Well, this should be just about it for my home state, Louisiana.
You just don't get this stuff out of the marsh. And this stuff -- crude oil, courtesy of BP -- will kill the marsh, and what's in it.
And then it all will erode away, and whole stretches of coastline will sink into the Gulf of Mexico.
GOODBYE, fishing industry. Goodbye coastline. Goodbye to what's left of the last protection New Orleans and other coastal cities have from the sea -- and the hurricanes that roll in off of it.
Goodbye to a massive chunk of the Louisiana economy. Goodbye not only to people's livelihoods, but also to their way of life. What their daddies did, and their granddaddies did, and their great- and great-great-granddaddies did before that, they no longer will do.
Does the U.S. code cover murder of an economy? Cultural genocide?
I know, when pigs fly. At least in this day and age.
BUT AS WE WAIT for porkers to get airborne . . . as a matter of financial expediency for whatever cleanup is possible in this catastrophic mess, can President Obama at least invoke whatever emergency powers are necessary to immediately seize every U.S. asset of every company responsible here?
Justice demands it. And God knows we are going to need the cash.
Scientists look at the spill, look at that number and say BP and the government are full of beans. Slimy, oily, polluted beans.
The questions are not new. In fact, those doubts are just as longstanding as the government's -- and the media's -- insistence upon using the 5,000-barrel estimate, which a government agency, according to a New York Times report, basically pulled out of its butt:
Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.
But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger. They also criticize BP for refusing to use well-known scientific techniques that would give a more precise figure.
The criticism escalated on Thursday, a day after the release of a video that showed a huge black plume of oil gushing from the broken well at a seemingly high rate. BP has repeatedly claimed that measuring the plume would be impossible.
The figure of 5,000 barrels a day was hastily produced by government scientists in Seattle. It appears to have been calculated using a method that is specifically not recommended for major oil spills.
Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.
“The government has a responsibility to get good numbers,” Dr. MacDonald said. “If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.”
Scientists said that the size of the spill was directly related to the amount of damage it would do in the ocean and onshore, and that calculating it accurately was important for that reason.
BP has repeatedly said that its highest priority is stopping the leak, not measuring it. “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing.
Yet for decades, specialists have used a technique that is almost tailor-made for the problem. With undersea gear that resembles the ultrasound machines in medical offices, they measure the flow rate from hot-water vents on the ocean floor. Scientists said that such equipment could be tuned to allow for accurate measurement of oil and gas flowing from the well.
Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements.
But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.
“The government and BP are calling the shots, so I will have to respect their judgment,” Dr. Camilli said.
IF YOU HAVE the formulas to come up with a better flow estimate, and you have outside experts offering equipment to better analyze the spill rate but still you refuse to employ the better mathematical formulas -- just as you blow off scientists' offers of analytical assistance -- the public is pretty much left with a single conclusion to draw.
The people in charge of this thing don't want to know how bad this oil spill is. More precisely, they don't want usto know how very screwed we are.
That's how junkies operate. Dope . . . oil . . . it's all the same when you're good and hooked. When the last thing you're interested in is kicking the habit.
OUR ADDICTION is going to kill us. But it's going to kill Louisiana first.
We hold some truths to be self-evident. Likewise, so are some tragedies.
The Gulf oil spill is one of those self-evident catastrophes. The destruction speaks for itself; the plain facts speak to the unspeakable sins against nature and man in all this, and no poor words of mine can add to that or subtract from it.
The plain facts in one Times-Picayune article Monday say enough about what went so horribly wrong on an exploration rig 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.
The plain facts speak to the horror wrought by poor judgment and careless complacency. And the testimony of the living, brought to light by a righteous engineering professor, bears witness to the horror of the last moments of the dead.
What happened in the Gulf in April led to an ongoing catastrophe the coastal states -- most notably, Louisiana -- are just beginning to live now. It is, and will be, an affront to the economy of that region and, especially, to nature and nature's God.
It took just two of the "seven deadly sins" to turn an effort by three horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse -- BP, Transocean and Halliburton -- into the "destroyer of worlds" Robert Oppenheimer referenced upon witnessing the first atomic blast.
Greed and pride. That's all it took.
HERE'S A TASTE of the Times-Picayune's account of catastrophe in the making. Read on, and do go and read the whole thing:
Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic kicks, and the decision to replace the mud with much lighter seawater won out.
Those are some of the new details gathered by Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor better known in New Orleans as co-leader of an independent team of scientists that conducted a forensic investigation of the causes for the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.
