Authurstone has been leaving me a slew of little love notes regarding the Great Oil Spill, seems he wants a post on the topic.
I don’t have anything cogent to say about the accident, but feel free to discuss the ongoing mess caused by BP’s blatant disregard for expensive safety measures, the regulatory agency that was too cozy with industry to perform unbiased oversight, the administration’s clear lack of rapid response to Jindal’s requests for assistance and permits to mitigate the damage or we can all pile on the latest Liberal Bandwagon and bitch slap Obama for refusing to wave his super-duper magic wand to just plug the damn hole already!
Since I always enjoy a good liberal snit, consider the hounds released.
To hold out for a coherent workable plani is to kill the debate before it starts.
To offer a plan that has something to do with more regulation, is to advertise one’s own profound ignorance of the situation as it exists, as well as his inability to solve even the simplest problems. It is to say “that regulation back there didn’t work, for reasons I lack the balls to comprehend; but this new regulation I’m proposing now will make everything better.” It is to inarguably qualify for Einstein’s famous definition of insanity.
My plan? I already jotted it down thankyewverymuch.
Telling the hippies to fuck off…about one little thing. When & where & how did that get dismissed, everlastingly, in all situations, as an option?
Ooops, darn html. Darn keyboard on girlfriend’s laptop.
Plug the damn hole!!!
Excellent.
Drill. Baby. Drill.
The one thing in your article that struck a cord for me is this:
“the regulatory agency that was too cozy with industry to perform unbiased oversight”
This is an industry wide problem in the industrial arena. Companies OWN these governmental agencies that “regulate” them. More nasty ass, cancer causing chemicals get released in the Texas/Louisiana air annually than oil has been lost in the gulf since it started leaking. The only difference is that you can’t see the chemicals being released and they don’t kill cute animals or screw up the beaches. The fines handed down by these agencies are a joke, a mere rounding error for the industrial giants when they are “fined”… and they rarely are.
My guess is that this “disaster” is less than meets the eye.
Oh, I think it’s a real disaster. The economic impact on the shoreline states will be huge, and paying beached shrimpers to clean it up is an economic figleaf.
On the other hand, it’s not a catastrophe. The fish and birdies will come back a lot faster than folks realize. Nature will rush in to fill an ecological gap.
All that said, I’m not surprised that something like this happened. Deepwater wells are fiendishly complicated things, and when you’re doing complicated things, sooner or later a chain of events will occur that will render all safety precautions invalid. It’s not evil intent. It just happens.
Like Arthurstone. Having endured some of his sneering, supercilious commentary myself, I know: Arthurstone happens.
Arthur doesn’t need to be fed. He’s self-nourishing via autofellatio.
“Huge” is a meaningless term. Will the economic impact of this incident be greater than Katrina? I doubt it.
A great deal of the oil (50% or more) is being consumed (literally) by micro-organisms at the very bottom of the food chain, and as such their numbers are sure to grow (an exponential rise is possible). This should result in a similar rise in the numbers of all species up the food chain, which means in a year or two the price of shrimp (and the other goodies) from down there will plummet (being so abundant).
I suspect in the end, this “disaster” will be the greatest thing to happen to the Gulf fishing industry in centuries.
BP is considered the worst of the drillers by those in the industry–even corporations have different cultures. Rig roughnecks tell us each chief of the several crews on a rig has authority to shut down a well without seeking permission of executive authority. This was a case where the well would have been shut down in other cultures, but on this rig those who sought to do so were talked out of it. There is tremendous money and time pressure on the line, something like we saw in the final shuttle Columbia launch.
By the time the well erupted, there was no hydraulic pressure left to activate the elaborate deep water shutoff valve.
BP’s stock is reflecting bankrupty, so investors are expecting it’s assets will all go to the Gulf.
Gedayila is generally right on the spill, BTW, and generally is as close as will be gotten.
One other thing….
Annually, 48,000,000 barrels of oil (naturally) bubbles up from the Gulf sea floor. If there are 30,000 barrels coming out of the wellhead each day (a middling estimate), that would amount to ~10,000,000 barrels a year, about a quarter of the known natural seepage.
