Oil Hell Breaks Loose: Thursday June 10 BO Oil Update

UPDATED BELOW

1. Pensacola Beach Oilcast.

The Mobile regional NOAA weather station is forecasting isolated thunderstorms with one to two inches of rain along the broader central Gulf coastal area today, moving from southwest to northeast "around 10 to 15 mph." The heat index is expected to exceed 100 degrees.

When will the Mobile weather station begin including an oil forecast for this area?

FWIW, the Windmapper animation for the next twenty-four hours shows coastal winds near Pensacola Beach coming more directly from the south, where the forward edge of the oil slick lies, toward the north where we are.

2. The Wages of Sloth.

We take one crumby day off from this volunteer, nonprofit blog to voluntarily shepherd our nonprofit grandchild around to various end-of-school events and see what happens? Oil hell breaks loose.

• Tarballs and sheen invade Perdido Key.
• Oil booms start going up all over town.
• BP bans our favorite Pensacola independent journalist.
• County commissioners start a word-war.
• The national media gets tutored in math.
• NOAA director Jane Lubchenco begins walking back over the issue of undersea oil plumes.
• And, we turn our thoughts to the Big Picture and what it all could mean in the distant future.
  

3. Perdido Petroleum.

Travis Griggs of the PNJ has the details on Perdido Key:

A mile-long stretch of Perdido Key beach near the Florida-Alabama line was coated with greasy tar balls, about the size of peas, scattered in sheets like pepper below the high-tide line.

No fewer than 20 ships, ranging from charter fishing boats to barges fitted with cranes, loomed offshore, circling in the Gulf near the mouth of Perdido Pass on Wednesday.

Helicopters passed overhead and circled near the flotilla as a line of shrimp trawlers, four abreast, cruised down the beach, dragging oil skimmers about 300 yards offshore.

An earlier report from Perdido Key by a TV reporter from Tampa more or less predicted it (starting at :30 seconds):

4. Boom Town.

Jamie Page wins the Snappiest Lede of the Day award with this: "The battle to protect Escambia County waterways has begun."

As oil sheen and glops of crude infiltrated Perdido Pass on Wednesday afternoon, Escambia County put booms in place to impede oil from damaging waterways and environmentally sensitive areas.

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard authorized the closure of Perdido Pass so a V-shaped boom could be deployed.
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Officials also approved deployment of booms within 72 hours at Bayou Grande; Bayou Chico, West Arm; Bayou Chico, North Arm; Davenport Bayou; Star Lake; Palafox Pier; LaFitte Cove; and Little Sabine Bay.

When the paper went to bed officials had not yet decided whether to close Pensacola Pass at the western end of Santa Rosa Island, although the state DEP reported seeing "tar balls and sheen... outside of Pensacola Pass."

5. Outzen Ousted.

A flaming war also started late Tuesday night when Rick Outzen, publisher of the Independent News weekly, blogged that he'd been "banned" from BP's scheduled press interviews with Pete Benson, "BP's head of operations at the Bayou Chico facility," and "Lucia Bustamante, BP’s Community Liaison in Pensacola."

Invitations were restricted to only four media outlets whom BP apparently expected "to share the video, photos and audio in a fair manner with any media outlet who asks." BP picked only one of the four local TV network affiliates serving the Pensacola area, one of two local commercial AM radio stations providing daily oil spill coverage, the one daily Pensacola newspaper, and a reporter from the Miami Herald.

Obviously, BP's PR flack-catchers haven't read Charles Kuralt's autobiography, A Life on the Road. Kuralt, as a cub reporter, learned "the old UPI trick" the hard way when he shipped an exclusive story back to CBS headquarters via a generous reporter for UPI, who then claimed the breaking story as his own. Next time, his boss wired him, "Throw your film in the water before giving it to UPI for shipping."

Not invited to the BP interview were wire service reporters, weekly newspapers, non-commercial public radio stations, out-of-town TV media reporters, bloggers, or any of the half dozen or more documentary film makers on site. And no local environmental or public health organizations providing regular news updates, either.

As Outzen says, "There is no valid reason" for the restrictions. It was, Rick figures, "BP’s way of punishing me and avoiding direct questions [from] one of their loudest critics." He might have added BP's motive might have been to avoid letting anyone who's been writing for The Daily Beast, a popular national news blog, in the door.

Rick Outzen is a bulldog. He fixed his teeth to BP's pants leg all day yesterday and didn't let up for the rest of the 24/7 blog cycle until BP admitted its mistake:

"Why Am I Banned?" went up on his blog soon after.
"Facts Continue to Belie BP Statements" was posted at mid-afternoon.
"BP Says Ban Was Symantics Error," came next.
"BP Apologizes for Pool Media,"
And, for good measure, he tweaked BP over its oafish effort to shut down the Twitter parody "BPGlobal PR." ["BPGlobal PR Asked to Identify Spoof"]

We're guessing the next time BP feels compelled to meet the press, they'll send a well-dressed butler to Rick with an engraved invitation, served up on a silver plate.

