No Surprise

Well it is two years tomorrow since the Deepwater Horizon spill and in spite of what we are being told by the PWTB and American media Al Jazeera actually has done some reporting on the ongoing effects of the worst environmental disaster of all time. It's ugly and very sad.

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

We are being lied to. No surprise there. Just keep in mind that the Gulf of Mexico provides about 40% of the seafood consumed in the U.S. and if you think all the eyeless shrimp, mutated crabs and lesion covered fish were consigned to the trash and never reached a dinner table somewhere think again. We haven't seen the full effect of the spill even yet and when we do we are going to be even more horrified. Don't worry though because BP and the other oil companies are making record profits and we are paying record prices for gas.

No Surprise Here

While it is the most profitable business in the world making obscene profits daily, it just isn't ever enough. Thanks to our bought and paid for friends in Washington the criminals running BP felt sure there was no down side for them to try and squeeze just a little more money out of the Macondo well.  Recent reports show that we are still at high risk for more such disasters.

Many of the poor decisions taken on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig before the fatal blow-out on 20 April were taken to save time and money.

"Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money)," the report said.

In a separate chart, it identified nine decisions that increased risk; seven of these saved the companies time. BP was involved in all nine decisions.

BP, which owned the well, did not enforce the proper controls to manage those increased risks, the report said. "BP did not have adequate controls in place to ensure that key decisions in the months leading up to the blow-out were safe or sound from an engineering perspective."

Who Do You Believe?

BP and the government are telling us that 75% of the 8.9 million gallons of oil gushed from the Deepwater Horizon well is 'gone'. Scientists at UGA's Sea Grant program say that 79% is still there. Here is the link to the article at FDL.

Me? I'm going with the independent scientists on this.

A Well Deserved Result

In light of the damage BP has inflicted on families and industries around the Gulf  I can't honestly feel to bad for these guys.

BP announced Tuesday that it lost $17 billion in the second quarter of the year because of the mounting cost of halting and repairing damage from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company also said the executive who has led its spill response effort for the last month, Robert Dudley, would take over Oct. 1 as BP's next chief executive, becoming the first American to run the London-based company.

Dudley, 54, had been widely expected to be chosen to replace outgoing chief executive Tony Hayward, whose dismissal was confirmed after a BP board meeting Monday evening.

So long Tony Hayward. 'heck of a job' destroying the Gulf of Mexico. That's some legacy but with the reported millions in severance I guess he can afford enough booze to soften the pain.

So how did all that cost-cutting and skimping on safety work out for you BP?  The real tragedy beyond the destruction of a way of life and an large chunk of ocean is that other corporations will probably not take any notice of the results of such negligence and just keep on cutting corners in the name of profit. You'd like to think this would be a lesson, but don't count on it.

Stopped For Now

Well the oil has stopped flowing for now. We'll keep out fingers crossed that all holds and that the integrity of the well is good enough to withstand the pressure. In celebration we are going to can pickled beets and bake a batch of sourdough bread. The excitement continues.

Short Term Thinking

As if we haven't already figured it out yet the NYT offers more proof that BP was ever more concerned with the bottom line than the possibility of a massive disaster.

Internal BP documents, including an e-mail message calling the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon a “nightmare,” show a pattern of risky choices made to save time and money in the weeks before the disastrous April 20 blowout, according to a letter sent to the oil  company by the leaders of a House committee on Monday.
The leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce cited five areas in which the company had made decisions that “increased the danger of a catastrophic well,” including the choice for the design of the well, preparations for and tests of the cement job and assurances that the well was properly sealed on the top.
Taken together, the documents offer the strongest case yet that BP bears much of the responsibility for the catastrophic explosion that killed 11 workers and the still-unchecked leaking of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Included in the bad decisions, obviously driven by short term thinking, that led to the disaster:

1. BP saved $7 to $10 million by using a cheaper -- but less reliable -- method to complete the well casing. The so-called "tapered string" meant the well had less capacity to resist upward pressure caused by gas bubbles.

2. BP ignored advice from Halliburton to deploy devices that would have given the well additional stability because they would have taken too long -- 10 hours -- to install.

3. BP did not fully circulate drilling mud which would have created better conditions for doing cement work. The reason: fully circulating the drilling mud would have taken 12 hours.

4. BP did not run a comprehensive test on the cementing job even though its own engineers had grave concerns about the quality of the cement work. Again, the reason was time: the test would have taken 12 hours.

