Gulf of Mexico oil leak

[faceless]

Gulf of Mexico oil leak: BP release first photo
BP have released the first photo showing oil spewing out from the broken pipe, a mile under the surface of the water.
12 May 2010
telegraph.co.uk

BP released the photo after coming under pressure from government officials over their handling of the crisis. The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank off the Louisiana coast three weeks ago, on April 20. Since then at least four million gallons of oil are thought to have been pumped into the sea from the broken pipe, killing wildlife and threatening the livelihoods of the fishermen living in the costal region.

A Congressional investigation into the massive oil spill heard on Wednesday that a critical device meant to prevent a disaster was faulty. The "blowout preventer," a five-story, 900,000-ton device on the sea floor that was supposed to cap the well before a blowout occurred, was deemed to be unsatisfactory. Its failure, while not the cause of the disaster, could have prevented the blast that killed 11 people and unleashed a flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the industry officials said.

"This seemed astounding to us," said Rep. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who is helping oversee the investigation. "The safety of its entire operations rested on the performance of a leaking, modified and defective blowout preventer."

BP said it hoped to have a small containment dome in place by late Thursday in hopes of staunching the oil flow from the Gulf floor. BP engineers have lowered a "top hat" over the leak along the seabed and are hoping to start capturing oil in it. The company is not guaranteeing it will work, citing the difficulties of working almost a mile under the ocean surface. BP also is drilling a relief well, which could take 80 more days.

Within two weeks it aims to try to plug the leak by pumping materials like shredded tires and golf balls into the well at high pressure.

---------------------

"a five-story, 900,000-ton device on the sea floor"

that should be storey, and what kind of monstrous carbuncle would something be that weighs 900 000 tons? The USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, fully loaded, weighs 75000 tons. So 12 of them...

This is from the Telegraph, 'Britain's best selling quality newspaper'...

Still, ignoring all that - the picture is just foul...

[luke]

Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well
Greg Palast

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now, he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic. While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?"

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is between Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn's my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," said Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.

Report from the Inferno
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Greg Palast on BP "The master of disaster".

Report from Anchorage Radio with Shannyn Moore - Listen

[SpursFan1902]

And all of it heading toward my beautiful beaches. And they want Florida to allow drilling off of it's coast....Absolutely not!!! Our Governor, Charlie Crist, spoke to my Florida Politics class and the question of drilling came up. He said that he had not made up his mind but that technology had really advanced and that he couldn't just automatically write it off. I hope he has now...

[SquareEyes]

How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

Paul Rademacher has build a neat tool with the Google Earth Plug-in that allows you to overlay the oil spill on major cities, to help you get an idea of just how large it is. Telling people that it's 2500 square miles is one thing, but to see it overwhelm major cities gives you a whole new perspective.

It's a very simple tool, but it's very useful.

[luke]

thanks squareeyes, the link for the images http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/disaster_unfolds_slowly_in_the.html is well worth looking at

drill baby drill ...

[pirtybirdy]

I'd like to know what we will do if China has the same problem with their oil rigs off of our coast, what we will do then. I think we should drill off our coast, since China is doing it anyway. This is sounding more and more like shoddy work, and it was all overlooked by everyone.

[luke]

do you think the chinese would act any better or worse than the british have?

i don't see that nationality comes into it - they're both driven by profit. if they can make more profit by cutting safety within the lax regulations big oil have lobbied for, they'll do that

the best that can come out of this is tighter regulations for all oil companies - british, chinese or american

[Skylace]

Alternative energy sources. Much better idea in my book. But of course, the oil companies don't want us looking into that.

[Brown Sauce]

one commentator said that we would divert vast quantities of water to clean the solar panels, and eventually kill similar quantities of bird life with wind turbines, he/she has a good point.

I think we only have the choices of no electricity, or nukes. And hope that we can find a solution to the waste problem sometime in the future.

[SpursFan1902]

I am all for anything that does not include oily pelicans dying on my beach...I like the alternative possibilities too, Sky. I know this is "pie in the sky" but I wish big business would do the right thing rather than the most profitable. How much money does one company need?

[luke]

BP boss implies oil slick is nothing more than a drop in the ocean


Tony Hayward implied that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was nothing more than a drop in the ocean

BP’s beleaguered boss risked international outrage last night by implying that the millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico were nothing more than a drop in the ocean.

Tony Hayward, chief executive of the oil giant, tried to downplay the disaster which is threatening to become the world’s worst oil spill.

His words will provoke a huge backlash from environmentalists who are furious that BP has failed to plug the leak three weeks after it erupted in a rig explosion that killed 11 workers.

The Briton insisted the oil slick and the estimated 400,000 gallons of dispersant pumped into the sea to try to disperse it were relatively ‘tiny’ amounts.

‘The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,’ he said. ‘The volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.’

Mr Hayward promised that BP would bring an end to the disaster, which is on course to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

‘We will fix it. I guarantee it,’ he said. ‘The only question is we do not know when.’

Greenpeace reacted angrily to the comments – saying that BP could not ‘fix’ an oil spill.

Its scientist Rick Steiner said: ‘You can’t effectively clean up a major marine oil spill. It just can’t happen anywhere.

'This whole mythology that we can respond to a spill is just that – mythology. The genie is out of the bottle.’


Drop in the ocean? Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, tried to downplay the disaster which is threatening to become the world's worst oil spill

Mr Hayward’s comments came as dramatic footage of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico was released by BP.

Taken by an underwater robotic camera, the rust-coloured liquid looks more like steam rushing from a geyser.

As many as 5,000 barrels a day have been released into the ocean following the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

At BP’s Houston headquarters Mr Hayward, 53, said he has had trouble sleeping and is refusing to watch TV news reports about the increasingly frantic attempts to plug the well.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1278279/Gulf-Mexico-oil-spill-BP-boss-Tony-Hayward-tries-downplay-disaster.html

i reckon we should use tony haywards head to block the leak

[SpursFan1902]

That is a pretty big drop...I am REALLY sorry he is having a hard time sleeping, I feel for him...

[luke]

the guardian are doing live updates as bp try the latest fix

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/may/27/bp-oil-spill-top-kill



stream in media player http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260

[luke]

from the updates;

the Deepwater Horizon spill is officially larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska back in 1989, making it now the worst oil spill in US history by some distance depending on which estimate you prefer.

Here's the AP description:

Even using the most conservative estimate, that means the leak has grown to nearly 19m gallons, surpassing the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which at about 11m gallons had been the nation's worst spill. Under the highest estimate, nearly 39m gallons may have spilled.

[faceless]

Apparently they've managed to stem most of the flow of the oil from the leak now. Here's hoping they're not just spouting as much shite as the pipe has been...

I hope that at least some small businesses can make a good living by cleaning up the oil carefully. I saw a thing a few years back about netting filled with straw - oil is attracted to the cellulose structure of the straw and sticks to it like glue, meaning you can then just pick t up out of the water. Then you can recycle the oil.

I'm trying to look on the bright side...