(10AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
It is hurricane season in the Northern Atlantic Ocean.
When the storm winds hit a mere 40 mph, the “floating city” of BP’s oil collection and flare off ships in the Gulf of Mexico has to shut down. They need 4 days in advance to do this, and find safe harbor. This is according to Admiral Thad Allen. They will need 4 days to set back up. The total number of days that the oil from the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon can spill freely into the Gulf during a short, 2 day tropical storm, is therefore 10 days.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node…
Guess what.
This is Alex.
Alex is a tropical storm.
By Tuesday, Alex could be a hurricane.
Alex is heading west right now.
Alex could then swing north.
This is the Gulf today.
Saturday, June 26, 2010. Day 67.
And this is WITH the containment LMRP cap “on” and the Q4000 hooked up to suck oil from the BOP.
This is a NASA picture which I added contrast color.
The vegetation is dying in the Mississippi River delta, the green along the estuaries disappearing.
The sheen of the oil extends all the way down the Gulf to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.
At 50,000 barrels of free spilling oil, that’s another 2.1 million gallons dumped into the Gulf if they have to shut down.
At 80,000 barrels of free spilling oil, that’s another 3.3 million gallons dumped into the Gulf, if it’s a 10 day pause in “oil collection.”
Nothing can live under this. It is liquid death, suffocating all beneath. It poisons those above with fumes.
It’s coming ashore.
But that is not all that is coming ashore.
6/23/2010
This is what it sounds like, when the dolphins cry
Christy Travis first saw oil splotched along the beach as she approached the surf at Fort Pickens. Then she turned and saw a bottlenose dolphin in distress. The dolphin was found beached in close proximity to heavy oil.Travis said the dolphin was crying as people rushed to save it. She said people scraped oil off the dolphin with their hands. “It was so sad. It just broke our hearts,” Travis said.
“It’s terrible. It’s awful,” said Dee Pittman, 57, a Pensacola resident, who was among the people gathered at Fort Pickens. “You can’t get close to the water. It’s (oil) just coming in. This is very dangerous. BP doesn’t get it. This is sacred ground to us. We got married on these shores. We baptized our children in this ocean. We entrust the ashes of our loved ones in this ocean.”
http://beforeitsnews.com/news/…
blog using story from Pensacola News Journal 6/24
another photo of the baby dolphin being held up in the surf, awaiting wildlife rescuers, here
Story with video here:
Oiled dophin
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/ne…
Once the dolphin was discovered, after beaching itself, a three hour ordeal ensued to try and save the mammal in the water. Two U.S. Coast Guard volunteers and a Florida Department of Environmental Protection officer were involved in the rescue attempt.
(sorry, the code for this short video from above won’t embed here)
CBS
slightly surreal video captioning voiceover
A beached baby dolphin, covered in oil, was brought ashore in Pensacola Florida. Unfortunately it died on its way to a rehabilitation center. On a happier note, more than 5 dozen rehabilitated pelicans were released on a Texas coast. it was the largest release since the oil spill began.
While I loathe linking to Fox news, you can also see their video on this story here:
Oiled baby dolphin does not survive after washing up near Pennsacola Florida
http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/new…
There is a (slow playing) video that has this part of the story about 1:50 in. The dolphin in the video is suspiciously clean, so I am wondering if it was an enactment, but they interview witnesses, and the reporter is nearly crying.
“It had beached itself. Its sides were covered in a quarter inch of oil. We started splashing water, scraped oil off it sides and off its eyes,” said Christy Travis, who found the dolphin.Help came immediately from the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge , a non-profit organization, and they were able to stabilize the young female. Sadly, she died shortly after. What’s worse, is she may not be the last.
“It was very sad, it would make you cry. It was crying. There was pod of dolphins just off surf and they were jumping out of water and they were making noise,” said Travis.
