Massive Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill

[Sea Skimmer]

It's bad enough we get played by the double jeopardy rule in a lot of safety cases within Big Oil, or how hilariously BP got a less than $100k fine for Cherry Point and will take two decades to investigate. Really? Fucking $70k is all the US government deems suitable to fine one of the largest companies in the world for over the clusterfuck of mismanagement and loss of life that was the incident in Texas?

Umm no it isn't, because you are very confused at the moment. Cherry Point refinery is in Washington State, not Texas. The Cherry Point plant was fined 70,000 dollars for some random site inspection safety violations by the state of Washington it seems, I never heard of that before personally but it was real easy to look up online. The 2005 explosion in Texas might have confused you because it was at the Texas City Refinery in Texas City... very hard to keep that straight from Washington! Anyway BP was fined 87 million for that by the Federal government and paid out over a billion and a half dollars in compensation to the families of those killed and to those who were injured. 87 million still isn't much for an oil company but it is the largest OSHA fine ever, and they paid other fines to other agencies as well. It took four years to convict them in court on the OSHA charges, which is quicker then many murders caught with blood on the hands are convicted in the US, not two fucking decades. BP wanted to make a plea deal the whole time too, but the court didn't allow them to do so.

[Admiral Valdemar]

A simple confusion of the two instances I was using doesn't change my overall point one bit. BP has had more safety near misses than any other major oil company operating in the West, and while they may try to claim it's because they're pioneers of bleeding edge tech, a lot of the problems aren't anything to do with the risky nature of deep well drilling off-shore, well, until now at least. But it was all Transocean's fault, right?

Still, $70k is a pittance, not that the $87M fine is any better given how large a company we're dealing with (keep in mind that 15 people died and over 100 wounded, on top of the costs to clear the whole mess up, that amount should barely cover the fatalities). To put some context into this, the company I work for, were it to fail a random GLPMA or FDA inspection on anything as serious as the safety concerns brought up with BP in the past, would be shut down there and then with the licence to operate revoked until such time that the inspectors are utterly convinced there is no potential for clinical trial data fiddling, or worse, production stage manufacture shortfalls. There is absolute zero tolerance, and that's based on historical precedence, because big companies go out of their way to cut costs, even if it means cutting corners to boot.

For some reason we don't apply this kind of strictness to these companies, or at least, not in the US (where, at least in the biotech industry, the regulations were born given how piss poor Big Pharma was before anyone in government deemed it an idea to keep tabs on such an industry). Differences here being, if you fuck up a batch of meds, you may kill a few people and get a hefty fine. What BP has done here, is basically screw and ecosystem and an economy barely out of the abyss from Katrina as well as several people, whom it felt the need to blame for all of this without any evidence whatsoever straight off the bat. Way to go. Personally, I wouldn't shed a tear if the whole company got taken down for this on costs alone, though looking at Thunder Horse, I wonder if they'll not just fade out of the GOM soon anyway.

On the incompetence with handling the booms via military assistance, what else is new? Like you say, FEMA dropped the ball with Katrina, so it's not like this event, even with plans in place, was going to turn out any better since we're clearly dealing with people who have only the ability to make half a plan and somehow forget how to execute it at that. The booms may not contain all the leak, but they sure could've been handy for a start.

[Sea Skimmer]

A simple confusion of the two instances I was using doesn't change my overall point one bit. BP has had more safety near misses than any other major oil company operating in the West, and while they may try to claim it's because they're pioneers of bleeding edge tech, a lot of the problems aren't anything to do with the risky nature of deep well drilling off-shore, well, until now at least. But it was all Transocean's fault, right?

No by law, which changed quite a bit after Exxon Valdez BP is liable for everything because they are the field operator. So whatever blame game they play for the press doesn't really matter in court. The largest true fault though really was most likely human error, because this is what causes the most trouble in the oil extraction industry. One place the US has been working on regulations is better documentation and checklist type procedures to help reduce that problem.
Piper Alfa blew up from human error too, though of course safety faults had to already exist for the error to have such critical results to occur from the error. But thats not true of all parts of the oil industry, some places its just a 'do something wrong and die' kind of situation. Shitty, but offshore work does pay pretty damn well because of it.

Still, $70k is a pittance, not that the $87M fine is any better given how large a company we're dealing with (keep in mind that 15 people died and over 100 wounded, on top of the costs to clear the whole mess up, that amount should barely cover the fatalities).

