SIGN UP - IT'S FREE!
SEARCH FSM
| National Debt Clock |
A million seconds pass in 12 days.
A billion seconds pass in 31 years.
A trillion seconds pass in 31,688 years!
July 17, 2010
Some Hope in the Gulf Oil Spill Saga?
7-15-10, 3:30 p.m. – As of right now, for the first time since April 20, there is no oil coming out of the Macondo well. As you can see from BP’s live feeds page, it’s just sea water.
Whether the cap will hold, or whether that wellbore will hang on and not allow oil to seep out elsewhere, we won’t know for 48 hours. But as of right now, they’ve got it shut.
Bout friggin’ time.
7-15-10, 9:30 a.m. – So overnight BP says they found a leak in one of the lines feeding oil to the surface from the Macondo well’s beat-up blowout preventer, and the company says they fixed it. Which means the test of their new setup atop the well to see whether it can be shut in using the new stack they’ve affixed atop the BOP can continue.
But the standard they were looking for to let them know it’s safe to shut the well in is 9,000 psi. A number significantly less than that would indicate that oil is seeping from the wellbore – which would mean shutting the well in won’t stop the leak; it’ll just surface somewhere else.
So given that, the live feed from the Olympic Challenger ROV, which is monitoring pressure levels in the well, isn’t very encouraging if we read it correctly. The pressure readings on that video hover somewhere between 2500 psi and 3000 psi.
We don’t know whether that’s significant, and we’ll keep watching that feed. They may be opening and closing vents while this is going on and they may be in a phase of their testing program which isn’t the “money” part of the thing. But earlier this morning BP said they’d be going live by now, and 2500 psi is not the number we were looking for.
At The Oil Drum, they’ve got a thread going which speaks in exhaustive detail about leaks and well pressure, using the statements of BP vice president Kent Wells and Unified Command head Thad Allen from yesterday to describe what’s going on. A lot of this stuff amounts to a trip through the weeds, but one piece of information which does not particularly radiate a pleasing odor is the disclosure that back in May when BP tried the top kill, while they were able to stop the flow of oil out of the well by shooting mud into the BOP they were never able to get a pressure above 6,000 psi. What that would mean is they were losing mud somewhere in the wellbore – and oil as well, since the well pressure is supposedly around 11,000 psi.
All this stuff taken in concert leads us to the tentative conclusion that shutting the well in at this point won’t work, BP is going to be producing oil out of that well again by tomorrow and this situation won’t be in hand at the wellhead until the relief well is finished.
7-14-10, 7:45 p.m. – Some things don’t surprise you, but they still make you shake your head.
“NAACP President Benjamin Jealous also released a letter to BP chief executive Tony Hayward, asking to meet with company officials to discuss his “outrage” that minority contractors are apparently being left out in the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.”
7-14-10, 6:45 p.m. - After a pressure test of the new stack on top of the Macondo well was delayed earlier today, it’s happening now. BP vice president Kent Wells said this afternoon that one of the main valves on the new containment system was shut at about 5 p.m. today, while two others are going to be shortly. And if the pressure readings taken inside the well are as hoped for, BP will be able to pump mud and cement into the well and kill it in advance of the relief wells hitting the reservoir and permanently shutting it in.
The delay in the test occurred as a result of government experts putting on the brakes:
Thad Allen announced the decision today at a press briefing, saying that the government had made minor modifications to the test to guard against damaging the wellbore.
The well integrity test had been on hold since Tuesday afternoon when BP officials had announced it would take place.
The decision to postpone the test was made following a meeting with US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a team of government scientists and “industry experts”, Allen said.
Earlier today, BP announced it has hit the pause button on the relief well just as it is poised to enter the Macondo well bore.
BP executive Kent Wells said Transocean’s semi-submersible rig Development Driller 3 ceased drilling as a “precaution”.
“We’ve stopped drilling there at 17,840 feet until after we do the well integrity test,” he said during a press briefing this morning.
“We’re only four feet away horizontally from the well,” Wells said, adding however that there exists a “possible scenario” that during the planned shut-in test oil flow could get to the relief well and possible complicate efforts.
