Chile Forum

patagoniax wrote:

Ellen-y-Rene wrote:how a government does not (want) to handle an oil spill??

1. This has nothing to do with Chile.
Nor do many things on this forum.... not many rules for/against content here?
(- notwithstanding sex~drugs~guns~and...???)
2. Crude oil is literally organic
organic~inorganic... a tar ball, by any other name, would smell as crude
and has been spilling into the environment for thousands of years before there were Chile forums..
agreed, in principle - but don't negate quantity, nor potential distribution, nor disregard potentially huge associated methane releases, nor forget unapproved toxic dispersants in the mix...
Nor, perhaps most importantly, holism before reductionism?
3. Crude oil breaks down naturally in the environment, more quickly in warm climates,
ah, yes... such a summer on the Gulf coast... happy holidaze
and does no permanent damage to other than political systems, which are inherently ephemeral, irrational, and disposable.
ja, ja, ja, ja... good one
Sure, Ma Nature can shrug this off in a year or two, or a decade or two... no worries.
But, we'll see how the "non-permanent" job~income~lifestyle "damage" pans out for those affected
In 20 years years nobody will remember this year's oil spill, just as nobody can remember the last time there was a "world's largest oil spill that will destroy all life as we know it."
With maximization, the flip side is minimization... truth is in the middle, as usual.
Good to know none of us live on the Gulf coast... perspective is everything, right?
Might be interesting to talk to the locals in 10-20 yrs. and see if they might agree in retrospect about their "... life as they know it"?
As long as the NIMBY principle works... we'll let others worry... until it gets "personal"

...the Exxon-Valdez spill (which, patagoniax correctly notes, has been largely forgotten).

The political and industrial reaction to this spill DOES have the potential to affect fuel prices in Chile, as everywhere that uses petroleum.

Aaaahhh... NOW, its getting personal

Faster than anybody expected? Hardly. The people who really know the natural degradation processes of oil and who have observed past oil spills knew that the sky was not falling. But it's much more fun to publish stories that life as we know it is going to end in 15 minutes unless we all go down to the beach and pull our hair out.

BP's Rosy Predictions Are B.S. -- Scientists Say Gulf Spill Will Have Catastrophic Impact for Generations
Contrary to recent media reports of a quick recovery in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and biologists are "deeply concerned" about impacts that will likely span "several decades".

"My prediction is that we will be dealing with the impacts of this spill for several decades to come and it will outlive me," Dr. Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, told IPS, "I won't be here to see the recovery."

Cake's grim assessment stems partially from a comparison he made to the Exxon Valdez oil disaster and the second largest oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (BP's being the largest), that of the Ixtoc-1 blowout well in the Bay of Campeche in 1979.

"The impacts of the Exxon Valdez are still being felt 21 years later," Cake said, "The impacts of the Ixtoc-1 are still being felt and known, 31 years later. I know folks who study oysters in bays in the Yucatan Peninsula, and oysters there have still not returned, 31 years later. So as an oyster biologist I'm concerned about that. Those things are still affected 31 years later, and that was a smaller spill by comparison."

He is also concerned about deepwater habitats. Given that BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of chemically toxic dispersants, the vast majority of the oil has remained beneath the surface, and much of that has sunk to the sea floor.

As an example, he cited "a new coral colony ecosystem" within 10 miles of BP's blowout Macondo Well, which was found by a pipeline company whilst it was producing an environmental impact assessment statement of the route of the pipeline.

"They found some amazing coral communities that no one knew about, and now they will be covered in oil," Cake said, "Those will not recover."

Dr. Stephen Cofer-Shabica, an oceanographer in South Carolina, focuses on the biology of barrier islands. He monitored the affects of the Ixtoc-1 oil disaster on Padre Island National Seashore in south Texas.

"You can go back now, 31 years later, and there's still oil in the sand there [Padre Island]," he told IPS. But his main concern is now about what the state of Louisiana is doing in response to BP's oil disaster.

Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal has authorized the dredging and building of sand berms near Louisiana's barrier islands in an effort to keep oil away from the shore. One area where the dredging project is still underway is the Chandeleur Islands.

"The Chandeleur project is totally futile and a waste of resources, and I can't believe they are still doing it," Dr. Cofer-Shabica said, "That's what I find totally unfathomable. There's oil floating around underwater, that has been dispersed and these barrier islands, as constructs, will not have any effect on that oil at all."

