Oil spill likely to be the worst environmental disaster in US history EHU HASEY

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.examiner.com/x-33986-Political-Spin-Examiner~y2010m4d29-Worst-environmental-disaster-in-US-history-Oil-slick-in-Gulf-of-Mexico-is-set-on-fire

Worst environmental disaster in US history: Oil slick in Gulf of Mexico is set on fire

April 29, 2010

There is a hole in the ocean floor that is spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of five thousand barrels a day. Powerless to stop the uncapped remnants of the fallen Deepwater Horizon oil rig, scientists and engineers have set the crude ablaze.

The surface burn is an effort to slow the catastrophic damage to birds, dolphins, whales, estuaries and other wildlife in the path of the toxic crude. The tourist and fishing industries are also expected to suffer a devastating blow, since the spill cannot be contained.

According to the Washington Post, "The crisis in the gulf is likely to get worse before it gets better."  The report added, "A BP official said controlled burns can get rid of 50 to 99 percent of oil within a limited area, but Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who worked on controlling the damage of the Santa Barbara spill, warned that in open seas, companies have generally captured less than 10 percent of oil spilled."

What makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster worst than spills in the past, is it's close proximity to land. The annihilation from this disaster may top the Exxon Valdez spill and earn the title of the worst in US history.

While touring the Gulf waters by helicopter, Governor Charlie Crist, who is also a candidate for the US Senate, said he was considering withdrawing his support for off shore drilling. "It's clearly not clean enough after we saw what we saw today -- that's horrific -- and it certainly isn't safe enough. It's the opposite of safe."

By the time this well runs dry, Governor Crists' words may be the greatest understatement of our time.

[Toruk Makto]

Also see:  http://cleantechnica.com/2010/04/29/oil-disaster-could-clean-up-climate-bill/

EDIT:
Watch the corporate puppets in the US government "change their minds" about offshore drilling.
Fayvrrtep. These people appear to have a pathological need of approval from whoever is currently in the news.

[Col Quaritch]

Yea US for the win again at destorying our home yet again. Makes you wish we could leave this planet sooner like the Sci-fi of the past promised us huh.

[Toruk Makto]

Yea US for the win again at destorying our home yet again. Makes you wish we could leave this planet sooner like the Sci-fi of the past promised us huh.

Frankly, I would settle for current technology to work like it is supposed to. And not have corner-cutting cheap-assed rig operators that run faulty blowout preventers.

[Kayrìlien]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100429/sc_livescience/expertsmostofthegulfoilspillwontbecleanedup

I'd post a comment in addition to my link, but I think Neytiri aready has it covered.

This is sad. Very sad only.

Kayrìlien

[Toruk Makto]

Too bad an entire eco-system has to be destroyed for these corporate a****** to wake up.
Let the finger-pointing begin...


http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/04/30/gulf-oil-spill-cost-cutting-to-blame/

Gulf Oil Spill: Cost-cutting to Blame?

April 30, 2010

LONDON Critics of British Petroleum have told Fox News past cost-cutting by the London-based oil giant helped to contribute to the rig explosion and oil spill disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tom Bower, author of the 2009 book "The Squeeze, Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century," told Fox, British Petroleum's economizing led to a lack of engineers, an overdependence on out-sourcing, and even a lack of supervisors to keep an eye on the sub-contractors.

The explosion which led to the oil spill in Gulf while occurring on an oil rig operating for BP was run by another company, Transocean. BP has said while it assumes responsibility for the incident, it is still waiting for an investigation to show Transocean's role .

Critics say if there was at least a supervisor on the rig, BP would already have a better understanding of the incident

It is also charged a voluntary remote control cut-off switch might have headed off the oil spill. When Fox put that to BP spokesman Robert Wine, he told us that was Transocean's responsibility.

As to the broader charge that BP has stripped its engineering ranks, spokesman Wine told Fox News those numbers are being built back up and that subcontractors are actually bringing "expertise to the operation."

BP's Wine DID admit to Fox News, in the wake of a series of other safety-related incidents involving BP including the deadly fire at a Texas City refinery in 2005, the company is in the midst of a "renewal" of "procedures" aiming at improved safety and a reduction of oil spills.

While the exact dimensions of the spill are still being assessed, its already taking its financial toll on the BP oil giant.

