Florida & East Coast get ready

[zeehag]

let uspray that is the case--there is way too much oil still spewing for comfort and we realllly dont know what it is gonna do----or where it is gonna go or how long it will take before it is resolved---and waaay too many sensationalists and counter sensationalists making waaay tooo many noises about it all
i hope everyone in the spill zone is gonna be ok and still be abl to make their living without losing the culture or their income base and the seafood industry doesnt die there....and more.....

 

[thereisabelle]

watching this fella from B.P. talk of their plans bring to mind a sea tale by john masefield," i'll hang on till her sheets bust and her sticks are gone" which the blushing looney did. her crew made seven and twenty dishes for the big jack sharks and little fishes. now oer their bones the water swishes. hear the yarn of a sailor an old yarn learned at sea. we are but sailors on B.P's tall ship. and we gather here in the focile wet and frowsey and gam." it's hard sonny hard it is for us poor sailin men. this stuff they claim to be capturing from the pipe wont be given away! jimbob

 

[Hermit Scott]

this stuff they claim to be capturing from the pipe wont be given away! jimbob

The stuff they are Not capturing will.

 

[richk]

Loop current and Gulf Stream

As if things were not bad enough already, they are now predicting that the oil spill will get into the gulf loop current within the next few days. There are already unconfirmed reports of a few tar balls around Key West. If this oil gets into the gulf stream, the entire eastern half of the country could be effected.

I don't know who they are, but transport of oil from the leak is a four dimensional problem. The mechanism is ocean current. If you know somewhat precisely the 3 dimensional distribution of the oil at a point in time then you may be able to predict where it will go, given existing numerical models of ocean current. Two currents of concern are the loop current and the gulf stream.

Average surface depictions of the loop current and gulf stream are in the attached images (from http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/atlantic/atlantic.html.)

Both currents meander.

Rich in Annapolis

 

[kloudie1]

Jimbob, you are correct, they will sell the crude or its products, but at current crude prices, they are probably recovering somewhere around $300,000-500,000 worth of oil a day .. The drillship that they are renting (they don’t own it) to recover that part of the oil probably costs in the vicinity of $1million a day; not really good economics.. That doesn’t even begin to count the many other vessels and people that BP is paying for to take care of this. They didn’t want this to happen and there were reasonable mechanical safeguards in place for prevention.. the other roughly 30,000 wells in the gulf were drilled with similar if not fewer safeguards. Think about the numbers: lets say that you have a car that you use the brakes on at an average of 5 times a day, every day for 16 years (30,000 applications); they perform flawlessly every time .. The failure of the brakes and back up system may result in death.. wouldn’t you think that the brake system has enough back up? .There will be some incriminating info that will surface that will most likely involve human error.. either in the way the well was balanced/unbalanced, or in maintenance of the preventer, or in commands and turf disputes at deck level.. Like most human error, the results were not thoroughly considered when the action took place.. BP’s business is making money, they really don’t like to have stuff like this happen, which degrades their income ! No, I don’t work for BP.. nor do I own their stock..

 

[sailaway78]

Deep Water Drilling

While not wanting to beat the drum for BP in any way, this is still fairly new technology. Keep in mind that this well is in 5,000 feet of water. This is not technology that has been used for a long time and is well understood. I heard one report that says that the Blow out Preventer has a failure rate of around 50% when drilling at this depth. My biggest complaint is that no one in the gummit has the cajones to say to do whatever is necessary, and send BP the bill. The way it is currently setup, is BP has to approve any expenditures, before they will pay.

 

[thereisabelle]

I can't imagine the horror of the good men and women on that rig when it blew.I can imagine that there were some thoughts and accusations following. " I told them"," should have done this or that." hindsight is 20-20. investigators now have to sift thru the survivors accounts to get an idea of how this tragedy took place.only then can measures be considered to prevent this in the future and with the many other rigs out there.
my closest personal account of panic situation was when i was a hydraulic tech. our job was to remove the ram from a large trash compactor in the basement of a j.c. penn. we checked all the limit switches on every floor and taped off all the access shoots,posted signs and the boss ran the ram out and threw A breaker. so i climb in and remove the pin and srart unscrewing the clevis. all of a sudden the machine cranks up and the ram starts in. he is haveing a fit with a hole in it. hollering and cussing. i'm sitting there trying to tell him it's ok. the blade is not moveing. he throws more breakers and runs to get help. the ram retracted and the pump stopped.
we found out later tha someone on the second floor removed the tape and the sign then tossed in some boxes. so much for the fandango...he proceeded to cuss out everyone in the store including some customers. later that day he suffered a mild heart attack. what a day. if the pump wasn't so loud he could have heard me say it was ok. all he heard was "LOYD!"
sorry.. my apologies if i rambled on but "the limit switches still turned on the pump! go figure... jimbob

 

[sailorkoop]

YOU've got to be kiddiing?..please tell me you're kidding!!

