Inspector General's Inquiry Faults Actions of Federal Drilling RegulatorsBYLINE: By IAN URBINA

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 1296 words

WASHINGTON -- Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil -- and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general's report to be released this week. The report said that investigators ''could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms.''

The report, which describes inappropriate behavior by the staff at the Minerals Management Service from 2005 to 2007, also found that inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry.

Although there is no evidence that those events played a role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the report offers further evidence of what many critics of the Minerals Management Service have described as a culture of lax oversight and cozy ties to industry.

The report includes other examples of troubling behavior discovered by investigators.

In mid-2008, a minerals agency employee conducted four inspections on drilling platforms when he was also negotiating a job with the drilling company, a cover letter to the report said.

And an inspector from the Lake Charles office admitted to investigators that he had used crystal methamphetamine, an illegal drug. Investigators said they believe the inspector may have been under the influence of the drug during an inspection.

The report was provided to The New York Times by a person familiar with the investigation who is not authorized to speak to reporters. Previous inspector general investigations of the minerals agency have focused on inappropriate behavior by the royalty-collection staff in the agency's Denver office.

The new report describes similar activities and improper relationships with industry representatives in the leasing and inspections staff in an agency gulf region office in Louisiana.

The report found that employees from the Lake Charles office had repeatedly accepted gifts, including hunting and fishing trips from the Island Operating Company, an oil and gas company working on oil platforms regulated by the Interior Department.

Taking such gifts ''appears to have been a generally accepted practice,'' said the report, written by department's acting inspector general, Mary L. Kendall.

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The investigation also found that at least two employees from the Lake Charles office of the minerals agency had admitted to using illegal drugs during their employment.

The report said the findings of the investigation had been presented to the United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Louisiana, which declined prosecution.

At least seven inspectors cited in the report as having been involved in inappropriate or illegal activities were still employed by the agency when the report was completed in March. Interior officials said the employees cited in the report would be placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of a personnel review.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that he found the report ''deeply disturbing,'' and that the actions it found were why, ''during the first 10 days of becoming secretary of the interior, I directed a strong ethics reform agenda to clean house of these ethical lapses at M.M.S.''

Mr. Salazar added that he had asked the inspector general to expand her inquiry to determine if any of the inappropriate behavior had persisted after he put the new ethics rules in place in 2009.

The inquiry began after investigators at the Office of the Inspector General received an anonymous letter, dated Oct. 28, 2008, addressed to the United States Attorney's Office in New Orleans, alleging that a number of unnamed minerals agency employees had accepted gifts from oil and gas production company representatives, the report said.

On April 12, Elizabeth Birnbaum, director of the minerals agency, received the report for review. The findings were to be released this summer.

But after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Office of Inspector General sought to speed up the report's release because it was too relevant to wait, a minerals agency official said.

This month, the Obama administration reorganized the agency in an effort to address conflicts of interest in its structure.

Shown the report, Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, said the agency was clearly dysfunctional. ''These newly revealed ethical lapses among agency personnel puts M.M.S. in the penalty box indefinitely,'' Mr. Rahall said.

The report said the inspector general had developed confidential sources ''who provided additional information pertaining to M.M.S. employees at the Lake Charles District Office, including acceptance of a trip to the 2005 Peach Bowl game that was paid for by an oil and gas company; illicit drug use; misuse of government computers; and inspection report falsification.''

One of the confidential sources described regulators allowing company officials to fill out inspection forms in pencil after which inspectors would ''write on top of the pencil in ink and turn in the completed form.''

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Industry watchdogs say that much of the inappropriate behavior found by the Office of Inspector General had stopped with the new administration. But some repercussions continue.

Some industry experts have speculated that the Deepwater spill and the report's findings could explain the sudden resignation this month of Chris C. Oynes, who led the Gulf of Mexico region for the Minerals Management Service for about 12 years until he was promoted to a senior position in Washington in 2007.

Mr. Oynes is not mentioned in the inspector general's report, and Interior Department officials have declined to answer questions about his resignation.

In a cover letter to Mr. Salazar, Ms. Kendall, the acting inspector general, said she wanted to emphasize that all the conduct highlighted predated Mr. Salazar's tenure and his January 2009 revamping of the ethics code.

She added, ''Of greatest concern to me is the environment in which the inspectors operate -- particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government.''

Some in Congress had been trying to get rid of Mr. Oynes for a while. In 2007, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, voiced outrage that Mr. Oynes was, at the time, being promoted to gulf regional director at the minerals agency.

''It is completely ridiculous that M.M.S. would take the person most likely responsible for the royalty rip-off and put him in charge of the whole show,'' she said, describing Mr. Oynes as the person who signed 700 of the 1,100 1998-99 oil and gas leases with missing price thresholds that limit royalty relief, to the agency's associate director of the Offshore Minerals Management Program.

Agency lagged in inspecting BP rig; Nearly a third of the required checks over the last 28 months weren't completed.BYLINE: Bettina Boxall, Jim Tankersley

SECTION: LATEXTRA; National Desk; Part AA; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1167 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES AND WASHINGTON

Federal inspectors failed to conduct nearly a third of required inspections on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the 28 months before it exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, according to government records.

The inspections that were carried out by the Minerals Management Service found no sign of trouble on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to documents posted Friday on the Interior Department's website.

