Posts from — August 2010

That a major corporation facing fines and penalties based on the amount of oil released would distort and stall, but McClatchy reports that Gulf oil flow was 12 times more than feds’ original estimate

WASHINGTON — As BP neared a fix that’s expected to kill for good the runaway well that’s wreaked economic and environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the government Monday said that 10 to 12 times the amount of oil had been flowing from the well than it originally thought.

New estimates released Monday by a government-led team of scientists found that as much as 62,000 barrels of oil were leaking from the well each day at its peak — far beyond the initial estimate of 5,000 barrels a day and more in line with what scientists told McClatchy it was.

The new estimates raise questions about whether the early response ever anticipated the disaster’s actual size and scope. The well gushed an estimated 4.9 million barrels for nearly three months before BP put in place a temporary cap 18 days ago.

The government now estimates that 53,000 barrels were leaking each day before BP installed the cap. Only 800,000 barrels — about 16 percent of the total — was captured before flowing into the ocean.

Wow, you don’t think this was why they blocked every effort to actually measure the flow and didn’t provide access to video of the spill until they were threatened with Congressional action? It must have been a misplaced decimal point, because everyone knows how hard it is to put them where they belong. [/snark – in case the casual visitor was unsure]

Oh, a minor correction – the original Coast Guard estimate was 8,000 barrels, which BP reduced to 1,000, and then admitted to the possibility of 5,000 barrels. The Unified Command accepted this bogus number because BP had the “expertise” in the area of oil drilling.

Update: after doing some simple math I noticed that these number coincide with the estimate on the Leak Meter labeled “BP (Worst Case)”.

On today’s All Things Considered they had two segments on deflation.

First they had a background piece. Examining The Risks Of Deflation and then an interview with St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard, who sees deflation as a very real possibility.

Raw Story reports on former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s appearance on Meet the Press:

“I am very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money,” Greenspan said during an appearance on NBC.

“The problem that we’ve gotten into in recent years is that spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous and my view is I don’t think we can play subtle policy here,” said Greenspan.

“You don’t agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?” asked NBC’s David Gregory.

“They do not,” Greenspan replied firmly.

The only problem with Social Security is that its surplus was used for the Bush tax cuts.

From Weather Underground

Cinco Bayou – Pocahontas Dr., Fort Walton Beach, Florida (PWS)
Updated: 12:03 PM CDT on August 2, 2010
Mostly Cloudy
91.6 °F [33.1 °C]
Mostly Cloudy
Humidity: 80%
Dew Point: 85 °F
Wind: 0.0 mph
Wind Gust: 0.0 mph
Pressure: 29.96 in (Falling)
Heat Index: 119 °F [48.3 °C]
Visibility: 10.0 miles
UV: 7 out of 16
Pollen: 3.90 out of 12
Clouds:
Scattered Clouds 2500 ft
Mostly Cloudy 10000 ft
(Above Ground Level)
Elevation: 16 ft

Excessive heat warning in effect from noon today to 6 PM CDT this evening…

Position: 13.6N 45.1W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [285°] near 23 mph [37 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1007 mb ↑.

It is about 1090 miles [1755 km] East of the Lesser Antilles.

If the model tracking holds the storm could be a problem for the Carolinas during this week.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

California can breathe a little easier because the West Fire, the Crown Fire, and the Bull Run Creek Fire are well under control and on their way to 100% containment tonight.

Alas, that is not the case in the rest of the world, as reported by the CBC –

In British Columbia an additional tragedy as a Water bomber crew confirmed killed

The company that owns a water bomber that crashed while battling wildfires in B.C.’s Fraser Canyon confirmed Sunday that the pilot and co-pilot of the plane are dead.

Crews can see the crash site, south of Lytton, but conditions are still too dangerous to reach the wreckage. They got within 500 metres of the scene Saturday night, Conair said.

There are reports the crash of the Convair 580, based in Abbotsford, sparked a new wildfire.

The water bomber went down just before 9 p.m. local time Saturday, about 15 kilometres south of Lytton, said Capt. Marguerite Dodds-Lepinski, the public affairs officer for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria.

About 1,000 firefighters are on the front lines across B.C., supported by air tankers, helicopters and heavy machinery, to battle more than 300 forest fires.

One fire in particular has forced 30 people from their homes in Cariboo Creek.

Evacuation orders or alerts have been issued for people living in a number of locations in the Kamloops area and Cariboo region as high temperatures and tinder-dry conditions continue.