“We don’t believe it actually is going to happen,” Wells said.
Drilling would resume once the planned well integrity test is over, he added.
Meanwhile, House Democrats are attempting to keep BP from drilling ever again. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has an amendment at the House Natural Resources Committee which passed today that would bar the company, or anybody else with a similar lousy safety record (note: NOBODY in the American oil patch has a safety record as putrid as BP does) from getting leases from the federal government.
The amendment did not mention BP specifically, but it would not allow any company to get leases that had more than 10 fatalities at drilling and production facilities or refineries that resulted from violations of federal or state health and environment laws within the last seven years.
“The Miller amendment would prohibit BP or any other company with an egregious worker and environmental safety record from new offshore oil and gas drilling,” Miller’s office said in an email after the vote.
The measure was added to a sweeping bill that the committee expected to clear tomorrow morning, but which would have to pass both the full House and Senate before reaching President Barack Obama’s desk.
While that amendment is only tangentially noxious, if hideously shortsighted, the quote the AP article printed next from Bart Stupak of I-got-rolled-by-the-White-House-over-my-pseudo-pro-life-stance-and-so-called-principled-opposition-to-Obamacare-on-that-basis fame which is breathtaking in its imbecility:
Representative Bart Stupak, who chairs a separate House subcommittee investigating the BP oil spill, said he supported giving the Interior Department the discretion to block BP from getting future leases because of the company’s bad safety record.
He downplayed concerns raised by some that BP needs continued drilling access to US waters so it can earn money from the oil it produces to pay for billions of dollars in Gulf Coast cleanup costs liability claims in the years ahead.
“I’m not going to allow BP to drill more so they make more money so they can pay us, and as they do that then there’s more environmental damage,” Stupak told reporters while speaking at the Platts Energy Podium.
“It’s a pretty big corporation. I’m sure they can find some money.”
Stupak assumedly has heard that this purported $20 billion fund BP set up is supposed to be paid into over the next four years, and is therefore subject to the company – or more specifically its American operations - not going belly-up during that time. How he squares those concepts with “I’m sure they can find some money” is an interesting question. Does Stupak’s callous concern over the thousands of jobs that will be lost by BP being banned from the market extend to whatever company might buy up the company’s American assets when it decides to sell out and pull out (which we’d have no problem with, by the way)? Or does he advocate standing in the way of any successor companies to BP drilling as well?
The guess here is that since these are somewhat sophisticated concepts they fly far over Stupak’s head. He’s never been a particularly bright bulb. Which, of course, explains why he chairs a committee in Nancy Pelosi’s House of Idiocracy.
7-14-10, 9:20 a.m. – We’re at a loss on this one. See if you can figure this out:
After days of progress on the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said Wednesday that delays have temporarily stopped work beneath the water on both a stopgap solution and a permanent fix to the gusher. BP was vague about the reasons for pushing back tests of a new cap meant to trap oil in the well and why it stopped, for up to 48 hours, drilling on a relief well aimed at plugging the gusher for good from underground.
Kent Wells, a senior vice president at the oil giant, said at a morning news briefing that it was the government’s call late Tuesday to re-evaluate plans for testing the new cap over the leak. That plan was put on hold for 24 hours.
With oil still gushing freely into the Gulf, Wells said BP and federal officials will re-evaluate the best path forward after the 24 hours.
But he did not commit with certainty to returning to the plan, in place before the late Tuesday delay, to shut the leak off by closing the valves on the new cap. Wells suggested other oil collection options might be redeployed.
“We want to move forward with this as soon as we are ready to do it,” he said.
Wells said the cap test, which could put the oil in the well under added pressure, could have an effect on the relief well. He did not elaborate.
The relief well’s timeframe has always been hazy, with company and federal officials giving estimates ranging from the end of July to the middle of August before it can be completed.
Wells said the test delay was ordered by National Incident Commander Thad Allen, who wanted to make sure everyone was clear on the steps involved and what the data gathered during the test might mean.
“This test is so important a decision was taken to give them another 24 hours to make sure this was the best possible test procedure we could execute,” he said.