In an effort to piece together the cause of the region's most recent calamity, Bea has been gathering statements, transcripts and other communications from about 50 people since the accident, including workers on the rig, engineers who worked with the rig from onshore locations, and engineers and oilfield workers who have been active in drilling for decades.
"As the job unfolded, ... the workers did have intermittent trouble with pockets of natural gas," said one statement sent to Bea. "Highly flammable, the gas was forcing its way up the drill pipes. This was something BP had not foreseen as a serious problem, declaring a year earlier that gas was likely to pose only a 'negligible' risk. The government warned the company that gas buildup was a real concern and that BP should 'exercise caution'".
(snip)
Bea believes the narrative he is creating raises serious questions about the risk assessments used by BP and the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with determining whether the drilling plans were adequate.
They failed to address what's called "residual risk," those things that planners don't think will fail. And in doing so, they underestimated the risk in ways very similar to the engineers who designed New Orleans' levee system, Bea said.
GREED. PRIDE. And then death -- death of 11 men, and perhaps death of a whole world, a whole ecosystem, a whole culture.
In the incident that forced Deepwater Horizon to shut down drilling temporarily, workers in the rig's drilling mudroom stabilized the situation by putting a heavier form of "mud," actually a mixture of clay and chemicals, into the drill-pipe as a counter-balance, pushing down against the upward pressure of the gas, Bea said.
A transcript Bea collected from a witness says the companies were confident enough they had a lucrative oil source that they decided to convert from an exploratory well to a more permanent production well, a process that requires them to apply a metal and cement casing to the well hole. They chose casing 7 inches in diameter, Bea said, and that was further sealed with cement pumped in by Halliburton. Bea said his sources reported that Halliburton was using a "new" kind of cement for the seal, something the scientist said made him say, "Uh oh."
"The cement is infused with chemicals and nitrogen, and those chemicals and nitrogen form a frothy cement that is like shaving soap sprayed from a can," Bea said. "It was put in there because of the concern about damage or destruction of the seals by methane hydrates."
The crew on the Deepwater Horizon waited 20 hours for the cement job to cure before opening a key valve at the wellhead so they could place a final cement plug about 5,000 feet down the well. Bea gives Halliburton credit for writing "many excellent papers" in the past two years about the challenge of setting cement seals in the presence of large amounts of methane hydrates, which the Deepwater Horizon crew encountered in spades.
"Because of the chemicals they've added, they think the cement can cure rapidly," Bea said.
But Halliburton's awareness of cementing's challenges did not stop the cement from failing in the Deepwater Horizon's well. The chemicals they added for the curing process also create a lot of heat, which can thaw the methane hydrate into the gas that causes dangerous kicks, Bea said.
"I call that 'Uh oh' again," he said.
One of Bea's witness transcripts describes in detail a heated debate among BP, Halliburton and Transocean officials as they are about to add the final cement plug to the well, 5,000 below the wellhead and 10,000 feet below the rig. They argued about whether to set the plug with drilling mud still in the well and riser, or if they should do it with lighter sea water there instead.
HALLIBURTON . . . is there anything (bad) it can't do?
No. No, there's not.
As The Times-Picayune reported last week, Bea's witness claims the decision was made to displace the heavy mud barrier with water before the final plug was set in order to finish the job more quickly.. The crew was planning to temporarily abandon the well, and before leaving, they would need to remove the riser and the blowout preventer, a massive stack of valves and slicing rams that are supposed to shut off the well in case of an emergency, and some time later another operation would re-tap the well to extract its riches.
The mud in the riser would have to be replaced with salt water before the crew could take the final step of removing the blowout preventer, or else polluting mud and chemicals would spill into the sea, angering environmental regulators. But based on Bea's witness, who describes the debate on board the rig and with officials in Houston, there was still a question about whether to replace the mud before the final plug was set.
"The debate comes back that it's been pressure-tested, the coast is clear, so they will displace the upper 10,000 feet of heavy mud and replace it with salt water," Bea said. "This is a crucial step, and the reason it's crucial is if the seal at the bottom is fine, it's OK, but if it's not OK, we're screwed. We don't have enough pressure (from mud) in the column anymore to fight the reservoir (gas and liquid) pressure."
(snip) "The explosion hurls them against the other wall" of the galley, Bea said. "Here's where I broke down when I read it.... It describes bodies being broken, necks gashed and people bleeding, and now everybody's in the dark. People are screaming for help. People are busy helping their comrades get to two lifeboats.
