What happened to the "Lake Landrieu" tag?

Sorry. It's still Lake Landrieu. It always was. It always will be.

Un-unprecedented!

Somebody finally starts telling the Ixtoc story.

Gulf of Mexico oil spill has 'perfect precedent' in 1979 spill

Morning Question

People really like to watch Spillcam. It's certainly more compelling TV than Treme anyway. Which one do you think they'll figure out how to cancel first?

Uh oh

Believe it or not, the oil gusher appears to have gone even more out of control.

Update: The linked post is largely speculative interpretation of images from Spillcam. May be that nothing has changed and we're still only dealing with the catastrophic horror we already knew about.

Cake Wars

As with all great crises, this one is being hashed out through the universal language of expressive cake baking. Just this morning we learned that the Alaska office of the Minerals Management Service (the federal agency charged with safeguarding you against mishaps like the great Macando oil gusher) recently staged an office celebration with a "Drill Baby Drill" cake.

Now maybe that's a little shocking but since we've already learned that BP is currently ordering the US Coast Guard around, we aren't quite as surprised as we used to be. Here is a must-read NYT article about the entrenched conflicts of interest generated by leaving BP in charge of clean-up operations. The feds want BP to pay for everything, so BP gets to call all of the shots, and since they're paying they make they're decisions based at least in part on finding the best way to save themselves money.

Here is a video of "Plack-mines" Parish President Billy Nungesser complaining that the feds won't approve state plans to dredge sand for emergency oil barriers. Likely because BP doesn't want to have to pay for it.



Meanwhile, as we all know by now, the good people at Breaux Mart have hit back with a cake of their own. We showed it to you earlier this week but here is it again in case you missed it.



And here it is on a blog called Cakewrecks. And here it is on eater.com, Salon.com, DailyKos, the LA Times, God knows where else it's gone now. Oh it also made HumidCity which I think is pretty sweet.

I'm a little sad that this random picture I took in the grocery with my cell phone currently has 68,221 views while Michael Homan's brilliant short film Geauxjira has pulled in a respectable but paltry by comparison 1147. The good news is that all of this sets up the sequel Geauxjira vs Cake which we hope goes into production any day now.

Meanwhile, as your Friday Cat Blogging treat, please enjoy. Biscuit Watches Geauxjira.



Expect this one to make the cover Time Magazine sometime next month.

Quote of the Day

Billy Nungesser:

"Everything that that blanket of oil is covering today will die," he said. "All of the bugs that the fish come in to eat, all of the critters in the marsh will die. And that marsh will die. There's no way to clean it up."

I know. That's harsh. I hate it too.

Hey, I know let's watch a movie! What do you want to see?

Spillcam is pretty popular today

But so is Geauxjira and it's got a happier ending.



Update: Alright, which one of you killed Spillcam?

On Wednesday, Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Lamar McKay, chief executive of BP America, asking the company to make its real-time camera feed of the gulf oil spill publicly available.

BP has complied, and the feed is up at the Web site of the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which the Democratic lawmaker is chairman.

Now, the only problem is that the site’s servers are unable to handle the traffic. As of early this afternoon, the video was not viewable.

“We’re working around the clock as we speak to fix this,” said Eben Burnham-Snyder, a spokesman for Mr. Markey. “The enormous demand for this video means that it’s now taxing the servers.”

Well I, for one, am glad to see that they're "working around the clock" to clean up this unprecedented overloading of their website that nobody could have predicted. It will probably take a few months to get the relief server installed so we're open to any quick fix "Apollo 13" style remedies you can think of. I've tried lowering a large dome down over my monitor a few times to no avail. Next I may start throwing old tires at it.

Define "some"

BP: Oil spill worse than first estimated

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - BP conceded Thursday that more oil than it
estimated is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico as heavy crude washed
into Louisiana's wetlands for the first time, feeding worries and
uncertainty about the massive monthlong spill.