6. Word War.

After Jamie Page's snappy lede he writes that the war he's talking about is less against oil than the Unified Command and BP Corp. itself:

County officials Wednesday were upset at the last-minute way they learned about the initial oil sighting in Alabama waters, just across the state line, that launched the sudden boom deployment.

"It was a surprise to us, and we were angered by the fact that the oil was already coming through the pass, and I consider that a complete communication failure of the Unified Command," said John Temperilli, one the county's four oil spill experts.

For those who are wondering 'Where did this 'Unified Command' stuff come from? you can consult Jim Stemp's "Incident Command System: History and Need." It explains how the Exxon Valdez oil spill -- which BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster now dwarfs -- was one of the prime progenitors mandating "that when a spill occurs, the management of the incident will use a Unified Command that includes the responsible federal official, State or local official and the responsible party."

As for BP, the Paul Fleming writes in today's PNJ that Escambia County commissioners are mad at one of their "Unified Command" partners:

Escambia County wants to run the cleanup and wants more equipment from BP.

"If they were really serious, they'd be providing the resources," Escambia Commission Chairman Grover Robinson IV said Tuesday. "What we've got is a lot of placating to feel good. People want action."

Among other things, the county wants BP to pay for mechanical sand rakes.

"We've asked for eight of them," Robinson said. "I don't even know why we're arguing about these."

Interestingly, the hostility toward BP apparently is not shared by neighboring Santa Rosa County, although the evidence Fleming cites for this is thin. One commissioner, Gordon Goodin, "said he's pleased with cleanup-crew response: 340 people were shoveling up and disposing of oil in the two counties Wednesday. The first oil came ashore Friday."

Oddly, Gordon Goodin seemed to be on the other side of the fence just a month ago. Then, he claimed to be worrying "that dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency will seem like a breeze compared to working with BP PLC on reimbursements related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."

There was a time when Commissioner Goodin enjoyed widespread public support, at least in south county. But over the past couple of years quite a number of voters have become disgusted with his inconstancy and concerned over suspected conflicts of interest between his developer business and his public office. For many, his foot-dragging on the Northwest Florida Zoo closure was the final straw.

Consequently, there is more than a little irony in Goodin's charge that "Escambia is being greedy." In case the insult wasn't obvious enough, he added, "I think they're being a little hoggish." Now, there's a classic pot calling kettles black.

7. Size Matters - Yet Again.

How many times have we said it? The size of the oil leak matters. But as often as we've said it, no one seems to have a reliable -- or truthful -- answer.

What we said almost a month ago, on May 11, remains true: "The facts about the oil spill were filtered through BP Corp., which, it is now apparent, is heavily invested in keeping them from public view" and "BP Corporation repeatedly falsified the size of the oil leak, either intentionally or through its own gross negligence."

Nothing in all of that has changed. The only improvement over the last month has been that a few universities sent research vessels into the Gulf. Not surprisingly, what they're bringing back confirms that BP has been deliberately misleading the Government.

Some journalists are beginning to catch on. "Forget those minimum estimates of BP's Gulf oil leak," reads the headline of Mark Seibel's recent blog report for McClatchy News.

Thad Allen's press briefing at the White House Monday makes one thing clear -- we can forget about that 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day range that Obama administration officials have consistently cited, inaccurately, as the amount of oil likely to be gushing from BP's blown-out Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico well.
* * *
The government's Flow Rate Technical Group never saw the 12,000 to 19,000 or the 12,000 to 25,000 as the full range of the leak's size. Rather those were the low-end estimates... .

The team didn't feel comfortable giving high end estimates... . Why not? They didn't have confidence in the information they'd been given.
* * *
[R]ead the report itself. Here's a quote: "Based upon the incomplete and often poor quality data available to the experts, only a range of values that represent an estimated minimum can be given [emphasis added]." And that's just 10 sentences into the 43-page report.

Earlier this week, Renee Schoof and Erika Bolstad reported for McClatchy News that "BP's runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once-called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a day... ." The information originally was attributed to "a member of the government panel tasked with determining the size of the spill."

"In the data I've seen, there's nothing inconsistent with BP's worst case scenario," Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government's Flow Rate Technical Group, told McClatchy.

Leifer said that based on satellite data he's examined, the rate of flow from the well has been increasing over time, especially since BP's "top kill" effort failed last month to stanch the flow. The decision last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe from the its blowout preventer in order to install a "top hat" containment device has increased the flow still more _ far more, Leifer said, than the 20 percent that BP and the Obama administration predicted.

More than one of the Flow Rate panel members agrees. Another was quoted on Rachel Maddow's show the other night. Today, the Associated Press quotes Purdue professor Steve Wereley as saying, "the daily flow rate is, in fact, somewhere between 798,000 gallons and 1.8 million gallons."

