Five years ago, a National Academy of Sciences study concluded that the decision to use a dispersant requires making a choice: saving the beach at the expense of the ocean. By Carol van Strum, edited by Eric Francis.
While BP tries one Rube Goldberg remedy after another to stop the oil gusher it unleashed in the Gulf, one of the most frightening aspects of the disaster is how totally clueless BP, the oil industry, and the government are about how to stop the gusher — misleadingly called a spill, leak or oil slick — or how to prevent or mitigate shoreline destruction.
Worse yet, they seem to be violating all common sense and scientific knowledge on the effects of the dispersants being used to conceal the damage caused by the plume of petroleum.
It’s not as if this disaster was actually unprecedented — though we’re being told over and over that it is. Way back in 1979, a drilling rig exploded, burned, sank, and gushed oil into the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico, sending 10,000 – 30,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea for more than nine months. Like the BP explosion, the catastrophic Ixtoc blowout was caused by a malfunctioning blowout preventer. Although the Ixtoc wellhead was located in only 170 feet of water and was accessible to dive teams and submersible vehicles, all efforts to stop the flow — including the top-kill lunacy repeated by BP last week — failed until the Mexican government-owned oil company drilled two relief wells. Oil continued to flow for three months after completion of the first relief well. Use of the same Corexit dispersants at Ixtoc failed to prevent some 3 million barrels of oil from crossing the Gulf and washing up on the Texas shoreline.
Note that relief wells are considered to be the definitive solution in this kind of runaway well, and BP is currently digging two such wells, which will be used to plug the currently active well with concrete. Time estimates on that happening are for August, at best. This is a deep well, and it’s located beneath miles of solid rock. [See BP graphic of the process.] BP was originally going to drill one well — the Obama administration told them they had to drill two. This is a good thing, since they are trickier than anyone is letting on. [We’re working on coverage of this issue.]
It was not the Ixtoc gusher, however, but the 1990 Exxon-Valdez tanker spill in Alaska that goaded Congress into action more than a decade later. In that year, after the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) alarmingly reported in damning detail that, “The country’s ability to recover oil from large spills is inadequate,” Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990. The act required, among other things, oil spill emergency preparations, including an on-scene spill coordinator, more comprehensive contingency planning for massive spills, more federal oversight, and coordination with an newly formed industry oil spill cooperative. [OTA report, “Coping With an Oiled Sea”].
Having fulfilled the first part of its mission, Congress then forgot to provide adequate funding to meet the requirements of the act. This would have been easy. The petroleum industry is hugely profitable; a fee or tax could have created a substantial fund over the years, sufficient for both preventive measures and many remedial measures after a spill.
Over the ensuing years, in the throes of anti-regulatory fever, both government and the oil industry grew complacent, assuming with no basis in reality that the day of big oil spills was over. The BP blowout, twenty years after passage of the Oil Pollution Act, caught both government and industry with their pants down. The panic, confusion, and incompetence that resulted are monuments to decades of deregulation and corporate profiteering, capping a decade of oil men in the White House.
Preventable dispersant poisoning
In 2002, the U.S. Coast Guard proposed changes to oil spill contingency planning regulations under OPA that would increase use of dispersants on oil spills, prompting the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a 2005 report on the efficacy and effects of such dispersants. [Link to full text of NAS 2005 report] The NAS team found that use of dispersants was in effect a trade-off between shoreline protection and seabed/deep-water protection:
Oil spill dispersants do not actually reduce the total amount of oil entering the environment. Rather, they change the inherent chemical and physical properties of oil, thereby changing the oil’s transport, fate, and potential effects. Small amounts of spilled oil naturally disperse into the water column, through the action of waves and other environmental processes. The objective of dispersant use is to enhance the amount of oil that physically mixes into the water column, reducing the potential that a surface slick will contaminate shoreline habitats or come into contact with birds, marine mammals, or other organisms that exist on the water surface or shoreline. Conversely, by promoting dispersion of oil into the water column, dispersants increase the potential exposure of water-column and benthic biota to spilled oil. Dispersant application thus represents a conscious decision to increase the hydrocarbon load (resulting from a spill) on one component of the ecosystem (e.g., the water column) while reducing the load on another (e.g., coastal wetland). Decisions to use dispersants, therefore, involve trade-offs between decreasing the risk to water surface and shoreline habitats while increasing the potential risk to organisms in the water column and on the seafloor. This trade-off reflects the complex interplay of many variables, including the type of oil spilled, the volume of the spill, sea state and weather, water depth, degree of turbulence (thus mixing and dilution of the oil), and relative abundance and life stages of resident organisms.
