The Feds' Oil-Spill Number Games

[G_j]

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/09/watchdogs-file-suit-govt-spill-info

The Feds' Oil-Spill Number Games

— By Kate Sheppard
Fri Sep. 17, 2010 3:00 AM PDT


Initial government estimates about the size of the Gulf oil spill were low—way, way low. The number the government repeated for four weeks, about 5,000 barrels per day, was about one-twelfth of the actual rate oil was seeping from the well. So what went wrong with the government's math? It's an awfully good question, one that watchdog groups want answered. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which represents whistleblower scientists at government agencies, announced Thursday that it is filing suit against the Obama administration to gain access to the paper trail on the government's early assessments. The group says government officials are "hiding the memos and e-mails behind official scientific assessments of the size of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

At the height of the spill, 62,000 barrels of oil gushed from the hole daily, the federal government flow rate team concluded in August. That's a far cry from BP's first estimate—1,000 barrels—and from the government's first initial estimate of just 5,000 barrels per day. They later increased the official estimate to 12,000 to 19,000 at the end of May.

Yet as I reported shortly after that range was released, the actual documentation that the US Geological Survey, a division of the Department of Interior, released a week later made it clear that even this rate was a low-end estimate. But Marcia McNutt, the director of the USGS and chair of the Flow Rate Technical Group, told reporters that this was the best estimate available at the time.

PEER says the administration is violating the Freedom of Information Act by not releasing the requested documentation, which includes the technical data supporting the estimates about the spill size, directives from agency heads, and correspondence between officials and scientists.

..more..

[nashville_brook]

1. this is a must read. thanks for posting!

[G_j]

2. thanks

for your comment

[The Flaming Red Head]

3. And we all instantly knew they were lying their asses off

I did anyways.

[The Flaming Red Head]

4. Just like they're lying about 75% being gone

n/t

[Urban Prairie]

5. They know that we knew...

That they lied through their teeth about the rate of flow from the gusher, as well as the amount of crude that is still in the GOM, in large part having been "dispersed" onto the seafloor.

[G_j]

6. and knew that we knew that

they could get away with it.