what kind of system we live under in the USA, here are a few reminders. This is a link to an event that occurred two days ago, when CBS-News reporters wanted to view some oil-threatened areas of the Louisiana coastline, from the Deepwater Horizon BP gusher. But were turned back by the US COAST GUARD, UNDER THREAT OF ARREST.
Here is the actual video.
Now, correct us if we are wrong, but isn't the US Coast Guard a part of the US government, which in theory is a democracy, answerable to the citizens of this country? Or is the US government for sale, to large corporations, to enable their profits to keep flowing? What do you think?
The corporate media though is slowly coming around to the magnitude of the BP gusher, as this NY Times article shows. It's hard to distort and suppress reality when it rears it's ugly head, as here, or when radiation spread around the Northern Hemisphere in 1986, after the Chernobyl explosion/fire.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hp
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar visited a wildlife treatment center in Louisiana on Saturday.
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 15, 2010
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
[Wow, we certainly know who's calling the shots now, don't we? This is what happens with unregulated capitalism, the large corporations are the government. What did B. Mussolini call that? Oh yeah, FASCISM! eds.]
The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.
BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.
“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”
Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.
Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.
Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.
“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”
He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.
While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.
Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.
Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.
CBS's Sixty Minutes actually put together some excellent in-depth stories about the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and gusher. At least the word is slowly getting out.
[false-color image from a European polar-orbiting satellite on 18MAY2010 showing the large surface oil-slick, the tail-looking appendage is a heavier surface concentration heading for the Loop current, which will soon bring it to Florida, then up and around in the Gulf Stream further north along the US Atlantic Coast. eds]
Here is another demonstration showing us who really runs the US government (as if we really needed it).
BP Withholds Oil Spill Facts — and Government Lets It
by Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof
WASHINGTON - BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say that data is crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe.
Moreover, the company isn't monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in gulf.
BP's role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.
Under pressure from senators, BP released four videos Tuesday, but it hasn't agreed to better monitoring.
The company also hasn't publicly released air sampling for oil spill workers although Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of monitoring compliance with worker safety regulations, is relying on the information and has urged it to do so.
"It is not ours to publish," said Dean Wingo, OSHA's assistant regional administrator who oversees Louisiana. "We are working with (BP) and encouraging them to post the data so that it is publicly available."
Much of the worker exposure data is being collected by contractors hired by BP.
Toby Odone, a BP spokesman, said the company is sharing the data with "legitimate interested parties," which include government agencies and the private companies assisting in the cleanup. When asked whether the information can be released publicly, he responded, "Why would one do it? Any parties with a legitimate interest can have access to it."
Joseph T. Hughes Jr., the director of the worker education training program for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said he didn't think "anyone has seen much of that data at all."
"The hard part about it is that in a normal response, when the government is doing this, there might be more transparency on the data," Hughes said. "In this case, when you have BP making the decisions and collecting the data it's harder to have that transparency."
Unlike the response to other past national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina where the government was in charge, BP has been designated as the "responsible party" under federal law and is overseeing much of the response to the spill. The government is acting more as an adviser.
So far, the government has been slow to press BP to release its data and permit others to evaluate the extent of the crisis.
"I think that one of the lessons learned here is whether the federal government should have more of a role in the response and not leave that decision-making in the hands of the responsible parties," said Hughes, whose institute was one of the first to raise questions about air quality at the World Trade Center site in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many Sept. 11 rescue workers still suffer from impaired lung function.
The Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, one of BP's consultants, is collecting air quality samples over the coast and the water.
"It's fair to say that a majority of the air monitoring along the shoreline is being done by our organization," said Glenn Millner, a partner with the CTEH and a principal toxicologist.
Gina Solomon, a medical doctor and a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her environmental organization has been pressing the government to release the data, after hearing reports of fishermen concerned about exposure.
"The fact that OSHA is saying that it's safe is important because they have access to data that we don't have," she said. "It's sort of awkward to have to take that on face value given the fact that there are fishermen who feel they are getting sick."
The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing shoreline data on its website, but not information about the air quality workers encounter on the water.
OSHA has access to that data and is monitoring it to determine what type of equipment the workers should be issued and other questions related to worker safety. So far, the air quality does not require workers to receive respirators, Wingo said.
Millner said that data as a matter of practice is shared only with the oil clean up worker and the company overseeing the cleanup.
BP also has exercised considerable control over how much is known about the amount of oil gushing into the gulf.
Early on, the government estimated that 210,000 gallons was being released daily. That estimate was based on satellite observations of the water's surface.
The first look at the oil coming out of the pipe on the sea floor was a video clip that BP released last week in response to demands from reporters and others. It caused a stir because some experts who analyzed it estimated that the amount of oil pouring into the gulf was many times the government's official estimate.
Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., on Monday asked BP on Monday to provide all available video footage.
BP provided clips from several days of the spill on Tuesday.
