Sarah Palin told Bill O'Reilly yesterday:
"... as governor of Alaska, what I did in dealing with the oil companies and I’ll betcha 75% of my time was being taken up by energy issues here in this state. I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues. It took us putting that as the highest priority to to protect our resources to protect our environment including not just the physical environment but the human environment here."
Some people (with better credentials and more integrity than Sarah Palin) beg to differ. Mudflats had an excellent article by Richard Fineberg back in February where he blows Palin's claims right out of the water. Fineberg looks at a series of spills and other incidents in Alaska and draws our attention to the performance of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the ineffectiveness of Sarah Palin's much trumpeted Petroleum Systems Integrity Office, highlighting the inaccuracies presented by Sarah Palin in Going Rogue.
Prior to the election it had been revealed that BP had been trying to save money for years by cutting corners on oil pipeline maintenance on the North Slope. This was very serious: leaks and spills from corroded pipelines were all too common and harmed the environment plus led to production slowdowns. So one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO). With the creation of the PSIO, Alaska became the first state to require industry operators to document their compliance with maintenance and quality assurance standards, and to share that information with the state. Unfortunately, the next year the House Finance subcommittee gutted more than a third of the PSIO budget. I fought to get it restored and finally succeeded.
The preceding excerpt -- one of Palin's few curtsies to environmental considerations in her autobiography -- is a mixture of fact, wishful thinking and empty rhetoric. Demonstrating her characteristic failure to follow through, Palin abruptly ended this snippet without telling readers what - if anything - the new agency accomplished during its two years under her tenure. The Alaska spill sequence that silently shadowed her Lower-48 book tour in late 2009 clearly suggest that the oversight procedures Palin claims to have established to insure safe production and transport of Alaska petroleum were either not in place or not working as intended.
Review of state documents reveals further evidence that Palin's new unit has not been able to fulfill the tasks or deal with the problems that Palin outlined in the passage above. According to the executive order establishing the PSIO in April 2007, the new agency's first major assignments were to conduct a gap analysis to identify redundancies and holes in the government monitoring process, and to "evaluate industry oversight of . . . facilities, equipment, infrastructure, and activities." When Palin left office two years later, the gap analysis had yet to be completed and there was no sign of a PSIO evaluation of industry management oversight programs.
Sarah Palin was economical with the truth in Going Rogue and continues to lie on her Facebook page and in interviews with her Fox News colleagues.
Jason Leopold, an investigative reporter, examines and documents how BP deals with safety concerns in their Alaska operations in an extensive article on Truthout. (This article was crossposted by Shannyn Moore on Mudflats as well)
This passage from the article doesn't sit very well with Palin's claims:
Two BP management officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters, said budget cuts were largely the reason equipment was not upgraded or repaired, and indicated that much of it has yet to be addressed. BP's Alaska budget for 2010 is $1 billion, compared with $1.1 billion in 2009 and $1.3 billion in 2008.
Moreover, according to two BP Alaska officials, projects related to "safety and integrity" have been cut by 30 percent this year and BP’s senior managers receive bonuses for not using funds from BP’s designated maintenance budget, a company wide policy implemented by Hayward. Documents show that Hayward also implemented a cost-cutting directive following the oil spills in 2006 in Prudhoe Bay.
Let's look at what Sarah Palin wrote in Going Rogue one more time:
Prior to the election it had been revealed that BP had been trying to save money for years by cutting corners on oil pipeline maintenance on the North Slope. This was very serious: leaks and spills from corroded pipelines were all too common and harmed the environment plus led to production slowdowns. So one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO). With the creation of the PSIO, Alaska became the first state to require industry operators to document their compliance with maintenance and quality assurance standards, and to share that information with the state. Unfortunately, the next year the House Finance subcommittee gutted more than a third of the PSIO budget. I fought to get it restored and finally succeeded.
Then at what she said to Bill O'Reilly:
"... as governor of Alaska, what I did in dealing with the oil companies and I’ll betcha 75% of my time was being taken up by energy issues here in this state. I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues. It took us putting that as the highest priority to to protect our resources to protect our environment including not just the physical environment but the human environment here."
I do hope these two well documented articles, which contradict Sarah Palin's statements, are picked up by the MSM and somebody points out that she keeps harping on a dodgy note, exposing her to a wider audience for the phony she is.
UPDATE
Bill O'Reilly said on Fox that Sarah Palin also "doesn't know how to stop that leak":
+++
In addition, the "Washington Post" already wrote on Monday that the Obama administration does indeed accept foreign offers, which contradicts Palin's accusations:
UPDATE "We'll let BP decide on what expertise they do need," State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters on May 19. "We are keeping an eye on what supplies we do need. And as we see that our supplies are running low, it may be at that point in time to accept offers from particular governments."
That time has come.
In the past week, the United States submitted its second request to the European Union for any specialized equipment to contain the oil now seeping onto the Gulf of Mexico's marshes and beaches, and it accepted Canada's offer of 9,842 feet of boom. The government is soliciting additional boom and skimmers from nearly two dozen countries and international organizations.
In late May, the administration accepted Mexico's offer of two skimmers and 13,779 feet of boom; a Dutch offer of three sets of Koseq sweeping arms, which attach to the sides of ships and gather oil; and eight skimming systems offered by Norway.
Sarah Lied to Bill-O! - Gov. Murkowski began Arctic Pipeline Technology Team, NOT Sarah!
We received an interesting document from an alert Alaskan with a long memory: Andree McLeod, who's a Republican and a very resilient watchdog of local politics. Sarah Palin keeps saying she had to set up the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office as if it was a novel idea and completely her own. Here are the screenshots of a press release dated April, 2006:
Lying again, Sarah?
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