8. Lubchenco walks back.

For over a month NOAA's director Jane Lubchenco was adamantly denying numerous scientific reports that any undersea pool of oil had been detected in the Gulf. It was as if she thought the scientific world was out of step with her -- not to mention her predecessor -- and how dare they?

Now, she's changing her tune.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said her agency had finished testing water samples collected by the USF team that confirmed the presence of the oil.

"The bottom line is, yes there is oil in the water columns," she told reporters. "That's confirmed for the sites we've done the analyses."

Lubchenco also has acknowledged that some of the the low-density oil plumes hundreds of feet below the surface of the Gulf have "fingerprints" that tie it to BP's exploded Deepwater Horizon well.

But Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen -- who had not mentioned the emerging scientific consensus until now -- wants to quibble over semantics. He "questioned the use of the term "plume" to describe that underwater oil.

"The term 'plume' has been used for quite awhile, [but] I think what we are talking about are concentrations," he said. "'Cloud' is a better term."

Holy oil spill! 'A cloud of oil is not a plume of oil.' That's deserving of a limerick or Haiku. BP Global PR ought to get working on it right away.

9. Dark Ages Revisited.

What's interesting about the response of these federal officials is a cloudy undercurrent of a different sort. Too often, Lubchenco and Allen seem to be acting in consort with BP to hide the truth from the public. What they really ought to appreciate is that BP's corporate interests are aligned against both the public and the federal government. The federal government should see the people who empower it not as the enemy, but as an ally against BP.

What leads us to say that is that we've begun ruminating over a book we read in college and re-read a couple of years ago. We mentioned it before in a related context: Barbara Tuchman's prize winning opus, "A Distant Mirror."

It is, as the reviewers say, a very detailed history of the "calamitous fourteenth century." The fourteenth century was a period when the nation-state in the nascent form of newly emergent, larger, and more powerful kingdoms first began to rival the thousand-year hegemony of the "Christian Church" in Rome. Hard as it is to imagine today, all of the Western world before then was largely ruled by the Pope (and from time to time Anti-Popes in places like Avignon). Even kings had to be sanctified as the Pope's local delegate.

In time, thanks in part to Henry VIII's marital infidelities, the nation-state separated itself from Rome, took a lot of property with it, and assumed the freedom to appoint government officials like the Chancellor wholly without Rome's assent. Protestantism was the first result before it, too, divided into fiercely quarreling sects. The "Christian Church" largely retreated from the secular world to fight its own internecine wars. The nation-state grew more powerful and evolved to become the world's leading organizer of economic life.

A respectable theory advanced by some serious scholars in the past few decades posits that we are on the brink of an analogous epoc, one in which the nation-state finds itself under siege to rival transnational corporations. Some see the two as symbiotic, each helping the other. Others are concerned that the explosive growth and exponentially increasing wealth of transnational corporations, who owe allegiance to no nation, ultimately poses a threat to the very sovereignty of the nation-state.

No one can be sure how it all will turn out, of course. We're still feeling the reverberations of the fourteenth century. But it's not hard to see the increasingly acrimonious struggle between BP Corp. and the federal government over who should "control" the BP oil disaster, and what the public should be told about it, as an early skirmish in the coming global war between Nation-State and Multinational Corporations.

Whom do you trust to 'organize the economic life' of repairing the entire Gulf of Mexico and all the human beings and sealife devastated by BP's oil spill? Our nation or BP's multinational corporate board of directors?

UPDATE Who would have thunk it? The director of the U.S. Geological Survey told reporters late this afternoon that the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group has recalculated the oil spill flow rate as being in a range of "20,000 to more than 40,000 barrels per day." This compares with BP's public claims over most of the last month that only 5,000 barrels of oil was leaking each day.

The newly calculated rate does not take into account changes, if any, since June 3 when BP installed a small cap and began recovering some portion of still-leaking oil.
minor edit 6-10 pm
Update 5:15 pm CDT 6-10

Hard Truths Tuesday: June 8 BP Oil Spill Update

"Independent experts say the pervasiveness of BP's problems... is striking. 'They are a recurring environmental criminal and they do not follow U.S. health safety and environmental policy," said Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA debarment attorney who led the investigations into BP.'"

-- Abrahm Lustgarten and Ryan Knutson, ProPublica, June 7, 2010

1. Pensacola Oil Weather.

NOAA's oil spill projection (see map, above) warns northwest winds "are expected to become SE overnight," likely pushing more older tarballs toward Pensacola Beach. For the next three days winds and currents will come from an East/Southeast direction, "inhibiting further eastward movement" and pushing the leading edge of the slick back west, also toward Pensacola Beach. BP's oil spill now has us out-flanked. We can get it from either direction.

