Update (Nov. 28): The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said today it was temporarily debarring BP, suspending the company from receiving new contracts with the federal government based on its "lack of business integrity" concerning the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers, and related oil spill.

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This story was originally published on May 21, 2010.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

That strategy may no longer work.

Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.

The EPA said in a statement that, according to its regulations, it can consider banning BP from future contracts after weighing "the frequency and pattern of the incidents, corporate attitude both before and after the incidents, changes in policies, procedures, and practices."

Several former senior EPA debarment attorneys and people close to the BP investigation told ProPublica that means the agency will re-evaluate BP and examine whether the latest incident in the Gulf is evidence of an institutional problem inside BP, a precursor to the action called debarment.

Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.

The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called "discretionary debarment" and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company's contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP's existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.

Present and former officials said the crucial question in deciding whether to impose such a sanction is assessing the offending company's culture and approach: Do its executives display an attitude of non-compliance? The law is not intended to punish actions by rogue employees and is focused on making contractor relationships work to the benefit of the government. In its negotiations with EPA officials before the Gulf spill, BP had been insisting that it had made far-reaching changes in its approach to safety and maintenance, and that environmental officials could trust its promises that it would commit no further violations of the law.

EPA officials declined to speculate on the likelihood that BP will ultimately be suspended or barred from government contracts. Such a step will be weighed against the effect on BP's thousands of employees and on the government's costs of replacing it as a contractor.

Even a temporary expulsion from the U.S. could be devastating for BP's business. BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico and operates some 22,000 oil and gas wells across United States, many of them on federal lands or waters. According to the company, those wells produce 39 percent of the company's global revenue from oil and gas production each year -- $16 billion.

Discretionary debarment is a step that government investigators have long sought to avoid, and which many experts had considered highly unlikely because BP is a major supplier of fuel to the U.S. military. The company could petition U.S. courts for an exception, arguing that ending that contract is a national security risk. That segment of BP's business alone was worth roughly $4.6 billion over the last decade, according to the government contracts website USAspending.

Because debarment is supposed to protect American interests, the government also must weigh such an action's effect on the economy against punishing BP for its transgressions. The government would, for instance, be wary of interrupting oil and gas production that could affect energy prices, or taking action that could threaten the jobs of thousands of BP employees.

A BP spokesman said the company would not comment on pending legal matters.

The EPA did not make its debarment officials available for comment or explain its intentions, but in an e-mailed response to questions submitted by ProPublica the agency confirmed that its Suspension and Debarment Office has "temporarily suspended" any further discussion with BP regarding its unresolved debarment cases in Alaska and Texas until an investigation into the unfolding Gulf disaster can be included.

The fact that the government is looking at BP's pattern of incidents gets at one of the key factors in deciding a discretionary debarment, said Robert Meunier, the EPA's debarment official under President Bush and an author of the EPA's debarment regulations. It means officials will try to determine whether BP has had a string of isolated or perhaps unlucky mistakes, or whether it has consistently displayed contempt for the regulatory process and carelessness in its operations.

In the past decade environmental accidents at BP facilities have killed at least 26 workers, led to the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope and now sullied some of the country's best coastal habitat, along with fishing and tourism economies along the Gulf.

Meunier said that when a business with a record of problems like BP's has to justify its actions and corporate management decisions to the EPA "it's going to get very dicey for the company."

"How many times can a debarring official grant a resolution to an agreement if it looks like no matter how many times they agree to fix something it keeps manifesting itself as a problem?" he said.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA's debarment negotiations with BP were strained even before the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The fact that Doug Suttles, the BP executive responsible for offshore drilling in the Gulf, used to head BP Alaska and was the point person for negotiations with debarment officials there, only complicates matters. Now, the ongoing accident in the Gulf may push those relations to a break.

Discretionary debarment for BP has been considered at several points over the years, said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who headed the agency's BP negotiations for six years until she retired last year.

"In 10 years we've got four convictions," Pascal said, referring to BP's three environmental crimes and a 2009 deferred prosecution for manipulating the gas market, which counts as a conviction under debarment law. "At some point if a contractor's behavior is so egregious and so bad, debarment would have to be an option."

In the three instances where BP has had a felony or misdemeanor conviction under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts, the facilities where the accidents happened automatically faced a statutory debarment, a lesser form of debarment that affects only the specific facility where the accident happened.

One of those cases has been settled. In October 2000, after a felony conviction for illegally dumping hazardous waste down a well hole to cut costs, BP's Alaska subsidiary, BP Exploration Alaska, agreed to a five-year probation period and settlement. That agreement expired at the end of 2005.

The other two debarment actions are still open, and those are the cases that EPA officials and the company have been negotiating for several years.

In the first incident, on March 23, 2005, an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers. An investigation found the company had restarted a fuel tower without warning systems in place, and BP was eventually fined more than $62 million and convicted of a felony violation of the Clean Air Act. BP Products North America, the responsible subsidiary, was listed as debarred and the Texas City refinery was deemed ineligible for any federally funded contracts. But the company as a whole proceeded unhindered.

A year later, in March 2006, a hole in a pipeline in Prudhoe Bay led to the largest ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope – 200,000 gallons -- and the temporary disruption of oil supplies to the continental U.S. An investigation found that BP had ignored warnings about corrosion in its pipelines and had cut back on precautionary measures to save money. The company's Alaska subsidiary was convicted of a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and, again, debarred and listed as ineligible for government income at its Prudhoe Bay pipeline facilities. That debarment is still in effect.