According to Dr. Cofer-Shabica, the so-called fix is actually a hugely destructive problem. "From an oceanographic perspective, this was biologically destructive, especially when you start digging up the bottom in shallow water, and building these barrier islands."

He added, "Louisiana is in a precarious position anyway because of the subsiding that is happening in the delta, and on top of that you have worldwide sea-level rise, so it has two physical factors that are working against its marshes. So building barrier islands to presumably keep oil out, amidst rising sea levels, makes no sense."

In addition to this, he said that the biological impacts of building islands "are larger than the physical impacts," and said this of dredging sediment from those areas: "You're in shallow water that is biologically rich with clams, worms, and bacteria, that will all be dug up and destroyed."

Dr. Cake is also worried about oil contaminating the oysters. He has seen much oil in Louisiana's marshes. "One of the experts with us worked for NOAA on the Exxon Valdez spill, and he told me if the oil is on the marsh grass, it's in the oysters."

BP and the Coast Guard are currently under scrutiny for having used so much oil dispersant, an industrial solvent that breaks up the oil so that it will sink below the surface.

For example, a 1979 report, "Effects of Corexit 9527 on the Hatchability of Mallard Eggs" in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, showed that even though dispersants are applied to minimise oil impacts to visible and charismatic species, Corexit actually enhances the lethal effects of crude oil on birds that are exposed.

Corexit 9527 penetrates eggshells and shell membranes as readily as crude oil. When applied to an eggshell near the embryo, the embryo would fuse to the shell membrane and die within 24 hours.

"Corexit breaks the oil up into micro-globules," Dr. Cake said, "That's the harmful part for oysters. Oysters are filter feeders, and they feed on a range of three to 12 millionths of a meter as particles. You can grind up graphite from a pencil in fine enough particles and they'll run it through their system. It's the same with the micro- globules of oil. They'll be taken in, but in going through the system, and in absorbing some of that oil, it'll cause lesions. So it's actually what the Corexit does to the oil that'll affect the oysters in the end."

According to Dr. Cake, his study teams have people watching and monitoring affected areas.

"In the past month, in Bretton and Chandeleur Sounds, oil was there during the day, it was sprayed with Corexit at night, and the next day it was gone. Where did it go? It went to the bottom, and that's adjacent to where these oyster farms are. So at that point, there's a lot less water for that Corexit to disperse into, and there may be an impact from that on the oysters."

Cake said that while scientists have found very large plumes of dispersed oil at depth, "I'm not sure that oil will ever get here as dispersed clouds. It's getting here as sunken clouds, because that's what they [BP] wanted it to do. Sink it, get it out of sight out of mind."

Chasidy Hobbs with Emerald Coastkeeper in Pensacola, Florida, is on the City of Pensacola Environmental Advisory Board and Escambia County Citizens Environmental Committee. Hobbs also directs the environmental litigation research firm, Geography and Environment.

"We're poisoning the entire Gulf of Mexico food web," Hobbs, who is also an instructor and advisor in the Environmental Studies Department at University of West Florida, told IPS. "It's crazy, and it's criminal. I'm deeply concerned with the long-term ecological and human impact."

Dr. Cake is among a large and growing group of scientists who are discussing a grim future for much of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP's disaster.

"The oil itself on the bottom is being eaten by bacteria. This has always been the case in naturally occurring seeps across the Gulf. But now we've introduced much more oil, and as the bacteria grow they are consuming the oxygen that is in that area. And that oxygen loss will result in dead/hypoxic zones, like the one off the West side of the Mississippi over towards Galveston where there's one that is 3,000 square mile area of dead bottom. Now we're looking at that along the eastern part because of the presence of so much more bacteria."

Oil Spill Calculations Stir Debate on Damage

The Obama administration’s latest report on the Gulf of Mexico disaster set off a war of words Wednesday among scientists, Gulf Coast residents and political pundits about what to make of the Deepwater Horizon spill and its aftermath.

The report, the subject of an extended White House briefing, claimed that most of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil that have leaked into the gulf could be accounted for, that much of it was effectively gone already, and that most of the remaining oil was in a highly diluted form. The implication of the report was that future damage from the oil might be less than had been feared.

That suggestion was not happily received on the Gulf Coast, where people are still coping with the collapse of fishing and tourism and saw the report as fresh evidence that the Obama administration was preparing to abandon them in the same way they felt the Bush administration did after Hurricane Katrina.

Gulf residents pointed to oiled beaches, blackened marshes and dead birds as evidence that, whatever the future damage from the remaining oil, the damage already done was severe enough.
.....
Even among scientists specializing in the issues raised by the new report, splits emerged Wednesday about how much credence to give it.

Some researchers attacked the findings and methodology, calling the report premature at best and sloppy at worst. They noted that considerable research was still under way to shed light on some of the main scientific issues raised in the report.

“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” said Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia who has led some of the most important research on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”

One of the most experienced gulf researchers, said the report, if anything, might have underestimated the amount of oil that had effectively gone away or been dispersed. He expressed concern, however, that dispersed oil in the deep ocean might not break down quickly.
...
The estimates in the report “are better than nothing, and probably not very far off,” he said. “They have measured all the easy stuff to measure, and the rest will be very difficult to measure if not impossible. So I suspect it is not going to get a whole lot better than this.”

The heart of the debate is the applicability, in a situation like the gulf spill, of the scientific technique known as modeling. In that approach, scientists build an elaborate computer program, incorporating numerous best guesses, to try to answer complex questions that cannot be tackled any other way.

In this case, the report’s authors started with an estimate from another government scientific team: how much oil spewed from the out-of-control BP well before it was capped on July 15. That calculation was itself the product of a drawn-out controversy in which the government was accused of deliberately playing down the size of the spill in the early days.

Starting with the latest estimate, 4.9 million barrels plus or minus 10 percent, a scientific team led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration incorporated various assumptions about the nature of the oil and the fates it could have encountered after hitting the water. (NOAA is the same agency that devised the early, now-discredited estimate that the well was leaking only 5,000 barrels a day, one reason some people distrust the new report.)

The firmest number in the report is that 17 percent of the oil emerging from the wellhead was captured by various containment devices. From there, the numbers got less certain.

The report estimated, for instance, that 25 percent of the oil either evaporated from the hot ocean surface or dissolved in the water into individual molecules of hydrocarbon. Some scientists, Dr. Joye among them, said they doubted that more than 10 percent or 15 percent of the BP oil had disappeared in this way.

Bill Lehr, a NOAA scientist in Seattle who was involved in creating the model, said the figure was based on both direct measurement and past scientific research about the fate of spilled oil. Efforts to refine the estimate, and the rest of the model, are continuing, he said.

Dr. Lehr said one difficulty was figuring out how much oil had dispersed naturally into tiny droplets. The accepted methodology for making that calculation is based on shallow spills. In this one, the oil shot out of the broken well at high speed a mile below the ocean surface, and some of it dispersed in the deep ocean. A new formula had to be created to take that factor into account.

When all the math was done, the government team concluded that about 16 percent of the oil had dispersed naturally. “We think it’s sound theory, but it’s new,” Dr. Lehr said. “You could say it’s an experiment in that respect. You do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

Similarly, the report offered calculations about how much oil had been burned or skimmed from the ocean surface, how much had been chemically dispersed, and so forth.

By a process of elimination, the researchers concluded that only 26 percent of the oil had come ashore or was still in the water in a form that could, in principle, do additional shoreline damage. And much of that was breaking down quickly in the warm waters of the gulf, the report said.

Of course, that 26 percent equals more than 53 million gallons of oil, five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

“One way of looking at it is to say that 26 percent of the world’s largest oil spill is still out there,” said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society. “And that is a lot of oil.”

Obama declares Gulf disaster “coming to an end”

The Obama administration on Wednesday stepped up its efforts to declare the Gulf oil catastrophe at an end.

The public relations campaign, which is based on little scientific evidence, aims to bury the ongoing disaster in advance of the midterm elections, protect BP from further financial damages, and accelerate deep-sea oil drilling operations under the same environment of total deregulation that led to the April 20 blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

In the morning, the Obama administration’s National Incident Command issued a three-page report, "BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened to the Oil?," that all but declared the blowout to be an insignificant event.

Hours later BP claimed success in its latest effort to seal the Macondo well. The “static kill” process of pumping heavy mud into the well’s blowout preventer worked, BP declared, paving the way for the completion of two relief wells later this month. It is impossible to independently verify BP’s claims.

