From Environment New York:
BP apparently has a new dangerous plan to drill eight miles under the ocean off the coast of Alaska to tap oil. Unfortunately, that’s not the only threat from BP: According to a whistle-blower, BP has another rig in the Gulf with the same faulty safety systems as the Deepwater Horizon rig that caused the spill — and this one poses three times the risk.
This ticking time bomb in the Gulf is called BP Atlantis. It is enormous, standing in water 7,000 feet deep and capable of gushing up to 200,000 barrels of oil daily — three times the amount that spilled out of the destroyed Deepwater Horizon well every day. Atlantis was built and drilled under the same lax rules and enforcement that led to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. And now a whistle-blowing project supervisor named Kenneth Abbott says many of its safety systems and plans areincomplete and not approved by engineers.[1]
The same drilling agency that rushed to approve BP’s fatally flawed drilling plans for the Deepwater Horizon has known about these problems for over a year and done little about it other than promise to investigate.
Despite vast cleanup efforts in the Gulf, a recent report estimates that 70 to 80 percent of BP’s spilled oil is still in the ocean, wreaking havoc with sea turtles, fish, whales and other wildlife. A spill at the Atlantis rig would be even more destructive–and even harder to fix. By BP’s own admission, “The water depths and reservoir structure make Atlantis among the most technologically challenging developments undertaken by BP.” [2]
Leave a Reply