The clips, however, would still result only in rough estimates because the oil flows at different rates at different times and it's mixed with gas, said BP spokesman Mark Proegler.
The company had no other equipment on the sea floor to monitor the amount of the flow, and no plans to install any.
"We've said from the beginning . . . it's difficult if not impossible to measure from the source of the flow," Proegler said on Tuesday. BP's focus is stopping the flow and keeping the oil away from shore, he said.
Jeff Short, an oil pollution expert and former National Marine Fisheries Service official who now works for the environmental group Oceana, said the estimate based on surface observations was very imprecise, and that looking at the flow rate from the pipe would be better.
"The public has the right to see what harm the environment is exposed to, and knowing the flow rate is fundamental to that," he said.
Judy McDowell, the chair of the biology department and a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who's studied many oil spills, said that in addition to knowing the amount of oil flowing in, scientists also need to figure out how it's dispersing and breaking down in order to know what effect it would have on living organisms in the water.
Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of NOAA, said in testimony to a Senate committee Tuesday said it was important, but difficult to get a better estimate of the amount of oil. She said that the Coast Guard planned to set up a team to get a better estimate.
Some university researchers have been frustrated by the lack of data and the refusal of federal agencies to press BP to collect detailed measurements from the broken well pipe or fully assess what might be happening underwater.
"We have been screaming from day one for data,'' said Peter Ortner, a fisheries biologist at the University of Miami.
Ortner also said that NOAA had been slow to consider sub-surface effects and didn't deploy the sophisticated gear that might help surveying for submerged oil.
Lubchenco said Monday that the agency had been discussing ideas about more sensing gear on the ocean floor but said "the priority at this point is to stop the flow.''
Meanwhile, an analysis of satellite imagery by the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, reported Tuesday that the spill has grown to more than 7,500 square miles, or about the size of New Jersey.
(Curtis Morgan of The Miami Herald contributed to this article.)
© McClatchy Newspapers 2010
It's imperative to understand, we must not take any information about the oil gusher, the release rate, the biological effects, etc. at face value from BP. Their livelihood is at stake, and they will do whatever they think they can get away with, not to jeopardise their profits, and existence. They have a proven history of willful disregard for safety in pursuit of profit, all over the World (including here in on the North Slope of Alaska). BP is saying now that they are siphoning off 3000 barrels per day from the gusher, yet we know from scientific estimates, that the release rate is still 10 to 20 times that!
When people living around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and the US Atlantic coast start to see the effects of all this oil as it moves into their areas, they will understand. The collapse of fisheries and tourism, lost jobs and livelihoods, destruction of ecosystems, and human health effects. And hopefully realise, how and why this all happened. Remember, hurricane season is just about upon us. Think about what will happen if/when an area of heavy oil concentration is pushed onshore by a storm surge.
OUR NEW BACKYARD
In just two days hence, the staff and materiel of the Alaska Progressive Review will be relocating to the balmy latitude of 61.15 degrees N., adjacent to the city of Anchorage. Our new facility will be the Chugach Front Research Centre. Negotiations are currently underway for the acquisition of a suitable facility, right at the base of the Chugach Mountains, about 10 KM east of downtown Anchorage. We say in Alaska, that Anchorage, because it is a big city, with all of the resulting characteristics that entails, is not really Alaska, but you can see it from there. In fact, the Chugach Front Research Centre, will only be two blocks from Alaska!
We will be able to quickly pack/run/ski/bike, from the Research Centre, right onto trails that connect with all the Anchorage area ones, and those that go right into the heart of the Chugach Range. A very special and desirable characteristic, necessary for our well-being. So we will have the best of both worlds, true wilderness for our backyard, and the social benefits of being in a larger community. We'll be able to interact and work with more progressive people and groups as well, in our quest for a more sane and just society, in this, and other countries.
We'll have to be more careful though. Your assistant editor, Mattie, is literally fearless. She will chase, or at least investigate, any large animal present. Moose, Caribou, etc.. She has not come across any bears yet. South-Central Alaska has a much higher black and brown bear concentration than the Interior. Because there is more food available, fish in the rivers/streams, and berries on land, along with a milder, slightly maritime-influenced climate. So we'll have to keep an eye on her. Homer of course is much calmer and wiser, in his advanced age of 14 years, so we are not worried about him.
Avalanche danger is very high on the steeper slopes of the Chugach Range in winter and spring, these mountains receive tremendous volumes of snow, and are heavily glaciated above 1500 metres, since they are close to the Gulf of Alaska, and wring out moisture moving over them from storms in it. Combine that with strong winds, from different directions, and very hazardous conditions occur, from wind-loading of these heavy snowfalls. Something we here at the Alaska Progressive Review are aware of, have studied, and will always be cognisant of as we traverse these mountains through the year on foot, ski, bike, or snowshoe. Cheers.