The 2005 NAS report summarized uses of dispersants on a limited number of spills, including a few in the Gulf of Mexico, but because actual water-column testing was done in only a very few cases, could not confirm the effectiveness of the chemicals and strongly recommended stringent effectiveness testing — including “developing a definition of field effectiveness” — as well as monitoring for toxicity:
In addition, current information is insufficient to evaluate dissolved components (e.g., toxic compounds) or concentrations of dispersed droplets for their impacts on nearshore environments. Ironically, as the effectiveness of dispersant increases, so does the potential threat to organisms exposed to the dispersed plume, due to the increased concentration of dissolved compounds and dispersed droplets in the water column.
The NAS report assumed dispersant use would be in relatively shallow water, and nowhere did the NAS authors consider the possible injection of dispersants a mile below the surface in near-freezing waters. Needless to say, few if any of its recommendations were followed.
BP’s desperate use of Corexit dispersants — particularly its deep-water injections at the seabed — was not supported by any research or logic, save the frantic need to do something visible and reassuring. Corext dispersants, banned in the UK, were not even allowed in U.S. waters during the 1979 Ixtoc blowout; the manufacturer’s MSDS records state no toxicity studies have been done on the products, but the warnings are dire enough, stating that the compounds can cause vomiting, reproductive problems, headaches, and nervous system, blood, and respiratory disorders.
Corexit should be called Mexitwurs
Research Corexit for about 10 minutes and you figure out that the only people who like it work for BP. Everyone else agrees that it’s toxic, ineffective, it will make the problem worse and that there are better, less toxic solvents.
Every chemical that is produced for the market has what is called an MSDS, or material safety data sheet, that tells you how toxic it is, and what to do in case of a spill.
This site includes MSDS sheets for all three Corexit products. We haven’t found any breakdown of which specific ones BP is using in the Gulf. The MSDS for Corexit 9527, a dispersant developed by Nalco Energy Services in the 1980s, and widely used in the Gulf, includes 2-butoxyethanol and 38% 2-butoxyethanol. A question remains about whether the proprietary formula also includes ethylene oxide (a carcinogen), reported by valdezlink.com to have been in a 1989 version:
Trade secrets keep the exact ingredients from being revealed, and safety [2] sheets [3] show that Corexit contains compounds that can cause vomiting, reproductive problems, and headaches at high doses. No toxicity studies have been performed on the compounds, but an environmental group called Protect the Ocean claims [4] that Corexit is four times as toxic as the oil. And an earlier form of Corexit used in the Exxon Valdez cleanup reportedly caused workers to develop nervous system, blood, and respiratory disorders.
The number one benefit of a product like Corexit for a company like BP is to push the most plainly visible pollutants to the sea floor and away from coastal areas, where the true ecological damage will remain out of sight. While much of the company’s use of the substance involves surface spraying, they are also injecting large volumes of Corexit into deep waters, where already massive oil plumes have spread over hundreds of square miles, their thickness and perimeter growing by the hour. Some of the plumes are hidden from visible sight, including the ones that are a mix of Corexit and crude.
The accumulation of oil at the bottom of the ocean presents a more startling threat to the Gulf’s ecology than shallow-water spills. Paul Montagna, a marine ecologist at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, explained to AFP: “What that means is that basically life in the entire water column is now being exposed.”
“Clearly you’d expect a huge die off in the water column as well as in the (affected) sediments,” said Wilma Subra, a chemist and consultant who works with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.
Another major concern is that the subsea oil and dispersants can be carried by currents in an entirely different direction from where the wind and waves send the surface slick, creating a “much larger area of impact,” she added.
Five years ago, a 400-page National Academy of Sciences study concluded that the decision to use a dispersant requires making a choice: saving the beach at the expense of the ocean.
“It’s all about trade-offs,” said Beth McGee, senior water quality scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and one of the authors of the 2005 study. “You look at the resources at risk and you make a choice.” While there may be some sickness and fatalities among the fish population, she said, “you hope you’re saving some beaches or marshes.”
