Gulf Oil Tsunami Update (Twitter bomb the MSM so they’ll ANCHORS away)

I wanted to share with you the latest news that we’re getting locally as I know that it doesn’t appear to be getting out of the region. Now that more data is reaching the scientific community, the news down here is getting more grim. Of course, most of the scientists studying the Gulf are Gulf residents themselves.

Jackson State Scientist , Dr. Remata Redd, who studies and teaches tropical meteorology is concerned about something I’ve thought possible now that hurricane season is beginning. He believes that the Gulf Oil Spill can only spread when surface winds push the oil. One of my bigger fears has always been that the oil will eventually work it’s way up the Mississippi and get into drinking water supplies for our various coastal communities as well as New Orleans, itself.

“Direction and intensity is important as to which direction the oil is moving,” Reddy said.

He said if a tropical storm were to form in the Gulf, there could major ecological problems for residents along the Gulf Coast. If a storm were to travel to the east of the oil spill, the concentration of the oil would head to the center of the Gulf, he said. If the storm would travel to the west of the oil spill, the bulk would be thrust up against the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coastlines, Reddy said.

“No one can tell me how much oil is below the surface and if a hurricane comes, the hurricane will stir it up and in the form of tidal surge,” said Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Director Deano Bonano. “There’s no boom, no plan in place to protect us.”

And some say it doesn’t have to be as severe as a hurricane to cause severe damage. Leaders in St. Bernard Parish are fearful of the possibility of wind, water and oil pushing inland.

“A tropical storm could lift oil and contaminated water to the marsh and to the eastern and residential areas as well,” said St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro.

Also, local sources (WDSU NEW ORLEANS) are reporting that BP is ignoring the EPA and continuing to use the same toxic dispersant we’ve discussed before. Having this reach potable water supplies worries me tremendously. I’m warning all my friends with small children to consider switching to pure spring water.

BP PLC is continuing to spray a toxic chemical dispersant to break up the Gulf oil spill, even though a deadline to stop use of the chemical has passed.The Environmental Protection Agency directed BP last week to find an alternative to a dispersant, called Corexit 9500, that has been identified as a “moderate” human health hazard. The product can cause eye, skin or respiratory irritation with prolonged exposure.

Every day on the local news we are regaled with maps of oil spill movements instead of wind currents aloft. We see maps and maps that show closings of fishing, shrimping and oyster areas. This has been going on here for well over a month and I have to admit I’m beginning to feel a siege mentality. It takes up nearly all the local news and most of the weather broadcasting. Meanwhile, if BP is responsible for the cleanup and catastrophe down here, why am I reading this at our WWLTV website?

Congress is getting ready to quadruple — to 32 cents a barrel — a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

The tax is levied on oil produced in the U.S. or imported from foreign countries. The revenue goes to a fund managed by the Coast Guard to help pay to clean up spills in waterways, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

If you haven’t seen the slideshow at WDSU called “Officials Clean Critters, Crude on Coast”, I urge you to go there and see our heartbreak for yourself. WWLT has a special set of pictures that show the damage the oil is doing to Pelicans and their nesting areas in Plaquesmines Parish. Here are some more galleries from nola.com which is the website for the New Orleans Times Picayune. I’ve seriously meant to write about other things–including Financial Regulation–but it’s very hard for me at the moment. I walk the dog and I smell the stuff. I see helicopters over head all the time again; much like during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. You can’t watch TV down here at all without seeing ad after ad of trial lawyers looking for clients and then there’s the relentless news and weather updates. We’re in a state of emergency. I don’t feel like any one at the White House really gets this.

I’m not sure what it’s going to take to get a serious plan and response to this crisis. We’ve seen no major news anchors down here. Not even the Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel has shown up so I feel like so many folks don’t know what kind of a situation is developing here in Southern Louisiana. I’m thinking we should twitter bomb them to get some better news coverage. I don’t know what else to do. Certainly, they can’t block the major TV news anchors from seeing the damage. Even BP chief Tony Haward has been here.

The chief executive of BP PLC walked the oil-stained sands of a closed Louisiana beach as workers in white coveralls and yellow boots tended to equipment being used to keep away crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

CEO Tony Hayward talked with the workers Monday at Fourchon Beach while the crews tended to booms meant to soak up the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Reporters were kept at a distance.

So, here’s my plea!!! Twitter bomb the news outlets! Post something to their facebook pages!!! Let them know that we need some major coverage down here because the Federal Government is just giving speeches and the Coast Guard is letting BP make all the decisions! Thank you!!!

What exactly is every one WAITING for?

Gulf Shrimp in their natural habitat: my dinner plate

I took that picture of my dinner because I have no idea how much longer I’ll be able to buy Gulf Shrimp. I also don’t know how to get the nation’s attention. We have an oil tsunami down here and it’s not getting any better.

I’m posting links to our local stations because it appears that BP and the Coast Guard are chasing off the national media. For some reason, local journalists make it on to the boats and see the damage first hand.

I’m going to show you what Jefferson and Plaquemines Parishes are doing and then there’s the presidential response which is basically to create an Oil-Spill Panel that’s got six months to do its thing. SIX fucking months! How many lives will be destroyed by that time? What on earth can be done by a committee that has six MONTHS to report? Where is the power of a president that can order a citizen assassinated and an assassin drone to cross the borders of a country with whom we are not at war? Where is any sense of urgency?