MMS reports, including one dated three weeks before the deadly April 20 explosion, indicate that the rig's blowout preventer was functioning properly, and

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they make no mention of any persistent problems with surges of natural gas, or "kicks," flowing up through the well and disrupting drilling.

Although the cause of the disaster remains under investigation, experts have blamed the explosion on a natural gas surge. A prominent outside investigator, UC Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea, said last month that rig workers told him the Deepwater Horizon had battled repeated kicks in the weeks before its sinking. MMS inspectors noted the presence of a kick in October 2008, but none later.

"It appears that the Deepwater Horizon experienced dangerous gas 'kicks' before the April 20 disaster," said David Pettit, a senior attorney and drilling expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who reviewed the inspection reports Friday. "It is hard to understand why MMS did not learn about this potentially deadly problem" before the explosion.

Despite federal regulations mandating that inspections be done monthly, the rig operation was only inspected three times over the first four months of this year; nine times in 2009 and six times in 2008. Officials at the Interior Department, which houses MMS, say rigs can miss inspections because they're on the move or because of weather conditions.

Interior officials declined to answer questions about the documents and released a statement saying that several investigations underway "have been charged with looking at all the questions related to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and BP oil spill. These questions will be best addressed in the context of those investigations."

The documents indicate that the last time the Horizon was flagged for a safety violation was in 2007, when an inspector found that a pressure washer was not properly grounded on the rig floor. Correspondence posted along with the reports show that BP unsuccessfully fought that citation.

A summary of the safety reports, also posted online, states that the Horizon was flagged three times for safety in 2002 and once in 2003 for an unspecified "pollution event."

Minerals Management has for years been criticized for lax oversight of the oil and gas industry. Several inspector general reports have cited ethical lapses on the part of agency employees, including taking gifts and negotiating jobs with the companies they regulated.

President Obama, who is planning his fourth visit to the gulf, on Friday spread some of the blame.

"I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said, 'We need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill,' there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said, 'This is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending,' " Obama said in an interview with Politico.

In the wake of Thursday's release of new estimates of the leak's size, the government's spill commander said Friday that BP won't be able capture most of the flow for several more weeks.

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A containment cap is now funneling a little more than 15,000 barrels a day of oil from the damaged well on the gulf floor to the processing ship Enterprise, less than half the amount that may be spurting from the wellhead, according to the new figures.

More ships and equipment are on their way to the spill site off the Louisiana coast. But Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said it won't be until late this month or early July that BP will have the ability to collect all the crude gushing from the deep-sea well.

The updated flow figures doubled earlier estimates, underscoring the spill's potential for harming the gulf environment and its 3,000-mile coastline.

"We may be talking about more beaches and more wetlands [affected] and more of an oil legacy in our ocean," said Jacqueline Savitz, senior campaign director for Oceana, an international conservation organization. "Toxicity depends on the dose. The more there is equates to a greater amount of exposure to marine life."

George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said he is particularly concerned about the amount of carbon -- a major component of oil -- the spill is dumping into gulf waters. The more carbon, the more oil-consuming microbes in the sea will deplete oxygen. Extremely low oxygen levels can create dead zones devoid of marine life.

Recent samples from an offshore area his lab has monitored for five years are showing the lowest levels of oxygen he has seen there, Crozier said. While he can't definitively link the oxygen plunge to the massive slick drifting in the gulf, Crozier said there was "presumptive evidence" that it was due to the BP spill.

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that light clouds of dispersed oil from the mile-deep leak are floating beneath the surface. University research ships have detected below-normal oxygen levels in and near the plumes.

Since the earliest leak estimates of 1,000 and then 5,000 barrels were made soon after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, some scientists have said the flow was likely much higher. In late May, a government-appointed scientific team asked to analyze video feeds of the leak pegged the flow at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels. After more study, the team this week raised those figures to a range of 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, or 840,000 to 1.7 million gallons, a day.

The higher figure far exceeds the combined capacity of the Enterprise and a platform vessel that is scheduled to join the ship next week. Together the two should be able to process and burn off about 28,000 barrels daily, Allen said.

In the meantime, BP is planning over the next few weeks to replace the containment cap that is capturing some of the well flow with a tighter device that may be able to collect virtually all of the oil gusher. The new apparatus, connected to a flexible pipe system designed to withstand storms, would funnel the oil to ships now headed for the spill.

They include the Loch Rannoch, a large shuttle tanker on its way from the North Sea, where it's used to transport oil from offshore rigs to northern Scotland.

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Friday, a supply vessel in the BP operation damaged a natural gas pipe as it was mooring at a gas platform near Cocodrie, La. The accident caused a gas leak, which was quickly shut off by a platform worker, according to the Coast Guard.

--The New York Times

May 30, 2010 Sunday Late Edition - Final

Documents Show Earlier Fears About Safety of Offshore WellBYLINE: By IAN URBINA; Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Kenner, La., and Andy Lehren from New York.

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1437 words

WASHINGTON -- Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of ''well control.'' And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

''This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,'' Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. ''However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.''

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company's safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options.

Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks.

''Nobody believed there was going to be a safety issue,'' Mr. Hafle told a six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials.

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''All the risks had been addressed, all the concerns had been addressed, and we had a model that suggested if executed properly we would have a successful job,'' he said.

