Add yet one more instance where BP’s assertions of reality in the Gulf Oil spill have proven to be either a mistake or seeming outright incorrect information: the initial estimates British Petroleum and the government (relying on BP) out are now believed to be wrong — and the oil is believed to be 4 to 8 times more than what the public was initially told.
The Christian Science Monitor:
For nearly a month and a half, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil blow-out is likely to have pumped between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, according to new estimates of the flow.
That eclipses initial estimates BP and the government used of 5,000 barrels a day — estimates that scientists outside the government and the international oil giant quickly questioned.
The updated numbers give people coordinating clean-up efforts – as well as government investigators looking at potential civil and criminal charges against BP – a better idea of the full magnitude of the blow-out.
On May 27, scientists working with the national incident command’s flow-rate technical group released a preliminary estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. But they emphasized that this represented the minimum amount of oil leaking into the Gulf.
The latest revision suggests that until June 3, when BP began its effort to install a containment cap on the leaking well to capture as much of the oil as possible and deliver it to surface ships, the blow-out pumped as much as 1.76 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.
That’s nearly two-thirds the amount of oil entering the Gulf as the region’s worst platform spill, the Ixtoc blow-out in the Gulf of Campeche in 1979. That event sent some 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.
These are not happy times for BP. And it’s sparking anti-British backlash in the U.S. and anti-US backlash in Britain. CBS News looks at the issue:
And the British government has started to respond to the tensions, vowing it will back BP:
Making his first public comments since the oil rig explosion, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said during a visit to Afghanistan Wednesday that the “U.K. government stands ready to help.”
“I completely understand the U.S. government’s frustration,” he said. “The most important thing is to try to mitigate the effects and get to grips with the problem.”
Mr. Cameron said he intends to discuss the issue with President Obama. The two are scheduled to talk on the phone this weekend. The Prime Minister declined to weigh in on the “anti-British rhetoric” London’s mayor and others in Britain have accused the United States of spreading.
George Osborne, the U.K. Treasury chief, told The Wall Street Journal in an emailed statement that the Prime Minister asked him to call Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive. “The Prime Minister is … clear that we need constructive solutions and that we remember the economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America.”
Juliet Huck, an expert in persuasive communications and head of The Huck Group, said the U.K.’s show of support is an interesting first step.
“But we’ll see if they put both feet in or there may be a backlash against them as well,” she said. “People want to see action.”
Speaking at a briefing in Washington after the new numbers were released, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, the Obama administration’s point man in the spill, said reliable numbers on the severity of the crisis are hard to get.
“I think we’re still dealing with the flow estimate,” he said. “We’re still trying to refine those numbers.” But he said experts still hoped to capture more of the spill as equipment is upgraded and made available.
The director of the United States Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt, who is also director of the technical group, said more detailed analysis of the video showing the gushing oil as well as the use of sonar equipment was used to arrive at the new estimates, The New York Times reported.
Two scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution made the measurements on May 31, the Times said, but another team came up with even higher estimates, The Associated Press reported.
President Barack Obama, who has made three trips to the region to inspect the environmental damage and talk to some of the thousands of people affected by it, is scheduled to take part in a meeting of administration officials at the White House on Wednesday with BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.
The company, which hopes to increase the amount of oil it’s capturing from the spill by next week, has been fighting off increasing criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Its stock rose slightly in London today after dropping to a 14-year low in U.S. trading on Wednesday.
BP, one of Britain’s biggest companies, plays a large role in almost every U.K. pension fund, The Times of London reported, and any move to suspend or defer dividend payments could send stocks down again and lead to public anger.
To see the live feed of oil still gushing into the Gulf CLICK HERE.
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related article at TMV: F BP and The Horse They Rose In On, and here on Why Humans Grieve the Death of Creatures, and here, one of the first attentive memorializations in media of the lives of the eleven men lost on the BP oil rig explosion and fires, all by Dr. CP Estés. Other BP coverage throughout TMV front page and archives.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.