Part I - Covering up a catastrophe
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This article, the first of a four-part series marking the first anniversary of the BP Gulf oil disaster, reviews the systematic corporate and government cover-up of the BP disaster and its consequences.

One year ago today, on April 20, 2010, an explosion on the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers, injured 17 more, and led to the greatest single ecological catastrophe in US history. By the time the blown out Macondo well was capped on July 15, 2010, some 206 million gallons of oil had gushed out from the wellhead located one mile beneath the ocean's surface and about 50 miles from Louisiana's southeast coast. Millions more gallons of highly toxic chemical dispersant were dumped on the Gulf's surface or released underwater.

The consequences of the disaster will be felt for decades. The spill directly impacted thousands of square miles of the Gulf of Mexico and coastline stretching from Texas to Florida, including estuaries, marshlands, and beaches. Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents face financial hardship, including many thousands who lost their jobs as a result of damages to the fishing and tourism industries. Cleanup workers will suffer serious health problems as a result of acute exposure to toxins released by the oil and chemical dispersants. Numerous species of marine and coastal life may never recover.

In spite of the magnitude of the disaster and overwhelming evidence that basic safety concerns were flouted in order to speed the oil well into production, not a single executive from any of the corporations implicated in the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig - well owner BP, rig operator Transocean, and rig contractor Halliburton - has been punished. BP itself is flush with profits and cash. No new restrictions or regulations of any significance have been put in place on deep-sea oil drilling, and the Obama administration has since granted dozens of new permits. Obama's "claims czar," Kenneth Feinberg, who explicitly stated that his primary concern was protecting the viability of BP, has blocked compensation for the majority of victims.

Obama's overriding concern from the beginning was to defend BP, one of the largest corporations in the world, and the oil industry as a whole. The result was a cover-up that began in late April 2010 and continues to this day. This cover-up, and the White House decision to leave BP in total control of the disaster site, clean-up, and response, were themselves criminal acts that flowed from the total subordination of all branches of government to the interests of the most powerful corporate interests.

In this the oil disaster was closely analogous to the response of the Bush and Obama administrations to the financial crisis of fall 2008. As in the aftermath of the financial collapse - when no effort was spared to advance the interest of the big finance houses that caused the crisis - the entire response to the Gulf oil disaster was tailored to meet the needs of BP.

The implications of this policy entailed more than shameless capitulation to BP. So long as the oil giant was left in charge and the profit drive continued to dominate the response, it was impossible to effectively deal with the blowout, or even to correctly estimate its size. The result was that BP and the Obama administration floundered from one debacle to the next, their efforts fatally compromised at every turn by the profit concerns that trump all other questions under capitalism.

The BP and White House cover-up began in the very hours after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Even as the fire still raged, BP and Transocean transported the 115 survivors not to their families, but to a holding center where they were interrogated by BP lawyers and forced to take drug tests. With the media already broadcasting images of the blazing rig, their families had no idea whether they were dead or alive.

On April 22 the rig, still on fire, collapsed. Its riser pipe, which connected it to the wellhead one mile below, crumpled and burst. Coast Guard hearings in New Orleans later suggested that the rig collapse itself may have been caused by the haphazard response of the Coast Guard, whose vessels likely doused the rig with so much water that it capsized.

From that day on, the Macondo well released millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. Yet on April 23, BP and US Coast Guard officer Mary Landry insisted there was no spill, claiming that oil visible on the surface was fuel from the collapsed rig. It was not until April 24 that BP admitted there was a spill, after the slick had become so large its origins could not be denied. At this point BP and the Obama administration claimed that a maximum of 42,000 gallons, or 1,000 barrels, per day were spilling into the Gulf.
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At the same time, the administration displayed complete indifference to the most immediate victims of the spill - the workers on the rig. On April 22, two days after the explosion - with the fate of 11 missing men still unknown - a reporter asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if Obama had yet "reached out to anyone in Louisiana over the oil rig explosion." Gibbs responded, "Let me check on that. I don't believe so."

