Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico

I live on the Gulf Coast, in the very northwestern part of Florida. The oil is supposed to come on shore Tuesday. It was only 70 miles away this morning. What a mess. Our beaches here have sugar white sand. Our tourist season just started a month ago. There is so going to such an horrible impact here environmentally and economically. They're setting out booms, and trying to stop the oil from coming ashore. I don't know how much they can prevent.

Kay wrote:I live on the Gulf Coast, in the very northwestern part of Florida. The oil is supposed to come on shore Tuesday. It was only 70 miles away this morning. What a mess. Our beaches here have sugar white sand. Our tourist season just started a month ago. There is so going to such an horrible impact here environmentally and economically. They're setting out booms, and trying to stop the oil from coming ashore. I don't know how much they can prevent.

It is the most heartbreaking thing I can imagine and the domino effect will be devastating for months maybe years.

I wonder how Sarah Palin feels about her Drill baby, Drill, idiotic comment now.

Percy wrote:

Kay wrote:I live on the Gulf Coast, in the very northwestern part of Florida. The oil is supposed to come on shore Tuesday. It was only 70 miles away this morning. What a mess. Our beaches here have sugar white sand. Our tourist season just started a month ago. There is so going to such an horrible impact here environmentally and economically. They're setting out booms, and trying to stop the oil from coming ashore. I don't know how much they can prevent.

It is the most heartbreaking thing I can imagine and the domino effect will be devastating for months maybe years.

I wonder how Sarah Palin feels about her Drill baby, Drill, idiotic comment now.

I believe this well is part of the old drilling policy, not the new expansion. It does not seem that it has changed anyone's mind:

The Obama administration said on Monday that it remains "premature"
to rule out including additional offshore drilling as part of
comprehensive energy legislation, even as Senate Democrats warn that
such a provision would make the bill "dead on arrival."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the president will
determine whether to stay with or abandon his call for additional
drilling off various parts of the coast once he gets the findings of an
investigation into the massive oil spill in the Gulf.

"The president was specific in ordering [Department of Interior]
Secretary [Ken] Salazar to look at all the possible aspects of what
could go wrong in this instance [and] to report back to him in that
thirty day period," Gibbs said in response to a question from the
Huffington Post. "This is an administration that is going to take any
information we can get from that and have that dictate our decision
making going forward. I think it would be premature to get too far ahead
of where Secretary Salazar's investigation is."

While the White House declines to fully abandon offshore drilling in
light of the current spill, others in the Senate are ramping up their
opposition. On Friday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl.) said any energy bill
that included such exploration in its legislative language would be
"dead on arrival" in the Senate. His office went even further,
speculating that larger energy bill itself was now all but impassable in
the Senate.

"It's dead on arrival if it contains oil drilling," an aide said, "if it doesn't have offshore
drilling then you don't have Republicans."

Over the weekend, the lone Republican who had lent his support to a
soon-to-be-introduced energy bill re-affirmed his stance that offshore
drilling should be a component of the final product.

"We've had problems with car design, but you don't stop driving,"
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the Greenville (S.C.) News. "The
Challenger accident was heart-breaking but we went back to space. The
biggest beneficiaries of this proposal to stop drilling would be
overseas oil interests, OPEC and regimes that don't like us very much."
Caught between Graham and Nelson, the White House has decided to kick
the can down the road. Asked if the president's thinking on the matter
had evolved as the news of oil spilling in the Gulf has grown worse,
Gibbs said that the administration's priority remains "to plug the leak
in the floor of the ocean, deal with the spread of the oil on the
surface, to ensure that we are doing all that is possible to prevent
environmental and economic damages."

"The investigation [by Salazar] is to determine what happened and to
use that information going forward to dictate any changes in our
policy," he added.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/03/gibbs-premature-for-obama_n_561313.html

The environmental disaster down in the gulf is directly Bush/Cheney's Fault.

It's yet another classic example of Bush/Cheney Era deregulation wreaking havoc on the planet. Deregulation and self inspection does NOT work!