But Wells declined to say that the company would definitely proceed with the “shut in” of the new cap, which was its planned course a day before.
All we can think of is these guys are freaked out about the possibility of opening other vents the oil could come out of that they’re afraid of doing anything. What any of that might have to do with the relief wells is beyond us, though. Our commenters are welcome to share their theories.
7-13-10, 10:30 a.m. – Fox 8 in New Orleans had a pretty cool story about Big Gulps and Little Gulps, which are barges retrofitted as oil skimmers to collect huge amounts of oil from the water’s surface and decant it while shooting water out of the side…
This is, of course, a product of the EPA’s finally backing off on its stupid 15 parts per million rule which crippled the effort to skim oil from the spill for the first two months of this disaster. Now that waivers have finally been issued in a number of cases, the oil can be picked up. And while the A-Whale continues to be tested with mediocre effects compared to the local invention’s stellar ones, we can perhaps brag that while the Taiwanese have the entrepreneurial spirit, they still can’t compete with Louisiana folks.
Meanwhile, at the Macondo wellhead there is finally something to feel good about. See for yourself…
There is still a little oil being vented out of the new stack BP has just installed, which is part of the plan. Today, BP is doing “well integrity testing,” which essentially consists of pressure readings. What they’re looking for is 9,000 psi or thereabouts. At that number, they feel like they can shut the rams on the stack they’ve put down and essentially shut the well in while they’re waiting for the relief wells to be finished.
But if the number is significantly more, they’ll produce from the well so as not to risk the system. And if it’s less, which might indicate a significantly compromised wellbore and the chance that oil would be seeping out of the seabed someplace else, they’ll produce from the well so as to try to channel the oil through Macondo.
Either way, the spill, for the most part, is finally just about over.
But the fallout isn’t.
7-12-10, 8:00 a.m. – Today we can offer one of two perspectives.
The first is that things are worse than ever, as all weekend long the Macondo well was spewing oil unabated into the Gulf of Mexico. The second is that we’re coming – hopefully – to the end of the current phase of this nightmare; namely, that BP is about to install a new cap on top of the well which they think might collect all of the oil coming out of it. And the work on the relief wells is proceeding apace, with a possibility if everything goes well (it almost assuredly won’t, as it certainly hasn’t so far) that the well might intersect the well and begin to kill it before the end of the month.
On Friday, BP’s Ken Wells put out a video outlining what the company was planning. Essentially, they pulled the Lower Marine Riser Cap they’d been using to collect some 20,000-25,000 barrels a day of oil off of the blowout preventer (between the 15,000 the Drillship Enterprise was collecting and the 8,000 being flared by the Helix Q4000), and several actions followed. First, instead of sawing through the riser pipe, which they’d done to mediocre effect, BP unbolted the phlange that had connected the riser to the BOP. After that came the current procedure, which involves bolting a transition spool onto the BOP, which they did last night, and then installing an 18-foot high, 150,000-pound stack on top which has three rams in it – giving BP the potential option to shut in the well if it has enough integrity to do so.
Four different oil-producing vessels are at the scene, and with the lines and risers already attached to the BOP and those attached to the new stack BP thinks they’ll collect all of the 60,000-80,000 barrels a day of oil coming out of the well. But they’re going to be doing a pressure test – and if the pressure is 9,000 psi at the wellhead or less, they’re going to shut those rams and perhaps close off the well entirely.
Meanwhile, the first relief well is at 17,810 feet, which Wells says is about 60 feet from the depth they’re looking for. It’s also very close horizontally to the Macondo well, so after some well maintenance they believe they’re relatively close to punching through and intersecting the gusher. The second relief well is more than 16,000 feet down as well. But because of all the steps which will need to be taken and the tests which will have to be done, Wells is still saying it’s going to be next month before this is over.
So while it’s been slow as can be, there does appear to be some progress in shutting this thing off at the wellhead. By Thursday or Friday, we might see subsea pictures of that well which don’t have any oil shooting out since it’s all going up the various pipes to the drillships or not flowing at all. Best case scenario is that by Thursday or Friday that well is going to be stopped.
On the surface and the shore? Still a complete cockup.
