'Not for public': the oil spill may be getting much worse

[DrVolin]

[Besides, there's no wind under water and last time I checked the weather was pretty good.

I think they call it current.

[jimbo21]

The truth is, they are in look busy mode, trying to buy as much 'time' as they can. The planetary forces they have messled with, lacking the engineering or any other knowledge of this magnitude, are on the timescale of the catastrophe created. I have to say, I love it when human arrogance, stupidity, and greed come under the umbrella of self destruction.

[DoYouEverWonder]

[Besides, there's no wind under water and last time I checked the weather was pretty good.

I think they call it current.

There is a difference. And just because it is or isn't windy above the water, doesn't mean the current is any better or worse below.

[smiths]

you dont need wind and chop on the sea floor to upset lowering an object on a cable one and half kilometeres underwater,
even the smallest movements on the surface would produce large sways near the bottom
i think they would place anchor points around the area it needs to hit and attach cables to the dome as gets close to draw it down (but that is completely ignorant speculation based on what i would do if i was them)

[julie doceanie]

Assholes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f- ... 64163.html

Sex, Lies and Oil Spills
Robert F. Kennedy , Green News

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.


It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

[freemason9]

I'm thinking, though, that the sheer weight of the rig will tend to stabilize it. I'm assuming that suspension will be, at a minimum, eight points from maybe four flotation devices. In addition, the robotic vessels they already have in place will serve as eyes. This contraption is heavy enough that it won't yield to jitters and jigs. It sounds nearly impossible, but consider the massive technological feat of drilling/pumping oil from miles beneath the surface . . .

Yes, this can be done. I suspect it will be successful as well.

[Nordic]

Once the dome fills up with oil, then what?

It'll just come splurging out again.

That's assuming they can actually pull this off in the first place?

[smiths]

na man, the dome has a pipe sucking out the top

[Nordic]

na man, the dome has a pipe sucking out the top

Oh right. I'm sure that'll work just GREAT.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

"Pervasive intercourse"...a new definition of fascism, previously defined (by me) as-
A Male Dominance Cult.

[smiths]

what does that relate to hugh?

[82_28]

Here we go. And as I said. This shit ain't gonna work. Not that I was right, but that. . . Oh well. . . (no pun intended actually)

BP unsure oil-leak cap will work

VENICE, La. — As a crew began lowering a giant steel container 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface Thursday evening to capture oil leaking from a ruptured well, the chief executive of BP said he was not actually counting on it to work.

"It's only one of the battle fronts," said CEO Tony Hayward as his Sikorsky helicopter hovered 1,000 feet above the spot where the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded April 20, sending oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. BP was leasing the rig from owner Transocean.

The lowering of the metal box had been delayed earlier Thursday because of dangerous fumes rising from the oily water in the windless night, the captain of the supply boat hauling the box told The Associated Press. A spark from the scrape of metal on metal could cause a fire, captain Demi Shaffer said.

Deckhands wore respirators while workers on nearby vessels took air-quality readings. Later, the all-clear was given, and the work of easing the box into the waters of the gulf began.

Officials said that engineers would spend the next few days connecting a pipe from the huge metal box to a drill ship on the water's surface and that the system might be running by early next week.

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, cautioned that this was an experimental approach at these depths and that problems were likely to arise. He said it could take a week to get the device working smoothly.

If the box works, a second one now being built may be used to deal with another, smaller leak from the seafloor.

"Hopefully, it will work better than they expect," first mate Douglas Peake told AP aboard the ship.

Oil makes landfall

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard confirmed that the oil hit the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's southeastern tip Thursday, and the state said two dead gannet birds had been found covered in oil. The islands are part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge.

Hayward said he was convinced that his oil company eventually would get the growing spill under control using a variety of tools, from a flotilla of skimmers to the spraying of chemical dispersants and the drilling of relief wells to plug the leaks on the seafloor.

"This is like the Normandy landing," he said. "We know we are going to win. We just don't know how quickly."

Hayward's helicopter tour of the region — which took him from Houma, La., to a spill-response center in Mobile, Ala., then back to Louisiana — was part of a public-relations effort to encourage spill workers and to reassure worried Gulf Coast residents. He allowed a reporter for The New York Times to accompany him during the day, although BP declined to permit the reporter to observe some meetings.

Could face hefty claims

Depending on the extent of the oil damage and the outcome of government investigations into the accident, BP could face billions of dollars in claims.

"The possibility remains that the BP oil spill could turn into an unprecedented environmental disaster," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on a visit to Biloxi, Miss. "The possibility remains that it will be somewhat less."

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered a halt to all new offshore-drilling permits nationwide until at least the end of the month.

Salazar spoke to reporters Thursday outside BP's Houston crisis center. He said lifting the moratorium on new permits will depend on the outcome of a federal investigation of the gulf spill and recommendations delivered to the president May 28.

Salazar also said he believed BP's "life was very much on the line here" and he believed the company was taking the situation "very seriously."

His order will affect permits pending off Alaska as well.

Shell Oil is ready to drill in the Arctic Ocean this summer and asked a federal appeals court Thursday to rule quickly on a challenge by environmentalists who say the Minerals Management Service failed to consider the potential threat to wildlife and the risk for disaster before it approved the Shell project.

Although the appeals-court hearing had been scheduled before the gulf oil spill and arguments did not involve it, the environmental coalition has been making comparisons in public statements about the case.

We shall see, won't we? UGH. . .

[Peregrine]

[Jeff]

Oil Spill: Efforts To Use Robots To Cap Leak FAIL

First Posted: 05- 7-10 04:43 PM | Updated: 05- 7-10 05:15 PM

Reuters is reporting via Twitter that the latest efforts to stop the BP oil leak using robots has failed.

Reuters' exact message is:

FLASH: Robots fail to close valves at leaking BP oil well

Thursday, BP began the process of lowering a 4-story concrete dome 5,000 feet underwater in an effort to contain the spill. Robots and underwater equipment must be used to place the dome on the ocean floor.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/0 ... ef=twitter

[Julia W]

Oil Spill: Efforts To Use Robots To Cap Leak FAIL

First Posted: 05- 7-10 04:43 PM | Updated: 05- 7-10 05:15 PM

Reuters is reporting via Twitter that the latest efforts to stop the BP oil leak using robots has failed.

Reuters' exact message is:

FLASH: Robots fail to close valves at leaking BP oil well

Thursday, BP began the process of lowering a 4-story concrete dome 5,000 feet underwater in an effort to contain the spill. Robots and underwater equipment must be used to place the dome on the ocean floor.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/0 ... ef=twitter

Here's more on that...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0727423420100507

REFILE-Robots fail to close valves at leaking BP oil well
Wed, May 5 2010Stocks

HOUSTON, May 7 (Reuters) - BP has given up on efforts by underwater robots to close valves on a failed blowout preventer at the site of a massive oil leak in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, an executive said on Friday.

"We've essentially used up all those options," Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP (BP.L) (BP.N) said regarding the robots' unsuccessful efforts to close the valves, called rams, and plug the leak at the well.

Suttles said BP was lowering a 98-ton steel box-like containment chamber over a broken pipe that had connected the well to Transocean's (RIG.N) (RIGN.S) former Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which exploded and sank more than two weeks ago about 50 miles (80 km) from the Louisiana shore.

BP hopes to corral the leaking oil and channel it through a pipe to a drillship. The company also is drilling a relief well about a half mile from the well, which is the only proven method to plug the leak 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) below the water's surface.

Suttles said the robots had been trying in vain to close the valves on the blowout preventer, but the flow of oil remains unchanged.

BP is continuing to study two other options, which he said could be risky, in addition to the containment chamber and relief well.

One involves what Suttles called a "junk shot" that would entail injecting heavy fluids and other materials "to basically clog up the blowout preventer" and plug the leak. Other BP executives have referred to that option as a "top kill."

Suttles said BP brought in 20 experts from "across the world" to review that option.

The second option involves replacing a piece of equipment atop the failed blowout preventer with a new blowout preventer with valves that will close as designed and plug the leak.

A second, smaller leak is coming from the bent pipes that stem from that piece of equipment on top of the failed blowout preventer. Experts are studying whether removing that equipment could risk a worse leak.

"We don't want to do anything that would make the situation worse," Suttles said. (Reporting by Kristen Hays; Editing by Marguerita Choy)