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BP board game foreshadows Gulf disaster


In BP Offshore Oil Strike, the first player to earn $120,000,000 wins.

LONDON -- An obscure BP-themed board game in which players aim to avoid rig disasters has become an unexpected hit at a British toy museum.

BP Offshore Oil Strike was released in the early 1970s and allows up to four players to explore for oil, build platforms and construct pipelines. The first player to earn $120,000,000 wins.

Its "hazard cards" include "Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1million."

BP announced Monday that it has spent $3.12 billion dealing with the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The game was recently donated to the House on the Hill Toy Museum in Stansted, Essex.

"The parallels between the game and the current crisis... are so spooky," museum owner Alan Goldsmith told Britain's Metro newspaper. "The picture on the front of the box is so reminiscent to the disaster with the stormy seas, the oil rig and an overall sense of doom.

"I was just knocked over by how relevant this game is, despite being made some 35 years ago, to BP’s troubles today."

Goldsmith said the game is worth about £75 ($115).

- By Jason Cumming, msnbc.com

http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2 ... ?Gt1=43001

BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

smoking since 1879 wrote:

BP said it had the capacity to skim and remove 491,721 barrels of oil each day in the event of a major spill.

I'm sure I can't be the only one that finds "491,721" to be an odd number (no math pun intended)

I think its called "false concreteness" - a number so specific as to imply that it has been carefully calculated, where in actual fact it has been plucked out of thin air.

Who the fuck are these "federal regulators", and why isn't Ms Kimberly Kindy (paging Hugh...) chasing them up to find out how they verified that number?

Protecting Oil Companies? BP Investigation Blocked
by grtv

Before the 4th of July weekend, there was unreported maneuver in the Senate designed to protect BP and
the federal government from liability in the Gulf disaster.

Senate Democrats asked unanimous consent to pass legislation that would give the BP Oil Spill Commission the subpoena power it needs to do its job.

The US House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to give the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico full subpoena power. The Senate blocked it.

"Frankly, it's time we have a vote after so many Republican objections to this commonsense legislation," said Sen. Robert Menendez. "[This bill] asserts that we want to protect those families, taxpayers, not oil company profits."

Plot

Set at a bucolic midwestern college known only as The-College-on-the-Hill, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies (though he doesn't speak German). He has been married five times to four women and has a brood of children and stepchildren (Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, Wilder) with his current wife, Babette. Jack and Babette are both extremely afraid of death; they frequently wonder "who will die first". The first part of White Noise, called "Waves and Radiation", is a chronicle of absurdist family life combined with academic satire. There is little plot in this section, and it mainly sets the scene for the rest of the book. Another important character introduced here is Murray, who frequently discusses his theories, which relate to the rest of the book.

In the book's second part, "The Airborne Toxic Event", a chemical spill from a rail car releases an "airborne toxic event" over Jack's home region, prompting an evacuation. Frightened by his exposure to the toxin, Gladney is forced to confront his mortality. An organization called SIMUVAC (short for "simulated evacuation") is also introduced in Part Two, an indication of simulations replacing reality.

In part three of the book, "Dylarama," Gladney discovers that Babette has been cheating on him in order to gain access to a fictional drug called Dylar, an experimental treatment for the fear of death. Soon the novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and its obsession with chemical cures as Gladney seeks to obtain his own black market supply of Dylar.

However, Dylar does not work for Babette, and it has many possible side effects, including losing the ability to "distinguish words from things, so that if someone said 'speeding bullet,' I would fall to the floor to take cover."[3]
[edit] Subjects

White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the potentially positive virtues of human violence.

BP insisted Tuesday it can cope with soaring oil spill costs without asking shareholders for cash, as tar balls washed ashore in Texas, the fifth and final Gulf coast state to be affected.

The company's announcement that it would not sell additional shares drove BP's stock price 9 percent higher at end of trading on Tuesday.

In Texas, officials said operations were underway that could double the amount of gushing crude being captured by a containment system.

A BP spokeswoman in London denied the firm was planning to sell new stock to a strategic investor to raise money, amid reports that the British government is working on a crisis plan if the company is sunk by the disaster.

"We are not issuing any new equity," she said. "We welcome new shareholders to come onto the shareholder register and we welcome existing shareholders who want to take a bigger amount of shares."

Story continues below...


The Times newspaper in London reported that officials at the Department of Business and the Treasury were already considering contingencies for BP's potential collapse.

"It is not clear how bad this will get, but the government needs to be prepared for any eventuality," an anonymous source said to be familiar with the talks was quoted as saying.

BP has forked out some 3.12 billion dollars in spill-related costs and has promised to pay another 20 billion dollars into an escrow fund to compensate Americans affected by the spill.

The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers, unleashing the worst environmental disaster in US history.

On Sunday, tar balls from the spill arrived on beaches in Texas, more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) away, though it was unclear how the crude got there.

"Testing found that the oil was lightly weathered, raising doubts that the oil traversed the Gulf from the spill source," the disaster response center said.

"Boats carry oil collected during the response to Texas for processing, raising the possibility the oil could have been transported on a vessel," the statement said.

Tar balls in Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain, on the outskirts of New Orleans, are also being tested to determine if they are from the spill, raising contamination fears.

Some 492 miles of Gulf Coast shoreline has been oiled, and fishing ground closures and tourist cancellations threaten financial ruin for residents who have reacted angrily to BP's failure to cap the spill.

Up to 60,000 barrels of oil a day is believed to be leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, far outpacing the collection efforts of a system that is capturing around 25,000 barrels a day.

Officials hope to more than double that capacity to some 53,000 barrels a day by hooking up a third containment vessel, the Helix Producer, to the system that captures and siphons away the crude.

"There is a partial hookup right now and they can sustain that unless they have really severe sea states," said Admiral Thad Allen, the US official coordinating the spill response.

"We won't know for several hours whether they're able to do it. It currently is a work in progress."

Officials were also testing a mega-tanker, A Whale, which could boost efforts to skim spilled crude from the sea surface.

The ship is believed to be able to suck up to 500,000 barrels (21 million gallons) of oily water a day through its "jaws," a series of vents on the side of the ship.

By comparison, more than 500 smaller vessels in 10 weeks have only managed to collect some 31.3 million gallons of oil-water mix between them and high waves forced most of the boats to halt operations on Tuesday.

The first Atlantic hurricane of the year passed through the Gulf of Mexico last week without too much alarm for the oil containment efforts, but Allen said two nearby storm systems were being closely watched.

It will likely be mid-August at the earliest before the ruptured well is permanently capped by injecting mud and cement with the aid of relief wells.

The high end of the oil leak estimates means it has now surpassed the 1979 Ixtoc blowout, which took nine months to cap and dumped an estimated 3.3 million barrels (140,000 million gallons) into the Gulf of Mexico.

It is topped only by the deliberate release of six to eight million barrels of crude by Iraqi troops who destroyed tankers and oil terminals and set wells ablaze in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War.

Gulf Oil Spill: Scientists Beg For A Chance To Take Basic Measurements
First Posted: 07- 6-10 06:16 PM | Updated: 07- 6-10 07:05 PM

A group of independent scientists, frustrated and dumbfounded by the continued lack of the most basic data about the 77-day-old BP oil disaster, has put together a crash project intended to definitively measure how much oil has spilled and where and how it is spreading throughout the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

An all-star team of top oceanographers, chemists, engineers and other scientists could be ready to head out to the well site on two fully-equipped research vessels on about a week's notice. But they need to get the go-ahead -- and about $8.4 million -- from BP or the federal government or both. And that does not appear imminent.

The test is designed to provide responders to future deep-sea oil catastrophes with valuable information. But, to be blunt, it would also fill an enormous gap in the response to this one.

Federal estimates of the flow have over time gone from laughably low to laughably imprecise to just plain unpersuasive. And it took more than a month for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to take the marine science community's concerns seriously enough to embark on substantive missions to explore the potentially vast amounts of oil that are lurking beneath the surface with possibly long-term and devastating effects.

Team leader Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, released the group's 88-page science plan (SEE BELOW) late last week. Leifer has been pitching a variety of scientific missions to BP since May 1, and has yet hear word one from the company. But this time, he is more hopeful, in part because his team represents "a significant fraction of the marine hydrocarbon research community" and in part because of Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Markey, who successfully pressured BP to release live video of the leak, said through a spokesman on Tuesday: "Throughout this disaster, I have pushed for the involvement of independent scientists in evaluating the magnitude and consequences of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Ira Leifer and his colleagues have put together a proposal that could help answer some of the fundamental questions about this catastrophe and help us prepare should there be a next one. It is worth serious consideration by BP." Leifer said he is also talking directly to federal agencies that could conceivably bankroll the mission -- and demand that BP give the scientists the necessary access.

Leifer said his team would ideally begin its experiments at the well site, capturing data and imagery with remotely-operated vehicles that would produce authoritative measurements of the flow. The team would then shift its focus up through the water column and along with the current, to explore how the oil is interacting with the water.

"The idea is to understand why is the oil where it is," Leifer told the Huffington Post. And what parts of the oil, too.

"In my mind the really important thing is where are the toxic components going, and what are they killing?" he said. What's coming out of the well is not one homogeneous substance, he explained. Some components of oil and gas are highly toxic and carcinogenic, while others are relatively benign, and the components react differently to the elements.

So some of the key questions, Leifer said, are: "Where in the water column are the more dangerous components of the oil going? And therefore what is the most likely effect going to be on the part of the ecosystem they are acting with? And if that part of the ecosystem is destroyed, is there a cascading effect?"

Leifer, who is also a member of the federal government flow rate group, said that even his own group's current estimates, "such as they are, are still based on limited data and assumptions."

And the lack of accurate information has taken its toll, he said. If BP had properly understood what was going on 5,000 feet below the surface, it never would have attempted to stop it with a "top hat." And had they realized the pressure from the oil reserves was beyond the threshold for "top kill" they wouldn't have wasted time on that, either.

"We could have effective containment systems available now, if we'd had the measurements," he said.

Learning from this spill is essential for the future, as well, he said. There is no longer any doubt that a substantial amount of the oil remains undersea. But, Leifer noted: "Until recently this was considered a matter of debate at very high levels. We shouldn't have debates like that. We should know how to respond to it."

Leifer added: "I hope that people who love the Gulf, love the beaches and the wildlife and fishing and seafood and the Gulf lifestyle will contact their congressman and senators and radio stations to request that science gets the green light. This is critical so that we can respond to this catastrophe with knowledge and also have the best science available so that we can respond to any future accidents with appropriate response equipment and strategies to protect the environment."

BP did not return a call from the Huffington Post.

"They have not been an agent for insuring that learning occurs in the past," Leifer noted drily.

The plan is called "Deep Spill 2." The first "Deep Spill was a 2001 test off the coast of Norway that involved a mere 16,000 gallons of diesel -- but found that very little of the oil made its way to the surface.