BP'S ALASKAN PIPELINE WAS CORRODED YEARS AGO

GREG PALAST, GUARDIAN - Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an
investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline
system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who
own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding. Even
then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were
screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous"
because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the
system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those
who warn of pipeline problems. . .

BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down
of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for
15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job
only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head. . .

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a
decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in
mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise
prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22
a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells
four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and
repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning --
the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The
Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a
supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big
winner is Arco petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State.
Arco is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum. . .

I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US
CEO, Bob Malone, was co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in
Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's
environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife
refuge to drilling by the BP consortium.

Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of
BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on
the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill. Exxon took all the blame for
the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on
the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil
spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the
grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the
equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned