Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Ed Jewett]

Narrated video of helicopter overflight of spill zone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8JHSAVYT0&feature=player_embedded#!

[Ed Jewett]

[/url] [size=12]
U.S. Coast Guard Led Big Oil Spill Exercise Prior to Rig Explosion 11 May 2010 Three weeks before the massive Gulf oil rig explosion, U.S. Coast Guard officials led an elaborate exercise in which they practiced their response to a major oil spill -- one of four dry runs over the past decade that foreshadowed many of the weaknesses in coordination, communication, expertise and technology that are now hampering the federal response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.


http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/bp-oil-spi...d=10616979 via Citizens for Legitimate Government

[url=http://www.legitgov.org/]

[/SIZE]

[Susan Grant]

http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/

It seems to me that this video may just have the answer to cleaning up the oil and just by using hay. Wow! Is it just too simple?

[Ed Jewett]

“Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.”

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05...n_the.html

40 large color photos from the Gulf of Mexico[/FONT]

[Ed Jewett]

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: dead dolphins found washed up on US coast

US wildlife officials are investigating whether the deaths of six dolphins on the Gulf Coast are related to the massive oil spill.



Published: 7:00AM BST 12 May 2010

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Samples have been sent for testing to see whether the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was to blame for their deaths Photo: AP

The oil slick passes through the protective barrier around the Chandeleur Islands Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES


Blair Mase of the National Marine Fisheries Service said that dolphin carcasses had been found in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama since May 2. Samples have been sent for testing to see whether the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was to blame for their deaths.
Mr Mase and animal rescue coordinator Michele Kelley in Louisiana said that none of the carcasses had obvious signs of oil. Mr Mase also said it's common for dead dolphins to wash up this time of year when they are in shallow waters to calve.

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Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, said his agency found one of the dolphins on the north side of Horn Island in Mississippi. He said the body was decomposed.
"We have this additional factor (oil spill) going on, so that will be tested," Mr Solangi said. "We are not leaving that factor out and they are being tested."
There are 3,000 to 5,000 dolphins in and around Mississippi waters and an estimated 75,000 in the Gulf of Mexico. Federal officials reported that about a dozen birds, fouled and sickened by oil, had been rescued, and that two had been rehabilitated enough to be released.
Dozens of dead sea turtles have also been found.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlif...coast.html

[Ed Jewett]

US Senate Begins Oil Spill Cover-Up

by Tom Eley

Global Research, May 13, 2010
World Socialist Web Site - 2010-05-12


On Tuesday, the US senate began hearings into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which took the lives of 11 workers in an April 20 explosion and has since poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the region with an environmental and economic catastrophe.

Appearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the morning and the Environmental and Public Health Committee in the afternoon were executives from the three corporations implicated in the disaster: Lamar McKay, president of the US operations of BP, which owned the oil and the drill site; Steven Newman, president of Transocean, the contractor that owned the rig and employed most of its workers; and Tim Probert, an executive with Halliburton, which contracted for the work of cementing the rig’s wellhead one mile beneath ocean’s surface.

The hearing resembled a falling out among thieves, with multi-millionaire executives—who, until April 20, had collaborated in thwarting basic safety and environmental considerations—each blaming the other for the explosion.

McKay of BP blamed Transocean. “Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and its equipment, including the blowout preventer,” he said. “Transocean’s blowout preventer failed to operate.” Newman flatly denied that the blowout preventer was responsible for the disaster, shifting blame to BP, which he said controlled the operation, and Halliburton, which was responsible for the cementing around the well cap. “The one thing we know with certainty is that on the evening of April 20 there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing, or both,” Newman said. Probert of Halliburton pushed back, indicating that BP and Transocean had moved forward operations before cementing was adequately set.

There was, in fact, some harmony between the accounts offered by the executives of Halliburton and Transocean, both of whom appeared to suggest that BP ordered the skipping of a usual step in offshore drilling—the placing of a cement plug inside the well to hold explosive gases in place. That this step was passed over was corroborated by two workers on the rig, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on condition of anonymity. The workers also told the Journal that BP first cleared the decision with the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS). Both BP and the MMS refused comment to the Journal.

Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor, has gathered testimony from Deepwater Horizon survivors that indicates the rig was hit by major bursts of natural gas, promoting fears of an explosion just weeks before the April 20 blast, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. This raised concerns about whether mud at the well head should be replaced by much lighter seawater prior to installation of a concrete plug. The decision to proceed won out, according to information gathered by Bea.

Whatever the immediate cause of the disaster, the clear thrust of the hearings was to focus public outrage on a single, correctable “mistake,” such as a mechanical failure or regulatory oversight, in order to obscure the more fundamental reasons for the disaster: the decades-long gutting of regulation carried out by both Republicans and Democrats at the behest of the oil industry that made such a catastrophe all but inevitable.

