Emails and other documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or turned over as part of court proceedings ahead of the February 27 BP oil spill trial suggest politics and spin had more influence on determining the amount of oil BP’s blown-out Macondo well spewed into the Gulf of Mexico each day than actual science.
Top White House officials manipulated the scientific findings of independent experts to “seriously lowball the amount of oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon,” according to a group of federal, state, and municipal employees.
Lawyers for the federal government are posturing to collect heavy fines from BP and other companies for playing a role in the causing 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The Justice Depratment argued in a hearing in New Orleans Friday that BP, Transocean, and Anadarko should be found liable ahead of February’s trial for violating U.S. pollution laws.
Priding itself on “making things right” in Gulf of Mexico and coastal communities hard-hit the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP says it has big plans for expanding its operations in the United States. The announcement wasn’t supposed to comfort residents and businesses still struggling to recover in the BP spill’s oily aftermath, but to reassure investors that it doesn’t intend to hold back on its push to find and extract more oil and gas from U.S. lands and waters, despite the ongoing destruction of Gulf ecosystems and frustration of people who depend on them for a living.
BP began drilling operations at the Macondo well on October 7, 2009. Less than seven months later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in a series of massive fire balls, leaving 11 workers dead and setting off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. What events caused the BP oil disaster will likely be disputed for some time to come. But one thing seems evident: Had BP followed its own and government-mandated safety procedures more carefully, the catastrophe likely wouldn’t have happened.
Mobile Press-Register reporters went to Alabama’s Dauphin Island Monday looking for tar balls deposited on the beaches by BP’s Gulf oil spill, but they found the most telling signs that all is not right in the Gulf in a number of fish pulled from the surf with “bloody red lesions.”
A new lawsuit filed Tuesday in a Washington D.C. federal court challenges the federal government’s decision to accept bids from oil and gas corporations for new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the complaint, brought by a group of conservation organizations, asserts the federal government “dismissed the lessons learned during the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster from its assessment of oil-spill risk for the Gulf of Mexico, the possible size of an oil spill, and resulting damage — all considerations that could help prevent or mitigate a future spill.”
She married into a family of scheming oil barons on the television series Dallas, but in real life Victoria Principal is calling for tougher oil drilling regulations while supporting organizations working to prevent another environmental catastrophe like BP’s Gulf oil spill from occurring again. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Oceana, two groups that oppose an expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, recently announced that Ms. Principal made “extremely generous six-figure donations” to their organizations.
BP levied some hefty accusations against Halliburton Energy Services in court Monday, claiming the company intentionally destroyed cement samples, test results, and computer models that would have demonstrated the contractor’s culpability in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
BP is a repeat offender of environmental laws on Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope, and its probation from a negligent oil spill in 2007 should not be revoked, federal prosecutors say. The oil giant is currently lobbying for an end to its probation, put in place after a 2006 oil spill that flooded the Alaskan tundra with 200,000 gallons of North Slope crude – the largest spill ever in Alaska’s oil patch.
