Oil Spills, What Oil Spills?

Funny how BP seems to have so much loot profit they don't know what to do with it all, yet they still cannot afford to properly maintain their pipelines. One could almost suspect BP wanted to pull an Enron (artificially create shortages so as to be able to raise prices). I'm more interested in this than the personal sexual preferences of their ousted chairman.

House Presses BP on Oil Spills :
U.S. House investigators asked BP for more explanation of a finding in a report about two Alaskan oil spills.

Investigators in the U.S. House of Representatives who are looking into two spills that ended up shutting down Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field last year have sent a letter to the field's operator, BP PLC, asking for more explanation regarding a finding in a consultant's report. The document, put together at the request of BP, said the spills were preceded by budget cuts to maintenance and inspection of pipelines.
The letter was sent Friday by officials of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, who are set to begin another hearing Wednesday into why the spills happened. Although officials have found that corrosion led to a spill of about 200,000 gallons of crude from a pipe in March 2006 and a smaller spill from another line in August, the House investigators are looking into whether cost cuts made the lines more prone to rupture.
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One of the consultants hired by BP to help it investigate the incidents was Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Va., company whose March 2007 report on file with the House committee suggests: “Budget pressure eventually led to de-scoping some projects and deferring others. For example, the plan to run a smart pig in the [oil transit lines, which were the ones that ruptured] was dropped in 2004 and 2005.” A “smart pig” is a device that runs through a pipeline, taking measurements to see if the line suffers from corrosion or other defects.

In their letter to Robert Malone, chairman and president of BP's BP America Inc. unit, Reps. John Dingell (D., Mich.), chairman of the House Energy Committee, and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), chairman of its subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said the finding contradicts BP's previous assertion that failure to pig these lines wasn't a function of any budget pressure.

The congressmen also noted BP has asked that the reference to cost-cutting be removed from the Booz Allen report, calling it “in error.” “If the sentence is removed, we would appreciate a full explanation as to why BP and the report's authors believe the sentence to be inaccurate,” said the two Michigan Democrats in their letter.

The congressmen also disclosed in the letter that they had recently uncovered a Feb. 5, 2003, email from BP they say suggests the company planned to pig the very lines that failed. However, they said, those plans appear to have been rejected by superiors. The email contains an “Authorization for Expenditure” that the congressmen said appears to be a proposal to “install permanent pig launching and receiving facilities” in several places, including transit lines where the spills later took place. But the expense request appears to have been turned down, they added, since it included a notation: “rejected ... for approval.”

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