Oil spill likely to be the worst environmental disaster in US history EHU HASEY

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http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=524_1273510578&p=1

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0516/Gulf-oil-spill-real-disaster-might-be-lurking-beneath-the-surface

May 16, 2010

An aerial view of oil strips floating off the coast of Mobile, Ala., near the site of the sunk BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico Friday. New research suggests that only a fraction of the oil from the leak might be making it to the surface.
- Zhu Wei/Newscom


From the first moments that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank last month, it has been apparent that the blooming Gulf oil spill has been an oil disaster unlike any other. But the full truth of that statement is perhaps only now beginning to become apparent.

The oil that can be seen from the surface is apparently just a fraction of the oil that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20, according to an assessment the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology. Significant amounts of oil are spreading at various levels throughout the water column, says the report, which was posted online a week ago but first published by The New York Times Saturday.

The research, combined with other emerging data, could fundamentally alter researchers' understanding of the oil spill. It suggests that vastly more oil than previously reported could be spilling from the wellhead and the attached riser pipe that now lies crumpled on the seafloor like a kinked and leaking garden hose.

Moreover, it suggests that serious environmental degradation could take place in the open ocean, creating massive "dead zones" where no creature can live because of the lack of oxygen in the water. The spread of oil at all levels of the Gulf also could become a concern for shore communities in hurricanes, which stir up the water column as they come ashore.

Scientists looking at video of the leak, suggest that as many as 3.4 million gallons of oil could be leaking into the Gulf every day – 16 times more than the current 210,000-gallon-a-day estimate, according to the Times.
The depth of the problem

The fact that the spill could possibly be so radically misunderstood nearly a month after it began speaks to the unique nature of this spill. In particular, its depth – 5,000 feet below the ocean surface – makes it both unprecedented and difficult to study.

For experts, "most of their experience is with shallow-water spills that quickly bleed black goo onto beaches that are cleaned up relatively quickly," says the Los Angeles Times.

That is clearly not what has happened in the Gulf, where shorelines have, so far, emerged relatively unscathed.

The nature of the oil in the Gulf oil spill could be relevant – it is of a lighter grade than that in the Exxon Valdez spill, for example.

More relevant could be the dispersant that BP is applying to the oil at the source. BP officials have hailed the process as a success, noting diminishing oil at the surface. But the dispersant breaks the oil into smaller drops, which might instead be spreading throughout the water column, instead of rising to the surface.

It is not clear what this would mean environmentally, though past research indicates that oil can be trapped in the seabed for decades after oil on the surface is cleaned away.
Complicating projections

It would, however, make predictions for the spill far more complex.

"We have no idea where the oil that isn't reaching the surface is going," James Cowan Jr., an oceanography professor at Louisiana State University, to the Los Angeles Times. "It could go everywhere.

The Gulf currents operate differently at different levels, making the exact location and spread of the oil at different depths hugely important to predictions of where it might end up. Indeed, the system so complex that in time, oil could be taken anywhere from the Mexican Coast to Florida's Palm Beach, research suggests.

BP has so far rejected any efforts toward pinpointing the exact amount of oil entering the Gulf, saying that effort would detract from other containment efforts, such as the current effort to stopper one of the leaks with a siphon. But getting a more accurate sense of how much oil in leaking could be vital to trying to account for all of it, scientists say.

[Toruk Makto]

CNN's John Roberts grills BP COO Doug Suttles. Suttles waffles.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/17/gulf.oil.spill/index.html

May 17, 2010

Video of BP exec dodging the hard questions:
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2010/05/17/am.intv.suttles.cnn


Presidential commission will investigate oil spill

(CNN) -- President Obama will sign an executive order establishing a presidential commission to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, an administration official said Monday.

Eight U.S. senators called earlier Monday for an independent federal investigation of whether oil giant BP violated civil or criminal laws in connection with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In testimony on Capitol Hill, BP told senators that its latest attempt at capping the gushing crude is working, and the Obama administration vowed it won't rest until the company cleans up the spill and addresses its impact.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and BP America Chairman Lamar McKay appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to assess the response to what some lawmakers are calling a "catastrophe."

A BP maneuver to siphon oil from the well into a tanker using a tube has been working for more than 24 hours, said Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production.

The pipe is "producing over 1,000 barrels of oil into the drill ship, so it's good progress," he told CNN's "American Morning" on Monday.

The pipe isn't capturing all the oil gushing into the water, Suttles said, but the company hopes to increase the amount of oil it is siphoning from the site. Crews are trying to avoid mixing water with the oil, which can cause the formation of crystals known as hydrates, he said.

The 4-inch-diameter insertion tube extends five feet into a pipe 21 inches in diameter, BP told reporters. The insertion tube has a foam buffer extending several inches on either side of the pipe to help keep the water from mixing with the oil.

The next step in stopping the oil flow is a so-called "top-kill" procedure, in which a large amount of kill mud -- a heavy fluid used in drilling operations -- is inserted into the well bore, Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, told reporters in a conference call Sunday.

Wells said the mud will be pumped through the bottom of the well's blowout preventer at a maximum rate of 40 barrels (1,680 gallons) a minute.

"So with all of the pumping horsepower we have on the surface, we'll be able to pump far faster than the well can flow, and it's about us outracing the well," he said.

Preparations for the top-kill procedure will take place over the next seven to 10 days, Wells said.

Suttles said the heavy fluids overcome the flow rate and stop it, and then the well can be sealed with cement. Another option, putting debris in the well to stop the flow, may also be utilized, he said.

Asked why the options weren't exercised weeks ago, Suttles said testing and diagnostics had to be done. "We don't want to take any action that could cause the situation to get worse." However, most of that testing has been completed, and equipment is now on site for a permanent solution, he said.

Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar have expressed caution about the effectiveness of the insertion tube.

"This technique is not a solution to the problem, and it is not yet clear how successful it may be," the two said in a joint statement Sunday. "We are closely monitoring BP's test with the hope that it will contain some of the oil, but at the same time, federal scientists are continuing to provide oversight and expertise to BP as they move forward with other strategies to contain the spill and stop the flow of oil."