"People in the lifeboats are screaming, 'We've got to get out of here!' but the lifeboats aren't full," Bea said. "The doors slam and they drop the (lifeboats), and as they do, they can see some of their colleagues jumping into the sea. They can see their outlines because the rig is burning behind them.
"Back on the drill floor, all hell has broken loose. Explosions are propagating from the mud pit room back toward them," Bea said. "At that point, one transcript that's obviously been an observer heading toward the lifeboats says the drill floor disappears in a ball of flame. And at that point, the three on-board transcripts stop."
Bea said the concluding paragraph from one of those observing the explosion summed up the depth of the failure.
"In order for a disaster of this magnitude to happen, more than one thing has to go wrong, or fail. First, a shitty cement job. The wellhead packoff/seal assembly (the equipment directly below the blowout preventer that connects the lower pipe casing to the preventer) while designed to hold the pressure, is just a backup. And finally, the ability to close the well in with the BOP somehow went away," the witness said.
OF ONE THING, I have no doubt. Satan is a libertarian.
LBJ killed JFK! Elvis faked his death and last was seen at a Burger King in Chattanooga!
The North Koreans blew up the Deepwater Horizon!
We "know" all this because right-wingers hated the Great Society, beehived middle-aged ladies and assorted weirdos couldn't believe the King could ever die, and Republicans find it more plausible that Kim Jong-il launched a minisub on a suicide mission from a freighter steaming from Havana to blow up an oil rig that . . . oh, for pity's sake!
FACE IT, right-wing ideologues have gone around the bend, tinfoil hats are in vogue, and now is the time to buy, buy, buy those aluminum stocks.
With tensions increasing in the region throughout 2009 and into early 2010, the news suddenly reached the world that a SKorean naval patrol ship, the Cheonan, sank off Baengnyeong island in the Yellow Sea, near the border with NKorea on Friday, the 27th of March. A close range explosion had rocked the ship. More than forty sailors were missing and later presumed dead.
Earlier that same morning, the North's military leaders threatened SKorea and the United States with "unpredictable strikes."
At first, South Korea played down any involvement with its totalitarian neighbor to the north, but gradually incontrovertible evidence emerged that the North had deployed an armed, sophisticated mini-sub into the Yellow Sea. It launched a torpedo at the Cheonan and sunk it in an unprovoked attack.
Twenty-four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig owned by the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean, and operated by British Petroleum, suddenly exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen were injured and 11 assumed dead.
(snip)
Now as SKorea vows retaliation for NKorea's act of war, evidence has surfaced that NKorea may have deployed the same type of armed military submersible against Deepwater Horizon.
Facts have also emerged that Hyandai Heavy Industries of Seoul, South Korea built the rig at a cost of $1 billion and despite insurance may have to write off significant losses. The oil rig explosion also has repercussions for the SKorean economy.
So with one attack, NKorea could have dealt a serious blow to two of its greatest enemies.
According to some reports, suspicion has fallen on a NKorean merchant vessel, the Dai Hong Dan, that left a port in Cuba the night of April 18th. The merchant vessel is the class of ship that intelligence agencies have long known can be fitted for—and has carried in the past—NKorea's two-man mini-submarines.
The mini-sub, an SSC Sang-o Class submersible, can carry two torpedoes. They have been known to be transported by several classes of their warships, disguised as merchant vessels or by their older submarines.
The older NKorean subs have been determined By the SKorean navy to be based on a former Yugoslavian design that the NKorean military adopted. Those 1990 versions were retrofitted to carry the two-man submersible and capable of sea launch.
The newest generation of the NKorean mini-sub has stealth abilities, a longer range and can stay submerged much longer than its previous versions.
According to Russian intelligence which released a report in Moscow on May 30, 2010, the NKorean vessel carried a force from the 17th Sniper Corps and departed the Cuban port of Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana April the night of April 18, 2010. Although it's destination was Caracas, Venezuela, it changed course and steamed to within 113 nautical miles of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The mini-sub is estimated to have an effective range of 175 nautical miles.
Then, according to the Russians, the NKoreans launched one of its SSC Sang-o mini-subs (the same kind it used in the attack on the SKorean warship in the Yellow Sea). When the stealth sub reached the offshore oil platform it fired two incendiary torpedoes at the rig's superstructure.
BECAUSE ALL of this is soooooooooo much more plausible to conservatives than an oil company and its drilling partner getting greedy, lobbying against regulations requiring state-of-the-art blowout prevention, then cutting corners and screwing up . . . and blowing themselves up in a catastrophic fashion.
