Selected remarks from witnesses testimony about the BP Oil Spill to the Energy and Environment Subcommmittee of the House, June 9th,2010;  Briefing on "Beneath the Surface of the BP Spill: What's Happening Now, What's Needed Next"

Horrible things happen ... when complex technologies and procedures overtake humans, who service the technologies falsely assuming complete control. In this briefing I attempt to explain the blowout of the BP exploratory well Mississippi Canyon Block 252-01 in terms of complexity, technology, and science. I argue that organizational structures and human behavior have not kept pace with the complex technologies we – the engineers and scientists – have created. Given the structural changes in the industry, academia, and government, this tragedy has been at least twenty years in the making.

Given our current work on the BP well blowout, there is nothing in the science and engineering of this tragedy that baffles us. It seems that the human inability to grasp and execute the complex steps of a deepwater drilling procedure led to the tragic outcome. A separate discussion is warranted of an almost universal lack of preparedness by the industry and government to deal with the aftermath of this blowout. This general failure of organizational structures should also be understood in the context of complexity.

— From a statement by Ed Patzek, Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE) Department at the University of Texas in Austin.

I’d like to speak very briefly to workforce issues. There’s a workforce crisis in the Gulf today, finding and training enough workers to deal with the relentless onslaught of oil. But there’s a deeper crisis, another consequence of the play of the issue attention cycle. Many of the NOAA scientists and other specialists I know cut their teeth on Exxon Valdez. That was 21 years ago and that means they’re now beginning to retire. How do we train up the best people to take their place and keep current workers apprised of advances in technology and understanding? Workforce issues are pervasive throughout the government agencies that we rely upon to manage and protect our natural resources, and there are surely workforce issues within NOAA. Universities and programs like mine can help, through faculty exchanges and student training, the kinds of things we do best, but resources for such efforts have been lacking. Many vehicles exist, like Sea Grant and the NOAA Cooperative Institutes scattered around the Nation. What’s missing is the money.

We’ve been here before: In 1990, shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill, the US Office of Technology Assessment prepared at the request of the Congress a Background Paper, Coping with An Oiled Sea: An Analysis of Oil Spill Response Technologies. The report, strongly influenced by events then still unfolding in Prince William Sound, warned that future spills could easily overwhelm the technologies we had. It also cautioned that we can’t prepare for every contingency. The risk will never be zero. It found that industry had focused its efforts on preparing for small, relatively easily controllable spills in harbors and sheltered areas, and that it had likely oversold its ability to respond to major spills. Major spills in open water had up to that point seen recovery rates of no more than 10% of oil spilled, 6-8% in the case of Exxon Valdez, despite billions spent on response. I believe that this picture has not changed much today.

— From a statement by Thomas M. Leschine, Director and Professor, School of Marine Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle

It is virtually impossible to understand or quantify the ecological consequences of the BP blowout on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem without knowing how much oil and gas has leaked from the wellhead. These numbers need to be estimated and corroborated independently based on available observational data. Unfortunately, the leak rate was not quantified robustly during the first month of the spill (at least that information has not been made publicallyavailable). Unless we know how much oil is leaking from the wellhead, we cannot gauge the full extent of the ecological consequences in deepwater or surface water environments. For example, how much deepwater water column oxygen consumption will be fueled by this influx of oil and gas? Which water column microbial communities will be stimulated by oil and gas? What is the time scale of this response? How will surface water microbial communities respond to surface oil and gas inputs? Potential fishery, marine mammal, and wildlife consequences of the BP blowout cannot be properly predicted until we know the magnitude of the disaster. To put it bluntly, the scientific community is hamstrung until we know precisely how much oil and gas has leaked and is leaking from the wellhead.

It is even more important to quantify the inputs from the wellhead since dispersants are being added to the fluid stream at the seafloor. The aim of deepwater dispersant addition is to break up the oil and reduce formation of surface slicks. The application of dispersants at the riser makes it impossible to estimate the size of the leak solely from surface observations (e.g. using satellite imagery). Given the importance of the estimating the magnitude of the spill, the challenge of monitoring hydrocarbons not only on the surface but also within mid- and deep waters, and of quantifying the hydrocarbon's impact on ecosystem services in benthic, pelagic and littoral zones, it is critical that leak rates are quantified at least every other day by independent scientists until the well is capped and the leakage stopped. There are many scientists who can make these measurements and I know they are willing and eager to help.

From a statement by Dr. Samantha B. Joye, Professor of Marine Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia