This is a Jason Leopold TruthOut piece that has been cross-posted at The Mudflats. He will be Shannyn Moore's guest tomorrow here
http://kudo1080.com/ 11:00-2:00 Alaska time. (That's 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. on the East Coast). BP needs to be shut down and kicked out of the country.
http://www.themudflats.net/2010/06/15/documents-employees-reveal-bps-alaska-oilfield-plagued-by-major-safety-issues/Nearly 5,000 miles from the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, BP and its culture of cost-cutting are contributing to another environmental mess.
According to internal BP documents obtained by Truthout, and after interviewing more than a dozen employees over the past month, the Prudhoe Bay oil field, in a remote corner of North America on Alaska’s north shore, is in danger.
After two serious oil spills and other mishaps, the BP employees fingered a long list of safety issues that have not been adequately addressed, making the Prudhoe Bay oilfield vulnerable to a devastating accident that potentially could rival the havoc in the Gulf.
“The condition of the
field is a lot worse and in my opinion a lot more dangerous,” said Marc Kovac, who has worked for BP on Alaska’s North Slope for more than three decades. “We still have hundreds of miles of rotting pipe ready to break that needs to be replaced. We are totally unprepared for a large spill.”
Kovac, a mechanic and welder who is the steward of the United Steelworkers union local 4959, said a lot of employees share his feelings, but “don’t want to risk their jobs for speaking out.” Kovac said he was willing to take the risk because BP has been slow to deal with the Prudhoe Bay problems and that “many lives are at stake.”
Some of the employees, speaking anonymously, said BP follows an “operate to failure” attitude.
Kovac said that means BP Alaska avoids spending money on “upkeep” and instead runs the equipment until it breaks down.
Typical of this problems, the employees said, was an oil spill that was discovered on Nov. 29, 2009, when a BP Alaska employee performing a routine check discovered oil pouring out from a two-foot long gash on the bottom of a 25-year-old pipeline at BP’s Lisburne facility.
“The spill was from an 18-inch three-phase common line carrying a mixture of crude oil, produced water, and natural gas,” according to an incident report from the Alaska Department of Environment and Conservation’s (ADEC) Division of Spill and Response.
<snip - much more>
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