Mr. Hafle, asked for comment by a reporter after his testimony Friday about the internal report, declined to answer questions.

BP's concerns about the casing did not go away after Mr. Hafle's 2009 report.

In April of this year, BP engineers concluded that the casing was ''unlikely to be a successful cement job,'' according to a document, referring to how the casing would be sealed to prevent gases from escaping up the well.

The document also says that the plan for casing the well is ''unable to fulfill M.M.S. regulations,'' referring to the Minerals Management Service.

A second version of the same document says ''It is possible to obtain a successful cement job'' and ''It is possible to fulfill M.M.S. regulations.''

Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman, said the second document was produced after further testing had been done.

On Tuesday Congress released a memorandum with preliminary findings from BP's internal investigation, which indicated that there were warning signs immediately before the explosion on April 20, including equipment readings suggesting that gas was bubbling into the well, a potential sign of an impending blowout.

A parade of witnesses at hearings last week told about bad decisions and cut corners in the days and hours before the explosion of the rig, but BP's internal documents provide a clearer picture of when company and federal officials saw problems emerging.

In addition to focusing on the casing, investigators are also focusing on the blowout preventer, a fail-safe device that was supposed to slice through a drill pipe in a last-ditch effort to close off the well when the disaster struck. The blowout preventer did not work, which is one of the reasons oil has continued to spill into the gulf, though the reason it failed remains unclear.

Federal drilling records and well reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and BP's internal documents, including more than 50,000 pages of company e-mail messages, inspection reports, engineering studies and other company records obtained by The Times from Congressional investigators, shed new light on the extent and timing of problems with the blowout preventer and the casing long before the explosion.

Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, declined to answer questions about the casings, the blowout preventer and regulators' oversight of the rig because those matters are part of a continuing investigation.

The documents show that in March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as ''kicks'' and a pipe falling into the well, BP officials informed federal regulators that they were struggling with a loss of ''well control.''

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On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.

''The most important thing at a time like this is to stop everything and get the operation under control,'' said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, offering his assessment about the documents.

He added that he was surprised that regulators and company officials did not commence a review of whether drilling should continue after the well was brought under control.

After informing regulators of their struggles, company officials asked for permission to delay their federally mandated test of the blowout preventer, which is supposed to occur every two weeks, until the problems were resolved, BP documents say.

At first, the minerals agency declined.

''Sorry, we cannot grant a departure on the B.O.P. test further than when you get the well under control,'' wrote Frank Patton, a minerals agency official. But BP officials pressed harder, citing ''major concerns'' about doing the test the next day. And by 10:58 p.m., David Trocquet, another M.M.S. official, acquiesced.

''After further consideration,'' Mr. Trocquet wrote, ''an extension is approved to delay the B.O.P. test until the lower cement plug is set.''

When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure -- 6,500 pounds per square inch -- than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay. It tested at this lower pressure until the explosion.

A review of Minerals Management Service's data of all B.O.P. tests done in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico for five years shows B.O.P. tests rarely dropped so sharply, and, in general, either continued at the same threshold or were done at increasing levels.

The manufacturer of the blowout preventer, Cameron, declined to say what the appropriate testing pressure was for the device.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Gowers of BP wrote that until their investigation was complete, it was premature to answer questions about the casings or the blowout preventer.

Even though the documents asking regulators about testing the blowout preventer are from BP, Mr. Gowers said that any questions regarding the device should be directed to Transocean, which owns the rig and, he said, was responsible for maintenance and testing of the device. Transocean officials declined to comment.

Bob Sherrill, an expert on blowout preventers and the owner of Blackwater Subsea, an engineering consulting firm, said the conditions on the rig in February and March and the language used by the operator referring to a loss of well control ''sounds like they were facing a blowout scenario.''

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Mr. Sherrill said federal regulators made the right call in delaying the blowout test, because doing a test before the well is stable risks gas kicks. But once the well was stable, he added, it would have made sense for regulators to investigate the problems further.

In April, the month the rig exploded, workers encountered obstructions in the well. Most of the problems were conveyed to federal regulators, according to federal records. Many of the incidents required that BP get a permit for a new tactic for dealing with the problem.

One of the final indications of such problems was an April 15 request for a permit to revise its plan to deal with a blockage, according to federal documents obtained from Congress by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.

In the documents, company officials apologized to federal regulators for not having mentioned the type of casing they were using earlier, adding that they had ''inadvertently'' failed to include it. In the permit request, they did not disclose BP's own internal concerns about the design of the casing.

Less than 10 minutes after the request was submitted, federal regulators approved the permit.

The International Herald Tribune

May 22, 2010 Saturday

Conflict of interest feared in spill tests; BP is major client of firm hired to gauge damage to water quality and wildlifeBYLINE: BY CAMPBELL ROBERTSON AND ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 5

LENGTH: 1071 words

DATELINE: GRAND ISLE, LOUISIANA

ABSTRACT

Officials in Louisiana are furious that the oil spill has begun showing up on shore as tar balls, sheens and gooey slicks.FULL TEXT

Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.

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Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Florida, rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Texas. He opted instead to get a waiver so he could send his county's samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.

Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.

"Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled," Mr. Kirschenfeld said. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people."