Cover who? The 87 million is not money to the victims, its just a fine to the federal government which may then be spent on tank shells or toilet paper. Money to the victims is over 1.6 billion and was paid by BP direct to said families. That's about 8.5 million average, but I'm sure the true split would be much more lopsided with the families of the dead getting 30+ million and someone with a hand cut by broken glass getting 250,000.

Course keep in mind back in 1947 a industrial accident BLEW UP THE WHOLE CITY, when two shiploads of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded at a dock located in the middle of Texas City. 581 people died from that one... so a few things have improved.

To put some context into this, the company I work for, were it to fail a random GLPMA or FDA inspection on anything as serious as the safety concerns brought up with BP in the past, would be shut down there and then with the licence to operate revoked until such time that the inspectors are utterly convinced there is no potential for clinical trial data fiddling, or worse, production stage manufacture shortfalls. There is absolute zero tolerance, and that's based on historical precedence, because big companies go out of their way to cut costs, even if it means cutting corners to boot.

While thats a nice policy to have but you simply can't physically do that with an oil refinery. They take two weeks to shutdown normally, and are most likely to have accidents while they shutdown, because of all the thermal contraction in the pipes and massive pressure changes in huge volumes of liquids. In many cases a total shutdown would be the worst thing you could do. Many refineries have on site generating capacity as well as links to multiple high tension lines, and largely manual controls all because just loosing electrical power could be fatal otherwise. Startup is the next most dangerous time, and low and behold that Texas City explosion took place during a unit start up.

Faults are almost always fixed while units are operating, and this is one of the reasons why oil refineries are such insane jumbles of pipework because its been added into over and over again provide bypasses. If you shut them down for any safety violation at all, the oil industry would just completely come to a halt. With the US closing oil refineries left and right, and having constructed no completely new ones since the 1970s we simply do not have the gross capacity to have them shutdown like that. Its just not happening even if safety really was a much higher priority. We are already in a situation in which true emergency shutdowns happening in the wrong combination of capacity could already cause nationwide shortages of refined fuel. But that's the fun of oil dependence. Certain units can be shutdown somewhat at will, but others are just 100% vital to operating the entire refinery and shutting them down is the same as closing the whole place.

I have some very good friends who work in the refinery industry, though not for BP, so I have some clue as to how they operate and what goes wrong all the time. Steam leaks are the biggest day to day threat because the superheated steam comes out invisible and will burn a person to death instantly. You have to hunt down the correct pipe to shutdown with FLIR . Still his refinery went over six years recently with no deaths at all in a workforce of thousands.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The superheated steam problem was once mentioned in a story my grandfather brought up about a guy he knew in the RN who basically had his arm lopped off by such a jet. This was at a time when no FLIR would be available, or would be cumbersome at least. The whole catapult system had to be shutdown anyway. With a refinery, you can't afford such a large shutdown without eating a huge loss one way or another, though with a rig, especially a prospecting one, you can afford to be more cautious and, indeed, you need to be given a lot of what passes for basic production now will be hard to reach deep sea fields. Although fallible humans will always exist, in cases like the Buncefield explosion, and possibly this GOM disaster, it could be several factors, some technological by virtue of the complexity of the systems used and the, often experimental, nature of the technology. The double jeopardy law I mentioned could be exempt here if it's shown that BP was negligent in its handling of the rig's infrastructure and didn't properly inform the drill crew of what they were getting into. It's one thing to have the BOP fail, but for this to happen, some pretty wide systemic errors must've arose all at once.

I'm not convinced the DH incident was down to shoddy work on the part of the operators, who on a rig like that, would be some of the most highly trained on the planet (although I have heard from one BP off-shore projects administrator posting online that a lot of the experienced petro-geologists and engineers will be retiring within a few years, copying a trend in many heavy industries such as nuclear, where expertise seems to be hard to prosper). The report into this may be inconclusive in the end, though we can gauge at least some of the picture now, that being the BOP shears failing along with a communication error and potentially unnoticed pressure pocket. Given how dramatic the event unfolded, something pretty major didn't go to plan. The loss of a wellhead and a rig in such a way has never happened, which alone would cost BP a pretty penny, and now on top of that, they've got an army of lawyers to fight locally, the US gov't and all that lost production capacity to the tune of millions a day. We'll ignore for now that their Thunder Horse project is not satisfying the rosy predictions they forecast a few years back, something I was expecting to be frank (it was always an investor ploy more than a geological certainty).

