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"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

by Greg Palast
for FreePress.org

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn't have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

***

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores.

Get it now!

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GregPalast.com

********

5 years ago, we published out first report on the Vultures with BBC TV and Democracy Now! - in the UK it set London MP's to action - the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called them "morally outrageous” and pledged to make them illegal in that country.

In the US it was two Congressman, Donald Payne and John Conyers that stormed the White House with our report and told the President that he must act.

Congressmen Donald Payne, tirelessly fought against Vulture Funds in this country, calling hearings, pushing the Washington beltway to take notice of this practice. He died this week, he will be missed. State Senator Richard Codey said it best "He was bigger than life but never conducted himself that way, If you were violating somebody’s rights, you better get out of the way.”

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by Greg Palast
for TheMudflats

See Greg Palast on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman on the BP Settlement.

Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Greg Palast led a four-continent investigation of BP PLC for Britain's television series Dispatches. From 1989-91, Palast directed the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding for Alaska Native villages.

Some deal. BP gets the gold mine and the public gets the shaft.

On Friday night, the lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of a trial that could expose the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out.

I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage — and the oil that BP says is gone.  Miles of it.  As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives — from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases.

Two years ago, President Barack Obama forced BP to set aside at least $20 billion for the oil spill's victims.  This week's settlement will add exactly ZERO to that fund.  Indeed, BP is crowing that, adding in the sums already paid out, the company will still have spent less than the amount committed to the Obama fund.

There's so much corrosion, mendacity and evil covered up by this settlement deal that I hardly know where to begin.

So, let's start with punitive damages.

I was stunned that there is no provision, as was expected, for a punishment fee to by paid by BP for it's willful negligence. In the Exxon Valdez trial, a jury awarded us $5 billion in punitives - and BP's action, and the damage caused in the Gulf, is far, far worse.

BP now has to pay no more than proven damages. It's like telling a bank robber, "Hey, just put back the money in the vault and all's forgiven."

This case screamed for punitive damages. Here's just a couple of facts that should have been presented to a jury:

For example, the only reason six hundred miles of Gulf coastline has been slimed by oil was that BP failed to have emergency oil spill containment equipment ready to roll when the Deepwater Horizon blew out. BP had promised the equipment's readiness in writing and under oath.

And here's the sick, sick part. This is exactly the same thing BP did in the Exxon Valdez case. It was BP, not Exxon, that was responsible for stopping the spread of oil in Alaska in 1989. In Alaska, decades ago, BP told federal regulators it would have oil spill "boom" (the rubber that corrals the spreading stuff) ready to roll out if a tanker hit. When the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef, BP's promised equipment wasn't there: BP had lied.

And in 2010, BP did it again. Instead of getting the oil contained in five hours as promised as a condition of drilling, it took five days to get the equipment in place (and that was done by the US Navy on orders of the President).

This was more than negligence: it was fraud, and by a repeat offender. Now BP is laughing all the way to the bank.

And there's more. BP mixed nitrogen into the cement which capped the well-head below the Deepwater Horizon. BP claimed to be shocked and horrified when the cement failed, releasing methane gas that blew apart the rig. BP accused the cement's seller, Halliburton, of hiding the fact that this "quick-set" cement can blow out in deep water.

But, in an investigation that took me to Central Asia, I discovered that BP knew the quick-set cement could fail - because it had failed already in an earlier blow-out which BP covered up with the help of an Asian dictatorship.

The lack of promised equipment, the prior blow-out — it all could have, should have, come out in trial.

Think about it: BP knew the cement could fail but continued to use it to save money. Over time, the savings to BP of its life-threatening methods added up to billions of dollars worldwide. BP will get to keep that savings bought at the cost of eleven men's lives.

Other investigators have uncovered more penny-pinching, life-threatening failures by BP and its drilling buck-buddies, Halliburton and TransOcean. These include bogus "blow-out preventers" and a managerial system that could be called, "We-Don't-Care Chaos."

BP partners and contractors will have to pay $5.4 billion as part of the deal — and BP, not the victims, will keep the entire $5.4 billion. If TransOcean and Halliburton follow suit, BP could walk without paying another dime to victims.

BP had no choice but to pay proven damages and conceded as much. I have learned from inside the plaintiffs' legal team that this judge was just not going to allow punitive damages; and the Bush-burdened US Supreme Court is just as hostile. (The Supremes cut the Exxon Valdez punitive award by 90%.)