A similar calculation lay behind Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s Tuesday announcement that the MMS, which ostensibly regulates offshore oil drilling, will be split into two units—one that collects the estimated $13 billion in annual royalties from the nation’s extractive industries, and one that enforces safety and environmental regulations. Salazar’s claim that this would eliminate “conflicts of interest” in government regulation was nervy, to say the least, coming from a man with long-standing and intimate ties with oil and mining concerns, including BP.

Indeed, more farcical than the executives’ recriminations against each other was the spectacle of senators attempting to pose as tough critics of the oil industry. The US Senate, like the House of Representatives, the Department of the Interior, and the White House, is for all intents and purposes on the payroll of BP and the energy industry as a whole. Among the senators sitting on the two committees who have received tens of thousands in campaign cash from BP and the oil industry are Richard Shelby (Republican, Alabama), Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Louisiana), John McCain (Republican, Arizona) and Lisa Murkowski (Republican, Alaska).

One of the few truthful moments in the hearings came when an exasperated Murkowski told the executives, “I would suggest to all three of you that we are all in this together.” Murkowski and Landrieu also expressed concerns that the disaster could compromise offshore drilling.

None with even a passing familiarity of the workings of Washington or the Senate can have any doubt that Tuesday’s hearings were but the opening of a government whitewash. The ultimate aim is to shield the major industry players and the financial interests that stand behind them from any serious consequences.

The assemblage of the guilty parties inside the Senate chambers took place as ruptured pipes on the ocean floor continued to gush forth oil at a rate conservatively estimated at 220,000 gallons per day some 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast. The rate could be many times greater, but arriving at a more accurate estimate is impossible because BP has refused to release its underwater video footage for independent analysis.

BP, which is liable for cleanup costs, has all but admitted it has no idea of how to stop the leak. Its attempt last weekend to lower a four story box over the piping failed when ice crystals clogged a portal at the structure’s roof, a result that was widely anticipated. BP is now considering lowering a much smaller box in order to avoid icing. US Coast Guard and BP representatives have also floated the idea of a “junk shot,” firing golf balls, tire shreds, and other refuse at high pressure into the well.

The drilling of two relief wells continues, with the aim of disrupting the flow of oil from the current well. This option will take a minimum of 90 days, during which 18 million gallons more oil will pour out at the low-end estimate. Even this option provides no certainty. “The risks include unpredictable weather, since the wells will be operational at the start of hurricane season,” according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor. “The wells are also being drilled into the same mix of oil and gas that caused the original explosion, and operating two wells in the area creates the potential of igniting a second explosion that is more powerful.”

If the spill cannot be stopped—a distinct possibility—the ruptured well could release a large share of the deposit’s underground reserves into the Gulf of Mexico, which totals upwards of 100 million barrels of crude oil. And even if the spill is stopped at a lesser volume, with each day there is a growing probability that the oil will devastate the entire Gulf from Louisiana to Florida and possibly reach the Gulf Stream, impacting the Atlantic seaboard.

In the interim, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has given BP clearance to resume pumping chemical dispersants into the oil column as it emerges from the broken piping. BP also continues to dump large quantities of dispersant onto the ocean’s surface. The environmental impact of such heavy use of dispersants is unknown, but a growing number of scientists and environmental groups are warning that the highly toxic substance could simply be transferring the brunt of the spill from the shore to marine ecosytems.

“The companies love the idea of using a chemical to spray on an oil slick to sink it,” Rick Steiner, a former professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Alaska, told the World Socialist Web Site. “It’s ‘out of sight out of mind’ as far as the public is concerned because TV cameras can’t see it. This is the big oil company playbook: public relations, litigation protection, and image.”

Oil has now washed ashore in three places: the Chandeleur Islands off Louisana’s coast, on the coast of a navigable channel from the Mississippi River known as the “South Pass,” and on Alabama’s Dauphin Island. Fishing has been blocked over a wide area, effectively imposing layoffs on thousands of fishermen, many of whom are self-employed and therefore not entitled to unemployment benefits. Sightings of birds covered in oil and dead sea turtles washed ashore have increased in recent days.

In his testimony, McKay boasted that BP would make available “grants of $25 million to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida,” and that it has paid out approximately $3.5 million in damage claims to those affected by the spill. These figures, presented as an act of enormous magnanimity, are such a tiny share of BP’s revenues as to be almost inconsequential.

The company took home $93 million per day in profits—for a total of $6.1 billion—during the first quarter alone. The $3.5 million in damage claims paid out are significantly less than CEO Tony Hayward’s 2009 compensation, estimated at over $4,700,000 by Forbes.

