The purpose of the dispersants is to camouflage the real extent of the leak and to keep as much as possible off the surface.

You do what you can with what you have.

The problem with watch and wait, is all of the people who won’t come to the Gulf Coast at what is always the best time. The water is warming but not hot and there are no tropical storms ready to pounce. This is really the best time to see the area as it isn’t crowded and the Season price increases haven’t taken place.

Looks like the heavy lifting in this thing will be done by your local groups of wildlife professionals and volunteers on their own. No help from government. No help from BP, Transocean, or Halliburton.

Watch and wait. Has an ominous sound to it.

I really think it is a matter of not having the money to do anything about it. The Republicans have cooked the books for so long that I don’t think people understand how broke the state really is. I honestly think they are holding onto the $25 million that BP gave them to cover checks that they have to write. The state lost a bundle by investing in Lehman Brothers which went bankrupt. The CEO at the time was Bush kin, and hired JEB Bush when he left the governor’s mansion. Add in the lost revenues from the burst of the housing bubble, the general recession, the higher than national average unemployment, and you end up with no money for anything.

This is like a fire in a coal seam. You know it is happening below you, but you don’t know where it will pop up. No one really knows how to put those out either. All you can do is watch and wait.

BTW, I keep looking at the “Leak Meter” you have posted. This is truly horrifying. Where the Gulf Stream is going to take all this is a scary, scary thought.

What an irony that this rig exploded only, what, a week or so after Obama’s announcement about extending studies for exploration. I don’t live in the coal mining areas in the Appalachians, but they’re not geographically all that far from us. We have mine explosions and days of hideous waiting to find survivors which is a nightmare in itself. But watching this oil disaster slowly creep further and further into what should be pristine waters, knowing all the devastation this will bring, is a nightmare of an entirely different dimension.

Juanita, many of the dispersants are toxic in their own right, and there is definitely oil below that isn’t rising to the surface. There are scuba divers checking on some sites for the appearance of oil, but this stuff readily emulsifies, so it only look like cloudy water. That’s why people are doing their own sampling, but there is no organized effort.

Water monitoring is our first line of defense, because there are different currents at different depths in the Gulf. The bottom is like stair steps, not a continuous slope. The surface current is affected by the wind, but the lower currents aren’t. If the majority of the oil gets caught in the Loop, the tar balls could show up any where from the West Coast of the peninsula to Britain because of the Loop and the Gulf Stream. All of the Atlantic Coast could be affected.

Up here, we’re not all that familiar with how dispersants act in an oil spill. Could the dispersants cause some of the oil to move down in the lower currents instead of floating on top of the water? I mean could it be there, and you couldn’t observe it with the naked eye?

Steve, we may as well laugh about it, because nothing else seems to work.