If there's any question that BP stands for Bungling Pinheads (or make up your own favorite), there's an AP article published on nola.com that lists the numerous ridiculous flaws contained in the BP response plan for an oil-drilling-related disaster.
Some of the standouts are: a professor listed as a wildlife expert who died four years before the response plan was published, a website link for a spill response company that links to a defunct Japanese-language page, and the listing of walruses and seals as "sensitive biological resources," mammals that do not even live in the gulf.
The article is here. More elaboration below.
As this slow-motion horrow show unfolds in the gulf, it is easy to see that BP did not have a clue as to how to handle this catastrophe, and as the article states, "the on-the-fly planning continues." It seems the oil disaster response plan was an exercise in BS.
BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along.
Names and phone numbers of marine life scientists are wrong, mammal stranding service phone numbers listed are no longer in service. But this one takes the prize.
[Professor Peter] Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published.
With all due respects, Mr. Lutz.
In BP's other world:
In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.
The reality is far different from their don't worry, be happy, head-in-the-sand kind of response plan. BP's plan claimed "no adverse impacts" to gulf wildlife. We all know how that is going.
Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., says there are "3,000 acres (of wetlands) where life as we know it is dead, and we continue to lose precious marshland every day."
More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.
It seems BP had no idea what a worst-case disaster might look like, and were far too confident in their ability to deal with one.
BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks -- and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between.
Even their computer modeling was flawed.
The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.
Unbelievable. Inexcusable. It is hard to fathom the cavalier attitude that BP exhibits toward the environment and people from which they derive their wealth.