‘Exxon Valdez’ disaster predicted for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Hamel has had his share of detractors, notably BP and several Alaskan state officials, who said he’s a conspiracy theorist, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

But Hamel was vindicated in March when Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation confirmed Hamel’s claims of major spills in December 2004 and July 2003 at the oil well owned by BP and operated by its drilling contractor, Nabors, on the North Slope, which the company never reported as required by state law.

Hamel filed a formal complaint in January with the EPA, claiming he had pictures showing a gusher spewing a brown substance. An investigation by Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation determined that as much as 294 gallons of drilling mud was spilled when gas was sucked into wells, causing sprays of drilling muds and oil that shot up as high as 85 feet into the air.

Because both spills exceeded 55 gallons, BP and Nabors were obligated under a 2003 compliance agreement that BP signed with Alaska to immediately report the spills. That didn't occur, said Leslie Pearson, the agency's spill prevention and emergency response manager. BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said the company did report the spills after learning about it and said the spill wasn’t that big a deal.

"In this case, the drilling rig operators did not feel this type of event qualified for reporting," Beaudo told the Anchorage Daily News in March. "Obviously the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation felt otherwise and that's what they're saying as a result of their investigation. It's a matter of interpretation."

Beaudo said the agency’s findings are in line with BP's own investigation that the spills did not cause any harm to the environment, aside from some speckles on the snow.

But what’s troubling to Hamel is that Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation has let BP off with a slap on the wrist. The agency is not penalising BP, rather it said that it will ensure that the company reports other spills in a timely manner.

That plays into Hamel’s other theory: that the state of Alaska is in cahoots with the oil industry and routinely fails to enforce laws that would hold those companies liable for violating environmental regulations.

Safety issues and poor maintenance at North Slope oil facilities have been the subject of debate for years. In April of 2001, whistleblowers informed Hamel and Interior Secretary Gale Norton - who at the time was touring the Prudhoe Bay oil fields - that the safety valves at Prudhoe Bay, which activate in the event of a pipeline rupture, failed to close. Secondary valves that connect the oil platforms with processing plants also failed to close. And because the technology at Prudhoe Bay would be duplicated in the ANWR that means the potential for a massive explosion and huge spills are very real.

"A major spill or fire at one of our [processing centers] will exit the piping at high pressure, and leave a half-mile-wide oil slick on the white snow all the way," Hamel said at the time in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

That type of catastrophic scenario was wiped out of everyone’s minds after 9-11 happened.
 
But then in March 2002, a BP whistleblower brought up the very same issues and went public with his claims of maintenance backlogs and employee shortages at Prudhoe Bay, which he said could worsen spills on the North Slope, particularly if the ANWR is opened up to exploration.

The whistleblower, Robert Brian, who worked as an instrument technician at Prudhoe Bay for 22 years, had a lengthy meeting with aides to Senators Jospeh Lieberman and Bob Graham, both Democrats, to discuss his claims.