Conflict of Interest Worries Raised in Spill Tests

Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of anoil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.

Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex. He opted instead to get a waiver so he could send his county’s samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.

Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.

“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.”

The deadly explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last month has drawn attention to the ties between regulators and the oil and gas industry. Last week, President Obamasaid he intended to end their “cozy relationship,” partly by separating the safety function of regulators from their role in permitting drilling and collecting royalties. “That way, there’s no conflict of interest, real or perceived,” he said.

Critics say a “revolving door” between industry and government is another area of concern. As one example, they point to the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, Sylvia V. Baca, who helps oversee the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling

She came to that post after eight years at BP, in a variety of senior positions, ranging from a focus on environmental initiatives to developing health, safety and emergency response programs. She also served in the Interior Department in the Clinton administration.

Under Interior Department conflict-of-interest rules, she is prohibited from playing any role in decisions involving BP, including the response to the crisis in the gulf. But her position gives her some responsibility for overseeing oil and gas, mining and renewable energy operations on public and Indian lands.

Officials in part of what will remain of the Minerals Management Service, after a major reorganization spurred by the events in the gulf, will continue to report to her.

“When you see more examples of this revolving door between industry and these regulatory agencies, the problem is that it raises questions as to whose interests are being served,” said Mandy Smithberger, an investigator with the nonprofit watchdog groupProject on Government Oversight.

Interior officials declined to make Ms. Baca available for comment. A spokeswoman said Ms. Baca fully disclosed her BP ties, recused herself from all matters involving the company and was not currently involved in any offshore drilling policy decisions.

Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School, said that concerns about conflicts of interest in the cleanup are cropping up for reasons beyond examples of coziness between the industry and regulators.

He noted that because of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which was passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, polluters must take more of a role in cleanups.

“I do think the law brings the polluter into the process, and that creates complications,” Professor Parenteau said. “That doesn’t mean, however, that the government has to exit the process or relinquish control over decision-making, like it may be in this case.”

Dismissing concerns about conflicts of interest at his lab, James M. Brooks, the president and chief executive of TDI-Brooks International, said his company was chosen because of its prior work for the federal government.

“It is a nonbiased process,” he said. “We give them the results, and they can have their lawyers argue over what the results mean.” He added that federal officials and BP were working together and sharing the test results.

Federal officials say that they remain in control and that the concerns about any potential conflicts are overblown.

Douglas Zimmer, a spokesman for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency simply did not have the staff to handle all the animals affected by the oil spill. BP has more resources to hire workers quickly, he said, and letting local organizations handle the birds would have been impractical and costly.

“I also just don’t believe that BP or their contractor would have any incentive to skew the data,” he said. “Even if they did, there are too many federal, state and local eyes keeping watch on them.”

But Stuart Smith, a lawyer representing fishermen hurt by the spill, remained skeptical, saying that federal and state authorities had not fulfilled their watchdog role.

Last month, for example, various state and federal Web sites included links that directed out-of-work fishermen to a BP Web site, which offered contracts that limited their right to file future claims against the company.

This month, a federal judge in New Orleans, Helen G. Berrigan, struck down that binding language in the contracts.

Collaboration between industry and regulators extends to how information about the spill is disseminated by a public affairs operation called the Joint Information Center.

The center, in a Shell-owned training and conference center in Robert, La., includes roughly 65 employees, 10 of whom work for BP. Together, they develop and issue news releases and coordinate posts on Facebook and Twitter.

“They have input into it; however, it is a unified effort,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Carleton, explaining BP’s role in the shared command structure.

He said such coordination in oil spill responses was mandated under federal law.

But even if collaboration were not required, Mr. Zimmer said, it would be prudent because federal and state authorities could only gain from BP’s expertise and equipment.

“Our priority has been to address the spill quickly and most effectively, and that requires working with BP — not in some needlessly adversarial way,” he said.

In deciding where to send their water, sediment and tissue samples, state environmental officials in Florida and Louisiana said NOAA instructed them to send them to BB Laboratories, which is run by TDI-Brooks.

Though Florida has its own state laboratory that is certified to analyze the same data, Amy Graham, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection there, said the state was sending samples to B & B “in an effort to ensure consistency and quality assurance.”

Scott Smullen, a spokesman for NOAA, said that two other labs, Alpha Analytics andColumbia Analytical Services, had also been contracted, but officials at those labs said B & B was taking the lead role and receiving virtually all of the samples.

The samples being collected are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, which is the federal process for determining the extent of damage caused by a spill, the amount of money owed and how it should be spent to restore the environment.

The samples are also likely to be used in the civil suits — worth hundreds of millions of dollars — filed against the companies and possibly the federal government.