I read somewhere that is was costing BP about a million a day to run the drilling operation on the Deepwater Horizon so if my math serves me they might have saved as much as 11 million or so with these decisions. That's not chump change in anybody's books but when you look at the long view and the results of those decisions they were monumentally dumb and no one can claim ignorance since all of these decisions went against the prevailing 'best practice'.
We've seen the result of short term thinking when it was done by the fat cats on Wall Street and  by Bush and Cheney. They, most regrettably, have not suffered the consequences of their actions but maybe BP will. And yes, I feel sorry for all the investors who will lose money but by the same token they were more than happy to cash the checks when BP was violating safety rules and common sense. Even if this disaster should bankrupt BP there are plenty of other players to step in and fill the gap and just maybe this will be a lesson learned by both big oil and the government. I am sorry to say that I don't think this will be the case. All of the 'small government 'drown it in the bathtub' types and 'free market', self regulating harpies will just keep on marching us all to hell. 

Still Flowing

Well the oil is still flowing from the well in the Gulf and news reports this morning indicate that not only is the well not under control but that the sea floor around the well is fractured and leaking oil and gas as well. This is not good. If the well structure is damaged, as is believed, then even the relief wells will have limited effect in controlling the oil coming out and now we hear that even the relief wells may not be functioning until December. The news just keeps getting worse and we know we don't know what BP is not telling us.

It is nice to see the President Obama getting more engaged and threatening BP with escrow requirements but the reality is that no matter how much money is poured on this mess nothing is going to repair the damage to the ecosystem and lives along the coast and who knows what else. Whole species of turtle may be gone forever and an unknown number of fish, shellfish and bird populations may never recover. We like to think that enough money will solve any problem but the harsh reality is that is won't. The true effects of this disaster will never be known and surely not accounted for by BP or anyone else.

BP Overlooks A Few Details

It should come as no surprise that there was very little reality built into BP's disaster planning.  This is just another example of the fallacy of  'self regulation' which the GOP defends so dearly. The AP did a detailed analysis of the BP disaster plan and found a few discrepancies.I think is is more than time for BP to hand over the checkbook and let someone less obviously incompetent/willfully negligent get the job done.

Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.

Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.

The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.

BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.

h/t Americablog

Not A Lot Of Good News

Rained out of gardening this afternoon so here I  am. I did pick the first pepper and first yellow squash however so all is not lost.

Not much good news today other than it appears BP has gained some control over the spilling oil. It's still early in the game though and I would pop the bubbly just yet. In spite of BP's best efforts, pictures of oil soaked wildlife are breaking into the mainstream media. There was a big picture of an oil soaked brown pelican on the front page of the AJC this morning and there are scores and scores of heart rendering pictures on the net.

Markets went South big time today on the weak jobs report and the falling Euro. Looking more and more like we are going to get our double dip recession. Retail sales are down and nearly 30 million Americans, who should be spending money, don't have jobs. In spite of the 41,000 private sector jobs added in May we are still shedding jobs on a whole since population is growing. Estimates are that 22 million new jobs have to be created before we are anywhere near full employment. One of the biggest tragedies is that our elected officials and especially the Senate just can't seem to grasp the difference in short term deficits and long term debt. Our problems are with long term debt and that can only be addressed with a robust economy. Short term deficit spending, to replace the missing consumer spending, is the only thing that will trigger any meaningful economic recovery. The only reason we aren't into the double dip now is the stimulus, which is 75% gone, and the near zero interest rates. Now with the pressure from the bad news on the Euro we should be back into a full recession before the summer is out. It is going to get very ugly out there since the deficit hawks are in control and nothing constructive is going to happen until after the fall elections, if then.

It's Still Gushing

BP is reporting that they have finally cut off the riser and that they will have the containment dome in place this afternoon. Let's hope so. It just  amazes me that it is taking this long for the leak to be controlled. This really is just another symptom of the conservative campaign 'to starve the beast'. The government now has to rely solely on private industry to get this thing fixed when years ago we might have had the capacity in some part of government to do it. Not only is the lag in getting a resolution symptomatic of a starved government the whole spill is a result of the conservative campaign to let business self regulate and shrink the regulatory capacity and authority of government. This whole disaster would have been far less likely to happen under a strong and capable regulatory system.

That reminds me. I was asking myself the other day why these oil wells don't have a passive closure system. Why can't the BOP be driven closed by the pressure of the oil and must be held open by an outside force whether hydraulic or something else? These kinds of 'fail-safe' fluid handling systems are used in industry, especially for dangerous liquids. If something untoward happens the well would slam shut on its own accord.

I'm off to the garden to put extensions on some tomato stakes. The five foot stakes have now been outstripped by the plants and I need a couple of extra feet to tie them to. The twenty or so six foot cages are still OK but  won't be in a week or two that I will have to 'Rube Goldberg' something for them as well. This latest 'fix' is bamboo attached with cable ties and we'll just have to see if this will do the job. I've still got three months of tomato growth to anticipate so it could get ugly. Everything looks pretty neat and tidy right now but once the tomato plants start getting out of control it will be no longer. Amazing what a little fertile soil, good rain and bright sun will do. Not only do I have problems with tomatoes but my pole beans have just about outgrown my 7 foot bamboo 'tee pees' and it looks as if I am going to need a ladder to pick beans in a few weeks.