That accident alone -- which led to congressional investigations and revelations that BP executives harassed employees who warned of safety problems and ignored corrosion problems for years -- was thought by some inside the EPA to be grounds for the more serious discretionary debarment.

"EPA routinely discretionarily debars companies that have Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act convictions," said Pascal, the former EPA debarment attorney who ran the BP case. "The reason this case is different is because of the Defense Department's extreme need for BP."

Instead of a discretionary debarment, the EPA worked to negotiate a compromise that would bring BP into compliance but keep its services available. The goal was to reach an agreement that would guarantee that BP improve its safety operations, inspections, and treatment of employees not only at the Prudhoe Bay pipeline facility, but at its other facilities across the country.

According to e-mails obtained by ProPublica and several people close to the government's investigation, the company rejected some of the basic settlement conditions proposed by the EPA -- including who would police the progress -- and took a confrontational approach with debarment officials.

One person close to the negotiations said he was confounded by what he characterized as the company's stubborn approach to the debarment discussions. Given the history of BP's problems, he said, any settlement would have been a second chance, a gift. Still, the e-mails show, BP resisted.

As more evidence is gathered about what went wrong in the Gulf, BP may soon wish it hadn't.

It's doubtful that the EPA will make any decisions about BP's future in the United States until the Gulf investigation is completed, a process that could last a year. But as more information emerges about the causes of the accident there -- about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout -- the more the emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters. That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it considers how "a corporate attitude of non-compliance" should affect the prospect of the company's debarment going forward.

ProPublica reporters Mosi Secret and Ryan Knutson and director of research Lisa Schwartz contributed to this report.

Regulatory reliance on industry, recruitment troubles, and lax enforcement have long plagued the Minerals Management Service, but according to congressional testimony given by the Interior Department's inspector general, Mary Kendall, the agency's problems are bigger than that. [PDF]

"The greatest challenge in reorganizing and reforming MMS lies with the culture -- both within MMS and within industry," Kendall told the House Natural Resources Committee in little-noticed comments last Thursday.

Regulations are lacking and are "heavily reliant on industry to document and accurately report on operations, production and royalties," Kendall said.

A recent example of that? BP's letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in which the company said that it was "not aware of any MMS practice" [PDF] to demand compliance with a law requiring oil companies to provide proof that blowout preventers' shear rams could function effectively. (Shear rams are used to stop a blowout by closing off a pipe by cutting through it. But as a great investigation in this morning's New York Times shows, not only did the shear rams fail on the Deepwater Horizon, but they've frequently failed in other blowouts too. The Times cites an industry study showing that in the case of deep-water wells, the shear rams failed nearly half the time. What's more, as the Times notes, MMS failed too: The agency did not require testing on the shear ram or other key safety equipment.)

The training programs for MMS inspectors are "considerably out of date," and "have not kept pace with the technological advancements occurring within the industry," Kendall said.

In the Gulf of Mexico region, there may not be enough inspectors to begin with. According to Kendall, MMS has about 60 inspectors to cover 4,000 facilities, while the Pacific Coast has 10 for 23 facilities. (It's worth mentioning too, that the frequency of inspections of key safety equipment such as blowout preventers was halved more than a decade ago.)

And when those inspectors discovered violations, enforcement was weak. As we've reported, oil and gas companies have for years paid MMS a pittance in fines for safety violations. Since 1998, the biggest fine an oil company has paid to the agency was $810,000--small potatoes compared with the millions paid to other agencies, and smaller yet compared with industry profits. Here's what Kendall had to say on this issue:

In the operations and safety arena, we question whether the civil penalty regulations are tied appropriately to the seriousness of the violation and the threat to human safety, property and the environment.

Kendall also said that MMS's past ethical problems were "enabled by industry," and suggested imposing ethics requirements on companies doing business with the government to combat the problem. 

The Obama administration recently announced that it is splitting up MMS, so that the agency will no longer be both collecting royalties for drilling and regulating the industry. The administration has named a former Justice Department inspector general to oversee MMS and the reorganization.

As we've reported, the job done by offshore drilling regulators at the Minerals Management Service has been marked by fast-tracked offshore drilling plans, self-policing by industry, lax enforcement, the occasional sex and drug scandal, and loose royalty collection.

Apparently, that's how the oil and gas industry likes it. Documents filed last week with the White House by the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's major lobbying group, defend regulators at MMS and argue against more stringent environmental regulations, according to the Los Angeles Times:

"One accident does not mean that the practice and procedures of MMS are inadequate to implement NEPA's requirements, especially when the cause of the accident has yet to be determined," wrote the lobbying group, which represents 400 oil and gas companies, including BP.

Anadarko Petroleum, which owns a quarter share of the leaking BP well, wrote in a separate filing that it believes the government's enforcement of environmental laws has not "in any way played a role" in the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Following BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration announced a series of major reforms to the agency, including a promise to scrutinize MMS' liberal use of an exemption to the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires detailed environmental studies.

The exemption, known as a categorical exclusion, effectively fast-tracks offshore drilling projects in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, and their use is evidently near and dear to the heart of the oil industry. From the L.A. Times again:

"The current process provides ample opportunity for both public input and review of the potential environmental consequences" of drilling, Anadarko wrote.

As we've reported, the White House Council on Environmental Quality had actually been reconsidering agencies' use of categorical exclusions months before the disaster in the Gulf. BP, on April 9, sent a letter to the White House (PDF), arguing that these exclusions were necessary to prevent "time delays."