The deadly explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig last month has drawn attention to the ties between regulators and the oil and gas industry. Last week, President Obama said he intended to end their "cozy relationship," partly by separating the safety function of regulators from their role in permitting drilling and collecting royalties. "That way, there's no conflict of interest, real or perceived," he said.

Critics say a "revolving door" between industry and government is another area of concern. As one example, they point to the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, Sylvia V. Baca, who helps oversee the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling

She came to that post after eight years at BP, in a variety of senior positions, and also served in the Interior Department in the Clinton administration.

Under Interior Department conflict-of-interest rules, she is prohibited from playing any role in decisions involving BP, including the response to the crisis in the gulf. But her position gives her some responsibility for overseeing oil and gas, mining and renewable energy operations on public and Indian lands.

Officials in part of what will remain of the Minerals Management Service will continue to report to her, even after a major reorganization spurred by the events in the gulf.

"When you see more examples of this revolving door between industry and these regulatory agencies, the problem is that it raises questions as to whose interests are being served," said Mandy Smithberger, an investigator with the nonprofit watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

Interior officials declined to make Ms. Baca available for comment. A spokeswoman said Ms. Baca fully disclosed her BP ties, recused herself from all matters involving the company and was not currently involved in any offshore drilling policy decisions.

Dismissing concerns about conflicts of interest at his lab, James M. Brooks, the president and chief executive of TDI-Brooks International, said his company was chosen because of its prior work for the federal government.

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"It is a nonbiased process," he said. "We give them the results, and they can have their lawyers argue over what the results mean." He added that federal officials and BP were working together and sharing the test results.

Federal officials say that they remain in control and that the concerns about any potential conflicts are overblown.

Douglas Zimmer, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency simply did not have the staff to handle all the animals affected by the oil spill. BP has more resources to hire workers quickly, he said, and letting local organizations handle the birds would have been impractical and costly.

"I also just don't believe that BP or their contractor would have any incentive to skew the data," he said. "Even if they did, there are too many federal, state and local eyes keeping watch on them."

But Stuart Smith, a lawyer representing gulf fishermen, remained skeptical, saying that federal and state authorities had not fulfilled their watchdog role.

Last month, for example, various state and federal Web sites included links that directed out-of-work fishermen to a BP Web site, which offered contracts that limited their right to file future claims against the company. This month, a federal judge in New Orleans, Helen G. Berrigan, struck down that binding language in the contracts.

Collaboration between industry and regulators extends to how information about the spill is disseminated by a public affairs operation called the Joint Information Center.

The center, in a Shell-owned training and conference center in Robert, Louisiana, includes roughly 65 employees, 10 of whom work for BP.

"They have input into it; however, it is a unified effort," said Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Carleton. He said such coordination in oil spill responses was mandated under federal law.

In another aspect of the spill that has spurred disputes, The Associate Press reported that BP had conceded Thursday what some scientists have been saying for weeks: More oil is flowing from the leak than BP and the Coast Guard had previously estimated.

The BP executive in charge of fighting the spill, Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles, told the CBS ''Early Show'' on Friday that in the worst case scenario, the gusher could continue until early August, when a new well being drilled to cap the flow permanently could be finished, The AP reported.

But Suttles said he believes the rich Gulf environment will recover, in part because it is a large body of water and has withstood other oil spills.

Obama struggling to show he's in controlBYLINE: Karen Tumulty

SECTION: A-SECTION; Pg. A01

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LENGTH: 1030 words

A defensive President Obama sought Thursday to quell doubts about his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, insisting that his administration has been "in charge" from the moment it began and bristling that critics who accuse it of being sluggish to react "don't know the facts."

But at times during a 63-minute news conference in the East Room of the White House, the president seemed to undercut his own argument. He enumerated a litany of fumbles and lapses: that the government lacks resources and "superior technology" to respond to the disaster; that he personally had assumed oil companies "had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios"; that his administration "fell short" with its acceptance of BP's inaccurate estimate of the size of the gusher; that reforms of the corruption-plagued government agency that oversees offshore drilling "weren't happening fast enough."At one point, Obama said he did not know whether Elizabeth Birnbaum -- the director of the Minerals Management Service he blamed for allowing the oil industry to overrule environmental and safety concerns -- had resigned or been fired hours before.

The news conference marked a sharp departure in tone from the first days after an oil rig explosion caused the spill, when the White House seemed determined to fix the blame and keep the public outrage directed at the oil company involved. "In case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility," Obama said Thursday. "It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down."

This is the familiar Obama: resolute and in charge. But six weeks after the spill began, those words seemed to highlight the difficulty he has had in convincing the country that he is on top of the situation. As oil continues to foul the gulf, the conflicting signals coming from the president and his team have imperiled his reputation for competence and coolness in the face of crisis.

Only three weeks before the explosion, had proposed opening up 167 million acres to offshore oil exploration, as a means of finding more oil and more votes on Capitol Hill for comprehensive energy and climate legislation. In defending that plan, he had cited advances in drilling technology that he said made it significantly safer than it had been in the past.

