The story the US government and BP are not telling. Oil slick hits Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Tag: BP
May 22 2010
Morning Migraine: BiPartisanship Commission Member Named to BiPartisanship BP Oil Spill Study
Saturday May 21, 2010 One month and one day past the destruction of the drilling rig of the Deepwater Horizon, with BP unable to stop the oil blowout destroying the Gulf, President Obama’s anonymous source announced he will appoint former Senator Bob Graham (D, FL) and former EPA head William K Reilly to a commission to study the cause of the spill, federal oversight, and the potential risks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
William K Reilly was administrator at the EPA under the first George Bush administration, George H W “Poppy” Bush, the one who invaded the Middle East the First Time and went to war against Iraq the First Time, which was called the …… Gulf War.
The commission, modeled on ones which investigated the Challenger shuttle explosion and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, will not include any federal officials, administration officials said this week.
May 22 2010
Scientists outraged over the LACK of Science …
Science is one of those subjects I’m passionate about. Without Science, we’d still be casting spells, and coaxing The Fates.
If we’re not careful, we may be headed back to those “bad old days”.
Scientists Fault Lack of Studies Over Gulf Oil Spill
Justin Gillis, NYTimes – 05/19/2010
“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”
The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.
“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”
Maybe NOAA was too busy, texting BP?
May 22 2010
Blog Post
My words but a whisper — your deafness a SHOUT
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think
Your sperm’s in the gutter — your love’s in the sink
So you ride yourselves over the fields
and you make all your animal deals
and your wise men don’t know how it feels
to be thick as a brick
And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away in
the tidal destruction
the moral melee
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
as the last wave uncovers the newfangled way
May 20 2010
BP’s Gulf Oil Leak 19 Times Larger Than BP & Gov’t Say?
The Real News Network’s Jesse Freeston interviews journalists at McClatchy’s DC bureau to for their latest on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Journalists believe that BP and the Government may be hiding information on the severity of the leak. Those who fish for a living in the Gulf of Mexico are after BP for compensation. The central question yet to be answered to help resolve the question of how the explosion happened. And, the Cuban government is concerned but not vocal, given it’s own aspirations for deep sea drilling.
Real News Network – May 20, 2010
May 20 2010
Markey: BP thinks it’s their ocean — but it’s the American people’s ocean
Markey to Get Live Feed of BP Oil Spill on Website
BP Acquiesces to Markey’s Request, Will Release Video Stream Tonight to Chairman
May 19, 2010 – Following a demand from Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) for a live feed of the BP oil spill to be made publicly available on the web, BP said they would release the feed and it will be shown on Rep. Markey’s committee website at http://globalwarming.house.gov. The release of the live link to Rep. Markey is expected tonight.
“This may be BP’s footage, but it’s America’s ocean. Now anyone will be able to see the real-time effects the BP spill is having on our ocean,” said Rep. Markey, who conducted a briefing today with independent scientists where he reiterated the call for a video feed. “This footage will aid analysis by independent scientists blocked by BP from coming to see the spill.” […]
From the Latest News on the Wires it seems the BP’s getting some “stonewalling help” from the Coast Guard too.
May 20 2010
BP = Beyond Prosecution
Mention the name of the corporation BP to Scott West and two words immediately come to mind: Beyond Prosecution.
West was the special agent in charge with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criminal division who had been probing alleged crimes committed by BP and the company’s senior officials in connection with a March 2006 pipeline rupture at the company’s Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska’s North Slope that spilled 267,000 gallons of crude oil across two acres of frozen tundra – the second largest spill in Alaska’s history – which went undetected for nearly a week.
West was confident that the thousands of hours he invested into the criminal probe would result in felony charges against the company and the senior executives who received advanced warnings from dozens of employees at the Prudhoe Bay facility that unless immediate steps were taken to repair the severely corroded pipeline, a disaster on par with that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill was only a matter of time.
In fact, West, who spent more than two decades at the EPA’s criminal division, was also told the pipeline was going to rupture – about six months before it happened.
