Andrea Mitchell had BP spokesperson Bob Dudley on to give their side of how things were going with the oil gusher spill in the Gulf. As expected, Dudley disputed current estimates of how much oil is actually entering the ocean. Her patience seemed to have worn thin by this point in the interview so Mitchell challenged Dudley, with reports of a much larger spill indicated by video analysis of the oil spewing into the bottom of the ocean, and also satellite imagery of the Gulf. As expected Dudley wouldn't budge an inch.
The issue has been downplayed by both BP and the government agency NOAA, but many experts have called into question the official estimates from the very beginning. NY Times:
The issue of how fast the well is leaking has been murky from the beginning. For several days after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, the government and BP claimed that the well on the ocean floor was leaking about 1,000 barrels a day.
A small organization called SkyTruth, which uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, published an estimate on April 27 suggesting that the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day, and probably several times that.
The following day, the government — over public objections from BP — raised its estimate to 5,000 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so the estimate works out to 210,000 gallons per day.
BP later acknowledged to Congress that the worst case, if the leak accelerated, would be 60,000 barrels a day, a flow rate that would dump a plume the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into the gulf every four days. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has estimated that the reservoir tapped by the out-of-control well holds at least 50 million barrels of oil.
John Amos gives a warning for what may lay ahead.
“If we are systematically underestimating the rate that’s being spilled, and we design a response capability based on that underestimate, then the next time we have an event of this magnitude, we are doomed to fail again,” said John Amos, the president of SkyTruth. “So it’s really important to get this number right.”
