A delegation of U.S. senators head to the heart of coastal Louisiana Friday to assess the damage caused by the nearly two-month-long BP oil disaster.
The visit comes as local politicians express their outrage over how the response by the White House and oil giant is being handled.
The four senators, Sens. Benjamin Cardin, David Vitter, Jeff Merkley and Barbara Mikulski, will be in Grand Isle, one of the early areas hit by the slick created by the underwater gusher.
The senators, who are members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will hold a news conference after their “oversight” operation along the Gulf.
The senators are the latest in a virtual parade of officials from Washington to make the trip to the coast. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was in the region Thursday, while President Obama is scheduled to make his fourth trip to the region next week.
The attention from Capitol Hill hasn’t done much to soothe tempers along the Gulf.
LaFource Parish President Charlotte Randolph accused Obama of using the Gulf Coast for political purposes.
“I think he has an agenda, and this is certainly working into his agenda,” Randolph said Thursday. “Right now, we are the poster children for alternative energy. He can point to us and say this is why we need to move on to alternative energy.”
Randolph was one of several Louisiana officials who gathered in Port Fouchon, Louisiana, to criticize the administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater offshore oil drilling.
“The other morning I heard he was looking for some butt to kick. What he doesn’t realize is that he is kicking our butts right now,” Randolph said. “We can recover from all the storms we have had in the past. We are managing the oil. We can’t overcome this overriding issue — this moratorium — now.”
The continuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is one in a long list of failures indicating that the oil and gas industry has failed to learn key safety lessons, a federal official testified Thursday.
“The oil and gas industry must learn from its mistakes,” testified Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health.
Barab told the Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety that investigators are finding a lack of compliance during inspections of refineries.
“Time and again, our inspectors are finding the same violations in multiple refineries,” he said.
Incidents involving close calls, serious injuries and fatalities “are clear indication that essential safety lessons are not being learned,” he said.
Subcommittee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Washington, cited a litany of incidents: Eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20; 15 workers died and more than 170 were injured in the BP Texas City refinery disaster in 2005; seven workers died in the Tesoro refinery fire in Anacortes, Washington, in April.
BP’s response was not immediately available. The company failed to attend the hearing, an absence that infuriated Murray.
“Honestly, I find it very outrageous that even after an accident that killed 11 workers, BP is not putting a high enough priority on worker safety to send a representative to a hearing specifically focused on protecting workers in their industry,” she said.
Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, noted that he supports offshore drilling but said that doesn’t mean working Americans should tolerate “less than the maximum amount of security.”
The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, experts said Thursday, highlights flaws in the drilling industry’s main defense against oil and gas explosions: the blowout preventer, which is supposed to shut down an oil and gas well if something goes wrong.
Oil companies have treated such devices as virtually fail-safe.
“They’re certainly not fail-safe, because they didn’t close this well,” said petroleum engineering professor Paul Bommer of the University of Texas at Austin.
From 2000 to 2009, 72 spills dumped 18,000 barrels of oil into U.S. federal waters, compared to 15 spills that put 2,000 barrels into the water during the prior decade, according to the Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department, which regulates energy exploration.
Avoiding such spills depends upon the reliability of the blowout preventer, which is essentially a faucet on top of the oil well that is intended to keep oil and gas from gushing to the surface.
Rig workers use the preventer to keep a well under control, especially when oil and gas surge or “kick up” from a well.
When its valves don’t do the job, the blowout preventer is intended to choke off the drilling pipe, like squeezing a straw while drinking.
And, if that fails to work, a blowout preventer has another line of defense: huge shears, like giant scissors, that are supposed to be able to cut and seal the drilling pipe.
But, a mile underwater, where the pressure is intense, drill pipes need to be thick, especially the joints between them. And those joints are hard to cut.
“There are some parts of the pipe that the shears were never meant to cut,” said Ford Brett, an expert in petroleum project management who is advising the Interior Department’s oil drilling safety review.
“The blowout preventers had a probability of failing to crush that pipe that approaches 50 percent,” said professor Robert Bea of the University of California at Berkeley, who is familiar with the study. “It would be like getting on an airplane having a 50 percent chance of making it to your destination.”
Failures of basic communication sparked the ire of Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, who blasted federal officials Thursday for not alerting local authorities that oil from the Gulf disaster had entered Florida waters.
“The Coast Guard is doing a great job, but they are stretched to the limit,” Nelson said during a Senate hearing on the spill. “We are livid that the command and control is not there. … Communication is not coming to the state and local government.”
The drumbeat of hearings was too much for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, who mocked Congress on Thursday for holding them before experts have figured out how to stop the undersea gusher.
“Figure out what the hell went wrong, and then have the hearing and get the damn law fixed,” Boehner said at his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill.
Billy Nungesser, president of Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, told a Senate subcommittee that he didn’t know where to direct his anger.
“I still don’t know who’s in charge,” he said. “Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard? … I have spent more time fighting the officials of BP and the Coast Guard than fighting the oil.”
What is needed, he said, is someone “with the guts and the will to make decisions.”
Responsibility is a key question for families of the 11 oil rig workers who were killed and the 15 others who were injured in the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon.
Victims and their families are suing BP and Transocean, the Swiss-based company that owns the drilling rig. But getting a settlement from Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, could be difficult.
The company has invoked a 19th-century American law to limit its liability to $26.76 million, a fraction of what the plaintiffs are likely to seek.
“It may work,” said Martin Davies, professor of law and director of Tulane University’s Maritime Law Center. “They’ve got a chance.”
Obama said Thursday that he had a “frank conversation” with congressional leaders about the fact that current federal laws are not adequate to deal with the disaster.
The White House and Congress agree on the need to update the laws in order to ensure that residents in the Gulf “are all made whole” and the government is in a “much better position” to respond to future environmental crises, he said.
Meanwhile, BP has pledged to speed its payments to businesses that have suffered losses in the disaster, an Obama administration official said Thursday.
Pictures of oil-soaked birds and turtles have prompted a surge of offers of help from volunteers.
“Since the images have come out of wildlife in Louisiana, we definitely have had more volunteers willing to assist with wildlife,” said Anna Keene, programs director at the Alabama Coastal Foundation, a conservation group. “It hits them in the heart.”
Since the rig explosion, nearly 6,000 volunteers have been trained in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to help monitor beaches and prepare for oil coming ashore, according to Joan McCoy, a spokeswoman for the Joint Information Center in Mobile, Alabama.
The Audubon Society registered 5,000 new volunteers over the weekend of June 5, national field director Sean Saville said.
The Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service has registered more than 4,000 volunteers, according to spokeswoman Emily Wilemon.
Work continued Thursday on the effort to drill a relief well 16,000 to 18,000 feet below the seafloor, described as the only surefire way to stop the oil from spewing into the Gulf.
As of Thursday, BP said the drill for this relief well has reached a depth of 13,978 feet.
Workers acknowledged that the pace was slow but said it had to be done carefully.
“Part of the problem is that there is a lot of outside scrutiny on what it is that we’re doing out here,” Capt. Nick Schindler said aboard Development Driller III in the Gulf.
“The American population is wanting this well done. They want it now. We all want it done now. But we all have to understand that this is a well that killed 11 people … and sunk a rig. So we’re not going to speed up, and we’re going to do this as safe as possible.”
Source:CNN.com
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