Dance of the Reptiles (11 page)

British Petroleum announced today that it has fired its top engineer for safety design and replaced him with Jody McNamara, age 12, a sixth-grade honors student at the Dwight Eisenhower Middle School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

McNamara, who will earn about $350,000 a year in salary and stock options, was offered the BP job after a panel of industry experts selected his 250-word essay, “How to Stop Undersea Oil Leaks Really Quick,” over thousands of other entries.

“Jody is clearly on the cutting edge of deepwater energy technology,” said BP chief executive Tony Hayward. “We couldn’t be happier to have him join our team at such a critical time.”

McNamara was introduced to reporters at a lunch-hour press conference in the school cafeteria. He said his first priority would be devising a new strategy for dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I don’t want to talk trash about these other guys,” he said, “but come on—golf balls and car tires? Seriously?”

It was not clear whether McNamara has any prior experience
advising major petroleum companies. The school yearbook lists him as a member of the Science Club, the Chess Club, and 4-H. His interests are said to include “soccer, skateboarding, and collecting really cool arrowheads.”

The hiring of an outsider didn’t surprise industry insiders, who say BP had run out of ideas in its increasingly desperate efforts to plug the mile-deep Deepwater Horizon. A four-story dome that was supposed to fit over the gushing wellhead became clogged with icy crystals and had to be towed away. Burning off the floating crude has had only limited success, as gobs of tar are threatening shorelines and marine life all along the Gulf Coast.

“What Jody brings to the table,” said BP’s Hayward, “is a completely fresh viewpoint on problem-solving. The principal showed us his class project from last semester—the hamster-powered lightbulb? I’m telling you, this kid is scary smart.”

In his winning essay, McNamara proposed several possible options for sealing the ruptured oil pipeline. He said the most promising plan would require “a super-long straw” and approximately 3,700 metric tons of Quaker oatmeal. “You ever let that goop sit in a cereal bowl for an hour or two? It turns to rock,” the sixth-grader explained at his press conference. “There’s nothing that stuff won’t clog up.”

McNamara said he successfully tested the technique using a homemade LEGO model of the Deepwater Horizon, submerged in a 30-gallon aquarium in his brother’s bedroom. “Don’t worry, we took out all the fish first,” he said.

Hayward later conceded that the aquarium experiment was more sophisticated than any that BP had undertaken. “It could have saved us the fortune that we blew on that stupid dome,” he added ruefully.

Classmates describe McNamara as studious but not stuffy. One recounted a prank that occurred on a recent “Burger
Day” when McNamara loosened the cap on a bottle of mustard before handing it to an unsuspecting companion at the lunch table.

“We all fell on the floor laughing,” the classmate said. “Jody’s an awesome dude.”

Said another: “So what if it’s, like, his first really epic oil spill? He couldn’t possibly do worse than those grown-up dorks did.”

Critics of BP expressed guarded optimism about the company’s decision to put a 12-year-old boy in charge of the Deepwater Horizon containment project.

A spokesman for the Department of Interior released a statement saying, “Jody McNamara seems like a bright young fellow, and we are encouraged by BP’s willingness to give him a chance. God knows their own people don’t have a clue what to do.”

Before leaving for an orthodontist appointment, McNamara showed reporters his first memo to BP executives, written as an extra-credit assignment for his English class: “Please don’t build any more offshore oil rigs until you figure out how to shut them off.”

McNamara received an A on the paper.

He promised to get busy working on the oil-spill plan right away, as soon as he finishes his homework and cleans the hamster cage.

June 12, 2010

Now You Don’t Trust BP, but It’s Too Late

Every time a BP executive appears on television, I think of the garage scene from the movie
Animal House
.

An expensive car belonging to Flounder’s brother has just been trashed on a drunken road trip, and the smooth-talking
Otter comforts the distraught Delta pledge with these cheery words: “You f—— up! You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it.”

If only the BP guys were half as honest.