White House aides say that as oil continued to spew from the floor of the gulf, the president -- who described himself as "angry and frustrated" -- privately expressed dismay about the faulty assurances he received from the oil industry that exploration was safe. "For so long, we didn't have accidents in the gulf, and we took the oil and gas industry maybe a little too much at their word," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Obama

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announced new steps that he said would help "ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again." Deep and far-reaching reform will come, he promised, after a commission he is appointing finishes a six-month investigation of the causes of the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig and measures that might have prevented it.

In the early weeks after the rig sank, polls showed the public saw a clear villain -- BP -- and approved of the administration's approach to the situation, which emphasized ensuring that the oil company would bear the cost of stopping the spill, cleaning it up and repairing the damage. Some in the White House were so confident of their ability to stay ahead of the crisis that they welcomed comparisons with George W. Bush's bungling of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But the latest surveys show that public confidence in Washington's handling of the spill has dropped sharply. And there has also been a fraying of what had begun as a relatively smooth working relationship among the government, BP, and state and local officials in the region. "The president has not been as visible as he should have been on this," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told Politico, "and he's going to pay a political price for it, unfortunately."

Gulf Coast residents are furious; images of the oil's sheen on the water have given way to ones of black beaches and dead animals.news conference, he had to share the screen with a live shot of that painfully familiar underwater pipe spitting out brown gunk.

Even as the president laid greater claim to the handling of the disaster, he distanced himself from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's frequent boast that the administration has a "boot on the neck" of BP."I think Ken Salazar would probably be the first one to admit that he has been frustrated, angry and occasionally emotional about this issue, like a lot of people have," Obama said. He added: "I would say that we don't need to use language like that."

Indeed, Obama seemed most sensitive to suggestions -- made with increasing frequency by such critics as Democratic strategist James Carville -- that the oil company is calling the shots.

BP is the "responsible party," with access to resources, technology and expertise that the government lacks, said. But all its actions, he insisted, are done "under our supervision, and any major decision that they make has to be done under the approval of Thad Allen, the national incident coordinator."

Although he acknowledged that the government's performance before and since the spill began has been far from perfect, Obama insisted that it should not be faulted for lack of effort. "This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred," he said, and later added, "We are relying on every resource and every idea, every expert and every bit of technology, to work to stop it."

spoke of the toll the crisis has taken on him, an unusual turn for a president who is sometimes faulted for being too intellectual and aloof.

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"This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about," he said. He cannot escape questions about the spill, even at home. As he was shaving Thursday morning, he said, 11-year-old daughter, Malia, peeked in and asked, "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

Oil projects boomed while staffing stalled; U.S. agency scrutinized over shortage and quality of inspection manpowerBYLINE: Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson

SECTION: A-SECTION; Pg. A01

LENGTH: 1245 words

Over the past quarter-century, oil companies have pushed the frontiers of offshore drilling, sharply stepping up the number of deep-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, although the number of exploration rigs soared and the number of deep-water oil-producing projects grew more than tenfold from 1988 to 2008, the number of federal inspectors working for the Minerals Management Service has increased only 13 percent since 1985.

That brings the number of inspectors for the federal waters of the entire Gulf of Mexico to 62 -- only seven more than in 1985. To visit deep-water rigs, they often make two-hour helicopter rides from shore. The same inspectors also examine dozens of rigs and thousands of production platforms in shallow water.

The shortage -- and quality -- of manpower at the MMS is coming under scrutiny as Congress looks at the causes of the oil spill that started in the gulf with the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

One key question is whether the agency could carry out the required minimum once-a-month inspections or do a thorough job in an increasingly complex area. Investigators are also looking at whether applications for changes in the well design received only cursory reviews, including one that was approved seven minutes after being filed.

"It would seem that we're spreading these inspectors pretty thin, given the increasing complexity of these rigs and the distances they have to travel," said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), whose panel is examining MMS oversight of offshore drilling. "What's happened here at Deepwater Horizon is a perfect example of how there is very little room for error when it comes to the safety of these oil rigs."

On Tuesday the Obama administration ordered companies working in shallower waters to hire outside inspection firms to do what it thinks its own agency has failed to do. Drillers already use outside firms to check rigs for seaworthiness, which is also the subject of Coast Guard inspections. But it is unclear whether those outside firms will be independent while being paid by the companies they inspect.

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"The use of third parties seems to underscore a lack of confidence in the MMS," said a senior executive at a leading drilling rig company who asked for anonymity to protect his relationship with federal authorities. "And who is the third party? What are the standards of neutrality and independence, and are we subcontracting independent regulatory review?"

Even the agency, which has been criticized for being too cozy with the oil industry, has said that it was overwhelmed. By this year, the number of drilling rigs in deep water had climbed to more than 30 and the number of deep-water production platforms to 141.

Two-and-a-half months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the MMS told Congress that both the agency and the oil and gas industry faced "significant engineering, logistical and financial challenges" given the rapid expansion of deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

"As activities continue to move into deeper waters, MMS will need to ensure that exploration and development is conducted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner while regulating cutting edge technology in distant areas under increasingly difficult conditions," the agency wrote in its Budget Justifications and Performance Information Fiscal Year 2011, which it submitted to Congress on Feb. 1.

The Obama administration asked for six additional inspectors as part of its 2011 budget request but has not received the $900,000 it would take to pay for such an expansion.

The agency has a sign on its Web site: Help wanted. The qualifications: a year or more of work experience in the field, willingness to work for less than half of what private industry would pay, and the ability to bend and stoop and climb tall ladders.