Nick McGregor, oil analyst for London-based Red Mayne Bentley told Fox News that 20 billion dollars has been written off the market value of the company. He said thats four to five times the total cost of the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

"People are uncertain how this is going to go," McGregor told us, "they don't know how bad it's going to get."

As to the charge that engineering cut-backs at BP might have contributed to the disaster, McGregor said that only during the "post-mortem" stage of the probe would it be clear where the exact fault lies.

He did acknowledge the broader difficulties of running such a large company in situations like this. Sometimes, McGregor noted "...the folks at the top don't know everything that is going on throughout the firm."

For British Petroleum, much of this analysis will have to wait. It is in full damage control...and prevention mode.

"It is not a question of whether we WILL stop the spill," BP's Robert Wine told us, "it's a question of WHEN." He went on to say, "The most important thing is, it doesn't happen again."

[Toruk Makto]

Gulf of Mexico oil slick reaches US coast

[El Jacko]

Would've thought they'd learn from Exxon's mistakes.

Inb4 they jet-wash the coastline with boiling water (again)

[Sopyu]

Seriously. How many times do we have to issue a Environmental DISASTER before we realize just what we are doing to the ecosystem. this is like a horrible case ive seen many times as a kid. one person ruins it for the rest of us. except in this case we have hundreds of people in black slick suits running around saying "we will clean this mess up as soon as possible... if you want it done faster give us your money so we have the funds to fix this... blah blah blah." Seriously they have a eco-disaster on thier hands and they believe that we should be spending federal funding on other things!?! WHAT COULD BE MORE INPORTANT THEN THE PLANET WE LIVE ON! this is a sad show of how far humanity has fallen... greed comes before whats right.

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6424KO20100503

BP works feverishly for Gulf oil leak solution

May 3, 2010

(Reuters) - Energy giant BP Plc indicated some progress on Monday toward capping the underwater well that ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico almost two weeks ago, pushing a giant oil slick toward the U.S. Gulf Coast.

U.S.

The British company has been working to plug a leak nearly a mile under the surface of the ocean, under pressure from the U.S. government to try to limit a looming environmental and economic disaster to prized fishing, environmental and recreational areas.

BP said crews in Louisiana have finished building a 74-ton steel and concrete containment dome that the company plans to lower in place over one of the three leaks on the ocean floor.

"We will load that on a ship tomorrow along with other associated equipment, and transport it to the site," Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production unit, told reporters on a conference call.

Drilling also started Sunday night on a relief well that could cap the oil spill on the Gulf floor, the company said. Still, such an operation is expected to take two to three months to complete.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that the oil slick, which continues to spread over a wider surface area in the warm Gulf waters, will move further east and west by Tuesday, although not necessarily further north toward the coast.

Efforts to prevent the slow-moving mass from washing ashore in parts of four states have been hampered for days by choppy seas and high waves in the Gulf, but forecasts suggest calmer conditions in the next few days.

"The stormy weather is clearing as we speak," Shawn O'Neil, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New Orleans, said. "The winds will stay light and variable all the way through Friday. They will have much improved conditions to do what they need to get done."

Miles of booms are being laid along the coast of four states in an effort to contain the movement of oil onto beaches and into key wildlife sanctuaries and breeding grounds.

The Obama administration has kept the focus on BP to pay for and assume responsibility for the oil spill disaster, which started with an explosion April 20 on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers.

For its part, the federal government has come under fire for not responding more quickly to the spreading economic and environmental threat -- criticisms that may have prompted Obama to travel to the affected region on Sunday.

The oil spill, which continues unchecked for now, could ultimately rival the Exxon Valdez disaster from 1989.

That spill was caused when a single, massive oil tanker spewed most of its contents into Alaska's Prince William Sound.

Comments by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department was involved in the investigation of the incident raised the specter of criminal liability for BP over the spill.

A Justice Department official said it was not a criminal probe at this stage.

Argus Research on Monday downgraded both Transocean and BP Plc to "hold" from "buy" citing negative impact from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

"In many ways, the timing of this incident could not have been worse, as President Obama recently supported the expansion of drilling activity to areas where it was previously prohibited," the brokerage said raising its concern over impact on industry.

In New York, American Depositary Receipts of BP's shares fell 3.7 percent to close at $50.19. Shares Transocean Ltd rose 0.82 percent to 72.91.

