Lawmakers Cite Failure of Safety Measure in Gulf Spill
By MATTHEW L. WALD and LIZ ROBBINS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 12, 2010
WASHINGTON — As crude oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico for the fourth week, a Congressional investigation said that a safety mechanism that was supposed to seal an undersea well in the event of a sudden pressure release might have failed on April 20 because of a hydraulic leak.
Lawmakers disclosed the findings at a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, as the White House proposed a package of legislative changes meant to help people affected by the huge oil spill and to ensure that the companies involved pay more of the cleanup bill.
Angry lawmakers in Washington suggested that elaborate cleanup plans like the one under way should never have been required.
“The more I learn about this accident, the more concerned I become,” said Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. “This catastrophe appears to have been caused by a calamitous series of equipment and operational failures. If the largest oil and oil service companies in the world had been more careful, 11 lives might have been saved and our coastlines protected.”
Officials in Washington and in Louisiana spent the morning looking back at the accident on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which exploded, burned and sank in April, killing 11 people. Oil from the well it was drilling beneath 5,000 feet of water is emptying into the gulf at a rate of about 210,000 gallons a day.
BP, the oil company that rented the drilling rig and is one of the parties responsible for stopping and cleaning up the spill, said it had lowered to the sea floor another capping mechanism known as a top hat, a far smaller device than the containment dome that failed over the weekend. The new device could be connected by the end of the week, said Mark Proegler, a spokesman for BP.
The hydraulic leak was confirmed by underwater robots sent down to try to activate the safety mechanism, called a blowout preventer, after the accident, according to Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. When one of the robots injected dye into the device’s hydraulic lines, the dye “showed a large leak coming from a loose fitting, which was backed off by several turns,” he said in a statement.
Cameron, the company that built the blowout preventer, told committee investigators that it did not believe that the fitting was loosened by the accident itself, because “every other fitting in the system was tight,” Mr. Stupak said.
It is not completely clear, however, that the hydraulic leak was the reason that the blowout preventer failed to function, Mr. Stupak said; a Cameron official told the committee staff that a leak was only “one of several possible failure modes.”
Mr. Waxman said that according to a BP official who was interviewed, there was evidence that the well might not have passed crucial negative-pressure tests right before the accident.
Public hearings on the accident are also being held in Kenner, La., by the Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service. On Wednesday, the second day of the hearings, officials acknowledged that government oversight of equipment testing on oil rigs was insufficient, and that the system amounted to self-regulation by the industry.
Hung Nguyen, a Coast Guard captain and co-chairman of the investigation panel, repeatedly asked Michael Saucier, the regional director for the Gulf of Mexico in the Minerals Management Service, about testing and regulation of the blowout preventer.
“Designed to industry standard, manufactured by industry, installed by industry, with no government oversight of construction or installation, is that correct?” he asked Mr. Saucier, in what sounded like exasperated disbelief.
“That would be correct,” Mr. Saucier said.
A lawyer for Transocean, the company that owned the rig and employed most of the workers on it at the time of the explosion, took issue with frequent use of the phrase “self-certified” to describe the rig’s compliance actions.
“These people are depending on these tests for their safety and their lives,” he said.
But Captain Nguyen, in his questioning of Mr. Saucier, suggested that in-house control was not enough. “The operator self-certifies, establishes what they think is adequate, they provide training and then qualify their own people for the job?” Captain Nguyen asked.
“That’s correct,” Mr. Saucier said.
Addressing the issue of government oversight, the White House on Tuesday proposed dividing the Minerals Management Service into two branches, one responsible for policing the oil industry and the other to act as its revenue-collecting arm from drilling activities. Currently, the agency serves both functions at once.
On Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed a $118 million package of actions to combat the gulf oil spill, most of it to be paid for by BP, including unemployment benefits for fishermen put out of work, food aid for those hurt by the spill, and stepped-up inspection of seafood.
The legislation also calls for raising the cap on liability payments — payments made by an oil company to other parties who suffer damages because of a spill — but it did not specify a figure. The existing cap, $75 million for the owners of drilling platforms, was set in a 1990 law as part of a political bargain that also established an industrywide tax to pay for cleanups.
Legislation has already been introduced to raise the cap to $10 billion. Because the long-term impact of the spill on commercial fishing, tourism and the environment is still unclear, determining the cost of the cleanup is an inexact science.
“We’re studying it as closely as we can, but frankly it’s changing very quickly,” said Jeffrey Liebman, the acting deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a conference call with reporters. “We don’t have an aggregate number.”
Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s senior adviser for energy and climate change, said in the same call that the spill was “a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” and that it “jeopardizes the livelihood of thousands of Americans.” She quoted the president of BP America, Lamar McKay, in testimony on Tuesday, to the effect that the company would pay all costs.
“They will be held to it,” she said. “In the meantime, we are updating this statute as a matter of policy.”
The legislation would also make it easier for individuals to get help. For example, unemployment benefits are generally not available to the self-employed, but many fishermen who are self-employed would now be covered, White House officials said.
White House officials said they wanted to establish “one-stop shopping” aid centers for those harmed by the spill. Melody Barnes, assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said this was intended “to ensure that there’s no wrong door, that people won’t be given the runaround in their effort to get assistance in their time of need.”
Some parts of the bill would not be paid for by BP or other responsible parties in the spill; for example, the bill provides $29 million for stepped-up inspections of offshore wells by the Minerals Management Service.
-Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington and Liz Robbins from New York. Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Kenner, La., and Susan Saulny from New Orleans. |
