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.