I was busy Friday cooking Jambalaya and White beans for a Children's Miracle Network and entered a Jambalaya contest on Saturday Took 7th place out of 20 pots. What hurts got beat by a first time 13 year old girl. Dad was supervising.
On Sunday, I took a ride to Venice (3hr drive). There were tons of clean up people and boats but no one was working. I spoke with a few fish boat captains and they stated BP hired them but they have not left the dock in 10 days. Manage to get a boat ride through some of the oil soaked marsh. I can tell you what the media is reporting is for from the truth.
I was not allowed by the boat Captain to bring my camera on board as he feared he would lose his job. He is an oyster fisherman that was unemployed until BP hired him to sit idle at the dock. He tells me that what he showed me was only a small portion of marsh that was damaged. There are many more acres that was soaked in oil.
I had a friend go to Grand Isle and try and gets some pictures of oil birds on the nesting grounds but was threatened with arrest by what he believe were US Wildlife and Fishery Agents. They identified themselves as agents but when he asked for proof they threatened to throw him in jail. He does not believe they were agents but BP employees. He was able to get two pictures before they ran him off.
Today I went to work back in the refinery/chemical plant and I spoke with one of the old offshore hands that transferred in. He stated that in his belief the well is probably good for 50k to 100k barrels per day. He believes that the BOP is partially closed and the rubber on the rams were damaged when they try to pull the drill stem up out of the pipe casing. There were reports that chunks of rubber came up from the well a few hours before it blew out. His reason behind this is the cost of drilling a well that depth of water and that deep is not profitable for 25k Barrels per day. He does not think that 50K of oils is coming out the well before the latest attempt to capture the oil due to partially closed rams.
I can tell you that in the plant I work for Non BP but another major player, we have seen our share of cost cutting and risk taking. Since all this has occurred our injury rate has going up (65 people injured this year alone). My unit had 10 operators per shift and now we are down to 8. Out of 32 shift jobs and 5 day jobs, the average experience in the unit is less then 5 years, (only 6 have at least 20 years). Engineer experience is less then 5 years in the petrochemical business if not straight out of college. Boy I hate those engineers, with their book knowledge trying tell a seasoned 19 year vet how to run the unit.
We layoff all the experience management and replaced them with younger and cheaper labor managers that all they want to do is fire people. Things go so bad in my unit that we hire 15 new operators and 10 went to my unit. 7 either new or experienced (15 or more years) quit to work else where and 6 got fired before they made probation.
I spoke with a fellow refinery work at a BP plant in Texas City about 9 months ago. The one that blow up and killed 15 people and had 3 more fatalities after the explosion. We attended a training session together and as we all talked about our employees taking chances and making cuts, she laughed and said BP tried that and killed 15 at one time. She called me last week and told me that BP has just cut the hourly staff by consolidating jobs in the units and laid off 35. She is starting to see what we seen at my plant.
The bottom line is all theses major players are taking enormous risk to save a dollar. They will take their chances and if something happens they will just pay someone off and fire the hourly person (if they live) for screwing up. They are all focusing on Blaming the work and not the true cause. I have fought this at my location and we have had 12 non probabtion folks fired. We took to 7 out of 12 to arbitration. All 7 got their job back and the arbitrator ruled that the company did not do a complete investigation to find out the true cause of what happened. In the rulings they write the company shares at least equal if not more blame for the issues that lead to theses termination. We did not take the other 5 as we felt that the company had did a complete investigation and theses folks had a history of mistakes or they were arrested abd convicted of a crime.