BP Psy Ops

Rick at the Independent News has an open letter from Chasidy Fisher Hobbs, Coastkeeper of the local Emerald Coastkeeper, Inc., a coastal environmental group. Apparently there have been angry words exchanged over the fact that the beaches aren’t covered in oil, and accusations of over-reaction.

It is pointed out that we don’t know what is going on, and the “facts” keep changing. We have a surface spill the size of New Jersey in the Gulf, and Bob only knows how much oil beneath the surface that could show up anywhere along the Gulf Coast from Texas to the Keys.

Rick also noted that Escambia County finally decided that it should start testing the water: Official statement on Water Quality

The plan is to take one sample on Pensacola Beach and the following week take a sample from Perdido Key and return to Pensacola Beach the following week and so forth as we proceed through the summer and fall season.

They understand that they are going to have to find the money to do the testing so they can say the water is safe to swim in, otherwise people are not going to accept assurances that you can go to beach. A lack of money is really hampering local efforts, and it takes forever to get approvals. BP is proving to be not unlike FEMA after Katrina.

McClatchy reports that Gulf oil spill may be 19 times bigger than originally thought

Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., earlier this month made simple calculations from a single video BP released on May 12 and calculated a flow of 70,000 barrels a day, NPR reported last week.

On Wednesday, Wereley told a House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee that his calculations of two leaks that are on videos BP released on Tuesday showed 70,000 barrels from one leak and 25,000 from the other.

Congress is asking the right questions, and seems ready to demand some answers, while the Executive just defers to BP.

The other big question was: does size matter? To which all of the scientists responded, of course it matters. You can’t formulate a solution, if you don’t know the extent of the problem. For example, if you know the size of the pipe and the volume of the output for a given time period, you can calculate the pressure.

BP says it is calculating the flow from the surface area of the spill, at the same time it is dumping massive amounts of dispersant into the flow to prevent it from getting to the surface, so it obviously knows it is lying.