A litany of half-truths, withholding crucial video, blocking media access to the site and a failure to share timely and complete information about efforts to contain the largest oil spill in U.S. history have created the widespread impression that BP is withholding information about the April 20 oilrig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, if not misleading the public and the government.
The government has been little better, for weeks blindly accepting BP's estimates of the size of the spill, all but powerless to force the company to curb its use of toxic chemical dispersants and ignoring warnings from its own officials about possible worker safety violations.
Most damning, say members of Congress, was BP's failure to release video that would help measure how much oil is being released from the broken well — a number that will be key evidence when federal investigators and perhaps juries consider what damages BP should pay. ....McClatchy
According to one Louisiana State biologist, two newly discovered species of fish have most likely been killed off by the oil. That's whole species, not just a few fish.
...Independent scientists and government officials say another disaster is playing out in slow motion -- and out of public view -- in the mysterious depths between the gusher and the coast, a world inhabited by sperm whales, gigantic jellyfish and diminutive plankton.
More than a month after the BP PLC spill began, the disaster's dimensions have come into sharper focus with government estimates that more than 18 million gallons of oil -- and possibly 39 million gallons -- has already poured from the leaking well, eclipsing the 11 million gallons released during the Exxon Valdez spill.
''Every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil is probably dying. I have no doubt about that,'' said Prosanta Chakrabarty, a Louisiana State University fish biologist.
The deep Gulf is an area where light can't penetrate and researchers rarely venture.Yet what happens there can ripple across the food chain. ...NYT
NPR's science reporter says this morning that getting hard information from BP is ... hard.
Why do we continue to use the word "spill"? That word minimalizes and trivializes a gigantic, pervasive, and long-term disaster. Oh, I guess that's why...
Dispersants are bound to prolong the gradual death of much life in the Gulf. An estimated 910,000 gallons of dispersants -- enough to fill more than 100 tanker trucks -- are contributing a new toxin to the mix. Containing petroleum distillates and propylene glycol, the dispersants' effects on marine life are still unknown.
What is known is that by breaking down oil into smaller droplets, dispersants reduce the oil's buoyancy, slowing or stalling the crude's rise to the surface and making it harder to track the spill.
Dispersing the oil lower into the water column protects beaches, but also keeps it in cooler waters where oil does not break down as fast. That could prolong the oil's potential to poison fish, said Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. ...NYT
Meanwhile, the White House has moved into the next stage of grief and frustration: self-flagellation.
...Administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.” ...NYT
It looks as though pressure from the administration was responsible for BP's discontinuing the "top kill."
Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort. ...NYT
It's also looking as though BP doesn't know much more about how to cope with the problem than the government. And hurricanes -- common in the Gulf during the summer months -- could make things a lot worse.
If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.
After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.
In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.
The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season. ...NYT
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