BP Turns Down Offers to Better Measure Gulf Disaster
Even as BP has succeeded in siphoning off some of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the company has continued to resist calls for more accurate measurements of the oil flow, according to The New York Times.
The government continues to use the 5,000-barrels-a-day estimate, which comes from satellite images of the ocean's surface -- a method that is not recommended for measuring spills as large as this one.
The current method of measuring the disaster seems particularly ill-suited to the task, now that scientists have found enormous plumes of dispersed oil forming in the deep waters of the gulf -- and not on the surface of the water. (As we reported, the EPA approved the use of dispersants to break up the crude, making oil droplets linger longer in the water without floating to the surface.)
As we noted last week, scientists have stood ready with techniques to gain better measurements of the gusher, but BP has maintained that there's no way to measure the leak, and has not accepted the scientists' help. From the Times:
"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."
Video footage of the spill has led scientists to estimate its flow somewhere between 25,000 and 80,000 barrels of oil a day, according to the Times. In other words, that's five to 16 times worse than the government's estimate.
We've reached out to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that produced the government's estimate, to ask whether the discovery of deep sea plumes calls into question the accuracy of the current estimate. We will update when we get a response.
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1 comments
Buck Batard
May 17, 2010, 7:38 p.m.
The only logical reason for BP not allowing a proper measurement of the spill has to be that they do not want the public to know how much damage they are causing to the environment. If as the saying goes, the cover up is worse than the crime, then I suggest that a Rico action or a Qui Tam action be brought against BP since these are government leases involved and they are covering up the amount of damages to the United States and to the world since the oceans exist worldwide and the spill will dmage the entire globe.
There may be a multitude of other actions that can be brought against them in many other countries other than the US since the spillage that they are fialing to reveal will affect every country that borders on the ocean and perhaps even those that do not since rivers, lakes and other bodies of water will undoubtedly be affected by the spill even in landlocked countries.
This action may very well cause the limiatation on liability granted to oil firms by the US government to become unenforceable and that law to be of nor force and have no effect on damages that BP will owe to world governments.
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