You must be the CEO of BP!.....First of all, in 1942 people had other things on their mind. It was called WWll. The envirnment was not even considered back then. Do you really believe what you just wrote?..REALLY!!??......I'm truely astounded that someone could actually think that!!!...WOW!

Somehow I can't get tooo worried about oil being carried by the Gulf Stream up the East Coast ....
Considering that during WWII, U-boats sank almost 400 ships off the NC outer banks, most of which were oil tankers ... here's some interesting reading:

The war cut back on one favorite summer pastime for Outer Banks young people. “That summer we had to almost give up swimming in the ocean—it was just full of oil, you’d get it all over you,” Mrs. Ormond Fuller recalled of the oil spilled by torpedoed tankers.
Gibb Gray remembered the oil, too: “We’d step in it before we knew it, and we’d be five or six inches deep. We’d have to scrub our feet and legs with rags soaked in kerosene.
It’s hard to get off, that oil.” It is estimated that 150 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea and on the beaches along the Outer Banks during 1942.
©2008 North Carolina Museum of History
Office of Archives and History, N.C. Department of Cultural Resources

Despite all this oil spilled into the ocean off the NC in 1942, I have never read or heard of any meaningful damage to the ecology of the US East Coast...
So, despite today's media frenzy and Ecologist's screaming "the sky is falling", I don't really think there's going to be any significant environmental impact.

 

[sailorkoop]

an accident or negligence??

I believe, at least by watching 60 mnutes and reading the accounts of MIT engineering professors, that this was clearly caused by negligence.....NOT an accident.....this is much much different then 911. They were greedy beyond belief and ignored the obvious that even you and i would have recognized as problematic.....You can't coompare this to 911 at any level.

"This money is doled out on a month to month basis."....

I am sorry, but why is BP expected to make these people whole again?? Yes, I understand that they are culpable, but I just have to ask what other industry has paid out to people affected by an accident...not insurance, mind you...

I lost my job due to the devastation of 9/11..yet the company I worked for folded up shop and called it quits...did the airlines pay me? did the company pay me?

NO, when is the country going to learn to get off it's collective ass and DO...rather than waiting on someone to give them a handout.

simply ridiculous to me. As bad as this is, it is not the end of the Nation, or the economy, or the environment. Mother Nature is a stiff ol' broad.

 

[zeehag]

greed+corruption=accident of major proportions......

 

[John]

Regarding "hindsight being 20-20": It's not a matter of hindsight. Many oil producing countries require wells like this one to have two blow out preventers in line in case one doesn't function. The US doesn't; it was suggested but never made mandatory. As for the one they had: There were several things that went wrong. A key seal was damaged and parts of it (bits of rubber) were coming up with the mud days before the disaster, but they ignored it. A key battery was dead and they knew it but ignored it. Then, contrary to normal practice, they planned to set the cement plugs after the mud was replaced with sea water, not before. None of this is a matter of "hindsight". It is a matter of the fact that BP was running some three weeks behind schedule at a cost of $1 million per day, and they were trying to save money any way they could. And let's not forget BP's dirty history, starting with their refinery explosion in Texas, which claimed the lives of 15 workers. Then there were several cases in Alaska of BP pipelines which were reported to be corroding, but which BP ignored until they had major oil spills. (Fortunately, in those cases, they were in the winter onto ice, which made the clean-up a lot easier.)

As for the present mess: Let's not kid ourselves about the seriousness. Yes, the oil is eventually eaten by bacteria, who in the process consume the oxygen in the water, thus killing the surrounding sea life. As for the dispersant: It's known to be toxic. In fact, it's the most toxic of the dispersants authorized for such use. It's advantage: It's the cheapest.

Face it: BP is simply run by a bunch of criminals. But they are big time enough that they can get away with it. It's like what the man said: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one."

 

[Don S/V ILLusion]

I won't argue anything you said John except that Corexit (the first dispersant used) is the most prevalent and available in the largest quantity which was a consideration here. There are more toxic ones on EPA's pre-approval list.

