Topic: Deepwater Horizon

[Builder]

What's the difference between living your last day, your last year or your last five years?

[Nichi]

What's the difference between living your last day, your last year or your last five years?

Do tell!

[Nichi]

If one is to believe this, there is some good news:
http://ht.ly/2iYTm

The aggressive oil-skimming they've done seems to have paid off. The initial concern and prediction was that the oil would get into the "loop current", hit S. Florida and part of the US East Coast. Very recently this estimate was published by NOAA.

Now, they are saying that if the well-cap succeeds, that the oil will travel no more than it has. I'm all for this outcome, though I read it very cautiously.

Also, they've tested seafood in the eastern part of the Gulf, and it has been given the non-toxic nod. This seems the hardest to believe, given the material that was published about Corexit, the dispersant used. Time will tell.

[Nichi]

Coast Guard allows toxic chemical use on Gulf oil

H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press Writer   – 1 hr 34 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Coast Guard has routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of toxic chemical a day to break up oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico despite a federal directive that the chemicals be used only rarely on surface waters, congressional investigators said Saturday after examining BP and government documents.

The documents show the Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the restrictions were imposed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of gallons of the chemicals to be spread on Gulf waters. Only in a small number of cases did the government scale back BP's request.

The extensive use of dispersants to break up oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon raised concerns early on as to what long-term damage the toxic chemicals might be doing to the Gulf's aquatic life. That prompted the Environmental Protection Agency on May 26 to direct BP to stop using the chemicals on the water surface except in "rare cases."

But Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said Saturday that the chemicals continued to be used extensively with Coast Guard approval, often at a rate of 6,000 to 10,000 gallons a day. A request was made and approved on June 13 to spread as much as 36,000 gallons of dispersant, according to data obtained by Markey's Energy and Environment subcommittee.

The EPA directive "has become more of a meaningless paperwork exercise than an attempt ... to eliminate surface application of chemical dispersants," Markey wrote in a letter sent Friday to retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the spill.

Markey's office released the letter Saturday as well as the documents his panel had analyzed. Markey said that instead of complying with the EPA directive, "BP often carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it."

The House investigators found that the Coast Guard routinely approved the chemical use, in some cases a week in advance. On five occasions the Coast Guard approved a BP request to use 6,000 gallons a day over a weeklong period and "in many of these days BP still used more than double" the limit that was approved, Markey said in his letter.

A call to the BP press office in Houston was not immediately returned.

A spokesman on duty for the Unified Command Center in New Orleans did not have an immediate comment.

The chemicals break down masses of oil into small droplets that allow the oil to be more easily consumed by bacteria. But the chemicals also are toxic and it's not known what impact the large volume of chemicals being used against the BP spill might be having on marine life.

The EPA has acknowledged that there are tradeoffs and that some use of the chemicals are essential to combat the oil spill. The EPA directive issued in May concerned only surface dispersal of the chemicals. BP also has been using large amounts of chemicals near the ocean floor at the site of the damaged wellhead.

In recent weeks, little oil has been noticed on the Gulf surface, and scientists believe one reason for that might be the extensive use of the chemical dispersants.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100801/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_dispersants

I've read about this non-approved use on so many sites - how is it that "Washington" is just now learning about it?

[Michael]

What's the difference between living your last day, your last year or your last five years?

I guess it's a bit like the alarm waking you up at 6am, and realising it's Saturday and you can sleep in till 9am.

[Nichi]

I don't know what to make of it - here's an article which reports that as of 28 July, the Loop Current has been stalled.

http://yowusa.com/earth/2010/earth-0810-01a/1.shtml

If it's true, the questions it arouses will drive one mad.

[Nichi]

Much Gulf Oil Remains, Deeply Hidden and Under Beaches
New U.S. Gulf oil spill report called "ludicrous."

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
Published August 5, 2010
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100805-gulf-oil-spill-cement-static-kill-bp-science-environment/?source=link_fb08052010oilreportarticle

Part of an ongoing series on the environmental impacts of the Gulf oil spill.

