Long term implications?

Greater cancer rates in the human population in the states that border the gulf coast as the cancer causing chemicals (aromatic hydrocarbons etc) make their way up the food chain over a period of 1-10 years. The natural environment will recover to some extent but can take around 20 years if left to its own devices. The oil release won't help recovery of the dead zone found previously around the Mississippi delta in the Gulf due to the long term agrochemicals pollution, it will just increase the size of the dead zone.

NASA satellite photo of the Gulf Coast Dead Zone

I really feel for these fishermen who have been hired out by BP to run out all these booms and to do other clean up activities. Their physical health (in addition to the economic situation) could be negatively affected, the same way that many workers at Ground Zero have been affected. Depending on what BP eventually pays up, the people whose livelihoods depend on the sea could get a double whammy of economic and medical disaster. I don't think most folks realize how hazardous crude oil can be, and I don't think these guys are really given any special protection, at least not that I've seen on TV so far.

Of course, there's the hit to the seafood industry and all the knock on effects to employment, tax revenue, etc. Tourism will take a hit if the beaches are fouled.

I also wonder if the oil could further diminish the marshes protecting New Orleans from another Katrina-like event. The wetlands have already been shrinking significantly for a long time. I know there have been efforts to rejuvenate them after Katrina, but maybe all that effort will be destroyed by the slick.

If the crude comes ashore in great amounts the wetland, oyster flats, generally their entire interlocking ecosystems is destroyed. Estimates of time until recovery start at twenty years.

Exxon Valdez went aground in Prince William Sound in 1989 and parts of the area are still polluted. The black sheets of goop are gone but turning over a rock often produces visible oil and considerable amounts remain trapped in the gravel, sand and sediment of the area. So over twenty years may not be enough.

The good news is that Alaska is cold and biological processes run a bit slower in the cold and oil at those temperatures is thick and viscous. Florida and the gulf are much warmer so the thought is that biological activity is more aggressive and the oil will be easier to break down because it is less viscous.

One thing I haven't seen as a comparison between the two sites is that oil is not native to Prince William Sound so there was no great population of oil eating bacteria. The gulf has natural oil seeps that drain a few thousand gallons (WAG at 100 barrels) of oil into the gulf every year. This means that the populations of oil eating bacteria are naturally higher. Every gallon of seawater on the gulf is seeded with bacteria that love oil. Exposed to oil these bacteria eat, get fat, and double their population at an exponential rate.

That isn't a total solution, and it certainly doesn't mean we can kick back and do nothing, the gulf is screwed but that might offer a glimmer of hope that the majority of the area will clean itself more rapidly than what we saw in Alaska.

On the other hand, estimates of how fast the oil is leaking and how long it will take to staunch the flow mean that the spill in the gulf is likely to involve more oil than what we saw in Alaska. If they have to spend ninety days, longer if the weather doesn't cooperate, drilling a relief well the amounts could be huge. Pessimists are talking about waves of oil washing out of the gulf, engulfing the keys, and heading up the east coast. The sad part is that given the facts there is no easy to spot flaw in their logic that says that it can't get that bad.

On the bright side, given a few thousand years, nature can clean up most anything.

I have to point out that when that well was being designed someone asked how many layers of blow-out protection they would install. The cautious people in the room wanted more to protect the crews and lower the chances of a big spill. The accountants wanted fewer of those expensive devices installed, to save money. I wish they had installed at least one more.

Blow-out preventers are indeed expensive but how expensive are they in terms of the total cost of this situation?

I do wish we would factor in more redundancy when it comes to fragile ecosystems. The costs of cleanup and negative publicity must not be high enough to outweigh a little more safety.

Considering the cost of the rig, the cost of another back-up system would have been insignificant. . .except to a bean-counter.

The rigs already have a Plan B and a Plan C. The problem is that they didn't work, and nobody knows why yet.

