Following is a timeline of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for June 2010.
Events prior to June
June 1–5
June 1 United States attorney general Eric Holder said his office was going to investigate possible criminal prosecutions. He specifically said they are investigating Clean Water Act, Oil Pollution Act of 1990, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Endangered Species Act. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry steps down as federal on-scene coordinator and is succeeded by her assistant James A. Watson. 2010 Atlantic hurricane season begins. Oil reaches on the beaches of Gulf Islands National Seashore.
June 2 Oil spotted from Pensacola, Florida beaches. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal sends Obama letter opposing the six-month moratorium on new deepwater rigs. White House approves construction of five new sand berms in addition to the one approved the week before sending the $360 million bill to BP. The berms with sand from the Gulf floor will act as barrier islands.
June 3 BP begins airing an ad which features Tony Hayward and has the tagline: "We will get this done. We will make this right." It was reportedly prepared by Washington, D.C.-based "Purple Strategies" of political consultants Democrat Steve McMahon and Republican Alex Castellanos. It has an estimated budget of $50 million. Moody's estimates that the insured loss on the spill will be $1.4 billion and $3.5 billion. Moody's notes that BP's insured loss would have been more if it were not insuring with its captive insurer Jupiter Insurance of Guernsey. Jupiter has established loss reserves of $700 million. AM Best raises Jupiter's outlook from negative to stable. Liabilities beyond the insured losses would have to be absorbed by various involved including its three owners (BP: 65%; Anadarko Petroleum: 25%, Mitsui Oil Exploration Co. (MOECO) subsidiary of Mitsui: 10%). Transocean to be added to the Swiss Market Index on June 21. BP releases 24 ROV live streaming video feeds (2 each from the Boa Deep C, Discoverer Enterprise, Ocean Intervention III, Q4000, Skandi Neptune, Viking Poseidon).
June 4 Tar balls arrive on beaches in Pensacola, Florida. However, Escambia County, Florida officials do not close the beaches. Mississippi has not closed its beaches (with the exception of Petit Bois Island and Horn Island). Alabama warns visitors to stay out of the water on all of its ocean beaches. BP says it has paid $84 million reimbursing people for loss of income. BP closing stock price 37.16 Louisiana State University say they have discovered an underwater plume northwest of the well. Ecosphere Technologies - a diversified water engineering and environmental services company - deployed a non-chemical water treatment system to assist in the remediation efforts.
June 5 Obama in his third trip to Louisiana since the disaster began visits Grand Isle, Louisiana for the second time in two weeks. Obama criticized BP for paying $50 million for television advertising and planning to pay $10.5 billion in quarterly dividends. Obama in his weekly radio address said 20,000 people are involved, he has authorized the deployment of 17,500 National Guard troops, that 1,900 boats were working on the spill and 4.3 million feet of boom had been deployed. Thad W. Allen says that a cap intended to capture oil and pump it to the surface is capturing about a day. BP claims the cap captured on its first day. The NOAA "No Fish Boundary" extends , or about 33% of the federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico covering an area roughly from Dry Tortugas, Florida in the south to Panama City, Florida in the northeast and Morgan City, Louisiana in the northwest. BP confirms it purchased keyword search terms such as "oil spill" from Google, Yahoo and Bing so that the sponsored link at the top of the page goes to a BP page. The tag on the sponsored link for "oil spill" says "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping."Google search for oil+spill - google.com - Retrieved June 6, 2010
June 6–10 June 6 Both the Coast Guard and BP say the cap is capturing a day. The New York Times reports in an article headlined "BP Pays Out Claims, but Satisfaction Is Not Included" that BP has 25 claims offices across the Gulf and has paid $46 million to 17,500 residents. BP said it is still processing another 17,500 claims. BP is paying fishing boat captains $5,000/month and deck hands $2,500. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour tells Fox News Sunday that "we have had virtually no oil" wash up on the Mississippi coast. Hayward tells the BBC that he has not spoken directly to Obama since the spill started. Hayward says BP scientists have "no evidence" of plumes. BP abandons plans to close three remaining vents on the containment cap noting that with one vent it is capturing as much oil as it can handle.
June 7 A report on June 6 that oiled birds had washed ashore in Texas is called erroneous by various government officials who note the slick is more than from Texas. Senator Bill Nelson tells MSNBC he has seen reports that oil is now rising from the sea bed itself rather a broken pipe from above indicating the BP well bore and casing integrity has failed. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said BP could be fined $4,300 per barrel. The White House says it favors raising the $75 million cap on liability damages for drilling rigs. Officials say the cap is working and is approaching handling the maximum of per day that its gathering drillship the Discoverer Enterprise can handle. The Helix Energy Solutions Group Q4000 is to be configured to handle the excess. The Q4000 is onsite because it was used in the failed Top kill procedure. Part of the reconfiguring involves replacing the current cap on the blowout preventer with a new larger cap. Members of the Flow Rate Technical Group, which is a government group appointed to standardize the flow estimates from the leak, say it is impossible to make calculations without high resolution video and the lack of any formal measurement of the flow. One of the members of the group, Ira Leifer, said that the current operation may have actually increased the leak multifold rather than 20 percent that BP had suggested noting that video feeds show the leak to be the same or worse than it was before. Leifer said the pipe could be spewing a day – the worst-case scenario BP had offered. Construction of a second permanent riser begins.
