Oil drilling company asks evacuated workers to sign waivers
Workers pulled out of the Gulf of Mexico when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded last month were greeted by employees from the drilling contractor Transocean with waivers stating that they were not injured in the explosion.
The waivers required workers to state what they were doing at the time of the explosion and state that they were not witnesses to the incident requiring evacuation.
One worker, Chris Choy, told PBS News Hour that “I had been up for almost 40 hours, and just gone through hell. And they want to throw papers in my face for me to sign to take them, you know, out of their responsibility.”
Public Citizen has already pointed out serious problems with BP’s safety record, showing that it repeatedly put workers in dangerous situations. Just last year, OSHA issued the largest penalty ever – $87.4 million – for failing to fix violations for which it had previously been cited.
But despite multi-million dollar penalties from multiple agencies, BP continued to put its workers in danger. Last week, Senators Rockefeller and Byrd introduced two amendments to the financial reform bill that would make BP and other companies accountable to shareholders and the public for workplace safety violations. These amendments would require disclosure of workplace safety violations in a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Lena Pons is a policy analyst for Public Citizen.
May 20, 2010 @ 5:56 pm
While watching the latest news about the BP Oil spill, a frightening thought came to mind: what if we can’t stop the oil? I mean, what happens if after all the measures to cap the pipe fail, (i.e., “Top Hat”, “Small Hat” and “Top Kill”). What then? An accident this problematic is new territory for BP. The 21 inch-wide oil pipeline is nearly a mile down on the ocean floor, accessible only by robots. Add on top of that the extreme pressure at which the oil is flowing out of the pipeline and there you have it: the perfect storm.
Moreover, scientists also claim that they’ve found an enormous plume of oil floating just under the surface of the ocean measuring approximately 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. (I’m no math genius, but I bet one of you reading this could figure out just how many barrels of oil that is…)
There are new estimates that the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico is anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil a day: that’s a far cry from BP’s estimated 5,000 barrels a day. If BP’s estimates are correct, the total amount of oil now in the Gulf would be approximately 150,000 barrels (or 6,300,000 gallons). That’s barely enough to fill 286 swimming pools: sixteen feet, by thirty-two feet, by eight and a half feet deep. That wouldn’t cover an area the size of New York City, let alone an area the size of Delaware. Obviously, the spill is much larger than we are being led to believe. If the leak can’t be stopped, in a year’s time, we’ll have roughly 18,250,000 barrels of oil (or 766,500,000 gallons) in our oceans, killing our marine and animal wildlife. Such a calamity would be environmentally and economically disastrous. I’m not a religious man, but I pray that BP and our government work fast to end this catastrophe.
http://www.calculateme.com/Volume/Barrels(Petroleum)/ToGallons.htm
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/05/17/latest-news-from-the-oil-spill-in-the-gulf-of-mexico-is-grim/
http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2010/05/20/scientist-says-oil-spill-is-leaking-100000-barrels-of-oil-a-day-not-bps-estimate-of-5000/
Workers waivers | Trelittle
March 6, 2011 @ 7:15 am
[…] Oil drilling company asks evacuated workers to sign waivers «The waivers required workers to state what they were doing at the time of the explosion and state that they were not witnesses to the incident requiring evacuation. […]