Though I was under the impression the $87M fine from that previous explosion at a refinery was part of the reparation package. Either way, the Exxon Valdez disaster opening the way for larger liability will be needed given how BP is shying away from doing anything but what is absolutely necessary. They're paying people around $10/hr. to deal with the booms and contingencies for oil coming ashore, and I read that a smaller local workforce managed to set more up in one day than BP did in the four days previous.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Oil nearing Southwest Pass Port. Implications for shipping mean longer processing times.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There are a lot of people who need to be crucified over this spill. May they die slowly and painfully facing the coastlines they destroyed

Wednesday 05 May 2010

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

photo

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now, he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic. While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?"

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is between Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn's my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," said Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.

[FSTargetDrone]

Update on the containment attempt:

APNewsBreak: Series of failures led to rig blast

By NOAKI SCHWARTZ and HARRY R. WEBER, Associated Press Writers Noaki Schwartz And Harry R. Weber, Associated Press Writers

25 mins ago



The containment vessel is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico at the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig collapse, Thursday, May 6, 2010.
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – The deadly blowout of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

While the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the April 20 blast that killed 11 workers and touched off the underwater gusher that has poured more than 3 million gallons of crude into the Gulf.

Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.

Seven BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project's safety record, according to the transcripts. Meanwhile, far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

As the workers removed pressure from the drilling column and introduced heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead, the chemical reaction created heat, destabilizing the seal and allowing a gas bubble to form inside the pipe.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane gas is in a slushy, crystalline form. But as the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, the interviews said.

"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the seawater in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

The gas flooded into an adjoining room with exposed ignition sources, he said.

"That's where the first explosion happened," said Bea, who worked for Shell Oil in the 1960s during the last big northern Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout. "The mud room was next to the quarters where the party was. Then there was a series of explosions that subsequently ignited the oil that was coming from below."

The executives were injured but survived, according to one account. Nine rig crew on the rig floor and two engineers died.

"The furniture and walls trapped some and broke some bones but they managed to get in the life boats with assistance from others," said the transcript.

The reports made Bea, the 73-year-old industry veteran, cry.

"It sure as hell is painful," he said. "Tears of frustration and anger."

BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said he could not immediately comment on the report.

On Friday, a BP-chartered vessel lowered a 100-ton concrete-and-steel vault onto the ruptured well, an important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

"We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin," BP spokesman Bill Salvin told The Associated Press.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot-tall box into place in a slow-moving drama. Now that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least 12 hours to let it settle and make sure it's stable before the robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker.

"It appears to be going exactly as we hoped," on Friday afternoon, shortly after the four-story device hit the seafloor. "Still lots of challenges ahead, but this is very good progress."

By Sunday, the box the size of a house could be capturing up to 85 percent of the oil. So far about 3 million gallons have leaked.

The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo — arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons — is drawing ever closer to Louisiana's coastal communities.

There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box: The approach has never been tried at such depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots illuminate the area where they are working.

If the box works, another one will be dropped onto a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf.

At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in hopes of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and they are working on other ways to cap it.

Investigators looking into the cause of the explosion have been focusing on the so-called blowout preventer. Federal regulators told The Associated Press Friday that they are going to examine whether these last-resort cutoff valves on offshore oil wells are reliable.

Blowouts are infrequent, because well holes are blocked by piping and pumped-in materials like synthetic mud, cement and even sea water. The pipes are plugged with cement, so fluid and gas can't typically push up inside the pipes.

Instead, a typical blowout surges up a channel around the piping. The narrow space between the well walls and the piping is usually filled with cement, so there is no pathway for a blowout. But if the cement or broken piping leaves enough space, a surge can rise to the surface.

There, at the wellhead of exploratory wells, sits the massive steel contraption known as a blowout preventer. It can snuff a blowout by squeezing rubber seals tightly around the pipes with up to 1 million pounds of force. If the seals fail, the blowout preventer deploys a last line of defense: a set of rams that can slice right through the pipes and cap the blowout.

Deepwater Horizon was also equipped with an automated backup system called a Deadman. It should have activated the blowout preventer even if workers could not.

Based on the interviews with rig workers, none of those safeguards worked.

