The chickens have come home to roost. NPR interviewed ProPublica reporter Abraham Lustgarten yesterday. He got his hands on some internal documents that reveal BP repeatedly ignored safety and environmental rules. They were also aware of safety and maintenance issues as early as 2001. He also discusses regulation (or lack thereof) and states that there is plenty of blame to go around here. Excerpts:

On the regulation of BP

“BP has had difficulty in maintaining its operations and had problems throughout the years before [President George W.] Bush came into office. However, those years were notorious for relaxed oversight of the oil and gas industry and a presumption that the most efficient form of regulation was to allow the industry, to allow BP to regulate itself. So the government culture at the time was to take a step back and to trust BP’s expertise and trust BP’s own profit motives — to essentially safeguard their own operations. But what we see on a much broader scale is an industry that is completely intertwined with the agencies that regulate it — an industry that keeps its technological information, its guidelines and the deep technical understanding of what it does very close to chest. And government regulators can’t always keep up with — and don’t always have the laws to keep up with [the gas industry's expertise]. And thus, it consistently maintains the upper hand.”

On regulations in the natural gas drilling industry

“In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act. This was the culmination of the Bush administration’s energy policy and the meetings that Vice President Richard Cheney had under the energy task force in 2000 and 2001. The Energy Policy Act essentially created the loophole that exempted the process of hydraulic fracturing from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. In some ways, it was a clarification. The Safe Drinking Water Act is intended to regulate any fluids that are injected underground. The Safe Drinking Water Act stipulated that the fluids injected for hydraulic fracturing are used in the production of a resource and are then removed — and therefore, don’t constitute the disposal of fluids and therefore shouldn’t be regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. However you reason it, the net effect was that the exemption was created, and the EPA’s authority to regulate the specific process of hydraulic fracturing was removed. Ever since 2005, the EPA has not been able to invoke federal regulations that govern what tests are done before the hydraulic fracturing process is conducted, how the process itself is conducted — or examining the impacts it has after it’s been done.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127561853

Have you heard that BP’s fail safe plan included as its emergency contact a man who had been dead for four (4) years on the date the plan was released?

I think it is safe to say that BP is an unindicted rapist of the environment.

Thanks for the very good post and link, Paul.

The crude oil is toxic!! Workers cleaning the oily Gulf beaches need to know the danger. Don’t become BP’s Collateral Damaged, like Exxon’s Collateral Damaged.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/exxon-valdez-oil-risks-spur-warning-for-gulf-cleanup-crews-93258964.html

My name is Merle Savage, a female general foreman during the Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) beach cleanup in 1989. I am one of the 11,000+ cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS), who is suffering from health issues from that toxic cleanup, without compensation from Exxon.

Dr. Riki Ott visited me in 2007 to explain about the toxic spraying on the beaches. She also informed me that Exxon’s medical records and the reports that surfaced in litigation by sick workers in 1994, had been sealed from the public, making it impossible to hold Exxon responsible for their actions.
http://www.rikiott.com

Exxon developed the toxic spraying; OSHA, the Coast Guard, and the state of Alaska authorized the procedure. Beach crews breathed in crude oil that splashed off the rocks and into the air — the toxic exposure turned into chronic breathing conditions and central nervous system problems, neurological impairment, chronic respiratory disease, leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumors, liver damage, and blood disease.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5632208859935499100

My web site is devoted to searching for EVOS cleanup workers who were exposed to the toxic spraying, and are suffering from the same illnesses that I have. There is an on going Longshoreman’s claim for workers with medical problems from the oil cleanup. Our summer employment turned into a death sentence for many — and a life of unending medical conditions for the rest of Exxon’s Collateral Damaged.
http://www.silenceinthesound.com/stories.shtml

Let’s just nuke ever state on the Gulf of Mexico shore line so we don’t have to listen to them complain anymore.