"We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole," the statement said.

Meanwhile, the head of offshore drilling at an Interior Department agency criticized after the spill is retiring a month earlier than planned, an administration official said Monday.

Chris Oynes will step down as associate director of the agency's Offshore Minerals Management Program at the end of May, the official said. The program is part of the Minerals Management Service.

The underwater gusher began after an April 20 explosion aboard the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon. The explosion and subsequent fire caused the rig to sink two days later, prompting oil to begin spilling from the well.

The amount of oil pouring into the Gulf was estimated at about 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) per day in late April. BP said the estimate remains the same as of Sunday.

The slick has spread across much of the northern Gulf of Mexico, with bits of oil washing up onto the shores of Louisiana's barrier islands.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency reported Monday that 60 tar balls were recovered along the state's coastline in two counties, but the state Department of Environmental Quality reported no apparent public health risk associated with them. "Teams reported no oil or sheen in Mississippi waters, and reported no fish kills," MEMA said in a statement.

Satellite imagery and flights over the oil slick show that a tendril of oil has been pulled into a southward-moving current that could put the oil into the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current, according to meteorologist Jeff Masters.

The Loop Current transports water between Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, then loops through the Florida Keys and into the Bahamas, Masters wrote in an article.

"Once oil gets into the Loop Current, the 1-2 mph speed of the current should allow the oil to travel the 500 miles to the Florida Keys in 10-20 days" and could potentially impact the Florida coast, Masters said.

Scientists said Monday more potentially hazardous oil could be lurking below the surface in large oil plumes -- a previously unseen phenomenon they are eager to learn more about.

"Nothing like it has really ever been seen in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico before," Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, told CNN's "American Morning." "It's not only a large feature, but it's a very complex feature. There's a lot of vertical structure to it."

But the plumes could mean that even more oil has gushed into the Gulf from an undersea well than previously thought, and the contaminants under the surface could pose additional environmental hazards.

At least one of the plumes is thought to be enormous. Vernon Asper, a professor of marine science at the University of Southern Mississippi, told National Public Radio in a story that aired Monday that the largest is "probably 15 or 20 miles long and maybe 4 or 5 miles wide."

"This is a very different spill than we've ever had before, and we need to learn as much about it as we can," he said.

Asked about the oil plumes, Suttles said Monday that BP is attempting to get that information "and see if that can help us in how we're responding. I can tell you we're holding nothing back, absolutely nothing back, as we try to fight this thing."

CNN's John Roberts asked Suttles on Monday about a "60 Minutes" interview with Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician, who claimed that Transocean -- which owned the rig and was leasing it to BP -- was being pushed by BP to complete the well quickly because it was taking longer than expected.

Suttles said he did not see the program and "I don't know the details of that. I know people are talking about various things that occurred that night on the rig, but I actually haven't seen any of the results of these interviews or investigations. ... I don't actually have any knowledge that that was the case." The truth, he said, will eventually become known.

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100518/full/465274a.html

May 18, 2010




Oil cruise finds deep-sea plume

Nature  reports from the research ship Pelican  as scientists map the hidden extent of the Deepwater disaster.
Mark Schrope
Houma, Louisiana

The first oceanographic research expedition into the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill zone has uncovered evidence that a deep-sea plume — probably made of oil, and not visible on the surface — seems to be spreading from the ruptured wellhead.

Environmental concerns following the oil-well blowout on 20 April initially focused on the effects of spilled oil on the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, which hosts many fishing communities and wildlife reserves. The discovery of the plume suggests that much of the oil may instead be lurking deep below the sea surface, with potentially dire consequences for marine organisms.

The find is already raising questions about the possible impact of the widespread use of oil dispersants to tackle the spill, and comes amid growing dissatisfaction among researchers about the limited efforts that have been made so far to study the spill and accurately gauge its size.

The team that found the plume is from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST), a cooperative effort between the University of Mississippi in Oxford and the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland. The researchers had originally been scheduled to map sea-floor formations in the Gulf of Mexico, just 15 kilometres from the Deepwater Horizon platform, and to survey historically significant shipwrecks using autonomous underwater vehicles launched from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium's 35-metre-long research vessel Pelican.

But when the oil-well blowout happened, just days before the ship was scheduled to depart, team leaders decided that the group should divert to oil studies and set about getting approval from NOAA, which is funding the expedition through a competitively awarded grant. "We felt that the mapping that we wanted to do could wait and that it would be an inappropriate use of this valuable ship time to do something that was not as urgent as the oil study," says NIUST oceanographer Vernon Asper.

For the first week of the cruise, much of the NIUST work focused on taking samples of sediment cores throughout the region, to develop a reliable baseline for future studies of oil that may settle to the sea floor. After a week of establishing a series of study sites, the team returned to port briefly to take on additional equipment — and a Nature journalist.

On their fourth day back at sea, on 12 May, the scientists made an astonishing find. "You've got to see this," said Arne Diercks, rushing into the ship's main lab. As those aboard gathered in the control room where data from a lowered sampling system come through in real time, Diercks, NIUST's chief scientist for the cruise, pointed out the telltale instrument readings. At a depth of around 1,000 metres, the team seemed to have struck oil.

The team's hypothesis was based on three key readings. The transmissometer, which measures the blocking of light by particles or opaque dissolved matter in the water, showed a serious hike in murkiness. The fluorometer, tuned to measure fluorescence given off by dissolved oil, was also giving readings many times higher than normal. And oxygen levels had dropped, suggesting heightened activity by microbes as they consume the oil and associated organic material.

"We've got to home in on this," Asper said excitedly. "You never see signals like that in the open ocean." The team spent much of the remaining time at sea mapping the boundaries of a plume that extends about 45 kilometres southwest from the wellhead and roughly 10 kilometres wide at depths of 1,000–1,400 metres (see 'Oil zone'). On returning to previously sampled sites, the team showed that the plume was shifting, but that it generally remained at least 100 metres above the sea floor.

