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http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/next-deepwater-horizonNext Deepwater Horizon?
Obama halted new offshore drilling, but allowed existing production to continue—including another BP Gulf rig flying numerous red flags.
— By Kate Sheppard
Fri Jun. 4, 2010 3:00 AM PDT
Last week, President Barack Obama put new deepwater drilling operations on hold for another six months. With the Gulf of Mexico spill entering its fifth week, this move was meant to show that the administration is taking a more cautious approach to offshore drilling, after it had announced a vast expansion just weeks before the BP disaster.
Many news accounts on the moratorium extension implied that all deepwater Gulf operations had been shut down. But that's not the case. The administration is allowing deepwater drilling operations already in production in the Gulf to continue—including some that may pose a greater risk than the Deepwater Horizon. Exhibit A: BP's other major Gulf operation, the Atlantis, which sits 124 miles off the Louisiana coast.
Kenneth Abbott, a project control supervisor BP contracted to work on the Atlantis, and the environmental group Food & Water Watch filed suit against the federal government on May 17 seeking a temporary injunction to force the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to shut down the platform. Abbott claims that his contract was terminated shortly after he alerted management to the rig's lack of crucial engineering documents in late 2008.
According to Abbott, the BP Atlantis lacks more than 6,000 documents that are key to operating the rig safely. Abbott has said that the vast majority of the project's subsea piping and instrument diagrams were not approved by engineers, and the safety systems are out of date. In March 2009, Abbott took his concerns about the rig to MMS, the Department of Interior office responsible for regulating offshore drilling. He says the agency requested some of these documents from BP, but failed to seek specific diagrams of key components necessary for ensuring the rig's secure operation.
An internal BP email that came out in the course of Abbott's dispute refers to the potential for "catastrophic operator errors" on the rig due to these lapses. The suit argues that without these documents, the rig operators "are flying blind, and have no way to assure the safety of offshore drilling operations." Food & Water Watch began pushing for lawmakers to intervene on the rig back in August 2009.<snip>
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/28/bp_oil_spill_confirmed_as_worst<snip> The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to halt forty-nine offshore drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico that were approved without full environmental review. Meanwhile, the group Food & Water Watch is leading an effort to shut down the Atlantis, another BP oil rig in the Gulf. The group warns an oil spill from the Atlantis could be many times larger than the current spill and even harder to stop. (includes rush transcript)
<snip>
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, the first thing that needs to happen is that the BP Atlantis platform needs to be shut down before we have another accident. For the last year, we’ve been trying to get MMS to act on this, and we now believe that it’s President Obama who needs to take action in shutting down this very dangerous platform. We filed suit last week against MMS, demanding that the platform be shut down. And we’re asking people to go to the website www.spillthetruth.org and ask President Obama to shut it down immediately.
AMY GOODMAN:
Just one minute on this issue of Atlantis. I don’t think most people realize that these oil—deep sea oil drilling sites are continuing now, as they talk about moratoriums and the closings of, shutting down of these in the Gulf of Mexico. Wenonah Hauter, where is the Atlantis deep sea oil drilling rig?
WENONAH HAUTER: The Atlantis is 150 miles offshore from New Orleans, and it’s 7,000 feet deep. So it’s much deeper than the Horizon. And none of the safety documentation has been verified. So we’re very concerned that there could be an accident at any time.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of this particular platform’s importance to the general Gulf oil production, how big is it? And why is there such a resistance to looking at it?
WENONAH HAUTER: Well, it produces 8.4 million gallons of oil every day. And so, if there were to be a spill, it would be five—it could be five times larger than the Horizon spill within five days. And the thing is that we have a lot of evidence about what’s going on with BP Atlantis because of a whistleblower, but we suspect that this is the case with all of the deepwater platforms. <snip>
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