and I am pissed beyond words!
Spill may stop 16 to 19 million gallons of drinking water daily for Tampa Bay residents
...Emergency planning sources in Florida have informed that the state faces severe fresh water shortages and power blackouts if the thick crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster clogs sea water intakes at the largest seawater desalinization plant in the United States - the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalinization Plant at Apollo Beach.
The plant, which uses seawater reverse osmosis to turn seawater into 16 to 19 million gallons of drinking water daily for residents of the Tampa Bay area, faces the threat of filtration membranes becoming clogged if oil from the Gulf of Mexico enters its intake pipes. Such an event would render the plant unable to process seawater, resulting in a major fresh water shortage for Tampa Bay.
Similarly, oil clogging the water cooling intakes at the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant on the Gulf of Mexico coast, some 80 miles north of Tampa, could force the shutdown of the Unit 3 pressurized water nuclear reactor. Such an event would result in power shutdowns in the Florida areas served by the power plant.*
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1... Oh and i had to breathe the most putrid air for well over a week that burned our eyes and throats and gave thousands headaches..and we were not told wtf we were breathing!
The putrid air by me extended from tampa to Ft Meyers almost a 4 hour drive away and there was silence from our government and our media took 4 days to respond because they were put in a total blackout on info./
I have walked my backyard..the beach and Gulf of Mexico and documented dead birds..
so please don't think you know anything about me..other than I am mad as hell and not taking it anymore..not from BP and not from Obama..they are all liars!
BP Blocks Media Access
YouTube - BP Blocks Media Access
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giozCCjlQu4&feature=player_embeddedwho owns our beaches????????????????
why is BP controlling our beaches????????????
-and our air space..and is using the FAA to block flights and the Coast Guard to hide truth from those of us on the Gulf.
- and our National Guard to hide truth!
Piece of oil rig washes up on Florida beach Source: AP
A piece of wreckage from the deepsea rig that exploded in April has washed up on a beach in Florida about 190 miles from the site of the disaster.
Bay County Sheriff Deputy Ray Maulbeck was working beach patrol Sunday morning when he came upon the stainless steel tank that had some oil oozing from it, along with barnacles and sea growth attached to it. The Coast Guard and state environmental officials were called in to investigate, and they took the piece away.
Maulbeck says the part had markings that identified it as having come from the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Read more:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/06/12/2012132/piece-of-o... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another article:
Mystery Tank From Exploded Oil Rig Washes Ashore On Local Beaches
http://www.wjhg.com/news/headlines/96221084.html <snip>
Residents to that section of the beach say the tank first appeared last night and washed up to the shoreline over night. But no one reported it to authorities until mid morning today.
Eye witnesses tell newschannel seven the tank had BP identifying logos on it but those were promptly removed when crews arrived late this morning.
Its not known what is inside the tank but the Coast Guard, Bay County Hazmat Teams and The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sealed off the area for a thousand feet after fumes from the tank were so noxious people began feeling ill.
Bay County EMS Ambulance units were sent to the scene to stand by but they apparently we not needed.
Even though Bay County Hazmat teams did some on the spot testing to see what was involved, Valerie Lovett, the County's Public Information officer, told NewsChannel Seven she couldn't say what it was.
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"We Don't Need This on Camera": BP's Crappy Cleanup Job | Mother Jones
"We Don't Need This on Camera": BP's Crappy Cleanup Job
— By Mac McClelland
| Fri Jun. 11, 2010 8:55 AM PDT
http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/06/grande-terre-dolphin-towels-bp-cleanupxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Efforts in Gulf to Limit Flow of Spill News Source: New York TimesWhen the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request.
A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.
“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ”
Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/politicsemail/10ac... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
BP Refuses to Allow Scientists to Test Oil Spill Samples http://www.allgov.com/Top_Stories/ViewNews/BP_Refuses_t... Scientists in Florida are concerned that large plumes of oil floating beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico originated from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and want to test their samples against oil collected by BP. But the oil corporation is refusing to cooperate.
University of South Florida scientist David Hollander said he was “just taken aback” by BP’s unwillingness to assist in a scientific inquiry into the trouble. “It was a little unsettling.”
BP has publicly refused to acknowledge responsibility for the large masses of petroleum floating deep in the gulf which could be headed towards Florida. Company CEO Tony Hayward has gone so far as to insist the oil is “on the surface” of the ocean and that “there aren’t any plumes.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, however, is now saying oil has been discovered under the surface, although at “very low concentrations.”
In addition to not cooperating with scientists, BP has refused to grant media requests to fly over the gulf to capture images of oil slicks—refusals that also have been backed by federal agencies involved in the response effort.
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Government Collusion with BP to Block Information Flow Means We Need an Independent Commission to Handle Spill Response By: Jim White Thursday June 10, 2010 6:50 am
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/53862Writing in Thursday’s New York Times, Jeremy W. Peters provides further documentation of what he titles "Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News". Perhaps the most damning evidence Peters provides comes from an effort by Florida Senator Bill Nelson to visit the Gulf with a group of reporters:
Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.
“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.
Why would the Department of Homeland Security have a policy that prohibits elected officials and media being on the same ship in the Gulf? Is there any other explanation than a blatant attempt by the federal government to stifle reporting on conditions in the Gulf as they really exist, rather than as they have been presented by BP and federal "spokespeople"?so please do tell me..if this was happening in your back yard..how happy would you be????????
I am damn mad..we have been lied to in every way!
I don't want my grand daughter coming to my state or my home on the Gulf..it frightens me too much that coming to grandma's home will effect her future and her health..it makes me ill to think grandma's house could make her sick..but the air we had to breathe and the water we may have to drink..I can not risk that for her.
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"Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published."