Deepwater blowouts are rare and it's not clear how much actual real-world experience there is with the seafloor safety systems. Adding more unproven backups may actually hurt by leading to complacency: "we've now got Plans D, E, and F: what could possibly go wrong?"

At least one of the blowout cap systems on the seafloor is destructive (to the well). It might be best to focus on mechanisms that can be tested after installation and periodically during well operation. A safety system that is both destructive and lacks significant real-world usage is not a good thing to rely on.

Major events often seem to have ecological disasters shadowing them - September 11th turns out the debris field was bad for you. Katrina, toxins in the water...

Yeah. We're scrood. Tourism? Dead. Fisheries? Gone. Wetlands? Destroyed. Environmental impacts? Devastating. Health effects? Cancer, pulmonary disease and increased mortality. Economic consequences? Bleak. Prolonged regional depression on top of global short-term recession expected. Damages? Start at $2B and up. BP's limits on liability? $0.075B. Estimated cost of effective, proven preventative technology? Less than $0.001B. BP's profits for just the 1st quarter of 2010? $6B. And let's not forget 11 dead workers, and their families.

My prediction? The residents of the Gulf Coast and the American taxpayer will bear the lion's share of the costs, while the guilty parties, including the officers and executives of the corporations involved (British and Swiss foreign corporations, and the notorious Halliburton) as well as their bought-and-paid-for politicians (on which BP alone spent $16M last year), get away Scot-free with pockets full of cash. Watch and see if BP doesn't continue to post multi-billion dollar profits over the next several quarters regardless of this disaster.

I'm so angry I'm ready to string the guilty up from lampposts. This was, based on the available facts thus far, an entirely foreseeable and preventable disaster. It did not need to happen, and would not have happened, but for the greed and incompetence of the private sector and a failure of proper oversight and reasonable regulation in the public sector, as well as all of our ongoing addiction to oil.

My lungs were already a little fried from 9/11. Wonder what BP's oil disaster is gonna do to me? At least my Haiti rash finally cleared up.

Interesting article re the cause of the blowout. Apparently it was a methane bubble, the scourge of drillers, as they were changing over from drilling to production.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/worl...article1561343/

Money translates to freedom, power, and influence. BP, with billions on hand, is very free, powerful and influential. That it used that freedom, power and influence to increase profits by sidestepping both internal industry standards and government regulation, and used them repeatedly to avoid penalties when caught, seem to be a matter of record:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/05/bp_spent_millions_to_evade_saf.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/02/bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spills

I'm not saying they intended to have an explosion, wreck a rig, get people killed, or pollute the gulf. Drunk drivers don't usually intend to get into wrecks even though they roll the dice every night they drive home inebriated. I suspect that BP fully expected to stay lucky and to get away with their lax attitude. Besides their mandate as a business is profit, and who known more about drilling for oil than they do? The writers of industry standards and regulations don't have that sort of expertise. Not in drilling safety, and certainly not in making a profit. Unfortunately mother nature didn't see it that way.

It isn't like BP is a mom-and-pop operation barely making enough money to keep the owners sleeping indoors and fed. Yes, safety is expensive, and every dollar spent compliance with standards and regulation is a dollar that can't be reinvested into the business, or used to make investors happy.

Anybody have any actual information about what's going on with oil land fall and fumes? Media coverage is, as usual, crap.

The MSM coverage isn't really bad. You have to understand that this situation is simply too large, too widespread, too complicated, to say much of anything that isn't so narrowly focused, parochial, that it contradicts the situation somewhere else. Or, going the other way, so generally applicable to this huge situation that it is little more than a string of banalities. That and the MSM is saddled with spoon feeding people with the attention span of a gnat.

It is a big situation that can't be meaningfully explained in two minutes.

A decent place to start:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

But everyone is going to have to accept that you are going to have to dig and get information about it one piece at a time. Then again, if you're willing to wait a few years, I'm sure someone will write a book that will put everything in one spot for easy study.