[Ed Jewett]

Via Jenna Orkin at http://www.mikeruppert.blogspot.com/ :

Oil Catastrophe/Environment/Science
BP chief reveals $10m daily clean-up bill
Underwater Footage of Leak
Leak? How about "eruption?"
Satellite Images from SkyTruth
Turning the Oil into Asphalt and Gelatin
Senators want offshore drilling on West Coast banned forever - from Rice Farmer

Also in that day's listing of "Headlines":

Obama Sends Bomb, Mars Experts to Fix BP Oil Spill (Update1)

[url=javascript:togShareLinks('shr_v');pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/share_dropdown_link');]Share [/url][url=javascript:shareBusinessExchange();pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/share_BX_top');]Business Exchange[/url][url=javascript:shareTwitter();pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/share_twitter_top');]Twitter[/url][url=javascript:shareFacebook();pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/share_facebook_top');]Facebook[/url]| [email=?Subject=Bloomberg%20news:%20%20Obama%20Sends%20Bomb,%20Mars%20Experts%20to%20Fix%20BP%20Oil%20Spill%20%28Update1%29%20&body=%20Obama%20Sends%20Bomb,%20Mars%20Experts%20to%20Fix%20BP%20Oil%20Spill%20%28Update1%29%20%0D%0A%0D%0A%20http%3A//www.bloomberg.com/apps/news%3Fpid%3Demail_en%26sid%3Dao_GFutnMAHY]Email[/email] | Print | A A A


By Jessica Resnick-Ault and Katarzyna Klimasinska




May 14 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu signaled his lack of confidence in the industry experts trying to control BP Plc’s leaking oil well by hand-picking a team of scientists with reputations for creative problem solving.
Dispatched to Houston by President Barack Obama to deal with the crisis, Chu said Wednesday that five “extraordinarily intelligent” scientists from around the country will help BP and industry experts think of back-up plans to cut off oil from the well, leaking 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below sea-level.
Members of the Chu team are credited with accomplishments including designing the first hydrogen bomb, inventing techniques for mining on Mars and finding a way to precisely position biomedical needles.
“I don’t think there is a lot of confidence in BP in Washington right now,” David Pursell, a managing director at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. LLC in Houston, said by phone. Chu’s decision to bring in additional scientists may reflect that concern, he said.
BP’s effort to use robots on the seafloor to close off the well failed, and a 40-foot steel structure meant to cap the leak was scuttled when the containment box became clogged with an icy slush of seawater and gas. BP now is deliberating between using a smaller containment chamber to control the well or inserting a tube directly into the leaking pipe to channel the oil.
Chu said he’s tasked his team to develop “plan B, C, D, E and F” in addition to finding a way to stop the oil leak.
“Things are looking up, and things are getting much more optimistic,” the Nobel-prize winning physicist said after meeting with the scientists and BP in Houston Wednesday.
BP CEO Meeting
The group convened at BP’s command center in Houston yesterday, where they met with BP leadership, including Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward, the Energy Department said. BP is using more than 500 specialists from almost 100 organizations and welcomes additional help, Jon Pack, a BP spokesman, said by phone.
Their exact activities are cloaked in secrecy. “We saw some confidential and proprietary information,” said one scientist on the team, Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Katz’s early work focused on astrophysics, but now he consults on a wide variety of physics puzzles, he said. He is a member of the JASON group, a think tank dedicated to researching complex problems for the U.S. Government, including the Defense Department.
Provocative Thinking
In a telephone interview from his home in Missouri, Katz skipped across topics: computer models for global warming, equality in college admissions and the Mpemba effect -- the observation that, in specific circumstances, warmer water freezes faster than colder water.
Katz, 59 wrote articles that he has labeled as “thought- provoking” on his personal website, including, “Don’t Become a Scientist,” “In Defense of Homophobia” and “Why Terrorism is Important.”
“The best physicists have been very broad people,” he said.
Chu chose another JASON think tank member, Richard L. Garwin, for his oil spill taskforce. Garwin, 82, a physicist and IBM Fellow Emeritus, is a military-technology and arms-control consultant to the U.S. government. He helped design the first hydrogen bomb in 1951, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“To do interesting science, the whole point is not just to follow the beaten track, but find something new,” Freeman Dyson, another JASON member, said about Garwin.
Flaming Wells
Garwin, 82, held a 1991 symposium of academic scientists, explosives experts, firefighters and oilmen to grapple with how to stem oil flows from hundreds of wells Iraq set on fire in Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War, according to a summary of the event. Garwin declined to comment on the meeting in Houston, but confirmed his experience with Kuwait’s oil wells in an interview.
BP has described conditions around its leaking offshore well as resembling those in outer space. Chu selected one scientist with experience operating on Mars, George Cooper, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Cooper once worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to modify mining techniques on earth for use on Mars, said Berkeley Professor Juan Pestana, who leads the GeoEngineering section in which Cooper is an emeritus professor.
Cooper did not respond to e-mails or telephone messages.
Five Dozen Patents
Chu also selected Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who holds more than five dozen patents for devices related to biotechnology, robotics and computer science.
On his website, Slocum describes his research interests delving into nanotechnology, precision engineering, “and staying down longer while SCUBA diving.” He did not respond to telephone calls or e-mails.
“He has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb,” said MIT professor Wai K. Cheng, a colleague in Slocum’s department. “You can’t miss that one that is brilliant.”
The team is rounded out by Tom Hunter, 64, from Sandia Laboratories, which conducts research for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Hunter has been with Sandia since 1967, and served as president of Sandia Corporation, which manages the lab, since 2005.
“We’re using some X-ray type technology that Sandia labs has,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said today in an interview on CNN.
Chris Miller, a Sandia spokesman, said Hunter didn’t have time to comment.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jessica Resnick-Ault in New York at jresnickault@bloomberg.netKatarzyna Klimasinska in Houston at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 14, 2010 13:38 EDT

