tagged w/ Grand Isle
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This is a short film about people directly impacted by the Gulf oil disaster, set on July 4th, 2010. It's a snapshot of America on its most important holiday.This is a short film about people directly impacted by the Gulf oil disaster, set on... more
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Crews connecting oil vessel to ruptured well
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 6, 2010 9:11 p.m. EDT
(CNN) -- Crews are in the process of connecting the vessel Helix Producer to the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, said the man leading the federal response to the Gulf oil disaster. The hookup has been partially completed despite rough seas.
The vessel should draw up to 53,000 barrels of oil a day when it becomes operational, newly retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Tuesday afternoon in Houston, where he traveled to meet with BP officials. He also said progress continues to be made on two relief wells.
Despite rough weather in the Gulf of Mexico, Allen believes that the placement of a new containment cap and the deployment of key air and sea resources will eventually stop the massive amounts of oil now gushing from the well.
Once the Helix Producer is fully connected to the well and operational, officials will decide within 10 days whether to proceed with replacing the containment cap, Allen said.
Federal estimates say between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels (about 1.5 million to 2.5 million gallons) of oil have been gushing into the Gulf daily since April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank in the Gulf, two days after it exploded in flames.
High seas continue to hamper cleanup efforts. Allen said officials are closely watching a weather system near the Yucatan Peninsula.
Allen is meeting with BP in Houston about several "significant" developments. "You can't be successful if you can't coordinate, collaborate and integrate together," he said.
Allen told CNN earlier Tuesday that officials will be monitoring weather patterns to determine if and when they would try to install the cap, a process that will involve unbolting the jagged edge that exists on the structure now. Once completed, the new containment cap, he said, will achieve a perfect seal and keep oil from escaping.
Allen said the new cap "would let us get to a capture rate of 80,000 barrels a day." Crews currently are capturing up to 26,000 barrels a day.
Another tool in the effort to contain and stop the oil flow is a relief well that is "very close" to being completed, Allen told CNN, guessing it will be ready sometime in early or mid-August. Over the next week, relief well rig workers will drill 100 feet at a time until they can intercept the wellbore at just the right place, he added.
In early June, during an exclusive 48-hour embed with Allen, CNN's Kyra Phillips visited the site of the oil disaster and gained access to the Development Driller III -- the rig that is drilling the primary relief well some 16,000 to 18,000 feet below the sea floor.
"The intention is to intercept the wellbore, well down below the surface near the reservoir, then pump heavy mud in to counteract the pressure of the oil coming up," he told her. "That will allow them to basically plug or kill the well. Once that's done, you could do things like remove the blowout preventer, bring it to the surface and try to find out what happened."
Also, a massive airship, or blimp, and a ship that can suck oil out of the ruptured well are expected to arrive in the Gulf region at the end of the week to aid in oil disaster response efforts. Their arrival is being delayed because of rough weather, said Stephanie Hebert, spokeswoman for the cleanup effort.
The U.S. Navy airship will be used to detect oil, direct skimming ships and look for wildlife that may be threatened by oil, the Coast Guard says. It had been scheduled to reach the Gulf on Tuesday. The 178-foot-long blimp, known as the MZ-3A, can carry a crew of up to 10. It will fly slowly over the region to track where the oil is flowing and how it is coming ashore.
The Navy says the advantage of the blimp over current helicopter surveillance operations is that it can stay aloft longer, with lower fuel costs, and can survey a wider area.
The Coast Guard has already been pinpointing traveling pools of oil from the sky.
"The aircraft get on top of the oil. They can identify what type of oil it is and they can vector in the skimmer vessels right to the spot," Coast Guard Capt. Brian Kelley said.
But the problem since last Wednesday has been the ability to clean it up before it approaches land. Bad weather has made that task more difficult.
Tammy Mitchell of the Unified Command's Joint Information Center in Houma, Louisiana, said she believes no skimmers, aerial dispersants or onshore activity were deployed or operated Tuesday in Louisiana because of the weather. Teams are on a 48- to 72-hour standby watch because of the weather.