As BP finishes pumping cement into the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead Thursday, some scientists are taking issue with a new U.S. government report that says the "vast majority" of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been taken care of by nature and "robust" cleanup efforts.

In addition, experts warn, much of the toxic oil from the worst spill in U.S. history may be trapped under Gulf beaches—where it could linger for years—or still migrating into the ocean depths, where it's a "3-D catastrophe," one scientist said.

The U.S. government estimated Monday that the Deepwater Horizon spill had yielded about 4.9 million barrels' worth of crude.

On Wednesday a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report said that about 33 percent of the spilled oil in the water has been burned, skimmed, dispersed, or directly recovered by cleanup operations. (See "Gulf Oil Cleanup Crews Trample Nesting Birds.")

Another 25 percent has evaporated into the atmosphere or dissolved in the ocean, and 16 percent has been dispersed via natural breakup of the oil into microscopic droplets, the study says. (Read more about how nature is fighting the oil spill.)

The remaining 26 percent, the report says, is still either on or just below the surface, has washed ashore or been collected from shores, or is buried along the coasts.

Oil Spill Report "Almost Comical"?

For all their specificity, such figures are "notorious" for being uncertain, said Robert Carney, a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge.

That's in part because the fluid nature of the ocean means that it's "exceedingly hard" to track oil.

"Water is always moving—if I go out to the spill site tomorrow and look for hydrocarbons, I might not find much, because the oiled water is already gone."

But to accurately figure out how much oil is left, you need to know how much went into the Gulf to begin with, he said.

"Once you start off with that fundamental measure"—the total amount of oil spilled—"being an educated guess, then things aren't that great."

To University of South Florida chemical oceanographer David Hollander, the NOAA estimates are "ludicrous."

"It's almost comical."

According to Hollander, the government can account for only about 25 percent of the spilled Gulf oil—the portion that's been skimmed, burned off, directly collected, and so on.

The remaining 75 percent is still unaccounted for, he said.

For instance, the report considers all submerged oil to be dispersed and therefore not harmful, Hollander said. But, given the unknown effects of oil and dispersants at great depths, that's not necessarily the case, he added.

"There are enormous blanket assumptions."

Oil Trapped Deep in Gulf Beaches

The new report comes after days of speculation about where the Gulf oil has gone. After the damaged well had been capped July 19, U.S. Coast Guard flyovers didn't spot any big patches of crude on the water.

But oil cleanup is mostly getting rid of what's on the surface, Carney said. There's a common perception that "as long as you keep it off the beach, everything's hunky dory," he added.

In fact, scientists are still finding plenty of spilled Gulf oil—whether it's bubbling up from under Louisiana's islands, trapped underneath Florida's sugar-white beaches, or in the ocean's unseen reaches. (See pictures of spilled Gulf oil found just under Florida beaches.)

This week, biological oceanographer Markus Huettel and colleague Joel Kostka dug trenches on a cleaned Pensacola beach and discovered large swaths of oil up to two feet (nearly a meter) deep.

Oil gets trapped underground when tiny oil droplets penetrate porous sand or when waves deposit tarballs and then cover them with sand, said Huettel, of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

(Read more about oil found under "clean" Florida beaches earlier this month.)

Whether microbes munch the oil—the most common way oil breaks down—depends on how much oxygen is available for the tiny organisms to do their work. (See marine-microbe pictures.)

"So far, we haven't seen any rapid degradation in these deep layers," Huettel said, though he noted oil at the top of the sand has been disappearing within days.

With little oxygen, the buried oil may stay for years, until a storm or hurricane wipes away the upper sand layers.

Previous oil spills suggest that the buried beach oil may continuously migrate not only out to sea but also into groundwater, where it can harm wildlife, Huettel said.

Oil-laden groundwater in Alaska following the Exxon Valdez spill, for instance, led to "significantly elevated" death in pink salmon embryos between 1989 and 1993, he said. (Related: "Exxon Valdez Pictures: 20 Years on, Spilled Oil Remains.")

Gulf Oil Microbe Cleanup "Total Bull"

Microbes are not an oil-cleanup panacea either, LSU's Carney cautioned.