Oil prices moved above $86 a barrel as economic optimism lifted Wall Street and concerns the spill could cause short-term disruptions to supplying. So far, major shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico have not seen delays.

(Additional reporting by Kelli Dugan in Mobile, Chis Baltimore, Anna Driver and Kristen Hays in Houston; Matt Daily and Tom Bergin in London, Pascal Fletcher in Miami, Jeremy Pelofsky in London; Writing by Pascal Fletcher and Ros Krasny Editing by Philip Barbara)

[Jake_Sully_1]

BP said crews in Louisiana have finished building a 74-ton steel and concrete containment dome that the company plans to lower in place over one of the three leaks on the ocean floor.

"We will load that on a ship tomorrow along with other associated equipment, and transport it to the site," Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP's exploration and production unit, told reporters on a conference call.

Drilling also started Sunday night on a relief well that could cap the oil spill on the Gulf floor, the company said. Still, such an operation is expected to take two to three months to complete.

That's what I don't get:
In the mean time, why don't they rig up some kind of big vacuum cleaner hose and simply pump / suck off the oil right where it comes out of the leak in the ocean floor. I'm sure they've got big pumps. Can't they handle an oil / water mix? They could use a submarine to position the nozzle of a big suction pipe (or 3), suck off the oil as it emerges with big pumps on a boat and have a cascade of tankers fetching the oil or being filled up.

Neytiri is right again of course: This is sad. Very sad only.
(One of the best scenes of the whole film for me... :-)

Mark

[Toruk Makto]

The leak is a mile down. I guess they don't have a tested way of vacuuming it as you suggest.

[El Jacko]

That and the pipe has to be secured, otherwise the pressure of the oil would just push it aside. Hence the requirement for a 74-ton dome to block what is essentially a small (speaking inches here) hole.

[Toruk Makto]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8662573.stm

Gulf oil spill: first leak capped, says BP

May 5, 2010

(BBC) BP has managed to seal the smallest of the three leaks spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the company says.

A controlled burn of the slick to remove oil from open water is also set to take place on Wednesday.

Oil is still gushing into the sea at a rate of about 800,000 litres a day, but officials say working with only two leaks makes tackling the spill easier.

A controlled burn was last tried on 28 April when thousands of litres of oil were successfully removed.

Favourable weather conditions have now allowed another attempt, officials say.

Concerns for the impact of the burn on wildlife in the area have been dismissed by the body co-ordinating the response to the spill.

"No populated areas are expected to be affected by the controlled burn operations and there are no anticipated impacts to marine mammals and sea turtles," the Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center was quoted as saying by AFP.

Clean-up hopes

Remote-controlled submarines are being used to guide a specially-constructed dome to try to stem the main leaks.

Engineers plan to deploy the 100-tonne dome over the site on Thursday.

BP has never deployed such a structure at a depth of 5,000ft (1,500m) and difficulties may occur, it says. The operation is expected to take more than two days.

Describing the cap, coast guard officer David Mosley told AP news agency: "It doesn't lessen the flow, it just simplifies the number of leak points they have to address."

The spill was set off by an explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and killed 11 workers off Louisiana last month.

If the operation goes well, the dome could start funnelling the oil into a tanker early next week.

A sheen of oil has already reached the shore in parts of Louisiana but officials say coagulated crude oil is not expected to reach coastal areas until the end of the week, AFP reports.

BP has told members of a US congressional committee that up to 9.5 million litres a day could spill if the leaks worsen, AP notes.

[Tsamsiyu Atsteu]

Whenever I hear something about this spill, I can't help but think to myself "stupid savages". *Sigh* Way to go, humanity, way to go.

[Toruk Makto]

BBC News - BP sends giant box to contain Gulf of Mexico oil spill

BP sends giant box to contain Gulf of Mexico oil spill

May 6, 2010

A ship carrying a giant metal containment box has arrived at the site where a sunken oil rig has been leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil giant BP says it hopes the 90-tonne device will help to contain the oil.

The US is to carry out a controlled burn of some of the leaked oil. But the oil reached a beach for the first time on Thursday, officials confirmed.

The spill was set off by an explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig off Louisiana last month.