Incredibly, almost eight weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the company that caused the disaster remains the primary source of information about it. Predictably, much of that information has been stupendously, tragically wrong, starting with the low-ball estimates of how much crude was leaking into the sea. BP didn’t know the answer when the rig went down, and it doesn’t know the answer now. Nobody does.

Every day we see streaming underwater video of that mile-deep gout of oil, billowing and unstaunched. The image is only slightly less sickening than the pictures of dead sea turtles and gagging pelicans. Some people I know can’t bear to watch anymore, so painful are the feelings of helplessness and frustration. What’s happening before our eyes is the slow murder of one of the world’s most bountiful bodies of water, a crime precipitated by reckless corporate decisions and abetted by our own government.

Imagine a so-called regulatory process that allows oil companies to sink a drill 5,000 or even 10,000 feet through a living ocean without any reliable backup for when a blowout preventer fails to prevent a blowout.

Duh, let’s build us a big ol’ steel dome and drop it on the leak.

If that don’t work, we’ll blast us some golf balls and shredded tires into the hole.

Or maybe a giant sody straw might do the trick!

Obviously, these geniuses didn’t have a workable Plan B. Worse, nobody in government figured that out until it was too late. This is what millions of dollars in campaign contributions
buys—a free pass from Washington. The federal Minerals Management Service basically worked for Big Oil.

It was a relationship that flourished during the Bush-Cheney years, and not much changed when Barack Obama took office. Despite serious safety issues throughout BP’s North American operations, the MMS blithely accepted the company’s word that everything was peachy on Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even today, in the midst of the worst oil spill in history, the Obama administration is still relying largely on BP’s word, although by necessity and not choice. CEO Tony Hayward continues to say things that would merely be silly if not for the dire context. Last week he declared that, despite the findings of several sets of researchers, no submerged plumes of petroleum are spreading through the Gulf. “The oil is on the surface,” Hayward said. “There are no plumes.”

He sounds just like the pet-shop owner in the famous Monty Python sketch who is trying to convince a disgruntled customer that his extremely dead parrot is only napping.

As of this writing, the latest news from BP concerns its new oil-collecting contraption, which is said to be siphoning 15,000 barrels daily from the fractured wellhead. The company has promised that, within days, it will be capturing “a vast majority” of the flow from the Deepwater Horizon.

Unfortunately, attaching the new device required recutting the riser in a way that actually increased the volume of the leak. Many experts believe that millions more gallons than before are now pouring into Gulf waters.

So, at the end of the day, all we really know for certain is this: The oil keeps gushing, and nobody’s figured out how to stop it. That much we can see for ourselves on the dreary underwater video. Back on land, not a soul is able to state with certainty how much has been spilled, where it will end
up, or what the ultimate damage will be to the Gulf and beyond.

Meanwhile, the coastal marshes of Louisiana are dying, and brown glop soils the beaches of Alabama and northwest Florida. The seafood industry is being crippled, and tourism is reeling.

And our government, which possesses neither the technology nor the expertise to plug the leak, is stuck in a grim alliance with the perpetrators.

Oil spills are like hurricanes: One is all it takes to change everything.

From the president to the industry’s cheerleaders in Congress to all those state and federal regulators, too many people accepted the oil executives’ sunny assurance that deepwater drilling posed no serious threat to this country.

In the immortal words of Otter, you f——up.

You trusted them.

June 27, 2010

Oil Spill: The Nightmare Becomes Reality

A friend walked out on Pensacola Beach and took a photograph of the oil—miles of oil—on the morning that the gunk first washed ashore.

He e-mailed the picture to me with a note that said it all: “Sickening.”

Pensacola is his home, and the unthinkable has happened. Louisiana’s misery is now officially Florida’s misery, too. For many residents of the Panhandle, the dreadful wait is over, and their worst fears have come to pass. In a calamity lasting so long and unfolding so inexorably, emotions swing from anger to sadness to grim acceptance. There’s
simply nothing to do except struggle to clean up the mess—as Pensacolans quickly did—and pray for the day when it’s over.