Some lawmakers say that isn't enough training for the people who stand between the powerful oil industry and ecological catastrophes such as the one now afflicting the Gulf of Mexico.

Those applying for MMS inspection jobs, or petroleum engineering technicians, are only required to have a high school degree and some experience in the oil and gas industry. Federal mine inspectors undergo standardized training at the government's Mine Health and Safety Academy, but MMS employees have no such preparation. As a 1990 National Academy of Sciences report said, "Generally speaking, specific training in inspection procedures is limited to on-the-job training gained while accompanying a trained technician."

"We have to have a government-wide system and plan in place and not rely on the industry and allow them to just say, 'We've got it taken care of if something happens,' " said Rahall, who sent a letter Tuesday to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asking him for details on MMS inspectors' training, educational qualifications and ties to the oil and gas industry. Americans, Rahall said, "want to see professional, highly trained inspectors that are not just pushing paper."

Some oil industry executives praise MMS inspectors.

"They are required to visit working rigs every 30 days, and they almost always visit our rigs more frequently than that," said Randall D. Stilley, chief executive of Seahawk Drilling, the second-largest operator of Gulf of Mexico rigs that stand

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on legs in relatively shallow water. "I can't attest to their IQs or educational background, but they tend to be knowledgeable about rigs and rig equipment."

But the MMS can't compete with salaries in private industry. The agency's job ad says that inspectors can make $38,790 to $84,139 a year. Seahawk and Hercules, another shallow-water drilling rig operator, typically pay more than $100,000 a year.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has only intensified questions about MMS inspectors' rigor and judgment.

A review of internal BP documents submitted to the MMS before the explosion suggest that agency officials gave the company's plans only a cursory review as it moved to close the Macondo well. On April 15, five days before the blowout, BP submitted an "Application for Revised Bypass" outlining a well design that omitted a metal pipe 9.875 inches in diameter that had been in the plans up until that point; MMS officials approved the change seven minutes later. Later that day, according to documents obtained by congressional investigators, BP told the agency that it had "inadvertently removed the 9 7/8 inch" liner from the well design information. Have reincorporated it."

There were other discrepancies. On April 16, BP submitted its "Temporary Abandonment Procedure" plan, in which it indicated that the well liner would go down to 17,157 feet, rather than the 17,500 feet it had indicated in permit applications earlier in the week. Although this change showed that BP had not revealed the gap between its lining and cement job -- a gap that could potentially give oil and gas an opening to rush up through the pipe -- the company did not acknowledge the error, nor did the MMS.

BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said in an e-mail that there were "no significance to the changes" in the permit applications. "They resulted from a simple clerical error, and there was no material change in the casing plans."

Interior Department spokesman Kendra Barkoff said she could not comment on BP's permit applications to the MMS because of "the ongoing investigation" of the spill.

Staff writer Mary Pat Flaherty contributed to this report.The Washington Post

May 28, 2010 Friday Met 2 Edition

Oil-leak gush hits record levels; U.S. OFFICIAL RESIGNS Obama Enhanced Coverage Linking

pulls drilling permits for 33 deepwater rigs in gulfBYLINE: Joel Achenbach and David A. Fahrenthold

SECTION: A-SECTION; Pg. A01

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LENGTH: 1376 words

With mud continuing to battle oil in an attempted "top kill" of the leaking well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the historic scale of the disaster became clearer Thursday when scientists said the mile-deep well has been spewing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day, far more than previously estimated.

The new figure supports what many observers have assumed from the images of oil slicking the gulf surface, slathering beaches and spurting from a pipe on the sea floor: This is the worst oil spill in U.S. history.President Obama, Enhanced Coverage Linking

feeling pressure to act in a crisis now in its sixth week, yanked the exploratory drilling permits for 33 deepwater rigs in the gulf and suspended planned exploration in two areas off the coast of Alaska. He announced the moves at a news conference carried on cable TV channels that simultaneously showed the live video feed of effluent billowing from the cracked riser pipe at the bottom of the gulf. Obama Enhanced Coverage Linking

pushed back on suggestions that, as he put it, "BP is off running around doing whatever it wants and nobody is minding the store." He said that his administration is doing all it can, but that, when it comes to plugging the leak, "the federal government does not possess superior technology to BP."

The eventful day included the first prominent administrative casualty of the crisis. Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of Minerals Management Service, which issues permits for offshore drilling, resigned.

The political developments continue to be overshadowed by a technological struggle that has no precedent. Whether the top kill is going to work remains highly uncertain.

The maneuver is a brute-force, yet delicately calibrated, injection of heavy drilling mud into the blowout preventer atop the wellhead. As the mud is pumped from ships at the surface, the hydrocarbons should be forced back down the well toward their source in a porous reservoir called the Macondo field, about 2 1/2 miles below the floor of the gulf.

It has not been smooth sailing. After pumping mud for about nine hours on Wednesday, BP put the pumping on hold throughout the day Thursday while it pondered the initial results. The company resumed Thursday evening.

"Nothing has gone wrong or unanticipated," Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told reporters. He said engineers hope to improve on their initial performance by preceding a mud injection with a blast of rubber balls and other rough-textured materials -- a "junk shot" -- to clog the blowout preventer and force more mud down into the hole, rather than shooting it out of the leaks in the riser.

