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No One Could Have Imagined… — Why Now?
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No One Could Have Imagined…

by Bryan

Gulf Gusher symbolOf course they imagined it, and they wrote a report about it, because there are a number of groups within the government, not to mention the “think tanks”, who do nothing else.

McClatchy tells us: Feds knew of Gulf spill risks in 2000, document shows

WASHINGTON — A decade ago, U.S. government regulators warned that a major deepwater oil spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater.

The report also discusses the underwater plumes that BP continues to insist don’t exist, and the dangers of dispersants.

Update: In comments, Kryten located a half dozen different documents on NOAA’s web site and others that Dr. Lubchenco really should read to understand how bad things are.

3 comments

1 Kryten42 { 06.10.10 at 2:21 am }

Yeah… I found another article in Rolling Stone that supports that:

The Spill, The Scandal and the President
The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world’s largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to “catastrophic” errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. “We are very concerned,” they wrote, “that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis.”

The administration’s response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had “zero contact” with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

Seriously… Words simply fail.

2 Kryten42 { 06.10.10 at 2:49 am }

I found this interesting. It’s a site setup by Prof. James Corbett of the University of Delaware with a different take on the disaster to hopefully engage those who don’t really care about the actual environmental impact, and to add a different perspective.

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: 52 Days and Counting

He has some useful links for people. Good to see people who are not directly and immediately affected by the disaster doing what they can to help, and realizing that it will effect them, eventually. 🙂 Prez Cowardly Lion could do well to check this site out!

3 Bryan { 06.10.10 at 10:50 pm }

If anyone wants to know how this affects them, they can go to their favorite food store and watch the price of seafood rise day after day. Knowing that a major competitor has been knocked out of the market brings out the greed of the other suppliers.

Prices are going up, even for things that have never been supplied by the Gulf, like salmon. The speculators will gamble on anything, even shrimp futures.