Kodeco Platform Paralyzed After Cargo Vessel Crash

Jakarta Globe, Rizqon Bilhuda | August 15, 2010

Indonesia. Kodeco Energy’s platform off the coast of East Java, about 80 kilometers north of Gresik, has been hit by an unidentified cargo vessel, causing a delay in oil production at the site.

Kodeco, which is involved in oil and natural gas exploration and exploitation in the country, operates under the West Madura production sharing contract.

“At this point, it is understood that Kodesco’s KE 40 [platform] is relatively safe. There has been no loss of life, no oil spill and no fire,” Budi Indianto, the deputy of operations for Indonesia’s upstream oil and gas regulatory body, BPMigas, said on Saturday.

Budi said the regulator had conducted a preliminary inquiry into the incident, which took place on Wednesday, but that more investigation was needed.

Also involved in the investigation are the Directorate General for Oil and Gas at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Kodeco Energy and the Coast Guard and Navy, which are searching for the cargo vessel.

“Our investigation of Wednesday’s accident is still continuing,” he said.

Budi said there had been no signs yet of an oil spill but that BPMigas and Kodesco would continue to monitor the site and make the necessary preparations in case a leak was detected later.

He said Kodeco had prepared oil booms to safeguard the location, supported by equipment provided by HESS, Santos, JOB Pertamina-Petrochina East Java and Kangean Energy.

“All the basic equipment was moved to the site just three hours after the incident,” Budi said.

According to the Web site of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, the crash caused the platform to tilt by 40 degrees and caused some other damage, forcing the company to stop operations immediately.

The head of public and institutional relations for BPMigas, Elan Biantoro, said it was estimated that the incident might cause a production loss of 1,600 barrels of oil a day, or 15 million standard cubic feet per day.

Elan said that officials were assessing the stability and safety of the damaged platform, to determine where operations would be able to continue.

He predicted that if cleared, it would take two to three weeks before work at the platform could get back to full-scale production.

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Indonesia, US navies conduct disaster handling exercise

Antara News, Thursday, July 29, 2010 19:28 WIB

Ambon, Maluku (ANTARA News) - The United States and Indonesian navies held a joint exercise on Wednesday on the handling of natural disasters in integrated ways, a spokesman said.

The exercise which involved about 40 personnel from the Indonesian Defense Forces (TNI), the United States Navy (USN) and Maluku`s Search and Rescue (SAR) team lasted one day, spokesman of the US hospital ship USNS Mercy T-H 19 for Pacific Partnership 2010 Affairs, Daniel Bernardi, said.

"This exercise is held to provide knowledge on how to handle a natural disaster in an integrated way because a natural disaster in one country is different from that in another one," Bernardi said.

So, he said, if a natural disaster happens in a country, rescue workers sent to help mitigate the victims can provide assistance effectively because they already know how to handle it.

He said the joint exercise was divided into two sessions, one was on theories organized at the office of the Maluku governor`s office while the other one was field practice.

Bernardi said that during the Sail Banda event, the Pacific Partership 2010 held a lot of exercises, among others in the health field, emergencies and other types of exercises.

"We call the exercise SMET (Subject Matter Expert Training) which sometimes involve Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and the United States," he said.

The USNS Mercy is in Maluku on a Pacific Partnership 2010 mission and to support Operation Surya Bhaskara Jaya which is part of the international yachting event, Sail Banda.

The Pacific Partnership 2010 is an annual humanitarian program of the United States consisting of exercises on the handling of natural disasters in Indonesia.

Avertible catastrophe

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, Saturday, Jun. 26, 2010

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

(Photo: ANP)

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Earthquake preparations 'a disgrace', says seismologist

BBC News,

More quakes will happen and more planning is needed, scientists say

The lack of earthquake planning by the international community is a "disgrace", a leading seismologist has said.

Professor John McCloskey said that governments must prepare for quakes, rather than act after the event.

The University of Ulster expert led the analysis of the quake that started the Indian Ocean 2004 tsunami.

"It is an international disgrace that we appear not to have made the smallest progress in preparation," he said.

"The 'international community' is very good at preparing for war but has failed completely to prepare to help the poor, who are always the ones to suffer in these events.

"If we want to claim to be civilised we need to ensure that we never see these scenes again."

In a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience he and his team warn that a huge wave-generating quake capable of killing as many people as in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami could strike off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, with the city of Padang in the path of destruction.

The danger comes from a relentless increase in pressure over the last 200 years on a section of the Sunda Trench, one of the world's most notorious earthquake zones, which runs parallel to the western Sumatra coast.

This section, named after the Mentawai islands, "is near failure," the letter warned.

Professor McCloskey said that governments were "refusing the accept the inevitable".

"Earthquakes happen, they kill people, they will kill more and more people if we don't organise ourselves properly," he said.

He said the earthquake which rocked Padang, western Sumatra in September last year killing more than 1,000 people was not the "great earthquake" scientists were waiting for but it may have made the next massive earthquake more likely.

Professor McCloskey is the head of the Geophysics Research Group at the UoU's Environmental Sciences Research Institute.