This Haliburton built rig didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills. Plus Haliburton acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week. Cementing is old school and dangerous but its the cheaptest way to do it, inspectors for years have said it can lead to these very explosions but because of Halliburtons connections to Bushco they were allowed to work outside of new improved regulations.

http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/dee...rectly-links-h

Dont believe me? take a couple of minutes and watch.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/...-and-his-meeti


Every thing those war criminals touched they destroyed!

They were definitely Bozos for not making sure these things can be shut off in case of such an emergency...especially with how fragile the gulf can be weather-wise. I don't think everything they did is bad or evil, but putting something like fixing these things on the back burner was not smart.

I'm so sorry for the trouble this is going to cause. The head of our local wildlife rescue has left for the gulf to help with the animals there...God bless her and all those who take the time and commit their lives to helping in this way.

ziggy wrote:They were definitely Bozos for not making sure these things can be shut off in case of such an emergency...especially with how fragile the gulf can be weather-wise. I don't think everything they did is bad or evil, but putting something like fixing these things on the back burner was not smart.

I'm so sorry for the trouble this is going to cause. The head of our local wildlife rescue has left for the gulf to help with the animals there...God bless her and all those who take the time and commit their lives to helping in this way.

I am headed to Mississippi in a few weeks to work a case there for the next few months and I plan to spend my first weekend down in Biloxi on the coast and see whats happening there. They have white sand beaches and several rare bird sanctuaries there as well as some of the world's largest oyster and shrimp habitats, this will have a domino effect that effect all of us one way or another for years to come.

I agree it hard to just blame anyone for this as there are a lot of people involved but Haliburton was in charge and the buck has to stop with them.

Percy wrote:

ziggy wrote:They were definitely Bozos for not making sure these things can be shut off in case of such an emergency...especially with how fragile the gulf can be weather-wise. I don't think everything they did is bad or evil, but putting something like fixing these things on the back burner was not smart.

I'm so sorry for the trouble this is going to cause. The head of our local wildlife rescue has left for the gulf to help with the animals there...God bless her and all those who take the time and commit their lives to helping in this way.

I am headed to Mississippi in a few weeks to work a case there for the next few months and I plan to spend my first weekend down in Biloxi on the coast and see whats happening there. They have white sand beaches and several rare bird sanctuaries there as well as some of the world's largest oyster and shrimp habitats, this will have a domino effect that effect all of us one way or another for years to come.

I agree it hard to just blame anyone for this as there are a lot of people involved but Haliburton was in charge and the buck has to stop with them.

Beaches in Biloxi have brown sand. Maybe not as brown as other places, but definitely not white sand.

This has kind of disappeared from the news in VA.

Scott wrote:This has kind of disappeared from the news in VA.

Cause we're being saturated with it down here. Not that it isn't very important, but there isn't a lot of actual news. They're trying a smaller container this time; hope it works. The spill has actually gotten farther away from the shores here (my town) because that winds have been blowing them westerly . . . it's all going to Louisiana right now.

The oil industry and republican Party, in particular, and Americans, in general, have actively avoided and opposed meaningful conservation of energy and exploration/development of resources since the 1970's...

... this was avoidable, and, ultimately, unnecessary.

Somewhere in Houston right now there are no doubt several very nervous in-house lawyers at BP, Transocean and Halliburton carefully reading the indemnities in their leases and service contracts.

Although, as I think about it, if the companies were structured correctly, it may not matter all that much (at least as to common law negligence claims - if there are statutory claims attaching parent or control person liability, you're in a different world). You could conceivably come up with a structure in which all of the assets and personnel related to a given project were held in a single sub (or distinct group of subs), let that sub suffer a judgment, file it into a Chapter 7 and write it off, without taking a hit to the rest of the corporate group.


Sadly, now I'm probably going to waste my entire afternoon trying to figure out if there's a way a law firm could ever get comfortable to give a bankruptcy non-consolidation opinion on a subsidiary set up to own and operate a drilling platform.

As I try to wrap my head around that... are you down South yet Percy?

LOL Hey Zigster, dont mind me I was just thinking outloud. I leave for Mississippi Monday morning, have been busy preparing everything for the trip, should be online by Tuesday or Weds to check in.