While TDI-Brooks and B & B have done extensive work for federal agencies like NOAA and the E.P.A., TDI-Brooks is also described by one industry partner on its Web site as being “widely acknowledged as the world leader in offshore oil and gas field exploration services.”

The Web site says that since 1996, it has “collected nearly 10,000 deep-water piston core sediment samples and heat flow stations for every major oil company.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars are also likely at stake in relation to the oil-slicked animals that are expected to wash ashore in coming weeks.

While Fish and Wildlife Service officials say that BP’s contractor will handle virtually all of the wildlife and compile data about how many — and how extensively — animals were affected by the spill, they add that they will oversee the process.

The data collected will likely form the basis for penalties against BP relating to theMigratory Bird Treaty Act. In the case of the Exxon Valdez spill, Exxon was fined more than $100 million, partly for violations of that federal law.

www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/earth/21conflict.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Phone Rang At 3am…And Obama Hasn’t Answered Yet

Remember the Hillary campaign ad about Obama not being ready when that 3 AM emergency phone call comes in? Obama countered and successfully convinced most of the American people to believe that he was competent enough for any emergency. Despite the absolute certainty that Obama had never accomplished anything in his entire life, the American people trusted that his calm demeanor would win and he would do the right thing in any emergency.

All of this brings us to the oil volcano that is erupting in the Gulf of Mexico. Today is the one-month anniversary of the biggest environmental disaster in world history and Obama has not done a thing to stop this volcano from spewing any more oil into the gulf.

Worse than this act of complacency, he also decided to let British Petroleum (BP) handle the clean up of the oil volcano instead of using the Federal Government to clean it up. He could have issued an order for this easily and also billed BP for the work. This has to go down as truly the worst decision by any President in my lifetime. Without regard for the environmental disaster they had started, BP then proceeded to pour highly toxic dispersants into the waters of the gulf, which may have killed off all of the sea life in the area of the oil volcano.

While he was busy making jokes about his birth certificate to the White House Press Corps and joining together with the President of Mexico in attacking Arizona, millions of gallons of oil are pouring out of a high pressure deep well that threatens to actually destroy the oceans of our planet.

Obama’s detachment towards this event is even making his friends on the Left nervous. Informed people are asking: Where have his leadership skills gone? Why is he letting this go on and on? Why hasn’t he used explosives, or even mini-nuclear weapons to close this leak?

During this same time period Obama took a moment out of his very busy day to make a speech concerning how the Internet is not to be trusted as a source of news. Exactly at the same time that he was saying this it became clear, to all concerned, that the only place that one could find the truth out about the actual extent of this environmental disaster was on the Internet. The major media continued to report the erroneous figures on the amount leaked given to them from the government. The false statistics were very likely given to the Obama administration by the top executives at British Petroleum, who by the way, were one of Obama’s top campaign contributors.

The concerned sites on the Internet were reporting, from the start, the possible ramifications of this situation. These same sites reported that this was a very deep well, while MSNBC, CBS, NY Times, etc. refused to report anything about the actual depth of the well.  Slowly the mainstream media, forced on by the Internet that Obama so dislikes, finally began to report the truth. Now, a month out from the catastrophe, it is easy to see that it was the Internet that had all the facts right and it was the major news media that had everything wrong.

Where is our leader in all of this? Why is he not speaking out and doing everything in his power to stop the spill before it has reached epic proportions?

Do not be fooled by the reports, on the mainstream media, that British Petroleum can solve this thing anytime soon. If they could solve it  they would have done so by now.

Meanwhile Obama has deserted ship. He won’t have any press conferences; he won’t answer any questions from reporters on anything anymore. He has not held a press conference since last July. Through his lack of clarity, concern and action, our President has shown us all that he does not have the qualities that are so important for leadership in a time of crisis.

Any conspiracy theorist worth their salt also has to ask the question: are they letting this happen? The NWO relies on catastrophes to move the body politic towards their ultimate goals of world dictatorship, one government, one religion, and one culture. There has to be some concern that this is what is going on here.

Maybe this why Obama is so detached? If he remains emotionless during the initial first stages of the episode, he can remain blameless. Remember Bush at the elementary school reading about a pet goat while the twin towers burned? Is Obama doing the same thing, only in slow motion?

He says that he is mad at BP. Who cares what he feels? A leader doesn’t gripe about being lied to, a leader does something and accepts the consequences of his actions.

Obama has shown us all that he is not a leader.

Instead he is now telling us that he is going to appoint a committee to look into the entire accident. Please listen Mr. President; we don’t need a committee, not right now. We need this thing to get plugged up and we want it done right now.

You have made many mistakes in this episode but there is still a chance to save the situation. Please act like a leader and start making some decisions.

www.rense.com/general90/phone.htm