Posts from — June 2010

The wind from the South and Southwest are continuing to push the oil ashore with tar balls showing up East of Destin which is on the pass into Choctawhatchee Bay.

The situation is much worse in Alabama: Swimming on Alabama’s busiest beaches closed by oil

GULF SHORES, Ala. — After large swathes of oil washed up on Gulf Shores and Orange Beach beaches Friday evening and this morning, officials with both cities put out double-red flags warning beachgoers not to swim in the Gulf. The flags remained flying this evening, officials said.

This is a preview of what is going to happen in the Panhandle, and a direct threat to turtle nesting sites on the beaches.

The Mobile Press-Register Editorial Board expresses their frustration with another feature of this response: Hiding from news media won’t help oil spill response

WE WOULD like to tell you what was said about the oil spill in meetings among business owners, elected officials and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

But we can’t, because members of the news media were barred from Thursday’s meetings in Mobile, Biloxi and New Orleans.

Well, OK, a Press-Register photographer was allowed in to take pictures at the Mobile meeting, and there was a photo-op at a bait shop in New Orleans. So Secretary Locke and the Obama administration had no qualms about the publication of photos showing the secretary’s great concern for the Gulf Coast.

But a Press-Register reporter who identified himself was not allowed to attend the meeting in Mobile, although he probably could have walked right in if he had taken off his newspaper badge and said nothing.

Where’s the transparency you promised would be a hallmark of your administration, Mr. President?

Where is it written that there can’t be a frank discussion if the meeting is recorded? Are they aware of the open-meetings laws in Alabama and Florida? By closing the meetings you are denying elected officials the right to participate, because if a quorum of any council is present at a meeting, the meeting must, by law, be open to the public.

Somebody needs to tell these clowns that private meetings about public problems have very negative consequences down here. If people don’t know what was said, they will fill the gaps with rumors.

The Trouble Maker

Come on, come on, wake up!

[Editor: This is the reason the momma cat was on the truck, and the proof that the latest KT is a dedicated sleeper. This was taken before the picture on June 4^th.]

Group A finished the first day with draws all around:

South Africa 1-1 Mexico
Uruguay 0-0 France

Group B had winners and losers:

Republic of Korea 2-0 Greece
Argentina 1-0 Nigeria

Group C action started at 1:30 PM CDT with England already a goal up on the US.

Update: the US equalized, final: England 1-1 US

First off, Pensacola Pass was closed at 7PM CDT tonight to block any oil entering overnight. This has been expected all day because of the entry of oil through Perdido Pass with the tide, and the fact that there is a Huge plume of weathered oil 9 miles south of Pensacola Pass

A large plume of weathered oil has been found nine miles south of Pensacola Pass. The plume is two miles wide and goes south for 40 miles, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

An additional plume of non-weathered oil has been verified six miles south of Escambia County, the DEP said in a press release.

The communications screw-up over Perdido Pass is just the latest problem that is causing the officials from many of the counties on the Florida Panhandle to talk openly about a split from oil unified command, and is causing state officials to start talking about demanding that BP put a significant amount of money into an escrow account to cover the costs of defending the state from the slimy assault of BP’s Well from Hell.

This new wave of oil is the rusty-brown “mousse”, rather than the black weathered tar balls. As the Pensacola Beach Blogger noted, the new stuff looks a bit too much like chocolate. He is concerned with children who find it putting it in their mouths.

A lot of people [alas, not including me until now] have realized that the large litter box scoops are an effective way of picking up tar balls. I would think that “pooper scoopers” would also work without as much bending over, and either would be more effective than picking it up by hand.

The Pensacola News Journal reports that our orange governor, Charlie Crist has vetoed the latest attempt by the Republican majority in the legislature to interfere in doctor-patient relations in the state, and to order doctors to perform what may be unnecessary medical procedures, which will raise the cost of health care. [They don’t understand that’s what they are doing because they are pandering to their base, not thinking things through.]

The Republican leadership accuse Charlie of willfully and maliciously pandering to the voters by doing what a majority of them wants done, rather than doing what a minority of voters who will never vote for him want done.

It has never ceased to amaze me how many Republicans think that doing what the majority of people want is unprincipled.

That is a satellite composite of the Alabama-Florida Gulf Coast with the bays named and the passes to the Gulf indicated with the arrows. The Perdido River and Bay constitute the western border of Florida. To give you an idea of the scale, it is forty miles from the pass of Choctawhatchee Bay west to the pass into Pensacola Bay. The western two-thirds of the barrier island between the passes is called Santa Rosa Island, and Okaloosa Island on the eastern end.

The island to the west of Pensacola Pass is Perdido Key, and it is split between Florida and Alabama so the Flora-Bama Lounge can hold its Interstate Mullet Toss.

The last barrier island is Dauphin Island west of the pass into Mobile Bay.

From the picture you can see that securing Mobile Bay poses a problem, but the Unified Command couldn’t stop it from entering Perdido Pass which is narrow and has a bridge in place to anchor the boom. The lack of proactive measures to prevent damage is driving people up the wall.

Via Mustang Bobby who gets up and blogs before sunrise in the Eastern Time Zone, the BP Spills Coffee which would be better with British and Texas accents [if they were real].

Taking A Break

Ahhhhh…

[Editor: KT avoids the kittens by jumping up on the hood of my neighbor’s truck. Actually, she is only avoiding one, as the other knows how to take a nap until it cools off.]

Friday Ark

Thirty days of football [soccer to most Americans] begins to today in South Africa, but I’ll try to keep it down.

If you have never been involved with the Cup, there are 32 teams chosen after three years of games placed in 8 groups of 4. The initial round involves playing the other three teams in your group, with the top two teams in each group advancing to the final round that is a single knockout competition.