For more than a week after the blast, the Obama administration limited its public comments largely to reiterating its support for the lifting of moratoriums on offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast, the northern waters of Alaska, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When asked at an April 23 news conference whether this disaster would cause Obama to reconsider these policies, Gibbs said flatly, "No."

"We've taken swift action to ensure the safety of those that are there and to ensure the safety to the environment by capping the exploratory well," Gibbs declared. "We need the increased production. The president still continues to believe the great majority of that can be done safely, securely and without any harm to the environment. I don't honestly think [the disaster] opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last," Gibbs concluded. Obama did not make his way to the Gulf until Sunday, May 2, nearly two weeks after the explosion.

From the outset, administration officials acted as little more than BP spokesmen. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, pegged by Obama to head up its response to the crisis, repeatedly extolled BP. "I trust Tony Hayward," Allen said of the BP CEO. "When I talk to him, I get an answer."

Hayward's "answers" were a series of lies. The CEO, who was paid upwards of $4 million annually by BP, declared that the Gulf of Mexico is a "very big ocean," and in another occasion that the spill's effects would be "very, very, modest." Statements like these made Hayward a hated symbol of corporate arrogance. Perhaps his most memorable comment was his complaint about the personal strain the disaster put on him - "I want my life back," he told struggling Gulf residents in late May.

Even though BP and the Coast Guard worked to block access to the site - in one instance Hayward was caught on camera yelling "get out of here" to a news crew attempting to view cleanup efforts - independent scientists soon found ways to refute the 1,000 barrel-per-day claim advanced by the government and BP.

Analyzing only the visible part of the spill, Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University, estimated that 9 million gallons had been spilled by April 28, a rate of 1.3 million gallons (30,000 barrels) per day. SkyTruth, a non-profit environmental analysis firm, put the figure at 12.2 million gallons by May 2, about the same rate.

To deflect such criticism, the Obama administration knowingly promoted a lie. On April 28, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated the rate of spillage from the blowout was at most 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons, five times BP's estimate but only a sixth of that cited by MacDonald. Documents later gathered by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling revealed that the 5,000 barrels claim had no scientific foundation. It was based an internal NOAA e-mail written in the first days of the disaster by a scientist criticizing BP's claim that the spill rate was 1,000 barrels per day. The commission also found that the White House acted to block NOAA from revising the spill rate upwards.

This 5,000 barrel-per-day figure was quickly seized on by the media and presented, uncritically, as the maximum level of the spill rate. The New York Times, for example, based a May 4, 2010 "news analysis" on the statistic, arguing that the spill was really not so bad ("Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad?"). The newspaper had earlier called on Obama not to step back from deep-sea oil drilling. (See, "New York Times minimizes Gulf oil spill").

Had BP allowed independent analysis of the runaway well, it would not have been difficult to accurately estimate the rate of the spill. The Coast Guard, acting as a private security force for BP, blocked reporters from beaches and even from flying over the spill site. BP reportedly had 12 video cameras stationed near the wellhead beginning soon after the disaster, but these too were blocked from public view.

On May 12, BP finally released a short, pre-recorded clip of the underwater blowout. A journalist from National Public Radio (NPR) took the footage to three experts for separate types of scientific analysis. The results were shocking. Timothy Crone, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, put the spill rate at 50,000 barrels (2.1 million gallons) per day. University of California astrophysics professor Eugene Chaing put it in a range of 20,000 to 100,000 barrels daily. Steven Wereley of Purdue University used particle image velocimetry to establish a spill rate of 70,000 barrels per day - which he later increased to 95,000 barrels - with a margin of error of 20 percent.

The Obama administration and BP simply ignored these analyses, falsely claiming that there was no way to know what the spill rate was, and that in any case knowledge of the dimensions of the spill would not impact the response.

These were lies. BP was aware of at least one of the several methods available for calculating spill rates. Early on in the blowout it had recruited two scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to put in place a sonar measuring instrument precisely for that purpose. Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, who have performed many similar measurements, "were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements," the New York Times reported on May 14. "But they were contacted [just before their departure] and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again."

