Wednesday 9 June 2010

DEEPWATER ~ RED OIL? FLAMES SPEWING FROM THE SPILL?

A laughing gull struggles through the filth covered in more than its own weight in slime.

From the "Dear Lord, I wish I had been wrong" files.

When it happened, I said that this Deepwater mess would tip the ecological scales over basis so that all the climate change talk and footprints etc would be just so much silliness in comparison. Here are a few films and an article or two on what is going on there. One feels so incredibly helpless in the face of such disaster. There is no magic to fix it.

One of my mottoes is that if you begin to hate, they have won. I am being tested because I want to lash out and curse the perpetrators. But to what avail?

The fire spewing from beneath the ocean shore is very unnerving to say the least. Consider that this pocket of oil and gas runs beneath most of North America from Canada down to Mexico, there is the making of a major disaster should those flames spread and blow.


First piece, HOLY ISRAELI-style MEDIA CONTROL!

BP BUYS GOOGLE
AND YAHOO SEARCH WORDS

How controlling is this? BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news on Gulf oil spill disaster


In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top Internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought Internet search terms.

The words ‘oil spill’, 'BP oil spill', 'Deepwater Horizon' and 'oil spill response' are among several other related search terms that all lead to the top listed sponsored links purchased by BP.

BP has not been completely forthcoming with information on the oil spill, which has damaged the company's public image.

Tonight I found any searches on Deepwater were very slow, in fact so slow that the search "timed out".I am glad I already have my information sites saved.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, BP executives quickly underestimated the size of the disastrous oil spill. Some suggest
they did it to avoid costly EPA per-gallon spill fines. The less oil spilled, the lower the fines.

A month into the spill, the public learned through independent science, that the spill was in fact a million gallon a day gusher.
BP got caught in their own lie when the used a siphon pipe in one of the broken riser pipes and proudly proclaimed that they were capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. With the oil obviously still gushing, they had to up their spill rate to explain the reported discrepancy in their earlier estimates.

As the dead bodies of birds, turtles and dolphins began showing up on land, BP used a private security company as their
‘oil spill police’ to try to keep photographers and reporters away from the true death toll from their spill. Tides of black goo lapping a shore lined in corpses did not portray the company image Tony Hayward wanted for BP.

The world is watching the Gulf of Mexico from airplanes, boats and satellite images. Buying the links listed first on Internet search engines, which direct people to the BP company website, will not hide or erase the horrors of the
apocalypse unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Yet the question remains: If BP were not trying to influence information on the Gulf oil spill, why would they buy sponsored links?

BP CEO Tony Hayward has denied the existence of oil spill plumes. However, scientists say they do exist.

Multiple deadly,
floating plume clouds have been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientist say they were created by mixing BP’s toxic chemical dispersants with the oil and gas that has been escaping from the Deepwater Horizon well.

One such plume is now just
35 miles from the Florida shore in the Panhandle. Others remain in deeper water. The problems with the plumes is that they cause ‘dead zones,’ where nothing can survive.

The
unstoppable BP oil leak has been billowing more than a half-million gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico for the past 45 days.

BP executives initially claimed that the Deepwater Horizon was only leaking 1,000 barrels of oil a day when the spill began. Then they admitted to leaking 5,000 barrels a day.

Now, official estimates put the rate of the leak at 12,00 to 19,000 barrels a day. At 42 gallons a barrel, that means there is nearly a million gallons of oil and gas filling the Gulf every day.

It has been suggested that Tony Hayward has been underestimating the scope of the BP oil spill disaster to avoid costly per-gallon EPA fines and lawsuits.





The sliming ooze of corporate corruption slicks and smothers yet another innocent creature.

IN THE MURKY DEPTHS OF THE GULF OF MEXICO

I jump off the boat into the thickest, reddest patch of oil I've ever seen. I open my eyes and realize my mask is already smeared. I can't see anything and we're just five seconds into the dive.

Dropping beneath the surface some 40 miles out into the Gulf Of Mexico, the only thing I see is oil. To the left, right, up and down ~ it sits on top of the water in giant pools and hangs suspended 15 feet beneath the surface in softball-size blobs. There is nothing alive under the slick, although I see a dead jellyfish and handful of small bait fish.

I'm alone because the other divers with me wouldn't get in the water without Hazmat suits on, and with my mask oiled over and the water already dark, I don't dive deep.

It's quiet, and to be honest scary, with extremely low visibility. I spend just 10 minutes swimming around taking pictures, taking video. I want people to see the spill in a new way, a way they haven't yet.

I also want to get out of the water. Badly.

I make my way to the back of the boat unaware of just how covered I am. To be honest, I probably look a little like one of those poor pelicans we've all been seeing for days now.

The oil is thick and sticky, almost like a cake batter. It does not wipe off. You have to scrape it off, in layers, until you finally get close to the skin. Then you pour on some Dawn dish-washing soap and scrub.

I think to myself: No fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off itself. If any animal were to end up in this same puddle, there is almost no way it could escape.

The cleaning process goes on for half an hour before the captain will even think about letting me back in the boat. I'm clean, so I stand up.

But the bottoms of my feet still had oil, and I fall back in the water. The process starts again.

Another 30 minutes of cleaning, and finally I'm ready to step into the boat

A pelican slicked down in oil.

This Deepwater is getting downright scary. I have a feeling a lot of chickens will be coming home to roost soon. Americans have altered nature and the formation of our earth for too long and created quite a few problems that, one at a time might be survivable. But put them all together and you have some pretty rough potential horrors to consider.