For instance, oil-eating bacteria can't stomach asphalt, the heaviest part of an oil molecule and the same material used to pave roads, he said.

The leftover asphalt falls to the seafloor, where another kind of microbe may chew on it—making the molecule shorter and thus more toxic, according to Carney.

"The sentimentality that bacteria turn everything into fish food and CO2 is total bull," he said.

What's more, microbes cherry-pick whatever piece of oil is easiest to process—and on their own time, said Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Counting on microbes to quickly clean up an oil spill is "like asking a teenager to do a chore. You tell them to do it on a Friday, to do it when it's most advantageous, and they do it on a Saturday," Reddy said.

"It can be frustrating that you can't constrain the role of microbes and overall natural cleanup."

Deep-Sea Oil Spills are "Unchartered Territory"

Another "open question" remains, FSU's Huettel noted: What is happening to the oil deep in the Gulf?

For the first time during an oil-spill response, officials used chemical dispersants to break up oil at ocean depths between 4,000 and 5,000 feet (1,200 and 1,500 meters). The dispersant-treated oil bits may have sunk to the seafloor, Huettel said.

In the cold, dark ocean, this mixture of oil and chemical dispersants may be suspended and preserved, causing long-term problems for deep-sea animals, Texas Tech University ecotoxicologist Ron Kendall said during August 4 testimony before the U.S. Congress.

"We have very limited information on the environmental fate and transport of the mixture of dispersant and oil, particularly in the deep ocean," Kendall said.

Some oil fragments are so tiny they can't be seen with the human eye, said the University of South Florida's Hollander. Others are big enough to be gobbled up by baby fish that mistake the oil for food. (See pictures of ten animals at risk from the Gulf oil spill.)

Predicting what will happen to the deep-sea ecosystem is "uncharted territory," said Hollander, who's studying what the oil is doing to deep-sea creatures during a series of research cruises this summer and fall.

"Could be a bottom-up collapse, could be nothing happens," he said. But he suspects a "real large chunk of food chain is being disrupted."

"We're getting into something different than the 2-D petroleum spill" on the Gulf's surface, he added. "All of the sudden you've taken this 2-D disaster and turned it into a 3-D catastrophe."

[Nichi]

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08-05-so-what-happens-when-you-dump-2-million-gallons-of-toxic-chemica/

Quotes fisherman Mark Stewart:

All the sea life is trying to get out of the water. The turtles are all out there with their heads sticking out of the water trying to get air. It's not normal.

And fisherman Danny Ross:
...
Sea creatures that are normally bottom species are on top of the water due to the water column is so full of dispersants. The oxygen level is so low. A horseshoe crab, it's on top of the water trying to swim. We've never seen that in our life. We might not be biologists, but we know our waters. This is not normal.

[Nichi]

The story has devolved now into a fascinating display of minimization and near-denial, under pressure now from the Tourism boards all around the gulf.

First it was a wildlife apocalypse - now it was "just a little oil." Intelligent people call the agencies which have endeavored honest reporting "chicken little".

Supposedly, the "loop current" has been stalled, a first in known history, with possible consequences along the line of the film Day After Tomorrow, but no one is talking about it.

[Nichi]

Oil turned up in a Mississippi marsh over the weekend, contrary to expectations  voiced by BP. BP has accelerated a television ad campaign to boot over the weekend, and they've presented themselves as the average working-joe-who-cares.

Concerns are being voiced by the animal people regarding the annual winter migration of birds who arrive in Texas and Louisianna. It will be a real test of how "okay" things really are (not).

International Bird Rescue has published updated figures on the death count: now it cites that there have been

1837 captured alive
3839 collected dead
716 treated and released

More sea turtles have been collected in the last 10 days than in all the previous 3 months.

http://www.ibrrc.org/gulf-oil-spill-birds-treated-numbers-2010.html

[Nichi]

Louisiana Fishermen Slam Claims that Oil Almost Gone, Seafood Safe

Fishing grounds are full of oil-soaked marsh grass and tarballs, with shrimp season set to open next week, locals say

by Jacoba Charles
Aug 11th, 2010

HOPEDALE, LA.— In the small towns of coastal Louisiana, the widespread consensus is that the oil is far from gone.