Mark Proegler, a spokesman for oil giant BP PLC, said a
mile-long tube inserted into a leaking pipe over the weekend is
capturing 210,000 gallons a day - the total amount the company and the Coast Guard have estimated is gushing into the sea - but some is still escaping. He would not say how much.

You see a few days ago, BP told us they were sucking 40 percent of the total flow through their crazy straw. At that time their estimated total was 210,000 gallons a day. My phone calculator says BP was claiming to suck 84,000 gallons per day but BP uses more sophisticated instruments than I do so I'm glad I waited a few days for them to tell me that they're actually sucking the full 210,000.

But now there's "some" left over. Anybody want to guess how much "some" there is?

Proegler said the 210,000 gallons - 5,000 barrels - has always been just an estimate because there is no way to measure how much is spilling from the seafloor.

There's no way to know how much. But we were getting 40 percent of it. But we were really getting more than that. But that's not all of it. And there's no way to know how much more. But it's some.

Whatever. I guess it really is BP's ocean. They broke it, they bought it, right?

Speaking of which, I'm pleased to see that EPA is stepping in (after a month) to demand that BP use a safer dispersant than the toxic Corexit they've been force-funneling into the Gulf as though it were a fraternity pledge on alcohol poisoning initiation night. Dambala astutely assumes that this probably means Nalco is pretty much out of the stuff anyway.

Lot of good it did too.

Oil is lapping on the Louisiana coast from Port Fourchon to Grand Isle, a Jefferson Parish official said.

Oil has also washed up on Elmer's Island off lower Jefferson Parish, a wildlife refuge and popular spot for bird-watching and beach camping, a Jefferson Parish official said.

Anybody got any more toxic waste you're trying to get rid of? Now would be the time to dump it into the Gulf. It won't clean up the oil either but at least you won't be ruining anything pristine.

"BP thinks it's their ocean"

Just following up on something I wrote at the end of an earlier post. I mentioned that I heard WWL reporters talking about Coast Guard officials witholding video of the oil leak apparently at BP's request. Here's the CBS report that verifies that statement.

Earlier Wednesday, (Congressman Ed)Markey demanded the broadcast so independent scientists could more accurately calculate the flow rate. He questioned why such data wasn't readily being made public.

"BP thinks it's their ocean," Markey said while chairing a House Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Markey didn't stop with BP, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. He blasted the Coast Guard for what he described as letting BP call the shots.

Coast Guard officials were on a boat with BP contractors who stopped CBS News cameras from viewing an oily beach, and the Coast Guard - which is in charge of the investigation - admits it's had access to live video since Day One but wouldn't let Congress or the public see it, Attkisson reports.

This I wanted to pair with another story I shared in the same post about Coast Guard officers threatening to arrest reporters, again apparently on BP's orders, for attempting to film oil coming ashore in South Pass. I thought those two stories were jaw-dropping examples of the kind of power we've allowed corporate giants like BP to wield in our current climate of laissez-faire lawlessness.

But somehow I managed to obscure that point by shoving it in at the bottom of a messy post with a picture of a funny cake at the top.

Update: Just to demonstrate that I'm not the only genius around, C&L pairs the exact same stories in a similar post but writes more effectively about it.

Hold the phone...BP is making the rules???? Kind of hard to argue that we aren't a full-blown corporatocracy, when BP--that's British Petroleum--is leading the United States Coast Guard on this--and this is okay with a branch of our armed forces.

The British Petroleum are coming. We tried to send down General Jackson to stop them but he was already on their payroll.

None of these pictures is of cake

Greenpeace pics from Chandeleur and Lower Plaquemines

via Mosquito Coast

Update: So happy to know that all the not-cake in those pictures is actually "very very modest"

Holy crap this has gone on for 30 days already

I knew there was a reason for that cake.

