5 years after Deepwater Horizon: How the secrets were spilled

For me, the BP oil spill of 2010 began with the words, "The following is not public..."

The phrase was at the top of a secret U.S. Coast Guard report that a longtime source had slipped to me a week after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, setting off the spill from the well far below in the Gulf.

No oil had reached land yet, and the official government estimates suggested that the spill flow was a modest one, perhaps up to 1,000 barrels a day at the most. That's 42,000 gallons, and sounds like a lot, but to put it in perspective, scientists believe about that much oil bleeds into the Gulf of Mexico every day from various natural seeps scattered on the seafloor.

The guy who sent me the Coast Guard memo was a government scientist and had been one of my best sources for years. For the purpose of telling this story, he asked me to protect his identity with a fake name. He suggested, "Louis Cannon, you know, like loose cannon."

"I don't think I was supposed to get this," Cannon whispered into the phone. "Look in your email. I sent you something."

There, beneath a Coast Guard logo was a confidential memorandum.

"There is no official change in the volume released but the USCG is no longer stating that the release rate is 1,000 barrels a day," explained the memo.  "Instead they are saying that they are preparing for a worst case release and bringing all assets to bear."

This was a dramatic change from the line that the government had been selling during a news conference earlier that day. There, Mary Landry, the top Coast Guard officer in charge of the spill response, took issue when a reporter used the word "catastrophic."

GOVERNMENT HIDES, SUGARCOATS

"You're getting ahead of yourself to say this is catastrophic," Landry said, pledging that federal officials were being transparent and "not sugarcoating."

In retrospect, Landry's statement was patently false. What quickly became clear was that the government was actively hiding information from the public, when it wasn't sugarcoating as thickly as it could.

I called a petroleum engineer at Louisiana State University and described the Coast Guard memo. The engineer said a worst-case release from such a well would probably mean 2 million to 4 million gallons a day flowing into the Gulf. That would be unprecedented, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every three days.

"At that point, with that much oil," he said, "you begin to have to start considering significant health hazards for people living on the coast, just from the fumes."

When I called the White House for comment about a "worst case release" and the confidential memo, I got the brush off from a PR spokesman with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Your report makes it sound pretty dire. It's a scenario," the guy said.

In Mobile, we published the story under the headline, "Leaked report: Government fears Deepwater Horizon well could become unchecked gusher." It went viral on the Internet, and was reported widely in other media.

The story caused a first crack in the government's spill facade. Soon, it raised its flow estimate to 5,000 barrels a day, which is 210,000 gallons, or about one-twentieth of the amount oil that we now know was erupting from the well at the time.

The next day, I received another email, this one from a mysterious source whose address indicated only that the sender liked playing guitar. The email said simply, "This link backs up Ben Raines' story."

The email bore a link leading to an internal federal website. At my click, a video began loading on my screen. It turned out to be a 45-minute sequence shot in the federal government's hastily established "war room" for the spill in Seattle, Wash. In the video was a close up of a dry erase board with an estimate of the amount of oil flowing from the well. The numbers blew away anything that the government had admitted publicly. "Estim. - 64K-110 K BBLS/day," it read. Translation: 4.6 million gallons a day.

The video provided proof that behind closed doors, government officials believed the oil flow was 2,000 percent bigger than they were letting on. I choked up as I tried to explain to my editors what 4 million gallons of oil a day would mean to life in the Gulf. I remember the chief editor holding me by the shoulders and asking if he needed to slap me to calm me down.

We collected the video and posted it at AL.com, along with a story that suggested the government had spent two weeks drastically downplaying the spill, despite knowing otherwise.

Almost immediately, the video disappeared from the federal web site, while CNN, Fox, MSNBC and other major media began linking to our story and airing portions of our captured video.

Then the White House called. On the line was one of the president's deputy press secretaries, who demanded to know how I'd obtained the video and commanded me to henceforth provide the White House with all my reporting prior to publication. I told him that I had found the video on the web and said that I'd send my stories as soon as my bosses published them. I suggested that he should return my calls in the future. He slammed down the phone.

In retrospect, I've come to believe that right then, at that moment, is where the government made one of its greatest mistakes in the handling of the BP disaster: a conscious decision to continue to mislead the public about the magnitude of the spill.

It is clear from the memo and video, and many other documents that have come to light since, that the government recognized almost immediately that the well was most likely disgorging about 4 million gallons of oil per day. The 1,000-barrel-a-day estimate had come from BP.

