Wendy Carlisle ABC News 3 Dec 10;
It was the luckiest oil spill we ever had.
When the West Atlas rig - operated by the Thai oil giant PTTEP - haemorrhaged oil for 74 days last year, no-one was killed and according to the Government and the oil company the environmental damage has been minimal.
"The fact is we were lucky with Montara" said Resources Minister Ferguson when he tabled the Montara Commission of inquiry last week.
Headed by former public servant David Borthwick, the Montara Inquiry and its report had been a long 15 months in the making.
"The quick coordinated response from government's regulators and the industry means that the impact on the marine environment was minimal."* said Martin Ferguson.
Former environment minister Peter Garrett had said much the same thing during the spill.
"I've been advised the number of birds affected is about 22, some 13 birds had died. I mean that's terrible and I hope there are no more, but I think we can genuinely say the impact has been minimal.**
"We're head-down and bum-up on this" Garrett had assured Radio National's Fran Kelly at the time.
But leafing through the report I was struck with the strange feeling they were in a parallel universe to that inhabited by Commissioner Borthwick.
Borthwick did not conclude the environmental damage was minimal.
On the contrary, he said the environmental monitoring was so poor we might never know the truth.
"It is unlikely that the full impact of the blowout will ever be known. This reflects the vast and remote area affected by the spill; the absence of solid reliable baseline data on species and ecosystems, and the slow response in putting together a monitoring plan."
The crime scene had been destroyed, by time, by wind and by the seas.
Referring to scientific monitoring reports from both the oil company and the Government which cited one dead sea snake, 22 dead birds but no confirmed reports of oiled whales or cetaceans or other affected wildlife as a result of the spill, Borthwick noted:
"Mention has been made in submissions to this inquiry of very limited impacts of the blowout on wildlife. It is unlikely that this reporting depicts the extent of the impact on species."
He suggested dead wildlife would have sunk while nobody was looking.
"Animals that may have died in oil-affected water may not have stayed afloat for very long, making it unlikely that they could be detected in large numbers in the vast area of open water over which the oil and oil residue was dispersed."***
The Montara commission of inquiry has made 100 findings of fact about the spill, its causes and the aftermath, and 105 recommendations, most of which have been accepted.
Resources Minister Ferguson who now referred to the blowout as an 'incident' said the Government is now dealing with the "learning's".
There was room for improvement, but "our regulatory regime is good- it's effective".
"At the heart of the matter is the failure of the operator and the failure of the regulator to adhere to this regime."
Ferguson said Montara was "preventable" and he proceeded to wade into the territory government like one would with the village idiot.
Their approach to regulation was 'minimalist'.
Indeed a quick read of the territory's submission to the Montara inquiry bears this out.
It wasn't 'usual practice' for their inspectors to visit rigs. No, they sat at their desks in Darwin and rubberstamped oil company requests.
What he failed to mention was that that under Offshore Petroleum Act the Commonwealth is the regulator.
Canberra had delegated the territory to do the job, and paid them $2 million a year for their efforts.
Borthwick observed they'd been spending less than half that, and pocketing the rest.
Apparently no-one in Canberra had noticed.
It was light-touch self-regulation gone mad.
Borthwick threw the book at PTTEP. They had misled the inquiry and he questioned their corporate ethics. PTTEP ought show cause why they should be allowed to continue to operate in the Montara oilfield.
Ferguson agreed and said he would review all their licences, including the ones he awarded after the blowout began.
Ten days into the spill Peter Garrett despatched a Queensland Government scientist - Dr Mike Short to fly over the slick and pull together a wildlife response strategy in the event of the nightmare scenario - oil hitting the precious Ashmore reef or the Cartier Islands, home to protected and endangered species and thousands of migratory birds.
Peering out the plane's window Dr Short spotted a dead whale , but no autopsy was conducted.
Putting together my Background Briefing story (at the time, I called him up and asked for an interview. It was to be my first encounter with the confidentiality clauses that had been slapped on scientists by the Government and the oil company.
An interview would not be possible.
Meanwhile commercial fishermen started to worry aloud about the spraying of dispersants as fish were spawning. Fisherman George Hamilton landed four gold band snappers near Broome and he demanded they be tested.
The snappers would become exhibit A in PTTEP's (S4A) Fish study Assessment of the effects on Timor Sea Fish.
The frozen fish were sent to Associate Professor Monique Gagnon at Curtin University for examination.
She too had signed a confidentiality clause but had made a vital recommendation. "It is imperative to commence a monitoring program of fish health during the oil spill and continue monitoring after the oil leak has been solved."
This was ignored. Her finding of "no oil contamination" in the snappers was reported prominently on the Government's website.
Later the nation's leading marine science organisation AIMS would scoff at the S4A study.
They didn't call it junk science, but they might as well have.
"There was no description of when or where the fish were caught, no description of the methodologies or analytical techniques used.
"There comes a point when scientific rigour has been compromised to such an extent that results could be considered meaningless."
Sampling from commercial fisheries did not begin until mid-December, way after the well had been killed. A window of opportunity had closed.
As the oil gushing from the Montara well head entered its first month, the WWF became so frustrated at the lack of information that they sent their own vessel steaming into the spill zone.
On the same day Garrett flew over the slick for the first time and lest anyone think the Government was not doing anything, he too announced a survey vessel.