2. Manageable Amounts.

Along with a general update which looks like it was cobbled together from wire service as well as local reports, the Miami Herald is showing a unique slide show taken yesterday around Pensacola Beach, Ft. Pickens, and nearby environs. The accompanying article adds:

In Pensacola Beach, fewer tar balls appeared to have washed ashore than in previous days since the sticky globs began dotting the sand Friday.

That may be a fortuitous break, as forecasted stormy weather threatened to get in the way of cleanup and monitoring efforts, Escambia County officials said.
* * *
In Destin, dime-sized tar balls washed ashore on Okaloosa Island for the second day in a row, but only about a dozen of the reddish-gray pieces were found in the powdery white sand.

"It's all been a very manageable amount,'' said Dino Villani, public safety director for Okaloosa County. "We're very fortunate at this point.''

3. Hard Truth.

There has been a lot of caterwauling about a supposed lack of transparency on the part of the Obama administration. Insofar as it appears to have relied on BP in the first couple of weeks for specific details about the magnitude of the oil spill and the company's ability to stop it, we think that critics are probably being unfair. After all, the damn thing was a mile below sea level and then some below that, far from where the nation usually assigns its most sophisticated naval forces.

To be sure, if the Obama administration had dug a bit earlier into the musty old files of the George W. Bush administration, it would have discovered, as ProPublico.com reports today, "Years of Internal BP Probes Warned That Neglect Could Lead to Accidents."

A series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.

The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP's Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.

Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations - from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas.

But was fifteen months enough time for the Obama administration to unearth the evidence, too, while handling all the other economic, military, diplomatic, and environmental time bombs the Bush administration left behind? We report, those of you who voted for Bush can decide by counting the months on your fingers and toes.

It is true that within about a week after the rig fire and well blowout, the Obama administration as a whole was making it painfully evident to anyone this side of a BP shareholders' meeting that BP was lying and the Government would be stepping in to provide oversight and increased transparency. That's about the same time the Obama administration put Coast Guard Admiral Chad Allen in charge of the Government's response and began openly challenging BP's deceptive PR campaign to minimize the spill.

In any event, Obama's public remarks yesterday were straight from the shoulder. We're not talking about his made-for-TV threat to "kick ass" that has the press all in a tizzy, clutching its hankie and making a moue with its mouth. We're talking about his direct public statement immediately following yesterday's cabinet meeting:

[H]ere's what we know: Even if we are successful in containing some or much of this oil, we are not going to get this problem completely solved until we actually have the relief well completed, and that is going to take a couple more months. We also know that there's already a lot of oil that's been released, and that there is going to be more oil released no matter how successful this containment effort is.
* * *
This will be contained. It may take some time, and it's going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be damage done to the Gulf Coast and there is going to be economic damages that we've got to make sure BP is responsible for and compensates people for.

But the one thing I'm absolutely confident about is that as we have before, we will get through this crisis. * * * [N]ot only are we going to control the damages to the Gulf Coast, but we want to actually use this as an opportunity to reexamine and work with states and local communities to restore the coast in ways that actually enhance the livelihoods and the quality of life for people in that area.

It's going to take some time. It's not going to be easy. But this is a resilient ecosystem. These are resilient people down on the Gulf Coast. I had a chance to talk to them, and they've gone through all kinds of stuff over the last 50, 100 years. And they bounce back, and they're going to bounce back this time. And they're going to need help from the entire country. They're going to need constant vigilant attention from this administration. That's what they're going to get.

There surely will be plenty of others who will be conducting autopsies of what went wrong and why. Plaintiff's lawyers, BP corporate defense counsel, book authors, scientists, and voters are among the more important ones. A president's job is to focus on the future and how we can make the most if it.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama gave us an unabashed, candid assessment of where we are and where we will be going. By no means is it pretty. But it does look like the most optimistic, best case scenario we can hope for.

As for the worst case scenarios, see below.

4. Worser Truth.

Things are never so bad that they can't get worse. Ben Raines reports in today's edition of the Mobile Register that a volunteer pilots' environmental group has just returned from a fly-over that confirms BP's "Deepwater Horizon is not the only well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the last month."

A nearby drilling rig, the Ocean Saratoga, has been leaking since at least April 30, according to a federal document.

While the leak is manifestly smaller than the Deepwater Horizon spill, a 10-mile-long slick emanating from the Ocean Saratoga is visible from space in multiple images gathered by Skytruth.org, which monitors environmental problems using satellites.

Federal officials did not immediately respond when asked about the size of the leak, how long it had been flowing, or whether it was possible to plug it.

Skytruth first reported the leak on its website on May 15. Federal officials mentioned it in the May 1 trajectory map for the Deepwater Horizon spill, stating that oil from the Ocean Saratoga spill might also be washing ashore in Louisiana.

Officials with Diamond Offshore, which owns the drilling rig, said that they could not comment on the ongoing spill and referred the Press-Register to well owner Taylor Energy Co., which hired Diamond. Taylor Energy officials did not return calls seeking comment.