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"We did believe we did pump some mud down the well bore. We obviously pumped a lot of mud out the riser," Suttles said.

BP Managing Director Bob Dudley likened the top kill to an "arm-wrestling match with two fairly equal-rated forces. Or taking two fire hoses and driving them together, trying to overcome the other."

The well won't be considered killed until the mud injection has been followed by cement to permanently plug it -- at which point the news would be carried by "the roar coming out of this building," the deadpan Suttles said.

Even if the well is plugged this weekend, the spill already is of epic proportions. The Flow Rate Technical Group, a task force made up of scientists from government and academia, has produced preliminary estimates that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day have leaked into the gulf, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt said Thursday.

The scale of the spill has been a matter of furious debate and speculation. The Coast Guard initially pegged the spill at 1,000 barrels a day. Then the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration used satellite images to make an estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

Government officials and BP executives repeated that figure for weeks, even as independent scientists came up with figures as high as 95,000 barrels a day.

There are 42 gallons in a barrel. Assuming that the leak began when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank to the gulf bottom on April 22, and subtracting the amount of oil that BP said it has siphoned from the leaking pipe and pumped onto a barge, the new estimate would suggest that 17 million to 27 million gallons of oil have polluted the gulf.

The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, by comparison, put 11 million gallons of oil along more than 1,000 miles of Alaska's coastline.

Interior Department spokesman Frank Quimby said scientists used multiple techniques. One took video of the plume of oil escaping from the pipe and fed it through computer models. The result was 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.

Another technique relied on a NASA plane that could differentiate oil from water on the gulf surface. That produced an estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. A third method relied on measurements from the insertion tube that siphoned oil from the end of the riser. That produced an estimate of 12,000 barrels a day.

Also Thursday, scientists from the University of South Florida reported the discovery in the gulf of a "plume" of dissolved oil that was six miles wide and up to 20 miles long. The plume extended from the surface down to a depth of 3,200 feet.

The oil is entirely dissolved in the water, which appears clear, USF professor David Hollander said. That seemed to confirm the fears of some scientists that, because of the depth of the leak and the heavy use of chemical dispersants, this spill was behaving differently than others. Instead of floating on top of the water, it may be moving beneath it.

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That could hamper containment efforts and would also be a problem for ecosystems deep under the gulf. There, scientists say, the oil could be absorbed by tiny animals and enter a food chain that builds to sportfish such as red snapper. It might also glom on to deep coral formations.

Oil has now hit 101 miles of Louisiana coastline, state officials said, mainly lapping up on state's outer ring of uninhabited barrier islands: Whiskey Island, Raccoon Island, Isle Grand Terre. The beaches and marinas of Grand Isle -- a rare beach in a region of marshy coast, and a weekend destination for Cajuns and deepwater fishermen -- are deserted, except for those working on the spill.

"We should have about 4,500, 5,000 people on the beach," said Mayor Dave Camardelle at a news conference with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) Thursday. "And it's a ghost town."

Five of seven workers helping clean up oil in the Gulf of Mexico were released from the hospital Thursday after complaining of nausea, dizziness, and headaches the day before, prompting the Coast Guard to order all 125 boats working in the Breton Sound area to return to port. The incident has highlighted concerns about possible health risks. So far, air monitoring has not found alarmingly high levels of toxic chemicals, officials said.

On Thursday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave approval to a plan that sounded far-fetched in the spill's early days: build more Louisiana.

The corps approved part of a state plan to build a line of six-foot-high barrier islands off the Louisiana coast, designed to block oil on the surface and under the water.

In all, Jindal said, the Corps approved building 40 miles of the 100-mile barrier that Louisiana had proposed. The first move, he said, would be to build one smaller section as a prototype. He said BP should be made to pay for the plan, which has been estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars.

The oil industry did not new moves on offshore drilling. Bill Tanner, a spokesman for Shell Oil, said, "We respect and understand today's decision in the context of the tragic spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but we remain confident in our drilling expertise, which is built upon a foundation of redundant safety systems and company global standards."

In Lafourche ("la-FOOSH") Parish, a mosaic of bayous, lakes and marshland, oil has already penetrated some marshes. Charlotte Randolph, the parish president, said she fears for the future of fishing in the area.

"If this destroys our water, then we can't be who we were before," Randolph said. "The other industry here is oil and gas. We had a happy marriage before. And now the husband has really done something awful."

Staff writers Rob Stein, Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

The New York Times

June 2, 2010 Wednesday Late Edition - Final

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Deep Underwater, Threatened ReefsBYLINE: By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 1244 words

Last September, marine scientists studying deep-sea biology in the northern Gulf of Mexico lowered a submersible robot off the side of a government research vessel and piloted it 1,300 feet to the ocean floor.

There, in complete darkness and near-freezing temperatures, the robot's lights revealed a thriving colony of corals, anemones, fish, crustaceans and other sea life rivaling that of any shallow-water reef in the world. Researchers onboard were elated. ''We flipped on the lights, and there was one of the largest coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico sitting right in front of us,'' said Erik Cordes, a marine biologist at Temple University and chief scientist on the vessel, the Ronald H. Brown. Enhanced Coverage Linking

Nine months later, the warm thrill of discovery has cooled into dread. The reef lies just 20 miles northeast of BP's blown-out well, making it one of at least three extensive deepwater reefs lying directly beneath the oil slick in the gulf.

