The Oil in the Gulf !

Oil reported just offshore Cuba; Forecast “clearly shows the oil moving southeastward”

from : http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com

By oilflorida, on June 20th, 2010





USF model projects oil spill will expand further southward toward loop current, WTSP Channel 10 Tampa Bay, June 18, 2010:

A high pressure system centered over the Gulf of Mexico will bring light northwesterly winds to the oil spill area over the next few days.

As a result, models that attempt to predict the future track of the spill are suggesting that the oil will head back toward the southeast and closer to the loop current.

With mainly light winds in place, the heating of the surface by the sun will play a major role in the wind direction over the spill area. During the early morning hours winds will blow lightly out of the northwest. This pushes the oil away from the coast and toward the southeast out to sea.

As the land heats up during the afternoon hours, a sea breeze develops causing the wind to back to the SSW and blowing the oil back toward the shore. Later in the evening, as the air cools, the winds once again turn to the northwest. The overall affect this will have is to force the oil further toward the southeast and closer to the loop current.

The University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science and the Ocean Circulation Group and jointly produce a computer model that predicts the path of the oil spill. The latest run clearly shows the oil moving southeastward and pushing up against the current. This could lead to more oil entering the current over the next few days. …

The flow out of the loop current is not completely shut off and will likely never do so.

There are now reports of an oil sheen just offshore of Cuba. This implies the oil has reached the southeastern extent of the loop current and could continue east through the Florida straights.


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Global protest planned over BP's handling of oil disaster

from : http://www.sott.net

CNN
Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:51 EDT

Environmentalists plan to stage a worldwide protest against BP on Saturday as the petroleum giant takes hits from politicians and Gulf residents.

Worldwide BP Protest Day claims demonstrations will take place in more than 50 cities across five continents from Pensacola, Florida, to Christchurch, New Zealand.

"Let the world know YOU care," says a flyer on the group's Facebook page, which translates BP's initials to mean British Predator. "We need to let BP know that we are NOT okay with what they are putting in OUR oceans."

The protests come as politicians and Gulf residents slammed BP on Friday over its efforts to end the spew of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and make whole those who have been hurt.

"BP misrepresented what their technology could do," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday. "They misrepresented the amount of oil that was being spewed forth into the Gulf and continued to do so."

She was referring to Thursday's announcement by researchers that doubled estimates of how much oil has been gushing from the ruptured well: About 40,000 barrels (1.7 million gallons) a day may have escaped for weeks.

Pelosi said she met with President Obama on the matter and was pleased to hear that he had ordered the attorney general to look into whether there was negligence on BP's part.

"This is a matter of integrity," Pelosi said. "BP stated that they had the technology to drill deep, to prevent a blowout and that they had the technology to clean up, and none of these things happened to be a fact."

But the multibillion-dollar, multinational company found support for its efforts. In New York, that support came from billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"The guy that runs BP didn't exactly go down there and blow up the well," he told a radio program. "And what's more, if you want them to fix it and they are the ones with the expertise, I think I might wait to assign blame until we get it fixed."

In London, England, a Downing Street spokesman said Prime Minister David Cameron spoke Friday with BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.

"The prime minister explained that he was frustrated and concerned about the environmental damage caused by the leak, but made clear his view that BP is an economically important company in the UK, US and other countries," the spokesman said in a news release.

"He said that it is in everyone's interests that BP continues to be a financially strong and stable company."

Svanberg, who is to meet Wednesday with Obama at the White House, "made clear that BP will continue to do all that it can to stop the oil spill, clean up the damage and meet all legitimate claims for compensation," it said.

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg appealed for a reduction in the vitriol that has gripped many observers. "I don't, frankly, think we're going to reach a solution stopping the release of oil into the Gulf any quicker by allowing this to spiral into a tit-for-tat political, diplomatic spat," he said.

That comment elicited no sympathy from Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. "Obviously, Nick hasn't been over here and touched the oil," he told CNN. "We get a tropical storm that brings that oil and lays it across coastal Louisiana, we're wiped out for the next 20 years. This community will be dead, and they're talking like we're being too tough?"

By law, the company is responsible for paying all the costs to stop the leak and clean the oil off the shore. That's likely to be the small bill: in the single-digit billions.

A bigger concern will be claims of economic damage from fishermen, hoteliers and other businesses who report losses. BP has said it will pay "all reasonable claims" but has been vague on what "reasonable" means.

BP said that nearly 42,000 claims have been submitted and more than 20,000 payments made, totaling more than $53 million.

So far, the cost of the response is $1.43 billion, it said.

Lawmakers want to make sure the company has enough money not only to remove the oil but to reimburse residents for lost wages and other damage to the economy.

BP has argued that the company has plenty of money to do both. Executives noted last week that BP had a cash flow last year exceeding $30 billion.

The government's response manager offered a new round of numbers as well on what it takes to clean a spill of this magnitude: an Exxon Valdez-like spill every few days that has now gone on for 55 days.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said that more than 25,000 people -- contractors, volunteers and members of the military -- were involved on the ground.

Some 3.8 million gallons of oil burned, he said. About 1 million gallons of dispersant has been used to break up the slick. That has taken more than 500 skimmers, barges, ships and aircraft.

Piecemeal efforts to slow the flow are continuing.

As early as Monday, BP plans to deploy "Q4000 Direct Connect," the company's name for a containment device secondary to a primary cap that was put in place over the leaking well last week.

Allen has said he expects that the Q4000 will be able to take an additional 5,000 to 10,000 barrels per day.

A second Transocean drill ship is expected to arrive in mid- to late June, bringing an added capacity of 10,000 barrels per day, the company said.

By mid-July, the current cap will be replaced with a larger device that will provide a tighter seal, the company said.

The cap will be connected to another manifold and hose system to a free-floating riser 300 feet below sea level. The hose attached to the riser will connect with the containment vessel on the surface, giving cleanup workers the option of disconnecting from and then reconnecting to the riser should the ships need to return to port in the event of a hurricane.

The riser would remain in place at all times. This system could contain up to 50,000 barrels per day, according to BP.

The ultimate containment plan would insert mud and cement 18,000 feet under the seabed, effectively stopping the flow of oil, the company said.

Two such wells, one of which would be a backup, are under way and are slated for completion in August.

Meanwhile, a delegation of U.S. senators traveled Friday to the heart of coastal Louisiana to assess the damage.

"Until you see if firsthand, until you really smell it, get a sense of it, you can't understand it fully," said Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana.

They were the latest in a virtual parade of officials from Washington to make the trip to the coast. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was in the region Thursday, and Obama is scheduled to make his fourth trip next week.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.


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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. : Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

from : http://www.huffingtonpost.com

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."

Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.

Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.

It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."

BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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