The company that owned the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April had widespread safety concerns about several of its other rigs in the gulf, and a month before the disaster it commissioned a broad review of the safety culture of the company’s North American operations, according to confidential internal reports.

In response to “a series of serious accidents and near-hits within the global organization,” Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, commissioned the risk management company Lloyd’s Register to investigate its Houston headquarters and three other gulf rigs besides the Deepwater Horizon to assess its safety culture.

The confidential internal reports, obtained by The New York Times, offer an unusually candid view of safety and maintenance concerns within the world’s largest offshore drilling company, and they indicate that the problems highlighted in earlier reports provided to The Times about the Deepwater Horizon were not limited to that rig, which exploded on April 20, leading to an oil spill that is estimated to have poured at least four million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Transocean has 14 rigs now operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and 139 worldwide, and these documents raise concerns about locations beyond Deepwater Horizon, especially the three additional gulf rigs that were recently investigated. In fact, one of those rigs is being leased by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon site.

The new documents also shed light on one of the lingering mysteries of the disaster: why the rig sank. They indicate that there were problems with the Deepwater Horizon’s ballast system that was responsible for keeping the rig afloat and stable. If the rig had not sunk, the leak might not have occurred. Federal investigators have questioned whether deferred maintenance and other factors had played a role in the sinking of the rig.

A previous set of worker-safety reports provided to The Times were specific to the Deepwater Horizon. The new documents draw from analyses of three other rigs in the gulf and attempt to provide an overview for the entire North American division of the Transocean fleet.

The safety concerns cited in the company’s assessment of its North American division are supplemented by newly released internal reports concerning the Deepwater Horizon’s equipment. These equipment reports identify dozens of deficiencies, including some relating to the rig’s blowout preventer, and some that are categorized as “critical equipment items that may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

“Without a doubt, previous incidents and near-hits experienced throughout the organization were as a result of multiple causes and many contributory factors,” said the summary report, which gave an overview of the company’s North American Division and draws from investigations of Transocean’s Marianas, Discoverer Clear Leader, GSF Development Driller II and Deepwater Horizon drilling rigs.

This is not the first report of the Deepwater Horizon experiencing problems with its ballast system. In May 2008, Transocean was forced to evacuate more than 70 workers after problems with the ballast system flooded part of the rig, causing it to list to its side, federal records show.

A lack of hands-on experience for workers and managers has contributed to safety concerns at the company, and a stifling bureaucracy imposed by onshore management has led to widespread resentment among rig workers, the investigators found.

Nearly 40 percent of workers interviewed on the four rigs said that past problems were typically investigated by company officials strictly to attribute blame.

“It ticks me off when someone fails or has an incident; they focus on the paper rather than the process that was gone through,” said a worker from the Discoverer Clear Leader.

Another worker on Transocean’s Marianas rig said that the safety manual seemed to be “written for the courtroom, not the oil field.”

The reports are likely to broaden the discussion of blame for the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers. BP, which was leasing the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean at the time of the explosion, has been under the harshest glare for its role, but the Justice Department has said that its criminal investigation of the disaster will look at the role of the many companies involved.

About 43 percent of workers on the four rigs expressed fears of reprisals for reporting problems, the documents said. About 54 percent of Deepwater Horizon workers cited these fears, while about 61 percent of workers on the Marianas did so.

Some workers said the company was systematically deferring maintenance to save money.

“This rig is getting $550,000 per day; unless it’s a sink that needs fixing it isn’t getting fixed,” said a worker from the Marianas about the maintenance concerns. “They won’t send the rig to the shipyard for major refurb that is required in certain areas.”

The investigators who visited the four rigs in March concluded that many crew members and front-line supervisors were too readily promoted without sufficient on-the-job experience to appreciate the hazards. “Front-line crews are potentially working with a mind-set that they believe they are fully aware of all the hazards when it is highly likely that they are not,” the investigators said, adding that the workload, and thus the risks, on the rigs was increasing.

After reviewing the new documents, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety, voiced concern.

“These documents are more evidence that despite the growing count of worker deaths and safety violations, the oil and gas industry still just doesn’t get it,” she said. “They need to change their worker-safety culture, and I am pretty sure we can’t count on them to do it by themselves.”

She added, “The oil and gas industry is not the same as a mom-and-pop grocery, and they can’t be treated the same.”

Lou Colasuonno, a spokesman for Transocean, wrote in an e-mail that the company was committed to safety and maintenance and that it proactively commissioned independent employee surveys and rig condition assessments.

