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Oil Spill in the Gulf


Lawyer’s task called more complex; guidelines murky


by David A. Fahrenthold and Joel Achenbach


On Monday, Kenneth R. Fein- berg — Washington’s expert in the messy business of valuing tragedy in dollars and cents — officially takes over one of the messiest cases of his career. Feinberg, who oversaw compen-


sation funds for victims of Agent Orange, the Sept. 11 terrorist at- tacks and the 2007 shooting ram- page at Virginia Tech, was appoint- ed by BP and President Obama to oversee claims from the oil spill. Now the job of making the Gulf Coast whole is about to shift from BP to him. On Friday, Feinberg released a


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SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 2010 Gulf Coast on edge as Sept. 11 mediator assesses oil spill claims


“protocol” for parceling out emer- gency claims over the next three months. These were only vague guidelines, though they hinted that those closest to the oil might have the best chance of getting paid. In interviews, legal experts and Gulf Coast residents say that Fein- berg’s job looks more complex than his famous work after the 2001 attacks. The spill’s impact rip- pled through an interconnected economy, with losses at oil-free beaches in Florida and at oyster- shucking plants along the faraway Chesapeake Bay. And even when a loss is obvious — as with gulf fish- ermen — its value might be tied up in murky counterfactuals: Who can say how many shrimp one of them would have caught? “None of these go swimmingly,”


Feinberg said in an interview Fri- day. “There are hurdles and chal- lenges all along the way. Human nature being what it is, people


Trials, errors . . . and success Aſter many attempts to contain the oil that had been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico since April, BP engineers finally may have stopped the Macondo well for good. Dome Robot


Blowout preventer


Blowout preventer


ROBOTIC SUBMARINES deployed on April 25 to the submerged wellhead fail in their attempt to activate the blowout preventer.


CONTAINMENT DOME Aſter robots seal a small leak in the broken riser pipe, BP lowers a 98-ton, four-story-tall containment chamber over the main leak. Crystallized gas clogs it before it could capture any oil.


May


Deepwater Horizon explosion


April 20


INSERTION TUBE BP engineers put a riser insertion tube into a leaking pipe and begin siphoning a small portion of the oil to a drilling rig at the surface.


TOP KILL MANEUVER For three days, BP engineers pump dense drilling mud into the damaged blowout preventer to try to overpower the flow of oil and gas. Te well shoots the mud out and the “top kill” fails.


June


Chemical dispersants (applied both underwater and on surface to break up oil into tiny droplets) Boom (redirects or intercepts oil floating on the water’s surface)


Containment dome


First relief well started.


Riser insertion tube


Second relief well started.


SOURCES: Te Washington Post, Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, news services ALBERTO CUADRA, CRISTINA RIVERO AND BONNIE BERKOWITZ/THE WASHINGTON POST With BP’s know-how and U.S. authority, Macondo well was plugged oil from A1


nothing can go wrong.” The Obama administration has claimed credit for turning an un- controlled calamity into some- thing managed and mastered. The response to the disaster would have been different, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said after the well had been plugged with cement, had the ad- ministration not “pushed at every step of the way” for BP to “do things more comprehensively and faster.”


BP has stayed clear of that de-


bate. “I’ve got a philosophy that when you’re in the middle of the response, you stay focused on the response. When the response is over, that’s a good time to analyze how the response went and de- cide what could have been done better,” Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, said recently.


But the broader truth seems to


be that BP and the government have overcome their natural an- tagonism to create a functioning partnership. The two sides had testy moments, but again and


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again they found a path to agree- ment. When Allen was asked whether a recent pressure test was conceived by the government scientists or the BP engineers, he replied: “It’s hard to say anymore, we’ve been together so long. Some of these conversations start around the coffeepot.” The government needed BP be- cause the company had the tools to plug the hole. BP benefited from the outsider perspective of government scientists and need- ed officials of the Environmental Protection Agency to run interfer- ence on such contentious issues as the use of chemical disper- sants, a subject on which BP was viewed as having zero credibility. Keeping everyone moving in the same direction has been Al- len, perhaps the least-excitable person in American public life. Al- len said in a recent interview that his goal was to “produce unity of effort” and added, “You can’t do that by polarizing, or creating conflict, or getting caught up in a personal agenda or getting too ex- cited about things.” Allen said the government’s handling of the spill was entirely


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by the book, adhering to the Na- tional Contingency Plan for oil spills, a process developed in the 1960s and most recently updated in 1994. “Now, having said that, it’s been safe to say there’s been some so- cial nullification of the National Contingency Plan,” Allen said. Translation: The public never


liked the arrangement. “It was not well understood by


the general public,” Allen said. “I think the word responsible


party was a very confusing word to people,” said Carol Browner, White House climate and energy czar. “We were directing BP from the beginning.”