How is this for a real twist as to what is going on in the Gulf of Mexico massive oil sludge leak. Watch the video below and see the fire and flames on the bottom of the Gulf. This is getting more crazy by the day. What is going to happen? Your guess is as good as mine.


DEEPWATER SHOOTING FIRE INTO THE WATERS

Underwater flames are shooting out of the 'cap.' It's not from the cap but it's mixed in with the oil and gas. Is it going to blow from the pressure?

Good grief, what have they done.




GULF OIL LEAK BIGGER THAN BP SAYS IT IS

June 8, 2010 By RAY HENRY, HARRY R. WEBER and SETH BORENSTEIN

Blotting up oil on the beach. Like taking paper towels to swab up a lake.

NEW ORLEANS

While BP is capturing more oil from its blown-out well with every passing day, scientists on a team analyzing the flow said Tuesday that the amount of crude still escaping into the Gulf of Mexico may be considerably greater than what the government and the company have claimed.

Their assertions ~ combined with BP's rush to build a bigger cap and its apparent difficulty in immediately processing all the oil being collected ~ have only added to the impression that BP and the government are still floundering in dealing with the catastrophe and may be misleading the public.

The cap that was put on the ruptured well last week collected about 620,000 gallons of oil on Monday and funneled it to a ship at the surface, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the crisis. That would mean the cap is capturing better than half of the oil, based on the government's estimate that around 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons a day are leaking from the bottom of the sea.

A team of researchers and government officials assembled by the Coast Guard and run by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey is studying the flow rate and hopes to present its latest findings in the coming days on what is already the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

In an interview with The Associated Press, team member and Purdue University engineering professor Steve Wereley said it was a "reasonable conclusion" but not the team's final one to say that the daily flow rate is, in fact, somewhere between 798,000 gallons and 1.8 million gallons.

"BP is claiming they're capturing the majority of the flow, which I think is going to be proven wrong in short order," Wereley said. "Why don't they show the American public the before-and-after shots?"

He added: "It's strictly an estimation, and they are portraying it as fact."

Other members of the team also told AP they expect their findings to show higher numbers than the current government estimate, but they weren't ready to say how much higher.

To install the device snugly, BP engineers had to cut away the twisted and broken well pipe. That increased the flow of oil, similar to what happens when a kink is removed from a garden hose. BP and others warned that would happen. The government said the increase amounted to about 20 percent.

Asked about the containment effort and the uncertainties in estimating how much oil is escaping, Allen said: "I have never said this is going well. We're throwing everything we've got."

Paul Bommer, a University of Texas petroleum and geosystems engineering professor and member of the flow rate team, said cap seems to have made a "dent" in reducing the flow, but there is still a lot of oil coming out. That seemed clear from the underwater "spillcam" video, which continued to show a big plume of gas and oil billowing into the water.

The current equipment collecting the oil being brought to the surface is believed to be nearing its daily processing capacity. BP said it will boost capacity by bringing in a floating platform it believes can process most of the flow. The company also said it will use a device that vaporizes and burns off oil.

At the same time, BP is working to design a new cap that can capture more oil.

In the seven weeks since the oil rig explosion that set off the catastrophe, BP has had to improvise at every turn. The most recent government estimates put the total amount of oil lost at 23.7 million to 51.5 million gallons.

"I think virtually everybody from BP to the state to the Coast Guard was caught flat-footed and did not expect a spill of this magnitude," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University. "Everybody has been playing catch-up."

When asked why BP did not have containment systems on standby in case of a leak, BP spokesman Robert Wine said there was no reason to think an accident on this scale was likely.

"It's unprecedented," he said. "That's why these caps weren't there before."

Kenneth Arnold, an offshore drilling consultant and engineer, said the reason a bigger cap wasn't installed first was that BP probably wanted to start with what it could do quickly, which he said makes sense. He said BP has been working several solutions all along in parallel and deploying them as they can.

"They haven't been waiting for one to fail and then employing the next one," Arnold said.

He added: "The idea you can wave your arm at this and come to a magical solution is just from someone who doesn't understand the problem. We as a nation are used to instant gratification. There is a problem. We want someone to fix it tomorrow. Things are not always that easy."

Some answers may emerge next week, when BP CEO Tony Hayward will make his first appearance before Congress to answer questions in what will probably be a heated session, given the anger directed at BP.

The debate over the flow rate came as workers in bulldozers piled sand 6 feet high along barrier islands bordering Louisiana to protect the environmentally fragile areas from the spill, which has already coated islands and pelican rookeries in thick, brown, sticky crude.

"This is finally something that can help," fishing guide Dave Marino said of the sand barrier effort. "It looks like this is something that may work."

Attempts to skim the oil progressed as well. Boats fanned out across the Gulf, dragging boom in their wake in an attempt to corral the oil. But it's an enormous task.

In some spots, the oil is several inches thick and forms a brown taffy-like goo that sticks to everything it touches.

John Young, chairman of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish Council, said additional equipment has been ordered and more dredgers will be moving into the area soon, along with barges that will help block the passes.

"It's nice that BP has put up the money, but they need to ramp up not only the manpower but the equipment out there because we're losing the battle," Young said. "Unfortunately, we're on day 50 and it's too little too late, but I guess it's better late than never."

Meanwhile, researchers are beginning to obtain a clearer picture of the spill as they analyze water samples. For example, marine scientists found a 100-foot-thick layer of oil 1,300 feet below the surface about 45 miles from the well.

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