Is the BP Atlantis a Ticking Time Bomb?

[n2doc]

— By Kate Sheppard

Wed Oct. 27, 2010 3:00 AM PDT
Offshore drillers rejoiced when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on October 12 that the United States was once again "open for business," just six months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig began pouring crude into the Gulf of Mexico. But Salazar didn't mention BP's other major oil production platform in the Gulf, the one that watchdogs have called a "ticking time bomb" ignored by federal regulators. The BP Atlantis platform is operating in deeper waters and is extracting more oil from the Gulf each day than the Deepwater Horizon well leaked, but neither the company nor the feds have proved it is safe.

Located 124 miles off the Louisiana coast, the Atlantis platform produces 200,000 barrels of oil daily, more than triple the amount of oil that spilled from the Horizon site each day. But long before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a whistleblowing former BP contractor tipped off regulators that the Atlantis may be violating the law, and environmental groups and members of Congress have been publicly questioning the platform's safety ever since.

According to Kenneth Abbott, a former BP contractor who worked on the platform from 2008 through early 2009, more than 7,000 documents necessary to operate the platform safely are missing or incomplete. Abbott says the vast majority of the project's subsea piping and instrument diagrams were not approved by engineers, and the safety systems are out of date. In practice, the lack of documentation on this platform would make it extremely difficult to respond in the event of an accident like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, critics say, because no one really has an accurate picture of the Atlantis' design.

Abbott first aired his concerns to federal regulators in March 2009. In February 2010—two months before the Deepwater Horizon disaster—a group of 19 Democratic House lawmakers led by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) took up Abbott's cause, raising concerns about the Atlantis in a letter to regulators at the Minerals Management Service (renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement shortly after the spill), and the agency promised to look into it.

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http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/10/bp-atlantis-platform-ticking-time-bomb