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It was only a year ago today that the Deepwater Horizon oil well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, and yet it seems as if the horrendous damage it inflicted on people and wildlife in the region has all been forgotten.

Sure, for a little while, the "drill baby drill" chants subsided for a little while -- but not for very long. Now Republicans are trying to use the spill anniversary to attack President Obama for not opening up MORE drilling.

The public strongly supports efforts to make BP accountable for restoring the Gulf's ecosystem and the damaged communities, while Republicans have been apologizing to BP for those efforts.

But just because the media haven't been paying attention, it doesn't mean that dead wildlife haven't been washing ashore in droves, or that the ecological catastrophe is only starting to become manifest.

Of course, BP has been trying hard to suppress research into the spill's effects, despite increasing evidence that they will be catastrophic.

And at the same time, the government has opened the door for more such catastrophes:

With everything Big Oil and the government have learned in the year since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, could it happen again? Absolutely, according to an Associated Press examination of the industry and interviews with experts on the perils of deep-sea drilling.

The government has given the OK for oil exploration in treacherously deep waters to resume, saying it is confident such drilling can be done safely. The industry has given similar assurances. But there are still serious questions in some quarters about whether the lessons of the BP oil spill have been applied.

The industry "is ill-prepared at the least," said Charles Perrow, a Yale University professor specializing in accidents involving high-risk technologies. "I have seen no evidence that they have marshaled containment efforts that are sufficient to deal with another major spill. I don't think they have found ways to change the corporate culture sufficiently to prevent future accidents."

Mike Conathan at the Center for American Progress has a good summary on the government's abdication of its responsibilities:

Continue reading »

While the media is busy assuring their audiences that we still need nuclear energy despite catastrophic accidents potential, environmentalists would like you to remember we still have issues in the Gulf of Mexico from another one of our short-sighted energy policies.

The Coast Guard is investigating reports of a potentially large oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico not far from the Deepwater Horizon site. According to a knowledgeable source, the slick was sighted by a helicopter pilot on Friday and is about 100 miles long. A fishing boat captain said he went through the slick yesterday and it was strong enough to make his eyes burn.

According to the Times Picayune, the Coast Guard has confirmed they are investigating a potentially large 100 mile slick about 30 miles offshore. They are going to a site near the Matterhorn well site about 20 miles north of the BP Deepwater Horizon site, according to the paper. The Matterhorn field includes includes a deepwater drilling platform owned by W&T Technology. It was acquired last year from TotalFinaElf E&P.

I'm sure that the GOP will insist that this has nothing to do with the Deepwater Horizon site and is strictly a coincidence. And of course, by no means should this force us to reassess the wisdom of deep water drilling. To which, you can be sure, the administration will shrug and acquiesce.

Because why should we worry about a fragile eco-system and search for alternative fuel sources (thereby adding jobs and strengthening the economy) when we can instead live in the back pocket of Big Oil?

All I can say is, this guy better stay off small planes and deserted roads.

I still can't quite believe the oil companies had the sheer audacity to lie like this, considering the weight of evidence to the contrary. But then, I guess I can't blame them when they like lax enforcement just the way it is, thank you very much:

Reporting from Washington — Oil and gas companies have told the Obama administration that environmental regulations for deep-water drilling rigs do not immediately need to be toughened because the Deepwater Horizon explosion was an unforeseeable event, not a failure of federal oversight, according to documents filed last week with the White House.

The industry's chief lobbying arm, the American Petroleum Institute, submitted written comments to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The council is reviewing whether the federal Minerals Management Service — the now-splintered and much criticized agency charged with regulating oil drilling — has appropriately conducted reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA.

"One accident does not mean that the practice and procedures of MMS are inadequate to implement NEPA's requirements, especially when the cause of the accident has yet to be determined," wrote the lobbying group, which represents 400 oil and gas companies, including BP.

Anadarko Petroleum, which owns a quarter share of the leaking BP well, wrote in a separate filing that it believes the government's enforcement of environmental laws has not "in any way played a role" in the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Since the April 20 explosion, the MMS has drawn fire from environmentalists for routinely exempting hundreds of offshore drilling projects from detailed environmental analysis, including the one for the Deepwater Horizon rig. The practice is known as granting "categorical exclusions." That practice is a specific focus of the White House review.

Must. Hit. Head. On. Wall.

And by the way, BP? If I had a dog that did to my house what your company did to the Gulf, he'd be history.

One of the ideas that made our country great is the idea that the law is applied equally. I knew there were plenty of exceptions and special deals, of course, but somehow I still believed that ultimately, justice would prevail.

Now, compare this with what happens to you if you drive down the street with an outdated inspection sticker on your car. (I really have to stop watching those Frank Capra movies!)

