McCain Falsely Claims Katrina And Rita Did Not Cause Significant Oil Spillage
McCain Falsely Claims Katrina And Rita Did Not Cause Significant Oil Spillage
Speaking before Houston oilmen Tuesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) declared his support for lifting the 25-year federal moratorium on offshore drilling. He justified this reversal of his longstanding opposition by explaining that it’s now “safe”:
As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.
Watch it:
McCain is repeating a popular myth. As the hackish Newsweek and Washington Post editor Robert Samuelson wrote on April 30, 2008, “Despite extensive damage, there were no major spills, says Robbie Diamond of Securing America’s Future Energy, an advocacy group.” In the weeks following Katrina and Rita’s one-two strike in the summer of 2005, the Bush administration claimed there was “only minor sheening” from offshore oil spills.
In fact, the clear satellite evidence of major spills was borne out by final reports. In May 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) published their offshore damage assessment: “113 platforms totally destroyed, and 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10″ or larger diameter.”
Unsurprisingly, this devastation caused significant spillage, according to the official report prepared for the MMS by a Norwegian firm:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]
In addition, the hurricanes caused disastrous spills onshore throughout southeast Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast as tanks, pipelines, refineries and other industrial facilities were destroyed, for a total of 595 different oil spills. The 9 million gallons reported spilled were comparable with the Exxon Valdez’s 10.8 million gallons, but unlike the Exxon Valdez, were distributed throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf Coast states, many in residential areas. The most massive spills included:
– The Bass Enterprises Cox Bay spill of 3.78 million gallons of oil, the largest spill caused by the hurricanes
– The Murphy Oil spill in Mereaux, LA of 819,000 gallons of oil, contaminating 1,700 homes and the local high school
As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2005:
The quantity and cumulative magnitude of the 595 spills, which were spread across four states and struck offshore and inland, rank these two hurricanes among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
UPDATE: At the Think Progress mothership, Lee Fang notes that conservatives are repeating this false talking point:
– George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”
– Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”
– Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”
– Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”
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Did the MSM pass any of this on to the public????????
June 20th, 2008 at 12:44 amNo.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pmConservatives are feasting over Newt’s ‘Drill Here, Drill Now’ Movement, on Youtube. Don’t try to point out some facts, that just triggers their attack reflex. sad
June 21st, 2008 at 2:41 amhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXAFY9d_MpU
I believe there were likely significant spills, but am having trouble verifying what is posted here.
For instance:
I went to the link for MMS regarding both of these statements. The document dated 5/01/2006 doesn’t say anything like this. I searched and searched in the document dated 1/22/07 and could find nothing about 743,700 Gallons.
Something is not right.
June 21st, 2008 at 11:55 amI went to the MMS link and found the exact information cited. What probably confused Eve is that the amounts were stated in barrels in the MMS report instead of gallons. A barrel is equal to 42 U.S. gallons.
But the whole discussion of opening more areas to offshore drilling is mooted by the lack of deep sea drilling equipment to develop the leases which now exist.
June 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pmThank you gxs.
June 21st, 2008 at 5:29 pmEve: I apologize for silently doing the conversion — thanks to gxs for making it clear.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:27 pmThere was a posting here some weeks back that showed satellite pictures of the actual spills floating in the ocean. Gigantic swaths of spilled oil floating in the ocean. Does anybody recollect that posting and where we can find it?
I’m continuing to look for it because it was pretty powerful and obvious.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:08 amrocks911 — follow the “clear satellite evidence” link.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:41 amGlad someone asked for the facts. I had a hard time finding them myslef, but here is an excerpt from a press release I am putting out later today.
Technical report on oilspills from Katrina and Rita
http://www.mms.gov/ tarprojects/ 581/ 44814183_MMS_Katrina_Rita_PL_Final%20Report%20Rev1.pdf
Update report on drilling platform damage after Katrina and Rita
May 2006
http://www.mms.gov/ooc/press/2006/press0501.htm
The U.S. Minerals Management Service stated in their offshore damage assessment that: 113 platforms were totally destroyed, and 457 pipelines were damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10″ or larger diameter.