Dispersant debate

Data received from NOAA while the researchers were still at sea confirmed that deep-water currents at the time were flowing southwest, further suggesting that the plume they were measuring was oil emanating from the well. However, the group will not be able to confirm the plume's composition until tests on collected water samples are performed this week.

Aboard the Pelican, the NIUST team watched as news of the plume spread, and eventually began getting satellite calls from journalists. On 16 May, at a daily press briefing, officials from energy company BP, which operates the well, skipped over an initial request for comment on the plume. In response to a second question, BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said: "We have no confirmation of that, but my observation as a layman is that oil is lighter than water and it tends to go up."

Many scientists had also assumed that this was the case, although others had predicted that because of the depth of the leak, certain components of the oil would separate out as they rose to the surface and settle into a subsurface layer. Still, the magnitude of the plume was an unpleasant surprise.

Experts including Jeffrey Short, an environmental chemist with the conservation advocacy group Oceana, based in Washington DC, have suggested that oil coming straight from the well could naturally break into small, less-buoyant droplets that would be capable of forming such a plume below the surface. But underwater use of dispersants, a previously untried technique that was approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 15 May, may also play a part by shaping the oil into smaller droplets. For several days before that announcement, and while the NIUST team was studying the plume, BP applied more than 100,000 litres of dispersant at the sea floor during EPA-sanctioned tests.

Biogeochemist Samantha Joye at the University of Georgia in Athens, who works with the NIUST team and will be analysing the plume water samples, says that either possibility or a combination of both could explain the plume. But "it doesn't matter if it's dispersed oil or natural crude, it's going to have a huge impact", she says.

Thomas Shirley, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, says that although little oil has washed ashore and the harm to coastal ecosystems has so far been minimal, offshore species may be at greater risk. Toxic compounds from the floating oil could threaten species living near the surface, including commercially important fish and their prey, he says. Meanwhile, toxins from the under­water plume could affect deep corals and other species, a problem that could be exacerbated by dispersant use, which breaks up the oil into smaller particles and makes it easier for animals to take in. Shirley suggests that deep-dwelling organisms such as zooplankton might be hit by the low oxygen levels in the plume, which could take months or years to recover because oxygen is slow to diffuse into the deep. The plume could form a barrier that blocks the normal up-and-down daily migration of numerous organisms, and could block the flow of particles of organic debris from the surface to the deep where they are a critical food source.

"We've certainly put a kink in the efficiency of the system out there," says Shirley, "but how much effect that will have and for how long, we don't know."

Shirley says that as the effects of the deeper oil come to the fore, accurately assessing how much oil is gushing from the wellhead will be even more important. The official US Coast Guard estimate is 795,000 litres per day. However, a number of groups have questioned the figure, and Short says that the underwater plume could be further evidence that the true flow rate is much higher than the official figure.

Whereas NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco has argued that the estimate is reasonable and that having a more accurate rate would not change the response strategy, some researchers feel that knowing the spill's true size is essential to understanding its full biological impacts, and deciding whether massive deployment of dispersants is the best option.

"I think that knowing the volume of oil is very important," says Shirley, "and I would urge BP to make all the video they have available and work with people to provide all the data possible." BP's ultimate legal liability for damages could be directly tied to the size of the spill, adds Short: "That is a long-standing principle in these sorts of cases." Last week, the administration of President Barack Obama sent a letter to BP asking for clarification on the company's financial redress plans and reiterating the position that BP is responsible for all clean-up costs and economic damage. A BP spokesman declined to comment on the potential implications of the plume.

For now, both the gushing oil and the US political debate over drilling continue. On 16 May, BP reported that it had managed to insert a tube into the pipe coming out of the well, which it says is capturing about 320,000 litres of oil per day. And the company is pursuing several other options to capture leaking oil or close off the well before it can finish drilling a separate relief well, a process that could take months.

On 14 May, the team aboard the Pelican all gathered in the galley to watch a press conference in which President Obama said that offshore drilling remains an important part of the overall US energy policy, although any movement towards expanding it is on hold. Short says that the drilling debate centres in part on weighing the benefits of oil against the environmental impact. "If the environmental impacts are an order of magnitude larger than anyone dreamed of, that's probably going to be a factor in the debate," he says, "I suspect BP has its eye on that too."

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/21/gulf.oil.spill/index.html

Gulf oil spill effects to reach Arctic and Europe, expert says

May 21, 2010

Washington (CNN) -- The damaging effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be felt all the way to Europe and the Arctic, a top scientist told a congressional panel Friday.

"This is not just a regional issue for the wildlife," said Carl Safina, the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. Safina, who recently returned from the Gulf Coast region, presented several photographs, including one of an oil-covered bird.

"There will be a nest empty in Newfoundland," Safina said, noting common migratory patterns. Safina warned that multiple forms of marine life in the Atlantic Ocean "come into the Gulf to breed."

Safina's briefing to representatives of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was scheduled as part of an ongoing effort to draw on a broad range of expertise for cleanup efforts.

"We have to use science to find solutions," said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts. Markey has been strongly critical of the current cleanup effort, calling it ineffective.

Meanwhile, another congressman, concerned about people who are working to clean up the spill, has asked the White House to set up temporary health care centers along the Gulf Coast to serve volunteers and workers.

Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Louisiana, envisions such clinics as providing "medical checkups to people who have come in contact with the oil and assist in monitoring the health effects of the oil leak on south Louisianians."

He sent the request Wednesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. There was no immediate response from the agency.

"Many residents and volunteers are being exposed to hazardous materials on a daily basis, and some will have to travel hours to get treatment at the nearest health care facility. It is imperative that temporary health care clinics be established to provide basic health care services in this geographic area," he said.

He has also asked Sebelius to "appoint a health care coordinator to oversee and streamline the health care response."

Melancon emphasized that BP should be responsible for such health care services in his state. The energy giant was operating the oil rig that exploded and sank in April, triggering the spill.

A BP official says a gusher of oil pouring from its damaged well could be shut off as early as next week.

BP Managing Director Bob Dudley said Thursday night the company will pump fluids into the well this weekend in the beginning of a process that -- if successful -- could lead to the leak finally being closed off in a matter of days.

"If that option doesn't work, we've got a second and a third option we'll do after that," Dudley said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Thursday. "We're hopeful that next week, we'll be able to shut it off."

Earlier in the day, BP acknowledged that the underwater gusher is bigger than estimated to date, as new video showed a cloud of crude billowing around its undersea siphon.

Company spokesman Mark Proegler said Thursday that the siphon is now drawing about 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day up to a ship on the surface of the Gulf -- as much as government and company officials had estimated the spill was pouring into the Gulf every day for a month. Proegler declined to estimate how much more oil was escaping.

BP America Chairman Lamar McKay said Wednesday that the figure used by the oil spill response team had a degree of "uncertainty" built into it. But figures by independent researchers have run up to many times higher: Steve Wereley, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, told CNN's "American Morning" that the spill could be as big as 20,000 to 100,000 barrels a day.

And members of Congress released video from the company that showed much more oil pouring out of the damaged well than the siphon was capturing. Rep. Ed Markey, who leads a House subcommittee investigating the disaster, told reporters, "I think now we are beginning to understand that we cannot trust BP."

"People do not trust the experts any longer," said Markey, D-Massachusetts. "BP has lost all credibility. Now, the decisions will have to be made by others, because it is clear that they have been hiding the actual consequences of this spill."

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard announced the creation of a federal Flow Rate Technical Group to assess the flow rate from the well. Coast Guard Capt. Ron LaBrec said that Adm. Thad Allen would oversee the team, which will include members from the Coast Guard, the Minerals Management Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Society and others from the science community and academia.

The peer-reviewed team, which has already begun its work, is to determine the flow rate from the beginning of the incident to the present, LaBrec said.

The Obama administration announced Thursday that it has ordered BP to release all data related to the massive spill, including environmental sampling analyses, internal investigation reports and details of the cleanup effort. In a letter to BP Group CEO Tony Hayward, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson told BP to post that information on a website and update it daily.

"The public and the United States government are entitled to nothing less than complete transparency in this matter," they concluded.

The spill began with an April 20 explosion and fire that sank the drill rig Deepwater Horizon two days later. Eleven workers were lost with the rig, which was owned by drilling contractor Transocean and hired by BP.

The resulting slick now threatens the coastal marshes of southeastern Louisiana, where brown, syrupy oil made it past protective booms and into the wetlands near the mouth of the Mississippi River on Wednesday.

Over the weekend, BP inserted a piece of pipe into the larger of the two leak points and began drawing oil from the undersea gusher, located about a mile underwater, up to a ship on the surface. It also has been laying booms out along barrier islands and spraying hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants on the surface and near the sources of the leak.

But that element of the response came under new fire as well on Thursday, as the EPA ordered BP to find a less toxic chemical to use to break up the oil.

The EPA gave the company a day to pick a new substance and three days to start using it instead of the current dispersant, known as Corexit 9500. The chemical has been rated more toxic and less effective than many others on the list of 18 EPA-approved dispersants, according to testimony at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

"Because of its use in unprecedented volumes and because much is unknown about the underwater use of dispersants, EPA wants to ensure BP is using the least toxic product authorized for use," the agency said in a statement announcing the order. "We reserve the right to discontinue the use of this dispersant method if any negative impacts on the environment outweigh the benefits."

Corexit 9500 includes petroleum distillates, propylene glycol and a proprietary organic sulfonic salt, and prolonged contact with it can cause eye or skin irritation, according to the manufacturer's material data safety sheet. The document warns that "repeated or prolonged exposure may irritate the respiratory tract."

But BP says Corexit is biodegradable, has been approved by the EPA and the Coast Guard and is "readily available in the quantities required" by a response plan approved by the government before the spill.

"It has been very effective in causing the oil to form into small, isolated droplets that remain suspended until they're either eaten by naturally occurring microbes, evaporate, are picked up or dissolve," the company said. But it added, "At the same time, we are conducting ongoing assessment of alternative or supplemental dispersant products."

Meanwhile, BP is readying a new attempt to plug the leak for Sunday by injecting a large amount of heavy "mud" -- a fluid used as a lubricant and counterweight in drilling operations -- into the well bore. If that succeeds, the well will be cemented shut, officials have said.

"Everything is being done to make sure that happens," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department oversees offshore oil drilling, told CNN's "American Morning" Thursday. "We have the best scientists in the world who are overseeing what is going on. So, we are hopeful that it will happen soon."

Salazar said BP, which leased the rig from Transocean, has tried many techniques to stop the leaking and the government will do all in its power to hold them accountable.

"They're putting a lot of hope on that Sunday," he said. "We'll see if it happens."

Salazar announced Wednesday that he was dividing the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which regulates oil exploration, into three divisions. The agency has come under fire since long before the spill, and Salzar said it would be reorganized to separate what he called the conflicting duties of regulating oil companies and collecting royalties from them.

"We inherited here what was a legacy of an agency that essentially was rubber-stamping whatever it was that the oil and gas industry wanted," Salazar said. "We have been on a reform agenda from Day One."

[Roiki]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-supertankers-051310

The Secret, 700-Million-Gallon Oil Fix That Worked — and Might Save the Gulf

There's a potential solution to the Gulf oil spill that neither BP, nor the federal government, nor anyone — save a couple intuitive engineers — seems willing to try. As The Politics Blog reported on Tuesday in an interview with former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, the untapped solution involves using empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.


Found this on Io9 and it seems funny that when a good solution presents itself, no one is willing to pay.

[Toruk Makto]

http://science.the-environmentalist.org/2010/05/new-video-of-oil-plumes-cousteau-jr.html

May 25, 2010

Editor Note: Sam Champion from "Good Morning America" also interviewed several LearnNavi.org members regarding the Na'vi language a few months ago.

New Video of Oil Spill Plumes: Cousteau: "This is a nightmare"



   ABC News sent Sam Champion with Philippe Cousteau, correspondent for Planet Green and grandson of Jacques Cousteau, in special diving hazmat suits to get a look at the oil plumes building underwater as a result of the mixture of the spill and dispersants.