The Gulf ecosystem is well-adapted to the presence of this material. What is really threatened isn’t the ecosystem, isn’t the fishing industry or the oil industry. What is threatened is the tourism industry, for after all, who wants to go to the beach and sit or step on a tar ball.
So…
Right now the nation is in some kind of hysterical frenzy as if the end of all is close at hand. It isn’t. The tourism industry in the Gulf will be suing BP for decades. They’ll try and bleed BP dry.
There are tens of thousands of (previously) unemployed Southerners strolling up and down beaches with plastic bags and shovels soaking in the rays while casually poking around the sand for about 10 minutes out of every hour they’re paid.
“Environmentalists” get to rant and rave for free on national television.
The mass media has oily pelicans to put on its front pages and its newscasts.
This will all end when that stupid underwater camera shows nothing coming out of the well head. After that, the nation will forget about it quick.
Annually, 48,000,000 barrels of oil (naturally) bubbles up from the Gulf sea floor. If there are 30,000 barrels coming out of the wellhead each day (a middling estimate), that would amount to ~10,000,000 barrels a year, about a quarter of the known natural seepage.
There is, indeed, seepage, but I call bullshit on your reported quantity. If that were true, the beaches would be perpetually coated with tarballs.
Slow down Wraith. You’re not thinking clearly. The Gulf is lovely, vast, and deep. The coastline stretches from the tip of Florida all the way around to the coast of Honduras. I’ll leave it to you to calculate the length of said coastline and to recall that much oil is consumed or subsumed in the waters and that tarballs can be found on most shorelines of the world and have been since time immemorial.
La Wikipedia gives us some sense of how big this is:
“The Gulf of Mexico (Spanish: Golfo de México) is the eleventh largest[citation needed] body of water in the world. Considered a smaller part of the Atlantic Ocean, it is an ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. The shape of its basin is roughly oval and approximately 810 nautical miles (1,500 km) wide and filled with sedimentary rocks and debris. It is part of the Atlantic Ocean and is connected with it through the Florida Straits between the U.S. and Cuba, and with the Caribbean Sea (with which it forms the American Mediterranean Sea) via the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba. With this narrow connection to the Atlantic, the gulf experiences very small tidal ranges. The gulf basin is approximately 615,000 mi² (1.6 million km²). Almost half of the basin is shallow intertidal waters. At its deepest it is 14,383 ft (4,384 m) at the Sigsbee Deep, an irregular trough more than 300 nautical miles (550 km) long. The basin contains a volume of roughly 660 quadrillion gallons (2.5 × 1015 m3). It was probably formed approximately 300 million years ago as a result of the seafloor sinking.[1]”
Beware of the common mistake called the illusion of central position.
Here’s some help on the coastline of the US and Mexican stretches of the Gulf:
“The Gulf of Mexico’s eastern, north, and northwestern shores lie along the US states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The US portion of the Gulf coastline spans 1,680 miles (2,700 km), receiving water from thirty-three major rivers that drain 31 states.[6] The Gulf’s southwestern and southern shores lie along the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and the northernmost tip of Quintana Roo. The Mexican portion of the Gulf coastline spans 1,394 miles (2,243 km).”
That’s over 3,000 miles of coastline and we’re not even adding in Belize and Honduras, Cuba and the Carribean islands.
You’re right. I read barrels…was gallons:
Gallons, not barrels
Mea culpa.
From the article linked to above:
an MacDonald, the Florida State University professor who has gained attention with his estimate, based on aerial images, that the leak is five times the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, said nature will ultimately have to fix the gulf mess. “BP is not going to clean up this spill,” he said. “The Coast Guard is not going to clean up this spill. What’s going to clean up this spill is the physical, chemical, biological process of the good ol’, poor, downtrodden Gulf of Mexico.”
[my emphasis]
This is the point I was trying to make.
