Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Ed Jewett]

Scientists Worry About Oil Reaching Fla. Keys
(1:18)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7fot3q3bGY...player_embedded




Yesterday Coast Guard personnel discovered two dozen tarballs on Key West shores. They’re in the process of testing them to see if they came from the Gulf of Mexico’s growing oil disaster.

If so, it could determine the oil has been in the gulf’s loop current for at least the last several days. Scientists have feared that once the oil gets into the loop current that it could gravely damage South Florida’s coral reefs and wildlife.

Over the last few weeks Scientists had warned that the oil would eventually move into the loop current but could not give a specific date as to when it would happen.

The tarballs were found at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park during the day. According to the Coast Guard the tarballs range in size from about 3 to 8 inches long and have been sent to lab to be tested.

http://ncoal.com/blog/?p=2510




“An over 7,000-square-mile wildlife "dead zone" located in the center of the Gulf of Mexico has grown from being a curiosity to a colossus over the past two decades, according to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), and scientists are now concerned the recent oil spill and other emerging chemical threats could widen the zone even further.

The NWF describes the dead zone as being "the largest on record in the hemisphere in coastal waters and one of the biggest in the world."
During the summer months, it is nearly devoid of wildlife, save for the dead bodies of crabs, shrimp and other marine species that succumb to oxygen depletion in the polluted water.

Animal toxicology experts believe the Gulf dead zone is a man-made monstrosity.

"Outside of widespread impacts from oil release, the drainage of the Mississippi River into the Central Gulf has deposited massive amounts of agricultural chemicals and fertilizers from agricultural activities in the Central United States," Ron Kendall, director of The Institute of Environmental and Human Health, told Discovery News.

"Basically, this has created the large dead zone in the Central Gulf," added Kendall, who is chairman of Texas Tech's Department of Environmental Toxicology and was part of the assessment team for the Exxon Valdez.”

http://news.discovery.com/animals/gulf-dea...-oil-spill.html




As oil spill approaches, dead animals wash up in Mississippi
By The Associated Press
May 02, 2010, 3:55PM
http://blog.gulflive.com/mississippi-press...ississippi.html

[Ed Jewett]

Is it Gaia's revenge, a "false flag" attack, corporate malfeasance?

Or just an unmitigated disaster?


:banghead:

Day 26?.... unmitigated.

But we'll have a commission...

:banghead:

[Ed Jewett]

"... since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit filed today that BP's operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation.

Indeed, the industry and government spokespeople have used the exact same word as each crisis - financial and environmental - unfolded. They said the problem was "contained".

In both cases, we the people are left holding the bag because the giant companies and their campaign-contribution-buddies in DC are trying to sweep the severity of the problem under the rug, to manage the crisis as p.r. campaigns to protect those who let it happen ... instead of actually taking steps necessary to solve the problems, and to make sure they won't happen again."

An excerpt from

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Responses to the Gulf Oil Spill and to the Financial Crisis Are Remarkably Similar ... And Have Made Both Crises Much Worse

[Ed Jewett]

Katz Fired From Oil-Spill Team Due to ‘Controversial Writings’

By Katarzyna Klimasinska and Jessica Resnick-Ault




May 18 (Bloomberg) -- Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis., said he was fired from the team of scientists chosen by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu to help BP Plc control the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Some of Professor Katz’s controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill,” Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said in an e-mail today. “Professor Katz will no longer be involved in the department’s efforts.”
Chu brought Katz to Houston last week along with four other experts, Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and IBM Fellow Emeritus, George Cooper, a civil-engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Tom Hunter, president of Sandia Corp., which manages research for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
While Katz’s early work focused on astrophysics, he now consults on a variety of physics puzzles, he said. Katz wrote articles on his personal website, including, “What Is Political Correctness,” “In Defense of Homophobia” and “Why Terrorism Is Important.”
“I don’t self-censor myself,” Katz, 59, said in a phone interview today. “There’s no doubt there are things on my webpage that’ve been there for many years that are fairly controversial.”
He was fired from the panel this morning, he said. He declined to specify which articles triggered the dismissal.