Missing you guys!

Percy wrote:LOL Hey Zigster, dont mind me I was just thinking outloud. I leave for Mississippi Monday morning, have been busy preparing everything for the trip, should be online by Tuesday or Weds to check in.

Missing you guys!

We miss you too.

Yep - miss you. Can't wait for stories from the deep South. Keep thinking out loud because it stimulates my thought process.

Oh My his holiness Obama is there. I swear I was about to think that he was ignoring the problem because there were poor black people in LA.

Why hasn't the administration received a complete smack down for not getting this thing handled? If this were oil man Bush's action the cries would be deafening. I'm no Bush fan at all, but one can not help notice how differently the media and the dems. treat the messiah. At least Republicans will eat their own if necessary.

So I won't be seeing you at the next Obama rally?

LOL. I haven't liked a President since you know who - the big RR. Obama has so many weaknesses that if he were any other would have him skewered by the press. I don't get it. Maybe I do. We've sold out to wanting the good looking cool guy. United States of Entertainment.

Uh OH...the top kill method didn't work and POTUS is engraged now at BP.

Did the EPA block two suggested methods? Shouldn't there be some kind of risk utility analysis on those methods before the EPA just says no?

I say call Bruce Willis. He would have had this handled weeks ago. I love Bruce.

I went camping this weekend, on the Gulf. Did a lot of swimming and snorkeling. The water and beach were beautiful. You'd never know this was going on, except for all the booms floating nearby, just waiting for the oil to come. Which it is going to have to, sooner or later.

What do people expect the President and this administration to do? It isn't like they have a magic answer to stop this spill. I agree that if it were Bush, people would be a lot more critical. But when I hear the people demand that Obama take over, Obama do something about this now -- my questions is: do what?

Kay wrote:I went camping this weekend, on the Gulf. Did a lot of swimming and snorkeling. The water and beach were beautiful. You'd never know this was going on, except for all the booms floating nearby, just waiting for the oil to come. Which it is going to have to, sooner or later.

What do people expect the President and this administration to do? It isn't like they have a magic answer to stop this spill. I agree that if it were Bush, people would be a lot more critical. But when I hear the people demand that Obama take over, Obama do something about this now -- my questions is: do what?

Exactly. It is not as though a decision was made to just let the thing leak. I think that everyone working on the problem are doing all they can to fix it.

This is just my own thought: but perhaps they could find and employ the best experts for this. Don't other countries have off shore oil platforms? Would BP only use their own? Are there people out there who might be able to find a better solution? Being the government you would have more at your disposal to get THOSE guys.

Also the government has the means to stop the oil from spreading and can deploy these methods and the manpower if needed.

Even James the Serpent Head is screaming for something to be done.

My idea is to drill some anchors into the ocean floor rigged with morotized cranks then pour a giant cement plug, attach it to the anchors and crank it down into place anchored like a giant cork. That's probably not possible but I can't figure out why they can't plug that thing.

What's going on beneath the sea? A graphic explanation of the fight to shut off the oil leak


By Times-Picayune Staff


April 30, 2010, 7:42PM

Even as experts scramble to come up with a way of keeping the oil from the Deepwater Horizon well from continuing to flow freely into the Gulf of Mexico,

BP concedes that a relief well will eventually have to be drilled in order to successfully shut down the existing leaking well. The graphic below explains what's happening on the ocean floor, and how the relief well will work.

My nine year old was hitting me with questions this morning over breakfast as to why they just cannot plug the leak. Honestly. I don't know other than it is complicated construction venture that must be performed under extreme pressure. It exists in an environment so harsh that it is almost like working in outer space. You have an 18,000 ft deep well that starts nearly a mile down underwater. Everything is remotely operated. You cannot get actual people down there to work.

Indeed very complicated. The ocean floor is only 5,000 feet though (I say that with absolutely no idea if that is too far to send dive crews).

http://www.thescubasite.com/Learn-To-Scuba-Dive/how-deep-can-i-dive
I'm no diver. scubasite said no more than 1000ft and that requires special equipment.