[Ed Jewett]

Watch

Boxer Introduces Bill to Ban Drilling Off of West Coast
May 13 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, speaks at a news conference about the introduction of legislation that would ban new West Coast offshore drilling and the economic impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Joining Boxer in sponsoring the bill introduced today were Democratic Senators Diane Feinstein of California, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Feinstein, Cantwell and Merkley also speak at the news conference.

[Magda Hassan]

Commentary Last Updated: May 13th, 2010 - 00:25:10
As we die for BP, our military rots in the wrong Gulf
By Harvey Wasserman
Online Journal Guest Writer


May 13, 2010, 00:19

As you read this, the life of our bodies, nation and planet is being blown out a corporate hole in the Gulf of Mexico and into a Dead Zone of no return.
The apocalyptic gusher of oily poison pouring into the waters that give us life can only be viewed -- FELT -- by each and every one of us as an on-going death by a thousand cuts with no end in sight.
Yet our government -- allegedly the embodiment of our collective will to survive -- has done NOTHING of significance to fight this mass murder.
As it did while New Orleans drowned downstream from a willfully neglected levee system, our most potentially effective counterforce dithers on the other side of the world, in the wrong Gulf.
We squander our treasure on the largest conglomeration of people and weapons the world has ever seen. It's bloated with hardware designed specifically to destroy and kill. Hundreds of thousands of Americans sit on our dime in more than a hundred countries, rotting in the outposts of a bygone empire.
Why aren't they in the Gulf of Mexico, fighting for our truest "national security"?
The depth and scope of this catastrophe is impossible to grasp because it is just beginning. The entire Gulf, the west coast of Florida, the Everglades, the east coast of Florida and all the way up, wherever the currents go. . . . they are all at risk.
This is the most lethal single attack on the life of this nation since December 7, 1941. It is a time that will live only in infamy.
The moment it happened, a sane president, a functional government, a society worthy of survival, would have marshaled every mobile resource available and moved it down to the Gulf.
Except by hitting a nuclear power plant and rendering this all radioactive, no terrorist could dream of igniting the kind of havoc now destroying our most vital, precious and irreplaceable resources.
Our mass media should be filled with stirring images of a focused, determined president mobilizing all available assets to curb the damage. Instead, Barack Obama defends offshore drilling and endorses the resumption of whaling -- if this underwater gusher actually leaves any alive. It is a suicidal tribute to the power of corporate ownership.
Instead of a seeing a Gulf population deputized and mobilized to fight for survival, we are subjected to a loathsome trio of corporate stooges -- apparently named Larry, Curly and Moe -- blaming each other for the catastrophe. They should all be clamped into orange jumpsuits and locked onto a clean-up vessel.
Thus far, the only armies officially mobilized are of the corporate PR departments and ubiquitous lawyers savoring the gusher of billable hours sure to stretch through the decades.
Our collective non-response to this cataclysmic reality now includes the introduction of a pathetic "climate bill", concocted by another woeful trio, in service to the very corporations that have brought us this lethal gusher.
This bill will do nothing to solve this particular problem. Nor will it address the root cause of our addiction to obsolete and suicidal fossil and nuclear fuels at a time when the clean, cheap renewable alternatives are readily available. It is, in short, Beyond Tragic.
Make no mistake: in our lifetime, the Gulf will not recover. Nor will our species.
There are no corners of the Earth that we can pollute without poisoning it all. . . . and our own bodies. We cannot squander our resources on killing people on the other side of the Earth while leaving ourselves to be destroyed by the mayhem at home.
Either our species learns this lesson, and acts on it -- NOW! -- or we do not survive.
Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, is at http://www.harveywasserman.com. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of FreePress.org, where this was first published.

[Ed Jewett]

Gulf of Mexico Underwater Oil Plumes 10 Miles Long, 3 Miles Wide and 300 Feet Thick in Spots

May 16th, 2010 Via: New York Times:
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Posted in Atrocities, Collapse, Energy, Env