On the business front BP is a burgeoning disaster, as they’re trying to unload U.S. assets in an effort to cover the costs of this thing. Apache is talking to them about buying $12 billion worth of BP stuff, including BP’s stake in the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska. And ExxonMobil is looking into buying everything – whether that includes all the American assets or the whole company. With the Gulf spill crisis hopefully coming to something of an end soon and an actual estimate of the cost of this thing beginning to be possible, it’s going to become easier to set a real value for BP stock. Right now that stock is probably undervalued due to the publicity this mess has caused.
And of course that publicity, at least in the United States, has taken another sizable hit as folks have noticed that Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, the scumbag who helped plot the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 on behalf of the Libyan government but who was let go last year so he could die back home in Tripoli of the prostate cancer that was supposedly eating away at him, is still around. And Megrahi now has a prognosis that he could live another 10 years. And meanwhile Libya’s sovereign wealth fund is buying BP stock, and meanwhile BP’s got a sweet deal to develop deepwater assets in the Gulf of Sidra. Of course, despite the denials by British government officials that any quid pro quo was going on, it’s patently obvious that Megrahi’s release was effected on BP’s behalf – with the benefits of that deal beginning to flow.
Which means we want ExxonMobil to pick up BP’s American assets (and not the rest of their diseased and corrupt enterprise) at fire sale prices so that a real oil company will be in control of them. And then we want BP to disappear, British pensioners be damned.
On the governmental and spill cleanup end, it’s still 20 minutes of work an hour for $18 bucks along the beaches, with $1500 a day or more for owners of boats in the Vessels of Opportunity program – and most days, not much to do for the hirees. Oil keeps washing ashore from Texas to Florida, including in Lake Pontchartrain where they’re testing out a permeable boom which extends all the way down to the waterbottom if it’s a shallow area like the Rigolets in order to catch tarballs. The Times-Picayune today wonders whether the Coast Guard should have anything to do with future oil spills given how poorly it has performed with this one, while Reason Magazine does a piece cataloguing the pathetic government response overall with emphasis on the 15 parts per million idiocy we’ve discussed at length here.
7-9-10, 1:30 p.m. – National Review columnist and New Orleans/Louisiana enthusiast Deroy Murdock, who was in the Crescent City for Jazz Fest when the Deepwater Horizon well had blown up just days earlier (we got to meet him at a Pelican Institute get-together that weekend), has come out and said something we’ve hinted at for a good while – namely, that it’s time for state and local officials to tell President Obama and his merry band of clowns to pound sand…
Team Obama, the Washington bureaucracy, and their field agents pose a clear and present danger to the Gulf Coast’s entire population, both humans and wildlife. With tar balls as big as ping-pong balls now soiling Galveston, Texas — making this a five-state crisis — the region’s mayors and governors should respond to this emergency by openly defying federal officials who demand inaction while pelicans gag on oil and oysters drown in BP sauce.
Jefferson Parish should deploy those rocks. Louisiana should shift that sand into place. If Washington keeps restricting prospectively helpful foreign ships, as it still is doing, Gulf Coast governors should invite them to sail into position to protect their states’ shores.
And if the feds want to prevent these American citizens from saving people, property, and wildlife from 60,000 barrels of fresh petroleum daily, let Team Obama go down there and physically stop them.
Murdock does a very nice job of cataloguing the myriad examples of incompetence and obstinance of the feds with respect to the spill. His piece is well worth a read.
7-8-10, 10:30 p.m. – Kevin Costner is back, as today he had a press conference down at Port Fourchon to show off the Ella G., a Chouest Marine vessel outfitted with four of his large centrifuge machines reportedly capable of decanting some 20,000 barrels of oil per day, and also reportedly capable of operating in 10-foot seas.
Rolling boxcars — double sixes — with a fair pair of dice is roughly a “two sigma” event; it happens one throw in 36, or about 2.8% of the time.
Rolling six boxcars in a row, then, is a highly improbable event (about once every 2 billion tries) — unless you’re playing with loaded dice, or unless the outcome of each roll is not totally independent of the other rolls.
