BP officials are crunching numbers on a daily basis and are trying hard to downplay the size of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to limit the company’s financial liability. Earlier estimates indicated that between April 22 and July 15 60,000 barrels of crude freely flowed into the Gulf on a daily basis.
In the early days after the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig collapse, the first figures that were announced by the White House was 5,000 barrels/day. That statement soon changed when the daily logs of the Coast Guard were made available to the Associated Press and The New York Times.
The logs showed that on April 24, the Coast Guard reported that the riser pipe was spewing a daily average of 10,000 barrels per day. The figures subsequently change to 25,000 and then ultimately to 60,000 barrels.
Today, the estimates of the spill by BP executives and their legal team are the exact opposite. Both BP executives and Ret. Adm. Thad Allen went on record with Fox News and their new estimate now is that between 19,000 and 25,000 barrels were lost on a daily basis.
The truth is that the total amount is and has always been 2.5 times higher than what they are now willing to admit as they get closer to liability lawsuits and criminal negligence.
Depending on what the ultimate verdict may be, and if BP gets its way with their drastically reduced figures min a Court of Law, it would limit their liability to 6 or 19 billion dollars overall.
While this sounds amazing, criminal and inhumane in general, it should not come as a surprise. Company greed is the true logo of BP and their sunny logo only shines for them, not for the Gulf States residents.
There is however a little kink in the cable. Scientists can accurately measure the exact size of the oil spill by using a Log based computer model to count the oil particles and the speed with which they move. These calculations can be added to the burn-off figures as provided so liberally by BP and the total amount will not and cannot be denied.
BP announced earlier that it would scale down its cleaning operations because only 25% remains to be located and cleaned up. Prior to tropical storm Bonnie, 10,000 cleanup workers were already sent home and instructed to wait for further instructions, which never came after the storm passed.
Several thousand workers were submitted to a mandatory drug test and subsequently fired. Drug tests are very common in the corporate world but they are typically being administered prior to recruitment and not simply after more than two months.
It is clear that BP is now focused on two things; limit the liability by underestimating the size of the spill and reducing the number of cleanup workers, and secondly by ensuring that the relief well is completed in time with the intention of extracting every last drop of crude and every metric cubic foot of gas.
Written by Nick Doms © 2010, all rights reserved
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