___

Associated Press writers Cain Burdeau, Vicki Smith and Ray Henry in Louisiana, Jeff Donn in Boston and Michael Graczyk in Houston contributed to this report.

[FSTargetDrone]

In an interesting and related story:

Fox News Host Takes Down Rove’s Claim That Obama Administration Didn’t Respond Fast Enough To Oil Spill

By Ben Armbruster on May 6th, 2010 at 2:30 pm

Today on Fox News during an interview with Karl Rove, host Jane Skinner noted that many in the media (and on the right) claim that the oil rig explosion in the Gulf is President Obama’s “Katrina.” Rove said he “wouldn’t compare this to Katrina,” but he then ran through a timeline of the events as if to accuse the White House of having a delayed response to the disaster. However, Skinner didn’t buy it, noting that the White House was involved from the beginning:

SKINNER: Before we get too far in this time line, I just want to read because the press secretary Robert Gibbs has been asked so many questions about this and this was his response, “The morning after the Secretary — the Interior Secretary deployed his deputy to the region to coordinate it all and on the 22nd when it sank, the national response team was activated and later that day the President convened a meeting in the Oval Office with all those involved.”

I mean at some point in the beginning they were relying also on the oil company BP, this was a disaster that people didn’t have a lot of information about, it’s all happening a mile under water.

Rove then complained that the Interior Department Secretary’s chief of staff went on a work vacation after the oil spill, suggesting that it was somehow indicative of a hands-off approach from the Obama administration. Skinner promptly knocked this argument down as well:

SKINNER: Karl I know a lot of people are making a big issue about that but, first of all, he’s not the Interior Secretary, he’s not the Deputy Interior Secretary, those are the bosses of the department. He’s a chief of staff. You know, I know well what the job of a chief of staff is. … It’s not like the country, the Interior Department can’t run without the chief of staff.

A flustered Rove claimed the White House is “trying to rewrite history and say ‘we were engaged right from the beginning.’ No they weren’t!” “I just want to point out again is they do say they had the Deputy Interior secreteary down there, that he was the one that was actually in charge, tasked with organizing this,” Skinner replied. Watch it:



Similar to Rove, other conservatives are trying pin blame on the administration or to make the spill response “Obama’s Katrina.” “I think the parallels to Katrina are very real,” Newt Gingrich said yesterday. Today, MSNBC host and former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough called such a comparison “absolutely obscene,” adding that “anybody that draws that analogy is an idiot.”

Many on the right aren’t buying the delayed response argument either. Charles Krauthammer, the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes, and even Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) have all noted that the Obama administration responded appropriately to the Gulf oil spill. “What could [Obama] have done? … This is insane,” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly said of the administration’s critics.

There are multiple links within the body of the original article that I don't have time to edit in now, so check it out there for more.

[Instant Sunrise]

Glad to see that BP is already doing their part with this:

Alabama Attorney General Troy King said tonight that he has told representatives of BP Plc. that they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.

The agreements, King said, essentially require that people give up the right to sue in exchange for payment of up to $5,000.

King said BP's efforts were particularly strong in Bayou La Batre.

The attorney general said he is prohibited from giving legal advice to private citizens, but added that "people need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that.

"They should seek appropriate counsel to make sure their rights are protected," King said.

By the end of Sunday, BP aimed to sign up 500 fishing boats in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to deploy boom.

BP had distributed a contract to fishermen it was hiring that waived their right to sue BP and required confidentiality and other items, sparking protests in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Darren Beaudo, a spokesman for BP, said the waiver requirement had been stripped out, and that ones already signed would not be enforced.

"BP will not enforce any waivers that have been signed in connection with this activity," he wrote in an e-mail.

But King said late Sunday that he was still concerned that people would lose their right to sue by accepting settlements from BP of up to $5,000, as envisioned by the claim process BP has set up.

The attorney general said he is prohibited from giving legal advice to private citizens, but added that "people need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that."

"To the best of my knowledge BP did not ask residents of Alabama to waive their legal rights in the way that has been described," Beaudo said.

Hi there! We're from BP, here's $5000, just sign here to receive your money! Oh yeah, and you waive your right to sue us for damages regarding this, even though you would probably get more money. This is, assuming we ever paid up, and not tie it up in litigation for 20 years.

[FSTargetDrone]

By the end of Sunday, BP aimed to sign up 500 fishing boats in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to deploy boom.