June 8 An Obama interview with Matt Lauer of the Today Show airs with Obama saying he wishes he could fire BP chief Hayward and "I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick." British commentators take Obama to task for taking such harsh rhetoric against Britain's biggest company that paid $14.4 billion in British taxes in 2008 (and $7.2 billion in 2009) with Toby Young noting "what's bad for BP is bad for Britain." BP announce it will bring in a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel that could then be offloaded with a shuttle tanker (Loch Rannoch which normally services the Schiehallion oilfield) as the processing capacity of collected oil by Discoverer Enterprise ( of oil per day) is not sufficient. It also announced that it is setting up a new unit to oversee management of the oil spill and its aftermath, which will be headed by former TNK-BP chief executive Robert Dudley. BP releases the requested high resolution images of the leak.NBC Nightly News - June 8, 2010 NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco confirms that underwater oil plumes have been discovered at about northeast of the wellhead. She said the plumes discovered by the University of South Florida and measured oil at less than 0.5 parts per million. BP announces it will donate net revenue from oil recovered from the spill to create a new wildlife fund to create, restore, improve and protect wildlife habitat along the coastline of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. This is over and what it is required under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Net revenue consists of the sale of oil minus royalties (18.75%) to the US Government. This only affects BP's 65% ownership share and not Anadarko's or Misui's portion. Five of the seven members of the National Academy of Engineering sign a complaint saying they had recommended a 6-month moratorium on drilling in of water and not 500 as was announced. Price of a barrel of oil (West Texas Intermediate - Cushing, Oklahoma) $84.34.
June 9 BP's chief operating officer Doug Suttles contradicts the underwater plume discussion noting, "It may be down to how you define what a plume is here…The oil that has been found is in very minute quantities." BP announces plans to have the well testing vessel Toisa Pisces replace the Discoverer Enterprise for bringing oil to the surface and retrofitting the Q4000 to burn oil in a plan to increase the gathering capabilities from a day. The Toisa Pisces will have capabilities of handling a day while the Q4000 which currently has a day capabilities is to be converted to a day. The tanker Loch Rannoch is to be brought in by June to begin offloading the oil. In complying with a request from BP to Twitter parody site BPGlobalPR which has 145,000 follower, the site posts "We are not associated with Beyond Petroleum, the company that has been destroying the Gulf of Mexico for 51 days." The event is covered by the New York Times with the headline, "BP Account on Twitter? Just a Joke; K thx bye." The article also clarifies that BP's Twitter account is bp_america. BP made the request one day after ABC News correspondent Dan Harris interviewed the proprietor. The Guardian reports that since April 20, 2010, 27 new offshore drilling projects have been approved by MMS. All but one project was granted similar exemptions from environmental review as BP. Two were submitted by the UK firm, and made the same claims about oil-rig safety and the implausibility of a spill damaging the environment. According to the Centre for Biological Diversity, even after the catastrophe, the Obama administration did not tighten its oversight of offshore drilling. "This oil spill has had absolutely no effect on MMS behaviour at all," said Kieran Suckling, the director of the centre. "It's still business as usual which means rubber stamping oil drilling permits with no environmental review."
June 10 Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs indicates there is a not single command and control hierarchy in the cleanup and frequently BP is still taking the lead. Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, said "I still don't know who's in charge. Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard? I have spent more time fighting the officials of BP and the Coast Guard than fighting the oil." Time has an article headlined "The Dirty Dozen: Who to Blame for the Oil Spill" (1. BP former chairman John Browne, current BP president Tony Hayward, 3. MMS official in charge of Gulf drilling Chris Oynes, 4. BP COO Doug Suttles, 5 and 6. Dick Cheney/George W. Bush, 7. The American Driver, 8. Obama, 9. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, 10. MMS director S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, 11. Transocean CEO Steven Newman, 12. Halliburton executive Tim Probert) Waterworld actor Kevin Costner says BP has issued a letter of intent to buy 32 centrifugal oil-water separators from his company Ocean Therapy Solutions. The largest machine (112 inches high, 2-1/2 tons and cleans a day of oily water). Senate Democrats send a letter to Hayward asking that a $20 billion escrow account be set up to deal with the spill.Senate Letter to BP - washingtonpost.com June 13, 2010 Nearly 200 lawsuits have been brought against BP.
June 11–15 June 11