The federal agency responsible for ensuring that the Deepwater Horizon was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that the rig be inspected at least once per month, an Associated Press investigation shows.

In fact, the agency's inspection frequency on the Deepwater Horizon fell dramatically over the past five years, according to federal Minerals Management Service records. The rig blew up April 20, killing 11 people before sinking and triggering a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Since January 2005, inspectors issued just one minor infraction for the rig. That strong track record led the agency last year to herald the Deepwater Horizon as an industry model for safety.

[...] The AP sought to find out how many times government safety inspectors visited the Deepwater Horizon, and what they found. In response, MMS officials offered a changing series of numbers. The MMS has had long-standing issues with its data management.

At first, officials said 83 inspections had been performed since the rig arrived in the Gulf 104 months ago, in September 2001. While being questioned about the once-per-month claim, the officials subsequently revised the total up to 88 inspections. The number of more recent inspections also changed — from 26 to 48 in the 64 months since January 2005.

In the meantime, a "60 Minutes" investigation points to gross negligence on the part of BP.

This can't be right: A powerful corporation making a risky decision that put costs ahead of environmental safety? That's crazy talk!

About 11 hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, a disagreement took place between the top manager for oil giant BP PLC on the drilling rig and his counterpart for the rig's owner, Transocean Ltd., concerning the final steps in shutting down the nearly completed well, according to a worker's sworn statement.

Michael Williams, a Transocean employee who was chief electronics technician on the rig, said there was "confusion" between those high-ranking officials in an 11 a.m. meeting on the day of the rig blast, according to a sworn statement from Mr. Williams reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Williams himself attended the meeting.

The confusion over the drilling plan in the final hours leading up to the explosion could be key to understanding the causes of the blowout and ultimately who was responsible.

What is known from drilling records and congressional testimony is that after the morning meeting, the crew began preparations to remove from the drill pipe heavy drilling "mud" that provides pressure to keep down any gas, and to replace this mud with lighter seawater.

Ultimately, the crew removed the mud before setting a final 300-foot cement plug that is typically poured as a last safeguard to prevent combustible gas from rising to the surface. Indeed, they never got the opportunity to set the plug.

[...] Typically well owner BP would have final say, since it was paying roughly $1 million a day to lease the rig and pay for services from 12 companies that had people on the rig.

What is clear is that workers soon began displacing the mud. Later that afternoon a pressure test provided ambiguous readings, a possible sign of gas seeping in, according to what Rep. Henry Waxman says a BP executive told House investigators. Eventually, in the evening, after further tests, BP made a decision to carry forth in removing more drilling mud. The rig blew about 10 p.m.

How can the blowout device be considered fail-safe? Because the free market is powerful enough to do anything!

A senior House Democrat said that the blowout preventer that failed to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of one of the devices that was supposed to close the flow of oil and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through joints that made up 10 percent of the drill pipe.

In a devastating review of the blowout preventer that BP said was supposed to be "fail-safe," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said in a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the device was anything but fail-safe.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pressed BP on why it had assured regulators in its exploration plan that it could deal with a spill 50 times larger than the current one when the current one seems to have defied control technology. "The American people expect you to have a response comparable to the Apollo project, not 'Project Runway,' " Markey said.

Stupak said that the committee investigators had also uncovered a document prepared in 2001 by the drilling rig operator Transocean that said there were 260 "failure modes" that could require removal of the blowout preventer.

"How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" Stupak said.

Perhaps this is the answer:

In addition, an oil industry whistleblower told Huffington Post that BP had been aware for years that tests of the device were being falsified in Alaska.

Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.

As he describes it, the test involves a chart that shows whether the device will hold a certain amount of pressure for five minutes on each valve. (The test involves increasing the pressure from 250 pounds per square-inch (psi) to 5,000 psi.) "Sometimes, they would put their finger on the chart and slide it ahead -- so that it only recorded the pressure for 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes," he tells HuffPost.

Mason claims that a BP representative was usually present while subcontractors performed the tests.

The 48-year-old veteran oil worker claims that in the oil industry, particularly at BP, "the culture is basically safety procedures are shoved down your throat and then they look the other way when it's convenient for them." He claims that oil operators often wouldn't report spills and that when he spilled chemical fluid in 2003, he was told by his superiors not to report it. Mason, who now runs a small operation hauling freight in the Alaskan bush and owns guest cabins, says he was fired by a drilling company in 2006 after he wrote a letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News to condemn the firm for incorporating overseas and thereby avoiding taxes.

It was known long before the Obama administration took over that the MMS was rubber stamping every drilling application that came along. So why didn't they clamp down on this from the beginning?

Regulators at the Minerals Management Service exempted 27 additional offshore drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico from performing an in-depth environmental analysis—even after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, according to reporting by McClatchy. One of those exemptions went to BP.