BP had distributed a contract to fishermen it was hiring that waived their right to sue BP and required confidentiality and other items, sparking protests in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Hah: "We'll pay you to help us clean up the mess we made that will have a direct and most-likely negative impact on your livelihoods, but then you also cannot complain about what we did."

[FSTargetDrone]

Icy buildup has forced the removal of the containment dome from the damaged wellhead:

Deep-sea ice crystals stymie Gulf oil leak fix

By SARAH LARIMER and HARRY R. WEBER, Associated Press Writers Sarah Larimer And Harry R. Weber, Associated Press Writers

20 mins ago

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – Icelike crystals encrusting a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box meant to contain oil gushing from a broken well deep in the Gulf of Mexico forced crews Saturday to back off the long-shot plan, while more than 100 miles away, blobs of tar washed up at an Alabama beach full of swimmers.

The failure in the first attempt to use the specially constructed containment box over the leak 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, coupled with the ominous arrival of the sticky substance at Dauphin Island, Ala., crushed hopes of a short-term solution to what could yet grow into the worst oil spill in the nation's history.

More than 3 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf since a rig exploded April 20, killing 11, and officials said it would be at least Monday before a different solution is found.

Authorities in protective gear descended on the public beach on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than oil had been reported.

Kimberly Creel, 41, was hanging out and swimming with hundreds of other beachgoers when crews arrived to investigate. She said she found quarter- to pea-size balls sporadically along the beach.

"It almost looks like bark, but when you pick it up it definitely has a liquid consistency and it's definitely oil," she said. "... I can only imagine what might be coming this way that might be larger."

Even after discovering the oil and being warned not to touch it, Creel said beachgoers continued swimming.

Creel said it was sad to the see the oil come ashore.

"It almost brings tears to me eyes," she said.

About a half dozen tar balls had been collected by Saturday afternoon at Dauphin Island, Coast Guard chief warrant officer Adam Wine said in Mobile. Authorities planned to test the substance but strongly suspected it came from the oil spill.

The containment box, a method never before attempted at such depths, had been considered the best hope of stanching the flow in the near term.

"I wouldn't say it's failed yet," BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said. "What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work."

The icy buildup on the containment box made it too buoyant and clogged it up, Suttles said. Workers who had carefully lowered the massive box over the leak nearly a mile below the surface had to lift it and move it some 600 feet to the side.

Company and Coast Guard officials had cautioned that icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, would be one of the biggest challenges to the containment box plan, and their warnings proved accurate. The crystals clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.

Options under consideration included raising the box high enough that warmer water would prevent the slush from forming, or using heated water or methanol to prevent the crystals from forming.

Even as officials pondered their next move, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said she must to continue to manage expectations of what the containment box can do.

"This dome is no silver bullet to stop the leak," she said.

A petroleum chemist and geologist said the icy hydrates are a common problem at depths greater than 1,200 feet.

"At this water depth and the nature of the containment vessel, it's hard to know what their options really are," said Art Johnson of Kenner, La., who is president and chief of exploration of Hydrate Energy International.

The original blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP PLC's internal investigation.

While the precise cause is still under investigation, the sequence of events described in the interviews provides the most detailed account of the blast.

Portions of the interviews, two written and one taped, were described in detail to an Associated Press reporter by Robert Bea, a University of California Berkeley engineering professor who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety and worked for BP PLC as a risk assessment consultant during the 1990s. He received them from industry friends seeking his expert opinion.

A group of BP executives were on board the Deepwater Horizon rig celebrating the project's safety record, according to the transcripts. Far below, the rig was being converted from an exploration well to a production well.

Based on the interviews, Bea believes that the workers set and then tested a cement seal at the bottom of the well. Then they reduced the pressure in the drill column and attempted to set a second seal below the sea floor. A chemical reaction caused by the setting cement created heat and a gas bubble which destroyed the seal.

Deep beneath the seafloor, methane is in a slushy, crystalline form. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose up the drill column from the high-pressure environs of the deep to the less pressurized shallows, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, Bea said.

"A small bubble becomes a really big bubble," Bea said. "So the expanding bubble becomes like a cannon shooting the gas into your face."

Up on the rig, the first thing workers noticed was the sea water in the drill column suddenly shooting back at them, rocketing 240 feet in the air, he said. Then, gas surfaced. Then oil.