Fishermen return from working on cleanup crews or from recreational angling trips with stories of crabs whose lungs are black with oil, or of oysters with shells covered in sludge. They take photos and carry tarballs home like talismans to show what they have seen. They talk about their fears with anyone who will listen, and often their voices are tinged with panic.

Yet a government report released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up, dispersed or otherwise contained. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that of all the samples of seafood that have been tested since the oil spill, none have shown evidence of contamination.

While some in the coastal seafood industry agree with these assessments, a majority seem to view the news with a sense of betrayal.

"The cleanup isn't even close to being done," said Karen Hopkins of Dean Blanchard Seafood, which accounts for about 11 percent of the U.S. shrimp supply, on the barrier island of Grand Isle.

"The last thing I want to do is scare anyone away from the seafood down here," said Dawn Nunez, standing at the counter of the shrimp wholesale business and deli she owns in the tiny fishing town of Hopedale. "But if I’m not eating it or feeding it to my children, I can’t advise anyone else to eat it either."

On their dock across the street, Dawn's husband Marty Nunez pulls a clump of oil-ridden marsh grass out of a plastic bag. 

"There's people fishing where this is at – or worse than this," he said. "I can't understand how they say things are getting back to normal."

Nunez surreptitiously picked the grass while working as part of BP's Vessels of Opportunity cleanup operation on Monday. For him the oil-soaked grass is a symbol of a lurking threat. Like many other people living along the coast, Nunez is confident that vast quantities of oil remain in the environment, despite highly publicized announcements to the contrary.

"Our fishermen bring home grass and tarballs and then we watch the news and they say there is no sign of oil," said Dawn Nunez. "Where did it go? Where did millions of gallons of oil go if it's not in the Gulf?"

A widely held theory is that the 1.8 million gallons of dispersants that were sprayed during the cleanup operation caused the oil to sink to the bottom.

"I've been working with oil all my life," said Brian Zito, a commercial fisherman on Grand Isle. "Dispersant is like a soap, and if you wash your hands in a bucket your water will be all white and soapy and fine. But let that bucket sit there for a few hours and see what happens – all that oil is going to come back together."

When they start trawling for shrimp or dredging for oysters, fishermen fear that the oil will get stirred up again.

For now that fear is largely untested. Although 5,144 square miles of federal waters affected by the oil spill had been deemed safe as of Tuesday, little of that good news applies to Louisiana. The state's three main fisheries are crab, oysters and shrimp – but the shrimp season doesn't open until next week. And crab and oyster fishing is almost entirely shut down because of the spill, as are most of the nearshore fishing grounds relied on by Louisiana's shrimpers.

But perhaps the biggest problem faced by the state's commercial fishermen is that they don't trust their own product. Even when the government decides they are allowed to fish in the marshes again, many say they are going to wait.

"I know what's out there and I'm not going to mess up my equipment with oil," Zito said in an often-repeated sentiment. "You can't even ride back there in a boat without stirring up tarballs, let alone put a net in the water."

Trawling for shrimp involves dragging a heavy chain, called a tickling chain, across the bottom of the marsh, lake or ocean. Shrimp that live in the muck swim up, and get scooped into the waiting net. And if oil is on the sea floor like the fishermen fear, that will get stirred up as well.

And if there is any contamination of the seafood, there is a very real chance that the individual fishermen could ultimately be held responsible. Past lawsuits filed by restaurant customers have made this possibility seem very real.

"We are going to have to buy product liability insurance on a product that we've never had to worry about before," Hopkins said.

Perhaps because of this, demand for Gulf Coast seafood is down. Marty Nunez said that the processor he has sold to for years called to warn him they wouldn’t be buying his product, should he get any in.

"They can't buy it because they can't sell it," he said. "They can’t even sell Gulf Coast shrimp that they have from last year."

But the fishermen facing this uncertain future stand to lose much more than a job. Many come from families that have hunted, fished and lived in Louisiana's swampy waterways for generations.

"This is a way of life," Nunez said. "It's what we eat, drink and breathe."