Back to BP: they appear to have made a series of operational choices on the Macondo well that involved some acknowledged element of risk. They ran a “long string” instead of a liner; they didn’t get all the gas out of their mud returns; they didn’t centralize the pipe per Halliburton’s recommendation, etc., etc.
The details of the engineering aren’t important. They were probably correct in thinking that they could “probably get away with” each step, and that the likelihood of catastrophic failure of all the systems was very, very remote.
But they fooled themselves, because they weren’t playing a game of dice, they were playing dominoes. Gas in the mud led to a failure in the cement which cascaded into a failure of the pipe which cascaded into an inoperable blowout preventer and a lower marine riser package that didn’t work as designed.
That chain of events put a combustible gas bubble at the surface, which caused the explosion and fire.
Maley also notes that BP’s minority partner in the Macondo well, Anadarko Petroleum, is a good bit disgruntled by the company’s practices prior to the disaster on a well they held a 25 percent stake in:
“The mounting evidence clearly demonstrates that this tragedy was preventable and the direct result of BP’s reckless decisions and actions. Frankly, we are shocked by the publicly available information that has been disclosed in recent investigations and during this week’s testimony that, among other things, indicates BP operated unsafely and failed to monitor and react to several critical warning signs during the drilling of the Macondo well. BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement,” continued [CEO James] Hackett.
Under the terms of the joint operating agreement (JOA) related to the Mississippi Canyon block 252 lease, BP, as operator, owed duties to its co-owners including Anadarko to perform the drilling of the well in a good and workmanlike manner and to comply with all applicable laws and regulations. The JOA also provides that BP is responsible to its co-owners for damages caused by its gross negligence or willful misconduct. …”
7-7-10, 12:45 p.m. – There’s an article in the New York Times today which addresses this business of the feds blocking all the state and local plans to keep oil out of Louisiana’s marshes. It’s a rather friendly piece toward the Corps of Engineers and the Obama administration (go figure), in that it justifies the chorus of “no” the feds repeat time and time again when ideas are floated like the rock jetties in Jefferson Parish or sand dredging in the Chandeleurs and elsewhere.
Basically, the piece says, the administration is listening to the scientist community in rejecting these plans.
That might sound like smart policy. After all, the scientists ought to know what to do more than anybody else, right?
Maybe not.
It was these experts, along with their scientific peers in federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, who offered the strongest opposition to the proposed rock barrier. Many of those critiques were included in supporting documents released by the Army Corps of Engineers before the official ruling was announced.
The scientists explained to the corps how narrowing the inlets with rock would set the stage for the breaching of existing barrier islands during the region’s frequent storms. They warned that damage to these islands — which have buffered the impact of major storms like Hurricane Katrina — would prove difficult to repair, perhaps impossible, and would most likely outstrip any benefit to the wetlands gained by stopping the oil with the rock barriers.
Having raised their voices in objection, these coastal experts now bristle at the accusation that they are out-of-touch academics or pencil-pushing bureaucrats, as state and local officials have charged.
“It’s really offensive, I think, and not fair, to call the scientific community bureaucrats,” said Dr. Ioannis Y. Georgiu, a professor of marine engineering at the University of New Orleans. “We are being demonized.”
Yet by siding with federal agencies blamed from the beginning of the spill for a slow-footed and chaotic response — and for which resentment still lingers over the failings of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina — these coastal scientists have made themselves easy targets for leaders eager to portray themselves as stopping at nothing in the fight against the oil. For these politicians, swifter action is crucial.
“You don’t wait weeks and weeks for studies and federal permits in the middle of a war,” Mr. Jindal, a Republican, said in a speech on July 2. “You do what you need to do as quickly as possible to protect your land and your people.”
The local scientists argue that quick-fix solutions are being sold to the public with little firm evidence that they will succeed, and with potentially dire side effects being minimized and ignored. A lack of engagement of the scientific community has also bred frustration. On the rock barrier plan, for instance, coastal experts were consulted only after a local engineering firm had drafted the permit application and orders had been placed for thousands of tons of rock to dump in the inlets.
