Lots of ink, plus and minus: BP points fingers at self, among others; The good news – looks like microbes and dispersants worked a cleanup marvel
September 8th, 2010
So many barrels of ink have been spilt describing and so many big cutaway diagrams published of a previously obscure piece of heavy industrial, the BP blowout preventer that couldn’t and was raised from the dead wellhead Saturday. One therefore can hardly wait for the company and its contractors to pull it apart and figure out why its brutal blind shear rams and other heavy duty valveworks didn’t obey orders.
For now, we’ll take what we can get. In the news is BP’s in house report on the spill’s apparent causes. It includes 25 recommended ways to slash the chances of such a thing happening again. The press release (see grist) says the recommendations are “designed to prevent” such things recurring. Prevent, huh? Like, never happen? One must recall the name the industry puts on that big lump of steel mentioned at the top of this post. It’s not a blowout push-the-button-and-cross-your-fingerser.
BP takes blame and shares it at the same time. Plenty of reporters looked at the 200-page report and the good ones made a few calls.
Stories:
- NPR – Scott Neuman: BP Report Blames Multiple Companies for Gulf Spill ; Richard Harris: audio report. Harris says it could easily have been prevented, no BOP necessary, if the engineers and operators had just watched their gauges more carefully.
- Washington Post – Steven Mufson, Joel Achenbach: BP releases reports on gulf well blowout ;
- Financial Times: Backlash greets BP’s internal report ;
- USA Today – Jessica Durando: BP: ‘Sequence of failures’ caused Gulf oil spill ;
- AP – Harry Weber (video report): BP Report Places Blame Everywhere ; written story Weber plus Michael Kunzelman, Dina Cappiello: BP report blames itslef, others for oil spill; One must read this for the quote from a lawyer set to sue BP.
- Guardian (UK) – Damien Carrington: BP oil spill report lists series of failures – mostly by others – that led to disaster ; Regardless of how the blame game ends, this calls the report an “astonishing catalogue of failures and errors.”
- Wall St. Journal – Tennille Tracy : BP Outlines Steps to Prevent Future Spills ;
- … plenty more, we’ll update this tomorrow.
IN THE MEANTIME – about those microbes and the elusive giant remnant plumes lurking in the deep. More signs the spill is pretty much over. If this were fiction, a morality tale, it wouldn’t end this way. Let’s hope it does.
- AP – Seth Borenstein: Microbes are eating BP oil without using up oxygen ; A second shoe to earlier news, a new government report reinforces hopes that microbes, aided by dispersant added to the plume as it emerged at the seafloor, have made the oil go sort of poof. It may have been luck, but some tell Borenstein the dispersant application may have his a “sweet spot” of high efficacy. Borenstein balances that with enduring doubts that this can end so cleanly as that.
- Houston Chronicle – Matthew Tresaugue: Feds find no dead zones caused by BP’s oil spill ;
- New Orleans Times-Picayune – Mark Schleifstein: Gulf oxygen levels are lower, but not deadly, in wake of spill, researchers report ;
- Charlie Petit
Grist for the Mill: BP Press Release (includes link to full report);
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September 8th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Each one of these topics is important, even (or maybe particularly) Dick’s look at NASA PR.
But I think your points about upstream science coverage are well-considered. I hate to drag evidence into things, but anyone who remembers the optimism of the “precision journalism” and narrative boom of the 80’s-90’s can see how advertisers greeted deeper science coverage (see page 10 and this was before the recession). http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers/working_papers/2006_04_russell.pdf
Overall, there is a familiar sound to this whole critique; ‘journalists’ not covering the ‘process of science’ was an old trope when I took my first STS class in 1991. Don’t get me wrong, this is a well-intended and true as far as it goes critique, but Walter Lippmann disemboweled it as a serious one for all news back in 1922 in Public Opinion.
There is also the issue of how the access granted to upstream reporters would not lead to the old struggle with boosterism that the science reporting field has sought to shed at least since Tuskegee. Beats me, but I think this is a discussion worth having.
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