Poor conditions also canceled a boat tour for BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles, although he did manage to meet with workers.
Suttles said improvements have been made in cleanup operations. "The program will more effectively deploy boats to oil recovery activity and better utilize local commercial and charter fishing vessels to advance the effectiveness of the Gulf of Mexico response."
Meanwhile, Bob Grantham, spokesman for TMT Offshore Group, said progress has been made in testing the company's A Whale oil skimmer, the world's largest.
The delay from high seas "has allowed us to make valuable observations and to develop some additional technological innovations designed to improve the channeling of oily water into the ship's large capacity tanks," Grantham said in a statement issued Tuesday. "Over the next few days, we will have our first real opportunity to test the new technology under conditions that we hope will maximize the effectiveness of collection and ultimately decanting."
Earlier, officials said A Whale's abilities so far are "inconclusive," meaning the massive converted oil tanker -- which is 3.5 football fields long -- has yet to prove its Taiwanese owner's claim that it can skim between 15,000 and 50,000 barrels of oil off the sea in a day.
The Coast Guard said the testing period for the A Whale has been extended through Thursday.
So far, crude oil floating in the sea has not been concentrated enough for A Whale to skim effectively, according to oil company BP, even though it appears the ship has been surrounded by pools of oil just a few miles from the gusher.
"We've got oil coming up from over a mile below the surface. And it doesn't always come up in one spot. It's not always predictable. So, in fact, we need to locate the oil first, and then assign the ship to the areas of heaviest concentration," BP spokesman Hank Garcia said.
Bad weather has hindered cleanup efforts, he said. "When you've got 6-foot, 8-foot seas, it's not going to lend itself to good capture of the oil."
On Monday, authorities said tar balls linked to the crude gushing from BP's ruptured deepwater well had reached Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain and hit the beaches near Galveston, Texas.
The Coast Guard reported over the weekend that a shift in weather patterns could send more oil toward sensitive shores in Mississippi and Louisiana, and bad weather over the past few days has significantly hampered cleanup efforts.
Anne Rheams, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, said Monday that the pattern was expected to persist for at least three more days.
The National Hurricane Center said Tuesday afternoon that a low-pressure area located near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in the southern Gulf of Mexico was producing showers and thunderstorms, but it was not likely to develop into a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours. A system that had hovered over the Louisiana coast Tuesday morning moved inland.
CNN's Allan Chernoff contributed to this report.Crews connecting oil vessel to ruptured well
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 6, 2010 9:11... more
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GETTY IMAGES
A worker uses a shovel to remove an oil glob from the beach Thursday, July 1, in Biloxi, Mississippi.GETTY IMAGES
A worker uses a shovel to remove an oil glob from the beach Thursday,... more
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By the CNN Wire Staff
June 16, 2010 9:55 a.m. EDT
Photo: The nesting grounds of brown pelicans and other birds have been affected, the Plaquemines Parish president says.
Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- Crews cleaning up the oil in one Louisiana parish have trampled the nests and eggs of birds including the brown pelican, which came off the endangered species list last year, the head of the parish said Wednesday.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said the parish doesn't want to turn away contractors, but he called for more care when crews work in the sensitive wetlands.
He said officials recently found broken eggs and crushed chicks on Queen Bess Island, near Grand Isle.
Plastic bags containing snare boom were "recklessly placed" around the island without consideration for wildlife. In one picture released by the parish, a plastic bag was on top of a nest containing broken speckled eggs.
Dozens of people, including experienced veterinarians, have been going to the area from all over the country to help with the affected wildlife, the parish said.
Nungesser met with the Humane Society of the United States and asked it to work with contractors who are cleaning the birds to come up with a better way to enlist the help of volunteers, the parish said.
"We want to improve our comfort level of knowing someone is out there looking for these birds and other animals -- doing all they can to save them," Nungesser said on the parish website.