Yet it is not the slick that troubles scientists. They fear a more insidious threat: vast plumes of partly dissolved oil apparently spreading in the deep ocean.

The latest research team in the gulf to detect these plumes observed one extending roughly 22 miles northeast of the well site, in the vicinity of at least two major deepwater reefs, including the one discovered last fall. Preliminary images of the plume show layers of it touching the sea floor. Marine scientists have no firm grasp yet on what the impact on the corals will be, but they are bracing for catastrophe.

''The worst-case scenario is that there's oil coating some of the corals,'' Dr. Cordes said. ''It would basically suffocate them.''

The composition and distribution of these plumes remain a mystery, and several government research vessels are aggressively pursuing them in the gulf. Scientists believe that the plumes are not pure oil, but most likely a haze of oil droplets, natural gas and the dispersant chemical Corexit, 210,000 gallons of which has been mixed into the jet of oil streaming from the seafloor.

This oily haze could prove highly toxic to coral reefs. Both oil and dispersants, which chemically resemble dishwashing detergent, hamper the ability of corals to colonize and reproduce. And these effects are amplified when the two are mixed.

Studies on the effects of oil and chemicals on coral are limited to the shallow-water variety, however. Essentially no research has been conducted on their slow-growing deepwater cousins. So BP's spill has prompted scientists to embark

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on a sudden crash course on the interaction of deep-sea biology with these toxins.

''Everybody's scrambling,'' said Steve W. Ross, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and an expert on deepwater corals. ''There's a lot of evaluation that has to be done.''

But some believe that studies on the impact of oil and dispersants should have been done long ago, given the proliferation of drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

''Some of these studies were proposed years ago, and the agencies decided not to fund them,'' Dr. Ross said. ''We're paying the price for it now.''

The BP spill coincides nonetheless with a fertile period of deep-ocean exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past decade, the Minerals Management Service -- the federal agency criticized by lawmakers for its oversight of the offshore drilling industry -- has financed extensive research into mapping the life of the deep ocean.

On numerous voyages, researchers have scanned the sea floor for anomalies and deployed submersible robots to search for life in the icy depths. The result has been a string of discoveries across the northern gulf, among them prolific deepwater reefs the size of football fields or larger. The identification of new species has become commonplace.

Yet even as such discoveries have multiplied, little has been done to protect the sea life. An environmental impact statementprepared by the Minerals Management Service in 2007 that covered a vast area of the gulf being opened up to oil and gas drilling, including the lease area where the BP well is located, concluded that drilling posed no serious risk to deepwater reefs. Deep-sea rigs were required to avoid damaging coral sites directly with anchors or pipelines, but few other restrictions on drilling were deemed necessary.

The nearly 1,000-page document mentions only in passing the potential of oil released under high pressure to form undersea plumes, despite previous studies showing the distinct likelihood of such an event.

The study also failed to explore the application of dispersants deep underwater. This use of the chemicals, approved by federal authorities, is essentially unprecedented. It appears to have reduced the extent of the slick, limiting its impact on wetlands, beaches and surface life. But officials know little about its potential impact on life underwater.

''The long-term effects on aquatic life are still unknown,'' Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said at a news conference in May on the use of dispersants.

The application of dispersants is already highly discouraged in areas like the Florida Keys because of their known toxic effects to coral, said Billy D. Causey, Southeast regional director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Sanctuaries program.

''We consider the dispersed oil more harmful than a sheen passing over the reef,'' said Dr. Causey, who served as superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

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Deepwater reefs have their own distinct biology -- they do not rely on photosynthesis for energy, for instance, but scavenge food from the water column -- so their sensitivity to such pollutants is deeply uncertain.

If enveloped by toxic plumes, one consequence for reefs could be a sudden lack of oxygen, as bacteria that feed on hydrocarbons rapidly multiply. This would kill off the algae and micro-organisms corals need for food.

''It might be locally catastrophic, particularly if there's an oxygen-depleted mass that develops,'' said Jeffrey Short, Pacific science director for Oceana, a conservation group, and a former research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration specializing in oil pollution.

At least a hundred deepwater coral sites have been charted between the Texas and Florida coasts. More remain undiscovered. ''We know 1 percent of what's out there in deep waters -- perhaps 1 percent,'' Dr. Causey said.

There is reason to hope that deepwater corals far from the blowout will escape serious harm. Deep-sea currents are slower than surface currents, limiting the ability of the deeper plumes to spread extensively. And oil and chemicals will disperse as they migrate away from the site of the blowout.

The existence of large natural oil seeps into the Gulf of Mexico -- estimated as high as one million barrels per year -- also suggests that deepwater corals may have adapted to the presence of low-level concentrations of oil.

Still, as more and more oil enters the ocean each day, the likelihood that at least some reefs will be overwhelmed only grows. Anxiety thus runs high among deepwater biologists.

Dr. Cordes, for one, is itching to return to the gulf to examine the reef he discovered last year.

''We're in the process of getting down there sooner rather than later,'' he said. ''I hope for the best and fear for the worst.''

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