BP's Gulf spill plan outdated, error-filledBy JUSTIN PRITCHARD, TAMARA LUSH and HOLBROOK MOHR
The Associated Press
Published: June 9th, 2010 10:32 PM
Last Modified: June 12th, 2010 11:38 AM
VENICE, La. - Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.
Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.
The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.
BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government.
last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.
"Look, it's obvious to everybody in south Louisiana that they didn't have a plan, they didn't have an adequate plan to deal with this spill," said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. "They didn't anticipate the (blowout preventer) failure. They didn't anticipate this much oil hitting our coast. From the very first days, they kept telling us, ‘Don't worry, the oil's not going to make it to your coast.' "
In the spill scenarios detailed in the BP's exploration plan, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.
There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.
The Gulf's loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida's southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn't mentioned in either plan.
The website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp. - one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill - links to a defunct Japanese-language page.
In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds would be cleansed of oil.
And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn't apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the response.
Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in an e-mail Wednesday to the AP that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., have asked for a criminal investigation of some of the company's claims.
"The AP report paints a picture of a company that was making it up as it went along, while telling regulators it had the full capability to deal with a major spill," Nelson said in an e-mail. "We know that wasn't true."
This week, after BP reported the seemingly good news that a containment cap installed on the wellhead was funneling some of the gushing crude to a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new set of plans mostly aimed at capturing more oil.
The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cap, using a special incinerator to burn off some of the recaptured oil and bringing in a floating platform to process the oil being sucked away from the gushing well.
In other words, the on-the-fly planning continues.
---
Some examples of how BP's plans have fallen short:
- Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore - a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.
"The vessels in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively," one of the documents says.
BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks - and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between.
The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP's regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.
- BP's site plan regarding birds, sea turtles or endangered marine mammals ("no adverse impacts") also have proved far too optimistic.
While the exact toll on the Gulf's wildlife may never be known, the effects clearly have been devastating.
More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill's impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.
In Louisiana's Barataria Bay, a dead sea turtle caked in reddish-brown oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins also have washed ashore. So have countless fish.
There weren't supposed to be any coastline problems because the site was far offshore. "Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected," the site plan says.
But that distance has failed to protect precious resources. And last week, a group of environmental research center scientists released a computer model that suggested oil could ride ocean currents around Florida and up to North Carolina by summer.
- Perhaps the starkest example of BP's planning failures: The company has insisted that the size of the leak doesn't matter because it has been reacting to a worst-case scenario all along.
Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak has grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble - to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.
---
While a disaster as devastating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can't be solved in advance, or even foreseen, BP's plans do not anticipate even the most obvious issues, and use mountains of words to dismiss problems that have proven overwhelming.
In responses to lengthy lists of questions from AP, officials for BP and the Interior Department, which oversees oil rig regulator Minerals Management Service, appear to concede there were problems with the two oil spill response plans.
"Many of the questions you raise are exactly those questions that will be examined and answered by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into BP's oil spill," said Kendra Barkoff, spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who she said has undertaken transformational reforms of MMS.
Said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo from Robert, La.: "We expect that a complete review of the regional response plans and planning process will take place as part of the overall incident investigation so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. Thus far we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us much to learn from."
A key failure of the plan's cleanup provisions was the scarcity of boom - floating lines of plastic or absorbent material placed around sensitive areas to deflect oil.
From the start, local officials all along the Gulf Coast have complained about a lack of supplies, particularly the heavier, so-called ocean boom. But even BP says in its regional plan that boom isn't effective in seas more than three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often bigger. And even in calmer waters, oil has swamped vital wildlife breeding grounds in places supposedly sequestered by multiple layers of boom.
The BP plans speak of thorough resources for all; there's no talk of a need to share. Still, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said his shores were left vulnerable by Coast Guard decisions to shift boom to Louisiana when the oil threatened landfall there.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, some have complained that miles of the boom now in the water were not properly anchored. AP reporters saw evidence they're right - some lines of boom were so broken up they hardly impeded the slick's push to shore.
Some out-of-state contractors who didn't know local waters placed boom where tides and currents made sure it didn't work properly. And yet disorganization has dogged efforts to use local boats. In Venice, La., near where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, a large group of charter captains have been known to spend their days sitting around at the marina, earning $2,000 a day without ever attacking the oil.
But perhaps the most glaring error in BP's plans involves Lutz, the professor, one of several dozen experts recommended as resources to be contacted in the event of a spill.
Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published.
Molly Lutcavage, a research professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who worked closely with Lutz for years on a groundbreaking report on the effects of oil and sea turtles, was dismayed to hear that Lutz was still listed as an expert in the response plan.
"It's horribly depressing and shocking that so little attention is paid to a bona fide contingency plan," she said. "What would Peter think? Oh, boy. I think he would think it was typical of bureaucracy."
Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/06/09/1315823/bp-c-plan.html
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go ahead and bury your head in the sand..if you can find clean sand ...but my back yard and the backayrd of millions of people is the Gulf..we don't have that luxury!
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posted on DU today..thank you to the poster!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8549555
Gusher in the Gulf: What's the worst that could happen?
Here's a post at The Oil Drum that appears to be written by a knowledgeable outsider, the conclusions this guy reaches are positively terrifying.
There is considerably more both before and after the snippet of text I'm posting here, I urge you to go and read the whole thing, it's a bit technical in places but written well enough to be largely understandable by the layman..
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967
What is likely to happen now?
Well...none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact...it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.
Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.
(...)
According to BP data from about five years ago, there are four separate reservoirs containing a total of 2.5 billion barrels (barrels not gallons). One of the reservoirs has 1.5 billion barrels. I saw an earlier post here quoting an Anadarko Petroleum report which set the total amount at 2.3 billion barrels. One New York Times article put it at 2 billion barrels.
If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls -- as it were -- fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities.
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