"The people BP sent out to clean up oil trampled the nesting grounds of brown pelicans and other birds," he said. "Pelicans just came off the endangered species list in November of last year. They already have the oil affecting their population during their reproduction time, now we have the so-called clean up crews stomping eggs.
"The lack of urgency and general disregard for Louisiana's wetlands and wildlife is enough to make you sick," he said.By the CNN Wire Staff
June 16, 2010 9:55 a.m. EDT
Photo: The nesting grounds of... more
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River Shay walks his dog in the front yard of his Grand Isle, Louisiana house planted with crosses with the names some of the marine life, seafood dishes and recreational activities that are being lost due oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico June 7, 2010.
The BP leased Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded April 20 and sank after burning, leaking record amounts of crude oil from the broken pipeline into the sea. Eleven workers are missing, presumed dead. Photo © Jose-Luis Magana/Greenpeace
For the latest blogs, videos, & info on the BP oil blowout and spill check this page regularly: www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/gulf-oil-spillRiver Shay walks his dog in the front yard of his Grand Isle, Louisiana house planted... more
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Today, I spent my time interviewing people on the Gulf Coast from Mississippi to Louisiana. Several of those interviews were conducted on camera, and you'll be seeing those videos as early as tomorrow here on NaturalNews.
Interestingly, it turns out that a lot of the people living on the Gulf Coast have a history of working with oil companies -- and even on oil rigs. I spoke to several people who have a work history with BP, and two of them told me they are certain that British Petroleum is NOT trying to stop the oil coming out of the well. What they are trying to do, I was told, is SAVE the oil well so that they can capture the oil and sell it.
This claim stands in direct contradiction to what BP says. The company insists it's trying to stop the flow of oil from the well. But if you look at BP's actions, what they're really trying to do is siphon off the gushing oil where it can be pumped to a tanker ship and sold as crude. It is a simple matter, by the way, for oil companies to separate water from oil. They do it all the time in oil fields all across America. So if they can siphon off the oil from the Deepwater Horizon well -- even if it's mixed with water -- they can sell it for potentially billions of dollars.
It raises the question: Is the economic promise of captured oil causing BP to avoid using its best effort to cap the well?
Tapping, not capping
Notice that the new device they're lowering onto the well is designed not to close it off but to pump the oil to an awaiting ship. This is a plan to "capture" the oil, not to seal off the well.
The mainstream media hasn't picked up on this yet, by the way. To my knowledge, no one is yet reporting this story that BP may have never had any intention of actually capping the deep sea well.
We already know BP has been extremely dishonest with the media about this entire situation. By distorting the truth and lying to the public, BP has lost all credibility with almost everyone (Governors, Senators, journalists, etc.). So how can we trust that BP is actually trying to cap this well when there's so much money to be made from allowing it to keep spilling oil that can soon be captured?
In other words, it's in BP's financial interests to avoid capping the well and claim the well can't be capped when, in reality, what they may be trying to do is buy more time until they can lower a "capture containment device" onto the well head that can direct all the outflowing crude oil to BP's awaiting tanker ships.
In talking to the people face to face here on Gulf Coast, I learned that Gulf Coast people don't trust BP, and they don't trust the company's intentions. Today was the first I had heard of the BP agenda to "keep the well flowing" yet suddenly this theory makes sense. BP, after all, went through all the trouble and expense to drill the well. Why wouldn't they want to cash in on the crude oil coming out of it?
To collapse the well and plug it for good would destroy BP's chance to siphon off oil and sell it for profit (until at least August, when the pressure relief wells are expected to be completed). And that is perhaps the single most important reason why oil is still flowing out of that well right now.
As one person I interviewed today put it, "Why should a British petroleum company care about what happens to America's shores?" After all, the financial payoffs to the businesses hurt by the spill may pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in profit to be had from tapping -- not capping -- the well and turning crude oil into raw cash.
There will be more to this story. Let's see if the mainstream media picks up on this angle.
