A) Why should the military be doing this?
B) What can the military do that BP can't?
A) Why should the military be doing this?
B) What can the military do that BP can't?
Hope is the denial of reality
Military = Coast Guard, National Guard, Army Corps of Engineers. Add some Navy for coordination of skimmer ships and filtering tankers, to be "in charge" of all the sea traffic that will grow with the spill. Assist in building those sand berms that Bobby Jindal wants.Originally Posted by Loki
BP may have scientists and engineers for the rig itelf, but they're not experts in containment or clean-up. Let alone coordinating something on this massive scale. Over 60,000 square miles of federal waters are affected.
But this is just what I've read.
Don't know if I would go that far, but BP has shown its putting the dollar before safety and the environment. Maybe if someone else had stepped in with a blank check and the ability to send BP the bill, we would have seen a quicker resolution.
Thing One and Thing Two
Have No Fear. BP Is Here.
By PETER JEFFREY
We looked all around us
And what did we see?
We saw a big mess
And a helpful BP.
"Don't be sad," said BP.
"Don't be mad. Have no fear.
I will suck it all up
Once I build the right gear."
Then he left for two weeks
And came back with a box.
"Look at this!" said BP
As he pulled up his socks.
"In this box are two things,
I will show to you now.
They will clean up this mess,"
Said BP with a bow.
A big dome popped out
And a "top hat" as well
And the insides of golf balls
And garbage. The smell!
"I know it is odd,"
Said BP, "all this goo.
But I've got some good tricks.
I will show them to you."
Then he balanced a berm
On the tip of his nose
And rode on a robot
Deep down where it flows.
"Gosh," said our fish,
"Does he know what he's doing?
He is the reason
This bad goo is gooing!
I knew this would happen.
Won't Mother be mad."
And back came BP,
His dome clogged with shad.
"My net!" BP said.
"My net's a good bet.
I bet with my net
I can get that stuff yet."
Our fish said, "Get out!
We do not need more trouble."
"But I like to be here,"
Said BP. "Try a bubble?"
The lesson seems clear
From the stern to the prow.
It is fun to have fun
But you have to know how.
Loki
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
Fixing something like this may indeed have been something we'd like to get the Army Corps of Engineers involved in, except I suspect they're not going to be any better, and probably worse, than other organizations at operating that deep. Just not the sort of environment they'd ever be expected to deal with.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
GGT's pretty much always hysterical.Who's hysterical? And strictly speaking, it's true we'll never be able to clean it. That doesn't mean the gulf will never be clean again though.But in the short to medium term, the gulf's going to be pretty fucked up.
Ok, but even ignoring your projected sea level rise, that marshy coastline would still be screwed, because of how fast it's sinking.Every marshy coastline in the world's going to be drowned in the next 50 years +/- and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
As you say, I'm fairly sure BP is in a better position to coordinate this operation than the Army Corps of Engineers (as well as having more qualified personnel at hand), and if the government had better ideas about solving this than BP, presumably they would have offered them to BP by now.
"Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant who has been overseeing the government’s response to the disaster, told a talk-show host the same day that only BP had the means to deal with the leaking well a mile below the sea. “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to be solved,” he said."
Everyone was suddenly a self-appointed expert. A White House official fumed: “[New York Times columnist] Bob Herbert says we should get our best and brightest down there. Well, guess what? They were down there three weeks ago! [Sen.] Bill Nelson [of Florida] says we should put the military in charge. Unless I missed something, the Coast Guard is part of the military.”
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/29/b...er-rising.html
Last edited by Loki; 05-30-2010 at 11:14 PM.
Hope is the denial of reality
Different "ops".
One is fixing the leak itself, where the scientists and equipment who are in the oil industry should focus. There are other deep water drilling experts besides BP who've offered advice (including Shell) but been turned down.