“We’ve got such a coastal brain trust here, and they’re being left out in the cold,” said Dr. Len Bahr, a coastal scientist and former director of the Louisiana Office of Coastal Activities. “To me that’s just unconscionable.”
Some coastal experts concede that the scientific community has been more reactive than proactive regarding the spill, and has often waited to be consulted on solutions rather than offering up its own innovative ideas to keep oil off the coast, a criticism that local officials have echoed.
“We want to prevent the damage — we don’t want to clean it up,” Mr. Bonano, the emergency-preparedness director, said. “That’s the big difference between us and them.”
Certainly some of the coastal science group’s concerns are valid. As some of the stupid Corps of Engineers projects in the past have proven, you can throw things out of balance with a major engineering project. There are always unintended consequences to a major action of any kind. And with any of the plans Jindal and the locals are pushing, there will be tradeoffs. We get that.
The problem is, as the article notes without particularly pressing the point home, none of the scientists screaming about rock jetties, sand berms, freshwater diversion or the other ideas the locals want to pursue have any plans of their own. If all you do is criticize somebody else’s ideas, you’re not particularly useful in the midst of an emergency. After all, rock jetties and sand berms aren’t ideological. If they work, eveybody should support them. If they don’t, everybody should support something else that will. But the coastal scientists have neither presented alternate ideas nor gotten on board with the ones being pushed in an effort to tweak them. Maybe there would be less frustration and less stridency on the part of local officials like Bonano if he and others would hear something like “OK, if you want to do that you need to keep in mind that X can happen, and we suggest you also do A and B to try to mitigate the possibility of X.” Or “Look, a really good idea if you’re going to do this would be to do it this way. It’ll be more effective and less damaging in the long run.” And so on.
If that has been happening, it hasn’t shown up in the Times piece. It also hasn’t shown up in the Times-Picayune or Advocate’s coverage, either. What has shown up is a bunch of academic types basically saying the state and local people are meatheads and pooping on everything they come up with. Fair or not, it comes off a whole lot like the behavior of environmentalist freaks who attempt to stand in the way of virtually every bit of human activity anyone can dream up – and when those folks are successful, they almost always force a perverted, nonsensical solution which costs too much, doesn’t work like it should and ends up being a bigger environmental threat than the action they tried to stop in the first place.
This is not to say all the coastal scientists at LSU and UNO and Tulane are tree-hugging loons. We have no idea whether they are or not. But it sure seems like they’re not part of the solution, and when the final story on this spill is written it’s quite possible the best that can be said about their opposition is that they kept a number of solutions from being implemented – some of which would have prevented damage to our ecology and economy.
7-6-10, 5:30 p.m. – This evening we have a double-shot of incompetence from our two lead actors in this fiasco.
First, we have the federal government, which if you haven’t heard has now rejected the construction of rock jetties in Jefferson Parish – a plan put forth to the Army Corps of Engineers all the way back on June 7. Originally, the rock jetty plan called for blocking five passes into Barataria Bay, and it was then narrowed down to only two passes. But even that didn’t pass muster, since the Corps of Engineers declared that it would speed water flow through narrower openings in the barrier islands from the Gulf into the bay, and that would make it more likely oil would get in.
The Corps also said that the jetties would encourage scouring, and thus increase coastal erosion.
BP, to its credit, had actually bought the rocks for the plan. Now it’s stuck with a bunch of rocks. They’re just sitting there in a couple dozen barges along the Harvey Canal; they’ve been there for two weeks, and it’s costing $4,000 a day to store them in that spot.
Maybe BP can pay victims of the Obamoratorium in rocks. Or tarballs.
Jefferson Parish officials say they’re going to sue the Corps of Engineers.
“It’s to save the doggone estuary,” said Lafitte Mayor Tim Kerner.
Kerner said the rocks are badly needed and could serve more than one purpose.
“It will also not only stop oil, but (saves) millions in money on restoration projects. This stops coastal erosion,” Kerner said.
Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts agrees. And for help, he’s already talking to the state’s attorney general.
“We are regrouping. Legal action may come,” Roberts said. “We have to weigh our options against the Corps.”
