BP, Governments Downplay Public Health Risk From Oil and Dispersants whilst Broome hosts oil spill response training

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/the-big-lie-bp-government_b_638369.html

William Rea, MD, who founded the Environmental Health Center-Dallas, treated a number of sick Exxon Valdez cleanup workers. He once told me, "When you have sick people and sick animals, and they are sick because of the same chemical, that's the strongest evidence possible that that chemical is a problem."

It's not just skin rashes and blisters. At community forums, I commonly hear from adults and children with persistent coughs, stuffy sinuses, headaches, burning eyes, sore throats, ear bleeds, and fatigue. These symptoms are consistent across the four Gulf states that I have visited. Further, the symptoms of respiratory problems, central nervous system distress, and skin irritation are consistent with overexposure to crude oil through the two primary routes of exposure: inhalation and skin contact.

Most distressing to me are stories about sick children. "Dose plus host makes the poison," I learned in toxicology. A small child is at risk of breathing a higher dose of contaminants per body weight than an adult. Children, pregnant women, people with compromised or stressed immune systems like cancer survivors and asthma sufferers, and African Americans are more at risk from oil and chemical exposure - the latter because they are prone to sickle cell anemia and 2-butoxyethanol can cause, or worsen, blood disorders.

Public officials have failed to sound an alarm about the public health threat because three federal agencies - DHHS, EPA, and OSHA - cannot find any unsafe levels of oil in air or water. Perhaps the federal air and water standards are not stringent enough to protect the public from oil pollution. Our federal laws are outdated and do not protect us from the toxic threat from oil - now widely recognized in the scientific and medical community.

BP is still in the dark ages on oil toxicity. BP officials stress that, by the time oil gets to shore, it is "weathered" and missing the highly volatile compounds like the carcinogenic benzene, among others. BP fails to mention the threat from dispersed oil, ultrafine particles (PAHs), and chemical dispersants, which include industrial solvents and proprietary compounds, many hazardous to humans.

If oil was so nontoxic, then why are the spill response workers giving hazardous waste training? Our federal government should stop pretending that everything is okay. What isn't safe for workers isn't safe for the general public either.
On the 1st of July is was reported by the local Kimberley ABC that a pecial training sessions are to be held in Broome to help ensure local authorities know how to respond in the event of an oil spill.

The Department of Transport's oil spill response team will host three days of training this week at Broome Port for port workers, government officers and members of the private sector. Appropriately,participants will be taught how to quickly assess spills that reach the coast and how to use equipment, such as containment booms, to limit their spread.

Coordinator Matt Verney says the team is able to draw on its experiences with last year's Montara oil spill."All the training is an opportunity to get the latest information and try out new equipment, and also put in place the lessons learnt from other incidents, so we're best prepared next time we do have an incident," he said.

Redhand would like to suggest that Matt Verney reads the article in full at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/the-big-lie-bp-government_b_638369.html and if at all possible visit the Gulf of Mexico and offer them his expertise because they sure could use it. The fact of the matter is once oil flows death follows, economic, environmental and social structures disintegrates.

BP worse health, environment and safety record

Woodside Energy Ltd, BHP Billiton Pty Ltd, BP Developments Australia Pty Ltd, Chevron Australia Pty Ltd and Shell Development Australia Pty Ltd’s all have shares in the proposed largest LNG Precinct in the world at James Price Point, Kimberley, Western Australia. It is these very same companies and their subsidiaries companies that are in association with the world's most damaging oil spill. Now in its 41st continuously gushing day – is creating huge unseen "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico, according to oceanologists and toxicologists. They say that if their fears are correct, then the sea's entire food chain could suffer years of devastation, with almost no marine life in the region escaping its effects.

While the sight of tar balls and oil-covered birds on Louisiana's shoreline has been the most visible sign of the spill's environmental destruction, many scientists now believe it is underwater contamination that will have the deadliest impact. At least two submerged clouds of noxious oil and chemical dispersants have been confirmed by research vessels, and scientists are seeing initial signs of several more. The largest is some 22 miles long, six miles wide and 3,300 feet deep – a volume that would take up half of Lake Erie. Another spans an area of 20 square miles.