The other operation is collecting/containing the oil in the water, and protecting wildlife-wetlands-shorelines. BP can't just hire hundreds of people, give them rakes and bags, and send them out there for a photo op. News reports claim they're damaging things with that approach, flattening dunes with vehicles, mangling grasses with improperly laid boom, not tracking dead animals, tossing contaminated haz mat suits into restaurant dumpsters, etc.
BP also didn't conduct any pre-dispersant soil or water samples, to have a baseline comparison after spraying and dumping Corexit in thousands of gallons. BP has also denied underwater oil plumes, even though several university research vessels, manned with scientists, have all concluded they exist. For a company to say "it's all surface oil" means their containment and clean-up effort is gonna be fucked up.
US Navy has done oil retrieval in the Persian Gulf, they have the vessels and skills. They could also use those centrifuge tankers (Kevin Costner's venture, go figure) with skimmers and supertankers to clean the water, before it even reaches shore. The Navy's all-hands-on-deck attitude, and streamlined command structure, would be a good thing. IMO.
Didn't the EPA already provide its suggestions for better and less toxic dispersants, only to have BP tell them to buzz off because BP wasn't double dipping in the other companies?
Yes, BP "overruled" EPA somehow. What do you mean by double dipping?
Now the EPA, CDC, FDA, OSHA and some other government agencies are involved, mostly regarding the health hazards of the oil but also the Corexit. It's never been used in deep water, they don't know the long-term effects.
Get those responders some aspirators or at least HEPA masks....geezo
BP has investments in the company that produces their dispersant of choice. Its great that they are investing in research like that, but when your attempt sucks compared to the more efficient and less toxic alternatives that others have produced...you don't put cost above agency directives or coastal cleanup.
Ah, it probably stands to reason that they'd have a stake in the chemical used to clean up their oil spills. Too bad there seems to be a lack of research on its side-effects to Living creatures. No wonder they've had to shut down miles and miles of fishing areas.
The list of 10
Goes a little off the deep end at parts, but I can't really post a list of 10 by skipping numbers1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak
Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world's largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it's no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped... nine months later.
This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean's decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It's not hard to bet on failure when you know it's somewhat assured.
2. BP has a terrible safety record
BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)
With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper -- and less safe -- casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one -- even though they only cost $500,000.
SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.
3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP
According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number -- which doesn't include the immeasurable environmental damages -- to the current cap on BP's liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.
BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.
The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.
This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: "Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity."
4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit
It's no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line -- but it's at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.
Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a "safety alert" but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: "[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant."
The Interior Department's Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives' private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. "Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties" were also common.
Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?
It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here's the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.
But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.
5. Clean-up prospects are dismal
The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the "top kill" method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.
But here's the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let's be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.
Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.
6. BP has no real cleanup plan
Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable "Oil Spill Response Plan" which is, in fact, no plan at all.
Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon's plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.
The whole thing totals 600 pages -- a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.
7. Both Transocean and BP are trying to take away survivors' right to sue
With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.
So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won't be held liable for those same impacts.
Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while Transocean flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.
If there's anything to learn from this disaster, it's that companies like BP don't make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.
8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money -- and doesn't care if they get sick
When BP unleashed its "Beyond Petroleum" re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.
An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster -- the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 -- when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.
A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not "blast resistant." In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.
Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?
Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren't provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn't sign waivers.
9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe
It's hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.
In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren't all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.
On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas -- 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.
Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.
10. No one knows what to do and it will happen again
The very worst part about the Deepwater Horizon calamity is that nobody knows what to do. We don't know how bad it really is because we can't measure what's going on. We don't know how to stop it -- and once we do, we won't know how to clean it up.
BP is at the helm of the recovery process, but given its corporate track record, its efforts will only go so far -- it has a board of directors and shareholders to answer to, after all. The U.S. government, the only other entity that could take over is currently content to let BP hack away at the problem. Why? Because it probably has no idea what to do either.
Here's the reality of the matter -- for as long as offshore drilling is legal, oil spills will happen. Coastlines will be decimated, oceans destroyed, economies ruined, lives lost. Oil companies have little to no incentive to prevent such disasters from happening, and they use their money to buy government regulators' integrity.
