Oil Spill Could Surpass The Exxon Valdez Disaster

[Despanan]

No, no, you're confusing your internet lingo. What you meant to type was "pwnage".

[Still Jack]

Originally Posted by Despanan

I don't know. I'm still wondering how you could possibly outrun anything.

'cos he's so fat or 'cos he was fucking his sister?

[Ben Lahnger]

Bill White, the Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas, posted the following on Facebook about his opponent in the upcoming election and current Texas Governor, Rick Perry:

Perry today said that British Petroleum "historically had a very good safety record from my perspective." Asked about the oil spill, he said, "there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented." He also said, "I don't think that a big wave came along at a very inopportune time . . . but I don't know that." See below the report by an panel headed by James Baker on safety at BP, after the explosion which killed 15. A big wave? An act of God?

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_inte...nel_report.pdf

Ben - I hope the idiot just keeps saying things like this ... and that the press keeps reporting on it.

Perry backs offshore drilling, calls spill 'act of God'

Rick Perry warns against 'knee-jerk' reaction to gulf oil spill

Governor Perry Warns Against Regulations for Oil Industry

[JustNSane]

An uncle and cousin of mine both worked on that rig. Luckily they were on their home rotation.

i have nothing else to add to this discussion besides...how the fuck can anything pertaining to this be blamed on the Obama administration? That is why i detest politics.

Carry on.

[Ben Lahnger]

A new update on the situation. Earlier on BP estimated the amount of oil being leaked into the ocean to be about 5000 barrels per day. Now they have announced that the new small pipe they've inserted into the leak is siphoning off about 5000 barrels per day!

Since the media has current underwater video to analyze of the spill (with the pipe siphoning off its 5000 barrels) still showing massive amounts of oil spewing from the leak, analysts are now estimating the amount being spilled into the ocean to be somewhere between 40,000 and 100,00 barrels per day.

Here's an ABC news roundup of the subject:

BP Oil Spill: Congressman Says 'Environmental Catastrophe' Worse Than Previously Thought

Real-time video of oil leaking from beneath the damaged Deepwater Horizon rig 5,000 miles under the Gulf of Mexico reveals a disaster many times greater than BP has led the American public to believe, Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., said today.

"Today, BP is claiming that they are siphoning off 5,000 barrels a day," he said. "But if you look at the video you can see plumes of oil spilling into the Gulf far in excess of 5,000 barrels a day. These videos stand as a scalding, blistering indictment of BP's inattention to the scope and size of the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of U.S."

In addition, it turns out that the chemical dispersant that BP has been using to treat the oil spill on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is toxic, and has been known to be toxic for some time - it was banned 10 years ago in the U.K. - so after dumping over 700,000 gallons into the sea, the EPA has ordered BP to change to a less toxic alternative.

In a statement to ABC News, BP called the chemical "one of the most well-studied dispersants" and said it chose Corexit in part because it could "get a sufficient supply to meet our needs on short notice."

For weeks, the company assured that using the dispersant was safe, with officials describing them like soap suds. But today, others painted a far more sinister picture.

"Any living organism that contacts this stuff, particularly the mixture of dispersant and oil, is at significant risk of acute mortality," said marine biologist Rick Steiner.

In fact, EPA testing released today indicates that where the dispersant had been used, 25 percent of all organisms living at 500 feet below the surface died.

Why is it starting to feel like we have The Three Stooges in charge of responding to this disaster? And how do we deal with this when Congressmen feel that BP can't be trusted?

[CptSternn]

Where are all the right-wing pundits screaming 'drill baby drill' now?

Whats funny is the right-wing are trying to attack Obama on this issue. They are calling it his 'Katrina'. The irony being, one was an act of God, the other was a man-made disaster that was avoidable, but due to the lax oversight, thanks to bush and his cronies, none of the protections worked.

I also find it funny that the right is attacking Obama saying he is not doing enough, yet, they are blocking his attempts to make the oil companies liable by blocking new legislation they are trying to pass right now involving regulating the industry.