Eleven days later, the Deepwater Horizon exploded, sank, and caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Industry, unfazed, has continued to argue that environmental regulations are adequate and that widely acknowledged regulatory failures had no part in the Gulf disaster.

As one of my colleagues just noted, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration acknowledged today that more training is needed to protect some Gulf cleanup workers. It turns out that's not the only critique that the agency's chief had regarding the safety in the Gulf.

OSHA's David Michaels said that his own agency's chemical exposure limits, which BP has continually cited in its assurances about worker safety, are so "outrageously out of date" that no one should be citing them as evidence of safety. (You can listen to his full answer.)

"Let me be very clear. In the Gulf, we're not saying BP has to protect people to those limits, because they're not safe," OSHA chief David Michaels said in an interview on C-SPAN's Washington Journal earlier today."What we're telling people is don't refer to our legal limits. What we're trying to do here is make sure workers are safe."

Someone might want to tell BP, and other federal agencies. As we've reported, they've continually responded to our inquiries about worker illness and chemical exposure by pointing out that air sampling results have been within permissible exposure limits set by OSHA.

But as experts interviewed by ProPublica have also pointed out, most of OSHA's standards haven't been updated for decades. As one expert put it, workers in the Gulf are being exposed "to levels that are perhaps perfectly legal, but not safe." Now add OSHA's chief to the list of experts who question the exposure limits.

When I asked BP spokesman John Curry about this, he told me, "We can only go by what the standard is," and said that the company has been providing respirators to workers near the spill's source even when chemical exposures have been detected at levels below OSHA's permissible exposure limits.

"We want to do all we can to protect workers. We have no reason to want people to get ill or sick or injured," Curry said. "We continue to take data and the data continues to show that it's below the OSHA action level."

As we've reported, workplace safety experts and a federal official have expressed concern that the safety trainings that Gulf cleanup workers are receiving are too short and fail to prepare them for the health risks they are facing.

This morning on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, David Michaels, was shown our report -- and said that he shared our concerns. "We agree with much of what is said there," Michaels said. He said that while four hours of training "may be adequate" for workers on the beaches, it was insufficient for others. "We've told BP that for workers on vessels who are pulling up boom which is contaminated by oil, more training is needed," he said.

Watch Michaels' appearance here:

Update: OSHA's chief also noted that the government's chemical exposure limits are "outrageously out of date" -- concerns that we raised last week in a post on how cleanup workers exposure levels may fall within the legal guidelines but still be far from safe.

Though some may see efforts to raise the liability cap for oil spill damages as a knee-jerk response to BP's disaster in the Gulf, a report released on Wednesday by a government watchdog points out that the idea is hardly a new one.

For years, the Government Accountability Office has suggested that liability limits are too low, particularly for oil spills from certain vessels, like tank barges. (Liability limits, such as the $75 million cap on BP's liability in the Gulf disaster, depend on the type of vessel the spill comes from.)

After the party responsible for an oil spill reaches its liability limit (or its ability to pay), up to $1 billion may be drawn from an Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which is funded by taxes on both imported and domestically produced oil. Oil spills with costs that go beyond these liability caps, therefore, put a strain on the government's fund, which is why the GAO has pointed out over the years that liability limits are too low. Here's what the GAO said in a December 2007 report:

The liability limits for certain vessel types may be disproportionately low compared with their historic spill cost.

And here's what it said in a report released Wednesday:

The liability limits for certain vessel types may be disproportionately low compared with their historic spill cost.

That's word for word, two and a half years later. The 2007 report was released after a spill in the San Francisco Bay. And the 2010 report, released two months after BP's disaster began, noted that the inadequacy of current limits is something the Coast Guard, too, has been aware of over the years. From a 2009 Coast Guard report to Congress:

The historical data clearly demonstrates the financial impact vessel discharges with costs that exceed liability limits had on the fund and show the impact has grown in recent years.

BP, for its part, has said that it will not invoke its $75 million liability cap for the Gulf disaster, promising to cover damages for "all legitimate claims."

"We've said that we will ignore that cap, and that cap is irrelevant for this particular matter," Lamar McKay, the president of BP America, told a House Energy panel on Tuesday.

At the urging of lawmakers and President Barack Obama, the company has agreed to set aside $20 billion in an escrow account for damage payouts. Experts are still divided on whether this is enough, given that this environmental disaster, the worst in this nation's history, could soon become the costliest.

Neither BP nor Deepwater Horizon Unified Command appear to be systematically tracking worker illnesses in a way that notes possible causes, such as exposure to petroleum fumes or dispersant.

"They don't have any documented reports of people getting sick from chemical exposure, and that's why there's not a breakdown," Ayla Kelley of the Coast Guard told me, after she asked around at Unified Command's Joint Information Center.

But the log of illness and injury kept by Unified Command and released by BP late last week indicates there have been sicknesses that may be related to chemical exposure.

Records of specific incidents describe mostly physical injuries -- cuts, back or neck pain, sprained ankles, possible insect bites, and injuries from lightning. Only seven records describe problems that could even be construed as illnesses:

• "Heat-related illness, motion sickness" (May 6)
• "IP was checking spray nozzles on airplane, sprayed in face with dispersant when he took a nozzle off the boom under pressure" (May 7)
• "person collapsed at the safety training" (May 10)
• "Worker noticed rash on both arms and neck after completing beach cleanup" (May 25)
• "Suspected inhalation of crude oil vapors" (June 7)
• "Worker dizzy, nauseated, chest tightness, ache in left shoulder" (June 8)
• "Chest pains" (June 9)

Dispersants are mentioned. Crude oil vapors are mentioned. And yet aside from these few mentions, there's no information that tracks broadly what sick workers have been exposed to, or what may be causing these sicknesses -- be it heat, dispersant, fumes from the oil, or any number of causes that other state agencies are tracking and making public.