“You’re making a decision to save your birds at the expense of your larval fish and shellfish population,” agreed Henderson. But marine life should be able to bounce back more rapidly, he said.
That’s the case when the dispersants are sprayed on the surface, as their manufacturer recommends. Over the past few weeks, BP has been testing a radical approach, shooting the dispersants at the source of the leaks a mile beneath the surface, even though EPA officials say the effects of underwater use “are still widely unknown.”
Though all dispersants are potentially dangerous when applied in such volumes, Corexit is particularly toxic. It contains petroleum solvents and a chemical that, when ingested, ruptures red blood cells and causes internal bleeding. It is also bioaccumulative, meaning its concentration intensifies as it moves up the food chain.
But now the US regulator has admitted that the ecological consequences of this are unknown. The EPA has said that “the effects of underwater dispersant use on the environment are still widely unknown, which is why we are testing to determine its effectiveness first and foremost.”
Larry Schweiger, the head of the US National Wildlife Federation, has also said the method of using underwater dispersant at the source of the leak was untested and could have devastating effects. “The problem with putting the underwater dispersant where they’re putting them is that they’ve never done that before.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged in a statement that the ramifications of the underwater dispersant were unclear and said it had only authorized two tests of the method for that reason.
“The tests were done to determine if the dispersant would be effective in breaking up the oil and helping to control the leaks,” the EPA said. “No further use of dispersants underwater is planned until BP provides the results of these tests for our review.”
BP has ignored the order.
Carrie, I have no idea whether or not this probe will amount to anything substantial, but I choose to believe in the possibility and potential of that very thing. I am an optimist. I do expect that the probe will be sincere, the same as I believe Obama is a good man who has difficult choices every day to make, and I do expect that those responsible will be held accountable. This will be necessary. Will it happen as I’d like to see it? I don’t know. But I do know I don’t want to set my expectations so low that the energy I put forth won’t have any chance at all of helping the situation. I’ll risk disappointment and pray those involved rise to the occasion. To me, this is a vital part of keeping the faith, having faith, as it seems to me that having faith requires an optimistic approach. I think the universe supports that more readily than the opposite.
I never watched Dallas and I don’t recall Queen Amidila – but I like her. :0)
xo
Patricia MoonRose
moonrose,
I hate to sound like the resident pessimist but an FBI probe will probably lead to nothing happening but a slap on the wrists of BP officials. Someone somewhere has “dirt” on those such as Holder and others (think J R Ewing’s little safe with the compromising photographs that he kept on people to force them to cooperate…this was from the 80’s evening soap opera, “Dallas”). Why else would every major investigation into Big Oil and other such perpetrators be derailed?
I would be willing to bet the FBI makes a lot of noise but makes barely a dent in the overall scheme of how “business as usual” works with BP and other Big Oil companies. Reminds me of Queen Amidala of “Star Wars, the Phantom Menace” saying to the senate that she will not agree to see her people die while the senate discusses the blockade in committee. She demanded action; we should all do the same in very loud and publicly vocal ways.
BP is facing an FBI probe:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/01-6
“Mr Holder announced that he was launching a criminal and a civil investigation into the oil spill.”
“State and federal investigations are likely to focus on BP’s relationship with the Minerals Management Service, a government agency condemned in official reports for a “culture of corruption”. In an unusual departure from normal procedures, the MMS granted BP three changes to its drilling permit for the Deepwater Horizon rig in a single day a week before the rig sank, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed yesterday.”
Good?
Patricia MoonRose
Hi Eric. Thanks for your quick reply to my comment. I appreciate what you’ve been doing all along, and those things I pointed out are basically minor issues. I am definitely also willing to believe that the chemical industry lies, distorts and lies some more. I wrote just because I wanted to see more clearly how Carol came to a few of her conclusions, but really everything else feels very transparent and rigorous. And the spirit of candor and honesty is in her writing too, which is unfortunately rare in journalism these days. More and more when I read the New York Times lately I feel like I’m peering through a mucky musty basement that is the smug, complicit perspective of someone I really would rather not know. They just published this folksy “human face” story about this president of one of the New Orleans parishes, and I kept thinking while reading it, “this is what they spend their time researching?” Also in another article about what the fishermen of the Gulf are facing, I just felt sick at how much they use this sort of hedging, noncommittal language about the state of things there, which they pretend is a sort of impartial objectivism but which I think is more like a sort of denial perpetuation tonic.
