For want of getting repetitious, it seems that BP has yet another corrosion problem in Alaska – this is its third. Chuck Hamel, BP’s bette noir, wrote to Stephen Johnson, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to report that BP had suffered additional corrosion leaks, which it had not yet reported. One we reported yesterday in a gas pipe.

As for the other….“They have yet to reveal the newly discovered existing leak from a hole in the same transit line at another recently excavated caribou crossing . . . barely a mile away,’’ says Hamel in his letter. “It is apparently indeterminate just how long this second internal corrosion leak has existed . . . so silence is the rule.’’