   For the first time since the BP Deepwater Horizon tragedy over a month ago, "Good Morning America" Weather Anchor Sam Champion, along with Philippe Cousteau and a team of specially-trained divers, reported from under the water in the Gulf of Mexico to see first-hand what is happening beneath the surface. Wearing special hazmat dive suits, the team is the first to dive in - and document - the oil-laden waters off of the Louisiana coastline.

What they found lead Cousteau to remark: "This is a nightmare."

[Kyle Kepone]

Well, this is just ridiculous.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

by Greg Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum. That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.



Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.



Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn't the government do something to stop it?

The answer is, because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rulebooks. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rulebook. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence.

When the choice is between Dan Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Dan's my man.

***

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews who therefore poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," says Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here: the man on the platform – or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana?

Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez disaster for the Chucagh Native villages of Alaska's Prince William Sound. An expert on corporate regulation, Palast, now a journalist, authored the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

[Toruk Makto]

Here we go. All the incompetence and lies from BP and the US Government slowly being revealed...
- Markì


http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/27/gulf.oil.spill/index.html

BP temporarily suspends 'top kill' effort

May 27, 2010

Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- BP's much-anticipated effort to cap its undersea gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was temporarily suspended Thursday afternoon and was expected to resume later in the evening, a BP executive said.

"Nothing has actually gone wrong or unanticipated," Doug Suttles, the company's chief operating officer, told reporters. He said engineers have been monitoring the process for the past 24 hours, and determining adjustments to the mud-like fluid being injected into the line to counter to flow of oil.

He said the next step will be to restock the drilling fluid and restart in the evening.

The Gulf Coast had been holding its breath all day Thursday as a grim assessment came in -- the spill is now estimated at twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Earlier in the day while the top-kill effort was going full force, hopes had been riding high on the procedure.

BP's effort to suppress the oil spill by pumping heavy drilling fluid into the breach could take another 24 to 48 hours to complete, Bob Dudley, its managing director, reported Thursday. At that time, the "top kill" attempt had so far been successful, and the company planned to start pumping more fluid down a second line in hopes of clogging the underwater well, he said.

Enormous brown plumes of drilling "mud" billowed from the damaged well during the process, which Dudley called "a "titanic arm-wrestling match" a mile below the surface. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is leading the government's response to the oil spill, said the work "is moving along as everyone had hoped."

"They're pumping mud into the well bore, and as long as mud is going down, hydrocarbons are not going up," Allen told reporters Thursday afternoon. The work could take another night, he told reporters in Venice, near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"I think we just need to let that run its course, and we will see what happens," Allen said.

Stopping the leak took on even more urgency after government scientists released spill estimates that far exceed the previous 5,000-barrel-a-day number given by BP.

The burst well is spewing oil at a rate of at least 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt told reporters Thursday, meaning 260,000 to 540,000 barrels had leaked as of 10 days ago -- larger by far than the 250,000 barrels spilled when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.


The now 38-day-old spill was beginning to take its toll on Louisiana's sensitive marshes, where heavy oil has been killing plant life and fouling local wildlife and fisheries. On Thursday, the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the beaches of Grand Isle were empty.

"If only it gets stopped, if what they did yesterday works, that's the beginning of the end," Grand Isle Tourism Commissioner Josie Cheramie said. "We can clean up what's already been put out there, but we just really need to get it stopped. That's the main thing."

The spill claimed a job in Washington, as the head of the scandal-plagued federal agency that oversees offshore drilling resigned.

Elizabeth Birnbaum stepped down as head of the Minerals Management Service "on her own terms and own volition," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a House subcommittee. Two Obama administration sources told CNN that she was fired.

Reports from the agency's independent inspector general have painted a picture of an agency that has had close ties to the industry, most recently noted in a report on the Lake Charles, Louisiana, office released Tuesday.

Salazar has ordered the agency split into three parts with separate responsibilities since the April 20 explosion on an offshore drilling rig that caused the spill.

In a news conference Thursday afternoon, President Obama said the spill shows "more reforms are needed."

"For years, the oil and gas industry has leveraged such power that they have effectively been allowed to regulate themselves," Obama said. He said U.S. laws were "tailored by the industry to serve their needs instead of the public's," giving short shrift to environmental concerns.

After a month-long review of the industry, he announced his administration was suspending dozens of drilling projects, canceling plans to open new parts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Virginia coast to exploration and suspending new deepwater permits for another six months.

Obama also defended his administration's response to the disaster, telling reporters that people who accuse it of being too slow to respond "don't know the facts."

"It doesn't mean it's going to happen right away or the way I'd like it to happen. It doesn't mean that we're not going to make mistakes," he said. "But there shouldn't be any confusion here: The federal government is fully engaged, and I'm fully engaged."

The spill erupted April 20, when the drilling platform Deepwater Horizon exploded and burned about 40 miles off Louisiana. The rig sank two days later, taking 11 of its crew of 125 with it.

The Coast Guard and the Minerals Management Service are leading a joint investigation in Louisiana, while several congressional committees are also investigating the disaster.

BP, rig owner Transocean and oilfield service contractor Halliburton have all blamed each other for the explosion, which witnesses have said was preceded by a series of unusual pressure tests and a rush of gas out of the well.

One of BP's two representatives on the rig, Robert Kaluza, has refused to testify in the Louisiana hearings, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the Coast Guard told CNN. The other, Donald Vidrine, bowed out of his scheduled Thursday appearance, citing illness.

The rig's chief mechanic, Doug Brown, testified Wednesday that Transocean and BP managers argued about plans to finish the well on the day of the explosion, with BP's representative winning the argument. He could not identify which of the BP representatives was involved in the dispute, and BP had no comment on his account.

The rig's offshore installation manager, Jimmy Wayne Harrell, told the Louisiana investigation Thursday that there was no "heated debate." But he said he did reject an initial BP plan to start replacing drill "mud" with seawater without conducting a negative pressure test on the well's initial cementing.

