Friday, July 23, 2010

If you think BP is going to clean up every drop of oil

Prince William Sound


Think again.

Now I can't say that I have first hand knowledge of the Gulf spill but others who have investigated their actions can say first hand what this company is all about. One investigator Greg Palast has such knowledge. In his report of the Exxon Valdez spill which by the way BP had the major financial stake in ownership and spill response, Greg gives a real insight into just how sleezy this company really is.

From his investigative report:
Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group (BP's oil response group) claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.


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I do recall now that I think of it when I first got my 80 hour hazmat certification and was on loan to another company to do some oil and jet feul clean up talking to a worker who had gone to work on that spill. He gets a call about 1:00am gathers a suit case and is on the next flight to Alaska. He said it was a joke. He and a handful of other workers were there cleaning rocks with absorbent pads only to have them get recontaminated at the next high tide. The clean up crew also used high pressure steam to clean the rocks which killed any benificial bacteria that eats the oil. The 'beach' is mostly rocks and to this day some 21 years later you can go there pick up a rock and find oil on the underside.
The fishermen there didn't fair any better. After fighting for years the average compensation was around $5,000. These were guys who were used to making that much in a week from fishing.

4 comments:

Tim said...

I guess you can't sleep either.
You know in just about any other scenario officials in charge of the Gulf mess would be instituted.
People would believe them insane as they keep doing the same things i the last forty years and expect a different result.
I don't believe BP, Or our Government,
in handling this whole thing. You and I know people will get sick and die over this and there's not a damn thing we can do to stop it.
Patriot was right in thinking the Gulf should be evacuated. This pretend cleaning up for show is obscene. Maybe that's why I can't sleep.

Randal Graves said...

I'm sure we'll learn our lesson this time.

jmsjoin said...

They are not going to pay up in any instance. They are going to get away with this too and this already dwarfs the sound in every respect. A month ago we were hearing the oil was in the loop and it was moving down Florida. Today I was listening to a team testing the sea bed and life and the4y said there is no sign of oil and no sign the oil hit the loop. More than 100 million gallons of oil, where the hell is it then?They are frigging going to get away with this one way or the other. It is still the dispersant that concerns me the most.

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