Man’s missteps are a poor imitation of nature’s indifference. Once upon a time man spent most of his era on earth within ice-ages, but that was before he knew how to whine.
And funny thing, whining didn’t apply toward the Soviet Union and it’s satellites despoiling the planet and its citizens. We hear nothing today from the left of what China does to its environment, people, or the world, other than we should be more like them. Chinese coal mine fires burn 200 million tons of coal a year.
Our excessive pursuit of safety and cleanliness is a pursuit of sterility by the sterile.
gedaliya
agreed:
”The Gulf ecosystem is well-adapted to the presence of this material.”
That’s what a TEXACO engineer told me when the Exxon Valdez spilled in Prince William Sound. Oil has always leaked from the ocean floor, and none the worse for the wear.
not agreed:
”There are tens of thousands of (previously) unemployed Southerners strolling up and down beaches with plastic bags and shovels soaking in the rays while casually poking around the sand for about 10 minutes out of every hour they’re paid”.
How do we know the people strolling up and down the beaches were not bussed in from Detroit or Chicago.
The non-union Southerners I’ve met seem willing to give
an honest days work for an honest pay.
Bacteria will indeed consume the oil and multiply exponentially, but this will consume the oxygen and EVERYTHING will die in the areas where the water is calm. How long it takes to recover is anyone’s guess.
Government’s job is to reflect the will of constituents, and of campaign donors, on an up-to-the-minute basis, so that the people at the top are re-elected. If we all woke up at 6:00 a.m. not giving a shit (for some reason) about the gulf, our government would stop offering the appearance of giving a shit about it by 6:02.
BP’s job is to provide a return on investment to its shareholders.
Anybody involved in this sad circus, who is to be judged as a wonderful person or a sad pathetic sonofabitch, because of the abundance or dearth of their genuine concern about this oil spill…no matter where they work…is a loathsome, execrable creature. Given that premise, that is where sound logic leads us. So let’s just agree to it and move on.
You’re making this up. First of all, there are no “areas where the water is calm” in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.
But be that as it may…
As sourced above, there are about 1.07 million barrels of oil annually released into the Gulf via natural seepage. This oil disappears via numerous mechanisms, i.e., some of it evaporates at the surface, much is consumed by micro-organisms deep below the surface, some solid material drops to the sea floor after precipitating out of the goo, and some tiny amounts wash up against the shore line, be it marsh or beach, usually in the form of “tar balls.”
The BP gusher is releasing somewhere between 5K and 30K barrels of oil a day, which would take between 35 and 210 days to match the annual natural seepage. This incident will probably last somewhere around 100 days, meaning it will release between 1/2 and 3 times the annual natural seepage.
Given those facts, it is simply ridiculous (and fatuous) to assert that the bacteria consuming the oil will “consume the oxygen and EVERYTHING will die in the areas where the water is calm.”
What is more likely to occur is a bloom of life all along the food chain beginning with those hungry little buggers at the bottom, who happily chomp away at what they consider to be the most delicious and delectable supply of victuals in all of creation: crude oil compounds, served up aplenty by both man and nature.
The areas of Prince William Sound, NOT involved in the pressure washed and chemically cleaned procedures, recovered faster and more competely.
My husband, an environmental engineer (industry side), specializes in large scale remediation of contaminated ground and water.
He agrees with Gedaliya’s assessment, in most respects.
This seems very much like the Ixtoc spill of 1979, which one rarely remembers which was much larger than Exxon Valdez
or the Cadiz or any of a host of others. It does seem to managed less adroitly than the Mexican Govt and that’s saying something
Keep in mind that the Ixtoc gusher was in only 160 feet of water, lasted 10 months, and put out an estimated volume of 3,000,000 barrels of oil.
Ixtoc Spill Facts
This spill will be far less serious than than that.
Priorities
Or, how an engineer and a politician approaches a problem…
“Let’s work the problem people.”
(~NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, during the Apollo 13 crisis – 1970)
“I want to know whose ass to kick!”
(~President Barack Hussein Obama, during the gulf oil spill – 2010)
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