It’s been a pretty bad week on the Gulf coast, with no progress made on slowing, containing, or otherwise interfering with what is now being estimated as 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 gallons per day flowing from the blown out well. Yes, BP is capturing some oil, maybe as much as 20%. These numbers, however, are not exactly useful. So far the only reliable information coming from the Unified Incident Command (which amounts to a large part of the Federal government and BP) has been that information from the Unified Command is at best misinformed, more likely, propaganda. These official estimates of the flow of crude oil place the volume at a level that was intially reported by SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald of Florida State University on 27 April and eventually published in the NY Times on 22 May. Meanwhile, the CEO of BP Plc has been seen on media all over the world, denying science, blaming food poisoning as the cause for clean up workers sickened on the job, and publicly complaining that this catastrophe has interferred with his personal plans.
The latest attempt to capture oil – the so-called Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) – which of necessity increased the flow when engineers cut the crimped part of the original riser off, was immediately said to be capturing twice the amount that BP had previously maintained was the total flow, and plenty of oil still seen to be not captured at all. Apparently, you can say anything. And also apparently the oil will continue to flow, at some rate greater than 1,000,000 gallons a day until the relief wells have been drilled, with a completion date estimated by Unified Command to be August. Of course, as former president and petroleum industry enthusiast, GW Bush, once ‘remarked’, Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
Category: deepwater horizon
How the media is missing the real drama of the Oil Spill – by Bill McKibben of 350.org
How the media is missing the real drama of the Oil Spill — Please Share (We can be our own media!)
When a well started spewing oil off Santa Barbara in 1969, it spurred the first Earth Day, which in turn launched the environmental movement and a fundamental questioning of the balance between humans and the rest of nature. It turned out, in other words, to be a real Moment.
It makes one wonder if there really shouldn’t be a little more depth to the endless coverage of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf. (Which, just to be semantic for a moment, isn’t really a “spill,” or a “leak,” unless you’d also call a knife wound a “bloodspill,” or a gunshot to the carotid a “bloodleak.” BP has punched a hole in the bottom of the sea.)
Yes, the obvious story is important: There’s oil spewing out, BP has demonstrated infuriating nonchalance, shrimpers are watching the sheen wash up on the coastal marshes, etc. This all needs to be covered, and is being covered with the incredible agonizing boredom that only 24-hour cable channels can bring to any issue.
And there’s a “political angle,” which as usual has been about atmospherics. Is Obama angry enough? Is he connecting with “real people”? This sort of thing is conventional good fun for political reporters (especially when Obama plays along, announcing he’s consulting with various academics in order to see “whose ass needs kicking.”). But isn’t there something more? Isn’t this potentially a Moment too?
Let’s think about the stories that are suggested by this trouble.
One has something to do with peak oil. BP has gone to all this trouble for a well that taps into what they now think may be 100 million barrels of oil. And that’s… five days supply for the U.S? Does that give you any sense of the precariousness of the arrangements under-girding our economy right at the moment?
Another — even more important — has to do with global warming. Let’s assume that the oil from the Deepwater Horizon made it safely onshore and was refined and then burned in the gas tank of your car. What then? Well, the CO2 in the atmosphere would be doing at least as much damage as the oil spreading across the Gulf. Consider the following things that have happened since the Deepwater exploded:
* Asia and Southeast Asia have each recorded their hottest temperatures ever — 129 degrees in Pakistan, and 117 in Burma. India is having the worst heatwave since the British started keeping records — people are dying by the hundreds.
* We’ve seen the biggest rainstorms ever recorded in lots of places, from Nashville to Guatemala — the clear result of an atmosphere made 5% wetter because warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
* Satellite data has shown that Arctic ice is now melting even faster than in the record year of 2007.
* NASA has released new statistics showing that the past 12 months were the warmest on record and that 2010 is almost certain to set the title for the warmest calendar year yet.
All of these, it seems to me, could be considered parts of the Deepwater Horizon story because they demonstrate that fossil fuel is everywhere dirty. They change the political question from “is Obama angry enough” to “can Obama lead a credible fight for real energy and climate legislation?” More to the point, they connect with the mood of existential despair and anger that the oil spill has set off across the country. People are sad and bitter only in part because they see those pelicans oiled; mostly, they sense correctly that our leaders have yet to deal with what is clearly the biggest problem we face: the transition off of fossil fuels.
The questions that the Gulf spill raises, in other words, go well beyond: How big an idiot is Tony Hayward? What will happen to the tourist economy of the Gulf? How cool is James Cameron’s minisub? The questions are more like: How out of balance with the natural world are we? And what would it require to get back in balance?
You’d need to interview not just oil execs and colorful shrimpers, but nature writers, solar pioneers and psychologists.
