The Further Adventures of Macondo, the Misbehaving Well.
Oh, Macondo, you were supposed to save us, and now look what you’ve done!
Can you hear the drums, Fernando ? I remember long ago another starry night like this
In the firelight Fernando, You were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar
I could hear the distant drums , and the sound of bugle calls were coming from afar
They were closer now, Fernando, every hour every minute, seemed to last eternally. I was so afraid Fernando, We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die
and I’m not afraid to say, the roar of guns and cannons almost made me cry
There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright, they were shining there for you and me, For Liberty, tho we never thought that we could lose, there’s no regret, if I had to do the same again, I would my friend, Fernando
Friday: The First Family puts on their color coordinated summer outfits in muggy DC, and marches dutifully to the helicopter for the obligatory New England Summer vacation in Maine. They will be staying at the Holiday Inn in Bar Harbor on Mt Desert Island, which was last visited by a President while in office 100 years ago, when William Howard Taft showed up.
Enjoying a stroll today at Acadia National Park in Maine, Properly Attired for the Neighborhood.
A small earthquake hit Washington DC, this morning. The 3.6 magnitude rattler was the largest recorded within 30 miles of the nation’s capitol since 1974. There were no reports of damage from the 2.0 aftershocklette.
Matt Simpson’s Prediction Comes True at Last.
The House of Congress adjourned the day before, and scheduled its next meeting for lunchtime on Monday, July 19, 2010. The Senate also adjourned at 6:33 pm Thursday, and vowed to return next Monday afternoon, whereby they will take up the Jobs Bill. Or the Energy Bill. Or something.
Gov Manchin of West Virginia will have appointed a new Senator by then to fill the seat left vacant by the loss of Senator Byrd.
And thereby complete the Entire Remaining Agenda of the First Term of the Obama Administration in 12 Days. Yes, By God, West Virginia.
Almost heaven. Life is old there. Older than the seas, Younger than the mountains, Blowin’ like a breeze. Take me home. To the place. I belong.
Or at least get the polling numbers up.
(sssppst, those polling numbers…. didja fire the old one yet ? )
Home. If home foreclosures continue at the current rate this year, in 2010 there will have been a million homes lost to the banks, more than the 900,000 homes lost to foreclosure in 2009. The usual amount is about 100,000 homes a year, before the mortgaging/bank financial meltdown started. 7.5 million homeowners are in some sort of payment problem. The 3.2 million jobless people who had their unemployment benefits expire because of lack of Senate action so far this month become the targets of the self righteous, who ignore the higher “unofficial” unemployment rates of 15 to 20% in places like Republican Tea Partier’s Wally Herger’s district in the rural north of California, and tell them to get off the couch, stop eating chips and sodas, and learn to live on subsistence income. Because the system shouldn’t reward the lazy nor punish those who succeed. It is 107ºF degrees in Redding this afternoon, this Friday. Not using air conditioning is the new patriotic.
It was the 87th day since the pierced earth in block 252 of the Macondo prospect in Mississippi Canyon, nearly a mile under the sea, had bled out all the ancient dead liquified souls that it had held for eons, and covered it, shifted it back and forth by wind, strangled it in its carbon and sulfur stench, and mired its living things in tar and fed the swimming things the liquid toxins. People of the coastal Gulf waters watched with cynical eyes as the British Petroleum company and the government told them that first they had shut it off, and then they would wait and see, and then maybe they would turn it back on, after all.
Pressure readings after 24 hours were about 6,700 pounds per square inch and rising slowly, Allen said, below the 7,500 psi that would clearly show the well was not leaking. He said pressure continued to rise between 2 and 10 psi per hour. He said a seismic probe of the surrounding sea floor found no sign of a leak in the ground, one of the major concerns because oil erupting into the surroundings would be harder to contain and could weaken the well before it is plugged for good. The news came at the dinner hour on Friday, just as it always does.
The slow deflation of optimism continued.
All the miracles of modern technology, 4 billion dollars and 3 months later, and still couldn’t get it up.
Said from the start if pressure didn’t rise to 5- 6K PSI, no well integrity & 7,500 + PSI, we would absolutely have integrity.
-Kent WellsBP_ America
Official BP
http://twitter.com/BP_America/…
Maybe there is a blockage in the well. “The pipe integrity’s still there, It’s just getting around obstacles,” said one geology professor at Columbia.
A few hours earlier, another one at the University of Houston named Don Van Nieuwenhuise had tried to say that the well had merely lost power over the time it has been leaking. But in another source he says
“There’s a couple of weak points at 9,000 feet, and one at 17,000 feet, that they might be particularly interested in looking at watching in the seismic. ”
http://www.neurosoftware.ro/fi…
Another telegenic oil wonk, Rob Cavner, of Houston, put it thus:
“they are just sitting there circulating on the bottom at 17,840 (feet). Just sitting there. Wells claims they are doing that for “safety reasons” during the well integrity test. What ? …. what the hell are they doing ? They now have an ability to capture all the oil and stop this massive pollution of the Gulf, as well as measure it. We have great weather to get the relief well completed. We already know without the “well integrity test” that they have severe damage to the BOP and other surface equipment and casing. If that were not true, it wouldn’t have blown out in the first place.”