At least 743,700 Gallons were spilled from 124 reported sources (the Coast Guard calls anything over 100,000 gallons a “major” spill).
554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pmYou all really need to use updated information here is what the MMS reported as of June 20, 2007
As of January 25, 2007, MMS identified 125 spills of petroleum products totaling 16,302 barrels that were lost from platforms, rigs, and pipelines on the Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) as a result of damages from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
Those spills did not occur due to loss of control of the producing wells.
There were no major spills (2,381 barrels per spill or greater) according to USCG official standards.
The USCG defines offshore spills of less than 10,000 gallons (238 barrels) as “MINOR”; offshore spills of 10,000 to 99,999 gallons (238 to 2,380 barrels) as “MEDIUM”; and offshore spills of 100,000 gallons, (2,381 barrels) and greater as “MAJOR”.
According to a report on “Oil in the Sea” from the National Academy of Sciences (1995), far more oil enters the ocean from natural, underwater seeps than from offshore production platforms. In fact, the seeps introduce about 1700 barrels of oil a day into U.S. marine waters, which is about 150 times the amount from oil and gas activities.
Over the past 20 years, less than .001 percent of the oil produced in U.S. state and federal waters have been spilled.
The loss of oil from the Federal OCS wells themselves was minimal due to the successful operation of the safety valves that are required by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to be installed on every well at least 100 feet below the ocean floor.
All facilities on the Outer Continental Shelf in areas threatened by the hurricanes are “shut in” prior to a storm’s arrival, meaning that pipelines are closed and platforms are secured for heavy weather.
Oil losses were mostly limited to the oil stored on platforms that were damaged or oil contained in individual segments of pipelines that were damaged.
There were no accounts of spills from facilities on the OCS that reached the shoreline, or oiled birds or mammals, or involved any large volumes of oil to be collected or cleaned up.
The five largest spills were estimated to be between 1,000 barrels and 2,000 barrels. Two of the five spills may have only been a couple of hundred barrels. These five spills represent only 4 percent of all the spills but total 8,428 barrels and 52 percent of the total spillage. The table below provides more details
but i’ve never known the left to be worried about the truth
http://www.mms.gov/ SettingtheRecordStraight/ EstimatedOil%20SpillsAsaResultofHurricanesKatrinaandRita.htm
http://tinyurl.com/6yyan9
At least 743,700 Gallons were spilled from 124 reported sources (the Coast Guard calls anything over 100,000 gallons a “major” spill).
do you have a link to the above information?
July 15th, 2008 at 5:11 pmwell digging through the pdf report provided above I did a search for “124 spills” and get one hit in the document and here it is
As a result of both storms, 124 spills were reported with
a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, of which about 13,200 barrels were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 4,500 barrels were refined products from platforms and rigs.
as for the pipelines the following is reported
July 15th, 2008 at 5:51 pmPipelines were accountable for 72 spills totaling about 7,300 barrels of crude oil and condensate
spilled into the GOM.
Peter,
You, like the first group of Republicans who were claiming that no “major” spillage of oil occurred are engaged in a dishonest game of semantics. When you use the term “spill”, you are referring to a specific spill instance at a particular platform, pipeline, or storage location. As in
By which the MMS is claiming that no single source had a spill of more than 2,381 barrels.
The specificity of this usage is made clear by your preceding paragraph in which you note that
The mean spill was then “only” 130.42 barrels per spill - well within USCG’s “minor” designation for an individual spill.
So if you make the claim that no “major” spills occurred, then you are making a argument that is correct in a very narrow, technical sense.
However, when the rest of us are using the term “spill” we are referring to the total amount of oil spilled from all the off-shore sources in the Gulf of Mexico due to damage received from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. According to the numbers you’ve provided that total spillage was 16,302 barrels (or approximately 685,000 gallons), which is a very significant amount.