Go see Maitri for lots more links

BTW: Speaking of that cake, is anyone else reminded of the Lakeside Shopping Center's Katrina Christmas Village from 2005? Same kind of clever on a slightly smaller scale.

Afternoon oil digest (Please do not attempt to digest oil-tainted seafood)

Cake spotted in Breaux Mart grocery store on Magazine Street May 18, 2010

WWLTV: Local leaders concerned after oil sheen begins hitting Pass a Loutre

PLAQUEMINES, La. -- 20 miles down the Mississippi River from Venice at the mouth of South Pass where it meets the Gulf of Mexico, large patches of oil stain the beach. Bright, slimy stains cover nearby rocks where thousand of birds normally perch.

It is the arrival of the heavy oil at the coast that officials have dreaded.

Times-Picayune: Even underwater oil must be removed, La. officials warn

Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham said Tuesday that an argument between EPA and NOAA over the validity of tests of the effects of dispersants in deep water call into question assurances by EPA and BP that the dispersants are safe. Barham said NOAA officials told him the ship's dispersant tests contained few useful samples and that the analysis would provide little useful information. EPA officials disputed NOAA's conclusions, he said.

"The use of sub-sea dispersants to combat the effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on our coast is an action that I am not able to give my support to," Barham said in a letter to David Rainey, BP America vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration, requesting more sampling information. "While I understand the importance of mitigating the effects of this oil on our fragile wetlands to date, little or no substantive data has been provided to the state of Louisiana concerning the efficacy and risks associated with deep injection of dispersants."

The Atlantic: Why BP Won't Measure the Oil Spill

One potential motivator for the company's behavior may involve its unprecedented use of chemical dispersants. Responders have been spraying the dispersants across the oil slick and applying them underwater as well. The discrepancy between the volume measurements based on the surface slick and those gleaned from the underwater footage may mean that the dispersants are working, breaking the oil into distinct particles before it reaches the surface in slick form.

Funny thing about that. Now that BP is sucking some portion of the flow up through a crazy straw hooked to a boat, they're quite happy to claim they're getting 40 percent of it. Although that figure depends on which estimate of the flow rate you believe. From the above-linked T-P article:

Some scientists have said they believe the estimate is absurdly low, and several members of Congress continued to question it Tuesday, based on new videos released by BP on Tuesday. "This new leak video deserves a new look by independent scientists," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. "BP brags about collecting more than a 1,000 barrels of oil a day from their new siphon technique, but they still don't know how many thousands of barrels they are missing."

Here's a nice rant from Black Gulf including a timeline of the misinformation regarding the severity of the leak. It concludes

This list is far too short.
Yet, here is major media this morning, controlled by Big Energy and Big War, ready to gobble the magic pipe (story) and we can all rest easy. The bronze statue to CNN for this prize would be pornographic and distasteful. Too distasteful for description here. I leave it to your imagination, dear reader, to conjure the image I am thinking of.
Nice.
Meantime, won't we at least ask someone for video footage of the allegedly staunched flow before we gargle and spit this information onto the public?

Funny thing about that, of course, is the newly released video shows us..

A new video has emerged revealing heavy plumes of oil slowly seeping out from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting BP oil leak bigger than previously thought. This is a leak that is suspiciously close to the location of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded on April 20. The plumes may be evidence of a spill that is far larger in scale than previously thought, and is certainly cause for much concern.

Last night I was half listening to WWLTV's newscast when I swear I heard somebody say in passing that the Coast Guard has had access to underwater footage of the leak for some time now but had not released it to the public until BP was ready. That seemed a little weird to me. But not quite as disturbing as this.

When CBS tried to film a beach with heavy oil on the shore in South Pass, Louisiana, a boat of BP contractors, and two Coast Guard officers, told them to turn around, or be arrested.

"This is BP's rules, it's not ours," someone aboard the boat said. Coast Guard officials told CBS that they're looking into it.

As the Coast Guard is a branch of the Armed Forces, it brings into question how closely the government and BP are working together to keep details of the disaster in the dark.

This WWL story from the same broadcast wonders if the Federal response to the leak "feels like deja vu" with regard to the flood of 2005. Yeah a little. Although I guess BP would tell you they're pretty satisfied with the service they've gotten to this point.

Phantom test

Rig explodes at 10:00 PM. Data is only current until 3:00 PM. During that seven hours somebody made a fateful decision based on... what?

(Rig workers' attorney Tony) Buzbee said that when Halliburton showed BP PLC and Transocean officials the results of the pressure tests that suggested gas was leaking, the rig workers were put on "standby." BP is the rig operator and leaseholder.

Buzbee said one of his clients told him the "Transocean and BP company people got their heads together," and 40 minutes later gave the green light.

The attorney said the Halliburton crew members were not shown any new test results.

"They said they did their own tests, and they came out Oklahoma," he said. "But with the phantom test that Transocean and BP allegedly did, there was no real record or real-time recordation of that test."

Buzbee suggested that BP and Transocean had monetary reasons for ignoring the earlier tests.

"The facts are as they are," he said. "The rig is $500,000 a day. There are bonuses for finishing early."

The "missing seven hours" business could get interesting. And no, I don't mean interesting in the fun "look what's in Ray Nagin's email" way. Nothing Nagin lied about ever resulted in eleven horrifying deaths and the destruction of an irreplaceable coastal estuary.

They are using the wrong kind of sweetener on the iced tea

NYT: Less Toxic Dispersants Lose Out in BP Oil Spill Cleanup

But according to EPA data, Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.

Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.

I used to tell people that since the pink stuff was carcinogenic and the blue stuff was linked to Alzheimer's, every morning coffee presented the same dismal choice. I always went for the pink stuff. My reasoning for that, I would argue, was at some point when I'm lying in a hospital bed, at least I'll be able to say to myself, "Wait, what's happening? Oh yeah I'm dying of cancer. Wait, why? Because I had too much of the pink stuff." That's fine. But the alternative result of too much blue stuff being a semi-aware state of child-like consciousness struck me as unbearable. I mean, that's too close to an actual description of my regular work day as it is. And the thought that basically nothing will have changed by the time I'm ready to check out... well there's real horror there. Anyway, I stopped worrying about any of this when they came out with the yellow stuff. Nobody knows what the hell that might do to you and I hope they never find out. Otherwise it's right back to the daily dismal decision.

Which is what, I guess, BP was thinking about their use of Corexit. Everybody knows oil on the beaches is bad but the effects of the dispersant are less well-known and so given the choice between a known known and a known unknown most people feel safer if they just don't know. Except now it turns out that EPA knows a bit more than we knew they had known. And now it's even less clear that BP knows anything about anything. Obviously they could use a little help here. Perhaps EPA should use all of this data to make stronger recommendations. Isn't it their job to prescribe guidelines for safe usage of these products they're evaluating?

EPA has not taken a stance on whether one dispersant should be used over another, leaving that up to BP. All the company is required to do is to choose an EPA-approved chemical, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters yesterday during a conference call aimed at addressing questions about dispersants being used in efforts to contain the Gulf spill. "Our regular responsibilities say, if it's on the list and they want to use it, then they are preauthorized to do so," Jackson said.

One explanation for BP's reliance on Nalco's Corexit, which its competitors say dominates the niche market for dispersants because of its industry ties, was its availability in large quantities at the time of the Gulf spill.

"Obviously, logistics and stockpiles and the ability for the responsible party to pull the materials together," Jackson said. "I'm sure that has a lot to do with the ones that they choose."

Of course. Silly me I almost forgot about how bad all that government regulation type stuff can be compared to the wise efficiencies generated by one company's dominance of a niche market. Carry on, I guess.

Meanwhile, clearly desperate, state officials are considering going back to natural sweeteners. Don't they know what that stuff does to your teeth? Or for that matter your oysters?

