Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1403954 Comments:2390
From a March 19 Bloomberg report by Laurel Brubaker Calkins and Margaret Cronin Fisk:
BP Plc’s (BP/) Atlantis platform, its second-largest oil producer in the Gulf of Mexico, should be shut down until it’s proven to comply with U.S. safety and environmental laws, a whistle-blower’s lawyer told a judge.
BP misled U.S. offshore regulators to win operating permits for the platform, located about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of New Orleans, according to the whistle-blower. The facility produced an average of 60,000 barrels of oil daily last year and is capable of producing as much as 200,000 barrels a day, according to data on London-based BP’s website.
“Atlantis is presently not fit for service under normal engineering standards,” David Perry, a lawyer for Kenneth Abbott, a former BP contractor, said at a hearing today in federal court in Houston. “We ask the court to take action to oversee remediation to make it fit for service.”
It would seem that BP’s “renewed” commitment to safety and our federal government’s commitment to more rigorous oversight – on the heels of the worst oil spill in U.S. history – are being exposed as a fraud. We’re getting a look behind the scenes at another BP operation, and what is being revealed is frightening indeed. The jig appears to be up, again. More from the Bloomberg report:
Perry told [U.S. District Judge Lynn] Hughes there’s a specific pressure-relief valve “that is protecting a 16-inch pipeline” connecting Atlantis to shore and “that is undersized by a factor of 20 to 1.” A failure in that valve “could cause catastrophe at any time,” Perry said.