Eleven rig workers died in the explosion, and the ensuing oil leak has since been threatening several southern US states.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Connie Terrell said teams from the operation Unified Command in Robert, Louisiana, had confirmed oil on the beach, at the south end of the Chandeleur Islands, at Freemason Island.

"This is the first confirmation that Unified Command has received of oil on a shoreline," Ms Terrell said.

"It's largely just sheen, there is no evidence of medium or heavy oil," she said.

Complicated operation

Remote-controlled submarines will now be used to lower the containment device over the leak.

The operation to fix the massive funnel in place is expected to take two days, and a further two days will be required to connect it to a ship above via a drill-pipe.

If the operation is successful, BP hopes to begin pumping oil to the surface early next week.

BP has never deployed such a structure at a depth of 5,000ft (1,500m) and difficulties may occur, said BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward.

Mr Hayward gave no prediction as to when the oil leak would be stopped, or how much the clean-up operation will ultimately cost.

[Col Quaritch]

you know im not even a super huge "green" person and when I heard this i just cried all our dam tech and this best we can do?

[Jake_Sully_1]

you know im not even a super huge "green" person and when I heard this i just cried all our dam tech and this best we can do?

Welcome to "reality".
Hey, it's WAY better than just watching as they did the first couple a weeks!


Mark

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/05/08/1933388/bp-has-long-record-of-legal-ethical.html

BP has long record of legal, ethical violations

May 8, 2010

By RICHARD MAUER AND ANNA M. TINSLEY
McClatchy Newspapers

The causes of the disastrous blowout and gas explosion on BP's leased Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico are a long way from being determined.

Yet already BP's actions are facing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to a years-long history of legal and ethical violations that critics, judges and members of Congress say shows that the London-based company has a penchant for putting profits ahead of just about everything else.

Over the past two decades, BP subsidiaries have been convicted three times of environmental crimes in Alaska and Texas, including two felonies. It remains on probation for two of them.

It also has received the biggest-ever fine for willful work safety violations in U.S. history and is the subject of a wide range of safety investigations, including one in Washington state that resulted last week in a relatively minor $69,000 fine for 13 "serious" safety violations at its Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Wash.

While BP has said it accepts responsibility for the spill, it denies that it's guilty of a systematic pattern of safety and environmental failures.

"We are a responsible and professional company," said BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart. "We work to high standards. Safety is our highest priority."

A review of BP's history, however, shows a pattern of ethically questionable and illegal behavior that goes back decades.

BP's best-known disaster took place in 2005, when an explosion at its refinery in Texas City near Galveston, Texas, killed 15 workers, injured 180 people and forced thousands of nearby residents to remain sheltered in their homes.

An investigation of the explosion by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board blamed BP for the explosion and offered a scathing assessment of the company. It found "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation" and said management failures could be traced from Texas to London.

The company eventually pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, was fined $50 million and sentenced to three years of probation. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration assessed BP the largest fine in OSHA history - $87 million - after inspectors found 270 safety violations that had been previously cited but not fixed and 439 new violations.

BP is appealing that fine, but BP's legal and ethical problems go back much further.

In Alaska, BP first brought unwelcome attention to itself more than 20 years ago in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Exxon was BP's partner in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oilfield, the nation's largest, and shared in the ownership of the trans-Alaska pipeline system, known as Alyeska and headed then by a BP executive who was on loan to the pipeline company.

After a series of documents were leaked to news reporters and Congress that showed how Alyeska failed to live up to its promises to contain spills, that executive, James Hermiller, in February 1990 ordered an undercover operation to track down the leaker.

Hermiller's chief suspect was Chuck Hamel, a former congressional aide and oil broker in Alexandria, Va., who became a conduit between industry whistleblowers and reporters. With Hermiller's blessing, Alyeska hired Wackenhut Corp., a security company in South Florida, to catch Hamel and identify his whistleblowers.

Wackenhut set up a phony environmental law firm and attempted to get Hamel to use it to pursue public interest lawsuits against Alyeska and Exxon. They stole Hamel's trash, bugged an office he used and hired a beautiful blonde to pretend she was an environmentalist in order to get Hamel to talk.

But the scheme collapsed seven months later when one of the Wackenhut operatives came to believe that it was Hamel who was honorable, not Alyeska, and switched sides, bringing the Wackenhut spies with him.

