The Rice Stuff

It looks like the pain may be spread around as the Pensacola News Journal is reporting that the oil may be pulled into the Loop Current within the next day.

The Loop Current will take the oil down to the Florida Strait between Florida and Cuba and then out to the Gulf Stream, to head up the Eastern Seaboard on its way to Britain. It will coat our reefs and the Keys, and can wash up anywhere on the East Coast. Welcome to our nightmare, y’all.

Over the weekend 20 sea turtles were found dead along Mississippi beaches. It is time for them to come ashore and lay their eggs on the beaches. Instinct tells them where to go and they need a lot of food for the effort, so they have to pass through the oil and eat the polluted fish.

In an article about BP’s containment boxes this gem pops out:

Another spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said the oil will flow into the chamber and then be sucked through a tube into a tanker ship at the surface.

BP did not build the containment devices before the spill because it “seemed inconceivable” the blowout preventer would fail, Rinehart said.

“I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now,” he said. “The blowout preventer was the main line of defense against this type of incident, and it failed.”

It’s the Rice defense- “I don’t think anybody could have predicted …” Ms Rice was also involved with the oil industry.

Unfortunately for Mr. Rinehart, McClatchy reports that Decade-old report cited failure of oil rig safety system

Citing a Minerals Management Service report, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said there were 117 failures of blowout preventers during a two-year period in the late 1990s on the outer continental shelf of the United States.

As the Times [the real one in London] reports BP warned of rig fault ten years ago.

There are multiple sources that note that Norway and Brazil require additional equipment because they don’t trust blow out preventers.