The Obama administration finally authorized a semi-official Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG), comprised of scientists and technical experts, to measure the rate of the blowout. On May 27, NOAA reported that, based on the work of the FRTG, the rate of oil lost was between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day, far more than the 5,000 barrel rate BP had long claimed.

This too turned out to be a distortion. The 12,000 to 19,000 figure represented the range of absolute minimum figures of the various scientists involved. They had not yet come up with a high-end range. After criticism from some scientists in the FRTG, on June 10, NOAA released a tentative range for the rate of the spill of between 30,000 barrels, low-end, and 50,000 barrels.

The final estimate of the FRTG, not released until the first days of August, arrived at a rate that varied between 53,000 barrels and 62,000 barrels per day, an amount equivalent to the quantity of oil spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every week.

The capping of the well in mid-July did not end the cover-up. In early August, NOAA published a report claiming that much of the oil had been dispersed or dissolved. Carol Browner, the director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, went on NBC's "Meet the Press" to assure the American people that "the vast majority of oil is gone." The same day, Thad Allen, head of the National Incident Command, appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation" to congratulate BP, saying the company had done "very well" with operations at the wellhead.

Independent scientists immediately challenged these claims. Among them was Susan Shaw, the director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, who told the press, "The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50 percent of it is still in the water." University of South Florida chemical oceanographer David Hollander described the statements as "ludicrous."

Even if much of the oil was broken up into smaller droplets, it remains a threat to marine life. "The dissolved component of oil and the dispersed component of oil are still in the ecosystem, still causing damage," marine biologist Rick Steiner told the World Socialist Web Site. "This has all fit into the modality of minimizing the damage from this disaster, because every bit of the truth reflects poorly on the administration and on BP."

The National Commission on the BP oil spill has since taken the lead in the cover-up. President Obama formed the committee in May, appointing as co-chairs former Democratic Senator and Florida Governor Bob Graham and William Reilly, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under the Reagan administration during the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Reilly has spent the past 18 years on the corporate board of energy giant ConocoPhillips.

On November 8, the general counsel of the oil spill commission asserted that there is no evidence of criminal negligence in the lead-up to the disaster. If BP is found to have been criminally negligent, it could face fines of $4,300 for every barrel of oil spilled into the Gulf. If the disaster is determined to be the result of an accident, the fine will be about one third as much, a finding that would save the company billions.

"To date, we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety," commission counsel Fred Bartlit said. "We see no instance where a decision-making person or group of people sat there aware of safety risks, aware of costs and opted to give up safety for costs," adding that he agreed with "90 percent" of BP's internal findings on the disaster.

Part II - A colossal failure of the "free market"
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An overwhelming body of evidence from investigative hearings, media reports, and Deepwater Horizon rig workers demonstrates that the April 20 explosion and subsequent oil spill was a direct product of the negligence and cost-cutting of BP. In the months, days and hours leading up to the disaster, the energy giant ignored numerous warnings that a blowout was likely so that it could hurry its Macondo well into production.

This blatant disregard for workers' and environmental safety was possible only due to the near total absence of government regulation. BP and rig operator Transocean could trample over safety concerns in the knowledge that there would be no consequences from the federal agency with primary jurisdiction over deep-sea oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) of the US Department of the Interior.

The BP Gulf oil blowout was, in short, a consequence of capitalism - and, in particular, systematic deregulation and promotion of the "free market" as the sole arbiter of industrial practices.

Since the late 1970s, successive Democratic and Republican administrations have worked to remove virtually all legal limitations on the pursuit of corporate profit. Major corporations have been left to supervise their own safety, environmental, and ethics practices.

Deregulation has produced disaster after disaster in recent years. In April 2010, an explosion at West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine killed 29, the deadliest US mine disaster in decades. The Mine Health and Safety Administration had failed to enforce safety regulations. There have been repeated recalls of poisoned and spoiled food from plants that went uninspected by the Food and Drug Administration. This year has seen a deterioration of conditions in the air travel industry, ostensibly overseen by the Federal Aviation Authority, including overworked air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job and planes literally falling apart in air.