To contact the reporters on this story: Katarzyna Klimasinska in Houston at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net; Jessica Resnick-Ault in New York at jresnickault@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: May 18, 2010 12:09 EDT

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=2...wGAk&pos=9

[Ed Jewett]

DMITRY ORLOV: AN AMERICAN CHERNOBYL Thursday, 06 May 2010 Reprinted from ENERGY BULLETIN The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

• An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe
  

• A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico
  

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland.



The Chernobyl disaster was caused more or less directly by political appointeesm: the people in charge of the reactor control room had no background in nuclear reactor operations or nuclear chemistry, having got their jobs through the Communist Party. They attempted a dangerous experiment, executed it incompetently, and the result was an explosion and a meltdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster will perhaps be found to have similar causes. BP, the owner of Deepwater Horizon, is chaired by one Carl-Henric Svanberg—a man with no experience in the oil industry. The people who serve on the boards of directors of large companies tend to see management as a sort of free-floating skill, unrelated to any specific field or industry, rather similarly to how the Soviet Communist party thought of and tried to use the talents of its cadres. Allegations are already circulating that BP drilled to a depth of 25000 feet while being licensed to drill up to 18000 feet, that safety reviews of technical documents had been bypassed, and that key pieces of safety equipment were not installed in order to contain costs. It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents.



More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were dropped into it from helicopters, with lethal consequences for the crews. Eventually, a concrete sarcophagus was constructed around the demolished reactor, sealing it off from the environment. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, the technical difficulty lies with stemming a high-pressure flow of oil, most likely mixed with natural gas, gushing from within the burned, tangled wreck of the drilling platform at a depth of 5000 feet. An effort is currently underway to seal the leak by lowering a 100-ton concrete-and-steel "contraption" onto it from a floating crane and using it to capture and pump out the oil as it leaks out. I think "sarcophagus" sounds better.



The administrative challenge, in the case of Chernobyl, lay in evacuating and resettling large urban and rural populations from areas that were contaminated by the radiation, in preventing contaminated food products from being sold, and in dealing with the medical consequences of the accident, which includes a high incidence of cancer, childhood leukemia and birth defects. The effect of the massive oil spill from Deepwater Horizon is likely to cause massive dislocation within coastal communities, depriving them of their livelihoods from fishing, tourism and recreation. Unless the official efforts to aid this population are uncharacteristically prompt and thorough, their problems will bleed into and poison politics.



The political challenges, in both cases, centered on the inability of the political establishment to acquiesce to the fact that a key source of energy (nuclear power or deep-water oil) relied on technology that was unsafe and prone to catastrophic failure. The Chernobyl disaster caused irreparable damage to the reputation of the nuclear industry and foreclosed any further developments in this area. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is likely to do the same for the oil industry, curtailing any possible expansion of drilling in deep water, where much of the remaining oil is to be found, and perhaps even shutting down the projects that have already started. In turn, this is likely to hasten the onset of the terminal global oil shortage, which the US Department of Energy and the Pentagon have forecast for 2012.



Translate "industrial accident" into Russian and back into English, and what you get is "technogenic catastrophe". This term got a lot of use after the Chernobyl disaster. It is rather more descriptive then the rather flaccid English phrase, and it puts the blame where it ultimately comes to rest in any case: with the technology, and the technologists and politicians who push it. Technology that can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, is no good, regardless of how economically necessary it happens to be. It must be shut down. In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we are already hearing that expansion of deep-water drilling is "dead on arrival". This could be the beginning of the end for the huge but dying beast that is the petrochemical industry, or more such accidents may be required for the realization finally to sink in and the cry of "Shut it down!" to be heard.
The energy industry has run out of convenient, high-quality resources to exploit, and is now forced to turn to resources it previously passed over: poor, dirty, difficult, expensive resources such as tar sands, heavy oil, shale, and deep offshore. Under relentless pressure to do more with less, people are likely to try to cut corners wherever possible, and environmental safety is likely to suffer. Before it finally crashes, the huge final effort to wring the last few drops of energy out of a depleted planet will continue to serve up bigger and bigger disasters. Perhaps the gruesome aftermath of this latest accident will cause enough people to proclaim "Enough! Shut it all down!" But if not, there is always the next one.