The polls say most Americans (although not all) are outraged by the oil spill. Those untouched by the disaster may, if they choose, keep a distance. Along the Gulf shores, workers are scooping up dead dolphins and trucking them off for necropsies. The pictures aren’t easy to stomach, and the impulse is to look away.

It might be difficult for someone who was born and raised far from a beach or a bayou to visualize a place they cherish being poisoned and defaced on such a massive scale. Or maybe not so difficult. Imagine if 120 million gallons of crude oil were flushed into the Minnesota headwaters of the Mississippi River, and for months the sludge was allowed to seep down through the veins of America’s Midwest.

Now you begin to get the picture—the heartbreak, the helplessness.

Far from Pensacola Beach, where tears were shed last week, a certifiable idiot named Joe Barton was apologizing to BP because President Obama had pressured the company into creating a $20 billion compensation fund for victims of the Deepwater Horizon accident.

Barton is a Republican congressman whose district in Texas includes Arlington and parts of Fort Worth, a long way from the Gulf of Mexico. Although he later was forced to apologize for his apology to BP, Barton was cheered by some Tea Party bloggers and others who accuse Obama of shaking down the oil giant.

Talk about misplaced sympathy. Being clueless is one thing. To showcase such an obscene insensitivity to suffering is something else.

With the encroaching oil slick comes a mugging for all whose livelihood depends on the robust health of the Gulf. Hotels stand nearly empty, shop and restaurant workers are being laid off, and fishing boats sit idle at the docks. The folks staring out at a befouled horizon have mortgages, car payments, medical bills, and kids who need clothes for school. Their lives are upended and might never be the same.

Marine experts say it will take many years for the Gulf waters to heal, long after the tar balls and glop are cleaned off the beaches. A spill so deep and so torrential has no precedent, so no model exists to tell us what happens next.

For the millions of Americans who live on or near the ocean, from Kennebunkport to Seattle, the consequences of the accident don’t need to be elucidated. The environment is the economy.

Interestingly, those who denounce Obama’s “shakedown” of BP use no such criminal terms for what the oil company has done to the coastal communities of Louisiana, Alabama, and northwest Florida. Assault would be the word for it. Negligence would be the cause.

Once the oil arrives and the nightmare becomes reality, those who must deal with the stink and the slop are moving past the questions that preoccupy cable news and radio talk shows.

No deep, dark mystery remains.

The rig blew up because somebody made a terrible mistake, period. The well is still gushing and will keep gushing until August, at the earliest. Exactly how many barrels a day is now an academic debate; the volume remains so immense that it’s virtually impossible to comprehend, a number that fluctuates from one press release to another.

Just get the damn leak plugged. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, the tropics are heating up. Who knows how
many storms will rip across the Gulf or how far they’ll spread the oil.

Gov. Charlie Crist traveled to Pensacola Beach last week, not far from where my friend took the photograph. Standing among the tar puddles, the governor said, “It’s pretty ugly.”

Sickening is a better word.

You shouldn’t have to be there to feel it.

April 23, 2011

A Year Later, Little in the Gulf Has Changed

One year and 206 million gallons of oil later, all that gushes from the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon is blame. Lawyers appear to outnumber the ocean microbes.

Everybody’s suing BP, while BP sues the rig owner and the maker of the blowout preventer that failed to prevent the blowout. Some folks who barely got grazed by the disaster have received settlement checks from the oil giant, while others along the Gulf who got wiped out are still waiting for compensation.

The beaches have been cleaned, but miles of once fertile marshlands in Louisiana remain goopy and barren. Elsewhere, the shrimp and fish are rebounding, but samples show elevated levels of petroleum-based hydrocarbons. Nobody is sure how much of the BP oil remains suspended in the dark depths, or what the long-term effects will be on marine life.

In its own way, the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon accident is as messy and maddening as the spill itself. Gulf Coast politicians who bashed the Obama administration for the way it handled the cleanup have also blasted federal efforts to prevent another devastating blowout.

The moratorium on deep-water drilling—which affected
only a fraction of the wells in the Gulf—was denounced as a dagger in the heart of the Louisiana oil industry. Yet dire predictions of massive job cuts proved to be wrong.