BartBlog

Author’s note: Duhhoooh!

Excerpt:
Hurricane Alex has whipped up waves as high as 7 feet that are washing oil over booms on the Gulf coast and driving oily water ashore and into marshes.

BP’s plan on file with the federal government for dealing with an oil spill in the Gulf, meanwhile, takes into account the potential impact on walruses, but not the potential impact of a hurricane or even a tropical storm.

One small problem with that – there are no walruses in the Gulf of Mexico, but tropical storms and hurricanes occur there regularily.

How stupid could BP and the federal officials at the Minerals and Management Service (MMS) who accepted this plan be? Are they on crack? That’s a rhetorical question, as investigations have shown that MMS officials have accepted bribes from oil company lobbyists that included cocaine, meth and hookers, when they were not watching porn on their taxpayer-financed PCs.

As Hurricane Alex moved through the Gulf on Wednesday, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) issued a sharply-worded press release and fired off a letter to BP asking why it had overlooked the possibility of contending with a spill in the middle of a hurricane or storm.

Here is a point that Markey made in his press release:

The BP plan had walruses in the Gulf, but no hurricanes, said Rep. Markey….Walruses haven’t been in the Gulf in a few million years, while a hurricane is just a few hundred miles from the spill site right now. This is yet another example of BP serial complacency.

At an Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing on June 15th, Chairman Markey and others revealed that the major oil companies had response plans that were 90 percent identical, and included references to walruses in the Gulf of Mexico, and emergency contact information for long-deceased experts. The CEOs of the major oil companies testifying admitted that their response plans contained significant flaws, calling them an “embarrassment.”

The BP response plan uses the word “weather” in several instances, but never does so in an analysis of extreme weather that could markedly affect response capabilities.

There are six more questions that Markey asked BP America CEO Lamar McKay. Hit this link and read them.

This is not just another example of BP’s utter failure to prepare for real contingencies such as a disaster like this, it is also a failure of the federal government to properly regulate the industry. Prepared for walruses, but not a storm in the Gulf!?! One does not have to be a meteorologist to know that major storms regularily hit the Gulf of Mexico and that any spill response plan ought to take that into account. Yet no one in the U.S. government required BP to plan for that, and of course, BP did not do that on their own.

That is so ludicrous that even a fiction writer would think it has no plausibility, yet it is a sad reality for millions of Gulf residents.

Read more and get links here: Madison Independent Examiner – As hurricane Alex whips up Gulf waters, BP disaster planning does not account for storms