Poor initial Gulf spill numbers did ‘not impact’ response

In the early weeks after the catastrophic blowout of the deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, BP — the well’s owner — provided the government dramatically low estimates of the flow rate of oil and gas into the sea. Did telling Uncle Sam and the public that the flow rate was 1,000 barrels per day and later 5,000 barrels per day — when the actual rate was closer to 60,000 barrels per day — affect the spill’s management?

“The answer is no,” said Thad Allen at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C., of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Allen, who recently retired from the Coast Guard, was its commandant during the early days of the spill. He assumed command of the spill’s management on day one.

“We never, at any point, relied on the 1,000 or 5,000 barrel per day” figure, Allen said. Indeed, he points out, that’s one reason “I established a separate government Flow Rate Technical Group to look at this from an independent standpoint.”

But even if the now-best-estimates had been available a few days into the spill, Allen says, it would not have affected his decision-making. The reason: “We assumed at the outset that this could be a catastrophic event” and acted accordingly.

Nor did he blame BP for issuing bum estimates, he says, because “it took a while for the event to reveal itself.” He says that “part of the problem with flow rates was access to the spill site.” People couldn’t get there and various contractors to BP took a while to experiment with sending remotely piloted vehicles into the hostile environment.

Even when video began sending back troubling data on the ferocity of the hydrocarbon releases, scientific estimates of the spill were hampered by resolution of the available video, Allen says. Based on a few small samples of some high resolution video that eventually emerged, Columbia University researchers last week reported in Science that the best estimates of the spill rates were between 56,000 and 68,000 barrels per day, depending on varying conditions of the well.

However, one of the commission’s co-chairs — former senator Bob Graham (D.-Fla.) — expressed skepticism about Allen’s claim that bad flow-rate numbers didn’t matter. During a news conference on the morning’s presentations, he said: “It’s a little bit like Custer. He underestimated the number of Indians that were on the other side of the hill and he paid the ultimate price for that.”