"What we had learned when I worked as a drill rig laborer was swoosh, boom, run," Bea said. "The swoosh is the gas, boom is the explosion and run is what you better be doing."

BP spokesman John Curry would not comment Friday night on whether methane gas or the series of events described in the internal documents caused the accident.

On Saturday, the boat with the plumbing equipment for the containment box was about 1.5 miles from the vessel that lowered the box. Company officials had hoped the box would capture up to 85 percent of the oil and feed it into a tanker on the surface.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been laying booms, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo — arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons is drawing ever closer.

In New Orleans, about 200 people showed up at a Sierra Club rally, speaking out against the dangers of offshore drilling. Protesters, some holding signs with slogans like "Clean, Baby, Clean" and "Save Our Wetlands Now," signed a massive banner that read: "This Is Your Crude Awakening."

"I'm angry that they didn't stop the oil right away," said John Sconza, a 56-year-old software salesman. "It's been 18 days."

___

Larimer reported from Mobile, Ala. Associated Press writers Cain Burdeau, Vicki Smith and Ray Henry in Louisiana, Jeff Donn in Boston, Michael Graczyk in Houston and Noaki Schwarz in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Fail. This simply isn't going to work. And the disaster continues.

[Broomstick]

Oh, please - yes, it's a serious problem, but if they can figure out a way to deal with the ice/slush formation it's worth trying again. Yes, it's "Moonshot" level of experimental technology, but we've been to the Moon more than once, right? Do you know how many frickin' rockets blew up on the pad before they got that one right? You succeed at salvaging disasters like this by persistence in trying. They absolutely should keep working on a way to get this funnel/cap idea to work. The payoff would not only be for this mess, but also on future ones where the technology might be applied.

Of course, other alternatives must be tried. Relief wells have been started.

We must keep trying to fix this. Throwing our hands up in surrender benefits no one.

Once we get this mess dealt with, then we can throw some BP executives to the howling mobs. I think on a fisherman's wharf in Lousiana would be a good place to start... After that, we'll let the environmentalists have a few...

[cosmicalstorm]

God damn this is so sad

[Broomstick]

Yes.

I'd like to see some heads roll over this.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Yes.

I'd like to see some heads roll over this.

I Prefer crucifixion. I even have a little list.

[Broomstick]

Well... I suppose we could crucify first, THEN roll the heads later...

Anyone up for original rules polo?

[Commander 598]

Pulled these from the LAWLF Facebook page:



Booms placed around Breton Island.



Dr. James LaCour, LDWF State Wildlife Veterinarian, LSU Veterinary School student (right) and Dr. Erica Miller, Tristate Bird Rescue examines a brown pelican.



Dr. James LaCour, LDWF State Wildlife Veterinarian, and LSU Veterinary School student examines and treats a cormorant.



LDWF biologist, Shane Granier scouts for injured and oiled wildlife, east of the Mississippi River, south of Breton Sound.

[FSTargetDrone]

Other ideas...

Oil spill grows to 3.5M gallons as BP scrambles

By HARRY R. WEBER and RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer Harry R. Weber And Ray Henry, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 31 mins ago

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – A growing collection of crippled equipment littered the ocean floor Sunday near a ruptured oil well gushing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, the remnants of a massive rig that exploded weeks ago and the failed efforts since to cap the leak.

On the surface, nearly a mile up, a fleet of ships maneuvered to deploy the latest stopgap plans hatched by BP engineers desperate to keep the Deepwater Horizon disaster from becoming the nation's worst spill. An estimated 3.5 million gallons has risen from the depths since the April 20 explosion that killed 11, a pace that would surpass the total spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster by Father's Day.

A day after icelike crystals clogged a four-story box that workers had lowered atop the main leak, crews using remote-controlled submarines hauled the specially built structure more than a quarter-mile away and prepared other long-shot methods of stopping the flow.

Chief operating officer Doug Suttles said BP was thinking about putting a smaller containment dome over the massive leak, believing that it would be less vulnerable. The smaller dome could be ready to deploy Tuesday or Wednesday.

"We're going to pursue the first option that's available to us and we think it'll be the top hat," Suttles said.

The company was also now debating whether it should cut the riser pipe undersea and use larger piping to bring the gushing oil to a drill ship on the surface. The third option would use a tube to shoot ground-up materials into the well's blowout preventer, a process that could take two to three weeks.

