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 PLC’s 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis.
The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company’s preparedness to deal with one.
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:
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 website 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.
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.
The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP’s regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.
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.”
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