“Reading the complete reports makes it abundantly clear that that both studies were positive and were designed specifically to identify strengths and weaknesses — a critical step in evaluating performance,” he wrote.

“Overall maintenance on the Deepwater Horizon met or exceeded regulatory and industry standards, and the company’s proactive review process helped the Deepwater Horizon log seven consecutive years without a single lost time incident or major environmental event prior to this incident.”

He declined to specify the series of “serious accidents and near-hits” that motivated the safety investigations.

The safety reports cite a variety of positive findings about Transocean. “Despite several rig management changes on board the rigs visited, rig leadership was generally praised by the work force,” one said.

Almost 87 percent of workers said they believed that there was enough time to do their work according to rules and procedures.

“Rig management and supervisors were generally seen as approachable, set a good example of the company commitment to safety, and were generally highly visible,” the investigators said.

But their praise often came with a certain ambivalence.

“Generally, the work force thought there was a sufficient number of staff to manage safety,” one report concluded before adding, “There were, however, some questions surrounding the retention of skilled personnel, competency levels for some personnel, and of processes in place for competency development and assurance.”

Although high levels of trust were reported at the rig level, “there was a significant level of mistrust between the rigs and the beach,” the report said, referring to onshore management.

Around 46 percent of workers on the four rigs said that some of the work force was uncomfortable with calling a “time out for safety.” Deepwater Horizon workers polled at about the same rate on this issue.

Transocean’s equipment documents reveal for the first time the severity of the maintenance issues that plagued the Deepwater Horizon, and they indicate that the company was aware of the consequences of the problems.

These new documents refer to at least 36 pieces of equipment in ill repair on the Deepwater Horizon that “may lead to loss of life, serious injury or environmental damage as a result of inadequate use and/or failure of equipment.”

The new equipment documents indicate that an inspection of the Deepwater Horizon rig conducted just days before the April 20 accident found various problems with hydraulic relays that controlled the rig’s watertight doors, two of which had to be opened and closed by hand.

Of the four rigs investigated, the Development Driller II is now being used by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon. The Marianas was the original rig that was drilling BP’s Macondo well before being damaged in a hurricane. Despite having been built in 2009, the Discoverer Clear Leader had “a few notable safety related incidents on the rig during its relatively short operational history.” It is now being used by BP for oil containment at the Deepwater Horizon site.

It was not clear where the other rigs cited in the safety reports are operating now.

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, 4August2010)

Who wants to pay for “D”-quality plumbing? Fly the skies with a “D”-rated pilot? Settle for a “D” restaurant?

Exactly.

The way the Mount Olive school district sees it, its students should not be getting by with D’s on their report cards, either. This fall, there will no longer be any D’s, only A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s.

“D’s are simply not useful in society,” said Larrie Reynolds, the Mount Olive superintendent, who led the campaign against D’s as a way to raise the bar and motivate students to work harder. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”

The no-D policy, which was adopted by the school board last week, has led to a flurry of Facebook messages from students calling it the worst idea ever, and has been debated on soccer fields and around swimming pools in this suburban township in northwestern New Jersey. Even some teachers have expressed concerns that it may result in more students failing.

“I really don’t like it,” said Chris Radler, 13, who is entering ninth grade; he said it was unfair and would increase the pressure on students. “If you’re a little bit less than a C, but not quite an F, you’re still going to fail. Some kids aren’t at that level yet. They aren’t able to get that upper grade.”

But parents like Christine Priest, a mother of six, applaud the new policy for reinforcing a message that they have long taught at home: D’s are not good enough. “With my kids, we always told them a D is an F,” she said. “D just wasn’t enough of an effort.”

Under the old system, students could pass with a 65 — 389 of the 1,500 students at Mount Olive High had a “D” on their final report cards in June — but now anything lower than a 70 will be considered failure.

While few high schools have banned D’s outright as Mount Olive has, some have sought to tamp down grade inflation by quietly tightening their standards over the years. Several New Jersey high schools, for instance, have raised the minimum for D’s to 70, which is traditionally the C-minus range, with anything below deemed an F.

Mount Olive, an above-average school in a middle-class community, is developing a support system to help students meet the tougher grading standard. When students receive a failing grade on a test, a paper or a homework assignment in the future, they will have three days to repeat the work for a C, and their parents will be notified by phone or e-mail.

Students who continue to fail will be placed on a “watch list” to receive extra-help classes, as well as tutoring from other students. If they need to make up a failed course, they will be given the option of attending an evening school, known as “Sunset Academy,” that will charge a fee of $150 per class.