Experts we've spoken with have pointed out that epidemiology is imprecise, and that determining causation in potential chemical exposure cases is a challenge. But it's one thing to say, "We're not sure, but here's what the workers were exposed to," and it's another thing to not track it at all.

There may be a reason, however, that the BP and Unified Command records provide such limited data.

I spoke with Franklin Mirer, a toxicologist and professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, who told me that because BP and Unified Command use OSHA guidelines to judge whether an incident is recordable, "they would miss almost everything" related to chemical exposure.

"It's not complete," Mirer said. He also said that OSHA has been trying to modernize these injury and illness recording guidelines.

When I asked BP spokesman Mark Proegler whether logs were being kept of health complaints believed to be related to chemical exposure, he did not answer directly.

"We take these complaints seriously, investigate them, and take corrective action as necessary," Proegler said. He added that there is a Deepwater Horizon Medical Support line that individuals may call to report health issues, and calls to that line are being tracked.

Last week, I received an email from BP's press office, which "wanted to flag" a letter from BP COO Doug Suttles telling employees and cleanup workers that they are allowed to talk to the media.

"Recent media reports have suggested that individuals involved in the clean up operation have been prohibited from speaking to the media, and this is simply untrue," Suttles wrote in a letter, dated June 9. "BP fully supports and defends all individuals rights [sic] to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if they so choose."

One would think this note from Suttles, entitled "Clarification of Media Access," would do the trick. But the reality on the beaches of the Gulf still seems to be otherwise. In one documented incident, a news anchor from WDSU-TV in New Orleans was repeatedly told by private security guards on a public beach that "Sir, you cannot interview the workers."

This didn't change when the reporter mentioned Doug Suttles' letter, either. The private guards denied the letter existed and said they were following orders. They refused to explain who was giving those orders.

Reporter: Who's briefing you all?
Guard: That's not important right now.
Reporter: Well if you're telling me I can't do it, it's important that I know who's briefing you.
Guard: What's important right now is that you cannot talk to the workers. You're interfering with their jobs right now.
Reporter: If there's somebody on break, I'm interfering with his job?
Guard: Yes, you're interfering with his rest.

Watch the exchange below:

As Gulf cleanup workers continue to report health problems, a workplace safety expert and a leading Louisiana health official have expressed concern that BP's four-hour training course for responders may not be adequately preparing them to work in contaminated areas.

Workers must complete a federally required safety course before joining operations where they may be exposed to hazardous materials. The program teaches them to recognize risks and use protective equipment, and the hours of training required vary based on workers' level of exposure and on-site responsibilities.

The rule states that post-emergency cleanup workers must undergo 24 hours of training before working in contaminated areas, but a 1990 directive by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration following the Exxon-Valdez disaster sliced this requirement to four hours for oil spill workers conducting lower-risk tasks such as beach cleanup. (Read our post about illnesses among Exxon-Valdez responders.)

Franklin Mirer, a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said four hours is probably not enough to teach untrained workers to recognize and respond to the risks they are facing. Crude oil and dispersants give off vapors that can include hazardous chemicals such as benzene, toluene and Polychromatic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, or PAHs.

"The question is, can you accomplish the goals of training in four hours, and I don't think you can accomplish what would be needed to be done," said Mirer, a specialist in occupational safety.

Dr. Jimmy Guidry, medical director of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said that continuing complaints of respiratory problems among cleanup workers have him worried that they are not following proper safety procedures. He said that OSHA has not responded to his requests for more detail about training for cleanup workers and safety conditions, and that news reports showing cleanup sites have only added to his concern. (We've written before about the difficulties of getting data on response workers' health.)

"We're not always seeing the best practices; sometimes they're not wearing protective equipment," Guidry said. "We're not sure if it's because they haven't gotten proper training or they haven't been following the training they've been given."

A spokesman at Deepwater Horizon Unified Command -- a response center involving BP, Transocean, the Coast Guard and numerous federal agencies -- said OSHA is in charge of monitoring workplace safety for the cleanup. The Louisiana health department does not have jurisdiction over workplace policies or personnel offshore in the spill area.

On June 4, the Louisiana health department wrote a letter to OSHA calling on the agency to investigate BP's health practices at cleanup sites. The letter urged OSHA to provide the health department with an official report that included data on worker complaints, air sampling results and a "comprehensive review of training protocols for workers."

"We haven't had any response from OSHA in terms of the materials we've requested," Guidry said.

BP spokesman Toby Odone said the safety trainings were geared to prepare workers for the tasks they will perform, and that OSHA had approved the course before it started.

"It was a course and content and time that was reviewed and approved by OSHA," he said.

We at ProPublica have been trying to speak with OSHA about the training course and its standards for preparing workers who will deal with spilled crude, but haven't yet received an answer. We'll update you when we hear more.

The latest numbers from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals are in, showing 109 reports of illnesses from spill workers and others after exposure to polluted water, tar balls, liquid oil, odor and fumes, dispersant, and heat in the Gulf. (You can read the state's report itself in our document viewer.)

Total health complaints recorded by the state agency have gone up by 35 percent since the previous report, released last week.

