Chain of Blame for the Blow Out

[Don't Blink]

At BP's request the Interior Department exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis.

and

BP declined to install an acoustic blowout prevention valve as they are required to do in most other new offshore wells

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... id=topnews




Halliburton's already doing some serious ass-covering, repeatedly declaring that their work was done to spec:

"in accordance with the well design"

"consistent with that utilized in other similar applications"

"In accordance with accepted industry practice approved by our customers"

"consistent with normal oilfield practice."

http://www.halliburton.com/public/news/ ... 43010.html



However, latest reports have the cement curing releasing the methane bubble that took out the platform:

"As the workers removed pressure from the drilling column and introduced heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead, the chemical reaction created a gas bubble and the cement around the pipe destabilized, according to the interviews."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD9FIEG103


Interview with drillers on the rig








addendum

The dispersant.

The chemical is called Corexit by Nalco. If you're wondering about the flammability ratings and health hazards. The flammability is 1 and the health hazards range from 1 to 2, generally stating on the MSDS that its a mild skin irritant and harmful if ingested or breathed in via vapors. Liver, kidney and red blood cell damage is evident in the chemical.

[cerina]

The whole thing is an horrendous incident but, put in perspective, the amount of oil spilled is still not on the scale of the Exxon Mobile spill.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10751857/bps-oil-spill-exxons-in-70s-tops-it.html

[Don't Blink]

Numerous estimates have been made for the amount of oil discharging ranging from 5,000–100,000 barrels (210,000–4,200,000 US gallons; 790,000–16,000,000 litres) of crude oil per day. The exact spill flow rate is uncertain and is part of an ongoing debate. The resulting oil slick covers a surface area of at least 2,500 square miles (6,500 km2) according to estimates reported on May 3, 2010, with the exact size and location of the slick fluctuating from day to day depending on weather conditions In addition, on May 15, researchers announced the discovery of immense underwater plumes of oil not visible from the surface.

The U.S. Government has named BP as the responsible party in the incident and will hold the company accountable for all cleanup costs resulting from the oil spill. BP has accepted responsibility for the oil spill and the cleanup costs but indicated that the accident was not their fault as the rig was run by Transocean personnel.

The spill is expected to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill as the worst US oil disaster in history. Experts fear that due to factors such as petroleum toxicity and oxygen depletion, it will result in an environmental disaster whether it reaches Gulf coast or not, damaging the Gulf of Mexico fishing industry, tourism industry, and habitat of hundreds of bird species.

Gulf_of_Mexico_oil_spill_May_17.jpg

image source http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/featur ... spill.html

Initial cost estimates to the fishing industry were $2.5 billion, while the impact on tourism along Florida's Paradise coast could be $3 billion.

On May 2 the NOAA closed commercial and recreational fishing in affected federal waters between the mouth of the Mississippi River and Pensacola Bay, increasing the closed area by approximately 50% on May 7, from the initial closure of 6,814 square miles to the new area of 10,807 square miles. On May 18 the NOAA more than quadrupled the area under the fishing ban to include approximately 19% of federal waters, or 45,728 square miles (118,435 square km) of the Gulf.

[cerina]

The sad thing is that it could probably have been prevented at a fraction of the cost of the clean up. And even if they do manage to do a sufficiently good job of cleaning it, it will be cosmetic and the unseen damage, to wildlife but also to human lives, will be immeasurable.

[Don't Blink]

BP boss implies oil slick is nothing more than a drop in the ocean
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... aster.html

BP’s beleaguered boss risked international outrage last night by implying that the millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico were nothing more than a drop in the ocean. Tony Hayward, chief executive of the oil giant, tried to downplay the disaster which is threatening to become the world’s worst oil spill.

At BP’s Houston headquarters Mr Hayward, 53, said he has had trouble sleeping and is refusing to watch TV news reports about the increasingly frantic attempts to plug the well.

Gulf Spill May Far Exceed Official Estimates - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =126809525

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

barrel = 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal; 158.9873 L)

[Don't Blink]

Say What ??? --- An interesting video from CBS news to say the least

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/1 ... 81779.html

When CBS tried to film a beach with heavy oil on the shore in South Pass, Louisiana, a boat of BP contractors, and two Coast Guard officers, told them to turn around, or be arrested.

"This is BP's rules, it's not ours," someone aboard the boat said. Coast Guard officials told CBS that they're looking into it.

As the Coast Guard is a branch of the Armed Forces, it brings into question how closely the government and BP are working together to keep details of the disaster in the dark.

Latest Videos of the leaking oil - http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/18/9 ... e-all.html

[Don't Blink]

Gulf oil spill likely 19 times bigger than originally thought - http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/19/9 ... times.html

WASHINGTON — The latest glimpse of video footage of the oil spill deep under the Gulf of Mexico indicates that around 95,000 barrels, or 4 million gallons, a day of crude oil may be spewing from the leaking wellhead, 19 times the previous estimate, an engineering professor told Congress Wednesday.

[Jack Flash]

I was wondering about this a while back

Hurricane plus oil equals more problems - http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/05/27/hu ... n.worries/

[cerina]

I wondered about that, Jack, and the fact that no-one can make any predictions is worrying.