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100811/louisiana-fishermen-slam-claims-oil-almost-gone-seafood-safe

[Nichi]

Gulf Outsiders Little Understand What is Happening to People Inside

Louisianan frames the local story of the disaster, and of persisting fears the tragedy may only be just beginning

Jul 31st, 2010
by Tim Gautreaux, Guardian

Those who live in Louisiana all their lives develop an understanding of disaster. We know a hurricane can turn over hundreds of offshore oil rigs in one pass and then come to land and do the same to our homes. Refineries explode, rigs blow up, pipelines burst, well pressures cause accidents that take fingers, feet, arms, legs and life itself.

There's hardly a family in the Gulf region that does not have a member involved in the oil industry. My father was a tugboat captain who handled barges of crude oil for the sprawling refineries, my brother sells oilfield equipment and technology, my nephew captains offshore supply vessels, my great-nephew operates a giant crane currently picking Katrina-smashed equipment from the Gulf floor. Cousins manage oil leases.

So, even though I am not an oil worker, the industry is part of my environment, my history, and when I saw images of the April Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire, I thought at once, "Wait a minute. Something's wrong. That rig is state-of-the-art, the size of a small factory, loaded with technology that rivals the space program in complexity. Why is the fire so enormous?"

And later, when the labyrinth of pipes and valves keeled over in a rumbling, hissing nimbus of flame, I was astounded, thinking, "Why didn't the blowout preventer shut down the well?" And days later, when it was revealed that the device was not functioning, a dark spill began to spread in my soul, a burgeoning realization that nothing could stop a runaway well 5,000 feet below the Gulf's surface. Nothing.

Fear of Well Rupture

A wide open fire hydrant blasting a plume of water out of a four-inch opening operates on a pressure of 50 pounds per square inch. The oil and gas venting from the rig's seven-inch pipe is propelled by at least 3,000 psi. Or more. And if the pipe beneath the blowout preventer fails? The reservoir pressures, I understand, are 11,000 psi. Unchecked, the subterranean caverns of oil would roar to the surface for years.

BP has made a number of attempts to stop the fountain of oil and all have failed, except for the latest cap. But even this success poses many dangers, including a well rupture far below the ocean floor, initiated by the high pressure caused by the cap. No one knows what the result of such a failure would be, and this highlights the most frightening facet of the catastrophe: its unpredictability. The final solution is supposed to be the relief wells BP is drilling, and on the day I realized even these might not arrest the blowout, I decided to stop thinking about it all.

I drove into my south-east Louisiana town of Hammond to get something good to eat. At a seafood cafe I ordered Oysters Scampi. The TV was on above the bar, showing miles-long strands of red oil streaming across the face of the Gulf. I thought of the men killed in the explosion, how they spent their lives trying to avoid something like this. My oysters were large and plump; I ate the first fellow, then looked up at the oil.

Shrimp, Grass, Birds

Locally, it's well known that 60% of the US's oysters come from Louisiana's coastal regions. The oyster beds would be killed by the oil and take years to regenerate. Longer, if the oil kept coming next year. And the next. The spill inside me widened as I realized that the shrimp fisheries would soon be closed, the commercial taking of red snapper, grouper and all their delectable cousins banned. I remembered that Louisiana supplies 73% of the nation's shrimp. My God, what about the charter boat industry and sport fishermen from Texas to Florida?

The nightly news told of oil coming ashore. Unlike its neighboring states, Louisiana has no shore, no sand beach except for a small spit called Grand Isle, no dunes, hills, cliffs. The entire Gulf border and its wide attendant marshes are exactly at sea level. The shore is mostly gritty mud held in place by tall, dense marsh grass. What is not water is grass, thousands of square miles of it. When the oil kills the grass, the shore will begin to melt away.

This coastal marsh is home to millions of birds – pelicans, terns, egrets, great herons – and a rich variety of mammals and reptiles. It is threaded through by countless miles of narrow bayous, inlets and lagoons, all spawning areas for shrimp and succulent blue-claw crabs, nesting grounds for vast flocks of migratory geese and ducks – a hot and humid greenhouse teeming with life.

