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.
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.
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.”
It’s been little more than a year since BP successfully plugged its blown-out Macondo well, and the effects of that catastrophic oil spill still abound on the Gulf Coast and deep beneath the surface. Years or even decades may pass before scientists finally get a handle on the spill’s impact, but that unfortunate mystery hasn’t stopped BP from acquiring the right to drill another exploratory well in the Gulf much like the Macondo well, only deeper.
The city of Orange Beach, Alabama, and BP reached an agreement Wednesday over tourism revenues the city lost during and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The settlement came after a year of negotiating, with BP agreeing to pay $1.27 million to cover lodging and retail taxes and other “small claims” the city has tried to recover since the BP oil spill fouled Alabama’s coastline.
Globs of tar that washed ashore in Alabama and elsewhere during Tropical Storm Lee prove that oil from BP’s blown-out Macondo well isn’t rapidly breaking down as some high-ranking officials have claimed.
A new federal government report released this week blames BP for most of the errors and oversights that caused the fatal Macondo well blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Compiled by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), the report echoes the findings of earlier probes, including those of a commission formed by President Obama to determine the cause of the spill, but it also slams BP for violating several federal safety regulations in an effort to save time and money.
The trial over BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and Gulf oil spill will begin as scheduled on February 27, 2012, and will be broken into three phases, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier said at a monthly status hearing Friday. More than 100,000 plaintiffs have so far filed lawsuits against BP and its partners, seeking compensation for damages created by the massive oil spill that permeated the northern Gulf last year.
The Gulf Coast and its many of its residents are still languishing in the aftermath of the largest oil spill in U.S. history, with contaminated fish and shrimp habitats and lost tourism revenues, but BP is once again pulling in multi-billion earnings, fueled in part by the near-record gas prices that leave motorists fuming at the pumps.