Next thing you know, the right-wing echo chamber will be arguing that destruction of the wetlands, and much of the Gulf fishing industry, actually is a good thing. That those shrimpers and oystermen ought to thank their lucky stars that multinational capitalists applied a little black-gold tough love to their blue-collar, loser asses and gave them such a golden opportunity to retrain for much more lucrative -- and much less smelly -- careers as derivatives traders and financial analysts.
Remember, no freedom-loving American capitalist patriot is worth the label if he can't believe at least a half-dozen impossible things before Rush comes on at 11.
A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could be on the verge of becoming an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.
"The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."
Asked Friday to comment on the document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said, "I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."
In scientific circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a day. It appears the new leaks mentioned in the Wednesday release are the leaks reported to the public late Wednesday night.
"There is no official change in the volume released but the USCG is no longer stating that the release rate is 1,000 barrels a day," continues the document, referred to as report No. 12. "Instead they are saying that they are preparing for a worst-case release and bringing all assets to bear."
The emergency document also states that the spill has grown in size so quickly that only 1 to 2 percent of it has been sprayed with dispersants.
The Press-Register obtained the emergency report from a government official. The White House, NOAA, the Coast Guard and BP Plc did not immediately return calls for comment made early this morning.
The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead and kinked piping currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels -- or 210,000 gallons -- per day.
If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate.
"Typically, a very good well in the Gulf can produce 30,000 barrels a day, but that's under control. I have no idea what an uncontrolled release could be," said Stephen Sears, chairman of the petroleum engineering department at Louisiana State University.
Every time the experts take a closer look at the Gulf oil spill, it gets five times bigger.
And now, according to this story in The Wall Street Journal, we have a true "Holy crap!" moment:
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be leaking at 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government's current estimates, industry experts say.
Basing their calculations on government data and standard industry measurement tools, the experts say the Gulf spill may already rival the historic 1969 Santa Barbara, Calif., and 1989 Exxon Valdez disasters.
The massive spill began washing ashore Friday along the Louisiana coast, reaching the mouth of the Mississippi River delta. The disaster also threatens to blunt new oil drilling along coasts, a politically sensitive issue as Congress debates climate change legislation.
The slick started oozing near Louisiana's fragile islands and barrier marshes overnight. Boats patrolled coastal marshes Friday looking for areas where the oil has flowed in, the Coast Guard said, and the state diverted thousands of gallons of fresh water from the Mississippi River to try to flush out the wetlands.
Reiterating the U.S.'s efforts to respond to the spill, President Barack Obama said Friday that the federal government is "fully prepared" and doing "everything necessary." The president said he has ordered Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to report to him in 30 days on "what if any additional precautions and technologies should be required to prevent accidents like this from happening again."
When I was young and full of dreams, My whole life in front of me. But things are not always the way they seem, Some things will always change.
My papa’d been a trapper living hand to mouth, But when I made shop foreman, I had it all figured out, I thanked God each and every day When the industry came to town.
Sunset on Louisianne, The sun going down on the promised land, I’ve given you everything I can, I’ve got nothing left to lose.
When I run across the likes of this in Friday's Washington Post, keeping things clean doesn't seem to do nearly enough justice to the magnitude of the sphincterlicious inside-the-Beltway shit peddling that's America's "new normal":
The worsening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday threatened not only the shores of five states but also President Obama's plan to open vast stretches of U.S. coastline to oil and gas drilling.
Hours before the spill started washing ashore in Louisiana late Thursday, members of Congress issued new calls for Obama to abandon his plans for expanded offshore drilling, and White House officials conceded that the spreading oil slick could cause the president to rethink his position. "We need to figure out what happened," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Would a finding of something possibly affect that? Of course."
The outlook in the Gulf of Mexico remained bleak in the wake of the April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and killed 11 workers. A change in the weather and choppy waters prevented a second burn of oil at sea and slowed efforts by a flotilla of ships to skim the oily mixture from the surface of the gulf, federal officials said. Continuing efforts to use remote-controlled robotic submarines to activate a malfunctioning blowout preventer lying on the sea floor in 5,000 feet of water failed.
The Coast Guard approved an experimental plan by petroleum giant BP, which had leased the rig, to apply chemical dispersants underwater near the places where oil is gushing from three breaks in the well pipes at an estimated rate of 5,000 barrels a day.
In Washington, the White House held a series of high-profile media events aimed at communicating that the administration is fully engaged in the crisis. Obama went to the Rose Garden and said, "While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and cleanup operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal, including potentially the Department of Defense, to address the incident."