Moreover you, and those making your claim, are counting on people assuming that you’re using the term “spill” in its common-sense way, and not in the narrow sense that you are. You are intentionally speaking a technical truth in order to perpetuate an overall lie.
Those Republicans who are now making the claim that “not one drop” of oil was spilled, are simply lying in all senses of the term.
But I’ve never known Republicans to be that concerned with the truth.
July 15th, 2008 at 7:26 pmJBen
sorry but no one refers to oil spills in gallons it always in barrels. Now the only reason to use gallons is as a scare tactic.
If you are going to use the MMS as a source then you have to use the latest information which is the press release I cite above. everything else is being cherry picked and taken out of context.
the problem is that you and your fellow travelers do not want to believe the facts. you want to make it seem worse than what it really is.
reread the MMS report and you will see that no oil was spilled unless you are referring petroleum products stored on a platform. The MMS is referring to spills from the well head or pipeline. but then why should you folks on the left be concerned about facts. you just want to take things literally. If one is speaking the truth technically then how can it be perpetrating a lie?
July 15th, 2008 at 8:16 pmPeter,
July 15th, 2008 at 8:17 pmPeter,
I did you the service of assuming that you understood the argument you were making. Obviously I should not have extended that courtesy.
Have fun.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:21 pmGiven the fact that Republicans think I am smart enough when it comes to spending my money (tax cuts) then I should be smart enough to make my own decision IF I have the information. Given that tell me the total gallons spilled per square mile over the area of all the spills. Let me make the decision. I am a big boy.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:29 pmYour presented source for discharged oil is not the only one: http://www.epa.gov/ OEM/ docs/ oil/ fss/ fss06/ davis.pdf
this is fairly detailed, including sources of the oil, and what eventually happened to it.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:24 amRead the report linked by this blog entry. Section 6: Environmental Impacts on page 27 states:
“Response and recovery efforts kept the impacts to a minimum with no onshore impacts from these spill events.”
Furthermore:
“As a result of both storms, 124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products, …”
A barrel of oil is approximately 31 gallons. Thus, 17,700 barrels is 548,700 gallons. This seems like a lot of oil. Yet, here is a statement from the NOAA and NRC:
“As pointed out by the National Research Council (NRC) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, “natural oil seeps contribute the highest amount of oil to the marine environment, accounting for 46 per cent of the annual load to the world’s oceans.
NOAA describe a natural seepage area in California: “One of the best-known areas where this happens is Coal Oil Point along the California Coast near Santa Barbara. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of crude oil is released naturally from the ocean bottom every day just a few miles offshore from this beach”
2,000 to 3,000 gallons PER DAY! On an annual basis, that is 265 times 2,000 = 730,000 gallons per year. So, in the COMBINED Katrina and Rita hurricanes, there was less than what happens naturally off the coast of California. This has been going on off the coast of California for thousands of years.
If the California ocean and coastline can survive this without any clean-up or containment effort at all, then what do you think of what the oil industry accomplished in the after-actions of Katrina and Rita? The did SPLENDIDLY!
Look again at the first statement: “Response and recovery efforts kept the impacts to a minimum with NO onshore impacts from these spill events.” Moreover, if you look at the photo in the PDF document, you’ll see folks out there in the GOM cleaning up the oil that was spilled, which is PRECISELY why the oil never made it to shore.
Finally, I am reading your references above about “greatest disaster ever” and in this report I see NO indication of it. Someone is lying! Still, you cannot have it both ways. There is only ONE truth and reality in this. Either the oil made it to the beach and there was a disaster or there was not.
Additionally, you folks scream, hand-wring and flail about in agony that this report “proves” your point that there was a disaster. This is not the truth. Read the report. The report says there are things to improve and lessons to be learned, but it is far from a report of disaster and doom and gloom. You people are feeding your flesh on the emotions based on irrational thoughts and irrational conclusions.