The Deepwater Horizon rig had also been exempted from having to perform an in-depth environmental analysis using something known as a “categorical exclusion.” Categorical exclusions are used to fast-track drilling plans by eliminating paperwork that is deemed to be unnecessary or redundant because the drilling would probably have no significant effect on the environment.

While the granting of an exclusion is not the final step before a company is free to drill, it does expedite the review process.

The Department of Interior has put a temporary moratorium on new permits to drill offshore. MMS officials told McClatchy that giving a categorical exclusion isn’t the same as giving final approval to drill, and they “could not say” whether the exemptions would stand when the moratorium is lifted.

BP’s massive oil spill was already in progress when MMS applied the categorical exemptions to these 27 projects in the Gulf, exempting them from having to produce site-specific environmental impact statements as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The BP rig still burning. The oil is spilling,” Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told me. “And they give another categorical exclusion to BP, saying there’s no chance of a spill. It’s just insane.”

BP’s Deepwater Horizon plans were also thought to pose minimal risk to the environment. In its exploration plan for the rig, submitted to MMS years ago, BP said “no significant adverse impacts are expected” to the environment and stated that a spill was an “unlikely event.”

In the three weeks after the rig exploded, MMS gave BP a categorical exclusion for a plan to drill “at a depth of more than 4,000 feet,”according to McClatchy. Another company, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., was given approval for a plan to drill in more than 9,000 feet of water.

Obviously not good news, but not all that unexpected, either. Government officials always like to keep us from having too much information, we might get upset! (By the way, here's a link to give you some perspective on the spill.)

The amount of oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster is five times more than what the oil company and the U.S. Coast Guard are currently estimating, said a Florida State University oceanography professor on Saturday.

At an oil spill environmental forum at the Hilton Pensacola Beach Gulf Front, Ian MacDonald said the blowout is gushing 25,000 barrels a day.

The Coast Guard and BP estimate 5,000 barrels a day of crude is spewing into the Gulf.

MacDonald said his estimate is based on satellite images and government maps forecasting the slick's trajectory.

MacDonald also told a crowd of about 100 gathered for the discussion that he's been frustrated by the lack of data from federal responders and BP since the April 20 explosion and subsequent spill.

Dick Snyder, director of the Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation at the University of West Florida, said satellite imagery and maps give a misleading picture of the spread of the spill.

Chemical dispersants and exposure to sunlight have made some of the oil nearly invisible and hard to detect, he said.

Testing seawater for a hydrocarbon signature is needed to adequately track the oil spill so cleanup operations can be activated before it arrives, Snyder said.

A proposal by UWF to conduct such testing off the Pensacola coast was rejected by the state Department of Environmental Protection, Snyder said.

Both Snyder and MacDonald are members of the newly created Oil Spill Academic Task Force.

Under the Bush administration, the Department of the Interior was literally handed over to the lobbyists (remember Steve Griles? He was convicted for lying to Congress in the Jack Abramoff case). So while the brand-new Obama administration rubber-stamped a waiver to Deepwater Horizon, the bulk of the blame for this spill properly belongs to Bush:

The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which triggered the spill spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, caught the energy world by surprise. The operator, Transocean Ltd., is a giant in the brave new world of drilling for oil in deep waters far offshore. It had been honored by regulators for its safety record. The very day of the blast on the rig, executives were aboard celebrating its seven straight years free of serious accidents.

But a Wall Street Journal examination of Transocean's record paints a more equivocal picture.

Nearly three of every four incidents that triggered federal investigations into safety and other problems on deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico since 2008 have been on rigs operated by Transocean, according to an analysis of federal data. Transocean defended its safety record but didn't dispute the Journal's analysis.

In addition, an industry survey of oil companies that hired Transocean perceived a drop in its quality and performance, including safety by some measures, compared with its peers, though it still scored tops in one safety category.

Already the largest deep-water driller, Transocean in November 2007 took over rival GlobalSantaFe in an $18 billion deal. A Journal analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that Transocean's share of incidents in deep water investigated by the regulator has gone up since the merger, even after accounting for its increased size.

From 2005 through 2007, a Transocean rig was involved in 13 of the 39 deep-water drilling incidents investigated by the MMS in the Gulf of Mexico, or 33%. That's roughly in line with the percentage of deep-water rigs, 30%, Transocean owned and operated in the Gulf then, according to data firm RigLogix.

Since the merger, Transocean has accounted for 24 of the 33 incidents investigated by the MMS, or 73%, despite during that time owning fewer than half the Gulf of Mexico rigs operating in more than 3,000 feet of water.

Some of Transocean's clients have cited the merger as a reason they believe the company's performance has dropped.