Perhaps most significantly, the financial implosion of late 2008 caused by Wall Street's swindling and double-dealing was green-lighted by several federal regulatory authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Rather than calling for new regulation of industry in response to these and other disasters, the Obama administration has done just the opposite. On January 18 of this year, Obama issued an executive order calling for a comprehensive review of all federal regulation. The aim was not to address the breakdowns and conflicts of interest that have created the catastrophes, but to establish a regulation "only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs" for "affected stakeholders in the private sector."

Deregulation and the BP blowout

By the time of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the MMS had long since established its primary purpose as a vendor of offshore oil drilling rights to large multinationals, the fifth most significant source of revenue for the federal government.

The revolving-door between industry and the MMS and the money involved combined to create a particularly corrupt agency. This came to a head in 2008 when an inspector general's report revealed that MMS agents regularly engaged in inappropriate relations with oil industry figures, such as accepting forms of payment that included drugs and sex.

The notion, promoted in liberal circles, that Obama could serve as some sort of antidote to "Big Oil" and its sway over government was false. While the oil industry as a whole has tended to favor Republicans, BP employees handed over $71,000 to Barack Obama in the 2008 elections - more than to any other candidate. BP has also given millions to leading Democrats to lobby on its behalf, among them John and Tony Podesta, former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle, and Leon Panetta, now Obama's CIA director.

In fact nothing changed. Obama not only continued, but deepened, Bush's policy of expanding deep sea oil drilling. Only three weeks before the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon, Obama issued his own "Five-Year Program" for offshore and deep-sea drilling. The proposal called for opening up areas for drilling stretching from Delaware to Florida on the Atlantic Coast as well as along Florida's Gulf Coast.

In April 2009, the Obama administration went to court to overturn an order blocking the continuation in the Gulf of the Bush administration's "Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, 2007-2012." In response to a suit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity against the Bush administration, the Washington DC federal court of appeals ruled that expanded deep-sea drilling violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) because it failed to adequately analyze the "relative environmental sensitivity" of impacted areas.

The Obama administration's secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, a close friend of the oil companies, successfully appealed the ruling. He argued that the Center for Biological Diversity had "'not identified any injury arising from the mere existence of these [drilling] leases, nor from further exploration and development activity on the Gulf of Mexico leases." Salazar further stated that exploration had already begun, and that "attempting to restore the status quo ante would therefore be extraordinarily difficult." The petition went on to note the substantial amounts of money that oil firms had already wagered on the exploitation of the deposits.

In July 2009, the court tentatively approved Salazar's petition, with the proviso that the MMS produce an environmental impact study for deep-sea oil drilling in the Gulf. The study was never completed.

The same month, the Obama administration granted BP a "categorical exemption" from producing a legally required environmental impact study and approved its exploration plan for "site 206," the future location of the Macondo well.

"Salazar approved BP's exploration plan without any environmental analysis on April 6, 2009, knowing that the lease could get struck down by an active lawsuit," said Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity. "When it was struck down 11 days later, he went back to court to get the BP exploration drilling (and other areas) removed from the vacature. His success in this legal maneuver allowed BP's exploration drilling to take place, resulting in the April 20, 2010 catastrophic disaster."

The Department of the Interior's work on behalf of BP to expedite production at the Macondo well continued until the day of the explosion. A Wall Street Journal investigative report revealed that in the week before the disaster, BP requested and received regulatory approval to make three changes in its drilling plans within the space of 24 hours. One of these was approved by the MMS within five minutes of submission. All three requests had to do with BP using a single pipe casing, presumably to save time, rather than the industry "gold standard" of double casing, according to experts. The changes very likely contributed to the disaster.

Buildup to the disaster

The Deepwater Horizon was an exploratory rig, not a producer of oil. The explosion took place during the well-capping process, in which the state-of-the-art semi-submersible oil platform was to leave the well so a production rig could come on-line to begin extracting oil.

The Deepwater Horizon cost BP about $1.5 million per day to lease from Transocean. Of more concern to BP was moving the rig on to explore new sites and to get the Macondo well into active production. A large well, the Macondo was, in theory, capable of producing tens of millions of dollars worth of crude per day.