 

[thereisabelle]

I just couldn't stand it. I went to the shop cut a piece of plexi-glass approx.14" diam. drilled a5/8" hole close to center, put a piece of 5/8" dowel thru. filled a mud pan with water close to top and added oil.stirred it up and held the wheel in the goo and turned it by hand. both sides of the disk are covered with oil. took a 6" wide knife and scraped it off into another container. repeated 4 times and most all the oil is in the other container. i will refine the gizmo more tomorrow. maby make supports for the shaft so i can afix a blade to scrape both sides and channel it away. 30-40 min. spent but now i see first hand it works. question... does oil have a natural attraction for plastic of is it the surface tension? dk... jimbob

 

[thereisabelle]

one more thing and i'll shut my hole for the night.... what about the gasses comeing to the surface? do they rise, gather or disperse? can lightning ignite it?

 

[Hermit Scott]

Any one who's seen a Steven Seagul movie knows oil companies are evil. All they want to do is kill baby seals.
Seriously though, corporations are intrinsically evil. They don't get to stay in business for good deeds. They get to stay in business for making money. So yes they are trying to save money even while cleaning up a mess.

 

[Buck420]

Nope, Not Kidding

You must be the CEO of BP!.....First of all, in 1942 people had other things on their mind. It was called WWll. The envirnment was not even considered back then. Do you really believe what you just wrote?..REALLY!!??......I'm truely astounded that someone could actually think that!!!...WOW!

Yes, "Sailorkoop", people DID have other things to do in 1942;
but ... that didn't change the FACT that despite all the oil that washed up on the beaches of the Outer Banks in 1942, there was NO long term environmental damage (that I can find any record of) ... and while it may be of little relevance, I vacationed there as a boy in the mid 1950s and do not remember any talk of oil or pollution, etc.
So, yes, I REALLY do believe what I wrote .... time will tell who may or may not be "truly astounded".

 

[sailaway78]

Buck, get real

Hey Buck,
Lets get real here. Of course there was oil washing up on the beaches from ships sunk during WW11. The USS Arizona was still bleeding a sheen of oil a few years ago when I was there. Has been bleeding for over 50 years. This oil from sunken ships is refined oil, it is not crude. And the quanties are hardly comparable. You have no idea of how many millions and millions of gallons are spewing out of this well. Unless of course you believe the BP propaganda. Remember how they keep raising their estimates, every time they get caught. Also the ships that you speak of were scattered up and down the coast, not concentrated in one place. And most important, the oil on the beaches is not much more than an inconvenience, and a clean up problem. Tar balls on a beach don't do much real harm. Hell, there have been tar balls on Texas beaches for years and years. But you start getting crude oil into the marshes of the gulf coast, and you have an entirely different scenario. I won't try to explain it to you, just educate yourself a little before you start responding to something you don't know anything about.

 

[Buck420]

Hey Buck,
Lets get real here. Of course there was oil washing up on the beaches from ships sunk during WW11. The USS Arizona was still bleeding a sheen of oil a few years ago when I was there. Has been bleeding for over 50 years. This oil from sunken ships is refined oil, it is not crude. And the quanties are hardly comparable. You have no idea of how many millions and millions of gallons are spewing out of this well. Unless of course you believe the BP propaganda. Remember how they keep raising their estimates, every time they get caught. Also the ships that you speak of were scattered up and down the coast, not concentrated in one place. And most important, the oil on the beaches is not much more than an inconvenience, and a clean up problem. Tar balls on a beach don't do much real harm. Hell, there have been tar balls on Texas beaches for years and years. But you start getting crude oil into the marshes of the gulf coast, and you have an entirely different scenario. I won't try to explain it to you, just educate yourself a little before you start responding to something you don't know anything about.

Nice,

I, like everyone else in America, am appalled and outraged at the oil gushing into the Gulf... and onto the shores and marshes of the Gulf Coast states.
Please don't misunderstand my post... I am in no way minimizing what is happening in the Gulf. My heart goes out to all of you for the terrible damage being done, and for the damage to the Gulf still to come.
But your initial post expressed concern that the oil would be caught up in the Gulf Stream and deposited along the US East Coast. My response was intended to address ONLY the possibility of THIS possible secenerio, and to compare it to the oil (much of which was, INDEED crude ) that spilled onto the Outer Banks in 1942.