You can be sure BP and the U.S. Coast Guard know about this. Reporter Raines adds: "Officials at the National Response Center said that the spill had been reported, but would not say when it began." (emphasis added)

More evidence of a lack of transparency? Certainly. It's an oil company, for pete's sake. What do you expect?

You can be sure this second oil well leak is being watched with interest, if not glee, in the corporate lawyer offices and boardroom of BP. Every leaking barrel of oil BP can blame on some other oil company is another barrel of money in the pockets of BP shareholders.

If the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder didn't know about this before, they do now. Sometimes it's smart lawyering to hold your tongue and wait for the other guy to have his say, even though it may frustrate the client (or in this case 330 million anxious Americans). But we can't imagine why the Government isn't publicly addressing this second oil company disaster.

Aerial photos taken by J. Henry Fair are expected to be posted soon on the web site of Industrialscars.com.

5. Worst Truth.

When things are getting worse they can always get 'worser.' Florida's senior senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), made news yesterday when he told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that BP's Deepwater Horizon oil may be leaking from the seabed surrounding the wellhead. The assertion is, as of this writing, unverified.

Bmaz, the nom de blog of a Phoenix attorney who writes for Firedog Lake and Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel, adds this alongside a video of Nelson's remarks:

This is potentially huge and devastating news. If Nelson is correct in that assertion, and he is smart enough to not make such assertions lightly, so I think they must be taken at face value, it means the well casing and well bore are compromised and the gig is up on containment pending a completely effective attempt to seal the well from the bottom via successful “relief wells”.

In fact, I have confirmed with Senator Nelson’s office that they are fully aware of the breaking news and significance of what the Senator said to Andrea Mitchell.

If and when Senator Nelson's information is verified, it means the hoped-for August "relief well" won't necessarily stop the leak, either.




6. Yet Another Hard Truth.

If all that -- bad weather forecast, a second leaking rig in the Gulf, and rising suspicion (as yet unconfirmed) that BP's Deepwater Horizon well is leaking at the seafloor -- isn't enough to depress you, then contemplate BP's other ongoing oil leak in Alaska:

While the focus has been on the BP oil rig explosion and crude oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP’s other spill of more than 100,000 gallons of oil in Alaska has been completely overshadowed.The Alaska Pipeline is owned by BP and is dangerously corroded and unmaintained. This neglect caused the pipe to burst and spill gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska.

“No one is watching,” said investigative journalist Greg Palast.

No one watching? Maybe that's because everybody around the world is too busy trying to keep decades of BP neglect from ruining their own shores.

7. Petrol Pols.

Locally, Independent News publisher Rick Outzen answers his mail. Here's a shortened version, as we would have edited his reply:

Florida attorney general Bill McCollum spends too much time writing letters and making self-serving campaign stops. Tell him to go back to the office and not to come out until he files suit against BP.

8. Special Session.

Speaking of pols, Florida Governor Charlie Crist almost certainly will call for special legislative session in July.

The governor said it was "pretty definite'' he would call for a legislative special session as early as July to consider a constitutional amendment that would ban offshore drilling off Florida, coupled with the possibility of looking at renewable energy options, in an effort to move toward "more green'' technologies.

Why rush to ban drilling off the Florida coast? Because just three months ago the Florida Republican Party was all about "drill, baby, drill." And, of course, Charlie is no longer a Republican, as he would like to remind voters over the next five months before the November election, silly.

BP Covering Up the Consequences

Pensacola Independent publisher Rick Outzen reported earlier today that a captain he knows says "boat crews" working the oil spill "have been ordered to not wear respirators, because BP doesn’t want a media helicopter to see the men and women wearing them."

The boat captain said, “I had a daughter call me, crying because her father was trapped in the oil and had the breathe the fumes.”

Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard writes, "BP is apparently barring cleanup workers from sharing photos of dead animals that have washed ashore." Nevertheless, she says, "the bodies are starting to add up."

Late last week, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other responders issued a tally of the animals collected as of Friday in oil-impacted regions of Alabama, Florida , Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—dead and alive. Those stats are shocking: 444 dead birds, 222 dead sea turtles, and 24 mammals (including dolphins).

Sheppard has asked the Unified Command for an updated report, but has not yet heard back.

We're expecting more such reports, and less factual accuracy from BP, as the days and weeks of spouting oil continue. As Duncan Black says, BP's --

theoretical primary responsibility is to their shareholders, in practice it's a bit more weighted towards the pockets of top executives. Birds and turtles, not so much.

Healthy people, not at all.

'Swine Wednesday' May 26 BP Oil Spill Update

"Our Titleist golf balls can withstand even the earth-shaking force of a ferocious, off-balance, downward-pressuring vector-force that squirts the ball wildly off in any ol' direction on the compass." (below)

1. Pensacola Oil Forecast
No appreciable change from yesterday in the weekend forecast. Lookin' good for Memorial Day Weekend. A little rain, perhaps, but odds are low and any showers on the beach probably will be brief and bring a welcome cooling-off period.

