failure of deep-sea disaster plan Failures in risk management were a key factor leading to one of the largest oil well disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, United States. The May 2010 Deepwater explosion killed 11 men and left miles of Louisiana coastline covered in oil, causing billions of dollars in damage to the area's tourism and fishing industries to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned" original essayBetween 3.3 and 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, marking the worst marine disaster in the states history. States Part of the emergency planning process failed – According to the BP plan, even in the event of a spill 10 times worse than the current one, the oil would not reach the coast because the drilling operations are too far from the sea: due to the distance from the coast (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant negative impacts are expected. Yet oil has already contaminated the marshes of coastal Louisiana, and tar pellets have appeared on beaches as far away as Florida. Officials were forced to ban tourists from swimming on several miles of contaminated beaches in northwest Florida and Alabama. The plan lists a company called Marine Spill Response Corp as a group that can provide equipment to respond to a spill. But the website listed for the company links to a defunct Japanese-language webpage. BP claims in the paper that it can launch enough ships to scoop up to 20 million gallons of oil from the water each day – a guess that now appears highly optimistic. And a method for calculating the volume of a spill based on the dark sheen color of contaminated seawater produces an underestimate, with internationally accepted formulas giving figures up to 100 times higher. Among the liaison people listed in case of emergency is Bob Lutz, appointed as a wildlife expert at the University of Miami. But AP says Lutz, a sea turtle expert, left Miami two decades ago to head Boca Raton University's marine biology department, and died four years before BP's plan was approved. The document errors are likely to contribute to the growing public impression that BP was unprepared for a major accident. There are other totally false hypotheses. BP's proposed method of calculating spill volume based on the darkness of the oil's sheen is a long way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce times 100 times higher. The Gulf Loop Current, which is expected to help send oil hundreds of miles around the southern tip of Florida and along the Atlantic coast, is not mentioned in either plan. In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. This was a workforce never foreseen in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how the birds will be cleaned of oil. And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted they have approached the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that is evident from the constantly evolving nature of the response. However, the shortage was prevented after BP reported the seemingly good news. that a containment plug installed on the wellhead was channeling some of the leaking crude oil towards an oil tanker insurface, BP introduced an entirely new set of plans aimed primarily at capturing more oil. The latest version involves building a larger cover, using a special incinerator to burn some of the recovered oil and introducing a floating platform to process the oil sucked out of the gushing well. Below are some examples of how BP plans have fallen short.1. The beaches, where oil would surface within weeks of a spill, were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could deploy more than enough boats to collect all the oil before any Deepwater spill could reach the shore – a statement that seems absurd in retrospect. The ships in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively, one of the documents states. BP says the combined response could skim, vacuum or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil from the water every day. But "this is what has transpired in the last six weeks - and the smudge now covers about 3,300 square miles," according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite tracking facility. Only a small portion of the spill was successfully skimmed off. Additionally, an undetermined portion of the spill has settled to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in the middle. The plan uses computer models to predict a 21% chance that the oil will reach the Louisiana coast within a month of the spill. An oily sheen reached the Mississippi River Delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy orbs soon followed. Other locations where oil spilled within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as safe and far from any oil danger. BP's plan for endangered birds, sea turtles or marine mammals (no negative impacts) also proved to be too optimistic. While the exact toll on the Gulf's wildlife may never be known, the effects have clearly been devastating. More than 400 oil-treated birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude oil, mostly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible sheen of oil contaminates pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the most harrowing aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; response plans do not foresee anything on this scale. In Barataria Bay in Louisiana, a dead sea turtle covered in reddish-brown oil lay sprawled as dragonflies buzzed nearby. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins also found themselves on the shore. So, catch countless fish. There should have been problems on the coast because the site was far offshore. Due to the distance from the coast (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are anticipated, the site plan states. But that distance failed to protect precious resources. And last week, a group of scientists at an environmental research center released a computer model that suggested oil could ride ocean currents around Florida and up to North Carolina by summer.3. Perhaps the clearest example of BP's planning failures: the company insisted that the size of the loss did not matter because it was always reacting to theworst case scenario. Yet, every step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak grew from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP was forced to scramble to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more booms, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.4. While a devastating disaster like a major oil spill will create some problems that can be solved in advance, or even predicted, BP's plans do not anticipate even the most obvious problems and use mountains of words to dismiss problems that have proven overwhelming. In responses to the AP's long list of questions, officials at BP and the Interior Department, which oversees the Minerals Management Service, the oil rig regulator, appeared to admit that there were problems with the two spill response plans. petrolium. Many of the questions you raise are exactly those questions that will be examined and resolved by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into the BP oil spill, said Kendra Bark off, spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. He added that “Salazar has undertaken transformative reforms of the MMS.” BP spokesman Daren Beaudo of Robert, Louisiana, said: We expect a comprehensive review of the regional response plans and planning process to take place as part of the overall accident investigation so we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. We have implemented the largest spill response in history so far, and many, many elements have worked well. However, we are very disappointed that the oil has washed ashore and impacted the coasts and marshes. The situation we are facing is clearly complex, unprecedented and will give us much to learn from. A fundamental failure of the cleanup plan provisions was the paucity of floating barriers of plastic or absorbent material positioned around sensitive areas to divert oil. From the beginning, local officials along the entire Gulf Coast have complained about lack of supplies, particularly the so-called ocean boom. But BP also says in its regional plan that the boom is effective in seas above three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often larger. And even in calmer waters, oil has submerged vital wildlife breeding grounds in places presumably sequestered by multiple layers of booms. BP's plans talk about widespread resources for everyone; there is no mention of the need to share. However, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said its coasts were made vulnerable by the Coast Guard's decision to move the boom to Louisiana when oil threatened to make landfall there. Meanwhile, in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, Nungesser and others complained that miles of reef now in the water were not adequately anchored. AP reporters saw evidence that he was right: Some boom lines were so broken that they hardly impeded the push toward shore. Some out-of-state contractors unfamiliar with local waters placed the boom where tides and currents ensured it would. Not working properly. Yet disorganization has hampered efforts to use local boats. In Venice, Louisiana, near where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf, a large group of charter captains are known to spend their days sitting on the docks, making $2,000 a day without ever striking oil. But perhaps the most obvious mistake is Nei.