He said that while earthquake prediction was "as far off as ever" all the indicators are pointed to western Sumatra as a massive quake location.

"Scientists cannot forecast the exact size of the earthquake but in this case there is complete agreement that it will be very strong, probably bigger than magnitude 8.5, dwarfing the energy release in the Haitian quake," he said.

"We also cannot say for sure what size the tsunami will be but it has the potential to be very destructive - maybe even worse than 2004.

"But the future need not look like Haiti. We know this earthquake is coming and we might have years or even decades to prepare.

"Given the unfolding scenes of carnage following the Haiti earthquake and the completely inadequate speed of the international response, the responsibility on the Indonesian government, the international community and the international NGOs is enormous.

"We must work urgently to prepare for this earthquake if we are not to witness again the awful scenes of children dying for want of a few stitches or a cast for a broken leg."

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Indonesia on alert for tsunami drill

BBC News, by Karishma Vaswani, Jakarta

Indonesians are still reeling from the devastating 7.6-magnitude earthquake which struck off the coast of Sumatra last month, killing at least 1,100 people and injuring many more.

However, as efforts shift from rescuing survivors to rebuilding the provincial capital, Padang, and outlying villages, some people have already begun to discuss whether the country is sufficiently prepared for another natural disaster.

Now a tsunami drill being held on Wednesday in 18 countries around the Indian Ocean rim aims to test the responses of local authorities and the public.

Experts are agreed that another powerful earthquake could hit the area anytime in the near future.

But they are unsure if the Indonesian emergency response teams are equipped to react quickly and effectively to a crisis on a similar scale.

The country's National Disaster Management Agency has acknowledged that it was too slow to respond to the Sumatra earthquake, which brought down hospitals, schools and shopping malls, cut power lines and triggered landslides.

"On the first day, it was just pure panic," Priyo Kardono, a spokesman for the agency, told the BBC.

"We couldn't contact our colleagues in Padang because they were affected by the disaster. It's human nature to save your family first in these circumstances. But everyone needs to evaluate their readiness and response to emergencies like these," he added.

Public response

The panic in Padang saw the city's airport closed for 12 crucial hours - an important window during which the authorities could have sent much-needed emergency rescue and relief teams to the area.

In 2004, the only warning most people had was the sight of a giant wave

The head of the Indonesian Seismological Agency, Fauzi, says that was because many of the airport workers rushed home to check on their families.

"Padang airport was abandoned shortly after the earthquake, because the workers were scared," he adds. "We urgently need systems in place to test the public's response to disasters like this, to see how they will react."

Garnering information about the responses of both the authorities and the public is one of the aims of Wednesday's tsunami drill.

Exercise Indian Ocean Wave 09 will simulate the 9.2-magnitude earthquake which struck off the north-western coast of Sumatra in 2004, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in 11 countries, more than half of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh.

Held on World Disaster Reduction Day, the exercise will be the first ocean-wide test of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (IOTWS), set up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) the following year.

When the tsunami struck five years ago, the only warning most people in the region had was the sight of a giant wave heading towards them.

Unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean did not have a system to alert residents of coastal areas that a tsunami was imminent.

Shortly after last month's earthquake in Sumatra, an alert was quickly broadcast warning people in low-lying coastal areas of the possibility of another tsunami and ordering them to evacuate to higher ground. It was eventually lifted, however, as a tsunami did not materialise.

Vital co-operation

Unesco is helping to organise Wednesday's tsunami exercise. According to the UN agency, it will be the first time that the IOTWS will be tested worldwide.

Spokeswoman Sue Williams says one of the major challenges has been to get all the countries who signed up to the system to share data.

"The countries have to share their data otherwise this system won't work," she explains.

"If a tsunami is generated off the coast of Indonesia and is on its way to Africa - then African authorities need to have data about the wave at the source, where it began its journey. That means sharing seismic data and maps - and that was a very important part of the discussions and negotiations we had before we signed this agreement."

Another major challenge is getting the information about a potential tsunami out to people in the coastal areas, Ms Williams says.

"The instruments that are used to measure seismic activity and tsunami activity are in the water - the thing to watch is what happens on the beach," she adds.

"We've seen that national authorities can get the message out about a potential tsunami very quickly, but getting the message out to the communities on the coast is a completely different challenge."

"If the fault line of the earthquake is very close to the coast - the way it was in Aceh - then people have only got a few minutes to act," she warns.

Equipment shortage

The Indonesian government wants to deliver tsunami alerts to its citizens and those most at risk from the destructive wave within five minutes of an underwater earthquake in the region.

But experts say that will not be achieved until the country has installed at least 22 buoys, 120 tide gauges and 160 seismographs in its waters.

So far, according to the Indonesian Seismological Agency, it only has 14 buoys, 60 tide gauges and 150 seismographs.

The system is expected to be fully completed by 2010, but is already operational. Much of the funding for it has come from international donors, including Germany, Japan and China.

Wednesday's test will therefore determine whether the Indonesian authorities have spent that money wisely, and whether people are prepared for another catastrophe.

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