No Back Up Plan?

Today, with the current state of our economy,including the growing unemployment, and all the people who have lost their homes. How can one feel secure anymore? We all need a back up plan. It’s a definite necessity, especially if you’ve owned a business, or have participated with the creation of a business. All business plans are required to have a back up plan.

Then why not the same for your everyday life?

Even Hollywood portrays the essentiality, with their latest release at the box office, The Back Up Plan.

The question here is why doesn’t a 65 Billion dollar company have a back-up plan?

BP says it is working on at least five possible approaches for halting the spew of oil from a damaged well deep in the Gulf of Mexico that is feeding one of the worst spills in U.S. history.

The company says all of the plans are moving forward simultaneously, even though some may turn out to be unnecessary or unsuccessful.

But several of the ideas, once considered back-up solutions, have begun to figure more prominently into the sweeping effort, including work on a subsea collection system for leaking oil and the drilling of a relief well to stop the flow from the damaged one.

That work is centered at BP's offices in west Houston, where hundreds of engineers and technical specialists, representing 160 companies, are assembled to attack the growing crisis.

“This is not just about BP,” said Bob Fryar, senior vice president of BP's exploration and production business in Angola, brought in to the center for his expertise in deepwater drilling.

After more than 10 days of continuous work without success, BP officials still hope to seal the well using robot submarines to activate an array of shut-off valves atop the well, called a blowout preventer.

Fryar and other BP executives said they still don't know why the blowout preventer did not seal the well when workers tried to activate it on April 20, after a blowout in the well engulfed the Deepwater Horizon in flames, killing 11 and sinking the structure two days later.

In recent days, half a dozen remotely operated vehicles have been engaged in the effort, but BP said it still hasn't worked, perhaps because the blowout preventer was damaged in the initial blast.

Within 24 hours of the explosion, robot submarines failed to execute two back-up methods for engaging the blowout preventer, he said.

Later, when trying to diagnose the problem, BP discovered leaks on the hydraulic controls, Fryar said, which have since been fixed.

Investigators are still trying to determine causes of the disaster, but Fryar said:

“there is nothing unique about the situation that was taking place at the time that would have prohibited the (blowout preventer) system from working as designed.”

BP said Monday four other solutions for halting the flow of oil from the well are gathering momentum.

Those include installing huge containment boxes over leaks to collect the oil and send it through a mile of pipe to a ship above; using long wands to spray chemical dispersants on the leaks at the sea floor to break up oil and keep it from rising to the surface; lowering a second blowout preventer onto the damaged one to seal the well; and drilling a relief well to intercept the damaged one and plug it.

Monday night, the company planned to install a valve on the end of a leaking drill pipe — one of three leaks in equipment down below — that could help slow the flow from the well.

That would be a first step in preparing to place one of two containment boxes over a leak causing the majority of the spill by as soon as this weekend, BP officials said.

A second box would be placed over a smaller leak close to the wellhead several days later.

“Over the next seven days or so, we'll be actually trying to connect all these pieces up and start up that system,” — Doug Suttles, CEO of BP

But he cautioned the technology has never been tried in such deep water.

In addition, deep-sea injection of chemical dispersants directly at the source of the leaks continues, and officials are hoping an aerial assessment will soon give them a sense of how effective that has been.

Fryar said an initial test showed “a clear difference” in the amount of oil traveling to the water's surface from the wellhead a mile below.

BP says it will try this week to take pressure measurements within the 50-foot tall blowout preventer atop the well to determine if it is safe to remove a top portion of the stack called the lower marine riser package. Removing the piece would allow BP to lower another blowout preventer on top of the damaged one to seal the well, but also might carry a danger of rupturing the well further.

BP began Monday afternoon drilling a relief well into the damaged well with the hope of permanently sealing it. The whole process will take up to several months to a half year.

The consensus media view is that the three main companies who share some responsibility for the still gushing oil disaster pointed their fingers at each other with no one taking responsibility. That was to be expected, because the executives for BP, Transocean and Halliburton realize there are billions of dollars in potential liability to be shared among them.