I wish you well in your self-made delusion.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:20 amCorrection: 265 was mistyped and ought to be 365.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:29 amThe natural California seepage canard has already been dealt with over at Think Progress, after our friend Nancy Pfotenhauer tried to promote it:
July 24th, 2008 at 7:38 pmi live on the outskirts of New Orleans, and the Murphy spill caused friends of mine to leave and not come back.
There is still a good bit of “black mud” in some areas, and still unfortunately, some neighborhoods that are almost still totally empty.
The EPA called the spills
“worse than the worst-case scenario.”
more + photos here…
http://batcave911.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 07/ mccain-katrina-oil-spill.html
Brad
August 1st, 2008 at 4:24 pmhttp://www.911review.org/Hurricane_Katrina/photos/
The Murphy spill began when Katrina hit storage tank No. 250-2 at the company’s largest U.S. refinery. Oil companies often fill storage tanks before hurricanes to weigh them down, which stabilizes them and helps prevent damage. But only 65,000 barrels of crude oil were in the 250,000-barrel tank when Katrina arrived, according to the EPA. Floodwaters rose to 18 feet, and the tank dislodged from its foundation. When the floodwater began to recede, about 25,110 barrels, or nearly 1.1 million gallons, leaked into the adjacent residential area, according to the EPA.
The U.S. Coast Guard took charge of the first phase of the cleanup, overseeing emergency responders working for Murphy Oil. The company’s workers repaired the damaged tank and tried to contain the crude, skimming as much as they could from the receding water. After the water had drained, a thick, oily muck remained across a one-square-mile area. National Guard units cordoned off the area. Departing vehicles were sprayed with decontaminants.
Responsibility for supervising the cleanup on land fell to the EPA, which worked with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Most large oil spills occur on water, where oil generally floats to the surface and can be vacuumed up. In St. Bernard Parish, the oil seeped into homes and the soil. That made the cleanup “much harder,” says the EPA’s Mr. Dunne.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13016
At the Chevron Empire oil terminal in Buras, La., oil spill responders used a controlled burn to clean up oil that spilled out of several of the facility’s tanks following Hurricane Katrina. The storm caused at least 8 million gallons of oil to leak at a number of different facilities, making it the second largest U.S. oil spill. Image courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert M. Reed.
http://www.geotimes.org/feb06/featureEmpireburn.jpg
Damage to oil facilities from Hurricane Katrina caused four medium spills (more than 10,000 gallons) and 134 minor spills, in which 8 million gallons of oil leaked onto the ground and into waterways from Louisiana to Alabama. The largest single spill was at the Bass Enterprises Production Company site in Cox Bay, La., where 3.78 million gallons of oil spilled. Another large spill was at the Chevron Empire oil terminal in Buras, La., where the roof of one storage tank was ripped off and the foundation of another ripped out, leaking 1.4 million gallons of oil.
http://www.geotimes.org/feb06/feature_oilspill.html
In St. Bernard Parish, one sample contained diesel range organics above the RECAP value of 650 ppm, with a level of 2100 ppm. USEPA and LDEQ believe the diesel range organics value is associated with the Murphy Oil spill,
http://www.epa.gov/ katrina/ testresults/ katrina_env_assessment_summary.htm
At the time, the tank contained 65,000 barrels of mixed crude oil, and released approximately 25,110 barrels (1,050,000 gallons). The released oil has impacted approximately 1700 homes in an adjacent residential neighborhood; an area of about one square mile.
Levels of diesel range organic chemicals exceeded the LDEQ screening levels for residential soil in approximately 29% of the samples; whereas, levels of oil range organic chemicals exceeded the residential screening levels in approximately 21% of the samples.
http://www.epa.gov/ Katrina/ testresults/ murphy/ index.html
Playground Soil and Sediment Sampling
The results of the samples were compared to LDEQ’s Risk Evaluation/Corrective Action Program (RECAP) Residential Screening Level of 400 mg/kg lead.
http://www.epa.gov/ Katrina/ testresults/ index.html#schools
Bobby Jindal Claims Katrina Caused No Oil Spills
August 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=b12iyoB3mmo&eurl=http:/ / www.911review.org