Tag: Louisiana

On Responding To Oil, Or, “Disaster, Or Emergency, Or Neither?”

We’re now into day way too many of the BP oil spill, and the President has just yesterday been down on the Louisiana coast-again.

There have been suggestions that the Administration should take action to essentially push BP out of the way and take over the work itself, particularly as it relates to the cleanup.

It may have even occurred to you that an official declaration of some sort might be needed, in order to bring the full power of the Feds into play.

That’s some good thinking, but before we go jumping right into declaring things we better understand the law, because if we don’t, we could actually make things worse.

The River…”The Body of the Nation”

Mark Twain called the basin of the Mississippi River, “The Body of the Nation.” It gathers slowly in the upper midwest. It is fed from a remarkable number of rivers and a remarkable number of states. It winds its way though the center, through the very soul of our country. There are countless stories and mythologies and poems written in homage to this beautiful languid body of water. There are lives who live and breathe because the river flows. There are whole ecosystems depending on the great artery to bring them life.



Earth Observatory…NASA

Crap in the Box – Gas Frozen in Oil Catch Dome

Remember Blue Popsicles ?

  Environment,tragedy,Oil Spill,Climate

 The Pipes on the Outhouse Froze.    photo, Navy.  color, ARC.

Cimate: Today’s Gulf Images, Govt Denies Spread Potential of 19 mil oil gallons to Florida

Today is Tuesday, May the 4th, the 2 week anniversary of the blowout, fire, and sinking of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. 14 days x 5000 barrels per day, = 70,000 barrels, or  2,940,000 gallons of oil so far have been dumped into the Gulf.   For my earlier diary today, with satellite photos from the past weekend, go here:

This Oil Spill is Bigger Than Delaware, You Idiots!

There are new satellite pictures from today which show the spread of the oil slick has continued west and south.

Climate: This Oil Spill is Bigger Than Delaware, You Idiots!

The BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig failed on Tuesday evening April 20, 2010, 14 days ago.

This is what it looked like Saturday, May 1st.   I took a satellite picture from the NRL Monterey of the Gulf of Mexico that was showing biological substances, cropped it, and color enhanced it by playing with the settings on iphoto, to make the colors have more contrast. Since oil is based on organics, this made it show up better, and I could recreate, roughly, what the LSU ESL  was doing to get the oil to show up on their pictures I posted previously.  Because there were thunderstorms this past weekend, the area was obscured by cloud cover often.  I also noticed the government was not putting up daily picture updates.

climate Nature

May 1, 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon’s oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, photo NRL Monterey, color enhanced by ARC  The thicker part of the slick is the part that looks like a bird’s beak pointing upside down off the New Orleans Louisiana Delta, which is to the left in green and pink. Pink is the coastline, drawn in.  The greenish tint is where the slick is thinner.  The blue is the water.  

*

*

This is the same picture from May 1st, larger area,  without my increasing the color contrast.

Climate Nature

May 1, 2010, BP Deepwater Horizon’s Oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, photo NRL Monterey.  The heavier part of the slick is gray, the lighter part of the slick is very hard to see, but is there and greenish grey.  The coast outline is drawn in pink by the website.  The ^ triangle to the north in the shoreline is the Bay of Mobile, Alabama.  To find the origin of the slick, look down from the left side of that triangle of the Mobile Bay and come out from the Delta about at a 45ยบ degree angle, where the lines would meet, is roughly where the broken drill rig is.   Where the up and down brilliant blue longitude line is to the right touches shore, is where Pensicola Bay is in the Florida panhandle.

*

*

As you can see from this larger view, the slick actually has spread quite a bit towards the Florida Panhandle by Saturday the 1st.

Climate Nature

5/1/2010,  Larger view of Gulf with BP DH Oil slick southwest of the New Orleans delta, spreading towards Alabama and Florida.

*

*

Sunday May 2-  This lovely overlay picture below is the satellite of the eastern half of the US, including the gulf of Mexico,  with the wind direction and speed marked on it.  Think of the little color icons as brooms with the stick end pointing towards what way the wind is going, and the bigger the broom, the faster.  There were several thunderstorm fronts moving thru to the southeast, and the wind in the Gulf is spinning in a clockwise manner, driving the waves and the oil around and around and easterly at the same time.

This is known as the “Conveyer Belt.” photo NRL Monterey

  Climate Nature  

Wind Direction on Sunday the 2nd, showing the Gulf’s classic “Conveyor Belt.”

The other thing you can see here is a big low pressure system spinning off the eastern coast and it’s spinning counterclockwise.  Look at Florida.  Now look at Cuba, the long island under it, then to its right, the island with Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and to the right of that, little bitty Puerto Rico, the rectangle island.

Do you see how small Puerto Rico is ?  Do you see how big the oil slick is, in the first picture ?   Do you know how stupid White House Correspondent Cokie Roberts looked, prattling about how the oil slick is so big it was as big as Puerto Rico, all day Saturday, when she wasn’t blathering about the White House Correspondent’s dinner ?    

‘Gag-inducing’ fuel smell wafting over New Orleans (updated)

New Orleans residents are understandably annoyed over their city being enveloped by the smell of fuel. Mandie Landry, an attorney who works in the city’s Central Business District, told Yahoo! News that “it smells like it’d smell if a bus was in front of you blowing out exhaust fumes right in your face.”

Another local resident, Tulane University employee Laura Mogg, told us that she caught wind of the “terrible” and “gag-inducing” smell from her office building on the school’s sprawling uptown campus. “I smelled it the second I opened the door,” she said. “Really, it’s that strong.”

