Multitasking
The Anchorage Daily News headline is fairly tame, Alyeska ‘may have dropped ball,’ official says.
They could have said “Millions of gallons of oil spilled in Delta Junction” to give people a sense of what happened. The back-up power system at a pumping station failed a test, and while people were trying to find out what happened to the generator, they forgot that valves open automatically when the power goes out and everything flows into a storage tank. They figured it out after the storage tank overflowed and the oil started pouring out on the ground. They also discovered that the storage tank wasn’t in great shape, and was in fact bulging.
So, why is this in the “Gulf Gusher” category?
The companies that own Alyeska and the pipeline are BP (46.9 percent), Conoco Phillips (28.3 percent), Exxon Mobil (20.3 percent), Koch Industries (3.1 percent) and Chevron (1.4 percent).
Alyeska president Kevin Hostler is a career BP executive who took over the Alyeska job in 2005.
On land or sea, BP can’t seem to keep “fail-safe” systems from failing.
Remind me again why BP is in charge of anything in the United States.