Did anyone see the CBS news where the BP contractors were ordering around the coast guard and telling journalists they couldn't film the destruction, under BP orders?

I didn't know the coast guard answered to BP, but it appears they do.

In fact, they did a follow up last night on that very topic as congress wants to see footage of the leak, but BP is only releasing small edited clips. The coast guard says it has access to live footage, but will not turn it over to congress or the white house as BP has ordered them not to show anyone.

Seriously? I didn't know BP has the authority to block the coast guard from granting requests put through by the president and congress.

[Ben Lahnger]

Yeah, I think the new Democratic protest sign at Republican rallies should be

SPILL, BABY, SPILL!

Republican responses to this will be taken care of in the fall, although to be fair, nobody's going to be able to tag them too hard on the drilling promotion, since President Obama came out in favor of offshore drilling himself in a very public statement not a month before the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

But at least it should lead to a moratorium on all current and planned offshore drilling until safety measures, regulation and enforcement can be investigated in this industry.

And I wouldn't worry about the BP/Coast Guard thing too much. The Coast Guard is in an untenable position at the moment, but all of BP's sins are coming to light ... and the only thing worse in American Public opinion that screwing up is getting caught repeatedly trying to hide the fact that you screwed up. And the American public is starting to smell coverup everywhere. I can tell the Congressmen and Senators are getting feedback from their constituants by their behavior in hearings and in interviews. There's chum in the water.

I wonder how Republican candidates are going to withstand charges in upcoming elections that they tried to obstruct raising British Petroleum's liability limit so BP can be held accountable for the full cost of this disaster?

[Heretic]

Originally Posted by blindNsect

Truthfully, the only reason Katrina is a big deal is because Dems made it so.

By implying that the death associated with Hurricane Katrina are "no big deal" you have posted what has to be just about the most idiotic thing I've ever seen on this board. 3,000 people in New York and Washington, SD.C. are killed by the 9/11 surprise attacks and the country looses it's collective mind. 4,000 people are killed as a direct result of the destruction brought on by a hurricane that was predicted decades ago and track for over a week before it hit...and you seriously think that the impact of this is nothing more than political hype whipped up by the Democratic party?

I've gone into a great amount of detail with this subject in the past on another board, so I won't bore everyone with what I had to say then. However, even a small amount of reading on that hurricane, including the long-term economic and ecological impact, should have been enough to cause you to refrain from such a display of ignorance.

Sorry for the flame, folks, but that level of idiocy really chaps my hide.

Turning back to the topic at hand, it would seem BP's original estimates on the rate of oil flow from the ruptured pipeline were, to put it mildly, ridiculously low. A few days ago, I ran across this article from CBS news:

1 Month Later, Numbers Just Get Worse for Gulf

Here's a excerpt from the article:

"....But one of the persistent storylines is the huge discrepancy between BP's estimate of the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf and those of independent scientists. Since the April 20 explosion, BP officials placed the flow rate at 5,000 barrels a day, or 210,000 gallons - a figure accepted by the government and widely reported as accurate. Those estimates put the total amount of oil spilt into the Gulf at around 6 million gallons.

However, after BP succumbed to pressure to release video footage of the blown-out well, those numbers have fallen under intense scrutiny. Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, told The Associated Press that he is sticking with his estimate that 3.9 million gallons a day is spewing from two leaks.

"I don't see any scenario where (BP's) numbers would be accurate," he said at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

His estimate of the amount leaked to date, which he calls conservative and says has a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent, is 126 million gallons - or more than 11 times the total leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989..."

That's right; after four weeks experts (and no, this guy from Purdue isn't the only one) estimate this disaster is already 11 times worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill...and we're looking at a minimum of 4-6 more weeks before they can cap this thing.

Saying that this spill is "big", or comparing it to those slurry accidents doesn't do justice to the level of pollution this region of the country is facing. This thing already dwarfs any other oil-related incident in human history, and we aren't even halfway done with it.


- Heretic