By the way, I don't yet have conclusive proof that BP's intentions are to avoid capping this well. It's just a working theory based on people I've talked to here on the Gulf Coast who appear to know what they're talking about. BP would obviously deny this, but then again BP has denied many things that we know to be true (like the fact that the beach cleanup crews specifically cleaned the beach on Grand Isle before Obama showed up, then left promptly as soon as he left).
If you haven't yet, check out my CounterThink Cartoon on the BP oil spill at www.CounterThink.com
Also, watch for video interviews with the people on the Gulf Coast. We'll be publishing them here on NaturalNews starting as early as tomorrow.
I'm headed to New Orleans tomorrow to check out the local scene there and see what else I can find out by talking to the locals on the front lines.Today, I spent my time interviewing people on the Gulf Coast from Mississippi to... more
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http://wbx.me/l/?p=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fintbirdrescue.blogspot.com%2F2010%2F05%2Fday-15-from-center-of-gulf-oiled-bird.html
Day 15: From the center of Gulf oiled bird care
After a very small break this weekend in Louisiana, Jay Holcomb is back with his daily updates from the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill response:
Louisiana - On Saturday we had a visit from Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Rebecca Dunne from Tri-State Bird Rescue and I gave him a tour through the Fort Jackson Center and allowed him to get a close up view of our team washing the latest oiled Brown Pelican that we received. The female pelican is a two year old that is a very sweet bird found in Grand Isle to the west of us. She is now outside with the other pelican and doing well, both are eating a lot of fish. Media report: AP video: Cleaning Oiled Pelican in Louisiana
For the last two days our capture teams in Louisiana were mostly grounded due to intense thunderstorms and lightning strikes on the water. Not safe! We took this time to check out land based pelican and tern roosting areas but no oiled birds were spotted.
The reports we are getting now are about birds out in the deep water oiled areas and on some of the islands but you have to have safe access to those areas. We are wading through politics and weather to get to those places to assess and capture oiled birds.
Yesterday afternoon we did receive an oiled Gannet that was luckily plucked out of the water by a fishing boat that was coming back to the harbor. Its an adult Northern Gannet, heavily oiled and will be washed today. (Photo, above, oiled Northern Gannet)
Alabama - Our oiled bird rehabilitation center in Alabama received 7 sick non-oiled, lethargic brown pelicans and 1 laughing gull from that area. They were discovered soon after a fish die off in the area and there are concerns that they may have botulism and it may be connected to the fish die off. 5 pelicans and the gull are still alive and they are temporarily being cared for at that facility until plans for their transfer to a rehab facility are completed.
Mississippi – Our center in Gulfport received an oiled Gannet on Saturday and it is doing well. The bird will be washed soon. The center development and problem solving is coming along well.
Florida - Our center in Pensacola received an oiled gannet on Saturday also and it is doing well. The bird will also be washed soon.
Back at Home at our California Bird Rescue centers- It has taken a few weeks for us to get the wildlife centers on line here in the Gulf states and get a handle on this program and to understand and infiltrate ourselves into how its all working in this spill. In the mean time our centers at the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas are in spring mode and getting busier by the day. In that sense this spill could not have come at a worse time.
In order to support our staff and volunteers back at home in Cordelia (Northern California) and San Pedro (Southern California) we are hiring on extra summer help at both centers to make sure that the clinics are supported and run as smoothly as possible.
Also, we will probably be shifting our main clinic rehabilitation staff out to give each of them opportunities to work in the Gulf. We will be evaluating and are developing this plan daily as things progress here in the Gulf and we gain a better idea as to how long we may be staying. I will post more on how we are managing the spill, the centers back home as I have something to more to report.
Thanks for your continued support and words of encouragement,
– Jay Holcomb, IBRRC Executive Director
http://wbx.me/l/?p=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fintbirdrescue.blogspot.com%2F2010%2F05%2Fday-15-from-center-of-gulf-oiled-bird.htmlhttp://wbx.me/l/?p=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fintbirdrescue.blogspot.com%2F2010%2F05%2Fday-15... more
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Kurta
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