The worst oil spill in the history of the Gulf of Mexico is occurring as we speak. This 600 mile oil slick may very quickly rival the Exxon Valdez tanker spill as the greatest disaster in US oil industry history.
And at the center of this ecological and economic disaster created when the oil rig owned by British Petroleum a/k/a BP Petroleum drilling in 5000 feet of water exploded, and which has taken the lives of at least 11 oil rig workers (that we know about) is a company with whom we are all too familiar: Halliburton or as most of us like to refer to it, former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney’s retirement fund.
NEW ORLEANS – The widow of a crew member killed in last week’s oil platform explosion in the Gulf of Mexico has filed a lawsuit accusing the companies that operated the rig with negligence, court documents showed Tuesday.
The suit was filed by Natalie Roshto against Transocean Ltd, British Petroleum and Halliburton after the blast that killed her husband Shane, a seaman on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig.
According to Rear Admiral Mary Landry of the US Coast Guard:
I am going to say right up front: the BP efforts to secure the blowout preventer have not yet been successful,” Rear Admiral Mary Landry told a press conference Tuesday, referring to a 450-tonne machine that could seal the well.
Asked to compare the accident to the notorious 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster, Landry declined but said: “If we don’t secure the well, yes, this will be one of the most significant oil spills in US history.”
What did your teacher tell you in school when you were a small child nearly every day? Safety Comes First! What message does business try to drill into their employees (their low level employees anyway) on a regular basis? Safety is Job 1. What auto company desperately apologized to its customers worldwide when a manufacturing defect led to the deaths of a 34 people and accident damage to hundreds of vehicles(out of tens of millions sold) over the course of the last ten years? Toyota.
Yet here we have Halliburton, with its unparalleled record of success at screwing the pooch when it comes to worker and environmental, once more firmly entrenched (no pun intended) in another environmental nightmare. Here are some examples of Halliburton’s record of concern for human beings (as opposes to corporate earnings) for your elucidation:
It tends to lose highly radioactive material:
For the second time in two years, hazardous radioactive material owned by Halliburton has gone missing. The material, known as americium, is used for drilling oil. It disappeared last October while being transported from Russia to Houston. Although it was lost for four months, Halliburton and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) insisted the public was never in any danger. The material was found this week at a Boston freight facility after an exhaustive search by the NRC, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In December 2002, Halliburton reported the disappearance of two radioactive devices from its Nigerian operations, sparking fears of a terrorist attack. The devices later turned up at a steel recycling plant in Bavaria, Germany, but nobody knows how or why they were shipped there. The Nigerian government was dismayed over Halliburton’s refusal to return the devices or explain the disappearance. So, the government banned the firm from receiving new contracts, citing a “negligent” safety record.
People who work for it tend to die because it plays fast and loose with the lives of its employees in war zones:
Government contractor Halliburton and its subsidiaries used a fuel delivery convoy as a decoy on an Iraqi highway resulting in an attack by insurgents that killed several civilian employees, according to a wrongful-death suit filed in California federal court.
A complaint by plaintiff April Johnson, the daughter of truck driver Tony Johnson, who died in the attack, accuses Halliburton and subsidiaries Kellogg Brown & Root and Service Employees International Inc. of knowingly and intentionally deploying her father’s fuel delivery convoy as a decoy in a hostile area.
The suit alleges the ploy was used to ensure the safe passage of another convoy traveling to the same destination, the Baghdad International Airport.
It tries to keep its own female employees who were raped by other company officials from having their day in court:
The Los Angeles Times reports that Halliburton is asking the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed Ms. Jamie Leigh Jones’ Halliburton KBR rape case to go to trial. Ms. Jones claims that she was raped while she was working for the company in Baghdad. KBR was Halliburton’s subsidiary until 2007. They are now two separate corporate entities that are currently involved in this case.
Halliburton claims that the contract signed by Ms. Jones and other workers hired by the company indicated that claims must be resolved through arbitration, not trials. However, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in Ms. Jones’ favor in September. They ruled that she can proceed with a court trial of her case. […]
This is not the first time that an employee has had a rape claim against the company. Halliburton KBR came under fire for another case that involved Ms. Tracy Barker, who was allegedly raped while working as a civilian contractor for the company.
There are literally so many examples of this type of mistreatment of its employees and other “civilians” as a result of Halliburton and its subsidiaries’ shady (and shoddy) business practices that I could compile a list that would take weeks to complete.
