A4
Oil Spill in the Gulf
S
KLMNO
LA. New Orleans
u
MISS. Gulfport
o
Chandeleur Sound
Breton Sound
Venice
Boom location
Forecast oil location for Wednesday
SOURCES: NOAA, Response Group
Point of spill
0 MILES
THE WASHINGTON POST
U.S. exempted BP rigs from impact analysis
ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A boat is loaded with protective boom that authorities hope will contain the torrent of oil leaking after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.
Oil slick brings big business for booms
Last month’s boatyard debris is hottest commodity in gulf
by David A. Fahrenthold
pass christian, miss. — On
the anxious Gulf Coast, there is a boom in the boom business. With an oil slick about one- third the size of Maryland grow- ing offshore, the coast’s most sought-after commodity has be- come the fluorescent-colored “containment boom.” A month ago, this was boatyard detritus: floating vinyl curtains, designed to trap oil on the surface. But now, despite assurances from federal leaders that they will do everything they can to stop the oil, the boom has be- come the object of a mad scram- ble by local officials from Venice, La., to Pensacola, Fla. In a region still pocked with the ruins of Hurricane Katrina, waiting for a new disaster to make landfall, the boom answers a jumpy impulse to do something. Already, these officials have ex- hausted local boom stockpiles and gone looking for more, ring- ing phones from Texas to Canada. Manufacturers have raised prices and lengthened work shifts. In Louisiana, one sheriff has posted deputies to guard the stuff, just in case.
All this has happened despite the ugly secret of the boom: It doesn’t always work. Without the boom, it’s “like if you were a tightrope walker, and you didn’t have the net,” said Ré- nee Brooks, an alderwoman in Pass Christian. The boom, Brooks said, “is hope.” As of Tuesday — the 14th day since the Deepwater Horizon off- shore drilling rig exploded, even-
But still, this coast wants far more of them than manufac- turers can make.
“I turned down about 200,000
[feet] worth of orders today,” said Sean Geary, sales manager at American Boom & Barrier in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Monday. “Can’t get it out fast enough.” Where boom was denied, there was talk of dark conspiracies. At a news conference Sunday night in Biloxi, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) faced a question about whether boom distribution was designed inequitably, favor- ing wetlands and steering the oil toward the beach towns. “If BP could put the oil where
CAROL GUZY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Nesting birds, including brown pelicans and terns, inhabit Breton Island, which is surrounded by booms in an effort to save the habitat.
tually unleashing a torrent of crude oil from the ocean floor — the first sheen of oil had reached the sound of Louisiana’s Chande- leur Islands, barrier isles that are home to a large population of nesting pelicans.
Authorities are using chem- icals to disperse it, and robotic submersibles to try to stop the leak at its source.
And as a last line of defense, the federally led cleanup is also deploying these containment booms on a historic scale. As of Monday afternoon, officials said 92 miles of boom had been laid around wetlands, barrier islands and other sensitive areas. For many local officials along the coast, that wasn’t enough. In St. Bernard Parish, La., a swampy expanse southeast of New Orleans, smack in the oil’s expected path, officials went straight to a manufacturer. “We told ’em to deliver 25,000
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feet of boom every two days to us, until we tell ’em to stop,” said Wayne Landry, who chairs the parish council. He said BP, the oil giant that was leasing the rig, was expected to pay the bill, which, at the going rate of 10 bucks a foot, is a hefty quarter- million dollars every other day. Now, Landry said, you can fly over St. Bernard’s marshes and see the results: Fluorescent lines zigging through the marsh, look- ing incongruously like the lane markers in a swimming pool. The booms in use here are made of a tough vinyl fabric: A round, inflatable section sits at the top for buoyancy, and a short curtain hangs down to stop oil floating below the surface. It is a low-tech, decades-old idea: “just like a fence in the wa- ter,” said Jeff Bohleber, of Elastec/ American Marine in Carmi, Ill. And it doesn’t work well in high waves or strong currents.
they wanted it . . . they’d put it on Cuba,” Barbour said. Pass Christian city officials de- cided to acquire the stuff them- selves. They called vendors as far away as Canada, trying to strike a deal. They appealed to the federal
government; they tried to buy boom from Texas or Florida; they tried to get it from nearby boat- yards. None of it worked. Finally, on Monday morning,
state Rep. Diane Peranich ap- pealed directly to the state’s first lady, Marsha Barbour. “It’s the same thing we saw in
Katrina: This mass is filling the gulf up, and we’re just sitting and waiting,” Peranich recalled say- ing. A boom would “be a tremen- dous emotional relief.” By Monday evening, workers
in boats were stringing bright- orange boom across the Pass Christian harbor entrance. Brooks, the alderwoman who was so worried, celebrated with a meal of Mississippi oysters. “I can actually enjoy the oys-
ters,” she said, looking out over the harbor from the restaurant deck. “Now we have a net with the tightrope.”
fahrenthold@washpost.com
CORRECTION TO LEGAL NOTICE
If you purchased a cell phone from AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless or AT&T Mobility, a class action settlement may affect your rights.
On April 21, 2010, a notice appeared in this publication of a proposed settlement in four lawsuits relating to software “locks” preventing AT&T Wireless, Cingular and AT&T Mobility (hereinafter, “AT&T”) cell phone handsets from operating with other compatible wireless telephone carriers’ services.