The total cost of these support efforts to the district is expected to be less than $10,000, school officials said.

Max Werner, 17, an A-student whose father, Mark, is president of the school board, said he and his friends liked the no-D policy because no one should be satisfied with such a low mark. “People are going to have to try harder,” he said. “It’s not like a nice college is going to see all D’s on a report card and want to accept that student.”

Dr. Reynolds said he used a similar grading policy — “A, B, or do it over” — when teaching college classes in Wichita, Kan., in the late 1990s. About half of his students in those classes had to rewrite their initial papers, he recalled, but eventually nearly everyone was turning in work that merited an A or B. “I have never given less than a B,” he said.

In summer school last week, 79 Mount Olive High students were repeating classes they had failed during the year. Mark Fiedorczyk, the summer school principal, said he expected to see an increase next summer because of the no-D policy.

Still, Mr. Fiedorczyk, who teaches seventh-grade science during the year, said the higher standard was just what some students needed. In June, he handed out D’s to a half-dozen students, all of whom, he said, were capable of C’s if they had tried harder. Instead, they had skipped homework and projects, and showed up unprepared for tests.

“I have kids who walk the borderline,” he said. “They know it. They admit it. They calculate what they need to get the D.”

At which, another teacher joked: “Then they’ll turn around and say they can’t do math.”

For Aphrodite Georgakopoulos, 16, the no-D policy means she will have to work a lot harder to avoid summer school again. She is repeating world history and Algebra 2 after getting lazy about assignments or just giving up in frustration, she said.

“It’s not like I can’t do it; it’s just that I won’t push myself,” she said. “I don’t know why. I need someone to be constantly on top of me, making sure I do everything.”

Down the hallway, Sean Robinson, 17, who is retaking Spanish, said he hoped that students would feel better about themselves in a D-free school, and that Mount Olive’s higher standard would raise its profile in the region.

“Normally, I just wouldn’t try, but I feel like if I did badly, I’d bring down my school’s G.P.A.,” he said. “My mom will be happy.”

(Michael Appleton, New York Times, 8August2010)

A study led by University of Alberta researchers found levels of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and zinc exceeded federal and provincial guidelines for the protection of aquatic life in melted snow or water collected near or downstream from oilsands mining.

High levels of toxic pollutants in Alberta’s Athabasca River system are linked to oilsands mining, researchers have found.

The findings counter the reports by a joint industry-government panel that the pollutant levels are due to natural sources rather than human development.

Mercury, thallium and other pollutants accumulated in higher concentrations in snowpacks and waterways near and downstream from oilsands development than in more remote areas, said a study to be published Monday afternoon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Upstream and undeveloped sites exposed directly to the McMurray Geologic Formation, the natural source of the oilsands, did not show high levels of pollutants.

The study led by Erin Kelly and David Schindler of the University of Alberta also found that levels of the pollutants cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, silver and zinc exceeded federal and provincial guidelines for the protection of aquatic life in melted snow or water collected near or downstream from oilsands mining.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and Juneau, Alaska-based Oceana, a non-profit group focused on water quality issues, also contributed to the report. The study was funded by the Tides Foundation and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, two non-profit groups with an interest in environmental projects.

Residents downstream from the oilsands have expressed concerns that pollution in the river may be causing increased cancer rates.

However, the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, a joint industry-government environmental body that monitors water in the Athabasca River and its tributaries, has reported the pollutant levels occur naturally due to erosion of the natural geologic formation that contains the oilsands and are not caused by human activity.

Goal to test claims of monitoring program

The authors of Monday’s study said they wanted to test those claims.

The Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program’s findings had been questioned in the past, but critics did not have any data from independent studies to compare to the program’s data, the paper said.

The new findings confirm “the serious defects” of the monitoring program, the study concluded. It added that detailed monitoring, including the ability to distinguish the sources of the contaminants, is “essential” to control the potential impact of pollutants on human health.

The researchers collected water from more than 35 sites in February and June 2008 along the Athabasca River, its tributaries, the Athabasca Delta and Lake Athabasca. They accumulated winter snowpack from 31 other sites in the region in March 2008.

The researchers chose sampling sites upstream and downstream from oilsands mining, with both within 50 kilometres of oilsands developments and near undeveloped oilsands sites.

They then tested the samples for levels of 13 elements listed as priority pollutants under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act.

(CBC, 30August2010)

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

(Frank Rich, New York Times, 28August2010)