BP’s ‘worst case’ even worse

ATLANTA – The effects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill continued to spread eastward Sunday, leaving tar balls along the white beaches of the Florida Panhandle, while Washington lawmakers maneuvered through the tricky political currents of the unprecedented environmental disaster.

Navarre Beach was among several tourist-dependent West Florida towns where tar balls were reported Sunday and where cognitive dissonance reigned: Everyone knew the oil had come and millions more gallons were threatening offshore. But many tourists happily indulged in sand and surf anyway.

Caitlyn Blizzard, an assistant in the Santa Rosa County public information office, said despite the official report of tar balls, she walked Navarre Beach on Sunday morning and saw nothing but blue water and pearly sand.

“People are in the water right now on Navarre Beach,” she said Sunday afternoon. “The water’s clear. It’s beautiful.”

Cortnee Ferguson, a spokeswoman for the Deepwater Horizon unified response in Mobile, Ala., said “strike teams” were established along the coast to pick up tar balls as they were reported.

In Washington on Sunday, the office of Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., made waves with the release of an internal BP document that described a number of possible flow rates from the well, including one estimate that as many as 100,000 barrels per day could gush out if the equipment around the top of the well, including the failed blowout preventer, were removed.

In a news release, Markey’s staff said at the time Congress received the document, BP officials were telling lawmakers 60,000 barrels per day was their worst-case scenario. Markey, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement the document raised “very troubling questions about what BP officials knew and when they knew it.”

But the equipment remains at the top of the well. BP doesn’t plan to remove it until relief wells enable the company to plug the gusher, spokesman Toby Odone said. He called the 100,000 number “obviously a theoretical calculation based on the removal of the blowout preventer.”

“It’s not like anybody’s trying to hide anything,” he said.

One barrel of oil is equal to 42 gallons.

Odone said BP gave the document to Congress on May 4. Markey’s office did not respond to queries about why it had waited until now to release it.

Markey accused BP of incompetence at the minimum.

“Right from the beginning, BP was either lying or grossly incompetent,” Markey said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel also criticized BP, but he saved his harshest words for congressional Republicans. Emanuel said Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP last week should remind voters of what would happen if the GOP won control of the House this fall.

Barton, a Texan and the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, apologized to BP at a House hearing Thursday for what he called a White House “shakedown” that resulted in BP agreeing to establish a $20billion claims fund for individuals and businesses hurt by the spill. Hours later, under pressure from Republican leaders, Barton retracted his apology, but Emanuel said Sunday it reflected the philosophy of Republicans at large.

“The approach here expressed and supported by other voices in the Republican Party sees the aggrieved party as BP, not the American – not the fishermen and the communities down there affected,” Emanuel said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“And that would be the governing philosophy. And I think what Joe Barton did is remind the American people, in case they’ve forgotten, this is how the Republicans would govern.”