Fed panel: Oil spill evidence tests need to stop

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Fed-panel-Oil-spill-evidence-apf-3159413613.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=

I'm inclinded to believe the Chemical Safety Board is having a hard time investigating. Especially since the Companies inolved tried to shut them out in the first place.
I agree with the Board that a third party independant needs to moniter the proceedures.
We really cant afford to be wrong or to hear any more half truths that these companies would like us to believe.
The Gulf is still in crisis now.


A federal board allowed to monitor the testing of a key piece of Gulf oil spill evidence -- the blowout preventer -- is demanding that the analysis stop until representatives of the companies that made and maintained the device are removed from the process.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board said in a letter Thursday that having the companies involved hands-on in the forensic analysis that began more than a month ago undermines the investigation's credibility

An AUTOPSY of the BP Gulf Oil Well at the Macondo Prospect

http://phoenixrisingfromthegulf.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/an-autopsy-of-the-bp-gulf-oil-well-at-the-macondo-prospect/

And BP is leaving their options open to go back and drill in this same area.

For the first time we have received a pictorial rendition of what may have occurred over the several stages of developing the Macondo Prospect oil well. Full credit goes to BK Lim for publishing these revealing diagrams on alternative news websites. It is quite consistent with reports and assessments that we have received over the past three and a half months since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon.

Again, we express our deepest gratitude to BK Lim for these diagrammatic portrayals of the well gone bad at the Macondo Prospect.

Dr. Tom Termotto, BCIM
National Coordinator
Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference (International Citizens’ Initiative)

Shocking pictures of man almost drowning in oil slick on the Yellow Sea off Dalian, China

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/7900599/Shocking-pictures-of-man-almost-drowning-in-oil-slick-on-the-Yellow-Sea-off-Dalian-China.html

Shocking difference isn't it compared to what the Gulf waters look like.
Had ours looked like this rather than thinned through the use of dispersants, the huge skimmer could have been used.

These images released by Greenpeace show a worker (C) as he pulls a trapped colleague (centre L) from an oil slick following an attempt to fix an underwater pump during oil clean-up operations in the Chinese port of Dalian, Liaoning province

Pilot flies over BP oil slick against US orders, a Godawful, Horrible MESS - vid

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=178443


This is gut wrenching.
The first 6.5 minutes are hard enough to take but the last 4 contain the truth of what's really been done to the Gulf.
There's a reason they don't want you to see this.
Pass it on

Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell



There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.

"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."

Gulf Coasters skeptical of Obama, BP promises

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100615/D9GBL8CG0.html


Watching oil flow through Perdido Pass in Alabama's Gulf Coast, former Navy firefighter Clayton Ard said he wished Obama would break up the unified command responding to the crisis and let local governments handle it with more autonomy.

"It's just a huge bureaucracy that's slowing things down. ... We want to stop the oil now, but we can't do anything," Ard said.

The breached well has dumped as much as 114 million gallons of oil into the Gulf under the worst-case scenario described by scientists - a rate of more than 2 million a day. BP has collected 5.6 million gallons of oil through its latest containment cap on top of the well, or about 630,000 gallons per day.

To trap more oil faster

AP Exclusive: Scuba Diving in the Gulf Oil Spill

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGX7krQYI_4&feature=player_embedded
http://www.katu.com/news/photos/95866799.html
It's a sad day that the lies of BP are even allowed to still be presented as the truth.
Why are no fly overs allowed, because it would prove NOAA right and BP is still trying to save face.
The American public and the rest of the world have the right to know the full scope of this catastrophe.


BP contradicts government claim on oil plumes
Company's COO says apparent differences may be due to semantics
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37588890/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf/


BP’s chief operating officer Doug Suttles denied reports of underwater plumes of oil Wednesday, one day after government scientists confirmed the existence of oil beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

"We haven’t found any large concentrations of oil under the sea. To my knowledge, no one has," Suttles said on NBC News’ TODAY show.

On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its researchers found subsurface oil as far as 142 miles from the leaking Gulf well. It was the first government confirmation of undersea oil near BP's blown-out well a mile beneath the ocean.

OSHA Says Cleanup Workers Don't Need Respirators .

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704764404575286180491707288.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_news

Common sense tells you this bullshit.
BP is burning oil and spraying chemical dispersant's from airplanes and OSHA really believes that there is no need for workers to use a respirator because it's minimal exposure?
Who bought off OSHA is what I want to know.
I guess this now makes it ok to burn tires again....right?