"I told him it was my policy to do a negative test before displacing with seawater," Harrell said. He placed the discussion the day before the blast, and he said Kaluza, the "company man" in the meeting, agreed to add the negative test to the procedure.

Under questioning by an attorney for Halliburton, which did the cementing work to plug the well, Harrell said BP decided not to do a "bottoms-up" test used to measure temperatures and pressures at the deepest part of the well.

Harrell said he wasn't concerned about the lack of a bottoms-up test, but said he wasn't aware that Halliburton had recommended using "substantially more mud" as a counterweight in the drill line than BP had recommended.

[Kyle Kepone]

Skxawng doesn't cut it here. Do we have a word for "a-hole" yet?

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/28/gulf.oil.spill/index.html

BP sees 'some success' with top kill method
May 28, 2010

(CNN) -- BP has measured "some success" in the Gulf of Mexico with a risky procedure known as "top kill," which has never been tried before a mile under the ocean's surface, the company's top executive said Friday.

The oil flow stopped when heavy drilling mud was being pumped into the well at high pressure, but it was too early to tell whether the operation will be able to permanently keep oil from gushing out, said Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive officer. The oil giant plans to resume pumping mud later Friday.

"Clearly, while we're pumping mud there is no oil and gas coming into the sea," Hayward said. A live video feed from the ocean floor showed a thick brown stream gushing into the water. That material was almost all nontoxic, water-based mud -- not oil -- he said.

Hayward, who had previously said the environmental impact on Gulf of Mexico would be modest, upgraded his assessment Friday to an "environmental catastrophe." EDITOR: Oh, you think?

Also Friday, engineers in the Gulf tried the "junk shot" method in an attempt to stop the massive oil leak in the Gulf, Hayward said.

The procedure involved shooting debris such as shredded rubber tires, golf balls and similar objects into the blowout preventer in an attempt to clog it and stop the leak. The goal of the junk shot is to force-feed the preventer, the device that failed when the disaster unfolded, until it becomes so plugged that the oil stops flowing or slows to a relative trickle.

The company plans to resume its "top kill" method, later Friday, he said.

President Obama is scheduled to visit Louisiana on Friday for the second time since an oil rig explosion sent a historic amount of oil gushing into the Gulf.

Obama's visit comes as his administration has been criticized for its response to the massive underwater gusher that is now estimated to be twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

"I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down," Obama said Thursday at a White House news conference. "That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. That doesn't mean it's going to happen right away or the way I'd like it to happen. That doesn't mean we aren't going to make mistakes."

The president even said his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, weighed in on the issue on Thursday.

"You know, when I woke up this morning and I'm shaving, and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?'" he said.

"This whole operation is very, very dynamic," said Doug Suttles, the company's chief operating officer "When we did the initial pumping [Wednesday], we clearly impacted the flow of the well. We then stopped to monitor the well. Based on that we restarted again. We didn't think we were making enough progress after we restarted, so we stopped again."

The light-brown material that was seen spilling out of the well throughout Thursday was the previously pumped fluid from the top kill procedure mixed with oil, he said.

"I probably should apologize to folks that we haven't been giving more data on that," Suttles said when asked why it took so long for BP to announce it had suspended the top kill. "It was nothing more than we are so focused on the operation itself."

Suttles said part of the problem is that too much of the muddy fluid is leaving the breach instead of going down the well.

"So what we need to do is adjust how we are doing the job so that we get more of the drilling mud to go down the well," Suttles said.

He said one solution would be to introduce solids -- known as "bridging material" or its variant "junk shot" -- into the mix.

The revelation that BP suspended the "top kill" effort for 16 hours before it was restarted late Thursday afternoon troubled some.

Neither Obama nor Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is leading the government's response to the oil spill, appeared to be aware of the break when they addressed reporters at separate news conferences Thursday.


A White House official told CNN that people inside the White House knew about the temporary halt in the "top kill," but it wasn't clear if Obama was aware of it.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who has been critical of the federal response to the spill, said the delay in information from BP was "par for the course."

"We've been dealing with this from day one, and the information has not flowed on anything," he said.

Stopping the leak took on even more urgency after government scientists released spill estimates that far exceed the previous 5,000-barrel-a-day number given by BP.

The burst well is spewing oil at a rate of at least 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt told reporters Thursday, meaning 260,000 to 540,000 barrels had leaked as of 10 days ago -- larger than the 250,000 barrels spilled when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.

The spill erupted April 20, when the drilling platform Deepwater Horizon exploded and burned about 40 miles off Louisiana. The rig sank two days later, taking 11 of its crew of 125 with it.

The rush of oil has taken its toll on Louisiana's sensitive coastal marshes. Heavy oil has been killing plant life and fouling local wildlife and fisheries. On Thursday, the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the beaches of Grand Isle were empty.

"If only it gets stopped, if what they did yesterday works, that's the beginning of the end," Grand Isle Tourism Commissioner Josie Cheramie said. "We can clean up what's already been put out there, but we just really need to get it stopped. That's the main thing."

[Toruk Makto]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/28/gulf.oil.environment.disaster/index.html

The Gulf's silent environmental crisis
By John D. Sutter, CNN
May 28, 2010 9:40 a.m. EDT

On the Gulf of Mexico (CNN) -- Ten miles off the coast of Louisiana, where the air tastes like gasoline and the ocean looks like brownie batter, Louisiana State University professor Ed Overton leans out of a fishing boat and dunks a small jar beneath the surface of the oil-covered water.

"God, what a mess," he says under his breath, scooping up a canister of the oil that's been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even though Overton has been studying oil spills for 30 years, he's not sure what he'll find in that sample. That's because, just below the surface, the scope and impact of one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of the U.S. remains a mystery.

And that terrifies some scientists.

It's been five weeks since an oil rig exploded and sank, rupturing a pipeline 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Some clues about what so much oil -- perhaps 22 million gallons of it -- will do to the environment have become obvious:

Dolphins have washed up dead. Endangered sea turtles have been found with oil stuck on their corneas. Lifeless brown pelicans, classified as endangered until recently, have been carried away in plastic bags. Beaches in Grand Isle, Louisiana, are spattered with gobs of sticky crude. And when the moon rises over the coast there, the oil-soaked ocean sparkles like cellophane under a spotlight.