More than 8,300 species of plants and animals are at risk. Some, such as the bluefin tuna, which come to the Gulf to spawn, could even face extinction. Scientists predict it will be many months – even years – before the true toll of the disaster will be known.


BP, one of the worlds biggest oil and gas producer, has a worse health, environment and safety record than many other major oil companies, according to RiskMetrics, a consulting group that assigns scores to companies based on their performance in various categories, including safety.

The 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas City, Tex., killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP a record $87 million for neglecting to correct safety violations.

Only a year later, a leaky BP oil pipeline in Alaska forced the shutdown of one of the nation's biggest oil fields. BP was fined $20 million in criminal penalties after prosecutors said the company had neglected corroding pipelines.



BP had serious concerns about the Deepwater Horizon rig but still broke its own safety policy, The New York Times reports, citing internal company documents.
The documents also showed BP was worried about safety on the rig far earlier than it let on to Congress in hearings earlier this week, the paper reported late Saturday.

The Times said that on June 22, 2009, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal well casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
"This would certainly be a worst-case scenario," Mark Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report.

"However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur."

According to the report, the company went ahead with the casing but only after getting special permission from colleagues because it violated BP's safety policies and design standards.

The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. But they revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options, The Times said.



Here are some items from the evidence set being adduced in Kenner and Congress:

The failed blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had a hydraulic leak and a dead battery in one of its control pods, and testing in the hours before an April 20 explosion revealed that pressure in the well was dangerously out of whack.

While some data were being transmitted to shore for safekeeping right up until the April 20 blast, officials from Transocean, the rig owner, told Congress that the last seven hours of its data are missing and that all written logs were lost in the explosion.

Heavy drilling fluid was unconscionably replaced with lighter seawater against industry standards just prior to the blowout. Over heated objections by experts on the scene, BP management supervisors overruled drillers, and insisted on displacing the mud with seawater

The broken blow out preventer had not been inspected in over five years.

BP was in a severe economic and time crunch to finish the job quickly and were over six weeks behind schedule.

Immediately leading up to the explosion, BP used procedures that violated their own drill plan; and in spite of indications of a “very large abnormality,” kept testing until they got something they could disingenuously claim fulfilled the test.

BP management supervisors refused to run the comprehensive cement bond log test, a definitive test of the integrity of a well’s cement mandated by Federal Regulations if there are concerns with the results of negative and positive pressure tests like were clearly present.

The BP management official on Deepwater Horizon making the unconscionable decisions, over the vehement objections of seasoned drilling experts, Robert Kaluzza has refused to testify by invoking his 5th Amendment criminal right against self incrimination.

BP officials aboard the rig wanted to skip required pressure tests and tried to impose a drilling plan sent directly from BP’s Houston headquarters that had not been approved, as required, by the federal government’s Minerals Management Service.

As a direct and proximate result of the above described reckless, wanton, willful, and grossly negligent conduct, eleven men are dead and the biggest environmental disaster in history has been unleashed on the fragile and critical Gulf of Mexico, threatening the lives and livelihoods of untold numbers of American families. Some of the toxic death foisted upon the environment cannot even be seen because it lurks in deep giant underwater plumes miles wide by miles long.

Gulf Oil Spill - Where's The Latest Imagery?

For the most reliable up todate information about the Gulf Oil Spill follow

http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/gulf-oil-spill-wheres-latest-imagery.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed& utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Skytruth+%28SkyTruth%29.
both on their site and on tweeter.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

We beg your patience. Our main source of imagery is from the NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, that carry the MODIS sensor. This sensor measures visible to infrared wavelengths of light, so when it's cloudy or hazy in the Gulf, we get a nice picture of...clouds and haze. MODIS images also show a distinct pattern of glittery sunglint on the water (when there are no clouds in the way, and the geometry with the sun is just right). This can be very useful for mapping oil slicks because the oil flattens out the water, and will appear either very dark or very bright (depending, again, on the sun angle). But other things can make the water flat: calm winds, for example. So if we get a MODIS image that suffers from too many of these quality problems, we don't process and post it because it's not providing useful information about the spill.