The head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Thursday said workers hired by BP PLC to clean up spilled oil don't need respirators, despite complaints from some employees and lawmakers about toxic fumes.

David Michaels, assistant secretary for the Department of Labor's OSHA, said in an interview Thursday that based on test results so far, cleanup workers are receiving "minimal" exposure to airborne toxins. OSHA will require that BP provide certain protective clothing, but not respirators.

Questions about widely publicized complaints from cleanup workers are likely to continue. Two members of Congress on Thursday demanded that BP provide respirators for workers.

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: BP fits cap on ruptured wellhead

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7802390/Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-spill-BP-fits-cap-on-ruptured-wellhead.html

Keep your fingers crossed kids
We need all the luck we can get

The US Coast Guard confirmed that British-based BP had successfully attached the cylindrical well cap onto the jagged top of the crippled wellhead assembly using underwater robots, CNN reported.

"The placement of the containment cap is another positive development in BP's most recent attempt to contain the leak," Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said in the statement while adding that it would take "some time" to gauge the cap's ability to stem the oil, CNN said.


Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix and we must continue our aggressive response, operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf's precious coastline," Mr Allen added, according to CNN.

BP Revised Permits Before Blast

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704490204575278952784008676.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEADNewsCollection

5 minutes, do you think they even had time to register what that change actually was before they decided to go ahead and allow BP to do it?
Yeah I'd say at this point that there is no doubt a criminal probe needs to be started.

Just a week before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP PLC asked regulators to approve three successive changes to its oil well over 24 hours, according to federal records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The unusual rapid-fire requests to modify permits reveal that BP was tweaking a crucial aspect of the well's design up until its final days.

One of the design decisions outlined in the revised permits, drilling experts say, may have left the well more vulnerable to the blowout that occurred April 20, killing 11 workers and leaving crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Journal Community

..The Minerals Management Service approved all the changes quickly, in one instance within five minutes of submission

Top Kill failure

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3_O8dvwm028&pos=1

Day 40 back to square 1

-- BP Plc began working on a new plan to cap a leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after a three-day effort to stop the flow with a blast of pressurized fluids was unsuccessful.

The company started using high-horsepower pumps on May 26 to ram a mixture of mud-like drilling fluid and rubber scrap into the oil and gas that’s been gushing for more than five weeks, a process known as “top kill.”

At a press conference yesterday, Doug Suttles, the BP executive in charge of the spill response, said the top kill strategy didn’t work. BP will now try a containment device known as a lower-marine riser package cap, Suttles said.

Greed's Face

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3070/glpoilboom.gif


People are gonna say this is God's wrath
But it's not
It's just man's greed.
There is a significant change in the volume of oil flowing now from the photo.
An explosion happened, and it now raises concerns over how stable the sea floor is.
Apparently it is possible, as well as looking rather probable, for the gusher to turn into a huge sinkhole.
My mind can't even comprehend how fucked we all are if it does.
And just for a little added side factor of fun
Hurricane season is knocking at the door
We are in dire need of a miracle

Major Change Down Below...

http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com/2010/05/major-change-down-below.html

No comment needed

I've put everything back into proper chronological order, and have begun adding images and video for documentary purposes.

I've been watching the live Spillcam, and discussing it with folks, here all day long. About 5pm last night, we all started taking note of gas bubbling out of the seabed floor. It started earlier than that, actually-- see pic a few posts down. About 1am this morning, the eruptions began to increase in spew volume.


The First Noted Venting Hole (TNVH).



At about 8am, CDT, as I watched, things started changing rapidly. Where the water around the two major gush points used to be very clear, it is now super turbid, and detritus is flying everywhere in a chaotic manner. seabed venting is obvious to see when ROV cameras pan around.

Yet-to-be-confirmed rumors are that the casing wall has finally worn through, about 300 feet below seabed, at an annulus (coupling), and the gas and oil are now finding a new way out to the seabed.

Not good news, as it will make the Top-Kill/Junk Shot nearly ineffectual... At the least, it means that more pressure and mud/cement is going to be required.

We'll see.

See for yourself, here: via BP Live Spillcam

Screengrab of the early Morning Chaos Event. Everthing went up all at once. ROV was perfectly stationary. EVERYTHING went "BOOM" and black:

BP faces removal from oil clean-up operation

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7134583.ece

How many more rigs are out there, with all the craftsmanship of this one?
How many accidents like this are out there waiting to happen, all because someone shot the odds.


