President Obama vowed last night to end the oil industry’s “cosy relationship” with federal regulators, castigating industry executives for creating a “ridiculous spectacle” after they attempted to blame one another for the Gulf of Mexico spill.
He admitted that the Government shared responsibility for the disaster but expressed frustration at the industry’s failure to do the same during hearings on Capitol Hill this week. “I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings,” he said last night.
“You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people cannot have been impressed with that, and I certainly wasn’t. I will not tolerate more finger pointing or irresponsibility.
“For a decade or more there’s been a cosy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot, and will not, happen any more.”Oil-spill experts have challenged claims by BP that the slick is relatively tiny and said that the company has blocked scientists from measuring it. The British energy giant was coming under pressure to allow independent access to the site around the broken well, with analysts saying that imagery provided by BP suggested a leak of as much as 2.9 million gallons a day.
Admiral Thad Allen, the commandant of the US Coast Guard who is heading the federal response, said that he was treating the incident as catastrophic. While the crisis had not produced the feared impact on the shoreline, “this is a constantly changing life cycle”, he cautioned. “It’s like when you are engaged in a war looking at the enemy. In this case the enemy is oil.”
BP is trying to set equipment in place on the seabed that, if successful, will divert the oil through a pipe to the surface and into floating tankers. John Amos, a geologist and president of Skytruth, a non-profit group that uses satellite imagery to investigate environmental issues, is among those cynical of the company’s claims that it does not know how much oil is gushing.
“One key parameter for BP is, how much oil are we going to have to handle? Is it 200,000 gallons or is it two million? How big do our pipes need to be to handle it, what connections do we need, what kind of pressures are we going to be encountering? To hear these executives saying that ‘well, the number isn’t really important, it wouldn’t change our response’ raises red flags. It suggests a somewhat cavalier attitude.”
The US Coast Guard reported on April 24 that an estimated 1,000 barrels (42,000 US gallons) a day was pouring into the sea. On April 28 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, raised the estimate to 5,000 barrels — a figure that BP disputed before its chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, admitted the next day that the figure could be correct. “We’ ll take help from anyone,” he said.
Ian McDonald, a marine geophysicist and expert in oil-slick analysis at Florida State University, said that by that point the slick was 8.9 million gallons, with a daily leak of 26,500 barrels.
Steve Wereley, an expert in fluid mechanics at Purdue University, has also examined BP’s video footage of the leak, assessing the outflow using a method known as particle imaging velocimetry. The results indicated that, if the flow shown on the video remains constant, approximately 70,000 barrels are emptying from the well.
BP has declined to quantify the emission: “We have said all along that there was no way to measure the leak. We are focused on stopping the leak and not measuring it.” Oil-slick experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had been due to fly to the Gulf of Mexico last week to assess the spill. BP then withdrew the plan and told them not to come.
Douglas Brinkley, a Gulf Coast historian at Rice University, told CNN: “We’ ve got to stop relying on BP, we need transparency not cover-up . . . we need our best oceanographers on the site. BP has been blocking people, saying we’ve got it under control, and as we know they don’t. They’re running a misinformation campaign.”
Source:The times
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