Later in the day, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulators, appearing before a Congressional hearing, gave an ex post facto clean bill of health to the spill response’s heavy use of the chemical dispersant Corexit 9500, which is known to be highly toxic.

Finally, speaking to a convention of AFL-CIO officials on Wednesday, Obama hailed the latest developments and stated that "the long battle to stop the leak and contain the oil is finally close to coming to an end.”

Residents of the Gulf can only take Obama’s words and the day’s media events as an ominous warning. Cleanup operations, which BP has already begun to scale back, will soon enough be brought to a halt. The enormous dose of toxins dumped into the sea and on the coastline will be left to “Mother Nature,” as Obama environmental advisor Carol Browner put it. Workers who have lost their jobs and business owners who face bankruptcy will be left to their own devices. And the public health crisis—whose initial manifestation in sick cleanup workers has been largely hidden—will be denied.

On the other hand, all of the day’s events and pronouncements redound to the benefit of BP. The political purpose of the campaign was underlined by Senate Democrats’ abandonment of a bill that would have put in place new safety measures for offshore drilling and would have raised the federal liability cap on corporations responsible for oil spills, which is currently set at the absurdly low level of $75 million.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed the removal of the bill from floor debate, which he claimed to be a temporary measure, on Republican opposition. In reality the bill had little support among Democrats and faced open opposition from oil state Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska. The oil industry cheered the decision.

On Tuesday, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, indicated that the Obama administration is likely to lift its ban on issuing permits for new deep-sea drilling operations ahead of its scheduled November 30 expiration. "I think it is everybody's hope that we will feel comfortable enough that the moratorium can be lifted significantly in advance of Nov. 30," Bromwich said. The moratorium was largely a palliative measure that only affected 33 drilling operations. It nonetheless triggered massive opposition from the oil industry.

The move toward resumption of deep-sea oil drilling needed a “scientific” cover that minimizes the scope of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. This was provided on Wednesday by the National Incident Command’s rosy assessment, "BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget: What Happened to the Oil?”

According to the study, one fourth of all oil from the spill was captured or burned by BP, another fourth has been dissolved or evaporated through natural processes, and another fourth has been broken into tiny particles either through natural process or chemical dispersants. The remaining quarter has settled into sediment and seashore. The report declares the dispersed oil to be harmless.

The report is ostensibly based on the work of several government agencies. But there is almost no evidence offered in the thin report to substantiate the assertions, and still less reason to trust the agencies who ostensibly supplied the data. NOAA, for example, notoriously insisted until mid-June that the daily spill rate was 5,000 barrels per day—less than one tenth of the actual total.

"There's some science here, but mostly it's spin, and it breaks my heart to see them do it," commented University of South Florida oceanographer Ian McDonald. "This is an unfortunate report. I'm afraid this continues a track record of doubtful information distributed through NOAA."

Gulf coast workers also expressed distrust of the report. "There are still boats out there every day working, finding turtles with oil on them and seeing grass lines with oil in it," charter boat captain Randy Boggs, of Orange Beach, Alabama, told the Associated Press. "Certainly all the oil isn't accounted for. There are millions of pounds of tar balls and oil on the bottom."

"As soon as BP gets this oil out of sight, they'll get it out of mind, and we'll be left to deal with it alone," said crabber Oliver Rudesill, 28, of Yscloskey, Louisiana.

Scientists expressed similar doubts over EPA and NOAA claims that the use of chemical dispersants—1.8 million gallons in total—has proven harmless.

Lousiana State University oceanographer Robert Carney told the Wall Street Journal that the EPA’s testing method is similar to attempting to assess the immediate health impact of eating a large amount of sugar.

"It would conclude that it isn't great for our health but it isn't going to kill us, yet a lifetime of sugar can kill you," he said. "We worry about similar things in the environment."

Early in the spill, the EPA ordered BP to suspend use of Corexit. The oil giant, which has close personnel ties to the chemical’s manufacturer, Nalco, simply refused, and the Obama administration backed down.

The EPA’s subsequent endorsement of the chemical is not entirely supported within its ranks. EPA senior policy analyst Hugh Kaufman has publicly attacked the use of the dispersant.

