From the New York Times:
There’s a world of difference between the impact of an oil spill and a deadly hurricane. And the White House hopes it stays that way.
As President Obama, who will visit the Gulf region on Sunday morning, has stepped up his administration’s response to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, ordering a moratorium on new offshore drilling leases and dispatching cabinet secretaries and cargo planes to the region, the White House is also trying to avert the kind of political damage inflicted on former President George W. Bush by his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
Based on what I’m reading, this oil spill may be significantly worse than Hurricane Katrina if the wellhead is lost. The president is smart to visit the region tomorrow. And he better do more than just fly over the Gulf of Mexico. This is potentially the biggest environmental crisis of our generation. We could lose more than half of our nation’s seafood and 40% of our coastal wetlands. Louisiana’s economy will be utterly devastated and it will start falling into the Gulf as mass erosion events take place in each hurricane season.
Unless they cap this well soon, this is going to make Katrina seem like a walk in the park.
———————
If you like what we do here at the Frog Pond, please consider making a donation. I depend on your generosity to keep this place running.
If this oil comes up the east coast to Hatteras, I am going to be livid. We expect a risk in the Gulf since they drill there. Not in the Outer Banks.
I’m livid no matter where it goes. Those greedy pigs at BP had no contingency plan for anything possibly going wrong…much like the guys who built the “unsinkable” Titanic.
And then they tried to lie about true extent of the mess they created for the better part of the first week. I’m disgusted.
And Sarah “Drill baby Drill” Palin offers up prayers for residents of the area via twitter. That’ll help, I’m sure.
And that idiot thinks industry can save us. Here is the tweet:
Having worked/lived thru Exxon oil spill,my family&I understand Gulf residents’ fears.Our prayers r w/u.All industry efforts must b employed
Industry efforts have been. And have failed!! What a blithering idiot!!
Not to mention that industry efforts caused the blowout in the first place.
I heard on Tom Hartmann this afternoon that Although BP owns the well, someone else operates it and a subsidiary of Halliburton actually did the faulty work that caused the blowout.
The diagram in your link is freaking me out! Obama needs to declare a NATIONAL EMERGENCY to contain and shut down this event NOW!
We’ll be noticing the effects of this spill for decades. Remnants of Exxon Valdez still plague the Alaskan coastline…
Yet I never heard any talk of unstoppable gushers from the seabed. Did anyone predict this type of catastrophe? The specific environmental reasons against offshore drilling were never detailed in the media. I never dreamed of something of this magnitude. So I wonder did some lonely voice say “My God we could have a China Synrome with oil a runaway process spewing slow death.” Maybe a lot of people were talking about it but I did not hear them?
time for the President to be bold in his reaction.
thanks for the laugh. When has this president been bold?
What, dive in the ocean and seal the hole with his Aquaman ray?
nope.
get congress to propose regulations, and do whatever could be done on the regulatory end. the valves that EXIST, and are being used elsewhere in the world, were NOT on these rigs because of the closeness of Big Oil to the regulators of Shrub’s regime.
get the AG to file the suits to get the taxpayer’s monies back.
if they are on a ‘ subsidy’ list, eliminate that.
he doesn’t have to don a cape to do any of this.
Let’s look at this in perspective: this is just an extreme example of what we are doing to the planet every day. The overwhelming political necessity of economic growth makes the global destruction of our environment almost inevitable (a staggering amount has already been done and is irreversible). Political organizations and bureaucracies can hardly plan beyond the next election cycle, much less look decades and centuries ahead to where we are going as a civilization. Corporations are notoriously far worse. They’re only interested in getting as much as they possibly can this second, everyone else and posterity be damned. That’s what the CEO Jesus has brought us: an armageddon of psychopathic corporations and corporate states run-amok.
And the “free-market” cheerleaders and magical thinking prophets of growth will all be strangely silent amidst the coming calamities we are facing, of which the Deep Water catastrophe is only a taste.
Interesting comment on the wellhead story:
“working4u2,
I agree with you and after looking at the diagram they’re showing with drilling that secondary well, it shows me what appears to be that they’re still insterested in tapping that formation to get access to the oil. They say they’re plugging the well, but it’s far from it. They’re just diverting the flow because the secondary well will have pumps and they’ll take the oil at that point and only a small amount will leak out after that. I don’t see anything in their explanation about sealing the original pipe.
I say go ahead and collapse the current well and they can drill that formation later. We have to stop what’s happening right now. If you can collapse the well, then that should act like a cork. You may have some seepage, but nothing like you have now. Basically, all of that oil is at a higher pressure deep in the earth, and that broken pipe is its relief valve since it’s lower pressure. You take that away by burying tons of sand and mud on top of it.
I’m beginning to think that there are some folks out there who still think they can salvage the original tap, and are willing the risk the environmental impacts.
I haven’t heard the first person ask in the media or government why not collapse that well!
I don’t work in the oil industry, but I am a chemical engineer and have worked with drilling in different industries. I know it’s possible to collapse this stuff.”