Louisiana is a relatively small state, but it contains 40-45% of the nation's coastal wetlands. The neighboring states of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have similar fertile and productive marshes, though such areas are much smaller.

Greatest Fear Comes True

The oil that began to show up, the so-called tar balls, were really reddish pancakes of axle grease; they began to appear on Grand Isle, then east, on the Alabama beaches, followed by a nasty invasion of the lovely green water and white sand shores of Pensacola and Santa Rosa Island. Heavy dark oil began to pool against the Louisiana marshes, coating wildlife with a greasy, glue-like batter – no one can ever know how many thousands of animals have died, how many carcasses are at the bottom of the quarter million square miles of the Gulf.

Next, every fisherman's greatest fear happened.

The government had to close over 80,000 square miles of the Gulf to all fishing, and suddenly tens of thousands of fishermen were out of work, losing their identity and a way of life they and their ancestors have pursued for generations. The Cajuns have fished since they arrived in the 1700s; the Vietnamese, Croatians, African Americans, Native Americans, Islenos and plain American country boys who trawl and fish and process are all on the bank watching their livelihoods drown in oil.

How much oil? Who will ever know? As of now, a safe final estimate, if the cap holds and the relief wells work, is 200 million gallons. The oil washing up in July might have leaked in April. Locals are losing sleep about how much oil is looming underwater to bedevil us next year or for 10 years.

Calls to counseling and crisis lines are through the roof. Fourteen million people depend on fishing and oilfield work for a living in the Gulf region. The fishermen can't pay rents and mortgages, utility bills, insurance, buy fuel for their boats, save for any kind of future; they stand in charity food lines on 100-degree days.

The oilfield people are facing cutbacks because of the new ban on deepwater drilling; this is affecting shipbuilding, crewboat, supply and helicopter fleets, machine shops, pipe yards, supply houses, foundries and a hundred other businesses. The fishermen are hurting acutely at the moment, but the oil workers are worried for their futures as well, as the industry is facing a wind-down that could last for years.

Outsiders Don't Understand

The news keeps getting more uncertain and, yes, things can get worse because hurricane season is now upon us and no one knows what havoc a big storm in the Gulf could cause. It could do anything from pushing a bow wave of killing oil over the estuaries to painting New Orleans with black rain.

I don't think people living outside the region understand what is happening.

One so-called environmentalist suggested Gulf fishermen and oil workers should just get educated in green technology and work in solar panel factories. What are they supposed to do for 20 years until the technology is perfected and the factories built? Fishermen want to work as fishermen; the Gulf is 1,000 miles wide and they are independent members of a huge culture, not employees.

By the end of June I tried to limit my news intake. It was now clear the enormous Gulf tourism industry was on shaky ground because all the beaches from Panama City, Florida to Grand Isle, Louisiana were fouled or soon to be fouled, and the result was a freefall in hotel, condo and restaurant bookings, and trade in the thousands of gift shops, filling stations, convenience stores, bait-and-tackle shops. Each type of business was firing workers, cutting orders, falling into debt.

After a charter boat captain shot himself in the head, I turned off the television. But everywhere I went, neighbors, bank tellers, waitresses, university professors all fretted about the spill. Last year, one billion pounds of fish was harvested from the Gulf; now only a tiny fraction of that is being caught in the small areas still open, and chances are even that clean catch will be distrusted by buyers outside the region. How many years will it take for Gulf seafood's reputation for quality to return?

This disaster rides like a tumor on the back of the monster Katrina, a storm that in 2005 killed more than 1,800 people in the New Orleans area. Many residents of the region were finally getting their homes rebuilt, their boats and docks restored.

Not a man in a thousand miles glad about any of it

It is true a few hundred men have been hired by BP at low wages to shovel muck off the shores. Several motels have been rented to house workers and BP has been leaking out checks to fishing families and charter boat operators (though there are tales of checks never arriving). Hundreds of boats have been hired to go after the oil, but not a man in a thousand miles is glad about any of it.

