Oil contaminated shrimp has been harvested from “oil-free” waters in the Gulf

State officials reopened two oyster harvesting areas in St. Bernard Parish while expanding fishing closures in lower Terrebonne Parish due to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The Terrebonne closure, which affects both recreational and commercial fishing, was instituted after a report of oil-covered shrimp was verified.

According to a news release from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Capt. Lyle Dehart of the shrimping vessel Rocking Angel caught oily shrimp around midnight on Friday in Bayou Severin, near Sister Lake. Shrimpers on the boat reported that their fingers stuck together when they touched the shrimp.

Officials from Wildlife and Fisheries boarded the boat on Saturday morning, noting that there was oil on the deck and the shrimp had black on their legs and heads. Samples were taken to confirm the substance is from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/fishing_closures_expanded_in_l.html#comments

BP’s Own Investigation Found Problems With Another Gulf Oil Rig

*I will keep going with this. Not going to shut up.*

HOUSTON — The company whose drilling triggered the Gulf of Mexico oil spill also owns a rig that operated with incomplete and inaccurate engineering documents, which one official warned could “lead to catastrophic operator error,” records and interviews show.

In February, two months before the Deepwater Horizon spill, 19 members of Congress called on the agency that oversees offshore oil drilling to investigate a whistle-blower’s complaints about the BP-owned Atlantis, which is stationed in 7,070 feet of water more than 150 miles south of New Orleans.

The Associated Press has learned that an independent firm hired by BP substantiated the complaints in 2009 and found that the giant petroleum company was violating its own policies by not having completed engineering documents on board the Atlantis when it began operating in 2007.

Stanley Sporkin, a former federal judge whose firm served as BP’s ombudsman, said that the allegation “was substantiated, and that’s it.” The firm was hired by BP in 2006 to act as an independent office to receive and investigate employee complaints.

Engineering documents – covering everything from safety shutdown systems to blowout preventers – are meant to be roadmaps for safely starting and halting production on the huge offshore platform.

Running an oil rig with flawed and missing documentation is like cooking a dinner without a complete recipe, said University of California, Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea, an oil pipeline expert who has been reviewing the whistle-blower allegations and studied the Gulf blowout.

“This is symptomatic of a sick system. This kind of sloppiness is what leads to disasters,” he said. “The sloppiness on the industry side and on the government side. It’s a shared problem.”

BP and the Minerals and Management Service, which regulates oil drilling, did not respond to calls from the AP seeking comment on the whistle-blower allegations. But in January an attorney for BP wrote a letter to Congress saying the company is compliant with all federal requirements and the Atlantis has been operating so safely that it received an MMS award.

“BP has reviewed the allegations and found them to be unsubstantiated,” said Karen K. Westall, managing attorney for BP.

The MMS is expected to complete its probe later this month.

Last month, the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank 5,000 feet to the ocean floor. Since then at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day has been leaking into the Gulf, endangering wildlife, shutting down large areas to commercial fishing and threatening coastal tourism.

Government officials and critics of the oil industry say the alleged problems with the Atlantis are further evidence of systemic safety problems and lax federal regulation of offshore drilling.

“I think it’s a legitimate area of concern to ask serious questions about any rig that bears any similarity whatsoever to the Deepwater Horizon,” said Richard Charter, a senior policy advisor with Defenders of Wildlife. “If we’ve got another Deepwater Horizon waiting to happen, we’d better know about it soon.”

BP operates and holds 56 percent ownership in the Atlantis. The company leased the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean Ltd.

The Atlantis subcontractor who lodged the complaint was Kenneth Abbott. He was laid off in February 2009 and said in a written statement a few months later that he believes it was partly in retaliation, which the company denied.

When reached by the AP, Abbott said, “I had complained about BP’s problem,” but declined to elaborate.

In a statement read on an October 8, 2009, conference call he said he has 20 years of experience as a project control supervisor on various engineering projects and that part of his concern about rig safety stems for the fact that he lives on the Gulf and enjoys recreation on its waters.

“I have never been against offshore production because I believe it can be done safely but I am very concerned that BP is acting unsafely and that it may lead to a disastrous spill in the Gulf … ” he said, according to a copy of the statement.

Sporkin, the former judge who heads the Washington, D.C.-based ombudsman office hired by BP, told the AP his office found in August 2009 that BP’s execution plan for the Atlantis called for all documents to be finalized and onboard before production started.

“That did not happen,” Sporkin said.

Last month, Sporkin’s deputy, Billie Pirner Garde, indicated in an e-mail to Abbott that BP had long known there was a document problem aboard the Atlantis.

“It was … of concern to others who raised the concern before you worked there, while you were there and after you left,” she wrote. “Your raising the issue did not result in any change to the schedule of BP addressing the issues.”

BP production member Barry C. Duff said in an August 2008 e-mail to two colleagues that “hundreds if not thousands” of subsea documents had not been finalized, and warned having the wrong documents on board the Atlantis “could lead to catastrophic operator errors.”

Abbott provided e-mails, a BP database and other documents to an environmental group called Food & Water Watch, based in Washington. The AP obtained copies.

Members of Congress were provided the documents and a report by Mike Sawyer, a safety engineering consultant who previously assisted the plaintiffs in a suit aginst BP after the 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Texas, refinery that killed 15 workers.

Sawyer reviewed a database detailing the status of thousands of Atlantis safety-related engineering documents provided by Abbott. He concluded in May 2009 that the majority were incomplete, introducing “substantial risk of large-scale damage to the deep water Gulf of Mexico environment and harm to workers.”

Sawyer said he found that about 85 percent of the piping and instrument designs “have no final approval” and more than 95 percent of the welding specifications had no approval at all.

“I think it’s very serious,” said U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., who led the call for an investigation. “I think it speaks to the lack of the federal government’s ability to protect its own public property. It speaks to the opportunism and advantage these companies took of the taxpayer.”

More than a year after Abbott first lodged his complaint, it remains unclear whether BP updated the documents.

Sporkin said BP told his office the company was not federally required to have the documents on board the Atlantis and could change its execution plan at any time.

Sporkin said BP recently told his office they had fixed the problem, yet provided no written documentation.

Kenneth Arnold, a consultant to the offshore oil and gas industry for safety and project management, read the whistleblower’s allegations.

Without knowing which documents were incomplete, Arnold said it would be difficult to draw any conclusions as to how much of a threat the omissions might be. When his company worked on BP projects, Arnold said they were sticklers.

“If anything they’re so anal about these processes they require more engineering and man hours than I think might be necessary,” said Arnold, who recently retired after 45 years in the industry. “If I had a complaint about BP, it is they were too detailed. People are piling on.”

www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/15/bps-own-investigation-fou_n_577668.html

Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at theUniversity of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”

Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.

Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.

Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.

“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”

He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.

While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.

Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.

Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.

“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”

www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes