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

[Blue]

Julia W, I can't get any of those Youtubes in your post to work.

Here's what I think is true. They capped it and there is no more oil coming out of that one. There is not now nor is there going to be a methane burst that will kill all life along the gulf. Nukes were not used to shut it down. Mud was.

Yes, the feds have and continue to allow BP to control the situation which affects the coastline of four US states and the Gulf of Mexico waters. THAT is enough to piss off every fucking American citizen, not just the locals. Every scientist involved with testing and forecasting right now says "I. don't. know." So the long term negative affects upon the sea life and sea food (which is a huge industry there) not to mention the tourism industry of the area is unknown.

It's bad enough that corporations have taken over our government and lie but we don't need internet doomsday liars to spread absurd stories about the GOM. Louisiana and MS were hard hit, Alabama a little less so and further east Florida is not really damaged at all by oil. I've been there. No yellow skies.

Other than the Lousiana barrier islands that are freaking saturated with oil the entire GOM is not toxic.

Fearmongers suck.

[Julia W]

Julia W, I can't get any of those Youtubes in your post to work.

Here are the actual links, if you want to give these a try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhPvQot ... re=related part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbry0D2R ... re=related part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDO4KNm1 ... re=related part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fobsqXyz ... re=related part 4

[Nordic]

Admittedly, some things are rather strange about this whole thing:

The way they shut down the air space. Was this just for PR? Because it's pretty bad PR to shut down air space. Or was it done for a more nefarious reason?

The way the first capping attempts failed miserably, then lo and behold a latter capping event worked like a charm. What's up with that? I haven't seen a very good explanation for that yet (although I could have easily missed it).

The anomalies in the locations of said wells.

The fact that there was plenty of video showing oil billowing up from the sea floor.

A lot of weird weird stuff with this one, and we're all supposed to accept the "move right along, nothing to see here" bullshit at this point.

[DoYouEverWonder]

Admittedly, some things are rather strange about this whole thing:

The way they shut down the air space. Was this just for PR? Because it's pretty bad PR to shut down air space. Or was it done for a more nefarious reason?

The way the first capping attempts failed miserably, then lo and behold a latter capping event worked like a charm. What's up with that? I haven't seen a very good explanation for that yet (although I could have easily missed it).

The anomalies in the locations of said wells.

The fact that there was plenty of video showing oil billowing up from the sea floor.

A lot of weird weird stuff with this one, and we're all supposed to accept the "move right along, nothing to see here" bullshit at this point.

The first cap didn't work because they tried to attach it to the sawed off broken riser pipe. With this arrangement it was impossible to make a seal and lots of oil continued to leak out of the well.

Then they finally unbolted the damaged top of the BOP and BOLTED a new one in it's place. It was only at this point that they could actually capture most of the oil coming out and to reverse the pressure by pumping mud back in.

The first attempt to kill the well was a joke because there was no way to overcome the pressure of the oil coming up when you can't get a good seal at the top.

This is why I think that BP jerked around with all their various feeble attempts until they were almost finished drilling their relief wells.

[82_28]

But you do have to hand it to BP for being kind enough to supply all that mile down webcam footage from the get go. A webcam, just ready to go, with ready-made uplink and distribution fathoms below the sea. Now nobody cares. Sealed off, off to Red Lobster, no harm no foul.

I wonder why nobody cares anymore. Nothing has changed besides perception of the event. Vicarious disaster fatigue is what they have ultimately drilled the Earth for. Who the fuck cares? A dangerous precedent I would think.

[StarmanSkye]

stone on stone wrote:
"There is a stand-off between BP and the US gov, as both now are co-conspirators in the resolution. The US has to keep the use of a nuke seal dead quiet, with Iran and Korea in play, but probably extracted a certain high committment from BP regarding clean up and an agreed limited hang out of corporate responsibility, in exchange for their part in the misdirection.

Otherwise there is no explanation for the lack of ripping the facade off this carnival sideshow, unless it's in the interest of all, behind the scenes."

****
I don't think its possible for a nuke, even a "small" one, to be set-off without it being detected by hundreds of seismographs around the world. Too hard even for all the reach of USG officialdom to control or censor them all, besides the obvious tell of violently displaced water-column with resulting pressure-wave making its own audio signature.

And that's BESIDE the point of the problematic technical issues re: using a deep underwater explosion precisely enough as a way to cover and seal a runaway oilwell breach -- just as likely the immense pressures of escaping oil will cause an increase in rate of flow as seabed crust is fractured. A VERY risky gambit at the very least. It would probably make more sense to use conventional demolition explosives and techniques (modified for unique 1-mile-deep conditions) to precisely move sufficient seabed material to cover the damaged wellhead -- without need for secrecy. In fact, a nuke could have been used (IF feasable) under cover of the activity and expected effects of a demolition-explosion event. That would make more sense than trying to keep such a thing secret.

Re: Simmon's contention that BP pulled a substitution stunt -- What's the point? There would still be an immense oil-leak that would have to be stopped.

Worst-case disaster-mongering is really fucked-up, esp. when common-sense and qualified speculation are abandoned in favor of sensationalist blather for the sake of self-indulgent dramaqueen theatrics.

The disaster is horrible enough (too bad with implications we still can't grasp) without yanking the conspiroid sky-is-falling crap.

By all means, the chief CEOs and officials whose criminal negligence caused this debacle should be figuratively drawn-and-quartered as an example, and corporate power & influence ought to be reigned in, with the state resuming review and authority over the public consequences of corporations. (Fat chance THAT will happen tho!)

[stoneonstone]

StarmanSky wrote:

The disaster is horrible enough (too bad with implications we still can't grasp) without yanking the conspiroid sky-is-falling crap.

That isn't the point, nor the over-the-top conspriracy crap that is implied. I guess I'd first like to have those who have images of co-ordinate bearing video images from the previous 110 days or so to check, and see which of the two MC 252 wells are shown, and on what day.

The only reason I give any credence to a blast to seal the blow-out is
1) almost a decade on, I do believe that some sort of minor nuclear devices were used on 9-11 to evaporate the concrete and destroy the cores of the two towers (and cause the very bizarre burnouts and metal melts on vehicles that day. No other explanation fits with what we were allowed to see, and what was left.)
2) if not for that, I would find the whole idea of sealing a well with a tiny nuke (very deep) absolutely a non-starter. But even with strange seismic readings on 9-11, nothing really resulted from that...they've been explained away six ways til Sunday, or ignored.
3) Sept 11 validated the small use of nuclear devices for some, demonstrated their ability to be controlled and cleaned when below ground. Behind the secrets of the state, that plays off arguments for all scenarios in ways we'll never be privy to in such a deep security level discussion.

The pressures and flows that were bandied about, plus the rather spectacular failures of previous attempts to cap the blow-out really do cause nothing but skepticism about the successful capping last week, and the successful sealing with drilling mud. Almost with the ease of a local volunteer fire company pulling a cat out of a tree. Doesn't make any logical sense.

The volumes of oil, even on the low end of the scale clearly make this one of the worst disasters in modern history to an ecology and large region. But now we are supposed to believe that 75% of the oil is gone, and everything is fine? Nothing about this adds up.

I just put forward a scenario I think is more than plausible, given both the well co-ordinates shell game, and the end of Matt Simmons bleating on about using a nuke.

Let's pull that apart, and poke about there please, rather than just sending a blast that I'm peddling unthinking disaster and conspiracy.'

I'm not. Some major shift has happened, that has not been explained anywhere near an adequate degree, and needs to be. The corexit, multiples of Exxon Valdez quantities of oil, and environmental changes are horrific as mentioned. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't look critically at how the panic and hopelessness (and pathological corporate lying) that was a given for everyday up until it changed on a dime two weeks ago.

Why and how did THAT happen?

[Nordic]

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Obama_to_s ... 82010.html

Obama takes one for the team. Team BP, that is. He should get an "Employee of the Month" plaque for this.

Obama to serve Gulf seafood at birthday bash: aide

Published: Sunday August 8, 2010


US President Barack Obama is confident in the quality of Gulf of Mexico seafood despite the BP oil spill and will serve some at a party Sunday to mark his 49th birthday, a top aide said.

"Later today at the president's birthday party, he's going to be serving his guests seafood from the Gulf of Mexico," White House energy advisor Carol Browner told NBC.

The White House did not release details about the Sunday event. Obama turned 49 on August 4 while his wife and their daughters were out of town, and he marked the occasion in Chicago with a collection of friends including talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

The Gulf of Mexico is known for its shrimp, crab, oysters, and dozens of species of fish, but the billion-dollar seafood industry has been devastated by the spill due to the closure of large areas of fishing waters.

On Friday the US Food and Drug Administration, which earlier deemed safe the seafood caught in waters open for fishing, said that some 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants that were poured into the sea to dissipate the massive oil slick was unlikely to show up in the food chain.

"There is no information at this time to indicate that they (dispersants) pose a public health threat from exposure through the consumption of seafood," the FDA said.

Earlier this month, BP's chief operating officer Doug Suttles also said he would eat Gulf of Mexico seafood after the massive oil spill poured 4.9 million barrels of crude into the water and devastated the region following an explosion on a BP-leased rig in April.

"I absolutely would," he said in response to a question about whether he would eat Gulf seafood. "And I would feed it to my family," he said.

[Jeff]

Numbers of Oiled Wildlife Increasing

08/09/2010

Last week, I posted about how it's misleading to conclude that the worst of the BP oil disaster is over just because the cap seems to be working and the amount of visible surface oil is declining. This week, news reports are bearing that out. Since the cap was put in place, the numbers of oiled wildlife have been on the increase.

The reality is that there’s still a massive amount of oil out there and wildlife is continuing to be exposed to it. The visible surface oil might be on the decline, as last week’s NOAA report indicated, but there’s still the equivalent of multiple Exxon Valdez disasters out there. And right now many birds are fledging and leaving the nesting colonies, exposing a whole new generation to the oil for the first time, which is likely contributing to the increase in oiled birds recovered in recent days.

Rather than start making plans to wrap up the clean-up efforts, we need to be devoting even more attention to continue to aggressively monitor the situation to know what’s going on for sure. Based on the long term impacts of previous oil spills, the fact that wildlife is continuing to suffer shouldn’t be a surprise. Again, the idea that the disaster is over just because the cap seems to be working and there’s not a lot of visible surface oil is misleading. The spike in wildlife deaths in recent days is evidence of that.

http://blogs.discovery.com/gulf-oil-spi ... pgn=fbapl1

[Nordic]

Just saw this at cryptogon, original is here:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environmen ... 114225.ece

USF says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

A month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, scientists from the University of South Florida made a startling announcement. They had found signs that the oil spewing from the well had formed a 6-mile-wide plume snaking along in the deepest recesses of the gulf.

The reaction that USF announcement received from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agencies that sponsored their research:

Shut up.

"I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil," USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF's public announcement, he said, comparing it to being "beat up" by federal officials.

The USF scientists weren't alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction. "We expected that NOAA would be pleased because we found something very, very interesting," Asper said. "NOAA instead responded by trying to discredit us. It was just a shock to us."

NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, in comments she made to reporters in May, expressed strong skepticism about the existence of undersea oil plumes — as did BP's then-CEO, Tony Hayward.

"She basically called us inept idiots," Asper said. "We took that very personally."

Lubchenco confirmed Monday that her agency told USF and other academic institutions involved in the study of undersea plumes that they should hold off talking so openly about it. "What we asked for, was for people to stop speculating before they had a chance to analyze what they were finding," Lubchenco said. "We think that's in everybody's interest. … We just wanted to try to make sure that we knew something before we speculated about it."

"We had solid evidence, rock solid," Asper said. "We weren't speculating." If he had to do it over again, he said, he'd do it all exactly the same way, despite Lubchenco's ire.

Coast Guard officials did not respond to a request for comment on Hogarth's accusation.

The discovery of multiple undersea plumes of oil droplets was eventually verified by one of NOAA's own research vessels. And last month USF scientists announced they at last could match the oil droplets in the undersea plumes to the millions of barrels of oil that gushed from the collapsed well until it was capped July 15.

"What we have learned completely changes the idea of what an oil spill is," USF scientist David Hollander said then. "It has gone from a two-dimensional disaster to a three-dimensional catastrophe."

Now Lubchenco is not only convinced the undersea plumes exist, but she is predicting that some of the spill's most significant impacts will be caused by their effect on juvenile sea creatures such as bluefin tuna. Lubchenco and her staff say they are now working smoothly with USF and other academic institutions in investigating the consequences of the largest marine oil spill in history.

However, Hogarth said, not all is hunky-dory.

USF's first NOAA-sponsored voyage to take samples after Deepwater Horizon, the one that turned up evidence of the undersea plumes, was designed to gather evidence for use in an eventual court case against BP and other oil companies involved in the disaster. At the end of the voyage, USF turned its samples over to NOAA, expecting to get either a shared analysis or the samples themselves back. So far, Hogarth said, they've received neither.

NOAA's top oil spill scientist, Steve Murawski, said Monday that he was "sure we will release the data" at some point. However, he said, because NOAA has collected so many samples over the past three months, when it comes to the samples from USF's trip in May, "I'm not sure where they are."

Lubchenco's agency came under fire last week for a new report that said "the vast majority" of the oil from Deepwater Horizon had been taken care of. Scientists who read the report closely said it actually said half the oil was still unaccounted for.

Lubchenco said anyone who read the report as saying the oil was gone read it wrong.

"Out of sight and diluted does not mean benign," she said.


[Last modified: Aug 10, 2010 08:23 AM]

[Jeff]

DOJ gags scientists studying BP disaster.

In an explosive first-hand account, ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP’s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that “researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement” that “prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.” Hooper-Bui writes:

It’s not hazardous conditions associated with oil and dispersants that are hampering our scientific efforts. Rather, it’s the confidentiality agreements that come with signing up to work on large research projects shepherded by government entities and BP and the limited access to coastal areas if you’re not part of those projects that are stifling the public dissemination of data detailing the environmental impact of the catastrophe.

...

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/10/scientists-bp-gag/

[Nordic]

From an article at rawstory about the same woman:

In May, a US Fish an Wildlife officer took away ant samples from some of Hooper-Bui's PhD students because their project had not been approved by Incident Command, a joint program of BP and federal agencies

What was that Mussolini quote again, the one about fascism?

"Incident Joint Command" pretty much says it all about our government/corporate merger. Complete with the militaristic overtones.

[Twyla LaSarc]

We have now made the leap from embedded journalists to embedded scientists.

Yay team!

[82_28]

It is a weird effect reading this news while playing the below song. Give it a shot!

BP delays deep-water-drilling plans off Libya

LONDON — BP is delaying plans to begin deep-water drilling off the Libyan coast.

BP spokesman David Nicholas said on Wednesday that BP expects to begin exploratory drilling in the Gulf of Sirte later this year. The London-based company had said last month that it planned to start drilling within "a few weeks."

Nicholas said the company is "working through the detailed planning."

BP has run into opposition to its plans for drilling in both the Gulf of Sirte and off Scotland's Shetland Islands after the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Both fields could prove lucrative for the scores of companies, including BP, with drilling rights and will likely provide crucial new global gas and oil reserves as supplies of less risky land and shallow-water reserves decline.

But there is concern about the haste in proceeding before a full investigation into what caused the most serious environmental disaster in U.S. waters, particularly given questions about whether Mediterranean states are equipped to deal with a spill of such a magnitude.

Nicholas said that BP will be applying any lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico — where the company is still working on relief wells to permanently plug its Macondo well in the Gulf — in Libya and its other operations around the world.

But there are also political objections — a U.S. Senate committee has been investigating allegations that BP pressured the Scottish government into releasing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in return for Libyan oil deals.

New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez said last month that he wanted to send investigators to Britain to interview key witnesses including Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill and former British Justice Secretary Jack Straw.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... oil12.html

[beeline]

Posting these here because I think there is some kind of connection to the GoM


Link

Delaware Bay fish kill 'highly significant'
By Sandy Bauers

Inquirer Staff Writer

All day Wednesday, customers coming into Ben Budd's bait-and-tackle shop in Cape May County marveled at the thousands of dead menhaden they had seen along the Delaware Bay shoreline.

By late afternoon, the state Department of Environmental Protection had announced that it was investigating what it termed a "major" washup of dead fish.

Officials reported that the swath of dead menhaden - a small bait fish also known as peanut bunker - extended along seven to eight miles of shoreline from Kimbles Beach in Middle Township south to Villas in Lower Township, including an area known as Pierces Point.

Water samples collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed no indication of "red tide" or other toxic phytoplankton, the state said.

The DEP is also analyzing oxygen levels in the water.

"Right now, we just don't know" what caused the die-off, said DEP spokesman Larry Hajna. "It's a mystery."

Budd, a commercial crabber and owner of Budd's Bait & Tackle in Villas, said there were millions upon millions of bunker in the bay.

"If you're on my boat when we're working, the bunker are jumping all over. Sometimes the water is wrinkled with them," he said.

Eric Stiles, vice president for conservation and stewardship of New Jersey Audubon, said he had never heard of such a massive die-off of menhaden. They are a "critical fish" in the ecology of the bay, he said, so the fish kill is likely "highly significant."

DEP conservation officers are working with the Cape May County Office of Emergency Management to evaluate the beaches.

The area is marshy and largely inaccessible from land, so the DEP also dispatched an aircraft to better assess the extent of the die-off.

CNN Video Link to Massachusetts Fish Kill