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Energy Bulletin is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities.


Last Updated ( Thursday, 06 May 2010 )

[Ed Jewett]

Monday, May 17, 2010

May 17 2010: Katie Bar The Door



Detroit Publishing Co. Say Cheese 1904
"Photographer at Old Orchard House, Old Orchard, Maine"


Ilargi: Some things are more equal than others. Always have been. Just maybe not always the same things. Which makes me think of Marie-Antoinette fleeing the cake-eaters in her stagecoach. It also makes me think of this:

If this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door

[Stuart] Smith, [a lawyer in New Orleans, who's suing BP] on behalf of fishermen, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and four large hotels, alleges that BP and others were "grossly negligent" in allowing the blowout to occur. [..] Because the spill has been lingering offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen and tourist resorts that are getting cancellations. As rich as BP is, "if this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the door," Smith said. "I don't think they have enough money."

BP has been shown off late to be a crummy crappy sort of organization, which -with the full faith and credit of the UK and US government- has cut all corners it could find, and then made some more to cut. And now BP has been exposed, and people like Mr. Smith are dead-set to make BP pay, while the company itself is frantically trying to mitigaste its losses through lawyers it couldn't even really afford anymore if it were to pay full damages to all parties.

Which in turn makes my warped brain wonder what the difference is between BP and, say, Goldman Sachs. Environmental disaster, financial disaster, what’s the difference? Is it just that the latter is harder to prove? I don’t know, for one thing you’d think the reward, hence the incentive, would be greater too. Yes, BP has destroyed the livelihood of fishermen and "hospitality workers". So they should be sued for that. But the Wall Street cabal has destroyed the entire economies of entire countries, as well as countless building blocks that formed the foundation of these economies. Towns, pension funds, you name it. No matter how bad Deepwater Horizon will turn out to be, the Vampire Squid disaster will be many times worse, even if it takes longer for it to trickle down to people's conscious brains.

So why is no-one, 2-3 years after the economy started collapsing, suing the Squid? Why does it instead receive ever more funds from the very people it financially strangled? Isn't that the oddest thing, if you think about it? Of course, the fact that there's trillions of public funds now stashed away in Wall Street firms, without which they'd no longer exist, complicates the matter enormously. As a lawyer, you could potentially win huge settlements for your clients, but they’d sort of end up paying for them out of their own pockets.

We've been through California, which elects to let its poor rot so it can continue to support its rich. New York State intends to lay off -another- 10,000 employees. Illinois owes billions it doesn't have. Idaho delays Medicaid payments. All these sudden bursts of creativity, what a spectacle it is. Harrisburg, PA Controller Dan Miller advises the city to declare bankruptcy. I would advise an additional 10,000 US cities to do the same. At least when you’re first in line, you may get some help. This time next year there'll be a long waiting list. That is, unless Obama et al figure out another mirror trick, and saw the lady in half yet one more time. But I wouldn't be stoo ure the lady hasn't gotten tired of that act yet.

Those 10,000 US cities, and all the counties and states they find themselves in, are -all but a precious few- at the end of their financial rope. All but a few have voted in ridiculously rosy budgets, and now they see their revenues tank. Some will install sneaky speed traps to increase revenues, others will try to raise property taxes on homes plunging in value. All will fail to restore a sound budget. Millions of government workers will be laid off nationwide, which all by itself guarantees further declines in revenue. Which will lead to more lay-offs, all of which will lead to further drops in real estate prices, which lowers tax revenues etc. You have to admit one thing: it's not a terribly hard storyline to follow. It couldn't be easier if you had seen this film before.

Obama's mortgage modification programs are slumping along, getting more tragically laughable as they go forward. All they are and ever were is a backdoor to transfer money to banks. The rate at which they've helped any real persons is too low to speak of. And of course those things could never have worked. You have one arm of government spending citizens' funds to prop up home prices, and another arm trying to firmly lock those same citizens into loans at those artificially elevated levels, and yet another shifting the bad loans from private lenders to the "public domain". It may all rinse, but it will soon no longer repeat.