2. Spreading Oil, Proliferating Projections.

BP's river of oil has spread so far and wide in the Gulf of Mexico that about a week ago NOAA began publishing two separate projection maps (see left), one for the "near shore" and one for the southern parts of the Gulf, which NOAA denominates as "offshore." How long will it be before they have to make a third map, projecting the oil flow up the East Coast?

3. Pigs Will Be Pigs.

Pensacola publisher Rick Outzen reported yesterday for The Daily Beast on the discovery of two internal BP memos that cast a dark cloud over the oil driller's business ethics -- to say nothing of its humanity. One company memo coldly calculates the value of a worker's life versus the profits to be made by skimping on safety. The other sneeringly compares the cost of building a pig's house with bricks, to foil the big bad wolf from blowing it down, and concludes the pig's life isn't worth the expense.

Outzen explains:

The two-page document, prepared by BP’s risk managers in October 2002 as part of a larger risk preparedness presentation, and titled “Cost benefit analysis of three little pigs,” is harrowing:

“Frequency—the big bad wolf blows with a frequency of once per lifetime.”

“Consequence—if the wolf blows down the house then the piggy is gobbled.”

“Maximum justifiable spend (MJS)—a piggy considers it’s worth $1000 to save its bacon.”

“Which type of house,” the report asks, “should the piggy build?”

It then answers its own question: a hand-written note, “optimal,” is marked next to an option that offers solid protection, but not the “blast resistant” trailer, typically all-welded steel structures, that cost 10 times as much.

The two documents originally surfaced during pre-trial discovery in connection with wrongful death lawsuits brought against BP after its Texas City refinery caught fire in 2005. Fifteen plant employees were killed in the inferno and 170 were injured. Eventually, Rick writes, BP settled the cases for $1.6 billion, BP was convicted of a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, it paid a fine of $50 million and "was sentenced to three years probation."

As with too many recidivist criminals, BP didn't learn its lesson. Outzen writes:

Last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration levied the largest monetary penalty in its history, $87 million, for "failing to correct safety problems identified after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers at its Texas City, Texas refinery."

A BP spokesman told The Daily Beast that BP has reformed its ways since then. “Those documents are several years old,” he said.

Has the corporation found religion? Was it 'born again?' Outzen isn't convinced:

We know that the Deepwater well lacked the remote-control, acoustical valve that experts believe would have shut off the well when the blowout protector failed. The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. How would that stand up to a similar “Maximum Justifiable Spend” analysis (especially when BP’s liability is officially capped at $75 million by federal law)?

For a direct look at BP's swinish memos, click here.

4. Top Kill Reality TV.

If BP's "Top Kill" maneuver actually does begin today, you can watch it, live, right here. The Los Angeles Times has the vivid details:

Heavy mud will be forced into the well to counteract the upward pressure of the leaking oil and gas. Then cement will be poured in after the mud to seal the opening.

If for some reason the mud alone cannot push down the oil, BP officials said they might also try to stop the flow with a "junk shot" filled with golf balls, among other objects.

Success of the venture will depend on loading enough mud and cement into the well to stop the surge of oil and gas — a tricky proposition. Iraj Ershaghi, director of the petroleum engineering department at USC, estimated that the upward pressure was likely to be about 9,000 pounds per square inch. At a depth of 5,000 feet, the water pressure bearing down on the leak is about 2,500 pounds per square inch, he added.

That leaves a difference of about 6,500 pounds per square inch of upward pressure at the wellhead, explaining why the oil and gas flowing upward can easily overwhelm the water pressing down on it and why the crude has continued to gush into the ocean.
* * *
To make up the pressure difference, technicians plan to pump mud into the blowout preventer, a kind of surge protector that sits on top of the wellhead. The device had failed to cut off the flow of oil when the pressure surged too high.

The mud that will be used, drilling mud, is a dense mixture of water and minerals such as bentonite clay. It can be made even denser by adding heavier minerals such as barite and galena.

The heavier the mud, the more it will suppress the flow — but on the flip side, the harder it will be to pump in.

The mud will be pumped from surface vessels with a combined 50,000-horsepower pumping capacity into the internal cavity of the blowout preventer. BP officials said they planned to pump the mud at a rate of up to 40 barrels per minute.

It's unclear how much mud will be needed to stop the flow of oil, BP spokesman Bryan Ferguson said. It's possible, he said, that the entire cavity of the blowout preventer will have to be filled.

Once the oil flow has been contained, the hole will be covered with cement to permanently close the well.

5. Junk Shot Brand Placement.

Plan B (or is it "C" or "D"?) may follow immediately if the Top Kill fails. This means a "Junk Shot." Or, as the L.A. Times puts it, shooting into the disabled blowout preventer "odd objects such as rope knots, golf balls and shredded tires" to try to clog the leak.