Hermiller retired at the age of 57 in 1993 in the wake of subsequent investigations and congressional hearings and was eventually replaced by a new BP official, who vowed to clean up Alyeska's corporate culture. Hamel successfully sued and used some of his damage award to continue his watchdog pursuit of the industry.

BP ran afoul of federal environmental laws in Alaska after it was discovered that from 1993 to 1995 a BP contractor, Doyon Drilling, had illegally dumped hazardous materials down oil well shafts on the North Slope, the giant Alaska oil production area bordered by the Brooks Range mountains to the south and the Arctic Ocean on the north.

Doyon pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony violation of the Clean Water Act and was fined $3 million. BP was convicted on Feb. 1, 2000, of failing to report the dumping as soon as it learned about it, a felony. BP was fined $500,000, placed on five years' probation and ordered to create a nationwide environmental management program that cost the company at least $40 million.

A BP official told the judge, "We are committed to ensuring this never happens again."

But BP was still on probation when new problems erupted, this time in its North Slope corrosion control program.

Despite warnings from a leak-detection system, a badly corroded 34-inch-diameter pipeline in Prudhoe Bay lost oil for at least five days before a worker driving down a nearby service road on March 2, 2006, smelled oil and spotted the spill, which covered at least two acres of tundra. At 200,000 gallons, it was the largest ever on the North Slope.

Just five months later, on Aug. 6, 2006, a second spill of about 1,000 gallons was discovered on another line. Subsequent investigation found the line was riddled with corrosion, with 176 places where more than half the original diameter had been eaten away.

Congressional hearings held to probe the spills immediately focused on claims that BP actively discouraged workers from reporting safety and environmental problems. The British-born chief of BP's corrosion unit, Richard Woollam, who was removed from his supervisory role in that unit in 2005, took the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination during the hearings, which uncovered a 2004 report by the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins warning BP that employees faced retaliation for reporting problems.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, suggested BP had decided to "bet the farm" that the pipeline wouldn't fail before Prudhoe Bay would run out of oil, saving it the cost of replacement. He accused the company of fostering a "corporate culture of seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues."

In 2007, BP pleaded guilty in federal court in Anchorage to another violation of the Clean Water Act for the 2006 spill. This crime was a misdemeanor, but it still cost BP $20 million in fines and restitution and three more years of probation. Prosecutors said the spill occurred because BP was more interested in cutting costs than in maintaining an aging oil field.

A BP vice president told the judge that the corrosion problems were "out of character" for the company. BP had learned its lesson, he said.

But in November last year, 46,000 gallons of oil and water gushed from an over-pressurized BP pipeline on the North Slope, prompting the EPA and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to open another criminal investigation of BP. An EPA investigator declined to comment last week on the probe's status.

It's the 2005 Texas City explosion, however, that drew the harshest accusations against BP - from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which issued a 341-page report in March 2007, two years after the blast, and from a separate commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Both groups faulted BP's management at all levels for overlooking problems.

"Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it," the Chemical Safety and Hazard probe concluded. "Cost-cutting, failure to invest, and production pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City."

As an example the board cited a blowdown stack where the first explosion occurred when a geyser of flammable liquid erupted from it. A kind of chimney, the blowdown stack was described by the board as antiquated equipment of unsafe design originally installed in the 1950s.

The Baker panel also concluded that BP safety efforts were hurt by bad management and cost cutting. The panel said that the company had "a false sense of confidence" about safety and didn't always make sure that "adequate resources were effectively allocated" to safety issues.

After the 2005 explosion, BP officials said they created a panel to study safety practices at its site, increased the number of people responsible for safety and environmental issues, and spent more than $1 billion on upgrades and repairs.

A new chief executive, Tony Hayward, came on board in 2007 and made even more changes, hiring a management consulting firm and an analyst, among others, to identify needed changes. The company has spent millions of dollars on TV ads talking about how the company is a pioneer for efforts to move "beyond petroleum."

The efforts have won some praise. Lynne Baker, a spokeswoman for the United Steelworkers Union, which represents many of BP's refinery workers, has told reporters that BP has " worked hard to get themselves in a better position in all the refineries," and Kevin Banks, the director of the oil and gas division of Alaska's Department of Natural Resources, cautiously says BP has made improvements, though "it has some ways to go yet."

But others say it is unlikely BP has changed a profit-driven culture that's so deeply entrenched.