Meanwhile, back in my backyard at my favorite area to hike, things are a little more desperate. Oil is rushing towards the Barataria estuaries. Jefferson parish commandeered 40 idled-by-BP boats to try to stop the flow. That’s 40 boats just sitting around doing nothing. NOTHING at all. Oil is pushing into the marshes. We just keep getting excuses from every where. Plaquesmines Parish is now trying to fund their own program because they can’t get enough help.

Oil is pushing into more and more stretches of coastal marsh in Plaquemines Parish, with some stalks of cane now appearing to wilt from an onslaught of oil.

“This is our worst nightmare. I’m sick to my stomach,” said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. “It’s going through the other side of the bayou. So, it’s infiltrated all of this marsh and you can see the brown starting to work up the cane.”

Despite the presence of oil containment and absorbent boom, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser has watched more and more oil encroach on coastal marshes, with each passing day. As time goes by, he’s become more and more frustrated that the federal government has yet to approve a state proposal, which would build barrier islands off the coast to catch the oil, before it hits the marsh.

“We we’re asking to put back a little bit of the barrier islands, so we’d have a chance to save this,” Nungesser said.

The oil, which looks like thick, dark caramel, is sticking to this marsh and there is no clear solution on how to remove it.

“Seeing is believing,” said Plaquemines Parish Council Member Lynda Banta. “You hear it on TV, but when you come and see it first-hand– it’s overwhelming to me.”

Fully ONE month after the oil tsunami,we are getting a congressional delegation and a few cabinet secretaries on a visit again. Meanwhile, BP is fighting the EPA directive on dispersant. What do we have to do to get some attention down here?

I was relieved to see Anderson Cooper host both James Carville and Douglas Brinkley who basically said the time to do the razzle-dazzle is well past. This is a quote from the ragin cajun via Crooks and Liars.

“I’m as good a Democrat as most people, and I think this administration has done some good things. They are risking everything by this ‘go along with BP’ strategy they have that seems like, lackadaisical on this, and Doug is right, they seem like they’re inconvenienced by this, this is some giant thing getting in their way and somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it’ll all go away. It’s not going away. It’s growing out there. It is a disaster of the first magnitude, and they’ve got to go to Plan B.“

The deal is James, stick your nose out the door and take a whiff. It was that nasty smell of old crayons all day long. There is no Plan B. There is only the fact that we are indentured servants to the world’s biggest corporations. They own us and they own our politicians. We leave all the plans up to them and the plans are all about maximizing profits and nothing else.

In one of the few glimpses of positive steps I’ve seen since this particular crisis unfolded is this news from ProPublica. The EPA is evidently considering some sanctions against BP.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering whether to bar BP from receiving government contracts, a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company’s executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

That’s all fine and dandy, isn’t it? We keep warning them and they keep keeping on. One of the three culprits in this disaster is Haliburton and they’ve been on a list of Federal nastiness for some time. They are joined by GE and some of the biggest most influential corporations in the world. How many warnings do you get before the interests of the American people come before corporate profits and influence peddling?

Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.

The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called “discretionary debarment” and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company’s contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP’s existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.

The President and the Congress have this kind of power now. Why do we have to wait six months for a committee to tell them to use it?

To the rest of the U.S. from Louisiana: SOS

I just got my first notice to grab my shrimper boots and head south from GRIT. Here are some of the latest updates on the Gulf Oil Spill.

The current NOAA trajectory maps predict the movement of oil along the Louisiana coast to the Atchafalaya Bay over the next 72 hours. These trajectories are based on weather patterns and gulf currents. This trajectory could impact some of our beloved barrier islands and thousands of more acres of wetlands. Working with BP, GRIT has identified sites that would be safe and accessible for clean-up prior to the impact of oil. Debris and trash that collects on our shorelines can potentially get covered in oil and make the clean-up of these natural areas even more complicated.

The news from our part of the world is not good. I just read this update from the National Geographic Daily News. I think I would call today’s headline a conversation stopper. It reads ” Gulf Oil Leaks Could Gush for Years: “We don’t have any idea how to stop this,” expert says. ” Here are some of the highlights of the article.

If efforts fail to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico (map), oil could gush for years—poisoning coastal habitats for decades, experts say.

…

If the oil can’t be stopped, the underground reservoir may continue bleeding until it’s dry, Simmons suggested.

The most recent estimates are that the leaking wellhead has been spewing 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons, or 795,000 liters) of oil a day.

And the oil is still flowing robustly, which suggests that the reserve “would take years to deplete,” said David Rensink, incoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

“You’re talking about a reservoir that could have tens of millions of barrels in it.”

National Geographic–known for its excellent indepth coverage and wonderful photos–is at its best with its coverage of this spill. Please spend some time on the site.

Meanwhile, we’re finding just how complicit our own government has been with the oil profiteers.

The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.

Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.

The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists.

Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed.

NPR reports that the government may be under reporting the gusher.

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.

At NPR’s request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

Given how little environmental impact studies were done on this site, do you think we really have a handle on what the potential hazard this will be to the wildlife, plantlife, and people down here on the Gulf? I’m torn between anger and panic.