2010 World Cup draw

• Group A: South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, France
• Group B: Argentina, South Korea, Nigeria, Greece
• Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
• Group D: Germany, Australia, Ghana, Serbia
• Group E: Netherlands, Japan, Cameroon, Denmark
• Group F: Italy, New Zealand, Paraguay, Slovakia
• Group G: Brazil, North Korea, Ivory Coast, Portugal
• Group H: Spain, Honduras, Chile, Switzerland

[OK, so sled dog racing, the Tour de France, and the World Cup is a weird mixture, but you have to remember I was a military brat and veteran at the time when sports were even marginally important. These were the “big deals” when I was growing up.]

The libertarian Local Puppy Trainer has had it with “Drill, Baby, Drill”: Another oil myth evaporates

First to go, there was the myth that offshore oil drilling is reliably safe.

Then there was the myth — often cited by local drilling supporters — that oil rigs don’t cause spills, only tankers do.

Do a little research and you can watch another myth vanish beneath the waves. This is the myth that today’s spill is difficult to stop because it’s so far under water; the leaking well is about 5,000 feet down. If it were in shallow water, we’re told, it could’ve been plugged in a jiffy.

And they look at Ixtoc I to take out that myth. This is what the Republicans have been selling in Florida to open the coast to drilling, hoping to plug the huge hole in the state budget with drilling leases. Well the hole is a hell of a lot bigger because of the impact of this spill on property values and tourism, and if they think BP is going to come to the rescue, they haven’t been paying attention.

The LPT also noted that Ankle-deep mousse-like oil on beach at Alabama-Florida line, which is not the real lead. The lead should have been that oil has gotten by the booms and through Perdido Pass to the wetlands beyond.

Escambia County. Florida officials are annoyed that Baldwin County, Alabama officials told the “Unified Command”, but didn’t tell them. The Unified Command is supposed to be coordinating, but it doesn’t seem to have the necessary resources to do its job. Somebody needs to fix the problems quickly because people are getting really tired of all of the red tape and delays. Things are not working smoothly.

Take a break and watch Mark Fiore’s latest.

Now you don’t.

In comments Jack the Grumpy Forester noticed that the “Unified Command” web site was not the .GOV address that would be expected if this was a GOVernment entity, but a .COM, as if BP was in charge.

So I was looking at the site and noticed this post: BP to Donate Net Revenue From MC252 Well Leak to Protect and Rehabilitate Wildlife in Gulf States.

First off MC252 stands for “Mississippi Canyon lease 252”, AKA the Well from Hell. Then you notice the use of “Net Revenue”, which at this point is probably going to be a negative number depending on the expenses deducted, so this is a major, BFD PR thing, and confirms that the Unified Command site is another BP scam.

The plot thickens.

The Christian Science Monitor noted one of the major problems of not finding out how much oil is coming from the well. BP can’t contain what is coming up their cap. They don’t have the capacity to deal with the volume of oil they are collecting because they don’t have the equipment to handle it at the site.

This is a replay of their response plan to the Exxon Valdez: they sent two skimmer vessels to the leak, but didn’t send any barges or tankers to take the oil away after the skimmers collected it, so the skimmers had to sail back to port when their tanks were full, and then go back out to the site after dumping them in a tank at their port.

Now McClatchy reports that BP intends to burn thousands of barrels of oil it can’t store. That’s right, it’s going to light it off out there in the middle of the Gulf. It doesn’t have the resources to off-load it to barges, so it will be burned… the recovered oil that was going to help rehabilitate the wildlife is now going pollute the air instead of the Gulf.

A note for any visitors from the UK who stop by – we don’t hate BP because it’s British, we got over that a hundred years ago, we hate BP because they are destroying our environment with their total bloody incompetence and the fact that their CEO is an arrogant git.

Louisiana’s purportedly Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu says that Drilling moratorium causes economic harm

Speaking today on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Landrieu said the moratorium was issued without much economic analysis and said the deepwater rigs in the Gulf “employ, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands.”

I have some economic analysis for you Senator – If the oil spill only affect the Gulf Coast, the spill may cost the Florida economy $10.9 billion and erase 195,000 jobs, and Moody’s warns oil spill impact on Florida could be worse than recession.

Kiss my grits, Mary. You have blocked any meaningful regulation for years and have voted to get oil companies tax breaks to earn your “campaign contributions”, so don’t try to tell me you are worried about the impact on anyone but yourself.

‘Noz has given a Vizzini Award, Second Class, to the Jerusalem Post for abuse of “hypocrisy”.

It is surprising, as you would think that the Jerusalem Post would be more familiar with the meaning than any media outlet not owned by Rupert Murdock. 😈

Of 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.

This is such a normal part of corporate behavior that you rarely read about it anymore. This is from McClatchy – Supervisors reject BP’s plan to use landfill for oil spill waste

GULFPORT — Harrison County supervisors voted unanimously Monday to oppose BP using the Pecan Grove landfill in Harrison County to dump waste from the oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Supervisors found out last week during a meeting with elected officials that the unified command’s preliminary plan called for putting debris into the landfill. The board said it is “stringently opposed” to that plan.
…

Marti Powers, a spokeswoman for BP, said every agency involved with unified command received input about the best way and the best places to put the debris. She said Pecan Grove was on a pre-approved list of sites.

“We are open to suggestions for other places to put waste,” she said.

Ms Powers, y’all have a corporate headquarters and it is probably fairly large, so take your hazardous waste there, because you can’t dump it in a regular landfill.

I think it is about time that the public and officials got access to these “pre-approved lists” that BP keeps referring to, along with clear indications of who made the approvals. The Federal government can’t tell a county that they have to accept things, and most county landfills will not accept trash from outside of that county.