Memorial Day In More Ways Than We Want

It's Memorial Day weekend and the 'unofficial' beginning of summer. People will be BBQ'ing and hitting the lakes and parks and many will be enjoying their first days at the beach. For many it will also be beginning of the end of 'beaches' for many years to come and as some have already discovered, the end of 'beaches' has already arrived. I am speaking, of course, of the disaster in the Gulf and what it will mean for years and years to come. The effort to "Top Kill" the well has failed and while other tricks remain to shut down the well, their success is even less assured than the 50/50 Top Kill. We are looking at the real possibility of never completely shutting down this well!

The general public hasn't really grasped the magnitude of the disaster yet. Horrifying images of dead birds and turtles coated in oil or struggling in the deadly, sticky mess are few and far between in the major media. Pods with dozens of bottle nosed dolphins washed up on an oil stained beach are not to be seen but eventually they will be. The tons of dispersants pumped into the gushing oil nearly a mile below the surface have created vast underwater clouds of black death. Some are headed to sea and via the loop current around and through the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic Coast while others are headed North to further coat and destroy thousands of miles of delicate and life sustaining coastline around the Gulf. We haven't seen anything yet.


Here is one example of what we're all going to be hearing about for the next several months, if not years, to come:

Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama. The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

The thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters), and is more than 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) wide, said David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school. Hollander said the team detected the thickest amount of hydrocarbons, likely from the oil spewing from the blown out well, at about 1,300 feet (nearly 400 meters) in the same spot on two separate days this week.

The discovery was important, he said, because it confirmed that the substance found in the water was not naturally occurring and that the plume was at its highest concentration in deeper waters. The researchers will use further testing to determine whether the hydrocarbons they found are the result of dispersants or the emulsification of oil as it traveled away from the well.

The first such plume detected by scientists stretched from the well southwest toward the open sea, but this new undersea oil cloud is headed miles inland into shallower waters where many fish and other species reproduce. The researchers say they are worried these undersea plumes may be the result of the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil a mile undersea at the site of the leak.

So while this Memorial Day is and should rightly honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifices for our way of life we should also possibly pause in memorial to the vast and beautiful Gulf and its shores which we will not see again in our lifetimes. So very sad.

So Far, So Good

The news from the Gulf is good as far as it goes. The "Top Kill' seems to be going as planned but it is early in the game and we are just going have to wait and see. There is still a lot of oil about and the story and environmental damage is far from over. We'll see the ravages of this disaster for a generation but I'll take whatever good news there is to have.

I've got to go out and get something for aphids...the only thing I am aware of  that will be organic is a pyrethrin solution of some sort. I've tried the organic oils(rosemary, clove, etc.) and they are not very effective and there are just too many aphids on the tomatoes to continue to hand pick them and the lady bugs are falling down on the job. If you didn't know, aphids are born pregnant and go for generations without having to actually get a male and female together...good survival strategy but hell on gardeners. The good news is that I am staying ahead of bean beetles and potato beetles. So I am off to the garden center with murder on my mind.

Because They Can

As much as I don't want to believe it, things in the Gulf are going pretty much as expected:

The effort to stanch the vast oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was mired by setbacks on Monday as state and federal officials feuded with BP over its failure to meet deadlines and its refusal to stop spraying a toxic dispersant. The oil company had indicated that it could stem the flow of oil on Tuesday by trying a procedure known as a top kill, in which heavy fluid would be pumped into the well. But on Monday morning the company’s chief operating officer said the procedure would be delayed until Wednesday. At the same time, BP was locked in a tense standoff with the Environmental Protection Agency, which had ordered the company to stop using a toxic chemical dispersant called Corexit by Sunday. But BP continued spraying the chemical on Monday, despite the E.P.A.’s demand that it use a less toxic dispersant to break up the oil. The company told the agency that no better alternative was available.
At a news conference Monday in Louisiana, state and federal officials continued to hammer BP over its response to the spill.
“BP in my mind no longer stands for British Petroleum — it stands for Beyond Patience,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. “People have been waiting 34 days for British Petroleum to cap this well and stop the damage that’s happening across the Gulf of Mexico.”
“What we need to tell BP,” he added, “is excuses don’t count anymore. You caused this mess, now stop the damage and clean up the mess. It’s your responsibility.”

The EPA says stop and BP says fuck off. Let me explain, if I may, why BP thinks it can get away with this.