In a summer that saw the highest temperatures ever recorded for Russia, the Russian army battles wildfires

Russian authorities have mobilized almost 240,000 people to battle deadly wildfires that have been burning across the country, killing at least 30 people in the last few days.

Army units, including elite paratroops, joined the firefighting effort Saturday.

Tens of thousands of hectares of parched forests and peat bog are either on fire or at risk of burning.

More than 700 wildfires have destroyed or damaged homes in nearly 80 towns or villages. Dozens of other communities are threatened by the fires, which have forced thousands of people to evacuate areas in the path of encroaching flames.

Russians are coping with the hottest summer temperatures since records were first kept 130 years ago.

The record heat wave and severe drought have dried up fields, ruining about a fifth of this year’s wheat harvest.

For those unfamiliar with peat bogs, they are normally like marshes, i.e. wetlands, which makes the situation similar to the fires in the Okefenokee Swamp during the drought in the Southeastern US.

McClatchy asks the most important question on Gulf Coast: When will the oil spill be cleaned up? Maybe never

After more than three months, BP appears finally to have gotten a firm grasp on its runaway Deepwater Horizon well. Now the big question in the Gulf of Mexico is how, and if, an environmental mess of unprecedented scope can be cleaned up.

Only last week did federal spill managers begin discussing with state and parish leaders in Louisiana, the hardest hit state, how to set the standards for declaring the nation’s largest offshore oil spill officially mopped up.

“How do we get to the inevitable question of how clean is clean?” said retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s point man on the spill.

Many scientists and environmentalists believe there won’t be a quick or easy answer.

“We’ve never dealt with this before, the complication of this much oil coming from the deep sea and being hit heavily with chemical dispersants,” said Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. “We have conducted the largest environmental toxicology experiment in the history of this country in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Those of us who live and work on the Gulf Coast have been treated like lab rats by a multinational corporation that is only concerned with its profits, and then, only in the short-term. This wasn’t an accident caused by one bad choice, it required multiple bad choices over an extended period. The one defining thread in this collection of choices was that the decision made was cheaper than the alternative. This pattern is too consistent not to be corporate policy.

The Miami Herald is beginning to wonder. I wrote about these two guys Buying a Job and now the Herald is getting a bit more pointed.

Jim Morin, the paper’s political cartoonist, does it with a drawing, but Fred Grimm just says it: Two rich guys betting on our mass stupidity

Poor Jeff Greene. His candidacy suffers constant association with that other super-rich political dilettante come from nowhere.

Stories about monied neophytes out-spending and out-polling the pros in 2010 tend to lump the two together — Florida’s pecunious twins.

More than a few voters probably confuse Greene, the wildly wealthy Florida Democratic candidate from California, with Rick Scott, the wildly wealthy Florida Republican candidate from Texas.

But it’s the Texan, not the Californian, who was CEO of a hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in civil and criminal fines in the biggest Medicare fraud case ever.

Greene (currently outpolling Kendrick Meek for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination) has not been affiliated with a known criminal enterprise — though he does suffer an affinity for B-list celebrities with criminal records. The former “Hollywood Madam,” Heidi Fleiss, once lived in Greene’s guest house. Ex-con Mike Tyson was best man in Greene’s 2007 wedding. Drug-addled movie star Lindsay Lohan, currently doing a stretch in a Los Angeles County lock-up, was photographed in alluring beachwear on the Summerwind, Greene’s 145-foot yacht, off St. Barth’s in January.

I have no idea how you get through to people that these guys are part of the problems of the absurd health care costs and the meltdown of the economy, not part of the solution. They have so much money to spend on TV ads that their opponents can’t possibly respond. We have the best elections that money can currently buy.

From Weather Underground

Cinco Bayou – Pocahontas Dr., Fort Walton Beach, Florida (PWS)
Updated: 11:07 AM CDT on August 1, 2010
Clear
95.3 °F [35.2 °C]
Clear
Humidity: 69%
Dew Point: 84 °F
Wind: 1.0 mph
Wind Gust: 1.0 mph
Pressure: 29.85 in (Steady)
Heat Index: 124 °F [51.1 °C]
Visibility: 10.0 miles
UV: 11 out of 16
Pollen: 3.90 out of 12
Clouds:
Clear –
(Above Ground Level)
Elevation: 16 ft

Excessive heat warning remains in effect from noon today to 6 PM CDT this evening…