BP will be taken off the Gulf clean-up operation if the US government decides that its performance is not good enough, Ken Salazar, the US Interior Secretary, said yesterday.

“I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading,” Mr Salazar said after visiting BP’s US headquarters in Houston. “We are 33 days into this effort and deadline after deadline has been missed.”

President Barack Obama’s administration is facing growing public and political pressure to take full charge of the oil spill containment operation as criticism of BP grows. “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately,” Mr Salazar said, but he did not specify at what point this would occur or what might be the trigger for it. He added that BP had agreed to pay clean-up costs beyond the $75 million liability limit set by current US law.

BP was also accused yesterday of agreeing to keep a test valve on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which later exploded, despite knowing that it would increase the risk of accidents.

The rig’s owner, Transocean, wrote to BP in 2004 to confirm an agreement that Transocean would keep the test valve on the safety device known as a “blowout preventer” rather than replacing it with a permanent and more effective “variable bore ram” that could have halted the oil flow, according to a letter leaked to the Washington Post.

A representative of BP reportedly signed a copy of the letter,

Tar balls found on Key West shores

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/reuters/MTFH33602_2010-05-18_09-43-33_N1880093.htm

One has to wonder exactly how would the officials know how much of an impact has been really made since the majority of the oil gusher's leak remains below the surface and can't be seen.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Monday that state park rangers at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park on the island of Key West, Florida, found tar balls washing ashore throughout the day, marking the first appearance of oil debris reported in Florida since BP's deepsea well rupture on April 20.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has previously said the southern edge of the spill could make its way into the so-called Loop Current current, which could carry oil eastward toward the Florida Keys, out of the Gulf and up the East Coast of the United States.

Samples of the tar balls were collected and will be shipped to a laboratory for analysis to determine the origin of the source, the Coast Guard said.

Officials have stressed the spill has so far had minimal impact on the shoreline and wildlife along the Gulf Coast, but oil debris and tar balls had been reported earlier in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

Scientists find vast unreported oil leak from Deepwater Horizon

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7127904.ece

300 feet thick


A plume of oil 10 miles (16km) long, three miles wide and 300ft thick is pouring into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

The plume is one of a number that scientists have found gushing into the sea a mile underwater, increasing concerns that the size of the spill could be thousands of times larger than has been previously calculated, according to The New York Times.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, from the University of Georgia, who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather information from the spill. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column,” Dr Joye told the newspaper.

After studying footage of the gushing oil scientists on board the

BP's Own Probe Finds Safety Issues on Atlantis Rig

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704614204575246481681620318.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories


Ok so they KNOW
The question is why don't they care?
Because they're "To big to jail"
And with decisions like these and those made for Deep Horizon
Why do they still have a Corporate charter?
These people have no business being in this business.
The rule has to be: SAFETY FIRST!
NO EXCEPTIONS


BP production member Barry C. Duff said in an August 2008 email to two colleagues that "hundreds if not thousands" of subsea documents had not been finalized, and warned having the wrong documents on board the Atlantis "could lead to catastrophic operator errors."

Crew Argued Over Drilling Plan Before Rig Explosion

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704414504575244812908538510.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

An over whelming sense of fear, is still the predominant taste in my mouth after having read that there was a disagreement upon the proper procedure for shutting down the well.
Somewhere in my mind there was a certain sense of security, (that now is no longer there), that proper procedures were in place for everything built, that if not followed could cause catastrophic calamity to either the environment or that of man kind itself. I now, no longer hold that sense of security, and I'm having an exceptionally hard time trying not to envision this same scenario occurring over the proper procedures of constructing a nuclear power plant.
BP's employee argued it wasn't proper procedure, the dude ought to know it's his job
And the smell of caution is already there over the gas levels
And you know you jerry rigged the fail safe
Who decided to go ahead and shoot those odds?
To take nothing else into concern but completion of the job?
A corporate suit did.



Talk about a head game...this is the big one.
What else has been compromised?
For Profit




In his sworn statement, he described the meeting as including ranking personnel from BP, Transocean and Halliburton Co., a contractor that dealt with cementing the well.

According to Mr. Williams's account, Transocean's rig manager, Jimmy Wayne Harrell, was discussing the plans for the next few hours' work, including taking out the drilling mud and running a test to make sure gas wasn't seeping into the well. Mr. Harrell explained in the meeting that he had received the plans from BP.