"They push all their people to maximize the profitability of their sector," said Brent Coon, a Beaumont, Texas, attorney who amassed millions of documents representing workers and residents in lawsuits against BP for the 2005 Texas City explosion.

Coon says he's already contracted new clients over the Gulf spill and expects to take BP to court again.

"By all evidence I've seen," Coon said, "every operation they've ever engaged in, they take capital out of infrastructural repairs to put it into profits and into expansion."

[El Jacko]

Spoiler

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/05/08/1933388/bp-has-long-record-of-legal-ethical.html

BP has long record of legal, ethical violations

May 8, 2010

By RICHARD MAUER AND ANNA M. TINSLEY
McClatchy Newspapers

The causes of the disastrous blowout and gas explosion on BP's leased Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico are a long way from being determined.

Yet already BP's actions are facing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to a years-long history of legal and ethical violations that critics, judges and members of Congress say shows that the London-based company has a penchant for putting profits ahead of just about everything else.

Over the past two decades, BP subsidiaries have been convicted three times of environmental crimes in Alaska and Texas, including two felonies. It remains on probation for two of them.

It also has received the biggest-ever fine for willful work safety violations in U.S. history and is the subject of a wide range of safety investigations, including one in Washington state that resulted last week in a relatively minor $69,000 fine for 13 "serious" safety violations at its Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Wash.

While BP has said it accepts responsibility for the spill, it denies that it's guilty of a systematic pattern of safety and environmental failures.

"We are a responsible and professional company," said BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart. "We work to high standards. Safety is our highest priority."

A review of BP's history, however, shows a pattern of ethically questionable and illegal behavior that goes back decades.

BP's best-known disaster took place in 2005, when an explosion at its refinery in Texas City near Galveston, Texas, killed 15 workers, injured 180 people and forced thousands of nearby residents to remain sheltered in their homes.

An investigation of the explosion by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board blamed BP for the explosion and offered a scathing assessment of the company. It found "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation" and said management failures could be traced from Texas to London.

The company eventually pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, was fined $50 million and sentenced to three years of probation. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration assessed BP the largest fine in OSHA history - $87 million - after inspectors found 270 safety violations that had been previously cited but not fixed and 439 new violations.

BP is appealing that fine, but BP's legal and ethical problems go back much further.

In Alaska, BP first brought unwelcome attention to itself more than 20 years ago in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Exxon was BP's partner in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oilfield, the nation's largest, and shared in the ownership of the trans-Alaska pipeline system, known as Alyeska and headed then by a BP executive who was on loan to the pipeline company.

After a series of documents were leaked to news reporters and Congress that showed how Alyeska failed to live up to its promises to contain spills, that executive, James Hermiller, in February 1990 ordered an undercover operation to track down the leaker.

Hermiller's chief suspect was Chuck Hamel, a former congressional aide and oil broker in Alexandria, Va., who became a conduit between industry whistleblowers and reporters. With Hermiller's blessing, Alyeska hired Wackenhut Corp., a security company in South Florida, to catch Hamel and identify his whistleblowers.

Wackenhut set up a phony environmental law firm and attempted to get Hamel to use it to pursue public interest lawsuits against Alyeska and Exxon. They stole Hamel's trash, bugged an office he used and hired a beautiful blonde to pretend she was an environmentalist in order to get Hamel to talk.

But the scheme collapsed seven months later when one of the Wackenhut operatives came to believe that it was Hamel who was honorable, not Alyeska, and switched sides, bringing the Wackenhut spies with him.

Hermiller retired at the age of 57 in 1993 in the wake of subsequent investigations and congressional hearings and was eventually replaced by a new BP official, who vowed to clean up Alyeska's corporate culture. Hamel successfully sued and used some of his damage award to continue his watchdog pursuit of the industry.

BP ran afoul of federal environmental laws in Alaska after it was discovered that from 1993 to 1995 a BP contractor, Doyon Drilling, had illegally dumped hazardous materials down oil well shafts on the North Slope, the giant Alaska oil production area bordered by the Brooks Range mountains to the south and the Arctic Ocean on the north.

Doyon pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony violation of the Clean Water Act and was fined $3 million. BP was convicted on Feb. 1, 2000, of failing to report the dumping as soon as it learned about it, a felony. BP was fined $500,000, placed on five years' probation and ordered to create a nationwide environmental management program that cost the company at least $40 million.