Oyster fishermen, normally concerned about fresh water hurting their harvest, may now prefer it to oily dispersant creeping up all across the Louisiana marsh.

Slight post-publication edits to this post may have occurred.

Quote of the day

Atrios:

I'm not optimistic that the people saying there will be criminal action are correct. Mary Landrieu will probably chain herself to a BP executive if they try to take one away in cuffs.

Somebody recently compared this to a siege

While we're still waiting here behind our besieged floating walls of hair for... what? Are we waiting for the food supply to run out? Because we're already short on oysters.



Anyway here's that Boston.com collection of photos from the mess.

And a few more links from today:

Huffpo: Whistleblower Claims That BP Was Aware Of Cheating On Blowout Preventer Tests

Mike Mason, who worked on oil rigs in Alaska for 18 years, says that he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP.

As he describes it, the test involves a chart that shows whether the device will hold a certain amount of pressure for five minutes on each valve. (The test involves increasing the pressure from 250 pounds per square-inch (psi) to 5,000 psi.) "Sometimes, they would put their finger on the chart and slide it ahead -- so that it only recorded the pressure for 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes," he tells HuffPost.

You're supposed to get a good 5 minutes of action but BP only wants to pay for the 30 second version. It's like they're browsing itunes, I guess.

Uneasy living in Lafitte It's a Lens interview with two fishers from Lafitte who attended the BP training event for possible clean-up duty.

The Lens: So at the fishers recruiter meeting you attended, what did BP reps say they would provide for protection?

Bizani: Rubber suits and gloves, but they didn’t say anything about respirators. You sweat and that stuff gets in your pores. For me, I have small children. My youngest son is 2-years-old. I might want to have more kids. I don’t want to be dead in 10 years because I made a couple thousand dollars. I just want to do what I love. That’s why everybody’s here. They talked about going out in the boat for a few months, but if they shut us down for five years what are we going to do?

I guess today is Day 23. Maitri is back to counting them up again


Varg provides us with more gratuitous oyster pics and ruminations.

Ros and I went down to Acme in the quarter on Monday night to get as many of them as we could. We took pictures too.

Durin's bane

There are a lot of reasons to recommend this front page article from today's Times-Picayune about Berkley professor Robert Bea's investigation into the causes of the great gulf oil gusher. We learn the word "imagineering" as in

'The same trail of tears led to Katrina ... and it's showing up here again,' professor Robert Bea says. They failed to address what's called "residual risk," those things that planners don't think will fail. And in doing so, they underestimated the risk in ways very similar to the engineers who designed New Orleans' levee system, Bea said.

"BP fell into the same damn trap, and they were not engineering; they were 'imagineering,'" he said. "Risk analysis continues to mislead us because we're only looking at part of the risk."

We learn more about Halliburton's role in applying cement plugs that were supposed to secure the well as it was capped off.

A transcript Bea collected from a witness says the companies were confident enough they had a lucrative oil source that they decided to convert from an exploratory well to a more permanent production well, a process that requires them to apply a metal and cement casing to the well hole. They chose casing 7 inches in diameter, Bea said, and that was further sealed with cement pumped in by Halliburton. Bea said his sources reported that Halliburton was using a "new" kind of cement for the seal, something the scientist said made him say, "Uh oh."

We also learn that the BP, Transocean, and Halliburton officials in charge of the operation debated whether or not they should remove the "drilling mud" from the column before the final cement plug had been set.

One of Bea's witness transcripts describes in detail a heated debate among BP, Halliburton and Transocean officials as they are about to add the final cement plug to the well, 5,000 below the wellhead and 10,000 feet below the rig. They argued about whether to set the plug with drilling mud still in the well and riser, or if they should do it with lighter sea water there instead.

As The Times-Picayune reported last week, Bea's witness claims the decision was made to displace the heavy mud barrier with water before the final plug was set in order to finish the job more quickly

There's the obligatory irony.