There had been evidence before the explosion that the Macondo was a problem well, or "nightmare well" as rig workers called it. In three months of drilling the exploratory well, the Deepwater Horizon had four "well control events," with fluid and gas coming up the riser pipe connecting the rig to the well.

Evidence of such difficulties should have caused extra precaution on the part of BP and rig operator Transocean, or even the abandonment of the site. Instead, BP repeatedly cut corners and chose cheaper, but less safe, methods and equipment.
  • BP chose to use a well casing design that left few barriers against the potential eruption of gas. This was despite an internal review prepared in mid-April that warned that such a design would leave the seal assembly on the wellhead as the "only barrier" in the event of cement failure - and even though an internal BP study had predicted cement failure. "Cement simulations indicate it is unlikely to be a successful cement job due to formation breakdown," a report found days before the blast.

    The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that investigated the disaster concluded that "BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7-10 million more and taken longer."
  • BP used far fewer centralizers - devices that keep the pipe centered to prevent gas from escaping during the cementing process - than industry standards called for. If the tubing is placed incorrectly, experts say it is difficult or impossible to properly replace mud at the time of well capping, increasing the chances of blowout.

    "Industry specifications said they should use 21 centralizers, but they only used 6," the House committee noted. "They had another 15 ready to ship out there; they may have even flown them out to the rig. BP just sent them back."

    Halliburton, the cementing contractor aboard the rig, warned BP the well could have a "SEVERE gas flow problem'' if only 6 centralizers were used. In an email written April 16, four days before the explosion, a BP official involved in the decision-making wrote, "It will take 10 hours to install [the extra centralizers] . . . I do not like this.'' Another BP official acknowledged the risks related to using few centralizers, but concluded, "who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."
  • BP failed to do a final check, known as a cement bond log, on the well's cement casing, even though the crew that was supposed to do the procedure had been flown onto the rig to conduct the test. The testing crew left less than 12 hours before the blowout occurred. An independent expert consulted by the committee called this decision "horribly negligent."
The negligence continued right on up to the explosion. On the day of the disaster, BP disregarded several "kicks" of oil and natural gas coming up the riser pipe. Then, five hours before the blast, the rig crew found unusually low pressure inside the riser pipe, "suggesting there were leaks" in one part of the blowout preventer, according to the House subcommittee.

Two hours before the explosion, a test that involved reducing the well's pressure revealed three times more fluid than previously expected. In a follow-up test, the crew found abnormally high pressure on the "kill line," one of the pipes connecting the rig to the blowout preventer on the ocean bottom. Though this was an "indicator of a very large abnormality," BP concluded it was "satisfied" and that the test was "successful," according to the committee's findings.

In these final two hours, one survivor said the "well continued to flow and spurted," even though no drilling was going on. This abnormality coupled with the failed tests should have halted well-capping and initiated an emergency response. Instead, BP proceeded to replace heavy drilling mud inside the well - which was keeping the well pressure in check - with seawater.

Within an hour of the explosion, readings indicated that this seawater was moving up the riser. Eighteen minutes before the explosion, the rig's pump stopped working. At this point the crew tried to activate the blowout preventer (BOP), a five-story tall structure located on the ocean floor that is designed to seal the well in the event of a blowout.

The BOP, manufactured by Houston-based Cameron International, failed catastrophically. Powerful shear rams designed to slice through the pipes and cut off the flow of oil did not operate because hydraulic fluid did not reach the BOP.

BP and the Obama administration have claimed that the failure of the BOP was unforeseeable. In fact, numerous studies conducted by independent companies and the US government as well as BP and Transocean had revealed significant problems with blowout preventers in general and the equipment at the Deepwater Horizon rig in particular.

Analyzing oil trade information on BOPs, the New York Times observed that failures of BOPs were "common knowledge in the drilling industry." In one study, a Norwegian company, Det Norske Veritas, found that blowout preventers have a failure rate of 45 percent.

