I’ve been to a few oil spills in my day and, sad to say, my day seems like it hasn’t ended yet. ExxonMobil’s latest oil spill, in Mayflower, Arkansas, is of Canadian heavy crude oil. Continue reading
Author Archives: Mark Floegel
About Mark Floegel
Mark Floegel is a senior investigator in Greenpeace USA’s research unit. Floegel led Greenpeace teams to Louisiana in 2005 to respond to Hurricane Katrina, in 2010 to respond to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and in 2011 to investigate lingering effects of BP’s blowout. It’s arithmetic: $4.5 billion is chump change for BP
Let me apologize in advance for all the numbers that follow, but they’re important.
Eleven men died on Deepwater Horizon the night BP’s Macondo well blew out in April 2010. It’s one number we shouldn’t forget and no number can be placed on the loss their families and communities suffered and continue to suffer.
The number announced today – $4 billion – represents BP’s criminal settlement with the US government and a victory for the giant oil corporation. Continue reading
Texas Wildfires Contradict Governor’s Belief
Cognitive dissonance is name given to the discomfort caused by trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas. Policy dissonance might be the name applied when two conflicting ideas are the basis for government action.
An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended (at least in terms of the calendar). Wildfires destroyed an area of Texas as large as the state of Connecticut, another all-time worst.
On August 13th, in the midst of this, Texas’s Republican Governor Rick Perry declared himself a candidate for president. He thinks – or at least says he thinks – global warming is a hoax invented by scientists as a way to get research grants. He has not indicated whether he thinks these scientists are setting his state on fire.
Mr. Perry may be one reason Texas’s wildfires are bigger than everyone else’s. (Texans like to boast about the size of things.) This spring – long after the drought began – he cut 72 percent of the budget for firefighting equipment for volunteer fire departments
Salon quoted state Sen. Mario Gallegos, a Democrat and former firefighter: “Volunteer fire departments are the backbone of fire protection in this state, and they need heavy equipment and other resources to do their job.” On the other hand, Mr. Perry did ask Texans to pray for rain in April. God apparently said no.
The business of cutting nearly three-quarters of funds for volunteer fire companies caught my eye for another reason. In the recent dump of State Department documents by Wikileaks, was a 2003 memo on US-Canada pipelines. One section said: “Pipeline firms say they maintain close relationships with landowners, municipalities, and volunteer fire departments along their routes in order to enhance both monitoring of the pipeline, and emergency response. Company employees help to train local firefighters, and these two groups in combination are the ‘first responders’ to pipeline emergencies.”
Last month, that same U.S. State Department concluded the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry highly corrosive tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, is unlikely to have an adverse environmental impact. Look again, at the paragraphs above. Volunteer firefighters are the “first responders” to pipeline emergencies. Friend of oil companies Rick Perry cut the budget for volunteer firefighters by 72 percent and the State Department whistles past the graveyard of “adverse environmental impact.”
In Wednesday’s New York Times, Terry Cunha, a spokesperson for TransCanada (which proposes the Keystone pipeline) says Keystone will be the safest pipeline in North America. Words are easy and talk is cheap when it’s all just talk. Mr. Cunha should speak to BP Vice President David Rainey, who told the US Senate in November 2009 the “best available and up-to-date scientific information” supports offshore oil drilling and that such drilling is “safe and protective of the environment.” Mr. Rainey’s eaten those words a dozen times over since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout less than six months after his testimony.
(By the way, BP’s oil spew seems to be leaking. Again.)
Talk is cheap for corporate spokespeople, consequences for real people are not.
The government the polluters paid for
Happy Chernobyl Day. It was 25 years ago today Soviet engineers were conducting a systems test on that nuclear reactor when a sudden power surge led to a series of explosions, a fire and the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history… so far. The ongoing disaster in Fukushima, Japan may be worse by the time that situation is under control.
How are you celebrating Chernobyl Day? The folks in Texas City, Texas are celebrating by staying indoors and sealing their windows and door with duct tape. It’s called “shelter in place” and it’s not really a Chernobyl Day commemoration, it’s the citizens only defense against noxious fumes emanating from three refineries and a vinyl acetate facility that have experienced a power loss. Power loss, the same thing that kicked off the Fukushima disaster.
The three Texas City refineries are owned by Valero, Marathon and BP. The BP refinery is the most famous of the three, due to an explosion in 2005 that killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. The federal Occupation Safety and Health Administration found BP had ignored safeguards prior to that explosion. BP is trying to sell that refinery. So far, no takers.
According to wire reports, area residents report noxious fumes in the air, making breathing difficult. The refineries’ flares are still burning, so it’s unclear why people are choking. Other gaseous emissions may be occurring. Later reports say the power outage was caused not by the local utility, but by problems inside the industrial facilities.
We at Greenpeace have witnessed many industrial accidents. One sad feature of them all is that the industry in question always gives out incomplete or misleading information on day one. There always seems to be more concern for controlling the PR than for protecting the health of people who live nearby. There are 550,000 people who live in the “vulnerability zone” around the BP refinery. These are the folks who’ve been told to duct tape themselves into their homes.
