage the marsh. Under the hardened black surface is still liquid oil that coats gloves and plants.
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Some scientists say that more modern testing should be done to determine the levels of oil and dispersant chemicals that remain in the water.
Paul Sammarco, a marine ecologist with LUMCON, said that in late August he sampled at Timbalier Island and at Rock Island below Cocodrie in Terrebonne Parish using a new absorbent pad that only attracts and absorbs oil-related chemicals and not water.
After running the sample through a lab, he said he found 13 different crude oil chemicals as well as 2-butoxyethanol, a toxic chemical found in dispersants sprayed on the Gulf spill.
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“They say that the water is very low in concentrations of these chemicals and everything is OK,” Sammarco said. But he believes his results “raise the question that maybe we ought to go out and do a little more sampling.”
"Dead Zone" researches have some good news. Scientists from the University of Maryland Horn Point Laboratory who have been studying the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico for over twenty years seem to feel their preliminary data shows that the BP catastrophe has not appreciably worsened the dead zone. However, they and many other scientists are quite concerned about how the oil has affected the small organisms that form the base of the food web.
Microbes consuming oil from the Gulf of Mexico's BP spill deplete oxygen levels when they die, raising the threat of an expanded "dead zone," which endangers some marine life. Now scientists are using years of dead-zone data to determine whether the dangerous region grew after the spill.
One of those scientists, Caz Taylor, a population biologist and blue crab researcher at Tulane University, said that she was concerned about blue crab populations. On journeys aboard the Arctic Sunrise, she pulled in blue crab larvae across the Gulf -- from Galveston, Texas, to the Florida Panhandle -- and found "mysterious orange droplets" on them, she said at the news conference.
Extensive lab testing would help determine if the orange blobs on the larvae were caused by the oil spill, she said.
Gulf Islands National Seashore turtle nest numbers are down. Cleanup methods used for oil-fouled beaches are seldom Mother Nature friendly.
The majestic, undeveloped beaches of Gulf Islands National Seashore are attractive to nesting sea turtles searching for a quiet dune in which to dig a hole and deposit up to 100 eggs.
But throw in armies of noisy BP cleanup crews, all-terrain vehicles, beach rakes and Sand Sharks roaring around the beach 24-7, and it's no surprise the number of nests this year dropped significantly.
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"This was our third lowest year ever since daily surveys started in 1994," National Seashore park ranger Mark Nicholas said. "It's common sense that the oil spill is not going to help them."
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And that's why this year's decline is disheartening for those who rise before the sun every day for six months to search for the bulldozer-like tracks that indicate a sea turtle crawled up on the beach to nest.
"I've been doing it for almost 20 years," Gigi Naggatz, a volunteer turtle monitor for the Seashore and Navarre Beach said. "The numbers have just been going down and down. Sea turtles have been around since the dinosaurs and we're losing them, and it's on our watch. We need to do anything we can to save them."
One of Greenpeace's boat drivers blogs about the difficulty of cleaning dispersant treated oil from beaches. Imagine trying clean thousands, if not millions, of gallons of oily, filthy dishwater out of a sandy beach.
I'm Fred Ecks, one of the boat drivers for Greenpeace. I last wrote in June and July, when I was last here in the Gulf. I'm writing again now, with my first impressions upon my return to the Gulf today:
I'm currently camped on Horn Island, offshore from Biloxi, Mississippi with a small team of Greenpeace investigators witnessing the short-term effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is my third time visiting the Gulf since this disaster began...
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Now, upon my return three months later, what I see is more discouraging than I would have imagined. Before even anchoring our boat along the beach here, we found tarballs filling the sand. The oil cleanup workers are still here, but their work is futile when so much dispersant has been poured into the water. The oil can't be skimmed from the water or removed by other mechanical means; the dispersant ("Corexit") prevents this by immersing the oil within the water on a molecular level.
3 environmental groups sue BP over gulf oil spill - Yasuragi
The suit, brought by the nonprofit groups Defenders of Wildlife, Gulf Restoration Network and the Save the Manatee Club, says that the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig blowout and the resulting oil spill "have caused and will continue to cause the take of endangered and threatened species," including whales, manatees, birds and sea turtles that "show no avoidance response to oil slicks."
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The gulf region is home to at least 27 endangered or threatened species. The rig explosion killed 11 workers and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil. More than 600 sea turtles were found dead and an additional 456 were found alive but soiled with oil. More than 4,300 oiled birds have been found, more than half of them dead.
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Justice Department officials have filed papers indicating they will probably file suit on behalf of the American public, possibly for violations of the Oil Pollution Act and the Clean Water Act. The government is pursuing a criminal investigation as well.
BP oil spill forces restaurant to close - Yasuragi
Owning and managing a restaurant has never been easy, Lambert said, but the BP oil spill that hit the Gulf Coast this spring was a devastating blow to an industry already struggling to survive the challenging economic conditions of the past two years.
“We’re a seafood restaurant” she said, noting a recent poll that showed a majority of people are still afraid to eat local seafood. “We lost our lead product.”
The restaurant filed claims with BP, and then with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility administered by Ken Feinberg. They received one check for $8,000 in June, and a second one last week for $16,200. That didn’t approach their projected loss of $25,000 a month over the next six months, she said.