All emotion aside, if that's possible, you can understand why BP is doing as it's doing. They may be lousy at environmental protection or shutting off runaway oil wells but they do understand the world in which we find ourselves and they know how to make money and preserve capital.
They know down to the penny how much money they have paid to a large number of politicians from both parties. They have looked at what happened to Exxon when it came to actually paying for the Exxon Valdez disaster. I am sure they realize that one of the major parties wants to get rid of the EPA altogether. BP is looking at the situation and weighing the consequences of each and every action and what it boils down to is  the best business decision for them is do whatever they want because, fuck all, they and the rest of corporate America have insured that there will be little or no consequence for corporate malfeasance. They know their shareholders will look the other way. They know that same day sales at their thousands of company owned gas stations is unaffected by the disaster and their lack of effective action. They know that their bought and paid for politicians might make bellicose speeches damning them to hell for the disaster but who won't, in the end, do anything about it. Finally, they know they have better and more lawyers than the any shrimper or oyster-man along the Gulf coast.

The hard truth is that companies like BP and all the rest have created a corporate oligarchy where the corporation is king. Look at the recent Supreme Court decision of campaign financing if you are in doubt. If you still question that reality then look at the true agenda behind the 'tea party' movement. The so called fight for 'individual rights' and 'small government' is in actuality a not so subtle effort to free businesses and corporations from any government oversight whatsoever and make the oligarchy complete. That's the way it is folks and other than a major class revolution I don't know how to do anything about it. We have no one to blame but ourselves. In our ever endless search for more, better, and shinier we have sold our souls to the devils and the contract is signed in blood. Oh! And that's not your blood but the blood of your children and their children.

Oil Still Flowing and Caribou Barbie is Still Lying

Well nothing positive over the weekend on the oil spill. Now BP is saying they will try the "top Kill" on Wednesday morning. Never been attempted on a well this deep. Let's keep our fingers crossed. If this doesn't work then it may be August, when the relief well is complete, that the oil stops flowing. The devastation grows daily with more oil washing up in marshes and on beaches all along the coast. You just know thousands and thousands of gallons are flowing into the loop current and are headed into the keys and beyond. So sad and so preventable.

Sarah 'Where's the Money' Palin accused Obama of rolling over to BP because of all the money his campaign got from oil companies. The lady, and I use that term with a smirk, should actually check the facts before she runs off at the mouth. If she did she would find that of the millions pumped into political campaigns over the last 10 years some 75% has gone to the GOP. In the 2008 campaign Obama got 800 K$ and change and the dickhead that placed Sarah on the national stage received over 2 million. You won't see her statements challenged in the media however.

Nothing Good

Looks like BP now owns the Gulf of Mexico!

There is a lot of good coverage of the oil spill so I won't bother repeating any of it here. It is not encouraging that the thick oil is now fully invading the Louisiana marshes...there goes thousands and thousands of livelihoods for  a generation or more not to mention the breeding grounds for shrimp, birds and hundreds of other species. Looks like they are going to try a "Top Kill" this weekend by pumping rubber, mud and cement into the well. Never been done at this depth...not encouraging considering the failures so far. The thing that still infuriates me is that BP and the MMS know a blowout was likely maybe even inevitable with this well and did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Now that the oil has reached the loop current the Keys and even the East Coast should start getting very worried. Hell, at this rate oil from the Gulf could be washing up on British beaches before we know it.

Not a good day for the market. Every indicator is off more than 2%. Last I checked the Dow was off 250 points. Now that the market has fallen below the levels seen back in early May who knows where the bottom lies. I wouldn't be surprised to see it fall below 10,000 by next week.

As you can see, I'm blogging in the middle of the day which means I am being lazy. I had to wait around for the A/C guy to come for the spring check-up and now that it is up above 80F I just can't get excited about hitting the garden. Madam has requested banana bread so I'll do that instead.

Much Bigger Than We are Being Told

Several different scientists using the film footage provided by BP of the actual oil spilling out of the pipe have calculated that the flow is as much as 10 to 20 times greater than the 5,000 barrels per day that we are being told. Different methods have been used to calculate the flow but all are saying the flow is much greater. This is not good news.

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
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.

Nightmare Blooming

The nightmare of the disastrous Gulf oil spill is growing. Bryan at Why Now? reports that in addition to sea turtles washing up, dolphins are now as well. It is not unusual to have a  dolphin wash up this time of year as it is their calving season in the Gulf and it may not have anything to do with the oil but I wouldn't hold my breath. What is even more alarming from Bryan is the news that BP is not sharing information with the researchers in Florida on what they are doing and testing. Looks like it might be time for a little court action to insure the very experienced marine scientists in Florida are getting all the information and in a timely manner.