As British Petroleum’s mangers Wednesday began a “top kill” injection of heavy mud and cement in a risky attempt to plug the devastating oil gusher from its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, a congressional committee learned that BP and its oil rig contractor, Transocean, had a series of signals that trouble was brewing during the 24 hours that preceded the Deep Horizon’s fateful explosion.
Investigators who briefed the committee described how fluid pressure levels in various components of the blowout preventer assembly over the well a mile deep in the ocean suggested that valve seals, heavy mud and cement used to plug the well — which, ironically, was being temporarily capped so the drilling rig could be used for another job — might build up enough pressure to explode.
In fact, that fatal explosion occurred at approximately 9:49 p.m. on April 20, killing 11 workers and causing one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. The question now seems to be who made the critical decisions that preceded, or led, to the blowout? Managers at BP, which leased the well and employed Transocean to use its drilling rig to bring up the oil, or Transocean’s well operators, or other contractors? Testimony Wednesday described conflict between a BP official, who allegedly demanded the use of lighter sea-water in the capping process, and the oil-rig manager, who wanted to use a heavier fluid in the critical capping operation.
The preliminary report on the investigation of what went wrong, of course, is just one of the many moving pieces in this disaster, which has taken on the devilish characteristics of an environmental tragedy and legal and political nightmare that will have no end for years after the well’s gusher is contained. Indeed, the spill’s many threads and ramifications are becoming more complex and harder to keep up with every day.
The Obama administration, for example, is moving on a variety of fronts to position the government to handle various contingencies. Its efforts are necessarily overlapping, confusing and sometimes conflicting.
The administration has criminal investigators and Justice Department lawyers probing the events surrounding the blowout and clean-up efforts for both civil and criminal liability. It’s also digging back into the previous administration’s scandal which revealed cozy and unethical links between federal Minerals Management Service regulators for oil drilling who partied with and took favors from oil company representatives while ignoring drilling abuses — abuses that apparently continued after the Obama administration took over.
But while it has told key companies to preserve records pertinent to the spill, the administration is reasonably withholding some potential legal actions in order to facilitate cooperation and movement on the first priority: plugging the oil gusher that is fouling — and probably killing — a huge swath of the fragile estuaries that have supported the Gulf’s aquatic habitat, fisheries and storm-barrier wetlands.
The administration has also stumbled over its toes on how strictly to impose its claimed moratorium on new oil leases and drilling in the nation’s territorial waters. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been hard pressed to explain why federal regulators have granted at least 17 permits and at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects since President Obama announced the moratorium pending a thorough investigation of the BP/Deep Horizon disaster.
The quick excuse issued by the government is that many of those decisions did not concern new wells and new drilling. Rather, they were modifications of existing permits that were already under review when the April 20 spill happened five weeks ago. Those decisions could be faulted, yet it’s also true that routine permit modifications given to keep working wells operating are essential to the nation’s economy. More than a third of the nation’s oil, and a larger portion of our natural gas, comes from wells in the Gulf of Mexico — many in shallower waters where drilling is less risky than in the ocean’s much deeper waters.
The energy equation, however, must haunt the gulf’s fishermen and seafood harvesters, whose generations-long industries could easily collapse in the areas irrevocably choked by the current-pushed oil. Whatever the amount of damages given the Gulf states and citizens whose property and lives are affected the spill, money alone cannot compensate for such irretrievable losses and environmental damage.
The still-present oil globules and impact of the Exxon Valdeez spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 — then the nation’s largest oil spill — suggests that the long-term impact of the Deep Horizon blowout may be horrendous and extraordinarily long-lasting. And the longer it takes to contain and reverse the damage, the more scrutiny is merited on the inevitable costs of deep-sea drilling.