Escalated claims are not being paid. The claims process has improved but it sounds like there is quite a ways to go yet. Cheers to ProPublica for staying on top of the claims issue. - link from Yasuragi
Claimants seeking compensation for the Gulf oil spill who can demonstrate financial need may have their claims “escalated”—selected for prompt processing—by paymaster Kenneth Feinberg’s operation. But some applicants are experiencing long waits even after being told their claims had been expedited. Eleven claimants told ProPublica that despite their claims being escalated, they are still waiting for a decision weeks later. Six of these claimants have been waiting for more than a month.
Feinberg told ProPublica that escalation means that a claim is “immediately prioritized” and moved to the front of the queue for processing. He said that a claimant must show financial need, such as the risk of eviction or bankruptcy, in order to be selected for acceleration. Feinberg has never promised a specific timeframe for deciding on escalated claims, and he said that the amount of time needed for a decision depends on the contents of the application.
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ProPublica spoke with 13 claimants whose cases have been escalated. (We contacted them on Oct. 14 via our BP Claims Project.) Only two have received notice of a decision on their claim, and only one has actually received a check.
Dudley is under pressure to restore BP's dividend. If Dudley doesn't get BP's share price up the company will end up being a takeover target. It would be difficult to imagine that the new owner would be worse than BP on safety but anything is possible. - link from Yasuragi
Dudley’s task of lifting the share price after the Gulf of Mexico disaster is gaining urgency as the company falls further behind Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
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The sluggish performance puts pressure on Dudley to follow through on pledges to sell $30 billion of assets and to start paying dividends again. Investors will abandon BP if he fails, reigniting speculation that the London-based company will be split up or taken over, said investors and analysts including SVM Asset Management’s Colin McLean.
Editorial on the BP's oil catastrophe that gives the climate change deniers a run for their money. Click on the link if you want to read insanity in action. I'll spare you quotes. - link from Yasuragi
==== ROV Feeds =====
20876/21507 - Development Driller II's ROV 1
32900/49178 - Development Driller II's ROV 2
39168/39169 - Chouest Holiday's ROV 1
40492/40493 - Chouest Holiday's ROV 2
58406/21750 - Iron Horse ROV 1
The Development Driller 3 moved off from Relief Well #1's wellhead area at about 1:00 AM a week ago Saturday. She joined the Discoverer Enterprise, who's been stationary for the past month or so, approximately six miles northwest of the Development Driller 2. The Discoverer Enterprise is a dredger, and has been accompanied for some time by anti-pollution vessels, generally the Virginia Responder and the Mississippi Responder. The move by DD3 has not been reported in any news we've seen, but it's the first she's moved off the Macondo site since arriving to drill the relief wells with her sister ship, DD2.
In the meantime, the West Sirius (photos and descriptions and here and here), a semi-submersible driller, has replaced the DD3 beside DD2. Cargo ships, skimmers, and various other ships have been seen coming and going from the area of both Development Drillers on a regular basis.
That's a lot of action for the waters around a well that was supposed to be plugged and abandoned a long time ago.
==Multiple stream feeds (hard on browser/bandwidth)==
German multiple feed site that updates once a minute—Does not crash browsers and loads really fast.
BP videos All the available directly feeds from BP.
Bobo's lightweight ROV Multi-feed: is the only additional up to date multiple feed site.
See this thread for more info on using video feeds and on linking to video feeds.
Previous Gulf Watcher diaries:
Gulf Watchers Monday Edition - Reparations, Repair, Responsibility - BP Catastrophe AUV #414 - shanesnana
Gulf Watchers Sunday Edition - Will New Lawsuit Revive the Moratorium? - BP Catastrophe AUV #413 - Yasuragi
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #412 - gchaucer2
Gulf Watchers Wednesday Edition - 6 Months of Gulf Sorrow - BP Catastrophe AUV #411 - peraspera
Gulf Watchers Monday Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #410 - shanesnana
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #409 - Lorinda Pike
Gulf Watchers Monday Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #408 - peraspera
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #407 - shanesnana
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #406 - Sunday Wrap - Lorinda Pike
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #405 - bleeding heart
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #404 - peraspera
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #403 - Darryl House
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #402 - Yasuragi
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #401 - Lorinda Pike
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #400 - Yasuragi
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #399 - Gulf Watchers/peraspera/story/
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #398 - Gulf Watchers/peraspera/story/
Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #397 - Gulf Watchers/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers Morning Edition - BP Catastrophe AUV #396 - Gulf Watchers/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #395 - Condition: transition - BP's Gulf Castastrophe - David PA
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #394 - Transitions - BP's Gulf Castastrophe - Lorinda Pike
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #393 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Lorinda Pike
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #392 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - When Can we Share a Soda? - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #391 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Talking about Change - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #390 - Drips Redux - Lorinda Pike
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #389 - Night of the Living Drips - Lorinda Pike
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #388 - Sittin' Up With the Dead - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #387 - Time for a Wake? - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #386 - The Coroner Won't Pronounce - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #385 - Is it Dead? - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Lorinda Pike
The last Mothership has links to reference material.
Previous motherships and ROV's from this extensive live blog effort may be found here.
Again, to keep bandwidth down, please do not post images or videos.