These materials are picked for a reason — each odd shape serves a different function, and the more varied the shapes of the collected junk, the more effective the clog will be.

BP will not confirm that it plans to use Titleist golf balls in this maneuver. In our personal experience this brand of golf balls would be very effective.

Although we haven't tried it at a depth of 5,000 feet, based on prior experience we can say our Titleist golf balls can withstand even the earth-shaking force of a ferocious, off-balance, downward-pressuring vector-force that squirts the ball wildly off in any ol' direction on the compass. When the golf ball comes to rest a few feet farther on, moreover, it usually shows only one or two ragged cuts in the surface. The inner core remains perfectly intact.

Consequently, just as we do, BP could use and re-use a single collection of Titleist golf balls over and over again as the company's deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico blow up, one after the other. Less new "junk" to buy, more profits for the stockholders!

6. Golfo de Sopa.

7. Hurricane Debris.

Top Kill or no, hurricane season is right around the corner. And that means anything in the Gulf -- even lakes of oil and dispersants embedded in the sea bottom -- could wind up being transported deposited by high winds and water surges onto coastal beaches, wetlands, and marshes.

Pensacola Beach residents know better than anyone outside of Louisiana how much ancient detritus from the seafloor can be scooped up by a strong hurricane and thrown on shore. After hurricanes Opal (1995), Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005), the shallows where the waves curl and then exhaust themselves on the beach all along Santa Rosa Island -- from Navarre Beach to Ft. Pickens -- yielded a treasure trove of huge ancient shells in shapes and colors most beachcombers had never seen before. Many looked primeval.

"Top Kill" or no, the approaching hurricane season is very bad news for coastal residents everywhere. It means that in addition to the usual daily anxiety about reported storms we'll have something new to fear: that the remains of BP's leaking oil, in whatever form it may take after chemically bonding with the 785,000 gallons of Corexit BP has poured into the Gulf, will be invading our homes and businesses.

8. Palin Country Oil Spill.

Mother Nature has a perverse sense of humor. Reuters is reporting that an oil pipeline in the ex-half-term Alaska governor's state "shut down on Tuesday after spilling several thousand barrels of crude oil into backup containers, drastically cutting supply down the main artery between refineries and Alaska's oilfields." Drill, baby, drill.

Monday May 24: BP Oil Spill Update

1. Local Air quality.

The hourly Air Quality Index for Pensacola, including observed particulate matter, can be accessed here. Earlier today, it looked rather normal for this time of year; fair but not good. How much of the particulates in the air may be due to Mother Nature's insistence that flowers and plants continue send their propagating pollen into the air and how much to man's preparations of the planet for the ants we will not hazard a guess.

2. Gulf Coast Oil Forecast.

WKRG-TV out of Mobile has begun posting a useful daily "oil forecast" on its web site, along with links to other important information. For now, it appears, the oil is expected to continue moving primarily "west and south," as you can see and hear below:

3. Pensacola Oil-cast.

As for Pensacola and nearby beaches, three screenshots we took this morning give you some idea of why forecasting the future direction of BP's spreading lake of oil is so tricky. The screenshots are taken from the University of South Florida's "Ocean Circulation Group" web site.

Within the Gulf and along the coast, the mix of winds, surface water currents, and subsurface water currents is complex and sometimes contradictory. Below is the final frame of an animation forecasting prevailing wind direction:

And a second screenshot, below, is the final frame for the same time of an animated forecast for prevailing surface water currents:
Notice how the arrows for wind and water don't always agree?

Finally, below is a screenshot of the subsurface oil measured by as of the end of the animation period, May 27:
To see each of the full animations, and more, visit the web site for USF's "Ocean Circulation Group."

4. Mobile 'Graduation' Day on Pensacola Beach.

On one Sunday in May, every year, a large and predominantly black crowd from Mobile, Alabama, makes the trek to Pensacola Beach. We've written about this before here here and here and here. It's one of the larger events on Pensacola Beach distinguished by crowds of visitors motivated in some way by a particular cultural affinity.

The so-called "Mobile graduation" Sunday ranks right up there on the stress-o-meter of some local residents with the invasion of drunken Bubbas for the Mardi Gras parade; the hormone-driven invasion of college students over Spring Break; and Pensacola Beach's unique "Gay Memorial Day Weekend." We would have added early August's "Bushwhacker Festival," but we're not sure excessive drinking and listening to ear-splitting music is a recognized cultural identity.

This year, the Mobile 'graduation' thing went off without a hitch. The feared violence of past years, the overtly racist reception occasionally experienced by some visitors, and BP's oil spill were not in evidence.

"By 2 p.m.," Thyrie Bland of the PNJ reports, "the crowd remained light and some of the extra deputies assigned to work at the beach Sunday were let go." A few thousand more showed up late in the afternoon, but "it wasn't as big as last year," according to Deputy Sheriff Sgt. Mike Ward.