Seventy-four of the complaints were from Gulf cleanup workers--up from 51 in the previous report. The rest were from the general public. A few things to note: According to the agency, the complaints recorded are only the cases that warranted access to medical care. As we've noted before, it's difficult to prove causation in chemical exposure cases, and this report does not attempt to do this.

The complaints seem to be similar, but since the last agency surveillance report, symptoms of throat irritation, nausea, vomiting and rashes have either doubled or more than doubled among the reports from workers. 

Nineteen cases of illness have been reported in Alabama by people exposed to chemicals from the Gulf spill, according to a spokesman from the Alabama Department of Public Health. State health agencies in Florida and Mississippi told me they'd received no such complaints, but between Louisiana and Alabama, the illnesses potentially due to chemical exposure exceed the numbers for all illnesses recorded by BP and the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command.

An illness and injury document released by BP recorded 86 worker illnesses between April 22 and June 10, but as we've noted, no breakdown was provided for illnesses due to chemical exposure.

The EPA recently posted a note at the top of its air monitoring page saying that it has found "odor-causing pollutants associated with petroleum products along the coastline at low levels," and that the chemicals "may cause short-lived effects like headache, eye, nose and throat irritation, or nausea." We've called the EPA to ask for more details, but have not yet received an answer.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, in an effort to press BP on its cost-cutting and time-saving decisions that led to the Gulf disaster, has released a series of documents that seem to show BP cutting corners on what it knew was a "nightmare well." We've put many of them in our document viewer--linked below--so you can check them out. 

One e-mail, for instance, noted that BP's chosen well design "saves lots of time ... at least 3 days."

According to the House committee's letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, BP chose this more risky option despite the fact that in April a review of the plan recommended against it. Another option being considered "would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer," according to the committee.

As we've noted, Halliburton, the cementing contractor, warned BP that its well could have a gas flow problem if it didn't it install more centering devices to make sure the pipe was centered before the cement job was performed. BP didn't fully adopt that recommendation, installing only six of the 21 recommended devices. "A straight piece of pipe even in tension will not seek the perfect center of the hole unless it has something to centralize it," one BP employee wrote. "But, who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine and we'll get a good cement job."

Another e-mail from a BP engineer noted that "this has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place."

The House committee's website has all of the released documents. Many of them appear highly technical, but according to the committee, they amount to evidence that BP "repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time," and that the company "made minimal efforts to contain the added risk." A spokesman for BP told The Associated Press, "It would be inappropriate for us to comment ahead of the hearing." That congressional hearing, at which Hayward will testify, is scheduled for Thursday. Another hearing with top oil industry execs is going on right now. (Here's the video live on C-Span.) 

For explanations of some of BP's decisions in plain English, check out some of our prior posts, or read The Wall Street Journal's excellent investigation. 

We've updated our popular Gulf Spill FAQ yet again -- adding answers to pressing questions of what the federal government is currently doing to hold BP accountable, what we now know about the spill's size and movement, and what measures the government could potentially take to send a strong message to an oil giant that has a pattern of skirting its own safety rules.

What is the federal government doing to respond to the disaster?

Added June 15

President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet with BP executives this week to discuss damages, an issue for which BP has been criticized for a lack of transparency. The president is also taking to prime-time television today to give a speech about the oil spill.

Although BP says more than 20,000 claims have already been paid, many Gulf businesses continue to report that their claims have gone unpaid or been delayed by red tape.

One potential solution reportedly being considered by the White House is the creation of an independent, third-party panel to handle damage claims and payouts.

Fifty-four senators signed on to a letter calling for BP to set aside $20 billion in an escrow account to pay for damage claims in the Gulf region. Separately, legislation to formally lift the $75 million cap on damages still has not gone through Congress.

What options does the federal government have at its disposal to hold BP accountable?

Added June 15

The Department of Justice has launched both criminal and civil investigations into the BP spill. Attorney General Eric Holder has not specified which companies are under investigation, but the companies connected to the Deepwater Horizon are clear: BP, Transocean and Halliburton. The investigations could potentially result in hundreds of millions in fines for violations of environmental laws. (As we've pointed out, BP could benefit financially from the fact that official flow rate estimates have consistently been proven too low, because civil fines from the Clean Water Act are calculated based on how many barrels of oil have been spilled.)

If company executives are found to have committed fraud or taken part in a coverup, they could face jail time, but experts say this could be a difficult case for the government to make.

The most serious option the federal government has, however, is debarment. As we've reported, the EPA is considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would cost the company billions and end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

What's the latest in stopping the spill?

Updated June 15

By now, BP has attempted eight different methods to stop the spill: Undersea robots to trigger the blowout preventer, the large containment dome, the smaller top hat, a smaller insertion tube, the top kill, the junk shot, the latest containment cap, and two relief wells that are currently being drilled.

None of those methods have plugged the gusher yet. After managing to slice through the riser pipe, BP has a containment cap in place that it says is capturing around 15,000 barrels of oil daily. Given the imprecision of current flow rate estimates--which place the flow rate between 20,000 and 50,000 barrels of oil a day--it's impossible to know what percentage BP is capturing, and the company has been criticized by scientists for claiming to be capturing the "majority" of the gushing oil.

The relief wells remain the best hope for permanently plugging the ruptured well, but they  won't be completed until August at the earliest.

Relief wells also have their own risks. The Times-Picayune points out that last fall, engineers drilling a relief well off the coast of Australia lost control of it, resulting in a fire that consumed the original rig.

What is BP doing with the oil it's capturing?

Added June 15

BP announced on June 9 that it would donate the net revenue from the oil it was collecting to help restore wildlife habitats along the Gulf Coast. This announcement came after some began questioning whether it was appropriate for BP to sell its salvaged oil for revenue.