In a wide-ranging interview with Truthout, West described how the Justice Department (DOJ) abruptly shut down his investigation into BP in August 2007 and gave the company a “slap on the wrist” for what he says were serious environmental crimes that should have sent some BP executives to jail.
He first aired his frustrations after he retired from the agency in 2008. But he said his story is ripe for retelling because the same questions about BP’s record are now being raised again after a catastrophic explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and ruptured an oil well 5,000 feet below the surface that has been spewing upwards of 200,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf waters for a month.
May 19 2010
The Creative Math of BP’s 20, no 40%, Containment
BP has claimed that the new 4 inch Pipe inserted into the 21 Riser pipe is siphoning off 20% of the leaking oil. And then they updated that figure to 40% the next day.
Sounds good on the Morning News, but how did they get those numbers?
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the cross-sectional area of a 4″ Pipe vs the cross-sectional area of a 21″ Riser Pipe (minus its reported .812″ wall thickness)
And those calcs ended up: roughly 4.4% of the larger [inner] area would be covered by the smaller [outer] area — BUT all that was just a Red Herring — it turns out due to this BP picture (and its large rubber gaskets)
Looks good on Paper. Could the insert pipe with its many rubber stoppers actually be blocking up to 40% of the leaking oil from the larger pipe?
Yet one wonders, where did that 40% number come from, especially since BP is not all that keen on measuring and monitoring?
May 19 2010
Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak to Loop Current Forecast – May 17 through May 21, 2010
Video compiled from data produced by The College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, Ocean Circulation Group http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu/
OCG/CMS/USF maintains a coordinated program of coastal ocean observing and modeling for the West Florida Continental Shelf (WFS).
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory ensemble forecast from four different numerical models – Modeling includes a West Florida Shelf version of ROMS nested in the Navy’s operational HYCOM. We are also diagnosing model output from the Navy’s HYCOM, from NCSU’s SABGOM ROMS, and also from the NOAA RTOFS.
http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil_spill_ensemble_forecast.html
Embeddable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d53Y8t85bI
(about 1 minute 8 seconds)
May 18 2010
‘The Little Eichmanns’
The black plague spreads.
The leadership lies.
The CEO’s spin.
We are not ignorant of the horrific nightmare you have unleashed.
Chris Hedges has a piece on TruthDig today about our corporate leaders and how these ‘Little Eichmanns’ are doing exactly what many thought would happen when you commoditize every living breathing thing on the planet.
You die.
Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
May 18 2010
Ban BP from the Gulf
Thanks to 60 Minutes for opening the public’s eyes to the Safety violations committed by BP.
BP racked up millions in fines before disaster
LEE COUNTY: A new report shows BP has the worst track record among US refineries for workplace safety violations. Why did the US government allow it to continue operating before the oil spill?Before the oil refinery exploded, 11 workers were killed and millions of gallons of oil contaminated the Gulf of Mexico, the US government knew of BP’s history of unsafe working conditions.
According to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, “Two refineries owned by oil giant BP account for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years.”
But the Deep Horizon, is not the only drilling rig, BP is operating in the Gulf Of Mexico.
BP current has at least 5 other rigs in operation, including the Discoverer Enterprise currently siphoning the spill left by the Deep Water Horizon.
Holstein, Mad Dog, Development Driller III, Discoverer Enterprise, and GSF Development Driller II
May 18 2010
Shep Smith lays smartest smackdown ever on BP’s CEO “At least act like you care”
Now here is a rant that would make Keith Olbermann jump up and shout “Hallelujah”
After BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told a British reporter “It’s a relatively small leak compared to the volume of water in the gulf” and “Come on, this is America, there will be frivolous lawsuits.”.
Yeah, cause what’s a few hundred million gallons of oil in the gulf? It’s like saying, “So there is some urine in your tea, it’s still tea! Drink up!”
And thus begins Shep Smith in the smartest smackdown you may ever witness.
More, and transcript, below the fold