____
“As soon as they do capture all the flow, then a real, measurable number will be in front of the public, and that’s the last thing BP wants, since that number will then be used to extrapolate environmental damage, hence per barrel fines that will likely run to the tens of billions anyway.”
So just call Dickie’s cardiologist, would you ?
But for those who need help before a heart is available, or for whom a transplant is too risky, we have a gizmo called the left ventricular assist device, a $200,000 item. The LVAD is a cumbersome almost-artificial heart that requires the recipient to wear heavy batteries, a shoulder sling with various parts, tubes going through the chest and into the heart and abdomen, and other substantial inconveniences. It helps push a portion of the heart’s blood forward, doing the work the failing ventricle no longer can accomplish. Once used only to stabilize people awaiting heart transplant, it now is referred to, not ironically, as a “destination therapy”-the exact intervention that you want, not the half-assed loaner you are stuck with till the real McCoy arrives.
Six years ago, the doctor and medical historian Howard Markel, writing in The Atlantic, assembled seven fancy cardiologists and discussed Anonymous Patient C’s medical history with them; all were surprised that he was still puttering along, and even more surprised to then be informed that he was at the time their vice president. Stated most simply, he should have died long, long ago. Most people with his heart, his weight and sedentary habits, his history of cigarette smoking and who knows what else already have heard the bell toll. But not Cheney-pointing out that, though useful to define national trends, population-based statistics are completely useless for predicting the fate of an individual. The extremely unlikely happens every day, all of the time: Just as it’s the rare person who wins the lottery, or is struck by lightning, or rolls snake eyes 50 times in a row, so too does a bad guy with a worse heart beat all the odds to stay alive.
So too does a destructive national energy policy, with a bad deepwater oil well, beat all the odds to stay alive.
____________
Saturday Dawning:
Break out the champaign for brunch, darlings!
BP announces at its only press briefing of the day that :
http://www.theoildrum.com/node…[13:39] “You’ll see bubbles on the 36″ casing”
[13:39] “This is quite normal. First piece of pipe put in down to 500′. Build well on top of that”
[13:39] “There are 6 or 8 valves around this piece of pipe, it’s quite caution. But we’ll go take a sample and make sure it’s not gas from deeper down in the riser”
[13:40] ahh
[13:40] “Could be nitrogen or biodegrading methane”
[13:40] “As the well cools down, that’s probably what caused those bubbles”
Next technical update will be tomorrow (July 18) at 7:30 am CT. Any other updates btwn now & then will be announced.
about 2 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…At this point, there is no evidence that we don’t have well integrity. -Kent Wells
about 2 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…The longer integrity test goes, the more confident we get & the test will end when it is the right time to make that decision. -Kent Wells
about 2 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…Continuing to progress with long-term containment options as planned. -Kent Wells
about 2 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…Bubbles you see on the 36″ casing on one of ROV cameras is normal. Being cautious, going down to double check & get a sample. -Kent Wells
about 2 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…Well integrity test continues, with pressure currently at 6,745 PSI, building at approx 2 PSI per hr. -Kent Wells
about 3 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…Every 6 hrs we’re going to look at the info & keep making decisions at that point on what to do going forward. -Kent Wells
about 16 hours ago via web http://twitter.com/BP_America/…
3 comments
Author
…. in the morning.
This is our last dance
under pressure.
Author
…. for another 24 hours, which would take it to Sunday evening.
While the pressure test is going on, no oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
Still have pressure in the well / cap stack bop assembly holding relatively steady and rising very slowly.
Author
…. food stamps and counseling in their name because of this oil spill disaster.
This is the time for my cynical a$$ed self to remind readers of several things. One, the federal government actually tried to float the idea of cutting the food stamp program recently. (Rep. Obey outed that little escapade.) Two, the fed. government recently tried in some sort of appropriations bill to cut WIC food funding (poor, pregnant women & children) to pay for something else. Three, the Catholic Church fought tooth and nail to kill the health care reform bill, which was a precursor to killing off the energy bill. Four, the Catholic Church has a bit of a human rights equality problem with their attitude toward’s certain of God’s creatures and directly using church funds to fight against non Catholic’s right to marry.
I love charities. I just hate right wing ones dedicated to making more poor people miserable, and who don’t respect other religions or lack of, who do the work of large corporations who have no qualms about murdering people for profit. These people used to fish for a living. Now the sea is dead.