[Dennisq]

I'm just hoping their predictions for a busy hurricane season are wrong ... again. No matter what, we don't need another Katrina ... anywhere.

[ghost writer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.htm

[cerina]

That is disgusting.

[Don't Blink]

Efforts to End Oil Flow From BP Well Are Over, Coast Guard Says

By Jim Polson

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc has decided not to attach a second blowout preventer on its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico and efforts to end the flow are over until the relief wells are finished, according to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Thad Allen, who spoke at a press conference today.

Excuse me but relief wells won't be ready for 2 months ( BP's estimate)

[cerina]

Last night on the news here they were still talking about their efforts to divert the flow so what is really going on?

[Don't Blink]

NOAA Director Toes BP Line; Won't Confirm Sub-Surface Oil Despite Evidence - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/0 ... 98461.html

Despite more than three weeks of accumulating scientific evidence that gargantuan plumes of oil lurk beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico -- presenting an imminent threat to sea life and a possibly decades-long threat to the nation's coastlines -- NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco on Wednesday refused to contradict BP CEO Tony Hayward's statement over the weekend that "the oil is on the surface" and "there aren't any plumes."

Scientists on NOAA and academic research vessels have been reporting since the week of May 10 that they have spotted -- and sampled -- oil suspended in the water column. And the Huffington Post has learned that lab results from a previously secret NOAA research mission have been analyzed; its results just haven't been made public.

But to Lubchenco, the Obama appointee running the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all the accumulated evidence is just "circumstantial."

And what others call oil, she calls "anomalies."

Say What ?!?!

Deborah French McCay is the director of Applied Science Associates, an environmental consulting company based in Rhode Island that is working as part of NOAA's Natural Resources Damage Assessment. She told HuffPost she organized a mission on the private research vessel Jack Fitz more than three weeks ago.

"They went out and sampled all the way up and down the water column," she said. That included tests for chemistry, oil concentration, temperature, salinity, oil droplet size and so on. Preliminary descriptions clearly indicated the presence of oil beneath the surface -- and the final lab results, she said, came in Monday night.

There is also, she said, video from a remotely operated underwater vehicle from the Jack Fitz showing oil beneath the surface. "You could see it in the water column," she said.

But she doesn't have the video, she said. "NOAA does."

I guess we will need an act of congress to see that video too

The Jack Fitz mission has been previously unreported in the media -- or by NOAA. But, despite a slow start, several scientific missions have by now very publicly detected the presence of oil beneath the surface. Those include:

* The Pelican, whose May 10-16 mission was extensively blogged on the Nature magazine website. NOAA-sponsored scientists discovered and tracked the plume that doesn't officially exist -- and were blasted by Lubchenco for talking to the media when they got back.

* University of South Florida researchers on the WeatherBird II last week found a six-mile-wide, 22-mile-long plume "broken into millions of bits and beads and moving with the current," stretching from just beneath the surface to depths of 3,300 feet.

* Over at the Gulf Oil Blog, University of Georgia professor Samantha Joye has been blogging from the research vessel Walton Smith. On Sunday, she blogged about how, after finding indicators of subsurface oil, she and her fellow researchers could now actually see it. See? And on Monday, she wrote that the ship had "closed in on the source of the plume. After a very long day, we finally have this feature well constrained. We found more visible oil in the deepwater today -- at different sites from yesterday

So Who's side is our Government on; the Corporations or the people who elected them?

Meanwhile, one independent scientist is telling the Rachel Maddow Show that in return for being allowed aboard a NOAA boat, he's being forced to submit to a gag order.

"I'm essentially being told that the data I'm collecting on my hypoxia cruise may or may not be subject to quarantine," Steven DiMarco, a professor in the oceanography department at Texas A&M, told Maddow. "Which means that we will not be able to publish it, pending the liability litigation. Oh, yeah, 20 years from now, we may be able to publish it."

Other scientists see NOAA's reluctance to state the obvious and insistence on keeping data secret as serving only one purpose: BP's.

Guess that answers that question

[mugley]

[cerina]

[ghost writer]

the oil is soon expected to be pulled into the gulf stream as this model shows http://www2.ucar.edu/news/ocean-current ... ntic-coast

As bad as things are, they will soon become much much worse. One estimate is that fishing will be closed from the gulf to Newfoundland, and temporary bans extending across the North Atlantic to Europe and as far south as England may be needed.

[robertnm]

not funny but on topic http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/0 ... e_oil.html

[Don't Blink]

Not it's not funny but it has a lot of people's attention - good post

ghost w that is scary


and also http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/060 ... 0170.shtml

[Jack Flash]

The few people I've spoken with lately are very worried about the tourist season. With the recession we've not had a good season in several years

[cerina]

Even if they can carry out an adequate clean up in the immediate area, the effects are going to be seen much further afield for decades to come.

[Jack Flash]

Oil eating Microbes

http://www.bitoffun.com/video_vault/oil-microbes.html

Unfortunately they only work at the surface, and because BP tried to hide the problem with dispersants the problem is much much worse.

[gw]

looks like BP's fault

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... pen/57775/