NPR is reporting the daily flow is more like 70,000 barrels a day, not 5000. Apparently thats an Exxon Valdez sized spill every 4 days. And they don't know where the oil is, as most of it is under the surface. Better buy some oysters and shrimp now and throw it in the freezer. I imagine prices will go up eventually.

A good place to find authoritative maps:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doctype/2931/53979/

This is a page off of the crisis center site is cited before but it gets you there directly. Both status and forecast maps are presented in pdf format that you can zoom in on.

I was listening to an interview with an attorney for several of the deepwater horizon employees. There was a great deal of pressure on the drilling crew because they were behind schedule. At one one, they drilled through a rubber gasket and there were handfuls of rubber coming up at the platform. They asked a supervisor about it and he said not to worry.
There will be lots of blame to spread around.
I think the federal governments response to this has been despicable, but the oil companies have got to bear the real blame. Unfortunately, the consequences only are paid by the American people, especially the folks on the gulf coast. I truly hope this can get arrested before it gets too out of hand. If it isn't already.

The net rumor mill is abuzz that there are plans in the works to evacuate elderly and respiratory impaired people from areas around the Gulf. Anyone have any real information on it?

This thing may be getting really nasty here shortly.

Exactly what would you have done differently?

Failure to prepare is not an excuse. There is a direct analog to "preparedness" here - when going on a long hike in the woods your don't get excused after getting lost because you forgot to bring a compass or map, or didn't bother to check the weather forecast.

That's what happened here. A few days before the spill the government announced intent to expand offshore drilling - in effect, they announced a hike in the woods. What we've discovered is that this walk was without compass, map, radio, etc.

The fact that there is nothing that can be done now does not excuse failure to prepare when there was opporunity.

There was a story a few days ago of reporters from CBS (if I recall correctly) being turned away from a coastal marsh area that had been severely impacted by the Coast Guard. The reporters were told not to take any pictures or video and when they questioned the Coast Guard about this they stated that the "order" came down from BP.

Has anyone else heard this?

Why would the Coast Guard give a **** what BP wanted and would they enforce such a thing?

Is this story a bunch of hooey?

Any information on this would be appreciated.

Sounds like something you'd read on a conspiracy theory website. It doesn't make any sense.

However, it could be that the Coast Guard may try to keep people away from fouled areas because the crude is a health hazard, which by the time it goes through the rumor mill, turns into "the CG told us not to take photos". <shrug>

Here's the CBS video of that story.

Interesting, it's a real news report. However, the clip is so short, there's no way of grasping the context of the exchange. But, it does sound like BP did not want anyone taking photos or shooting video of the damage.

However, the Coast Guard has officially responded to the incident by saying that there are no restrictions like the one reported in place. They said that they were "disappointed" by the incident. Disappointed?

Just a small taste of the TRUE costs of depending upon fossil fuels for energy.

Drill Babby, Drill! has become "Spill Baby Spill!"

Then rent a helicopter and take some aerial photos. It's not expensive and the pilot won't care what BP or the Coast Guard wants.

I'm not worried about somehow getting shots of the damage and getting the information out there. Some reporter will have the gumption to do it and it will be shown...

What worries me is that BP should have no control over the armed forces of the United States in any way, no company should. Yet somehow BP made a decision not to show the damage they've done and the Coast Guard is enforcing the decision.

I have come across one article talking about a Gulf and East Coast Evacuation Plan is being worked on and put together.

NONE of the people making comments about this had any indication from Local LE friend types that such was going on.

Some of the comments were about National Guard personnel were being mobilized in Alaska and Minnesota to go assist with the Spill Response. No one reported being briefed about coordinating any evacuations.

I can't find any solid reporting sources that have any stories of this "evacuation being planned".

This looks like some Mis-information or S#!T stirring, at this time.

Some interesting information and insights from someone who knows about the industry:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6444