As the oil sheen neared, absorbent booms were placed on the beach in Grand Isle, La., yesterday. Methods to contain spills have changed little in decades.
(Alex Brandon/ Associated Press)
As oil spreads, a call for industry’s ‘Plan B’
Hearings quiz BP executives and regulators
As the oil sheen neared, absorbent booms were placed on the beach in Grand Isle, La., yesterday. Methods to contain spills have changed little in decades.
(Alex Brandon/ Associated Press)
HOUSTON — As hopes dim for containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon, more people are asking why the industry was not better prepared to react.
Members of Congress are holding hearings this week and demanding to know why the federal Minerals Management Service did not force oil companies to take more precautions. Environmentalists are saying they tried to raise the alarm to congressional committees that the industry had no way to respond to a catastrophic blowout a mile below the sea.
Local officials in the gulf are beginning to ask, “What was Plan B?’’ The answer, oil industry engineers are acknowledging, was to deploy technology that has not changed much in 20 years — booms, skimmers, and chemical dispersants — even as the drilling technology itself has improved.
“They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong,’’ said Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling. “So what we have now is some equivalent of a fire drill with paper towels and buckets for cleanup.’’
For years, major oil companies, as well as the Minerals Management Service, played down the possibility of an uncontrolled blowout on the sea floor, arguing that safeguards like blowout preventers were practically foolproof.
In November, Walter D. Cruickshank, deputy director of the Minerals Management Service, told a Senate committee that an undersea blowout and massive spill that had occurred in East Timor last year was highly unlikely in the Gulf of Mexico because of tighter US regulations. All wells had safety devices to shut off the flow in emergencies, he said.
At the same hearing, a
What government regulators and industry officials did not foresee in the Deepwater Horizon disaster last month is that the rig would sink and that robots would not be able to stanch the flow of oil at such depths, even though a consultant hired by government regulators in 2003 had warned that they were unreliable.
“This is the first time the industry has had to confront this issue in this water depth, and there is a lot of real-time learning going on,’’ BP’s chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, acknowledged at a news conference yesterday. “The investigation of this whole incident will undoubtedly show up things that we should be doing differently.’’
Once oil was flowing into the water, it became clear the methods of dealing with it have changed little in decades, environmentalists say. Tenting spills with giant upside-down funnels has been done in shallower waters, but until last weekend, it had not been tried in deep water. The first attempt failed.
“The oil industry went off the deep end with a new kind of risk, and they didn’t bother to build a response capability before they had a big disaster,’’ said Richard Charter, an advocate with Defenders of Wildlife who studies offshore drilling.
The heart of the industry’s plan to contain the oil falls to the Marine Spill Response Corp., a nonprofit organization formed in 1990 after the
Judith Roos, a vice president of Marine Spill Response, said the majority of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then,’’ she said.
Steve Benz, president of the corporation, said his group had no budget for research.
In the last three years, however, the company has added C-130 planes to spray dispersants. On this, the company says, it is ahead of the regulatory curve.
Allison Nyholm, a policy adviser with the American Petroleum Institute, said blowout scenarios were rare and needed to be handled case-by-case.
“One of the best tools is how you bring the best professionals together to respond to the spill,’’ Nyholm said.
Yet Dr. Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and frequent consultant on big oil spills, said the oil companies could have had some version of the containment dome ready before the spill.
“It is like building the firetruck when your house is on fire,’’ Steiner said.
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