Another study, authorized by the MMS, found 117 cases of BOP failures in just 83 wells, and concluded that "all subsea BOP stacks used for deepwater drilling should be equipped with two blind-shear rams," in case one of them fails. The MMS refused to act on the information.

Specific concerns were repeatedly raised about the BOP on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

An internal Transocean document from 2001 found the BOP had 260 "failure modes" that could prevent proper functioning in an emergency. In addition to faulty hydraulics, the BOP also had a dead battery and shear rams that could not possibly cut through connecting joints in the piping - which comprise 10 percent of the pipes' surface area.

All of this was made possible by the MMS, whose inspections involved rig personnel attesting that all equipment worked and that safety procedures were being followed. In a May 2010 inspector general's report, it was revealed that over a period of two years MMS agents allowed oil industry employees to pencil in answers on regulatory checklists. The MMS then went over these with ink pens.

Yet even this toothless inspection regime was not always followed. The MMS, according to its own policy, was required to visit the Deepwater Horizon once per month. The MMS failed to do so, and in fact was incapable of providing a clear statement of how many times its agaents did visit the rig. This is unsurprising given that the agency had only 50 inspectors to monitor the many thousands of drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

The aftermath of the explosion

In spite of the catastrophe created by deregulation and the free market, the Obama administration responded to the disaster by insisting that only BP, the party primarily responsible for the blowout, could manage the response. In other words, the same disastrous policy that led to the disaster - the subordination of all considerations to profit - would determine the response.

One particularly revealing example of the total subservience of government regulators to the corporations involved BP's use of the chemical dispersant Corexit 9500 to break up the oil slick on the ocean's surface. Corexit's producer, Nalco, refused to reveal what was in the highly toxic product, claiming this was a "trade secret."

On May 19, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave BP 72 hours to stop spraying the chemical until more data comparisons could be run against other - and by the EPA's own data - less toxic and more effective dispersants.

BP simply flouted the injunction, and EPA head Lisa Jackson quickly shifted to defending the oil firm, accusing those angered by the White House back-down of "Monday-morning quarterbacking."

In another abortive effort to appear to be "tough" with BP and the oil industry, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on deep-sea oil drilling in May 2010. This limited moratorium, presented as a "ban" by the media, in fact applied to a relative handful of exploratory sites.

Nonetheless, the oil industry and its most loyal political spokesmen, including Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, responded with a high profile campaign declaring that the moratorium - and not the oil spill - would destroy the regional economy. In October 2010, Obama lifted it completely, and has since handed out ten permits for deep-sea drilling sites.

The moratorium and Obama's attempts to appear "angry and frustrated" were for public consumption. During the first two months of the disaster, the administration issued 10 new drilling permits to BP and about 200 new offshore drilling permits overall - including three that were given the same "categorical exception" from environmental impact statements granted to BP for the Macondo well.

Almost nothing has changed. The MMS has done some desk reshuffling and been given a new name, the Bureau of Ocean Energy, Management and Regulation (BOEMR.) One of its first acts was to discontinue announcements informing the public when it grants new deep-sea drilling permits. The number of inspectors working the Gulf oil industry, 50, remains unchanged.

Congressional Democrats never followed through on promises to raise the ludicrously low $75 million liability cap on corporations responsible for oil spills, and with Republican control of the House, the matter is no longer up for consideration.

Part III - The environmental disaster continues

The release of 200 million gallons of crude oil and millions of gallons of chemical dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico over the space of three months last year makes the BP Gulf oil blowout one of the worst environmental catastrophes in human history.

BP and the Obama administration have from the beginning obscured the dangers posed by the spill to the ecosystem of the Gulf and to human health. This position was reiterated last week by Janet Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who declared that the Gulf is "much better than people feared," and by Obama "claims czar" Kenneth Feinberg, who predicted the Gulf would be back to normal by 2012.

In fact, the disastrous longer-term consequences of the BP blowout are only now beginning to be registered, in spite of efforts to suppress environmental study by NOAA and the US Justice Department.