But what's really going on in the depths of the ocean and in the all-important root systems of coastal marshes may prove to have more impact in the long term, and scientists know much less about what's happening in these invisible reaches of the Gulf ecosystem.

As one oceanographer put it, a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe could be brewing under the sea. Or the environment here may be dodging a huge bullet.

"It's kind of like falling out a window," Overton said of the confusion. "We don't know how hard that ground is gonna be until we hit bottom. We don't now if we're going to land in soft shrubs and live -- or if we're going to hit a rock."

If scientists' worst fears are realized, the oil plume in the Gulf could choke off and kill coastal marshes in the productive Mississippi Delta and barrier islands, turning these verdant tufts of life -- which look like hairy putting greens floating out on the water -- into open ocean. That would snap the region's marine food chain, exposing and starving all kinds of organisms.

Overton said the impacts of such an occurrence would last for a century.

Equally frightening, the oil also could spawn a massive oxygen-free "dead zone" deep in the Gulf's waters, which would suffocate all marine life on the ocean floor. Samantha Joye, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, said that if that happens, the dead zone could change marine chemistry in the Gulf of Mexico forever.

"I think it's sort of out of sight, out of mind," she said of the deep-water impacts.

Whether either of those scenarios comes to pass depends on what's taking place beneath the surface of the water.

Scientists now are scrambling to understand what's going on.

Joye recently embarked on a two-week mission to take water samples at the bottom of the ocean.

Researchers know almost nothing what the oil and chemical dispersants used to try to break up the oil will have on life below the Gulf's greasy surface, she said on her boat in Gulfport, Mississippi, just before heading out toward the epicenter of the spill.

"I don't think we know what's going on yet, and it's a month into this thing," she said.

Bacteria eat oil and in the process also chew oxygen out of the ocean. There's so much oil in the water, the bacteria may deplete oxygen reserves until deep-water fish like grouper and snapper and "benthic" communities of sea tubes and oysters suffocate, she said.

Joye will be dropping a huge testing kit -- it's as tall as a person and looks like a stick of dynamite -- several hundred feet into the oil plume to see what's happening. Initial tests show that the bacteria are depleting oxygen levels, she said.

And if the ecosystem at the bottom of the ocean goes, commercially important fish and crustaceans on the surface probably will feel the effects, too, she said.

"It's hard for me to imagine anything worse, honestly," she said of the Gulf oil spill. "It's going to dramatically alter the system."

The roots of the Gulf coast's marshes, also hidden from view, are another focus for scientists. Much public attention has been paid to the migratory birds that nest on the marshes and to the shrimp and fish that use their tangled roots as a nursery, hiding their vulnerable young from bigger fish that swim in open waters.

But the marsh grasses themselves and the less-sexy microorganisms that are the basis for the marsh food chain are easily suffocated and killed if exposed to oil, said Roger Helm, a marine ecologist and chief of the environmental quality department at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Meanwhile, these unseen "little guys" -- the plankton, diatoms and the like -- "are the basis for everything that's going on out there," he said.

"How this is going to affect the food web long-term, it's a great toxicological experiment," he said.

There are several reasons for the widespread scientific confusion.

Perhaps the best is that nothing like the Gulf oil spill has ever happened before.

Many have compared it to the 1989 disaster in which the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled oil off the coast of Alaska. About 260,000 barrels -- a smaller amount than what's gone into the Gulf -- were released into the environment in that case, and it happened rather quickly. The Gulf spill has dragged on over weeks and hasn't stopped.

A better comparison, some scientists say, is the IXTOC I oil well disaster in Mexico in 1979. But, in that case, little research was done to understand the spill's impact on the Gulf of Mexico, Overton said. So there is no real-world scientific precedent that could be used to understand what's happening now.

BP, the company that was leasing the offshore oil rig that exploded and sank April 20, is handling the environmental cleanup. It's doing so in a way that adds further question marks to the environmental situation.

BP has released more than 28,000 gallons of chemicals on the ocean, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in hopes these "dispersants" will break up the oil and minimize its impact on the environment. Such a huge amount of dispersant has never been released deep into the ocean before, according to the EPA, and some independent researchers and the EPA have questioned whether those chemicals may be making matters worse.

The EPA's chief, Lisa Jackson, recently told National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" that the agency is doing "science on the fly" to try to understand what's happening.

Other efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster are equally complicated.

Workers have put plastic booms, which look like elongated strings of childhood floaties, around select barrier islands in hopes of keeping the oil off brown pelican nesting grounds and sensitive marshes. On a recent National Wildlife Federation tour of Barataria Bay, off the Louisiana coast, at least one boom was broken, and another was caked in oil.

The scope of the contamination is daunting. More than 100 miles of Louisiana coast have been hit by the oil, according to CNN reports.

Cleaning up that huge mess along the coast -- which continues to grow -- may prove to be a near-impossible task, said Maura Wood, a senior manager for the National Wildlife Federation's coastal restoration program. Each clean-up option comes with drawbacks, she said, but she remains hopeful that scientists will be able to figure out a way to tackle the problem.

Other scientists are upset that more research wasn't done in advance to understand the environmental impacts of a deep-water spill like this one before it happened.

"It just irritates the piss out of me that we were not prepared for a situation like this and didn't have studies on these issues," said Overton, the LSU professor, adding that he and other scientists "should have raised more hell" about the lack of information about oil-spill response methods and about the marshes themselves.

He said the government should "siphon" a small amount of oil company revenues and put the money into more research about what happens to the environment after a major oil spill.

As Overton rode a fishing boat back to the Louisiana coast on a recent rainy morning, chocolate water spewing from its wake, he said there may be a faint silver lining in an otherwise dire situation.

Perhaps scientists will learn from this oil spill, he said. And maybe they'll learn enough that they can do better next time.

