Deepwater Disaster Plan Failed Risk management failures were a key factor leading to one of the largest oil well disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, United States, The Deepwater explosion in May 2010 killed 11 men and left miles of Louisiana coastline covered in oil, causing billions of dollars in damage to the tourism industry. and fishing in the region. Say no to plagiarism Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned” Get. in the Gulf of Mexico, marking the worst maritime disaster in US history Part of the emergency planning process failed – BP According to the plan, even if there was a leak Ten times worse than the current one. , the oil would not reach the coasts because the drilling operations take place too far offshore: due to the distance to the coasts (48 miles) and the response capacities that would be implemented, no significant negative impact is expected. Yet oil has already contaminated coastal Louisiana swamps, and tar balls have appeared on beaches as far away as Florida. Authorities were forced to ban tourists from swimming on several miles of contaminated beaches in northwest Florida and Alabama. The plan mentions a company called Marine Spill Response Corp as a group capable of providing equipment to respond to a spill. But the website listed for the company links to an old Japanese-language web page. BP claims in the document that it can mobilize enough vessels to recover up to 20 million gallons of oil from the water each day – an assumption that now seems very optimistic. And a method of calculating the volume of a spill based on the dark sheen color of contaminated seawater produces an underestimate, with internationally accepted formulas providing figures up to 100 times higher. Among the listed emergency liaisons is Bob Lutz, named wildlife expert at the University of Miami. But AP says Lutz, a sea turtle expert, left Miami two decades ago to head the marine biology department at a Boca Raton university and died four years before BP's plan was approved. . The errors in the documents are likely to add to the growing public perception that BP was insufficiently prepared for a serious accident. There are other extremely false assumptions. BP's proposed method for calculating the volume of the spill based on the darkness of the oil sheen is far from correct. The internationally accepted formula would produce delays 100 times higher. The Gulf Loop Current, which is expected to eventually help send oil hundreds of miles around the southern tip of Florida and up the Atlantic coast, is not mentioned in either plan. In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained in bird cleaning by listening to a presentation and watching a video. This was labor never contemplated in the plans, which contain no detailed reference to how the birds will be cleaned of oil. And while BP officials and the federal government insisted they approached the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that much is clear from the ever-evolving nature of the response . However, the shortfall was averted after BP announced the apparently good news. As a containment cap installed on the wellhead channeled aWith part of the crude gushing toward a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new set of plans aimed primarily at capturing more oil. The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cover, using a special incinerator to burn some of the recovered oil, and installing a floating platform to process the oil sucked up from the gusher. Below are some other examples of how BP's plans failed.1. The beaches, where oil washed up weeks after a spill, were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP had promised it could mobilize enough boats to recover all the oil before a spill. Deepwater cannot reach the shore - a claim which, in retrospect, seems absurd. .The vessels in question have the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively, one of the documents states. BP says the combined response could skim, vacuum or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But "that's about the amount of leaks in the last six weeks - and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles," according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami Satellite Detection Center. Only a small fraction of the spill was skimmed successfully. Additionally, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between. The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance that oil will reach the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. An oily sheen reached the Mississippi River Delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy balls soon followed. Other locations where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as being clear of any oil hazards.2. BP's site plans for endangered birds, sea turtles or marine mammals (no negative impacts) also proved far too optimistic. Although the exact toll on Gulf wildlife may never be known, the effects have clearly been devastating. More than 400 oiled birds were treated, while dozens were found dead and covered in oil, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On isolated islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil stains pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, AP photos show that illustrate one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the spill's impact . Such scenes are no longer unusual; the intervention plans do not provide for anything on this scale. In Barataria Bay, Louisiana, a dead sea turtle covered in reddish-brown oil lay sprawled among buzzing dragonflies. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins were also stranded. So have countless fish. There would be no shoreline issues as the site was far offshore. Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant negative impacts are expected, the site plan states. But this distance has failed to protect valuable resources. And last week, a group of scientists at an environmental research center released a computer model suggesting that oil could follow ocean currents around Florida and into North Carolina by summer.3. Perhaps the most striking example of BP's planning failures: the company insisted that the scale of the leak had notof importance because she had always reacted to the worst case scenario. Yet at every step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak grew from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons, or even perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP was forced to scramble to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.4. While a disaster as devastating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can be resolved in advance, or even anticipated, BP's plans do not anticipate even the most obvious problems and use mountains of words to ignore problems that have proven overwhelming. In response to AP's long lists of questions, officials at BP and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the Minerals Management Service, regulator of oil rigs, appeared to admit that there were problems with the two oil spill response plans. Most of the questions you raise are exactly these. Questions that will be examined and resolved by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into the BP oil spill, said Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. She added that “Salazar has undertaken transformational reforms of the MMS.” BP spokesman Daren Beaudo of Robert, La., said: We anticipate that a full review of regional response plans and the planning process will take place as part of the overall investigation into the incident so we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. So far, we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements have worked well. However, we are very disappointed that the oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we face is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us many lessons to learn. One of the major failures of the cleanup plan provisions was the scarcity of booms – floating lines of plastic or absorbent material placed around sensitive areas to deflect oil. From the start, local officials across the Gulf Coast complained about a lack of supplies, particularly from the heavier so-called ocean dam. But even BP claims in its regional plan that the dam is effective in seas greater than three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often larger. And even in calmer waters, oil has flooded vital wildlife breeding grounds in places supposedly sequestered by multiple levels of boom. The BP plans speak of comprehensive resources for all; we don't talk about the need to share. Still, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said its coasts were left vulnerable by Coast Guard decisions to move the boom to Louisiana when oil threatened to make landfall there. Meanwhile, in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser and others complained that miles of dam currently in the water were not properly anchored. AP journalists saw proof that he was right: Some dam lines were so broken that they barely stopped the slick from pushing toward the shore. Some foreign contractors who were unfamiliar with the local waters placed the dam where the tides and currents ensured. Not working properly. And yet, disorganization hampered efforts to use local boats. In Venice, Louisiana, near where the Mississippi River meets.