The day before staff from his department had made frantic calls to the University of Qld to locate a suitable scientist.
They found Dr James Watson, a marine biologist who would later tell me "They didn't have a clue what was going on. But they wanted someone there urgently".
A few days later Watson and two colleagues flew to Darwin and were picked up at the airport by an oil company rep who took them down to meet the Sea Sprite.
What happened next was astonishing.
"We got to the ship and the captain of the ship and I obviously didn't know where the oil was. So we sat around with the oil rep and he literally drew a map on an A4 piece of paper saying "This is the oil rig and then this is Ashmore Reef and we think the oil is here at the moment".
Dr Watson was incredulous. He needed satellite maps showing the exact location of the slick so that he could plan his transects.
The satellite maps never eventuated.
"Now without having any knowledge of where the oil slick was, that was quite stressful," he said.
Nevertheless the team was excited about the job ahead, but the main difficulty was that so little was known about this part of the planet.
"It's considered one of the most biologically rich places on earth. Just 100 kilometres from Ashmore Reef you see blue whales, you see fin whales. If you go in another direction there's massive humpback whale nurseries. It's the highest concentration of sea snakes on earth. It's an incredibly rich area yet we don't know anything about it."
For five days the team transacted the spill in straight lines. They saw pilot whales feeding in the oil.
"We saw a hundred pilot whales and if you look at the photos, its right in a big smack pool of oil. So there's no doubt they were feeding, some animals were feeding on fish which were actually living in that oil. We don't know what that means. It could mean nothing. It could mean everything in terms of the food chain."
In the absence of this he feared, the impact of the spill might never be known.
With the Watson expedition on the water Peter Garrett delivered the good news to Fran Kelly.
"We have got a team of marine biologists we are doing water sampling, we're making sure that we monitor very carefully the area of the slick," he said.
"We will pick up any impacts that have been taking place on wildlife as soon as they do and take the appropriate response."
Dr Watson's report recommended long term monitoring of sea birds, turtles, sea snakes and fish.
He wanted toxicology tests on whales and dolphins.
These recommendations were ignored. To date no research has been triggered into the whales, dolphins or turtles.
The fish studies would not begin until six months after the spoil began. There are no results yet.
But it was the spraying of 180,000 litres of chemical dispersants that aroused most concern. Scientists were worried about the impact on coral spawn and fish larvae.
Minister Garrett reassured them, "We are doing water sampling, we're making sure that we monitor very carefully the areas of the slick and in fact whether there are any impacts on the wildlife at all" he told ABC Radio.
The Government's clean-up agency - AMSA confirmed by email that water sampling was being done. However because of the Borthwick Inquiry "it would be inappropriate to comment".
Fifteen months later, the truth can now be told.
"The inquiry has not seen data that indicated the distribution of the oil and the dispersant mix beneath the sea surface. This is a major shortcoming of the response. There should have been a thorough sub-surface sampling of the oil/dispersant mix. This was important to inform judgements about the environmental consequences of the Blowout."****
While the use of dispersants had been justified, the absence of sampling meant detecting damage on coral spawn, fish larvae and other subsurface species might "never be fully known".
The reason for the mess was simple enough. There is a gaping hole in Australia's environmental defence laws. Oil rigs in Commonwealth waters are not required by law to pay for the cleanup, let alone assess any ecological damages that may occur as a result of a spill.
So behind the scenes Garrett's department furiously negotiated with the oil company over what the environmental monitoring plan might look like.
As Borthwick was later to note, the company called the shots on the science. He suggested the Montara plan would benefit from peer review, and in the future the process ought to be independent of oil companies.
Meanwhile as the spill played out the only 'scientific' monitoring that was being done was by Customs officers flying over in planes and workers on the water spraying the dispersants.
PTTEP's PR machine swung into gear.
Media was peppered with audio news releases, mostly dealing with the frantic struggle to kill the well, but some to do with the impact of the spill.
"I don't want to pre-empt the studies but I'm not expecting a large effect from this spill." said PTTEP's John Wardrop in one of them.
"Obviously things like turtles, sea snakes, birds are a concern, but we haven't to-date seen significant numbers and people have been looking."
Not only was the company controlling the science, but much of the other information as well.
Borthwick asked why was there no "authoritative" information about the volume of oil spilt or its coverage?
Why wasn't did the Government independently verify PTTEP's claims that the spill was 400 barrels a day when that could have been be way off the mark?
"The provision of information should not have been left in PTTEP's hands" said Borthwick.
In the wake of the Gulf Of Mexico spill, BP has set aside $30 billion for compensation.
The scale of the two spills is vastly different. But Borthwick's finding that the impact of the Timor sea spill might never been known must be music to the ears of PTTEP.
If no damage is detected, then potential litigants are going to have a hard time claiming damages.
As Ferguson tabled the Montara report in the parliament, the new Environment Minister Tony Burke was up at the site of the proposed giant new LNG hub at James Price Point on the Kimberly.
His office issued a statement to The Drum "The four monitoring reports released suggest that the immediate impact on marine life was limited.
"Long-term monitoring of the impacts of the oil spill will continue and the results of these studies will be released when they become available."
The italics were theirs.
It was the luckiest oil spill they ever had.