The weather report says it’s 80 degrees and hazy in Texas City. Of course, you have to shut off your air conditioner when you “shelter in place.” What would you do if you lived there? Tape the windows, swelter, turn on the radio, pray? Or grab the kids and run for the car, risk being overcome by fumes, just try to get out of there? Where would you go? These are not gated communities of McMansions. People who live near refineries don’t have much money.
Dow Chemical owns the vinyl acetate facility. The plant was part of Union Carbide, which Dow purchased in 2001. In 1984, a Union Carbide facility in India leaked methyl isocyanate. The “vulnerability zone” around that plant had a half million poor people living in it, too. Twenty thousand of them died; another 150,000 were severely injured.
According to the material safety data sheet for vinyl acetate, it is immediately threatening to the eyes, skin and lungs and cancer-causing in the longer term.
We at Greenpeace have been working for a nearly a decade – since before the 9/11 attacks – to convert America’s industrial facilities from the use of hazardous feedstocks to available safer alternatives, ones that don’t require huge amounts of poison gasses in the communities where we live and raise out children.
In 2004, then-Congressman Jim Turner (D), who represented a nearby area, called such plants “pre-positioned toxic weapons of mass destruction.” Unfortunately, a decade of efforts by legislators like Mr. Turner has run into a wall of pre-positioned lobbyists from the chemical industry and the politicians whose campaigns they finance.
Our nation was attacked by terrorists and no measures were taken to protect us from distinct hazards nestled among a half million people. Our economy crashed and no effort was made to recoup the thieved billions or regulate our financial markets. Three reactors and four spent fuel pools in Japan have been in crisis for weeks and our government does nothing to examine the 23 similar reactors in this country.
You get what you pay for, except this isn’t the government you paid for. It’s the one the polluters paid for.
Entergy lawsuit forces nuclear power on Vermont
Entergy, the Louisiana-based company that owns the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, announced today it will sue the state of Vermont in federal court, asking for a judgement to allow its nuclear plant to continue operating past March 21, 2012, the day its certificate of public good (CPG – aka state operating permit) expires.
Last month, just ten days after the tsunami that touched off the Fukushima catastrophe, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, issued Vermont Yankee a 20-year extension of its federal operating license, despite the fact that Vermont Yankee is of the same flawed design as the reactors at Fukushima and despite the fact that its spent fuel pool is jammed with highly radioactive waste, far beyond its design capacity.
Everyone expected Entergy to file suit. Since it bought the plant nine years ago, Entergy has lied (often under oath) to the citizens of Vermont, its managers have cut corners to the point that some parts of their facility collapsed from lack of maintenance and others caught fire for no apparent reason. The rust bucket has leaked – and continues to leak – radioactive material into Vermont’s pristine groundwater. This lawsuit merely represents the latest example of bad-faith dealing from a company that appears to know no other way of conducting itself.
I, for one, welcome this lawsuit.
In 2002, when Entergy purchased Vermont Yankee, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the state, agreeing that the state’s Public Service Board (PSB) can decide whether or not the plant may continue operation after March 2012.
In today’s announcement, Richard Smith, president of Entergy wholesale commodities, said the company’s lawsuit is premised on the notion that a state cannot prevent a federally-licensed nuclear facility from operating. If that argument is true, then it was true when Entergy signed the Memorandum of Understanding in 2002.
So, number one – I look forward to hearing Entergy attorneys explain that one – that they’re filing this suit out of deep concern for a process that did not seem to enter their minds in 2002.
Mr. Smith argues that Entergy need no longer honor the 2002 MOU because in 2006, the Vermont legislature directed the PSB to withhold action on a CPG until both bodies in the legislature approve of the action. That was a deal-breaker, Mr. Smith said today.
If that’s true, why didn’t Entergy sue in 2006? Why wait until now? And why sue on grounds of federal pre-emption? It seems a breach-of-contract suit is the proper means to seek judicial relief. But I’m not a lawyer, so I welcome this suit, so I can understand these issues better.
I welcome this lawsuit as a kind of spring training for the state governments of New York and Massachusetts, because they have serious questions about the operation of Entergy nuclear plants in their states (at Indian Point and Pilgrim, respectively).
Finally, I welcome this lawsuit as a much-needed public forum in which to hold a full and vigorous debate on the desirability of nuclear power in the United States in the post-Fukushima era.
Let’s have at it.
Ask a Stupid Question…
The presidential commission on the BP oil spill seems to be fulfilling the task of all such blue-ribbon commissions: ask the wrong questions, draw the wrong conclusions.
The commission’s general counsel, Fred Bartlit, burst across the media Monday with his claim that he could find no cost cutting leading to the April 20 blowout and the subsequent weeks of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.
“I’ve been on a lot of rigs,” the Washington Post quoted Mr. Bartlit as saying “and I don’t believe people sit there and say, ‘This is really dangerous, but the guys in London will make more money.’ We don’t see a concrete situation where people made a trade-off of safety for dollars.”