Critics remain unmoved. “The Obama administration


played this game where they’d make public statements saying, ‘We’re telling BP what to do,’ but it was clear that BP was still in charge,” said Tyson Slocum, direc- tor of the energy program for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. For political reasons, the ad-


ministration needed to distance itself publicly from BP even as, largely behind the scenes, it worked hand in hand with the oil company in responding to the spill. Many weeks into the crisis, and with the gushing well un- abated, the government stopped holding daily joint news confer- ences with a top BP executive. Al-


len took over the daily briefing, solo.


On the technological front, BP had to take the lead in plugging the well. Not even the Pentagon had the kind of robotic submers- ibles, hardware and know-how to deal with a blowout 5,000 feet deep in the gulf. But in the early weeks of the crisis, BP engineers went from Plan A to Plan Z and were on the verge of needing the Cyrillic alphabet. Engineers fiddled with the


well’s blowout preventer, to no avail. The first containment dome clogged instantly with icy meth- ane hydrates. A “riser insertion tool” worked about as well as planned but made little differ- ence. Then the top kill failed. Mud pumped into the well shot straight out the top. Failure, it turned out, was the prerequisite for the eventual tech- nological success. After the top kill didn’t work, engineers put to- gether a Rube Goldberg contain- ment system, one that used multi- ple ships, floating riser pipes, a new sealing cap and other hard- ware borrowed from around the planet. The goal was to capture as much as 80,000 barrels a day. In- stead, that system allowed engi- neers on July 15 to turn off the well as one might a faucet. The government urged BP to go to the more elaborate contain-


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ment system. A government-su- pervised team of scientists said the well was producing 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day, an extraordi- nary flow. In a testy exchange of letters in early June, the on-scene coordinator for the government, Rear Adm. James Watson, de- manded that BP ramp up its con- tainment.


BP had to be inventive, on the fly.


“They had to take two technolo- gies that did not pre-exist in the Gulf of Mexico,” Allen said. A production tanker with satel- lite-guided positioning raced to the gulf from the North Sea. Engi- neers also borrowed technology used off the coast of Africa. That system used floating riser pipes, which allow ships to attach and detach via flexible lines. “The North Sea meets Angola in the Gulf of Mexico,” Allen said. This expanded containment ca-


pacity included a new, 75-ton structure atop the well, known as the sealing cap, or 3-ram capping stack. The cap had been envi- sioned as early as April 24, just four days after the blowout, ac- cording to Wells. The new cap changed every-


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thing. Although it was designed to siphon oil to the surface, the new system created another possibil- ity: Engineers could simply shut in the well. Chu said the BP engineers had assumed, after the “top kill” failed, that the well had a loss of “integrity” somewhere down be- low the wellhead, with breaches that let the mud from the opera- tion surge into the rock formation instead of straight down the well. “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so,


there’s another scenario,’ ” Chu said. The well, he said, might have integrity after all. That opened


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the possibility, he said, for the “in- tegrity test.” They could close the well and see what happened. This led to the most anxious pe- riod of the response. The danger was that, by choking the flow at the top, the pressures could build to such high levels that the oil and gas could explode laterally, through the well casing. The hy- drocarbons might flow into the surrounding formations and then work their way up, into the gulf. “The worst-case scenario is you


create a fissure that doesn’t heal, and the entire reservoir empties,” Chu said. The entire reservoir contains upward of 50 million barrels of oil, according to BP.


When it came time to pull the


trigger on the integrity test, Chu and his colleagues called timeout for 24 hours. They demanded more information from BP engi- neers and asked for more seismic imaging of the gulf floor. Geologists consulted by Chu


gave him some reassurance. They said that the kind of formations below the well could potentially heal after a lateral blowout. But the timing was critical. A lateral blowout would have to be detec- ted quickly, via pressure readings, seismic surveys or visual inspec- tion of new leaks. The well would have to be reopened at the top be- fore the situation got out of con- trol.


And so the integrity test went


forward. A robotic submersible closed the final valve on the eve- ning of July 15. The horrid black plume of oil, the gusher that haunted the nation, quickly van- ished. Chu felt that BP wasn’t suffi- ciently monitoring the muddy gulf floor for signs of new leaks. Allen quickly fired off a stern memo demanding more scrutiny of the gulf bottom with robotic submersibles that BP had detailed to other jobs. Everyone waited, and watched.