The US Treasury announces a $1.6 billion loss on a loan to Chrysler, GM announces an $865 million creative accounting profit because it wants investors (who’ll be sure taxpayers' dough will support them all), and Obama announces a commission that will investigate how the Gulf of Mexico became one huge dead zone.

The President should have a commission investigate how the whole country became one. A financial dead zone.

Instead he insists it just ain’t so. Yeah, that’s right, just like BP does.

Limitless oil and limitless credit are but different manifestations of what makes systems work, and eventually, inevitably, kills them.

Katie bar the door indeed.

[Ed Jewett]

UPDATE 1-Florida Keys tar balls are not from BP oil spill

9:09am EDT
(Adds details, quotes)
MIAMI, May 19 (Reuters) - Tar balls found on beaches in the Florida Keys this week are not from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill leaking from a well owned by BP <BP.L>, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Wednesday, citing laboratory tests.
The news came as a temporary relief to Florida's tourism authorities, who are already reporting negative market impact from the month-long spillage from BP's leaking undersea well, the source of a huge slick that has already dumped oil debris ashore on the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The source of the tar balls has not been determined, the Coast Guard said in a statement.
Coast Guard personnel and pollution experts had found around 50 tar balls in recent days in Florida's Lower Keys, a mecca for divers, snorkelers, fishermen and beach goers. They had sent them to a specialist laboratory to test whether or not they came from the Gulf of Mexico spill.
"The results of those tests conclusively show that the tar balls collected from Florida Keys beaches do not match the type of oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The source of the tar balls remains unknown at this time," the Coast Guard said in a statement.
But it remained on the alert for oil contamination.
"The conclusion that these tar balls are not from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident in no way diminishes the need to continue to aggressively identify and clean up tar ball-contaminated areas in the Florida Keys," said Captain Pat DeQuattro, commanding officer of Sector Key West.
Despite the laboratory result, Florida Keys authorities are still preparing for possible impact from the Gulf spill as many forecasters see some oil from it being sucked by a powerful ocean flow, the Loop Current, around the Florida Keys and perhaps even up to Miami beaches. (Reporting by Pascal Fletcher and Jane Sutton; Editing by Doina Chiacu)



http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1922...arketsNews

[Peter Lemkin]

Is it Gaia's revenge, a "false flag" attack, corporate malfeasance?

Or just an unmitigated disaster?


:banghead:

Day 26?.... unmitigated.

But we'll have a commission...

:banghead:

BP keeps assuring everyone they are getting it under control and now [according to them] have about 1/3 of the leak being pumped [somehow] out of harms way. Meanwhile, satellite photos and undersea cameras show the leak is [and was] much larger than admitted and it seems a new break in the pipe has occurred....follows the usual pattern of Corporatespeak v. Truth Stay tuned as the Gulf dies!!! Oh, and the 75 mil cap on reparations still stands......that will cover a few % - no more...maybe only 1%. Who Runs America?...and the World.....:afraid:

Tar balls will be in NYC shortly....no problem...:bird::bandit:

Shrimp gumbo [while it still lasts....i.e. there are still shrimps] in N.O. will now be black in color.....due to the slick [oil slick and slick corporate capitalists at BP and in political positions behind them all the way up to the top!] Enjoy!:pepsi:

[Ed Jewett]

Appearing on PBS Newshour with Gwen Ifill, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco claims the BP oil disaster is dozens of miles away from the Loop Current, and even if oil does get caught in it, all that would wash up are "very little tarballs". Video here: http://therealnews.com/t2/component/seyr...nk&id=6262

[Peter Lemkin]

Appearing on PBS Newshour with Gwen Ifill, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco claims the BP oil disaster is dozens of miles away from the Loop Current, and even if oil does get caught in it, all that would wash up are "very little tarballs". Video here: http://therealnews.com/t2/component/seyr...nk&id=6262

"Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true." [paraphrased Buddhist saying]