There’s nothing pat about what’s going on in the Gulf. It’s the most vivid sign we’ve yet had that we are running into the kind of limits that people started talking about way back at that first Earth Day. But its meaning risks disappearing beneath the endless stories about Top Hat and Junk Shot. BP’s great victory will come if it need merely confess to technical overreach and pay a few billion in fines — if that happens, it can get back to making serious money, and the planet can get back to burning.
— Bill McKibben, Cross-posted on Neiman Watchdog.
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Number of birds rescued nearly doubles.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson reports Oil and Gas coming up from Sea Floor – well casing breached…
mercy mercy me
Birds in Care Increase with Oiling of Pelican Nursery on Queen Bess Island – BP Steps Up Measures to Keep Lid on Scope of Damage.
Latest Numbers from USFWS via Deepwater Horizon Response
Terrible photos from East Grande Terre Island, Louisiana
While BP struggles to protect itself from justice, and BP CEO Tony Hayward continues to make a public ass of himself, – as Janet Rubchenko leads NOAA into irrelavancy, the Oil that this industry and the State have loosed upon the world continues to poison and kill.
Caught in the oil – The Big Picture – Boston.com
Less than 10% of Dead Birds Collected on Gulf Coast Reported as Visibly Oiled
As of 31 May, the official toll on birds in the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon well blowout stands at 568, which includes the 74 birds who have been rescued and brought into care at one of the four rehabilitation facilities set up along the north Gulf coast.
Of the 74 birds, which the report does not break down by species, 57 have been rescued in Louisiana, closest to the gushing well, and hardest hit by oil. 1 bird has been brought into the Mississippi facility, and the rest are split between Alabama and Florida. So far, 24 have been released, hundreds of miles away, near Tampa as well as on the East coast.
First victims of oil spill released in Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge
The daily report from the US Fish and Wildlife Service breaks the two categories of live and dead down into visibly oiled, no visible oil, and pending. Pending describes those animals whose oiling is not obvious in the field, according to information gotten from the Deepwater Horizon Response website, and is meant to be resolved into either of the other two categories in the clinic, or lab. 69 of 74, or 93%, of the live birds rescued were visibly oiled.
Strikingly, among the 494 dead birds collected, only 29, or 6%, were reported as visibly oiled, while 70% (348) of these birds were reported as not visibly oiled. The percentage of non visibly oiled birds may climb due to the 110 ‘pending’ cases of the 186 dead birds found in Louisiana.
Also worth noting, while Louisiana far outpaces the other three states for live oiled birds captured and brought into care, dead birds have been found more evenly distributed. In Alabama, 137 dead birds have been collected, with only 5 of them visibly oiled. 133 dead birds have been collected in Florida, 7 of them visibly oiled. In Louisiana, besides the 110 pending cases, 15 visibly oiled birds have been collected along with 61 non-visibly oiled birds, while only 2 of the 38 dead birds collected in Mississippi are reported as visibly oiled.
Oil can kill birds in a number of ways. What we see most often, however are birds visibly oiled (with perhaps only a small amount, but visible) that have caused a typically water-dwelling bird to come to shore due to a loss of waterproofing. Oil violates the integrity of an aquatic bird’s feather structure allowing water to penetrate to the their skin. If a bird is to maintain a normal body temperature that can range from 102-106˚F (approx 40-42˚C) the critical function of feathers as insulation and waterproofing cannot be impaired.
In other words, oiled aquatic birds become cold and wet. They have to get out. However, adapted to life on water, many aquatic birds are wholly unsuited for land, and are highly vulnerable when beached. Although they might find relief from the cold, on shore things only get worse. By actively preening, all birds keep their feathers clean and functional. When oiled, preening leads to ingestion of oil and the eventual poisoning.
Eared grebes beached afer Cosco Busan fuel oil spill in San Francisco Bay 11/07
Without intervention by a rehabilitator, a bird in this situation is going to die. The greater the extent of oiling, the more quickly comes death, but almost any amount of oiling can kill.
While the internal effects of oil do kill birds, these effects are hard to come by without external oiling present – which leads to the question: why is such a high percentage of the dead birds not visibly oiled?
The USFWS report offers no conclusions and leaves many significant questions unasked and unanswered. Why are there so many non-oiled dead birds in the spill zone? Have any tests been done to determine the cause of death? What species are being affected? How many oiled birds are being observed in the field? In a region so rich in aquatic birds, in an oil spill of such magnitude, why have so few birds been brought into care? In the response to the devastation that this spill is wreaking on the Gulf, are all hands really on deck? Given the unprecedented quantities and highly controversial use of dispersants such as Corexit 9500 it seems these questions deserve public answers.