What do we know about the size of the spill and its movement?

Updated June 15

The federal government recently confirmed the existence of giant, undersea plumes of dispersed oil at low concentrations. BP has continued to deny they exist: "It may be down to how you define what a plume is," BP's COO told the "Today" show.

Last week, the government-assembled Flow Rate Technical Group issued another estimate of oil flow that doubled previous estimates. It now estimates that before the well's riser was cut on June 3, anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 barrels of oil were flowing daily from BP's ruptured well. Given the warnings that cutting the riser pipe would increase the flow, the actual flow rate could still be much larger, and further estimates are under way.

A few scientists from the flow rate group have publicly expressed frustration with BP for not turning over data, not allowing direct measurements, and for overstating how much oil it is capturing.

At the urging of the flow rate team, BP recently began trying to insert a pressure sensor to get direct measurements of the flow of oil, according to The New York Times.

By now, oil has breached barriers and found its way to much of the Gulf coastline. Oil has been found just off the coast of Florida and in some of the state's inland waterways. Scientists predict it will likely travel up the Atlantic Coast in a matter of weeks.

What are the challenges to cleanup and containment?

Added June 15

A major challenge now appears to be the nature of the spill. With so much oil dispersed, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, has said that there is "no longer a single spill," but "hundreds or thousands of patches of oil" throughout the Gulf.

BP can currently process only 18,000 barrels of oil a day that it's siphoning from the well. The Obama administration has asked the company to put together a plan to increase its collection and processing capacity, and BP has said it will bring in more vessels and equipment to do so, but this won't happen until at least the end of the month.

At the moment, rising temperatures in the Gulf have also slowed cleanup, as workers have to take frequent breaks to avoid heat-related sicknesses.

Are cleanup workers getting sick?

Added June 15

The safety of cleanup workers remains an area of concern, though statistics on health complaints related to chemical exposure remain particularly hard to come by.

BP's data, released June 11, record 485 incidents of worker injury or illness. Of those, 86 were reported as "illnesses," but there were no further statistical breakdowns of the data to show the extent to which chemical exposure may have been a factor.

Statistics from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, however, report that 51 workers have complained of symptoms believed to be a result of chemical exposure.

BP has maintained that air sampling has turned up no levels of chemical exposure that go beyond federal limits set by the Occupational Safety and Health Association, but experts interviewed by ProPublica said those standards set by OSHA are decades old and may not reflect the latest science, leaving workers exposed to levels "that are perhaps perfectly legal, but not safe." Some air sampling has turned up levels of chemical exposure that exceed limits set by another federal agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What's being done to minimize the spill's impacts?

Updated June 15

BP continues to use skimmers and controlled burns to get rid of some of the oil on the surface of the ocean. Those are solutions that have been favored by the Coast Guard in recent days.

Booms are in place to try to protect marshlands and shores, but when one reporter asked the Coast Guard last week about the futility of these devices, Adm. Thad Allen responded that it was a "vexing situation" and that "there is no good solution when oil enters a marshland."

Cleanup workers have continued to slog away, digging at oil-soaked beaches. Reports from the ground like this one from Mother Jones, however, describe other methods of cleaning up the spill, including the use of oil-absorbent pads that cleanup workers referred to as "paper towels."

Corexit dispersant continues to be used both at the surface and below the surface. When asked about its search for a new dispersant, BP has said that it is still working with the EPA to find a better alternative to Corexit, but as Wired points out, no progress has been made in the weeks since the EPA first issued a directive ordering the company to find a less toxic alternative.

What do we know about these dispersants BP is using?

Added May 19

BP has chosen to use two products from a line of dispersants called Corexit, both of which were removed from a list of products approved for use on oil spills in the U.K. Corexit is on the EPA’s list of approved dispersants, but as Greenwire has pointed out, it is more toxic and less effective on south Louisiana crude than other EPA-approved dispersants.

What’s more, the EPA and the Coast Guard are allowing BP to use these dispersants underwater near the ruptured well. They’ve called it a "novel approach" that will ultimately use less dispersant than if the chemicals were applied on the surface. The undersea application, however, is not the recommended application procedure laid out in the EPA’s information on Corexit.

The EPA has acknowledged that dispersants entail "an environmental trade-off," and that their long-term effects on the environment are unknown. It has promised to continue monitoring their use, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency is working with BP to get less toxic dispersants to the site as soon as possible.

Background on the Accident Itself

What are the basics of what happened?

On the night of April 20, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had an explosion, and two days later, it sank in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers were killed. The rig was operated by British oil giant BP but owned by Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company. The incident ruptured the oil well and has caused what is known as a blowout, or an uncontrollable spill.

What caused it?

Updated May 19

That’s still being investigated. The spill occurred when a safety device called a blowout preventer failed to stop the flow of oil from the well. BP has called the failure of this device "inconceivable," but new details have emerged as to why it may have failed.

According to a "60 Minutes" interview with a survivor, part of the blowout preventer’s seal broke during an accident weeks before the explosion. A Transocean supervisor, when told of the problem, said it was "no big deal," and operations continued despite several such equipment problems.

The rig worker also told "60 Minutes" that BP and Transocean managers had been jostling over who was in charge in the hours before the spill, disagreeing on how to seal the well. One expert told "60 Minutes" that BP’s method—faster, but riskier—may have set the stage for the blowout.

Halliburton was the subcontractor handling the cementing process on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which it completed shortly before the explosion.