Everyone has a sense of why the accident happened. Weeks before the explosion, it seems BP knew the blowout preventer was leaking and missing a crucial seal. About 10 hours before 11 men were burned up, employees report an argument broke out between the rig's BP manager, who wanted a speedy and cheap sealing of the well, and the driller and cementer, who demanded traditional, safe plugging methods. The company man overruled the experts. He wanted to save money, ignoring the first rule of industry economics: safety is never more expensive than an accident.

The clean-up bill is complex and will extend for years. In Florida, workers clean a beach at dusk; at sunrise it's covered again. The spill is slathering four states now. It could be blown over to Texas. It could show up in the marinas of Key West, or even Wilmington, North Carolina on the Atlantic, wherever the Gulf Stream carries it. The coming expense is not to be imagined. Lawsuits are spilling out with no judicial blowout preventer to slow them down. Injury and loss of livelihood suits, suits from hotels for loss of bookings, suits from restaurants, bars, stores, suits for mental anguish, even claims from municipalities for loss of taxes.

The future?

There is a large, years-old black spot in my driveway where my old Jeep once leaked a quart of transmission oil. It's not fading away. The BP spill is likewise staining the coast's soil, and sinking into the psychological fabric of the Gulf. Beneath the sorrow lies suspicion and anger based on the notion that if this spill had occurred near a place like Boston harbor where a lot of wealthy, well-connected people live, every oil-skimmer in the hemisphere would have been brought in and every offer of foreign help accepted immediately, instead of 71 days after the spill began.

The locals have watched with disbelief some of BP's lunatic and expensive clean-up methods, such as wiping down each blade of marsh grass with paper towels. They have watched their own, more effective, home-grown efforts ridiculed and crushed by irrelevant Coast Guard regulations and "experts" who have never seen Louisiana's coast except perhaps through the windows of a plane.

In three to 10 years, maybe the lawsuits will be settled, maybe the sea grasses will grow back to hold the marshlands together, maybe the fish now trying to breathe clouds of undersea oil will somehow propagate, maybe trust in the world's best seafood will return.

But a person's life is composed of minutes and is most fulfilled by working and bringing one's earnings to the family table. And who can give back even one ruined minute?

 
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100731/gulf-outsiders-little-understand-what-happening-people-inside

[Nichi]

BP Oil Spill: Endangered Species Still at Risk
Deepwater Horizon spill leads to rise in dolphins and endangered brown pelicans injured or killed this week

By Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian
Aug 9, 2010

U.S. officials recorded a big jump in the numbers of dolphins and endangered brown pelican and sea turtle injured or killed by the BP spill over the past week, even as officials were proclaiming that the oil was rapidly disappearing from the Gulf.

Some 1,020 sea turtles were caught up in the spill, according to figures today – an ominous number for an endangered species. Wildlife officials collected 177 sea turtles last week – more than in the first two months of the spill and a sizeable share of the 1,020 captured since the spill began more than three months ago. Some 517 of that total number were dead and 440 were covered in oil, according to figures maintained the Deepwater Horizon response team.

"It is a high number for any endangered species," said Elizabeth Wilson, a scientist for the Oceana conservation group.

The number of dolphins, whales and other marine mammals captured or found dead also rose last week, from 69 to 76. An analysis by the National Wildlife Federation said the numbers of oiled birds collected had nearly doubled since the well was capped, from 37 to 71 a day. 

It is unclear why the numbers of injured and dead wildlife have jumped. One official at the Deepwater Horizon response command claimed that the rescue effort had intensified over recent days, but did not provide numbers for increased crew.

Others suggested that oil was moving into wildlife habitats, or that animals initally exposes to smaller quantities of oil were sickening over time.

Conservation groups also accused wildlife officials of misjudging their earlier rescue efforts and putting some at risk species – such as the brown pelican – in greater danger.

Wildlife officials had earlier held back from visiting islands in Barataria Bay that are sanctuaries for brown pelican for fear of disrupting their nesting season.

But that concern to avoid disturbing habitat may have put pelican eggs and hatchlings at greater risk once able-bodied pelican fled the oil.