See our Twitter feed (just glance to your right!) - that's where we post updates and info that's briefer and more timely than these blog entries. Follow us on Twitter and when we know it, you'll know it.

Outcry after oil spill

For the Gulf #oilspill: Today's MODIS satellite image - fresh oil upwelling, slick footprint up to 3260 sq. miles - http://tinyurl.com/2dzkv...
and additional news at
http://www.examiner.com/x-4002-Green-Living-Examiner

NASA Satellite Images Show Gulf Oil Spill Size Larger Than Florida

Social networking may turn out to be the first line of defense against public relations spin by providing real time gathering of data on the massive river of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Transocean/Deepwater Horizon well explosion. Maps generated by satellite and "predictions" are only so valuable. One of the tenets of remote sensing is that "ground truthing" be a mandatory part of the equation. Truth is the operative word here as Gulf Coast residents face an unprecedented environmental disaster.

It’s been a bit of a revelation for Redhand about the extent in which the flow of information is so controlled and this has clearly been illustrated by the way in which the Mexican Gulf Oil Spill information flow has in lots of ways dried up. There are no new videos, or images for the last three days and those that are up there are very difficult to upload or do not connect at all. The ones that are getting through are either company or government issued or driven. This major news item seems to have dropped out of the major media outlets view.

It’s not just Redhand, many people all over the world are currently complaining about the lack of information flow and the validity of the trickle that is getting through about this spill. Even twitter has slowed to a tweet, every now and again. Research on this issue confirms that the free flow of information on the internet is manipulated and controlled over the years by corporations and governments and they are getting far more efficient at it. Printing press, radio, and television all started with free flow, but then became one way medias, in the hands of a few.

We can not allow ourselves to be thrown off track by these distracters who have hijacked our debates. These information hijackers are terrorists--I call them, information terrorists that are taking the reigns of our media, spreading their propaganda, refusing people’s access to real life truth, demeaning our freedom of speech and limiting our abilities to respond to issues in an informed way?

Redhand has experienced this first hand with the complete cover up of the Broome Dinosaur trackways blog and the Australian National Heritage Commission’s complete denial of the world significance of this 200 kms site. Only the local media picked up this story and it really went nowhere. Normally, stories of this nature would attract international and national coverage.

It does not matter if it is ordinary citizens who are inputting real-time photos and testimony in order for the general public to have the opportunity to experience first hand what is really happening in the Gulf of Mexico and along its shores, if their flows of information have been cut and they are locked out.

Following is a comment on another blog
Alexander Higgins says:
May 4, 2010 at 12:43 am
Seriously…. Where is all of the silt in the prior satellite photos? There are loads of them on this site and that “silt” only seems to surround the spill.
For example, http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=AERONET_WaveCIS_Site_CSI_6.2010115.terra.1km is the satellite image from 4/26… no “silt”.
Prior to the incident, 4/16 http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=AERONET_WaveCIS_Site_CSI_6.2010106.terra.1km and again no “silt”.
Also: updated article and added the ABC map, which is very close to what I have outlined with the exception that the ABC map does not go as far south.
And what the news is reporting is closer to what BP/Big Brother is telling them which has been proven to be a lie several times in this debacle. Even CNN’s latest map shows the spill decreased in size since yesterday, which happens to coincide with a FALSE BP report that they were successful in a partial sealing of the rig.
CNN Data shows oil spill on May 2, which is much larger than what they show for May 3rd.
But here is CNN’s graph for May 3rd. How did this happen? BP mistakenly released a false statement they were successful in partially sealing off the well. Just coincidence?
Regardless, the graph does not match ABC’s. Further most organizations are reporting data that is days old and even that is from Government sources. SkyTruth has already called out government sources twice. Remember when it was only 1,000 barrels a day? If it wasn’t for SkyTruth, CNN and every other media outlet would be reporting much lower figures.
Listen to the news, heh? CNN or ABC or who?? Or just look at the satellite images and see for myself. Hum?
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2010/05/04/today-in-questionable-sourcing-ny-times-misfires-on-oil-spill-assessment.aspx

NASA Satellite Images Show Gulf Oil Spill Size Larger Than Florida