We'll know something's gone wrong when the explosion happens

Certainly loud enough to serve as an alarm, anyway.

In the risk-management plan, West Fertilizer said the "worst-case scenario" would be an ammonia leak from a storage tank or hose. It didn't specify the likely consequences. The company said the plant had no alarms, automatic shutoff system or firewall.

You may remember we came upon a similar situation during testimony at the BP trial.

Bly said BP's well site leader and Transocean crews misinterpreted a pressure test that showed that change, as well as later pressure changes, losing key reaction time.

"That risk was neither recognized or addressed until it was too late?" Sterbcow asked.

"There were signs that the well was flowing," Bly said. "It didn't seem to be recognized or reacted to."

Actually it was more grossly negligent than that.. if this testimony from this week is any indication.

(BP's vice president of drilling and completions for the Gulf Patrick) O'Bryan described hearing someone ask the rig's master, Curt Kuchta, about activating the rig's blowout preventer, a key piece of equipment intended to shut down the well in an emergency, in the final moments before the explosion. Kuchta said he lacked permission to initiate the device's emergency disconnect system from Jimmy Harrell, Transocean's offshore installation manager on the Deepwater Horizon, O'Bryan testified.

"So after you see the fire and after you've seen mud raining on deck, you recall somebody asking Captain Kuchta about activating the BOP?" Karis asked, shifting focus  for the accident to the Transocean rig crew.

O'Bryan replied: "He was pretty empathic that he couldn't do it unless he had permission."

So on the rig, unlike at the fertilizer plant, there were a shutoff system* and alarms and  in place, but they "didn't seem to be recognized or reacted to." In a way, that might be worse, than having no emergency response system at all.  We'll be able to answer that better once we know more about what went wrong at the fertilizer plant.  Of course, that may take a while because... 

A placid announcement from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board that it's heading to West, Texas, to investigate the massive fertilizer plant explosion shouldn't be remarkable. But it is. Such deployments are rare. Critics of the agency — which is tasked with investigating such accidents — charge that it's mismanaged and prioritizes the wrong investigations. The agency blames someone else, if indirectly: BP.

For the past two years, the Chemical Safety Board's budget requests have argued that its lengthy investigation into the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill is sapping its ability to respond to other incidents. In its 2013 budget request, a document sent to Congress in February 2012 to make the case for its federal budget allocation this year, the CSB wrote that "the burden of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon investigation and a backlog of old cases has further hampered the CSB's ability to initiate new investigations."

And so gross negligence begets more negligence, I guess. 

*Sort of, anyway. Batteries sold separately, of course.

Meanwhile, it's been kind of an eventful week, so it may have been easy to lose the fact of the three year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion today.  Here are a few relevant links.

Phase 1 testimony in the BP trial wrapped up this week. All parties will now file briefs summarizing their arguments.  Judge Barbier will then be expected to rule on the "gross negligence" question although that may take a while.

Given the case's complexity, legal observers and others say it could be another year before Barbier issues a ruling on the first phase that will outline the percentage of liability to be assigned to BP or its partners, and whether any of the companies should be found to have committed gross negligence or willful misconduct, which could result in a four-fold increase in Clean Water Act fines.

Barbier has given attorneys two months to submit briefs summarizing their opinions about the evidence presented during the first phase of the trial.

So the outcome of the first phase remains in doubt and could be for some time.

Phase 2 begins in September and will focus on determining how much oil actually spewed into the Gulf during the several months that the well was un-capped.

No doubt, the use of dispersants will come into play in making that determination.

Not only is the chemical dispersant that was used to "clean up" the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010 extremely dangerous, it was knowingly used to make the gushing oil merely "appear invisible" all the while exacerbating levels of toxicity in the Gulf waters, according to a report released Friday, the eve of the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by the Government Accountability Project.

According to the report, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf: Are Public Health and Environmental Tragedies the New Norm for Oil Spill Cleanups?, Corexit—the dispersant chemical dumped into the Gulf of Mexico by oil giant BP and the U.S. government in the spill's aftermath—was widely applied "because it caused the false impression that the oil disappeared."

The President's Oil Spill Commission released a report this week that patted everyone on the back for a job well done.... except Congress, of course, where the proverbial mistakes were made.

The report gives the Obama administration a grade of B, the oil and gas industry a B- and Congress a D+. Congress gets credit only for enacting legislation that will funnel 80 percent of any Clean Water Act fines from the disaster to the five Gulf states, money the commission hopes will be used for  coastal restoration.

Way to go, guys.  Not what all that that B- work  is gonna do for this, though.

About 40 minutes by boat west of Port Sulphur in Plaquemines Parish, near Barataria Bay, three small spots of land are all that remain of what was once a much bigger barrier called Cat Island. One is a small, lifeless hook, easily found only by those who remember when the barrier island was five acres. A second, only slightly larger in size, is a vegetative graveyard, populated only by the bases of dead mangrove trees and bits of trash.

“This island was covered in oil,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said Thursday, standing just a few feet from the waters of Cat Bay. “Year after year we’d see deterioration in this island, but it was always green.”

Once, the mangrove trees rose eight feet overhead, and pelicans nested around the springtime. When the oil came up from the deep in 2010, the area became the environmental ground zero. After checking up on the island, Parish officials rushed Associated Press photographer Gerald Herbert to the area to take some of the first photographs of oil-covered brown pelicans. For those waiting nervously to see just how bad the disaster would be, there was no more potent symbol than the state bird of Louisiana covered in crude. Three years later, however, there is no sign of birdlife.