Sam, I will pass this onto Carol. We are working around a lot of missing information, as much of it is “trade secrets”; and of necessity we are working fast, without time to dig into remotely located litigation files. This report is based on publicly available documents. However, in reply to how we handled missing information, between Carol and I we have 60 years experience covering the chemical industry. It is eminently fair to assume the very worst, then stick a few zeros on the end of any number they give you.
They are understating everything; the MSDS gives the GOOD news on a product, the whitewash, not the truly bad news; no form of Corexit is good for anything that lives. ANY dispersant is horrendous for marine life and amounts to a chemical coverup of the real spill. From what I am reading the past few days, BP execs have gone off the deep end of pathological lying and psychosis.
I believe there are a few places where the clarity of this article could be improved. It’s very nice to have the links to the various source documents linked for further reference, but I feel that those shouldn’t be a substitute for clear citations within the text.
Examples:
1) “Though all dispersants are potentially dangerous when applied in such volumes, Corexit is particularly toxic. It contains petroleum solvents and a chemical that, when ingested, ruptures red blood cells and causes internal bleeding. It is also bioaccumulative, meaning its concentration intensifies as it moves up the food chain.” I believe it’s important to name what that chemical is. And doesn’t bioaccumulative actually mean that 1) bigger animals have bigger bodies which can thus store a larger amount of a toxic chemical and 2) big animals are eaten by even bigger animals and would thus ingest more of this chemical than say a small organism that eats plankton would. Is the point here mainly to imply that human beings are going to consume this Corexit? Is it to show that this will affect the entire food chain? If so, I think it would be fine to just say that directly.
2) This one is mainly just confusing because it appears contradictory: “This site includes MSDS sheets for all three Corexit products. We haven’t found any breakdown of which specific ones BP is using in the Gulf. The MSDS for Corexit 9527, a dispersant developed by Nalco Energy Services in the 1980s, and widely used in the Gulf, includes 2-butoxyethanol and 38% 2-butoxyethanol.” If we don’t know which ones are being used in the Gulf, how do we know that that one is being widely used?
3) “A question remains about whether the proprietary formula also includes ethylene oxide (a carcinogen), reported by valdezlink.com to have been in a 1989 version”…. I feel that, even with some degree of hedging in the text, that this statement seems a little bit too much like hearsay. At the very least it would be good to know who precisely at valdezlink.com asserted this and give us some sense of their qualifications or the research they did to make the allegation that there is a carcinogen in this stuff. Perhaps the idea is that the reader will then go to that site and evaluate for herself whether this statement is credible or not, but I feel that there should be a more rigorous way to present this particular assertion.
I am truly thankful for the time and energy that Carol has put into researching and analyzing this issue. It is a very direct and refreshing article, especially in bringing to light the fact that these dispersants were never even intended to be used in the totally irresponsible manner in which they are being used. I am instinctively inclined to believe the gist of everything she says about BP, the government, and the dispersants, but that is all the more reason why I think it’s important to be impeccably rigorous.
Thank you.
Sam
oooooo kay……. heck, we might be better off in Nigeria after all. Plumes under there are actually not “just” oil, it seems, but dissolved hydrocarbons mixed with??? Corexit???
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100531/hl_nm/us_dispersant_concerns;_ylt=AtPrD_JCJ9iLABOG_5q6uGN0fNdF
(excerpt)
But he said the contaminants — which could eventually be pushed onto the continental shelf before shifting slowly down toward the Florida Keys and possibly out to the open Atlantic Ocean — raised troubling questions about whether they would “cascade up the food web.”
The threat is that they will poison plankton and fish larvae before making their way into animals higher up the food chain, Hollander said.
INVISIBLE THREAT
The underwater contaminants are particularly “insidious” because they are invisible, Hollander said, adding that they were suspended in what looked like normal seawater.
“It may be due to the application of the dispersants that a portion of the petroleum has extracted itself away from the crude and is now incorporated into the waters with solvents and detergents,” he added.
“We think there could be both short-term and long-term implications … There’s a lot of unchartered territory that we’re moving into with this oil spill,” said Hollander.
He said dispersants, a cocktail of organic solvents and detergents, had never been used at the depth of BP’s well before, and no one really knows how they interact physically and chemically under pressure with oil, water and gases.