Why didn’t the blowout preventer work?

Blowout preventers are hardly foolproof. The Wall Street Journal, which has had great coverage of the disaster, reported that federal regulators had questioned in 2004 whether an "integral" part of blowout preventers, shear rams, would work in deep-water conditions. The Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling in about 5,000 feet of water, and the device obviously did not do the job.

Despite their concerns about the shear rams, regulators from the Minerals Management Service–the agency that regulates offshore drilling—did not issue new regulations to strengthen industry requirements, according to the Journal.

The Journal also reported that another device–one that the BP’s rig lacked–was a backup shutoff device called an acoustic switch that is used by some other oil-producing countries. MMS regulators had once considered requiring the acoustic switch. But after the industry spoke out against it, MMS backed down and simply recommended that the matter be studied.

So the spill wasn’t prevented. Could cleanup and containment efforts have gone better?

Following news of the leak, plans were announced to burn some of the oil in order to contain the spill, but there was no fire boom on hand in order to facilitate that burn, despite a 1994 response plan that suggested their immediate use in the case of a major Gulf oil spill, according to The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala.

Other cleanup and containment efforts include skimming oil off the surface and using miles of protective booms to contain the oil’s movement toward the coast.

BP has also bought up much of the world’s supply of dispersants to use on the spill. Dispersants are chemicals intended to break up the oil. As we’ve reported, those chemicals could present their own environmental concerns, since their exact makeup is kept secret.

Government’s Response—and Its Oversight

What was the White House’s initial response?

Updated May 19

The Obama administration says it has been fully engaged since "day one," but NPR reports that it was only after the rig sank two days after the explosion that the White House stepped up its involvement. At the time, President Barack Obama was assured that no oil was leaking from the ruptured well, and he subsequently left for a short vacation, according to a helpful NPR timeline. A leak was noticed that weekend.

As the weeks went on and the spill continued unabated, the Obama administration grew increasingly frustrated with the oil companies and regulators alike. President Obama blasted oil company executives for blaming each other at congressional hearings, calling it "a ridiculous spectacle," and criticizing the Minerals Management Service for its "cozy relationship" with industry.

What kind of job were regulators doing leading up to this incident?

Updated May 19

We’ve had a hard time getting hold of anyone at the Minerals Management Service, the agency in charge of regulating offshore drilling. Officials there have not responded to our many calls and e-mails.

But in a hearing last week, one MMS official said the agency left it to oil companies to certify that blowout preventers were working properly. The official said the agency "'highly encouraged,’ but did not require," companies to have backup systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency," according to The Wall Street Journal. That led to this gem of an exchange:

"Highly encourage? How does that translate to enforcement?" Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, who is co-chairing the investigation, asked at the hearings.

"There is no enforcement," Mr. Saucier replied.

The MMS official also testified that in 2001, new rules were drafted to tighten monitoring of offshore drilling and lay out requirements for blowout preventers, but the rules were never approved by higher-ups in Washington.

The Minerals Management Service—an agency within the Department of the Interior—has a rather mixed record. In 2008, the regulator was involved in a sex and drug scandal with oil and gas company representatives. Since then, the agency has also been criticized for understating the risks of oil spills in its plans to expand drilling off the coast of Alaska. A government investigation also concluded that an office at MMS withheld data on offshore drilling from environmental risk assessors in the agency.

The Washington Post also reported that when BP was seeking permission to drill with the Deepwater Horizon rig, MMS gave BP what is known as a "categorical exclusion"—meaning drilling plans would not be subjected to a detailed environmental analysis. Exemptions are given when the likelihood of a spill is seen to be low. Reuters reports that between 250 and 400 exploration programs in the Gulf have been granted these exclusions. The White House and Department of the Interior have promised to investigate MMS’ liberal use of categorical exclusions.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced several reforms on May 14, including breaking MMS into two separate agencies—one that oversees leasing and collecting royalties and another that oversees safety inspections and enforcement. As we’ve noted, some say this doesn’t go far enough to mitigate the regulator’s conflicts of interest.

Paying for the Disaster

Who’s on the hook for what happened?

Updated May 19

While accepting that it has to pay for the cleanup, BP has tried to distance itself from the spill and push at least some responsibility on Transocean. "It wasn’t our accident," BP CEO Tony Hayward said on NBC’s "Today" show on May 3.

Hayward has said that the company will honor "all legitimate claims for business interruption."

The contractor Transocean, for its part, has tried to limit its liability to $27 million, citing a law that’s a century and a half old, which says a vessel’s owner is liable only for the value of the vessel, according to the AP.

A whole slew of investigations have been launched—and hearings scheduled–by Congressional committees, the Coast Guard and MMS. President Obama also plans to create a commission to investigate the BP spill.

What’s this I hear about a cap on how much BP will have to pay?

Updated May 19

Everyone seems to be in agreement that BP will have to pay for the cleanup. That will include paying back federal agencies for their help in cleanup operations.

But liability for damages is a separate issue, and at the moment, damages are capped at $75 million by a 1990 law. Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have introduced legislation that would raise the cap on damages to $10 billion. Those lawmakers, with support from the White House, hope to apply the measure retroactively to BP.

At the moment, the measure is having a surprisingly difficult time making it through the Senate, with Republicans blocking the measure. Several Republicans have argued that BP has promised to pay for damages and will "be held to" that promise, and that raising the liability cap to $10 billion could hurt smaller oil companies.

If you've been following our coverage, you know we've been bugging BP and several federal and state agencies for statistics on worker illness.