We already know that this particular drilling project, like many others in the Gulf, had been subjected to only cursory NEPA review. The process allowed a generic but inadequate environmental impact assessment (EIS) to be performed to permit leasing and drilling over a wide region.

Once that broad-area hurdle was cleared, individual wells would be covered with only minor additional reviews by the Mineral Management Service(MMS).

So if industry could establish its own storyline that massive blowouts are unthinkable, that minor blowouts are unlikely, and that whatever spills might result from such minor events could be readily contained and their impacts mitigated with readily available and tested strategies.

So BP takes the stance that there are no unacceptable environmental impacts, and the impacts that might occur in that very unlikely event are acceptable and can be mitigated with proven methods.

Let us arise from this massive illusion, and face the reality that the BP disaster proves, as every coal mining disaster proves, that story was a massive, lethal fraud.

None of it was true.

The truth is, catastrophic accidents are possible; indeed they may be inevitable, given the dangerous, sometimes unknowable conditions in which deepwater drilling (and mining) occurs. And once these inevitable catastrophes happen, we’re well beyond the capabilities of traditional responses, remedies and mitigation measures.

We’re making it up.

We still don’t know how to stop a continuing catastrophe, and we’re woefully unprepared to deal with the consequences, let alone to make the surrounding environment whole again.

The consequences for hundreds of miles of coastline communities will be immediate, as vast areas will be rendered "dead zones.

Is this unfathomable to believe that it’s all due to greed?

In my opinion, President Obama is using the Gulf oil spill to play politics, and that Obama waited for the oil spill to worsen so he could shut down offshore drilling.

Now he can pander to the environmentalists and say, 'I'm gonna shut it down because it's too dangerous.”

This is a change in direction because Obama actually announced earlier this year that he was expanding the allowed zones for offshore work, much to the consternation of his supporters.

In an attempt to divert attention, the Obama administration made a token gesture yesterday—arguably helpful, proposing to split up MMS so that the office that collects royalties doesn’t conflict or influence the office that oversees safety. Fine, do it. But the degradation of NEPA and the acceptance of a benevolent, fraudulent view of dangers and their consequences could have occurred — and does occur — under bifurcated organizations and combined agencies alike.

The fundamental problem is corporate power and influence over deliberately weakened government regulators and policy makers.

There are massive amounts of money at stake, functioning in a political process that allows that money to corrupt our politics and governing institutions. Nothing has been proposed by this Administration or enacted by Congress to fix those problems.

In the meantime, what needs to sink into our government’s collective consciousness is that the BP Oil Disaster has now defined a clear and compelling legal challenge to the deadly inadequacy of every EIS and safety review on which the entire offshore drilling program floats.

The fundamental facts remain folks, and unfortunately, it’s no conspiracy theory. It’s reality.

No agency can now claim that what we’re doing is safe, that catastrophic accidents can’t occur, or even that they’re unlikely.

No agency can assert that we know what to do when it happens, that industry knows how to stop the catastrophe, or that we can contain the damage to reasonable/acceptable levels.

There are a few questions that come to mind, and most people are not willing to face themselves. Who is at fault? BP? Halliburton? President Obama?

The answer is right under your nose. Still can’t see it? I’ll make it simple…look in the mirror. It is YOU who is responsible.

No one ever wants to take responsibility in their lives. Look at the Christians. They are probably blaming the devil.

Ponder that while the dead wildlife inevitably wash up on the shores of Gulf Coast, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida.

Ok, so you can work on your perception, and hopefully this will help wake you up, and bring awareness to what is reality. Because folks, this is very real and millions of gallons of crude oil have been and continue to leak into our ocean.

So let me ask this question. What is the answer?

The answer is simple but clear.  No further deepwater drilling can legally occur — assuming we’re still a nation of laws — as long as that’s true. We will stand together, united and say no more.

Let that sink in, Congress.

Related Articles

Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Earth Day 40th Anniversary
Climategate - Politics or Science
Too Much Swamp to Drain