Bp Oil Spill Case Study

On April 4, 2010 a huge explosion of the Deep Horizon oil rig occurred in the Gulf of Mexico Near Louisiana. Fifteen out the of one hundred fifty men who were on board were injured. Approximately two days later, the rig sang and oil began spewing. The oil leaked for over one hundred days. The BP oil disaster in the gulf has posed a threat on the people and the environment that surround the oil spill. The effects of offshore drilling can be catastrophic, especially after seeing what has happened in the Gulf. There are many concerns that come to mind to when thinking about whether it is okay to drill off shore knowing that the effects are harmful to the ecosystems that are living under the rig, and surrounding it. Just from drilling alone we
has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan," the oil giant stated in its Deepwater Horizon plan. In the spill scenarios detailed in the Deepwater Horizon Plan, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

BP's plans have fallen short, Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore - a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.

In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds will be cleansed of oil, and while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn't apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the
More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.

Another example of BP's planning failures is that the company has insisted that the size of the leak doesn't matter because it has been reacting to a worst case scenario all along. Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more