Thad Allen: Low-balled oil spill estimates didn’t hamper response

The top federal official overseeing the BP oil spill said Monday that initial estimates of the gusher’s size that proved far too low didn't hamper the response.

“We assumed at the outset that this would be a catastrophic event,” said National Incident Commander Thad Allen at a Washington, D.C. hearing of a White House-created panel probing the disaster.

He told the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling that “we started moving every piece of equipment” called for in response plans as soon as word of the accident emerged.

The amount of oil that flowed from BP’s blown-out well has been among the most politically volatile issues in the disaster. A top White House official in May accused BP of having a vested interest in downplaying the amount of oil flowing because the size of the spill affects the fines the oil giant would face.

Soon after the April 20 blowout and explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, federal officials and BP estimated 1,000 barrels per day were flowing but shortly revised them to 5,000 barrels per day.

But those initial figures soon came under attack from outside scientists, and a federal task force convened – called the Flow Rate Technical Group – that included outside experts offered a series of escalating estimates in the subsequent months.

In August the federal team said 62,000 barrels was escaping from the well at the beginning of the spill, falling to 53,000 by the time the well was capped in mid-July.

But Allen said Monday that while he noted the varying estimates, they did not affect the response. “They weren’t consequential in any of the decision-making I did” or in the interagency work, said Allen, a retired Coast Guard admiral.

“We knew this thing had the potential to be much larger than it was,” he said. “We never at any point relied on the 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day” estimate, he added.

The federal task force estimates that 4.9 million barrels of oil flowed from the ruptured well before it was capped, of which roughly 800,000 barrels were captured by the containment system employed prior to blocking the flow outright.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, also said that the initial estimates did not lead to a less aggressive response in the early days of the spill.

“We literally threw everything at it,” he told the commission.