The Corps said it reviewed the rock barrier plan carefully, but two weeks later ruled that it may do more harm than good by directing water to other areas and possibly damaging other passes and marshland.
“I’m spending more time working through federal jams and more time fighting that and not oil and there is no excuse for that,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise.
And so the rocks continue to sit, at the cost of about $4,000 a day.
“Come up with a plan,” Kerner said. “We’re all ears. The only plan we think will work is rocks in the passes.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Bobby Jindal took another opportunity to blast away at the feds – a valid exercise, for certain, but one which is becoming more and more a futile gesture.
“On Saturday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected the rock plan to protect the Barataria Bay at Grand Isle after weeks of meetings and phone calls and even our talking to the President about it a month ago when we were told we would get a call about the plan within hours.
“No one can convince us that rocks in the water are more dangerous than oil. That is absolutely ridiculous. The only people who believe that are the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who can’t see the oil, smell the oil or touch the oil.
“No is not an answer. No is not a plan. No is not acceptable. Time and time again we have battled with them to get out plans approved. We are resubmitting this rock plan and we are asking BP to put funds in escrow in the event the rocks need to be removed. We have said all along that we are willing to make the rocks temporary or otherwise modify the plan to address any concerns – for example, we modified the barges by reducing the plan from five passes to two passes – but we continue to run into red tape at the federal level.
“We need the federal government to get in this war to win it. They continue to reject our plans while they put forward no plan of their own. This is not acceptable. They need to either lead, follow or get out of the way.”
“Every time one of our requested defense measures was not provided, we came up with an alternative – just to have these alternatives get shot down. What we are left with then is often a void of any action to protect our coast at all. The choice we have in this battle is not between our plan to protect this area and some other perfect plan, which is non-existent. The choice we have is fundamentally between fighting this oil out at sea or in the passes or having it come in and attack our marsh. Those are our only choices. Let there be no doubt that we will fight for every plan and alternative to having this oil kill our marshes, our fisheries and the very livelihood of our people.
“The reality is that sand berms and gap closures with rocks/barges will help protect our coast 24 hours a day in rain or shine. We need the federal government to recognize the vulnerability that continues to exist and to work with us rather than obstruct us from protecting our citizens. Instead, the federal government continues to lack the common sense and urgency that this disaster demands; and every time they reject one of our ideas they chose the path of inaction and more of our marshland is attacked by oil.”
Great quote. The response?
Of course, while BP promptly bought rocks, they were a little slower with something which might have done a great deal more good – as in getting an oil collection vessel to the spill site before Grand Isle’s beaches had to start resembling a cross between Treme and Cool Hand Luke. It seems that the Helix Producer was available in late April to assist in collection duties, but BP sat on their asses and ignored the offer until June.
Helix, the Houston-based owner of floating oil platforms and subsea wells, offered its Helix Producer I vessel in late April to help BP collect oil that has been gushing from the Macondo well since an April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers, Chief Executive Officer Owen Kratz said today in an interview. BP initially declined the offer, he said.
BP notified Helix June 10 that it wanted to lease the Helix Producer I platform to augment two other vessels that are receiving oil from the Macondo well, Kratz said. The delay meant Helix had to construct a collection tube from spare parts that will be plugged into a pipe just one-sixth the diameter of the main opening atop the well, he said.
“The ad-hoc way this has been reacted to has reduced the amount of oil captured,” Kratz said by telephone from Houston. “The connection to the vessel itself is jury-rigged because we’ve only had since June 10 to put it together.”
The Helix Producer is on the scene now, and BP is bragging that it’s going to allow them to capture 53,000 barrels of oil once it gets going. Except the seas are too high to do anything, so it’s just sitting there waiting for better weather. Nice work.
Nothing new on the A-Whale, either, because of the high seas. But BP says its first relief well is just 400 feet from the bottom of the Macondo well, which represents progress that has them a week ahead of schedule.
And Tony Hayward got to go to Azerbaijan. No word on the yacht races there.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Scott McKay, a sales, marketing and business consultant, is the Publisher/Blogger at TheHayride.com, a news/commentary blog about Louisiana and national politics.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0) | Sign Up for FSM Updates!