How many weeks/months will people in Louisiana and other states be forced to breathe these poisonous fumes as wave upon wave of toxic sludge hits their shores?  

What kinds short and long term health problems can these millions of people expect as a result?

We have yet to even remotely grasp the ecological, human and economic damage this disaster will cause.  Indeed, the more I read the more I fear that when the final butcher’s bill is taken, Deepwater Horizon could very well rival Chernobyl on the all time list of man-made disasters.  

And the most horrible part of all?  Nobody can do a damn thing to stop it.  

Climate: Oil’s Coming Ashore For Weeks in Louisiana Gulf

Last night, McClatchy reported that the first globs of crude oil from the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon were washing up on to the Louisiana delta shores of the Gulf Coast.  

The wind forecast for today in the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans, Louisiana, is from the southeast.

http://forecast.weather.gov/Ma…

climate Nature

Map of April 30 2010 Friday forecast of the BP Oil spill trajectory, in tan. Other days shown in other colors. Black asterisk at lower tip of light blue shows location of broken Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico.  Image courtesy of NOAA

To Attract Tourists, Louisiana Governor Announces Free Oil Giveaway

Baton Rouge (FNS)-Facing both a massive oil slick from a sunken offshore drilling platform and a second year of declining tourism revenues along the Louisiana Gulf Coast caused by high gas prices, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal today introduced a new tourism promotion that he reports is going to “…make lemons into lemonade”.

Jindal, flanked by British Petroleum’s Director of Marketing Dick Timoneous and the Executive Director of the Louisiana State Tourism Board, Jenna Talia, announced that the “All The Oil You Can Carry Festival” would officially commence today just east of New Orleans, and last at least through the month of May.

Climate: Burn, Baby, Burn (Updated- Much More Oil)

God said a fire, not a flood next time.

A “Controlled” Burn of giant oil slick in Gulf of Mexico begins by our Coast Guard, to attempt to prevent landfall of the unprocessed crude oil gushing out of the destroyed BP Deepwater Horizon rig’s wellhead for a week.   In spite of having four remotely operated submarines working nearly a mile underwater,  trying to jigger the automatic shut off valves, the well continues to blow out at least 42,000 gallons of crude a day.

“They lit it with a little float that has a fuel source on it that floats into the oil and ignites,” Petty Officer Cory Mendenhall told AFP. “It did successfully ignite.”

The first burn was lit at around 4.45pm local time (7.45am AEST) and officials said any fires would have to be extinguished by nightfall. Sunset is at 7.27pm local time.

“We think those few extra words are worth the effort.”

Photobucket

I’m on the levees.org email list and I got a message from them today:

Thanks to you, Levees.org was featured in the New York Times!

The article focused on our success in encouraging national media to report accurately on the man-made causes of the metro New Orleans flood.

And making the true story about the flooding as common knowledge as ‘the sun rising in the east’ will help the region recover.

This fine piece of journalism by reporter Brian Stelter greatly increases the reach of Levees.org message!

And it gives evidence that your ongoing efforts are paying off.

And that’s good because when the American people understand that the flooding was a federal responsibility, they may understand that rebuilding is a federal duty.

Thank you for your support!

We’re winning!

Sandy Rosenthal

Founder, Levees.org

levees.org

Here’s the New York Times story.

Climate:The Gulf’s Spreading Oil Slick & a History of BP

In oceania, no one can hear you seep.

The U.S. Coast Guard “discovered” 4 days after an explosion destroyed and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig 40 miles off the coast of Venice, Louisiana,  killing 11 crew workers, that indeed, oil does appear to be leaking out of the well head on the floor of the ocean.

From HuffPo this morning:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…


“We thought what we were dealing with as of yesterday was a surface residual (oil) from the mobile offshore drilling unit,” (Rear Admiral Mary) Landry said. “In addition to that is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday … This is a very serious spill, absolutely.”

Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels – or 42,000 gallons – of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles (underwater) and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday – about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said.

BP PLC, which leased the rig and is taking the lead in the cleanup, and the government have been using the remotely operated vehicles to try to stop the leak by closing valves on the well deep underwater.  If that doesn’t work, the company could drill what’s called an intervention well to control the oil flow. But the intervention drilling could take months.

The article says that the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker wreck in Alaska was 11 million gallons.   By dividing 11 million by 42,000 gallons, assuming the government is not lowballing this estimated amount, which seems like a nice, suspiciously round number, “1000 barrels,”  I’m coming up with 261 days before this is as big as the Exxon Valdez spill.  The regional director for the Federal government’s Mineral Management Services (the wonderful folk who let the companies bid on offshore drilling tracts) says that leaks have been repaired at this depth before, but it is difficult.  Bad weather is currently delaying the cleanup of already spilt oil.  

New Orleans is not Haiti

Ever since the Haiti earthquake happened, it has invited quite a few comparisons to the disaster brought about in New Orleans by the federal flood. There are even those in the mainstream media who have asked if this quake is going to turn out to be Obama’s “Katrina.”

This is not surprising because there are some similarities in the situations–for example, the slowness in rescuing and getting aid to the survivors–which reminds casual observers of the way New Orleanians had to wait a week for food, water and rescue after her levees failed. Also, these catastrophes are manmade–Haiti’s because of shoddily-constructed buildings, New Orleans’ because of poorly-built and maintained levees–both of which had been disasters waiting to happen.

Load more