He’s right, no one says, “The guys in London will make more money.” If they’re working on the rig floor, they say, “I’d better get this done cheap. If I don’t the boss will fire me and find someone who will.” If they’re a bit higher up the chain of command, they say, “My bonus and promotion depend on my bringing this project in under budget.”
No one wants to die on a rig or cause the death of others, but many of the automatic alarms and shut-off devices on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon were shut down. If they had not been, 11 men who are dead might be alive today and the gulf might have been spared a supreme injury.
If cement contractor Halliburton had not been trying to cut corners, why did it authorize the use of cement known to be faulty to (unsuccessfully) seal the well?
If BP was not trying to drill on the cheap, then why—as marine conservationist Rick Steiner points out—did BP use a long string casing in the lower 1,200 feet instead of a casing liner? BP emails obtained by Congress say the decision was made to save time—three days time. Everyone—even Fred Bartlit – agrees, time is money and saving three days with a less substantial long string casing meant saving four and half million dollars.
For goodness sake, if cutting corners in a reckless attempt to send more money to the bottom line—if the managers and engineers on the Deepwater Horizon were doing their level best, to hell with what it costs—if that was NOT the reason for the blowout, then the alternative explanation is even more ominous.
If everyone is doing the very best they can do and no expense is spared and we still have a blowout and oil spill of this magnitude, then the only answer is: shut down offshore drilling, deepwater and shallow. Shut down onshore drilling, too because we are clearly operating beyond our capacity to control our technology.
There are a number of reasons why a guy who sits where I do might want to shut down drilling. (Global warming comes immediately to mind.) But it is precisely BP’s corporate policy of rewarding managers for keeping the costs down that killed 11 men in April and killed 15 men at BP’s Texas City refinery in 2005.
Unless and until that mentality changes, there will be more blasts, more spills and more deaths.
–Mark
Disaster on the Horizon
I was in Venice, Louisiana in late April and early May of this year, waiting for the first oil from the blowout of BP’s Macondo well to come ashore. Journalists from across the globe, politicians, fishermen, government bureaucrats, environmentalists, BP reps all milled about in a chaotic scrum. No one had good information. It seemed that once a rumor had passed through the crowd twice, it became accepted as fact.
I
wish I’d had Bob Cavnar’s phone number then.
Mr. Cavnar is the author of Disaster on the Horizon, published this month by Chelsea Green. A 30-year veteran of the oil industry, who’s lived the industry from the oil patch to the boardroom, Mr. Cavnar writes about the BP blowout, oil technology, oil politics and energy policy in clear-eyed prose intelligible to those who only consume, rather than produce, petroleum products.
Who’s to blame? Anyone as blunt as Mr. Cavnar was not going to get into the rooms where the decisions were made, but his eye for details outsiders would miss and what he gleans from public sources point in ominous directions, such as:
– Transocean, which owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon, disabled or disconnected many of the alarms and emergency shutoff switches on the rig. Had those devices remained untampered, they might have shut down the engine that exploded when it encountered gas from the well. Alarms might have saved the lives of some of the 11 crewmembers that died. (Ironically, Transocean executives were aboard the rig that night to celebrate seven years of safe operations.)
- The US Coast Guard, whose marine safety mission has been supplanted by drug interdiction and homeland security, no longer had authority to oversee firefighting operations on the burning rig. No fire marshal was appointed to oversee workboats that poured water into the upper decks of the Deepwater Horizon, flooding them and likely the cause of the rig’s sinking.
- The Bush/Cheney administration, which spent eight years undermining the nation’s regulatory system, putting industry hacks in charge of “monitoring” their own interests and spinning the revolving door between government and corporate America at record speeds.
- The Obama administration, which took the blame for many Bush administration sins, but for its own part was too eager for the crisis to be over and the oil magically “gone,” too willing to let itself be gulled by BP, letting the oil company withhold crucial information and manipulate the technical end of the response for its own interests.
- BP, which dodged and weaved from Day One, always more concerned with limiting corporate liability that with limiting the size of the spill, protecting the Gulf of Mexico environment or playing straight with the federal government and the public. Mr. Cavnar asks why the drilling of relief wells was inexplicably halted for two months, that the much lauded “static kill” probably did not kill the well and asserts BP managed to outfox the feds by getting the well closed without ever taking an accurate measurement of the flow of oil. Since fines are based on the number of barrels spilled, no measurement means BP lawyers will hold the high ground when the court battle begins. (As marine conservationist Rick Steiner might say, “Lawyers yet unborn will be litigating this case.”)
I don’t agree with everything Bob Cavnar writes. Let’s not get crazy; he’s an oilman and I work for Greenpeace. But if his kind of honesty were better represented in the oil industry, our nation would have had a sensible energy policy decades ago. He also doesn’t forget (as we should not) that 11 men lost their lives on April 20, sacrificed to greed and arrogance. Some of that came from their industry; some from us, with our desire for cheap fuel without wanting to think of the danger and consequences that come with it.
–Mark