The myth of the vanishing oil

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The question of the blowout's environmental and human health impact has centered on the question of what has happened to the spilled oil. The Obama administration, NOAA, BP, and scientists allied with the oil industry have persistently argued that the lack of visible evidence of the oil indicates that the blowout was not so serious as feared, or else that the oil has already been broken down by microbes.

These arguments are disingenuous on a number of counts. There is in fact overwhelming visual evidence of the enormous size of the spill, which at its worst could clearly be seen from satellites in outer space, stretching over hundreds of square miles in the Gulf.

At least 60 miles of Gulf coastline are oiled to this day, and tar balls continue to wash ashore. Louisiana fishing boat captain Kerry O'Neill, who is now working as a subcontractor for the oil cleanup, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site from his boat on Friday. He said that there are still large amounts of oil along parts of the Louisiana coast, including the area he was working that day, and that in some places the shoreline has receded by a staggering 50 feet.

Many oyster beds have been lost. Fishing levels for the year are reportedly normal, but biologists warn that the population consequences for many species will not register in the first year. Biloxi, Mississippi shrimpers say that they are still hauling up nets full of oil with their shrimp.

Such experiences are common in the Gulf. "You talk to people who live around the Gulf of Mexico, who live on the coast, who have family members who work on oil rigs. It's not OK down there," said marine biologist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia in a recent interview with the Guardian. "The system is not fine. Things are not normal. There are a lot of very strange things going on - the turtles washing up on beaches, dolphins washing up on beaches, the crabs. It is just bizarre. How can that just be random consequence?"

Even to the extent that there has been a lessening of the visual evidence of the spill, this has much to do with the effort by BP and the Obama administration to cover it up, which has included blocking scientists and independent observers from the site of the blowout and destroying the corpses of animals found on beaches over the past year.

A number of scientists, Joye foremost among them, have carried out important work undermining claims that the oil has simply vanished. It was Joye's team that first discovered massive underwater plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and NOAA first disputed the evidence for this, but the plumes' existence has since been confirmed. It is likely that these plumes were created by the dumping of large quantities of chemical dispersants into the water column above the Macondo well to break the oil up before it reached the surface - and thus to hide it from public view.

More recently, Joye has documented that large quantities of oil are heaped up on the ocean floor in an area covering fully 2,900 square miles of the Gulf. In this extensive area, her submarine took 250 samples from the sea floor and photographs of oil-coated ocean floor life, "consistently [finding] dead fauna at all these sites," Joye said.

The Obama administration attempted to silence Joye and other scientists who have exposed BP's claims that the damage was "very, very modest," in the words of CEO Tony Hayward. Critical scientists "were bombarded with phone calls from furious officials, from NOAA and other government agencies," the Guardian reports.

"I felt like I was in third grade and my teacher came up to me with a ruler and smacked my hand and said: 'You've just spoken out of turn.' They were very upset," Joye said.

While the claim that the "oil is gone" is simply false, there is more to the question than whether it is physically present or has been broken down. Heavy crude can suffocate the flora and fauna of the sea and the coast, but is not in and of itself the biggest problem.

As oil breaks down, the chemicals contained within it are released into the water or air, including carcinogenic compounds such as benzene. Scientists believe that these toxic chemicals were accentuated, rather than diminished, by chemical dispersants - and were very likely made more easily absorbable into the food chain, where they increase in concentration as they work their way up from simple organisms to the most complex. It is this process, known as bioaccumulation, that may explain the ongoing die-off of large sea animals in the Gulf.

Unusual numbers of marine mammals, endangered sea turtles, sea birds and fish continue to die and wash ashore on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. So pronounced are these deaths among dolphins and porpoises that NOAA in February declared "an unusual mortality event."

The designation is still in place. But rather than allowing independent scientists to analyze the dolphins, NOAA has been disposing of them or taking sick animals out to sea. This makes it impossible to determine the cause of death or illness.

"We are not able to conduct necropsies on these animals any more either," Moby Solangi, director for the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, told Reuters. "This is all because of the BP criminal investigation. I know that everyone thinks they are doing their best but we must have answers and help every marine animal we can."