"There has been a lot of criticism of fish and wildlife for the fact that they never actually went on the islands, and because they did not, abandoned nests were left so that any chicks that were already hatched died, and any eggs that were left were also left to die," said Cynthia Sarthou executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network

[Nichi]

Birds
1917 captured alive
846 rehabilitated and released
4187 collected dead

Mammals (?)
78 dead

Turtles
Over 500 dead
Over 400 captured for rehabilitation

http://www.ibrrc.org/gulf-oil-spill-birds-treated-numbers-2010.html

These numbers are underestimates, perhaps gross underestimates. There are stories circulating about the "night-time" secret collection of carcasses, under tight security. The speculation is that BP doesn't wish to pay the 50k per each "endangered species" carcass, per a wildlife protection act, but I think it's more about publicity and the complicity in the new push to present everything as "ok". Everything's ok - the president had a swim off Pensacola Beach. Which, frankly, makes him complicit too.

[Nichi]

I'm still digesting this intellectually... can't say yet that I fully comprehend it. But it is of interest that BP has put much of the scientific community residing on the Gulf on their payroll: this report comes out of Georgia, whose coast is not on the Gulf.

Report concludes that nearly 80 percent of oil from Gulf spill remains
Media briefing featuring Samantha Joye, Charles Hopkinson scheduled for 11 a.m., Aug. 17

Writer: Sam Fahmy, 706/542-5361, sfahmy@uga.edu
Contact: Jill Gambill, 305/542-8975, jgambill@uga.edu
Aug 16, 2010, 16:56


Athens, Ga. – A report released today by the Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem.

The report, authored by five prominent marine scientists, strongly contradicts media reports that suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill remains.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” said Charles Hopkinson, director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

Co-authors on the paper include Jay Brandes, associate professor, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography; Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences, UGA; Richard Lee, professor emeritus, Skidaway; and Ming-yi Sun, professor of marine sciences UGA.

Hopkinson and Joye will discuss the report and the fate of gas released into the Gulf of Mexico at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 17. The briefing will be held in Room 261 of the Marine Sciences building on the UGA campus. Reporters can join the briefing via teleconference by dialing toll-free 888-204-5987 and entering access code 2560397.

The group analyzed data from the Aug. 2 National Incident Command Report, which calculated an “oil budget” that was widely interpreted to suggest that only 25 percent of the oil from the spill remained.

Hopkinson notes that the reports arrive at different conclusions largely because the Sea Grant and UGA scientists estimate that the vast majority of the oil classified as dispersed, dissolved or residual is still present, whereas the NIC report has been interpreted to suggest that only the “residual” form of oil is still present.

Hopkinson said that his group also estimated how much of the oil could have evaporated, degraded or weathered as of the date of the report. Using a range of reasonable evaporation and degradation estimates, the group calculated that 70-79 percent of oil spilled into the Gulf still remains. The group showed that it was impossible for all the dissolved oil to have evaporated because only oil at the surface of the ocean can evaporate into the atmosphere and large plumes of oil are trapped in deep water.

Another difference is that the NIC report estimates that 4.9 million barrels of oil were released from the wellhead, while the Sea Grant report uses a figure of 4.1 million barrels since .8 million barrels were piped directly from the well to surface ships and, therefore, never entered Gulf waters.

On a positive note, the group noted that natural processes continue to transform, dilute, degrade and evaporate the oil. They add that circular current known as the Franklin Eddy is preventing the Loop Current from bringing oil-contaminated water from the Gulf to the Atlantic, which bodes well for the East Coast.

Joye said that both the NIC report and the Sea Grant report are best estimates and emphasizes the need for a sustained and coordinated research effort to better understand the impacts of what has become the world’s worst maritime oil spill. She warned that neither report accounted for hydrocarbon gasses such as methane in their oil budgets.

“That’s a gaping hole,” Joye said, “because hydrocarbon gasses are a huge portion of what was ejected from the well.”

The complete Georgia Sea Grant/University of Georgia Oil Spill report is available online at http://uga.edu/aboutUGA/joye_pkit/GeorgiaSeaGrant_OilSpillReport8-16.pdf.

Figures from the report are available at http://uga.edu/aboutUGA/joye_pkit/GeorgiaSeaGrant_OilChart.pdf.

http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/100816_Sea_Grant.shtml