Among those tossed asunder by the explosions were BP officials who were on the rig to celebrate a seven-year spotless safety record.

And, of course, there is the description of the ominous gas surges highlighted in the headline which caused work on the well to shut down temporarily a few weeks before the final incident.

"As the job unfolded, ... the workers did have intermittent trouble with pockets of natural gas," said one statement sent to Bea. "Highly flammable, the gas was forcing its way up the drill pipes. This was something BP had not foreseen as a serious problem, declaring a year earlier that gas was likely to pose only a 'negligible' risk. The government warned the company that gas buildup was a real concern and that BP should 'exercise caution'".

A second statement said, "At one point during the previous several weeks, so much of it came belching up to the surface that a loudspeaker announcement called for a halt to all 'hot work', meaning any smoking, welding, cooking or any other use of fire. Smaller belches, or 'kicks,' had stalled work as the job was winding down" in the days before the accident. Bea said he could not name the people who gave the statements or reveal their positions.

When I read this part, I thought it reminded me of something I saw in a movie once. So I sent a text message to Menckles who I thought could appreciate the reference better than would most people.

The front page story is about the investigation into the causes. It has statements from the rig workers who describe fiery gas belches that preceded the explosion and shut down work for a time.

That should have told them there was a Belrock down there.

Now I'm just a guy who happens to have seen a lot of movies. But Menckles is a full-fledged dice-carrying D&D gamer geek so I knew she would run with this. A few minutes later I got the following response.

Btw, if you're going to make this joke on the blog, it's spelled, "Balrog." Also, mithril was what the dwarves wanted to come back to Moria for, after it had been plundered by the orcs.

"Its worth was ten times that of gold, and now it is beyond price; for little is left above ground, and even the Orcs dare not delve here for it. The lodes lead away north towards Caradhras, and down to darkness. The Dwarves tell no tale; but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane. (The Balrog) Of what they brought to light the Orcs have gathered nearly all, and given it in tribute to Sauron, who covets it."

What a fucking tree-hugger that Tolkein was, huh? Drill! Drill! Drill

I guess I could have said something like "BTW if you're gonna make that joke, it's spelled Drill, Baby, Drill!" but I figured I'd already lost this round anyway. So today's big Ha Ha cred goes to Menckles, I guess.

In the scene linked here*, Gandalf prepares to lay protective boom ahead of the approaching menace. Maybe he should have used more hair.


*God forbid we be allowed to embed the work of the masters here

The smell of fried foods and pure hot tar*

Air tests from the Louisiana coast reveal human health threats from the oil disaster

Today the Louisiana Environmental Action Network released its analysis of air monitoring test results by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's air testing data comes from Venice, a coastal community 75 miles south of New Orleans in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish.

The findings show that levels of airborne chemicals have far exceeded state standards and what's considered safe for human exposure.

Forget the respiratory and neurological issues. Forget about the carcinogens. Here's how this is affecting me personally. This afternoon in Uptown New Orleans it smells like somebody left a Barbie in the microwave. There is no way I can go do my semi-regular 4-6 mile jog in this. Meanwhile I'm desperately eating up all the Louisiana seafood I can get my hands on before it all goes away forever.



That's a gumbo I made Friday with oysters, crabs, and shrimp. I made a big shrimp stock to do this and have the excess stored in the freezer right now. I figure I'll be able to get $500.00 an ounce for the shavings in another month or so. I'm on my way out the door to find and eat as many fried and raw oysters as I can tonight. Also this is fucking depressing in general so I'm drinking more than I usually would.

So I guess my question is, can I just sue BP for making me fat?


*Isn't it great to exist at this point in time?

With just a touch of my burning hand I'm gonna live my life to destroy your world

So I guess it's Lake Lieberman now, too.