The well didn’t explode, and the reservoir didn’t empty. That was more than five weeks


ago. The job isn’t quite finished. “All I’m focused on is trying to kill the well, make sure it’s dead,” Chu said. “Make sure it’s really dead.”


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And so the strange partnership of BP and the government will continue a little longer, until final- ly everyone can go home and fear the Macondo well no more. achenbachj@washpost.com


Top kill First containment cap Q4000 rig (collected oil until mid-July) Second containment cap


CONTAINMENT CAP A much smaller version of the containment dome is lowered onto the sawed- off riser pipe, and it funnels some oil to a ship on the surface. But the cap fits loosely, and oil continues to spew from beneath it.


July Q4000


Tis rig siphons oil to the surface through a line attached to the blowout preventer and burns the oil off. It was used to pump mud into the well during the failed top kill in June and the successful static kill in August.


Flow is contained July 15


Insertion tube


Cap


Blowout preventer


NEW CAP


As part of new strategy to contain oil, a second, tight-fitting cap is placed atop the blowout preventer. Once its valves are closed, the cap stops all oil from flowing into the gulf.


August


Blowout preventer


Mud and Mud and ceme flow cement flow STATIC KILL


With the cap restraining the flow, heavy mud pumped down by the Q4000 successfully pushes oil back into the reservoir. Cement seals the well permanently.


Well is plugged Aug. 3


The “bottom kill” has been delayed until after Labor Day.


Q4000 platform


Containment cap


have expectations. Inevitably some people are satisfied and some aren’t. It goes with the territory. You do the best you can.” In the four months since the spill began, BP has handed claims for compensation of lost income. The oil company has received 153,974 claims as of Friday, and paid about 125,000 of those, for a total payout of $395 million. On Monday, all pending claims will be handed to Feinberg. These will include murkier cases where the claim originates far from the spill itself, or involves indirect im- pacts on groups such as beach- town real estate agents. Feinberg’s job is to parcel out $20 billion in BP funds, from an es- crow account the company estab- lished at the insistence of the White House. Fees to his law firm will be paid out of interest pay- ments from the $20 billion. The protocol issued Friday by Feinberg says that people and


businesses still awaiting payment from BP must file new forms with his Gulf Coast Claims Facility be- fore their claim will be paid. Be- tween Monday and Nov. 23, they can file requests for “emergency advance payments,” compensating for losses from the first six months after the spill. After that, Feinberg will decide


on “final” payments. On Monday, more details about claims will be available online at www. gulfcoastclaimsfacility.com. Feinberg said Friday that any- one receiving an emergency pay- ment retains all rights to sue BP or any other company involved in the spill. A final claim, however, will carry a procedure for releasing BP —and perhaps other companies — from liability.


Around the Gulf Coast this week, there were worries that Feinberg’s fund wouldn’t do enough, or that the Washington lawyer would fail to understand


the complicated connections that spread the spill’s pain far and wide. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) complained about the need for his residents to file new paper- work, while Grand Isle, La., sea- food dealer Dean Blanchard said he liked Feinberg but feared he wouldn’t come through. “If you got six months to live, you want Feinberg to tell you” be- cause of his comforting manner, said Blanchard. But, Blanchard said, would Feinberg understand that the weather predicted a huge year for shrimp, before the oil killed the shrimping season? If he didn’t, Blanchard might not get all of the $300,000-plus he still needs for unpaid bills. “I figured out what ‘ground zero’ means. That means zero money for Dean,” he said. Further from the well, the ques- tions multiplied. In Alabama, fish- ermen said it would be unfair if those who worked for BP’s cleanup


had their pay subtracted from their spill compensation. “You’re out there in a 121-degree


heat index, pulling boom or skim- ming or scooping or picking up tar balls, and they’re going to take that away from you,” said Avery Bates of the Organized Seafood Associa- tion of Alabama. In St. Pete Beach, Fla., a resort company that never saw a drop of oil has tallied $1.7 million in lost revenue — reasoning that news re- ports about oil in the gulf scared people off. That will go in Fein- berg’s queue, along with a request from faraway Weems, Va. There, on a Chesapeake Bay tributary 800 miles from the gulf, W.E. Kellum Seafood had come to rely on oys- ters from the gulf. The oil spill cut its supply. Now, after receiving only a small payment from BP, it is waiting on Feinberg to cut the firm a check.


fahrenthold@washpost.com achenbachj@washpost.com


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