Then, according to Mr. Williams's statement, the top-ranked BP employee assigned to the rig, Donald Vidrine, disagreed and said "that was not the correct procedure."

Scientists: Underwater plume of oil headed out to sea

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-15-gulf-oil-spill_N.htm

What will the consequences be this time as the penalty for another case of
"Hurry up and do something even if it's wrong"
Why does this situation remind me of the "Banking fix"
Possibly because, with money being used as a dispersant, it to has hid the toxic sludge from coming to the surface, but the problem is still there out of sight and it's volume grows.

In the first on-site measurements of the oil spreading below the surface, researchers found the plume of crude stretches 15 to 20 miles southwest from the site of the damaged wellhead and is about 5 miles wide, said Vernon Asper, a University of Southern Mississippi marine scientist leading the research.

The plume is compact, much thicker than the lighter remnants reaching the surface and suspended in about 3,000 feet of ocean, he said. A deepwater current is dragging it out to sea. The underwater oil cloud is not connected to the surface slick — now the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

"This [underwater] plume is some of the heavier products of the oil that won't reach the surface," Asper said in a radio-telephone interview from aboard the R/V Pelican, a 116-foot research ship at the site of the spill. "We think this oil is going to stay down there. It doesn't look like it's coming to the surface."

The company has already dropped more than 560,000 gallons of dispersants on the surface slick and 28,700 gallons at the subsea wellhead, BP spokesman John Crabtree said.

The use of chemical dispersants at such depths has been controversial because it's never been used at such depths. Dispersants injected into the spewing wellhead is likely keeping the underwater plume suspended in 3,000 feet of water, said Mandy Joye, a marine sciences professor at the University of Georgia.

That keeps the oil from bubbling to the surface and potentially reaching fragile coastal marshes. But it's also creating a massive, toxic plume of oxygen-less oily water stretching through the deeper reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, Joye said.


The underwater plume, invisible to satellite imagery or aerial photographs, can also get stirred up and tossed into shallower waters if a hurricane passes over it, Joye said. The Atlantic hurricane season, which includes the Gulf, starts June 1.

"It is a good thing the oil is not damaging the coast line," Joye said. "But to say everything is fine because it's not hitting the coast is missing a very important part of this equation

BP's cost responsibility

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aN5Ah2PAtMaY

Here's BP's last quarterly report, it's obvious that they are doing quite well.
Administration officials said the company will pay as much as possible
The question is: Who makes the decision that "as much as possible" has been met?
And is BP's corporate survival a concerning factor in that "as much as possible" decision?
In other words is there a fail safe in place, that can automatically be used to ensure BP's survival, or does "as much as possible" actually mean till BP breathes no more?
And if there is why should they be allowed to live?


April 27 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc, the energy company battling a 1,000-barrel-a-day leak in the Gulf of Mexico, said profit more than doubled in the first quarter on higher oil prices.

Net income jumped to $6.08 billion, or 32 cents a share, from $2.56 billion, or 14 cents, a year earlier, London-based BP said today in a statement. Excluding gains or losses from holding inventories and one-time items, earnings beat analyst estimates.

“BP has reported a very strong set of earnings,” said Peter Hitchens, an analyst at Panmure Gordon & Co. in London. “There was a strong performance from the underlying operating divisions, especially with exploration and production. The refining and marketing business came in slightly ahead

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7717695/Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-slick-new-Nasa-image-shows-it-looking-like-a-swan.html
Also on Wednesday, President Barack Obama asked Congress for at least $129m (£87m) in new emergency funding to cope with wide-ranging fallout from the massive oil spill.

Administration officials said they couldn't forecast total costs from the cleanup of the massive spill and a multitude of economic damages to the Gulf region, but the changes they're seeking in the legislative package suggest a multibillion-dollar response.

The administration wants to increase from $1 billion to $1.5 billion the amount that could be spent from an emergency cleanup fund paid with industry fees, and raise a $75 million liability limit BP would bear for costs not directly connected to cleaning up the spill, such as lost wages and tourism.

Administration officials said the company will pay as much as possible.

Some of the new proposed spending, including money for the Interior Department to conduct inspections for proposed offshore drilling leases, cannot be charged to BP.

White House energy adviser Carol Browner said: "We take BP at their word. They say they intend to pay for all costs. And when we hear 'all' we take it to mean all."

BP were unavailable to comment, but the company has said it will pay cleanup costs and "legitimate claims”.