WELL, there you go.
Because a multinational Big Oil conglomerate was too cheap to install state-of-the-art blowout protectors on its mile-deep oil well 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and because the federal government is too craven to insist they just fucking do it, my home state -- at least according to the experts -- is about to face the biggest environmental, economic and cultural shitstorm ever unleashed on one of these United States.
Well, at least since 1865. Or 2005, if you're from Louisiana.
In southeastern Louisiana, people are still living in trailers five years after Katrina washed away half the damned region -- and the Army Corps of Shitty Engineers ravaged the rest -- and now they get to watch the fishing industry destroyed perhaps for a generation, the wetlands destroyed maybe forever, the wildlife smothered in a tarry layer of petroleum and a genocidal knife plunged deep into the heart of their very culture.
All because, basically, Gordon Gekko wrote the rulebook for America 2.0.
This is what's happening. This is what may be happening for the next generation . . . or more. And New Orleans -- what's left of New Orleans -- is going to be sitting there with the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico lapping at "hurricane-protection" levees the Army Corps of Shitty Engineers is rebuilding only slightly less shittily than previously.
THE BOTTOM LINE here is that New Orleans is pretty much doomed because America couldn't care less. All we need is a Category 3 to just come close enough -- to the west this time.
Because in the United States today, being in government -- or traded on Wall Street -- means never having to say you're sorry. Or invest in Soap on a Rope.
These are the stakes now as the Crescent City sits under a stinking petroleum haze -- fumes from the black-tar slick just now starting to kill Louisiana's coast. And the livelihoods of its shrimpers. And its oystermen. And its coastal tourism industry. OK, we live in a Gekko world, so you want numbers, right?
How about this, then: According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the state's fishing industry has a total economic impact of $2.3 trillion.
That's with a "T."
And amid all this -- amid all the implications of all the stuff the g**damn Eastern press can't be bothered to much think about -- we hear from The Washington Post that this is the most important damned thing about the whole deal:
Hours before the spill started washing ashore in Louisiana late Thursday, members of Congress issued new calls for Obama to abandon his plans for expanded offshore drilling, and White House officials conceded that the spreading oil slick could cause the president to rethink his position. "We need to figure out what happened," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Would a finding of something possibly affect that? Of course."
I WENT to journalism school. I used to work for newspapers. I know all about the hierarchical design of the "inverted pyramid" method of newswriting. And that, my friends, was the second paragraph.
An entire ecosystem -- and many of the creatures living in it -- may be in the process of being destroyed. Is this Obama's Katrina?
The culture of southeastern Louisiana is being petro-choked to death. Will BP be able to weather this public-relations storm?
Thousands of people will lose their jobs -- and a way of life that survived generations but couldn't survive the explosive mixture of Big Oil and the free market. Will this cause the president to rethink the White House's position on expanding offshore drilling?
Asshat bastards. There's a sea of suffering humanity -- and suffering wildlife -- waiting to slip under the oily waves and these fuckers can't see past the political posturing and Gallup polls.
"We need to find out what happened" ought to be the epitaph on America's tombstone. Written in oil.
You know, the oil industry and the ass-kissing politicians just as well could march all of southeast Louisiana at gunpoint to the giant dust bunny that is Oklahoma, and the g**damn national press would be speculating whether the added demand for walking shoes would be a boon for Nike.
Then again, nobody much paid attention to the original Trail of Tears at the time. Cherokees, coonasses, blacks, Croatians, Isleños, Vietnamese . . . the wogs begin in Northern Virginia, right?
IT'S A DAMN PITY, Louisiana, that over a century ago when you sold your soul to the devil -- or to John D. Rockefeller, I forget which -- you wasted all the money on hookers and booze. And on second-rate schools, second-rate hospitals, third-rate roads and lots of all-pork boondoggles that kept brothers-in-law everywhere in high cotton.
Because right now, as after Katrina, it would be really helpful to have a diversified economy, an educated workforce, a decent infrastructure and a functioning civil society.
But you don't. And you're fucked. And America doesn't give a shit that you'reshit out of luck.
That's because America is the devil. It's a self-righteous country full of little satans, and they're -- we're -- all going to tea parties and chanting "Drill, baby, drill!"when we're not tooling around hell in air-conditioned SUVs.
Goodbye to a massive chunk of the Louisiana economy. Goodbye not only to people's livelihoods, but also to their way of life. What their daddies did, and their granddaddies did, and their great- and great-great-granddaddies did before that, they no longer will do.