Is BP not taking the most decisive steps because it’s trying to protect future profits? Why aren’t we dumping tons of sand on the well?
Re: your last time. Your first question answers your second.
Well, that should be demonstrated shouldn’t it?
If the wellhead goes BP and everyone associated with the platform, including Halliburton, might as well declare bankruptcy that day.
Remember that it’s in 5,000 feet of water.
They can put a big hose down there can’t they?
riddle me this: why don’t they just use a high explosive to seal off the hole?
that was the mo of red adair, et al. granted, the rationale for that approach on a surface fire…depriving the fire of oxygen…is not applicable here. what are the chances of success. they can get down there with a deep water submersibles to photograph the leak, why not place a charge and snuff it out.
hell, load the damn thing w/ c4, send it down and blow it up. what’s the loss of a multi million dollar submersible to the costs of cleaning up this catastrophe?
seems to me there’s a lot more thought going in to how to preserve the access and mitigate the damage and too little going into actually stopping the flow.
Maybe an explosive would blow the hole bigger? Not being an apologist but 5000 barrels an hour is a big flow, we wouldn’t want it to be 50,000.
Where in the body politic would you find anybody, in any party, who is not a prophet of growth? Not here, not at Kos or Open Left or Mother Jones or the Nation or anyplace else I can think of. The main criticism of Obama from the left is that he’s not doing enough to speed economic growth. I don’t even know where to look for an alternative view that doesn’t involve going back to the land or waiting for Jesus to fix us.
You may have noticed I recognized that’s the political reality. Given that it seems unlikely we can replace fossil fuels without disruption to the political holy grail of growth in the short term, ecological catastrophe is unavoidable. That’s my depressed point. And then we most definitely will be at a point of having no hope but Jesus.
The fact that fossil fuels A) adversely affect the planet’s habitability, and that oil in particular will B) soon run out, creating an economic holocaust, would seem to suggest, in the strongest possible terms, that the very most important task for us as a nation and for the globe as a whole is to entirely shift to alternative energy sources. If the mantra of growth stands in the way of that, so much the worse for growth, and so much the worse for all those politicians.
I guess my point was that it’s not just a political holy grail in the sense that there are even two sides. It’s received holy wisdom that nobody on any side would dream of questioning. The only way alternative energy can be defended — again, by any side — is that it’s the path to more growth without changing much of anything. It wouldn’t be so depressing if it was just politicians. It is, as Obama so stupidly said about the coal miners, “in pursuit of the American Dream.”
I see this as being intimately linked with consumer capitalism’s cunning exploitation of the human animal’s craving for status. After all, the middle class can only subscribe to growth as the be-all end-all of organized political action if it has been brainwashed by an advertorial and acquisitive culture. The luxury-brand ideal of consumption flatters the animal lust of the jealous consumer. Only this can satisfy his vain, sensual need to dominate through consumption.
The looming reality which our current politics cannot bear to face, and which it is perhaps designed to obscure, is that in the future we are likely to be quite “poor” by materialist standards. Thus the growth mantra. But though we may be all much “poorer” we can be ok. We can weather the storm collectively, if we work together.
It’s like, collectively, the human animal is basically a big baby.
the argument against growth-worship is not top down it is bottom up – the organic, locovore, slow food and grassfed movements in agriculture. let’s hope the grassroots, literally, is able to turn things around fast enough.
And BTW, what truly shitty spin from the NYT. Could it possibly be that Obama is concerned about more than political damage? That he’s actually desperate to mitigate the horrific damage? Granted he said stupid things about finding ways to prevent this from happening again, but this spin goes way too far. Send Helene back to the Style section or whatever braindead backwater she got promoted from.
Also, I don’t think Katrina should be brought up in this context. When a thousand people die and Obama does nothing, then maybe it could be raised. This has been Obama’s fourth Katrina moment as president according to the media.
.
(Wikinvest) – Transocean (RIG), as the name implies, is the biggest U.S. provider of rigs, platforms and services for offshore drilling. The company acquired Santa Fe International (GSF) in late November 2007, creating the second largest oilfield services company overall, behind only Schlumberger N.V. (SLB) (based on market capitalization). Given that GSF also specializes in offshore drilling, the company in effect doubled down on deepwater drilling.
BP, Transocean Lawsuits Surge as Oil Spill Spreads in Gulf
On April 22, 2010 a lawsuit (http://www.offshoreinjuries.com/CM/Custom/4.22.10-1st-amended-petition-Kleppinger.pdf) (Cause No. 2010-25245, filed in Harris County ED101J015754153) was filed by Houston-based law firm, Gordon, Elias & Seely, L.L.P., against Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling, Inc., Deepwater Horizon, and BP Products North America, Inc. on behalf of Kleppinger’s wife and son. The lawsuit claims that the defendants were negligent and that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was not seaworthy.
At the time of the explosion and fire, Kleppinger had been away from his family for about three weeks. On Tuesday night, just before the blast, he made his nightly call home to his wife, Tracy. They talked about how he would be ashore in the morning and how he planned to buy a new washing machine to replace a broken one on the following day.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."