At least 406 dolphins have washed ashore dead in the past 14 months. In the past few months, upwards of one-third of the deaths have been among newborn or stillborn calves. NOAA has documented that in a handful of these dead animals oil from the Macondo well was found.

The role of the chemical dispersant Corexit in the deaths is not known. To this day, manufacturer Nalco has refused to reveal the contents of the toxic substance, claiming it is a "trade secret." Both varieties of Corexit used in the Gulf are banned from use on oil spills by the United Kingdom, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers Corexit to be of less effectiveness - and higher toxicity - than other dispersants readily available on the market.

The advantage of Nalco to BP appears to be twofold. In the first place, its leading personnel are tightly linked to both BP and ExxonMobil. But as Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity pointed out in a Friday interview with the WSWS, the UK's banning of the use of Corexit meant that BP had a large stock that needed to be used up.

Impact on human health

The human health impact of intense or long-term exposure to both oil and chemical dispersants is known to include a number of serious or even fatal conditions, including cancer, damage to the central nervous system, organ failure, skin lesions, asthma and other respiratory problems.

Last year many workers involved in the cleanup suffered severe health problems. But BP saw to it that these low-wage workers - who in most cases were not given training or even basic safety equipment - were shepherded into a BP-controlled health care system. Made to sign legal waivers, the workers were also barred from speaking to the media.

Nonetheless, a number of health problems have emerged among cleanup workers and Gulf residents that are consistent with the sorts of problems reported by those exposed to toxins from oil and dispersants in earlier spills.

A doctor in Raceland, Louisiana is treating some 60 patients with the same combination of strange conditions. Mike Robichaux, an otolaryngologist, blames exposure to oil and dispersant for symptoms that include severe memory loss, extremely high blood pressure spikes, fluctuating blood sugar levels, and respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.

Robichaux believes that even in Raceland far more people are sick than he is treating, but they do not come forward. Among those with the ailments, "Ninety percent of them are getting worse," he said.

One of his patients is Jamie Simon, 32, who last year worked on a cleanup barge as a cook. Simon told AFP that she was told the dispersants that were sprayed on her and other workers, which caused immediate skin irritation, were safe.

"I was exposed to those chemicals, which I questioned, and they told me it was just as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid and there was nothing for me to worry about," she said. She now experiences dizziness, vomiting, repeated ear infections, a swollen throat, bad vision in one eye, and loss of memory.

BP refuses to admit that any sickness took place as a result of exposure to oil and dispersants. "Illness and injury reports were tracked and documented during the response, and the medical data indicate they did not differ appreciably from what would be expected among a workforce of this size under normal circumstances," it wrote in a recent media statement, adding that any worker compensation would have to "be supported by acceptable medical evidence."

A public health study commissioned by the non-profit Louisiana Bucket Brigade of about 1,000 people in four Southeast Louisiana parishes - Jefferson, Terrebonne, St. Bernard and Plaquemines - found that nearly half, 46 percent, of respondents reported being exposed to oil or dispersant, and 72 percent of those exposed reported experiencing at least one symptom that they believe was associated with exposure. The reported symptoms are consistent with those reported elsewhere in the Gulf and among cleanup workers, including nausea, dizziness and skin irritation. Among those with no health insurance, only 23 percent sought medical help for their conditions - another indication that spill-related health problems are likely being underreported.

The population of the Gulf is also suffering psychological consequences from the spill, a study from a team of doctors led by Liesel Ritchie of the University of Colorado's Natural Hazards Center has found.

The study, which focused on the southern part of Mobile County, Alabama, found that one fifth of respondents are suffering from severe spill-related psychological stress, and another quarter are suffering moderate stress. The stress is related to worries over family health, economic loss, and ties to the ecosystem.

The study's authors had previously analyzed the mental impact of the 1991 Exxon Valdez oil spill in the town most impacted by it, Cordova.

"Given the social scientific evidence amassed over the years in Prince William Sound, Alaska, we can only conclude that social disruption and psychological stress will characterize residents of Gulf Coast communities for decades to come," the study's authors write.

To be continued