So BP walks without the civil punishment that tort law should provide and justice demands, grinning and ready to do it again: drill on the cheap with the price paid by its workers and the public.

But stopping a trial denies the public more than the full payment due: it denies us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There are 72 million pages of evidence from inside BP and industry files obtained by legal discovery in the case which are now likely to follow the rig to the bottom of the sea.

That's not good. We need the real story.

The lawyers for plaintiffs got all they could get for their clients given the rightward march of the law. Also, there is no doubt that the control of the “$20-billion” spill fund by Kenneth Feinberg, known here in New York as “The Reptile,” the back room choice of Obama and BP, shafted victims by the thousands. Getting the Fund out of his saurian hands is probably the best part of the settlement deal.

But we need to widen the idea of “victim” to beyond those measurably harmed individuals. We are all BP’s victims: because of BP’s and the industry’s addiction to safety fakery from Alaska to the Caspian.

The President has just opened up the arctic waters of Alaska for drilling, has reopened the Gulf to deepwater platforms, and is fiddling with the idea of allowing the XL Pipeline to slice America in half.

So we need to know: Can we trust this industry?

The states of Louisiana and Mississippi could still haul BP into court. Fageddaboudit: neither Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal nor Mississippi's Phil Bryant, both of the Grand Oil Party, will expose BP. The Obama Administration must be pushed to bring the case to trail in the public interest. Though the history of federal complicity and Obama's fear of looking like a whale-hugging drill buster suggests a sell-out is in the offing.

Without a trial in the Deepwater Horizon case, we may never get the answer, never get the full story of the prior blow-outs, the fakery in the spill response system, and other profits-first kill-later trickery that bloats the bottom line of BP and the entire drill-baby-drill industry.

***

For more on Palast's worldwide investigation of BP and the industry in Central Asia, the Gulf, Alaska and the Amazon, read Palast's new book, Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores at www.VulturesPicnic.org.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

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They're stealing it again.

In 2000, my team uncovered how Katherine Harris illegally purged thousands of African-Americans from Florida's voter rolls.

In 2004, for BBC, we uncovered the Karl Rove GOP "caging scheme" that swiped that election.

In 2008, we uncovered, for Rolling Stone and BBC, with co-investigator Bobby Kennedy, the GOP attack on voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

This year, there's a new danger: Behind the election games are billionaires Super-PAC-ing the ballot box.

But we have something they fear: deep file cabinets filled with confidential information on the billionaires behind Restore Our Future and other PAC-rats.

(We broadcast the first investigative report of the Koch Brothers in 1996. And they're not the worst. We MUST get this information out and soon.)

Now, our team is prepared to dig in again, to write about and to film the scams against our civil rights -- and this time, we have TV networks and major print outlets ready to take our reports.

BUT, they can't finance the basic detective work that gives our reports their powerful weight of undeniable facts.

For that, we count on you.

Please, right now, make a tax-deductible donation to the Palast Investigative Fund for our Billionaires and Ballots investigation.
If you join up with us to help fund the completion of our investigation, for your tax-deductible donation, we'll be happy to send you, in thanks:

- $150 - The Billionaires & Ballots Pack: includes a signed copy of Palast's latest, highly acclaimed book, Vultures' Picnic, the Election Files DVD and 5 copies of the Steal Back Your Vote comic plus the new Elections Games film when released. - $75 - Get two DVDs: Election Files and Palast Investigates: from 8-Mile to the Amazon (which includes the 2008 election shenanigans), both signed by Palast - $25 - Get 5 print copies of Steal Back Your Vote: The Graphic Election Guide (one SIGNED by Greg Palast).

Would you consider becoming an Associate Producer (minimum donation $500) or an Executive Producer (minimum donation $1000) of our film on the election games of 2012?

Producers will get a film credit, a dozen signed copies of the new Election Games: Billionaires and Ballots DVD and companion book when released in July. And copies of the book, film, and comic book election guides to the activist or civil rights group of your choice (we have suggestions).

We have lots of film from all over the USA already in the can. We have the files on the billionaire boys club. What we need are the funds to complete the work to get it on the air, into the hands of policy-makers, voters, the voting rights movement and waiting media outlets.

We don't come to you often. Now is the moment.
And we can't tell you how much we appreciate your support.

Yours,
Greg Palast and the team

****

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin.

You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here.

Support the Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.

GregPalast.com

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