Another version of the story here: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-…
Park rangers in the Gulf Islands National Seashore helped to rescue an oiled juvenile dolphin found beached in the sand. Bobbie Visnovske, a park ranger, said a family found the young female dolphin Wednesday morning. Wildlife officers carried the animal into shallow water for immediate resuscitation and later transported it to a rehabilitation center in Panama City about 100 miles to the east.
The discovery was the first case of an oiled dolphin washing ashore in Florida. According to a statement by the United States Coast Guard and BP, the dolphin died during transportation to a facility in Panama Beach, Florida.
The emotional impact on those who live here and witnesss such things, over and over again, is devastating.
Some of the humans have become overwhelmed not only by the impact of watching the oil ruin the sea and kill the fish and wildlife, and by the toxic, brain fogging effect of the fumes, but by trying to deal with BP’s 52 page invoices to get paid for the work they were doing with their own boats. Allen Kruse was 55 years old, and had been earning a living as a sea captain for 25 years. He had three children, and a wife, Tracy. They are watching the schools of fish suffocating under their bows, they see the slick extending as far as the horizons, and they can’t even legally tell anyone about it under BP’s gag order.
“Nothing was easy working with BP. Everything was hard, and it consumed him. He wasn’t crazy,” said his wife, Tracy, 41, sitting outside the couple’s home in Foley on Thursday.
“He’d been a charter boat captain for 25 years, and all of the sudden he had people barking orders at him who didn’t know how to tie up a boat to a pier. I think he thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this. I can’t take it.’ ”
_____
Then, the captains met with BP officials at a nearby building. It was hot inside, and many of the captains were angry and frustrated.
Deckhand Joe Resmondo said something happened to Kruse at the meeting. What, he didn’t know, but Kruse had a look of horror on his face.The co-owner of the marina, Billy Parks, passed Kruse and playfully punched him in the shoulder. Using his nickname, Parks cajoled him, “Cheer up, Rookie. It’ll be OK.”
But something was very wrong. Then Kruse went missing.
What is missing is any sort of common compassion and urgency in Washington DC, that “to make sure nothing like this ever happens again” is more than a cynical insult of empty campaign rhetoric. 67 days after this started, not only is the oil unstoppable, about to get spread by hurricanes, and government is so full of corrupt judges preening themselves over their stock portfolios they can’t even get a temporary moratorium up on other deepwater drilling just to check for safety hazards.
This is madness.
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….. we have to drive the dialogue towards making the government prepare for refugees, as well as getting it stopped and going towards energy alternatives. And tell the stories because they think no body is listening.
agreed that a strong B.P. was very important. Another too many investors will get hurt story. I guess now we have sea life, sick people who have to wait until 2014 to get medical care, and the unemployed all in the same holding tank. It’s starting to get dangerously crowded and suffocating. And desperately needing bold leadership and vision from the President of the United States, we get a shill. Isn’t it great now that we all live in a cozy global market instead of a planet.
And we know that this is not an isolated case with dolphins, despite what might being said in the news.
And the “clean-up” is being closed down for 5 days in view of the hurricane impending and it will take another 4 or 5 days to get started up again.
Meantime, that times some 100,000 barrels per day will be gushing unabted for approximately 10 days.
of this for some reason, but this is perhaps wise considering my feelings and beliefs about dolphins who i have been told actually cry tears by a fisherman who had seen this happen as a one laying dying and crying tears on deck.
the evil that has been unleashed is beyond comprehension.
i can never, ever again support any facet of our current government.
we are utterly corrupt.
i suspect every news outlet. every single one of collusion. they are, of course, terrified of what will happen when people learn of the real devastation.
Mother Earth, we’re sorry. Forgive us, your children, for hurting you so very deeply, and for for injuring and killing so very many of your creatures, especially those who swim, and those who fly, and those who live in deep water. Forgive us for destroying the coral and the plants and the plankton. Please forgive us for how we’ve treated you and your creatures. I’m sorry. Please don’t die. I love you.