But all of those examples are unrelated to Halliburton’s oil drilling business you say? All right then, let us examine that record, shall we? here’s one case that went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (based in Texas) where Halliburton was adjudged guilty of gross negligence in the blowout of test stem drilling of a natural gas well:
After the third test was completed [by Halliburton personnel] and as the IPO valve was being removed from the test string, pressure in the Well created a kick. The drill crew brought the Well under control by tightening the connections on the IPO valve, thereby shutting in the Well. During this time, the IPO valve acted as a blowout preventer, a purpose for which it was not intended. Over the next one and a half hours, completion fluid was pumped into the well, causing the pressure to rise. As a result, the single pin in the IPO sheared unexpectedly, causing its ports to open and allowing a blowout of natural gas into the atmosphere. All personnel were safely evacuated from the rig.
It is undisputed that if the IPO had been pinned as intended, the blowout would not have occurred. After 19 days, the blowout was brought under control and the Well was placed into production.
Fortunately for Halliburton, that time the 5th Circuit reversed a factual finding of the trial court (a rare instance indeed, as any attorney can tell you) and it was only found to have committed “ordinary” negligence, not gross negligence. Thus Halliburton was able to enforce an indemnity contract to protect itself from all liability. Lucky boys, indeed.
Halliburton is also a leading proponent, promoter, developer and employer of hydrofracking, a drilling process whereby “a fluid is injected at high pressure into an oil or a natural gas deposit to fracture the rock and release the liquid or gas below.”
This process is highly dangerous as it uses toxic chemicals, large amounts of water and “releases radioactive materials and other hazardous substances” into the fractured rock formations where the chemicals can leach into the local groundwater. It is a process considered by many to be dangerous to the environment and to the quality of water supplies used by human populations with attendant risks to their health and well being.
Fracking chemicals are escaping into groundwater, critics say, and in several states there have been reports of fouled water and increased illness since drilling began. In addition, naturally occurring toxic substances such as arsenic are released from underground by fracturing and have been found at elevated levels near some drilling operations.
There are more than 200 “introduced” chemicals used in fracturing but details of how they are used are not published by energy companies. They are not required to disclose it because of an exemption to a federal clean water law granted to the oil and gas industry in 2005. That exemption has made it hard for critics to prove their case.
Drilling chemicals may cause many illnesses including cancer, fertility problems and neurological disorders, critics say. […]
… The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found 14 “contaminants of concern” in 11 private wells in the central Wyoming farming community of Pavillion, an area with about 250 gas wells. The August report did not identify the source of the contamination but is conducting more tests and is expected to reach a conclusion by spring 2010. In Pennsylvania, at least two privately conducted water tests near gas drilling have also found chemical contamination. One set of tests is being used in a lawsuit by a landowner against the gas company. […]
Residents complain of water that is discolored, foul-smelling, bad-tasting, and in some cases even black. Some say drinking it causes sickness and bathing in it causes skin rashes. In a few cases, water has become flammable because methane has “migrated” from the drilling operations to water wells, a fact that has been confirmed by regulators in Pennsylvania. Many low-income people who live near gas rigs drink bottled water, and some have their water supplied by the gas company.
So how did Halliburton get around the Safe Drinking Water Act to use “fracking” to contaminate water supplies with known carcinogenic compounds and other dangerous chemicals? Thanks to Dick Cheney and his friends in Congress, that’s how. He got what is known as the “Halliburton loophole” to the Safe Drinking Water Act passed through Congress in 2005 (you know, back when the Republicans controlled Congress and all was right with the world?) which permits hydrofracking to occur today, perhaps in a community near you.
Fracking’s long term effects are still not well known, but I sure wouldn’t want to live anywhere near where this process is being used to drill for oil and gas, would you? Not when I saw this:
Not that Halliburton ever waited for Congress to act in order to use illegal drilling methods to contaminate groundwater in pursuit of profits, as Henry Waxman recently discovered:
In an earlier investigation, Waxman had already learned that Halliburton had violated a 2003 nonbinding agreement with the government in which the company promised not to use diesel fuel in the mix when extracting from certain wells. Halliburton pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic, diesel-containing liquids into the ground, potentially contaminating drinking water.
According to the Department of Energy, there were more than 418,000 gas wells in the U.S. as of 2006. Since the Environmental Protection Agency lacks authority to investigate and regulate fracking, the extent of the pollution is unknown.
I don’t know how much blame can be laid at the feet of Halliburton for the disaster occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, but UI do know what the widow of one Halliburton worker is alleging in her lawsuit about the role it played in the explosion that killed her husband:
Her lawsuit charges that Halliburton, an oil services industry firm which prior to the explosion “was engaged in cementing operations of the well and wellcap… improperly and negligently performed these duties, which was a cause of the explosion.”
Those are pretty bold and stark allegations of wrongdoing. Yet given Halliburton’s track record, can we dismiss them out of hand? Hardly. On the contrary, I suspect the more we learn in the coming days, the more Halliburton will be implicated as one of the principal responsible parties for this catastrophe of unprecedented proportions which may shape the future lives of millions of Gulf Coast residents for decades to come.