A BP official told the judge, "We are committed to ensuring this never happens again."

But BP was still on probation when new problems erupted, this time in its North Slope corrosion control program.

Despite warnings from a leak-detection system, a badly corroded 34-inch-diameter pipeline in Prudhoe Bay lost oil for at least five days before a worker driving down a nearby service road on March 2, 2006, smelled oil and spotted the spill, which covered at least two acres of tundra. At 200,000 gallons, it was the largest ever on the North Slope.

Just five months later, on Aug. 6, 2006, a second spill of about 1,000 gallons was discovered on another line. Subsequent investigation found the line was riddled with corrosion, with 176 places where more than half the original diameter had been eaten away.

Congressional hearings held to probe the spills immediately focused on claims that BP actively discouraged workers from reporting safety and environmental problems. The British-born chief of BP's corrosion unit, Richard Woollam, who was removed from his supervisory role in that unit in 2005, took the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination during the hearings, which uncovered a 2004 report by the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins warning BP that employees faced retaliation for reporting problems.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, suggested BP had decided to "bet the farm" that the pipeline wouldn't fail before Prudhoe Bay would run out of oil, saving it the cost of replacement. He accused the company of fostering a "corporate culture of seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues."

In 2007, BP pleaded guilty in federal court in Anchorage to another violation of the Clean Water Act for the 2006 spill. This crime was a misdemeanor, but it still cost BP $20 million in fines and restitution and three more years of probation. Prosecutors said the spill occurred because BP was more interested in cutting costs than in maintaining an aging oil field.

A BP vice president told the judge that the corrosion problems were "out of character" for the company. BP had learned its lesson, he said.

But in November last year, 46,000 gallons of oil and water gushed from an over-pressurized BP pipeline on the North Slope, prompting the EPA and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to open another criminal investigation of BP. An EPA investigator declined to comment last week on the probe's status.

It's the 2005 Texas City explosion, however, that drew the harshest accusations against BP - from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which issued a 341-page report in March 2007, two years after the blast, and from a separate commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Both groups faulted BP's management at all levels for overlooking problems.

"Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it," the Chemical Safety and Hazard probe concluded. "Cost-cutting, failure to invest, and production pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City."

As an example the board cited a blowdown stack where the first explosion occurred when a geyser of flammable liquid erupted from it. A kind of chimney, the blowdown stack was described by the board as antiquated equipment of unsafe design originally installed in the 1950s.

The Baker panel also concluded that BP safety efforts were hurt by bad management and cost cutting. The panel said that the company had "a false sense of confidence" about safety and didn't always make sure that "adequate resources were effectively allocated" to safety issues.

After the 2005 explosion, BP officials said they created a panel to study safety practices at its site, increased the number of people responsible for safety and environmental issues, and spent more than $1 billion on upgrades and repairs.

A new chief executive, Tony Hayward, came on board in 2007 and made even more changes, hiring a management consulting firm and an analyst, among others, to identify needed changes. The company has spent millions of dollars on TV ads talking about how the company is a pioneer for efforts to move "beyond petroleum."

The efforts have won some praise. Lynne Baker, a spokeswoman for the United Steelworkers Union, which represents many of BP's refinery workers, has told reporters that BP has " worked hard to get themselves in a better position in all the refineries," and Kevin Banks, the director of the oil and gas division of Alaska's Department of Natural Resources, cautiously says BP has made improvements, though "it has some ways to go yet."

But others say it is unlikely BP has changed a profit-driven culture that's so deeply entrenched.

"They push all their people to maximize the profitability of their sector," said Brent Coon, a Beaumont, Texas, attorney who amassed millions of documents representing workers and residents in lawsuits against BP for the 2005 Texas City explosion.

Coon says he's already contracted new clients over the Gulf spill and expects to take BP to court again.

"By all evidence I've seen," Coon said, "every operation they've ever engaged in, they take capital out of infrastructural repairs to put it into profits and into expansion."

Sounds about right.

Unfortunately, I fear it shows that BP is relatively undeterred by financial penalties, regardless of size. Which begs the question: How can we realistically punish the company? Banning them from areas could do the trick, but that would still leave their infrastructure there, which by the sounds of that report would cost a fortune to bring up to scratch.