“On the surface they’re very readily or actively used and their behavior is well understood. That’s not the case at all with their use in the subsurface and especially at a mile deep,” Hollander said.
“A very-large-scale experiment is being conducted and we don’t know the implications of it,” he added.
Hollander said the amount of suspected dispersants in the cloud of hydrocarbons was likely to be known after about two weeks of further testing.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/31/oil.spill.order/
So, fishermen who are now being hired by BP to work cleanup (there being no other work) are getting sick, we can probably safely assume they are getting sick from Corexit. When they go to get treatment, BP destroys their clothing….. so this guy got a restraining order (if I am following this right) telling BP not to destroy clothing of workers who come down sick from the clean up….
ugly business indeed.
I’m sharing this one more time, just to try to open the picture beyond BP itself as the baddest bad guy, and our US Gulf or even our European shores as the worst impacted by this corporate behavior. We can hope that world wide attention to this will ratchet up a few notches now, and maybe even enough to create some intelligent solutions ……. :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
John Vidal, environment editor
The Observer, Sunday 30 May 2010
……………….
Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. “We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots,” said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. “This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months.”
That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month….
…………
With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.
“If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention,” said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. “This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta.”
“The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different.”
“We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US,” said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. “But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people’s livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
“This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper,” he said.
It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far….
…….
Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: “Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond.”
Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: “Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care.”
There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: “What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.
“It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice.”
Dear Eric Francis,
After seeing the chart of the Gulf Stream on Planet Waves of Friday 28th May 2010, I saw what I spoke out the day before: the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will reach us here on the Dutch west coast.
Saturday the realisation and a subsequent feeling of loss: that moment when I had orgasmic sex while being in the North Sea – like having sex outdoors, in – will never come again. A double loss. This immense monstrous oil wave struck a chord with me: Yeats’ “rough beast” which “slouches towards” my part of the world, my world, his Second Coming (as you know).
“(…) if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us that the air shares its spirit with all life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow’s flowers (…).
(…) the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers (…).
W hat is the white man without beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man.
All things are connected.”
Chief Seattle (1786 – June 7th 1866), Suquamish Tribe
(an excerpt form a letter from Chief Seattle to United States President Franklin Pierce, sent in 1854)
I got carried away,
I greet you,
Carla
PS
only look at how the masses abuse their holy body (and mind) and it’s no wonder they abuse their environment too
Hey Eric!
Does anyone at PW send this stuff on to the White House? Or how about a comp subscription to Obama?
This is a real mess that the Gulf is in and given that its within months of what’s gotta be some of the most tense astrology since 1981 – you just know that this is ticking off as the poster picture for the sunset of the oil industry. The gloves are really off now – the oil guys have no clue and given how scared they are – they arrested legit shareholders at a Chevron meeting the other day http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2010/05/70503.php that it really is time to protest LOUDLY.
You know that Toronto is hosting the G8/G20 summits, right?
The absolute OUTRAGE from callers on a phone in show on CBC radio yesterday was nothing short of revolutionary. People are totally pissed from the amount of money Canada is spending on SECURITY – 1 billion – to the 5 hours it is going to take if anyone – ( particularly the people who work at the CBC building at ground zero to the hotel these clowns are staying at) who has security clearance to come into the perimeter of the city- on all levels it’s a crazy proposal.
One of the most interesting comments was from a former head of CSIS (like the CIA) – he said the likelihood of terrorism actually happening while the summit is going on is unlikely – however the protesting and the groups travelling to Canada to be there for this – that was his main concern – because of Toronto’s central location nationally and globally – its an easy place to get into. He also said that with the myriad of tunnels and tall buildings that it was going to be more than “challenging” to lock it down 100%.
So – its going to be very interesting to see how it all shapes up – one of the biggest jazz festivals happens for 8 days right after the summit ends. Its going to go from a lockdown to flashmob mentality and the contrast between the two ( I think) will serve to illustrate the idiocy of the former.
Might be the Summer of 68 all over again.
Urs
use this link for facebook:
http://planetwaves.net/pagetwo/2010/05/31/dispersants-bp-spill-astrology/
Great article! Any way to put in a Facebook button here? I’d like to post on my FB page.
Tony Baloney. Reminds me of Blair.
Out in the blogosphere, Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO is putting out pre-litigation disinformation:
BP CEO Disputes Claims of Underwater Plumes.