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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: dario73 on April 14, 2011, 08:00:51 AM
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‘Spillionaires’: Profiteering and Mismanagement in the Wake of the BP Oil Spill
The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money.
Some people profiteered from the spill by charging BP outrageous rates for cleanup. Others profited from BP claims money, handed out in arbitrary ways. So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames -- "spillionaires" or "BP rich." Meanwhile, others hurt by the spill ended up getting comparatively little.
In the end, BP's attempt to make things right -- spending more than $16 billion so far, mostly on claims of damage and cleanup -- created new divisions and even new wrongs. Because the federal government ceded control over spill cleanup spending to BP, it's impossible to know for certain what that money accomplished, or what exactly was done.
Some inequities arose from the chaos that followed the April 20 spill. But in at least one corner of Louisiana, the dramatic differences can be traced in part to local powerbrokers. To show how the money flowed, ProPublica interviewed people who worked on the spill and examined records, including some reported [2] earlier by [3] the New Orleans Times-Picayune [4], for St. Bernard Parish, a coastal community about five miles southeast of downtown New Orleans.
Documents show that local companies with ties to insiders garnered lucrative cleanup contracts and then charged BP for every imaginable expense. The prime cleanup company, which had a history of bad debts and no oil-spill experience, submitted bills with little documentation or none at all. A subcontractor charged BP $15,400 per month to rent a generator that usually cost $1,500 a month. A company owned in part by the St. Bernard Parish sheriff charged more than $1 million a month for land it had been renting for less than $1,700 a month.
Assignments for individual fishermen followed the same pattern, with insiders and supporters earning big checks.
"This parish raped BP," said Wayne Landry, the chairman of the St. Bernard Parish Council, referring to the conduct of its political leadership. "At the end of the day, it really just frustrates me. I'm an elected official. I have guilt by association."
In some ways, parish residents seemed to view the disaster and BP's culpability as a way to recover from earlier blows. More than other coastal communities, St. Bernard bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded almost every home in August 2005. The population dropped almost in half, from about 67,000 in 2000 to about 36,000 in 2010, largely because people didn't come back after Katrina and the hurricanes that followed. Before the spill, the parish slashed its budget by 11 percent, cutting garbage collection, the fire department and mosquito control. There was just no money.
The spill changed that. Fishermen were paid to lay out protective boom, the floating material used to corral the oil. Contractors were hired to manage the cleanup and provide security. Claims money began flowing to people who said their lives had been upended by the crisis.
The parish government was among the first to benefit, snagging a $1 million check for oil-spill expenses. Parish employees went shopping for cameras, printers, a file cabinet, staplers, six pairs of children's scissors and 712 shirts emblazoned with the parish name [7]. Some of the money also went to overtime pay for more than 40 parish employees [8], including three who claimed overtime for picking up dog food [9] for the animal shelter. St. Bernard's homeland security director, David Dysart, a salaried employee and Taffaro's good friend, was paid almost $23,000 for working 497 hours of overtime in less than seven weeks. That meant he was working an average of more than 16 hours a day, including weekends.
There is a lot more here:
http://www.propublica.org/article/spillionaires-profiteering-mismanagement-in-the-wake-of-the-bp-oil-spill