In a recent interview with National Journal, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) not only defended offshore oil drilling, but also sought to downplay the current Gulf coast crisis, saying "accidents happen."

You know, just... Fuck you

I'm sorry but that's about all I can say there. I could repeat it a kabillion times if you like but we still wouldn't have an adequate flow rate to match what BP and its enablers have unleashed.

Here are some links.


Maitri: SE Louisiana is "officially screwed"

Chemical dispersants being used in Gulf clean-up are potentially toxic

OSHA requires companies to make Material Safety Data Sheets, or MSDSs, available for any hazardous substances used in a workplace, and the ones for these dispersants both contain versions of a disturbing statement. 9500's states that "Component substances have a potential to bioconcentrate," while the one for 9527A has the slightly more comforting, "Component substances have a low potential to bioconcentrate."

This is not what you want to hear about toxins being dumped in the sea by the hundreds of thousands of gallons. The EPA defines bioconcentration as the "accumulation of a chemical in tissues of a fish or other organism to levels greater than in the surrounding medium." In other words, substances that bioconcentrate tend to move from water into fish, where they can do damage to the fish itself, as well as be passed on to predator fish -- and on up the food chain, to human eaters.

And just how toxic is this stuff? The data sheets for both products contain this shocker: "No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product" -- meaning testing their safety for humans.

This is jaw-dropping. According to Ronald Tjeerdema, chair of the Department of Environmental Toxicology at UC Davis' College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences, who has been studying dispersants since the '90s, "The industry typically only stockpiles one or two of these things," and while Corexit 9527 has been the dispersant of choice for a long time, in recent years, Corexit 9500 has gained prominence. Yet Nalco has done no toxicity studies on these industry-dominating products now in heavy use in the Gulf?

They do appear to have toxic properties. Both data sheets include the warning "human health hazards: acute." The MSDS for Corexit 9527A states that "excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, anesthetic or narcotic effects," and "repeated or excessive exposure to butoxyethanol [an active ingredient] may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver."

It adds: "Prolonged and/or repeated exposure through inhalation or extensive skin contact with EGBE [butoxyethanol] may result in damage to the blood and kidneys."

Opinion: An oil-stained cloak (from City Business)

BP’s reach evidently extends beyond the fishermen when it comes to keeping a lid on cleanup operations. CityBusiness reached a number of local businesses known to be involved with BP’s containment operation, and they refused to discuss their work.

No one begrudges legitimate businesses making a profit from this unfortunate situation. To the contrary, most are thankful the expertise and capacity to address such a catastrophe exists in our own backyard, just minutes away from the problem.

What is worthy of resent is keeping people in the dark, especially those who stand in harm’s way. A lack of information generally leads to misinformation, and ignorance can only exacerbate a problem that already stands to reach grotesque proportions.

That greed evidently outweighs concern for the well-being of those affected by the disaster is not only shameful, it borders on criminal.

Broken record time. BP exists to make money. That's what guides its priorities and incentives. Ideally your democratically elected representatives exist to recalibrate things so that your safety and livelihood takes precedence over BP's priorities but then, you know...

(via oyster) Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf

WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now that... that's probably closer to being "criminal" than City Biz's complaint against BP.


BP struggles with list of ways to plug Gulf of Mexico oil spill
"Top kills" golf balls, giant boxes, slightly smaller giant boxes. Get the feeling they're just giving you something to look at while they spend three months doing the only thing that will actually work? Yeah me too.

BP is managing a PR crisis. Not an environmental crisis. Remember, your elected representatives never required them to plan for that. Because no such plan was required, we've instead been treated to a series of colorful food metaphors to describe the "iced tea", "chocolate milk", "mousse", "toasted marshmallows" happily floating atop the Gulf. We've been told again and again how "unprecedented" and "unpredictable" this situation is/was when that clearly is not the case. We've been prepped with a number of alternate explanations for the sudden appearance of dead or distressed wildlife on the beaches. It has even been suggested that BP's efforts to combat the flow might someday make a great movie.

