Deepwater Horizons: One Year Later, 20 April 2011
The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling ceased operations on March 11, 2011, not quite one year after the blowout occurred. All of the Commission's documents have been transferred to the Office of Fossil Energy in the Department of Energy. The Commission released its final report on 11 January 2011, and the Chief Counsel's Report on 17 February 2011. The Commission's video record of the spill is also available on-line. You can also read the Commission's Final Recommendations.
The Chief Counsel reported that "The Macondo [Deepwater Horizon] blowout happened because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent such an event. The Chief Counsel‘s team identified a number of technical risk factors in the design, execution, and testing of the Macondo well. The team was also able to trace all of these failures back to an overarching failure of management. Better management of personnel, risk, and communications by BP and its contractors would almost certainly have prevented the blowout. The Macondo disaster was not inevitable."
Recognizing that oil-drilling technology is quickly outstripping advancements in safety and spill mitigation, the Commission concluded: "Our recommendations—for a new approach to risk assessment and management; a new, independent agency responsible for safety and environmental review of offshore drilling; stronger environmental review and enforcement; a reorientation of spill response and containment planning; and a revision of liability rules to better protect victims and provide proper incentives to industry—aim to establish an oversight regime that is sufficiently strong, expert, well-resourced, and flexible to prevent the next disaster, not the last. The oil and gas industry—remarkable for its technological innovation and productivity—needs government oversight and regulation that can keep pace."
So what has actually been done to implement these recommendations? Well, the discredited Minerals Management Service has been renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE. [Yes, it is already (un)affectionately known as "BUMMER" in Louisiana.] Florida Governor Rick Scott visited Panama City and went fishing in Destin. The Gulf Coast Task Force will hold its third meeting on May 6th in Mobile to develop an ecosystem restoration strategy. (So far the Task Force has produced classroom lesson plans for discussing marine environments and oil spills, and fact sheets with information "about the response to the Gulf oil spill on a variety of different health, claims, environmental and wildlife subjects.") And of course, "BP's commitment to the Gulf remains unchanged."
So it was more than a little disappointing to learn that more than 3,200 active oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico have been abandoned, and are currently unplugged and unprotected. This is in addition to the 27,000 abandoned wells that have been plugged. Following is a list of links to articles and resources about coastal drilling and our way forward -- that is, our way back to the Gulf we knew it.
Links and Resources