Very soon, multiple experts were calculating that the spill was growing by millions of gallons based simply on the size of the slick that had spread across hundreds of square miles of water. And yet federal officials stuck to that ridiculous number -- 1,000 barrels a day -- until May 29, more than five weeks after the spill began. As it turns out, the well was releasing that much oil every 15 minutes.

It seems clear today that the government intentionally broke the public trust in the first days of the spill, and then chose to sit tight even after the truth had become perfectly, painfully clear. And that decision tainted everything that followed during the course of the spill.

Having been fooled once, the public doubted assurances that seafood was clean, for example, or that dispersant chemicals were safe.

From a public relations standpoint, the government's bluff and deception were just plain wrong-headed. And now, from a legal perspective, they've proven dangerous to the government's case: BP lawyers have wielded the discrepancies in the government flow calculations to undercut estimates of how much oil escaped into the Gulf.

BURNED AND BETRAYED
Despite a lifetime spent fishing and scuba diving around oil and natural gas platforms, and more than a decade covering the energy industry as a news reporter, I found myself stupefied by the sudden realization that my beautiful Gulf of Mexico might die, that a hole in the floor was spewing so much oil so fast that it could kill the whole thing.

The government began releasing a daily map showing the slick spreading from the well head about 110 miles to the south. We called the slick "The Blob."  With winds coming out of the south for days on end, The Blob was heading north, straight for the mouth of Mobile Bay.

Each day, The Blob was about 10 miles closer.

It seemed inevitable that The Blob was going to swallow everything that I loved -- the barrier islands, the marshes, the bays -- all the reasons that I had chosen to live here.

On the day that I first watched the war room video, I remember driving home across Mobile Bay and feeling a tear roll down my face at the sight of a snowy egret perched in a cypress tree at the water's edge.

Crying comes rarely and never easily for me. Except for the three months that began in the spring of 2010. During those months, I cried.

My fishing buddies -- scientists, shrimpers, fishing guides, mechanics, crusty old men -- told me that the same thing was happening to them.

Every time I saw something beautiful, which happens a lot in the spring in coastal Alabama, my sense of wonder was followed by the thought, "It's probably going to die when the oil gets here."

One day, I got a call from a longtime contact, Ron Gouget, a recently retired NOAA spill cleanup coordinator. If the BP spill had happened on Ron's watch, he would have been one of the people involved in the agency's response. He knew more about handling oil spills than almost anyone in the world. [Paragraph revised at 4:24 p.m., April 18, 2015]

"Did you hear the Coast Guard talking about conducting a test burn in the news conference? You need to find out what that's all about. There is no test. This is bright, fresh crude. It burns," Gouget said. "All my old colleagues, they know they should have started burning that oil right away. Something is fishy here."

Gouget explained that burning was supposed to be the primary emergency response to a worst-case spill in the Gulf. As heavy, thick oil reached the surface, fire would destroy it immediately and entirely.

Gouget was part of the team that created the "In-Situ Burn" plan, which was approved by all of the relevant federal agencies in 1994 as the go-to response for a spill like BP's.

"The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away," Gouget said. "No need to wait 10 days for approval or anything like that. So what's the hold up? If it turns out they didn't have the equipment to do it, that's unconscionable"

But that was exactly the problem.

The burn process requires a device called a fire boom. Towed between two boats, the boom corrals oil until it forms a layer thick enough to set alight.

Crews working with a single boom can burn 75,000 gallons an hour. Theoretically, with the BP well leaking at a rate of 191,000 gallons per hour, three fire boom crews could have captured and burned all of the oil every day.

But despite a federal plan calling for immediate deployment of fire booms to combat spills, the U.S. government had not a single one on hand at the edge of the one of the largest oil fields in the world.

Oil companies themselves are required to have fire booms staged and ready to go in oil fields around the world, from Norway to Brazil.  But not in the U.S.

In order to finally conduct a "test burn" in the second week of the BP spill, the U.S. government had to buy a fire boom from the manufacturer in Illinois and wait for it to be trucked to the coast.

I discovered this after calling the company, Elastec/American Marine, on a hunch.  Jeff Bohleber, the company's chief financial officer, was flabbergasted that the federal government had been so ill-prepared. Yes, he told me, the government had called and asked to buy a fire boom after the spill started.

Not only that, he said, the government asked the company to contact its customers in other countries to find out whether the U.S. could borrow their fire booms.

But fire booms are large and complex. Booms from abroad wouldn't arrive for weeks; fabrication of new ones would take 45 days.

If fire booms had been present, Gouget estimated that 90 percent of the oil that ruined Louisiana marshes or defiled Alabama beaches could have gone up in smoke before it ever made landfall.