August. WTF.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Fucking finally.
If BP is found to have been negligent at all, which is coming across as an obvious yes at this point, that would remove the $75 million responsiblity cap.
Even Bloomberg.com is questioning if BP will survive this. With clean up and litigation easily expected to pass $10 Billion, and a stock price that can't find the bottom, BP has made itself a takeover target.
I can't wait to see what the Gulf is like in August when they finally stop the spill. Seriously. This is unprecedented. Its like something the old Soviet Union would do, like dry up the Aral Sea or something. I once wrote in the only ACC pages that Yes, Sometimes The Sky Does Fall. Is there anyone here that imagined, before now, a simple exploratory well could end up with an accident so fully disastrous? I never imagined it. I had <gasp> more faith than that in both our coprporate overlords and in the government. I never imagined they would be completely powerless to stop a gigantic oil leak like this. I have to say it again: W.T.F???
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Yeah, of course it sounds stupid now in the face of this disaster and some past disasters, but it seemed a bit hard to imagine a simple, single oil well could wreak this kind of devastation.
and yet countries like Canada require relief wells for shit just like this.
It really is fucking mind blowing. I used to think the activists who were like "no off shore drilling anywhere ever!" were extremists, but I'd bet your left nut even they are surprised nobody can plug this leak!
Yeah, this is the rub. Whose going to try to claim Canada knew the danger of this kind of thing but the US didn't? Come on. Canada, a country so backward that people like Cain leave for modern society in fucking Ohio, ffs. Likely the Canadian government's just harder to buy into. You know, how Money = speech in the U S of A.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Norway and Brazil require those redundant relief wells, too.
I imagine it like they hit an undersea artery of oil and gas. Once they opened it, the pressure just released like a volcano, and the stop-cock blew out. But they don't know how to do such a deep sea bypass operation, with robots, cameras and joy sticks. Makes me wonder if there's a huge heart of oil that could just keep spewing, bleeding oil through the open artery.
the negligent part? BP knew of deepwater problems for 11 months before it finally came to a head.
Criminal decisions need to be dealt with at the individual level, not the corporate level or the institutional level. Allowing individuals autonomy via corporate or agency allegiance is criminal. Complain all you want about BP and the DOI and MMS and all the other entities involved but it comes down to certain individuals making decisions that caused this catastrophe. It is sad that people blame institutions and let the real bad guys walk away while we pay the fine. If we hold people personally responsible for their decisions, what would be the result?
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
If you hold people personally responsible for everything a corporation does, then people's lives will be ruined by frivolous lawsuits against corporations and individuals.
Here's an example: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20006379-71.html
Woman uses Google Maps for directions, walks into the middle of a small highway and gets hit by car. Sues Google. Under your hellish fantasy world, the hundreds of Google employees who probably worked on Google Maps would have to lawyer-up.
Dread seems confused by the frivolousness of the current system, instead of how individuals are shielded for chasing the almighty dollar.
So according to Dread, a world that embraces personal responsibility is a
Nobody should go to jail for destroying the Gulf of Mexico, it was a business decision.
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
If you're a factory worker who builds a car that ends up getting into an accident, do you think the car owner should be able to sue you personally?
Hope is the denial of reality
So, corporate groups can basically buy legislators, since that's considered Free Speech (groups on par with individual rights), but we can't go the other way and sue individuals in corporate groups.
Not when they foul up an ocean industry (or a financial industry), let alone cause an environmental catastrophe.
That means the shareholders get burnt, the counter parties get burnt, dominoes fall and the tax payer eventually gets burnt. But that Hayward guy and all his colleagues will probably walk away with nice golden parachutes.
Sounds like a scam.
I think, they were think more about suing the decision makers - the people who actually gave the command to forgo security measures.If you're a factory worker who builds a car that ends up getting into an accident, do you think the car owner should be able to sue you personally?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
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