On Friday night, BP finally posted a document containing some injury and illness data, and it shows that from April 22 until June 10, 485 injuries and illnesses were reported by cleanup workers. You can check it out in our document viewer.

Most of the injuries recorded were sprained ankles, cuts, rashes, and back and neck pain; there were also some injuries from lightning strikes. The document counts 86 reported "illnesses" in the Gulf. But there's no breakdown of illnesses possibly connected to chemical exposure, whether due to oil or dispersants. (The document's one reference to something of this nature is a case of "suspected inhalation of crude oil vapors.")

Compare that with statistics released last week by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, which showed 71 health complaints believed to be due to chemical exposure, 51 of which were from cleanup workers.

BP's data is only for "recordable" injuries and illnesses, and does not include "non-recordable first aid cases." The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets rules governing what makes an illness or injury recordable. We've called BP and a few experts to ask about the extent to which BP's data reflects chemical exposure complaints in particular. We'll update when we know more.

Businesses in the Gulf region are still reporting delays and unresponsive bureaucracy when they submit claims to BP.

BP spokesman David Nicholas told the Los Angeles Times that “more than 20,000 of the 42,000 claims submitted have been paid” – suggesting that about half of claimants have not received a check.

Nicholas said that no documented claims have been rejected, and the report did not specify how many claims had been denied.

Some of the toughest struggles for compensation are faced by businesses outside the fishing industry; fishermen and others who could document immediate, direct losses received initial checks of $2,500 to $5,000. From the LA Times:

Hotels, restaurants, machine shops, bars and tour companies all became collateral damage when the Gulf of Mexico, one of the nation's most important fisheries and tourist destinations, became an industrial cleanup site. The people whose lives depend on those businesses complain about ignored claims, unanswered phone calls and lost paperwork.

The Obama administration has stated that it finds BP’s claims process inadequate and has demanded that the company open an escrow account to pay spill damages, which would be administered by a third-party monitor. BP’s board will hold an emergency meeting today to consider starting the escrow account.

Should the company hesitate, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said this weekend that President Barack Obama will seek to “use his legal authority to compel them” to take this step.

"It's not clear to us that there's the right of transparency involved concerning the data, how long it takes to pay claims,” Adm. Thad Allen, President Obama’s designated chief of the federal response, told CBS on Sunday. “We'll be talking about an independent third party that can administer a fund to make sure it happens quicker."

BP has repeatedly stated its commitment to pay all “legitimate” claims for damages from the spill, but it appears to have reservations about the administration’s demands. So far, the company has paid out $53 million in claims. Senate Democrats have proposed a figure of $20 billion for the escrow account.

"BP will not hand over a blank check to anyone, whether it's the administration or an independent mediator," said a source described by The Washington Post as “familiar with senior BP executives' thinking.”

When we--and others--have asked about the health concerns of cleanup workers in the Gulf, BP's response has been that extensive air sampling is being done, and that none of the samples have shown levels of chemical exposure that go beyond federal exposure limits set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

That may be true. What the company doesn't mention, however, is that some of the samples [PDF] have come back with exposure levels that exceed different federal limits -- limits set by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency that's part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sampling results released by BP this week show that both benzene (a carcinogen) and 2-butoxyethanol ( a compound in Corexit, one of the dispersants being used) have been found above the recommended exposure limits set by NIOSH, while still within the permissible exposure Limits set by OSHA. For both these chemicals, OSHA's limit is greater than NIOSH's by a factor of 10. (We've called OSHA to get a comment for this story, but have not yet heard back.)

I asked some experts to explain how it works between the two agencies with these two different standards.

"NIOSH is an advisory board and their numbers don't have force of law. They can just follow the science," explained John Kissel, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington. OSHA, on the other hand, is more politically hamstrung. There's "a lot of discussion about how protective are OSHA standards, given that they don't get updated because Congress listens to the regulated community."

OSHA has in the past tried to adopt more stringent standards along the lines of NIOSH's recommendations, but its efforts to make these changes must go through proposed rulemaking stages and public comment periods, giving industry a chance to make arguments about the cost of stricter standards outweighing any proven benefits to worker health. And because epidemiology is a "blunt instrument," Kissel said it's often difficult to prove causation.

"You're often left with an ‘I don't know,'" said Kissel. And if you're on the side of ‘it-would-cost-me-money-if-standards-were-changed,' you say there's no problem."

According to Gina Solomon, a practicing physician and a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, this means workers, including the ones in the Gulf, may end up being exposed "to levels that are perhaps perfectly legal, but not safe."

Even the more stringent, NIOSH exposure limits may not be sufficient, Solomon told me. That's because all of the NIOSH exposure limits are calculated based on a 40-hour work week and eight-hour work day.

"Really none of the workers on the spill are working an eight-hour day," she said. "Or even if they are, some are sleeping on boats out there, so they're still in same environment."

What we do know is that workers have reported experiencing many of the same symptoms of benzene and 2-butoxyethanol exposure, although some of these symptoms could also be caused by heat.

Franklin Mirer, a toxicologist and Hunter College professor, has been looking closely at BP's air sampling results. Mirer said that given the exposure levels, he's not surprised by worker symptoms, and that OSHA's permissible exposure limits "allow exposures where these symptoms are observed."

But faced with so many potential causes, it's hard to make an argument for more stringent chemical exposure standards, according to Kissel.

"Standards are not precise harm/no-harm boundaries. They're supposed to be protective and they might be, they might not be," he said. "It costs money to protect people to a greater extent."