As BP weighed its options on the mainland, waves of dark brown and black sludge crashed into a boat in the area above the leak. The fumes there were so intense that a crewmember of the support ship Joe Griffin and an AP photographer on board had to wear respirators while on deck.

A white cattle egret landed on the ship, brownish-colored stains of oil on its face and along its chest, wings and tail.

Meanwhile, thick blobs of tar had washed up on Alabama's white sand beaches, yet another sign the spill was spreading.

It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart the containment box 50 miles out and slowly lower it to the well a mile below the surface, but the frozen depths were just too much.

Company and Coast Guard officials had cautioned that icelike hydrates, a slushy mixture of gas and water, would be one of the biggest challenges to the containment box plan. The crystals clogged the opening in the top of the peaked box, Suttles said, like sand in a funnel, only upside-down.

"We never believed the hydrates could actually plug up a 12-inch opening and they did, which means they're forming very rapidly and in large quantities," Suttles said.

The containment box plan, never before tried at such depths, had been designed to siphon up to 85 percent of the leaking oil.

The original blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP PLC's internal investigation. Deep sea oil drillers often encounter pockets of methane crystals as they dig into the earth.

As the bubble rose, it intensified and grew, breaking through various safety barriers, said Robert Bea, a University of California Berkley engineering professor and oil pipeline expert who detailed the interviews exclusively to an AP reporter.

___

Associated Press writers Ray Henry and John Curran in Louisiana, Jay Reeves and Brent Kallestad in Florida and Sarah Larimer and video journalist Rich Matthews in Alabama contributed to this report.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Drilling clathrate deposits is a Bad Idea™. The last thing we need is to destabilise a sizeable deposit while drilling for oil, or worse, while drilling for such deposits as a resource.

[MKSheppard]

Clearly, this is a problem for the MIGHTY ATOM to be looked at to solve.

[MKSheppard]

There are a lot of people who need to be crucified over this spill. May they die slowly and painfully facing the coastlines they destroyed

Organ grind much? Your article is totally at odds with what other people "in the know" are saying -- there are apparently fifty billion stories as to why this well blew out.

And every single safeguard they had to prevent a disaster like this failed. How the hell do you plan for every single safety device failing? That's up there with TOP SOVIET ATOMIC ENGINEERS turning off the safeties on Chernobyl-4 RBMK-1000 to carry out an experiment.

[Patrick Degan]

Today on Fox News during an interview with Karl Rove, host Jane Skinner noted that many in the media (and on the right) claim that the oil rig explosion in the Gulf is President Obama’s “Katrina.” Rove said he “wouldn’t compare this to Katrina,” but he then ran through a timeline of the events as if to accuse the White House of having a delayed response to the disaster.

Uh huh. Tell us, Karl, how many deaths resulted from Federal inaction prior to the BPocalpyse? Bet it wasn't anything like 1,331, the number of people who drowned in New Orleans when the floodwalls —the budgets for their reconstruction and reinforcement having been slashed four years straight by Chimpus Caesar— failed. None? Thought so. Has the BPocalypse resulted in a city being left to burn after it had drowned, like after Katrina? How many days did it take before the first Federal responders, the Coast Guard in this case, appeared on the scene? Bet it was a lot fewer than either FEMA or the National Guard took to finally amble their way into New Orleans after the flood. And how many Federal officials concerned with responsibility for disaster response put their restaurant reservations ahead of actually doing their jobs the way Heckuvajob Brownie did? None? Thought so.

Go fuck yourself, Karl.

[The Yosemite Bear]

It looks like drill baby drill assholes are getting in the face, and trying to say it was the otehr guys.

[Alyrium Denryle]

And every single safeguard they had to prevent a disaster like this failed. How the hell do you plan for every single safety device failing? That's up there with TOP SOVIET ATOMIC ENGINEERS turning off the safeties on Chernobyl-4 RBMK-1000 to carry out an experiment

You know what you do then dumb fuck? You have a ready-made contingency plan for a catastrophe. Like how to stop a blow-out at the drilling depth if your safety devices fail. You dont lobby aggressively to prevent requirements for up to date safety devices. You dont try to make the now out of work fishermen you hire to clean up your mess sign wavers to prevent them from suing you. You do not claim to pay the cost of the multibillion dollar spill when federal law only has you on the hook for 70 million. You dont fund an in house "conservation group" to say that the ecological damage "Wont be that bad".

They need crucifixion.