[Toruk Makto]

Some images from the CNN website:

Descriptions:
01- Coast Guard helicopter captures the blaze aboard the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon on April 21, 2010.
02- Emergency ships work to extinguish the fire on the Deepwater Horizon during daylight hours on April 22.
13- BP constructs a massive cofferdam in hopes of containing the oil gushing from the damaged undersea well. The
     containment process ultimately fails.
15- An Air Force C-130 drops an oil dispersing chemical into the Gulf on May 5.
16- A dead Man o' War washes up on shore on Freemason Island, Louisiana, on May 5. The Man o' War is covered with
     orange-colored chemical dispersant used to help break up some of the oil.
20- The Development Driller III sits near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Development Driller is charged
     with drilling a relief well in an effort to stop the leak.
21- A smaller version of the cofferdam constructed weeks earlier, dubbed the "tophat," is prepared to be carried into the
     Gulf.
22- An image released by BP shows the site of the leaking crude oil from the underwater well on May 11.  The only
     image released from BP to date.
25- A marine biologist inspects oil that washed in with the tide near Venice, Louisiana, on May 17.
26- A close-up of the oil that washed ashore near the mouth of the Mississippi River near Venice, Louisiana on May 17.
28- Smoke rises from a controlled burn of some of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico on May 19.
29- Some of the heaviest oil on land to date is seen along the Louisiana coastline on May 20.
30- A smiley-face balloon covered in oil is seen floating about 22 miles off the Louisiana coast.
41- A gloved hand covered with oil points to a marsh where oil has come ashore on Wednesday, May 26, near Brush
     Island, Louisiana
44- Shiny patches of floating oil are seen around Brush Island, Louisiana, on Thursday, May 27.  Boom containment
     failure due to faulty deployment is obvious.
46- Mobile offshore drilling unit Q4000 sits directly above the damaged Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer on
    Thursday while crews attempt a technique known as top kill.
47- An aerial photo taken by actor Stephen Baldwin shows oil washing ashore on the coast of Louisiana.


http://content.learnnavi.org/txepsiyu/oilspill/01.uscg.jpg
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[Dani]

Perhaps scientists will learn from this oil spill, he said. And maybe they'll learn enough that they can do better next time.

I rather hope there wont be a "next time", though.

[Toruk Makto]

Well, not this bad anyway. There will likely be other spills.

[Kayrìlien]

I'm linking this article about the oil spill because I think it is rather well-written, albeit a bit paternalistic and a smidgen preachy, but then again, it is more of an op-ed piece than a list of facts. Enjoy.

From Yahoo! News

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writer   – Sun May 30, 1:05 pm ET

WASHINGTON – It's all so last millennium, that filthy business in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

It reeks of yesterday's fuel, yesterday's sweaty labor — a hands-on way of life from another time. Today's Americans don't care to know how the gas comes to the pump, the food to the table, the iPad to the store.

Just make sure they do.

But now they're staring, transfixed, at where things come from. And what people still do to get it to you, and the death and devastation that can result when something goes wrong and it can't be fixed with a call to technical support.

"Top kill" wasn't a video game. It was a desperate injection of mud and junk into the primeval muck near the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. It was the most ambitious effort yet for a temporary fix, and it failed. So the oil spews, the search goes on and long-term hopes rest on relief wells still two months or more away.

In this age of microchip miracles, people are seeing brute mass, old tools and ancient physics at work in the weirdly lunar undersea landscape. The atmospherics could be from a moon mission.

A mile down, supersized vise grips clench a pipe forcing a flotsam into the ruptured well like oil workers have done on land.

All so yesterday in look and feel — even if it is the first ever top kill at such great ocean depths.

The enormity of the Gulf, its depths and the engineering challenges are beyond ordinary comprehension. (The Gulf alone is punctured with more than 2,300 deep wells. Who knew?) No fancy touch-sensitive chart on TV conveys the vastness. Even experts wildly disagree on fundamental questions such as how much oil is coming out.

The United States is a seafaring nation whose encounters with the sea now tend to be Red Lobster in the suburbs or Memorial Day at the beach.

It's historically a farming, industrial and exploring nation, most of whose people now are distant from the elemental struggles of living and working in the physical environment, much less understanding it.

Only 14 percent of the modern U.S. work force is engaged in production: manufacturing, mining, logging, construction and the like. The rest are in services.

While it is often considered an alien place, too, Washington is a product of that nation.

The president and many lawmakers are lawyers by training, not engineers, roustabouts or farmers. No wonder members of Congress met to discuss legal liability among their first orders of business in the oil spill response. For many in Washington, the talk is of blame, accountability and political consequences.

No wonder, perhaps, that President Barack Obama assumed that something so terrible would not happen because it had not happened before.

Like most Americans, he lacks the sixth sense of a mariner in foul weather or a miner listening to the earth speak.

He does, though, hail from Hawaii, where, as he noted last week, the ocean is sacred. Not to mention, all around.

Obama touched on the disconnect between those of the grounded physical world and everyone else during his news conference. He showed that he knows what he can't really feel.

"When I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair," he said. "On the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are."

The land, sea and factory are less and less an integral part of Americans.

If Aristotle were blogging about all of this, he would probably have little patience with the armchair experts and the pontificators who think the solution should be as easy as Malia Obama suggested when she asked her father, "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

The Greek philosopher said "those who dwell in intimate association with nature" are apt to understand the big picture. "Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view."

His way of saying, you have to be there to get it. Americans, these days, are not.

Kayrìlien

[Kyle Kepone]

@Kayrìlien: wow. That was pretty powerful...

[Toruk Makto]

IMO we need more reminders like Avatar that the foundation needs of our technical culture present risk and destruction to those unfortunate enough to be in the way of the procurement of those needs.

[Col Quaritch]

I disagree this the wost, we are American I'm sure we can top this soon with more bandaid solutions and cut backs so big wigs can buy another air-condition dog house for their arm candy wives. Do I sound bitter ?

[Toruk Makto]

Some more spin from BP under the label "technical briefing":

http://bp.concerts.com/gom/kentwells_update24052010.htm