The dispersants were used “to hide the magnitude of the spill and save BP money,” Kaufman told Democracy Now on July 20. “And the government—both EPA, NOAA, etc.—have been sock puppets for BP in this cover-up. Now, by hiding the amount of spill, BP is saving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines.”

“Consequently, we have people, wildlife—we have dolphins that are hemorrhaging,” Kaufman continued. “People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do. EPA now is taking the position that they really don’t know how dangerous it is, even though if you read the label, it tells you how dangerous it is. And, for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around fifty. It’s very dangerous, and it’s an economic—it’s an economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public.”

Local media accounts from the Gulf reveal that BP is accelerating its shut-down of the cleanup effort.

In Destin, Florida, located about 30 miles east of Pensacola, representatives from BP, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Coast Guard on Tuesday told a town hall meeting of cleanup workers—largely displaced fishermen and charter boat operators—that they would scale back the “Vessels of Opportunity” program because no oil was being found in the area, according to the Destin Log.

This brought an angry reaction from fishermen, who said that oil was in fact being recovered. “A lot of the product that’s been turned in is not being reported,” said boat captain Joey Verkes. “Sunday afternoon, they turned in 67 25-pound bags of oiled absorbent materials.” Other fishermen enrolled in the program complained that they had yet to be put to work.

And in Alabama, a firm contracting cleanup work for BP, Plant Performance Services, announced that it was cutting the hourly pay of cleanup workers by $4 to $10, a local news station reported. Workers will now receive as little as $14 per hour for the dangerous job, which has sickened hundreds, and perhaps thousands, up and down the Gulf Coast.

This shows that BP are lying about having capped the gushing well. I captured this video a couple hours after BP issued a press release claiming that their "static kill" procedure had successfully taken control of the well. Kudos to Youtube user "2010MsBambi" for tipping me off to this -- watch his excellent 4-part video series about this topic at Youtube. But what would take you 40 minutes to hear him explain I can do for you in a fraction of the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDZx6ZCZCGg&feature=player_embedded

The Skandi ROV #1, one of the pair that were parked in front of the oil gusher all those weeks, was moved after the tropical storm came through the Gulf. It is now parked in front of "Well A," the one that BP first attempted, then capped and abandoned after problems developed. They then drilled "Well B" which is the one that blew Deepwater Horizon out of the water and was and still is gushing oil.

BP claim that they are showing you video of a capped Well B, which is a lie. Go to the government's own web site and download the paperwork that BP filed for the MC252 survey zone:

Mineral Management Service PDF File
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/PLANS/29/29977.pdf

Well A is located at map coordinates X=1202804 and Y=10431617.

Well B is located at map coordinates X=1202514 and Y=10432914.

The Skandi ROV, parked on the wellhead BP claims is Well B's, is at map coordinates X=1202778 and Y=1043165**2, with two numbers not clear from the video.

NOTE: The date appears as 4/8 instead of 8/4 because the Skandi ROVs are based in Europe and that is their dating convention.

This is hands-down proof that BP are lying and showing pictures of the neat, clean cap they put months and months ago on Well A before moving Deepwater Horizon over Well B's location and starting to drill it. The oil is still coming out Well B and BP cannot stop it so they are lying to limit their financial damages.

BP used Tropical Storm Bonnie as an excuse to pull all the ROVs from the water and then reposition the Skandis and probably others as well at the clean, capped Well A, which was capped well before problems started happening to Well B. That's the missing piece in this whole game. Well B, the one that cause all this mess, is still wide open and BP and the dumb media are lying to you.

from MSM...
"The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected
...The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone...
...there was no oil to be seen.
...The gulf has an immense natural capacity to break down oil, which leaks into it at a steady rate from thousands of natural seeps. Although none of the seeps is anywhere near the size of the Deepwater Horizon leak, they do mean that the gulf is swarming with bacteria that can eat oil.
...Perhaps the most important cause of the oil’s disappearance, some researchers suspect, is that the oil has been devoured by microbes.
Typically, there are enough microbes in the ocean to consume half of any oil spilled in a month or two... there are reasons to think that the process may occur more quickly in the Gulf than in other oceans.
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Faster than anybody expected? Hardly. The people who really know the natural degradation processes of oil and who have observed past oil spills knew that the sky was not falling. But it's much more fun to publish stories that life as we know it is going to end in 15 minutes unless we all go down to the beach and pull our hair out.

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