"They missed a chance to contain and destroy most of the oil in the early days of the spill because they weren't ready. They simply didn't have the tools they were supposed to have," Gouget said.

But being ill-prepared has long been status quo for the government when it comes to responding to oil spills. In 2004, a Coast Guard report after a simulated spill exercise noted that there was no federal requirement for oil companies to keep fire booms available. The report also warned that the agency's "oil spill response personnel did not appear to have even a basic knowledge of the equipment required to support salvage or spill clean up operations." Those shortcomings came home to roost during the BP spill.

When a few fire booms finally arrived, they were put to work straightaway. Crews burned 700,000 gallons of oil in a single day, according to BP records from June 2010. By contrast, the fleet of skimmer boats toiling in the Gulf managed to collect just 1.4 million gallons of oil from the water's surface during the first five weeks of the spill.

Much of the rest sloshed ashore.

For those of you who would like to think that the U.S. better prepared these days, I suppose it is. Today, the Marine Oil Spill Response Corp. -- a non-profit entity created by the industry after the Exxon Valdez spill -- boasts on its web site that it has 22,500 feet of fire boom, enough for about 45 fire boom systems.

The problem is, each boom system breaks down after two or three days of burning. Given that the BP spill would have required three systems in service at all times, those 45 fire booms would have lasted about two weeks. The BP spill extended for three months.

EMPTY PLANS ALL AROUND

The permits filed by Gulf drillers provide response plans that are supposed to prove the company's ability to cope with a worst-case spill.

The 2009 exploration plans for the Deepwater Horizon well stated that BP could handle a spill involving as much as 12.6 million gallons of oil per day. The plans were almost word-for-word copies of the drilling and response plans filed by every other company working in the Gulf.

Skimming was to play a major role should a spill occur. But the notion that anyone could ever skim 12.6 million gallons of oil a day is simply preposterous.
 
By the end of the three-month BP spill, the company had managed to skim about 2.8 million gallons. That's about 1/500th of the 1.4 billion gallons that BP presumably was ready to deal with over such a span of time.
 
The rest of BP's 582-page Oil Spill Response Plan wasn't much more useful. (One portion offered advice on dealing with walrus and seal populations, of which the Gulf has none.) The plan called for fire booms, but provided no source for obtaining them.
 
In fact, the plan was just one more indication that no one ever really imagined a spill on the scale of the BP spill. And it was further evidence that the federal government and BP were inventing a response on the fly.

The lack of a plan was also evident when it came to figuring out whether the seafood in the Gulf was safe to eat. For reasons I still don't understand, federal officials decided to ignore the long-standing safety standards used to protect people from oil-contaminated seafood after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and other major spills in Oregon, Rhode Island, California and Maine. Instead, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration chose to allow three times more oil in Gulf seafood than had been allowed after past spills.

For instance, after the New Carissa oil tanker ran aground in Oregon in 1999, the safety standard for shellfish was set at 45 parts per billion for BaPE, which is an estimated total of cancer-causing oil compounds. After a spill in California, the standard was set at 34 parts per billion. But in the Gulf after the BP spill, the FDA set the standard at 132 parts per billion for shrimp and crabs, and 143 parts per billion for oysters.

A primary factor behind the decision to allow more contamination in the Gulf seafood was that the FDA used a one-in-100,000 risk of developing cancer on the Gulf coast. The standards after the California and Oregon spills were based on a one-in-1-million cancer risk factor.

Revelations about the standards outraged the Gulf public.

In the end, the major lessons I took from the BP spill aren't the ones you'd expect, such as the fallibility of technology, or agency ineptitude, or the hubris of the oil industry for working in water so deep without a real safety net. Those lessons were there to be learned for sure. But two much more important lessons jump at out at me, five years on.

First, the government should never knowingly lie in the face of a national disaster, for once you break the public's trust, you never get it back.

And second, the Gulf of Mexico is magnificently resilient, but we should let that fact be a call to arms, not a reason for complacency in the face of all the insults we heap upon its waters.
 
COMING SUNDAY: After a last lovely day, the oil spill arrives, in all its ugliness, befouling Alabama waters, shores and lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Few writers in the world know the BP oil spill as well as Ben Raines. In 2010, Raines, working as a reporter for AL.com, spent months on the front lines of the crisis. His efforts to probe the disaster, and expose the failings of government and industrial interests, received national attention. Today, Raines serves as the executive director of the Weeks Bay Foundation in Fairhope, Ala.