“It’s just an amazing effort, truly an Apollo 13 effort 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean trying to stop this spill.”

The worst thing about this is somewhere out there marketing pros are talking excitedly about the challenge of reviving the BP brand or about the pitfalls of "green branding"

Particularly galling, says Merriam, who runs Merriam Associates, is its slow response time. "They put all this emphasis on 'human energy,' and where are the humans now? It took them seven days to get out a Twitter response, and it's so corporate and robotic. If you're going to brag about how honest and open and responsive you are, you have to do that -- would it have killed them to run a Twitter post that said something like, "Our hearts go out to the friends and families of those lost in the accident," or "We are working around the clock to contain the damage"?

Yes, of all the horror, angst and despair brought about by tons of sludge spurting into the ocean I thought that BP's lack of facility with the Tweeter Tubes was "particularly galling".

But OK that's fine. Since there's not much any of us can do to keep the oil off our coastline and out of our seafood by this point we might as well get to work writing BP's new ads for them. So far all I've got is the slogan at the top of this post which is a line from the jingle. It goes like this.

We'll go down and smell around

Apparently nothing on the rig worked at all. BOP didn't work, cement didn't work, and it's also possible the rig crew wasn't following the safest procedure at the time of the explosion.

In order to properly cap a well, drillers rely on three lines of defense to protect themselves from an explosive blowout: a column of heavy mud in the well itself and in the drilling riser that runs up to the rig; at least two cement plugs that fit in the well with a column of mud between them; and a blowout preventer that is supposed to seal the well if the mud and plugs all fail.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, Scott Bickford, a lawyer for a rig worker who survived the explosions, said the mud was being extracted from the riser before the top cement cap was in place, and a statement by cementing contractor Halliburton confirmed the top cap was not installed

Perhaps the companies responsible for making sure these things worked would have taken the issue more seriously if they had been given the impression that someone was going to hold them accountable when something went wrong. Turns out they weren't even required to file a contingency plan for this sort of emergency.

Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.

Now why would Minerals Management Service employees feel at liberty to take such a relaxed attitude toward their mission? Well, yeah, they kind of felt that way about a lot of things.

Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.

That's right. The regulators were actually literally in bed with representatives of the industry they were supposed to police. I just hope those oil lobby-whores were damn good lays because they sure did turn out to cost a lot of shrimp.

Note: Even if you go out and get the biggest toughest condom you can find, it doesn't do anywhere near as much good if you wait until the load is shot before you put it on.

And all of this says nothing about what kind of a deal they managed to swing for Senator Landrieu but we assume it was some good shit because..

Meanwhile there is renewed discussion of the lovely smell wafting over New Orleans from the south tonight. It's difficult to describe exactly. It's kind of a charred chemical sweetness. Somebody, I think it was Pat, described it as melting crayons but that's not quite strong enough. When I was a kid, I had this friend who liked to melt Star Wars action figures with a butane lighter. I think it smells like somebody barbecued a pile of Boba Fetts outside tonight. Maybe that goes well with iced tea but I haven't seen any yet.

Send more hair

Gulf oil spill spreads west of mouth of Mississippi

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO -- Streaks of putrid, orange and rust-colored oil snaked well west of the mouth of the Mississippi River in an area that has received less attention.

Here's an NPR story on the nylon and hair booms we read about the other day.

Commercial booms are usually made of plastic. But an alternative source for the booms is found on the floor of salons across the country.

As it turns out, hair adheres to oil pretty efficiently, which is why your hair gets greasy. Now salons are donating their discarded locks to help with the Gulf Coast cleanup.

A group in San Francisco has been producing hair booms for nearly a decade now. Matter of Trust makes nylon stockings stuffed with human hair and trimmed animal fur.

Christmas trees to fight erosion and old hair to fight the oil. Way to "push the technological envelope" guys.