The four
lawsuits are: (1) Meoli, et al. v. AT&T Wireless PCS, LLC, et al., and (2) Mendoza, et al. v. Cingular Wireless LLC, et al., No. JCCP 4332, pending in Alameda County
(California) Superior Court; and (3) Pickering v. Cingular Wireless, LLC, Case No. 2004 CA 005060, and (4) Graber v. AT&T Wireless PCS, LLC, et al. Case No. 2004 CA 004650, pending in Palm Beach County (Florida) Circuit Court.
The end date of the period covered by the settlement is April 2, 2010, NOT
October 26, 2004, as originally stated. The complete paragraph with the correct date is as follows:
ARE YOU AFFECTED?
You are a class member if you have or had an AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, and/or AT&T Mobility individual account and you purchased, directly or from an indirect retailer, a wireless handset other than an Apple iPhone for use with AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, and/or AT&T Mobility service from March 12, 1999 to April 2, 2010.
All other information set forth in the original notice remains unchanged. If you have questions, or if you wish to receive additional information about the case, what the settlement provides to class members, a detailed notice or other documents about the lawsuits or your rights, visit
www.attlockinglawsuits.com, or write to: AT&T Wireless/Cingular Locking Class Actions, P.O. Box 8060,
San Rafael, CA 94912-8060.
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Prior reviews concluded that a large oil spill in the area was unlikely
by Juliet Eilperin
The Interior Department ex- empted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area conclud- ed that a massive oil spill was un- likely. The decision by the depart-
ment’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categori- cal exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobby- ing efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemp- tions — show that neither federal regulators nor the company antic- ipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.
Rethinking the rules
Now, environmentalists and
some key senators are calling for a reassessment of safety require- ments for offshore drilling. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who has supported offshore oil dril- ling in the past, said, “I suspect you’re going to see an entirely dif- ferent regime once people have a chance to sit back and take a look at how do we anticipate and clean up these potential environmental consequences” from drilling. BP spokesman Toby Odone said the company’s appeal for NEPA waivers in the past “was based on the spill and incident-response history in the Gulf of Mexico.” Once the various investigations of the new spill have been complet- ed, he added, “the causes of this incident can be applied to deter- mine any changes in the reg- ulatory regime that are required to protect the environment.” “I’m of the opinion that boost- erism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D- Mass.) on Tuesday. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.” Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it is important to learn the cause of the accident before pur- suing a major policy change. “While the conversation has shift- ed, the energy reality has not,” Ge- rard said. “The American econo- my still relies on oil and gas.” While the MMS assessed the
environmental impact of drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico on three occasions in 2007 — including a specific evalu- ation of BP’s Lease 206 at Deep- water Horizon — in each case it played down the prospect of a major blowout. In one assessment, the agency
estimated that “a large oil spill” from a platform would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a “deepwater spill,” occurring “off- shore of the inner Continental shelf,” would not reach the coast. In another assessment, it defined the most likely large spill as total- ing 4,600 barrels and forecast that it would largely dissipate
within 10 days and would be un- likely to make landfall. “They never did an analysis
that took into account what turns out to be the very real possibility of a serious spill,” said Holly Do- remus, a law professor at the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley who has reviewed the documents. The MMS mandates that com- panies drilling in some areas identify under NEPA what could reduce a project’s environmental impact. But Interior Department spokesman Matt Lee-Ashley said the service grants between 250 and 400 waivers a year for Gulf of Mexico projects. He added that Interior has now established the “first ever” board to examine safe- ty procedures for offshore dril- ling. It will report back within 30 days on BP’s oil spill and will con- duct “a broader review of safety issues,” Lee-Ashley said. BP’s exploration plan for Lease 206, which calls the prospect of an oil spill “unlikely,” stated that “no mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate po- tential impacts on environmental resources.”
While the plan included a 13-
page environmental impact analysis, it minimized the pros- pect of any serious damage asso- ciated with a spill, saying there would be only “sub-lethal” effects on fish and marine mammals, and “birds could become oiled. However it is unlikely that an ac- cidental oil spill would occur from the proposed activities.” Kierán Suckling, executive di-
rector of the environmental group Center for Biological Di- versity, said the federal waiver “put BP entirely in control” of the way it conducted its drilling.
Agency a ‘rubber stamp’
“The agency’s oversight role
has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petro- leum’s self-serving drilling plans,” Suckling said.
BP has lobbied the White
House Council on Environmental Quality — which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agen- cies— to provide categorical ex- emptions more often. In an April 9 letter, BP America’s senior fed- eral affairs director, Margaret D. Laney, wrote to the council that such exemptions should be used in situations where environmen- tal damage is likely to be “mini- mal or non-existent.” An expan- sion in these waivers would help “avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays,” she added. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were talking Tuesday about cur- tailing offshore oil exploration rather than making it easier. In addition to traditional foes of off- shore drilling such as Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.), Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and centrists such as Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said they are taking a sec- ond look at such methods. “It’s time to push the pause but-
ton,” Baucus told reporters.
eilperinj@washpost.com
Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.
50
Gulf of Mexico
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2010
Mobile
Mobile Bay
ALA. FLA. Pensacola
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