5. Pensacola Geography Lesson.

The other day we mentioned that a few tarballs washed up on the beach at Ft. Pickens. An estimable neighboring blogger we admire, Rick Outzen, did the same.

One of our readers, another estimable object of our admiration, took umbrage at Rick's referring to the fort as being on "Pensacola Beach." Then he, so we understand, took umbrage at her for taking umbrage.

We were going to ignore the minor contretemps, but then, last night, a question popped up on the Internet Tubes. "Admin" for something called RAEstate ("Consumption and Real Estate") posted this:

Question for anyone who lives or ever been to Pensacola Beach? [I]n the current there in June and I wonder how Pensacola is and how close is the public beach? [sic]

It is not uncommon for otherwise intelligent folk to confuse Pensacola or even Ft. Pickens with Pensacola Beach. Technically, they are all separate legal entities, just as Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan each has separate legal status, although most folk broadly refer to each of them as "New York City."

We see no harm in that. The five boroughs of New York may seem vastly different to those who live in New York, but to the rest of us they all kind of mush together in one huge, crowded, smelly, exciting, ugly, dangerous, wonderful metropolis.

So, too, Pensacola and nearby environs probably mush together in the eyes of past and prospective visitors. The area shares essentially the same ecology and weather (not to mention the same economy, politics, and culture).
Even more so are Pensacola Beach and Ft. Pickens part of the same barrier island environment. They border one another and share about twenty miles of the same stretch of beach, the same winds, and the same water currents. Click here or on the map:

The political differences are vast, of course. One is an unincorporated Golden Goose without democratic representation that Escambia County seems intent on killing with higher and higher taxes, tolls, high rise buildings, and ridiculous elevated highways. The other is part of the federally-protected Gulf Islands National Seashore and, except for the nineteenth century fort, actually looks like a barrier island should.

Some day soon, perhaps, Pensacola Beach and the Fort Pickens part of the National Seashore will be physically separated. In the meantime, everyone is right, as far as we are concerned. They ought to save their umbrages for a better opportunity, like throwing them at BP.

Hot Oil League Trade

Independent News publisher Rick Outzen, just back from an interview and photo trip to Louisiana, wants to trade Northwest Florida's congressman Jeff Miller (R-Oil Spill) for Massachusetts congressman Edward Markey (D-Medford), who represents the suburbs along the north side of Boston.

We know the north Boston suburbs, Rick. They're no Northwest Florida. They'll never fall for your scheme.

The Stages of Oil Grief

It's becoming apparent that the BP oil catastrophe, for lovers of Pensacola Beach, among others, is going to be like a death in the family. As the smells and the toxins come ever closer, each of us is likely to experience something very much like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' "stages of grief" as first outlined in her book On Death and Dying.

A common representation of her ideas boils things down to this graphic, showing shock and denial... anger... depression.... bargaining... and acceptance:

One could quibble over the number and the exact nature of each of these stages, but the basic idea resonates with almost everyone who has lost a loved one.

Last night, to judge from his late-night blog post, the estimable Rick Outzen of Pensacola's Independent News leaped way ahead of most of us in the Pensacola Beach grieving process. Most people in Pensacola are still in denial or they're mad as hell. Rick already is plunging into feelings of depression and hopelessness:

We aren’t supposed to win. British Petroleum is a global oil company, which made $5.6 billion the first three months of 2010. We are a community recovering from three hurricanes, a depressed real estate market and national recession. I am the publisher of a weekly newspaper and creator of a little blog.
* * *
BP will buy people off. They will run ads convincing us that all is fine. They will pay a bunch of $5000 claims, settle with the federal and state governments and continue to make billions every month. They will blame our claims and the cost of cleanup for “making” them raise the price of gas at the pump. Greedy Pensacola will pay for its claims at each fill-up.

We can’t win.

There's more, along the same lines. But his post was (as he confesses) written in the lonely hours after midnight.

Not to sound like an insipid neighbor trying glibly to help him buck up, but Rick Outzen has been doing a tremendous job sitting by the bedside of a desperately ill Gulf of Mexico. And he's been doing it for a very long time, often running extremely good and sometimes prescient articles in the Independent News calling attention to pollution of our waters and the indifference or outright hostility to the environment manifested by the voting records of too many of our elected leaders.

Lately, he's also become a regular contributor to The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast is an innovative and important news web site who writers often are guests on the razor-sharp, informative, and entertaining Rachel Maddow Show and Keith Olbermann's Countdown . Rick recently has been among them, too.

Kübler-Ross suggests that in circumstances such as we have now, friends and relatives should let those who grieve "talk, cry, or scream, if necessary. Let them share and ventilate, but be available."

You can be available for Rick by checking out his collected Daily Beast articles right here.

Slacks and the City

Pensacola Independent News publisher Rick Outzen drops trou on his blog for a 'Miss Lonely Hearts' advice column.