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BP Oil Spill Update, 6/7/2010 [ We are
probably ~still~ not getting the full truth about what is
going on in the Gulf of Mexico! ]
===========================
Bill Nelson: Not Enough Skimmers, Oil Seeping Up from Seabed
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/53369
Appearing with Andrea Mitchell today, United States Senator Bill
Nelson (D-FL) says that further leakage may require more military
involvement than the Coast Guard can provide. He also makes news:
there are reports that oil is seeping up from the seabed due to the
casing below the wellhead being pierced.
===========================
Obama hit on whaling turnaround
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/06/06/Obama-hit-on-whaling-turnaround/UPI-67531275860640/
WASHINGTON, June 6 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama is breaking a
campaign promise as his administration backs an effort to lift a
24-year ban on commercial whaling, critics say.
Environmentalists, already unhappy with the administration's allegedly
lackluster response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, say the president
is going back on his campaign pledge to end the slaughter of whales,
FOX News reported Sunday.
The administration is leading a push within the International Whaling
Commission to lift the ban on whaling against Japan, Norway and
Iceland, the three countries in the commission still hunting whales,
FOX News said.
The White House says a new agreement will save whales by keeping the
three countries from exploiting loopholes in the current moratorium,
but environmentalists say they aren't buying it.
"That moratorium on commercial whaling was the greatest conservation
victory of the 20th century," Patrick Ramage of the International Fund
for Animal Welfare said.
"And in 2010 to be waving the white flag or bowing to the stubbornness
of the last three countries engaged in the practice is a
mind-numbingly dumb idea," he said.
Australia has announced it will take Japan to the International Court
of Justice to try to end its "scientific whaling" program in southern
oceans, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
===============
'The Plan Is to Let Us Die,' Coastal Parish President Says
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/05/25/27551.htm
<<<
Far below Louisiana's fragile wetlands are reserves of crude oil
and other valuable minerals. Local residents speculated on Monday that
BP is after the mineral rights, which it cannot touch while the
wetlands are alive.
It's a grim prospect, perhaps far-fetched, but not for those who
live along the 70 miles of oil-saturated coast, who wonder what the
heck happened this weekend when BP refused to fight the incoming oil.
>>>
===============
Breaking: Coast guard logs show gov't knew oil spill was devastating
within hours:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2123/
Coast Guard Logs Reveal Early Spill Estimate of 8,000 Barrels a Day
White House Timeline Missing Early Estimates, Reports of Oil Sheens
By John Solomon and Aaron Mehta | June 03, 2010
http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2123/
Contrary to early reports from the Obama Administration that it was
not aware of the catastrophic nature of the Gulf oil spill,
newly-released Coast Guard logs show that the government knew within
hours that the spill would be devastating.
According to Public Integrity, the government almost immediately
assessed that the gusher would emit at least 8000 barrels of oil into
the Gulf per day. By April 23 it had revised that estimate
significantly upward.
===============
Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-04/obama-briefed-in-april-by-carol-browner-on-how-bad-bp-spill-was-/?cid=hp:mainpromo1
What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only
briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad
it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.
===============
Obama told how bad Gulf oil spill would be days after BP's rig exploded:
report
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/06/05/2010-06-05_obama_told_how_bad_gulf_oil_spill_would_be_day.html
SUMMARY BY CITIZENS FOR LEGIT GOV:
http://www.legitgov.org/Obama-told-how-bad-Gulf-oil-spill-would-be-days-after-BPs-rig-exploded-report
June 6, 2010 by legitgov
Obama told how bad Gulf oil spill would be days after BP's rig
exploded: report 05 Jun 2010 As criticism of the Obama
administration's response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf, a new
report claims the president was told by a government official in April
just how much damage BP's exploded offshore rig would cause. Days
after the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, Carol Browner, head of the
White House's Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama
the explosion would result in a never-before-seen disaster, senior
White House aides told The Daily Beast. [This means that Obusha crisis
spokesman, BP tarball Thad Allen, kept pimping for BP, despite WH
knowledge of the depths of the disaster. --LRP]
==============
Bill Nelson: Not Enough Skimmers, Oil Seeping Up from Seabed
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/53369
Appearing with Andrea Mitchell today, United States Senator Bill
Nelson (D-FL) says that further leakage may require more military
involvement than the Coast Guard can provide. He also makes news:
there are reports that oil is seeping up from the seabed due to the
casing below the wellhead being pierced.
Mitchell rightly focuses on the real issue here: the relief well as
currently aimed may not be low enough to capture the oil if it leaking
from collapsed casing below the intercept point.
Bill Nelson also gets a chance to watch Haley Barbour talk about
"tarbahls" and how they come to the beach every year. Nelson thinks
Barbour is tempting Providence with his talk. Barbour reminds me of
the tourism-happy mayor in "Jaws."
=================
'The Plan Is to Let Us Die,' Coastal Parish President Says
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/05/25/27551.htm
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
By SABRINA CANFIELD
ShareThis
GALLIANO, La. (CN) - Almost 70 miles of Louisiana coast are
soaked with oil. That's more land than the seashores of Maryland and
Delaware combined, Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday after Secretary of
the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet
Napolitano were flown over the devastated coast. Napolitano said the
federal government would "disperse it, boom it, burn it," to keep more
oil from coming ashore. But St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro
had a different idea. "I would be betting the plan is to let us die,"
Taffaro said.
Federal officials delivered messages similar to Napolitano's, but
none wanted to address an incident that occurred last weekend, when BP
and the Coast Guard abandoned 44 boats loaded with booms on
Louisiana's shores as thick black oil flooded into the marshlands.
BP was nowhere in sight as the oil inundated the fragile marshes.
And the oil company has provided little explanation about what made it
jump ship rather fight the oil as it hit land.
BP has continued to spray two chemical dispersants into the Gulf
despite an order by the Environmental Protection Agency to end the
spraying on Sunday night. The chemical dispersants, made by Corexit,
are banned in BP's homeland, the United Kingdom, because of their
toxicity.
Ever since the April 20 explosion of the BP oil rig the Deepwater
Horizon, oil has spewed unchecked from a broken well at the bottom of
the Gulf of Mexico. At least 6 million gallons of crude have already
gushed into the Gulf, though the estimates vary widely. Some experts
have said that every week the spill has dumped more than the 11
million gallons the Exxon Valdez released off the Alaskan coast in
1989, in what was formerly the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Far below Louisiana's fragile wetlands are reserves of crude oil
and other valuable minerals. Local residents speculated on Monday that
BP is after the mineral rights, which it cannot touch while the
wetlands are alive.
It's a grim prospect, perhaps far-fetched, but not for those who
live along the 70 miles of oil-saturated coast, who wonder what the
heck happened this weekend when BP refused to fight the incoming oil.
"We can actually see birds that are covered in oil," Gov. Jindal
said Monday at the news conference in Galliano.
"It is clear that we do not have the resources to protect our
coast," Jindal said, describing the past weekend, as booms and workers
"sat for days waiting for orders" and got no direction approval from
BP or the federal government.
The Army Corps of Engineers has continued to drag its feet on
whether to approve dredging plans to create a barrier around
Louisiana's wetlands. BP officials have not proposed any plan to
prevent the oil from moving away from the broken well and into
Louisiana's fragile marshes.
Salazar said he will do everything he can to keep Louisiana's
coast from disappearing.
"We're going to keep the boot on the map," Salazar said,
referring to the shape of his the state.
Interior Secretary Salazar and other federal officials continue
to claim that damages will be kept at a minimum, and have been managed
to get BP to acknowledge responsibility for the continuing disaster,
but Louisiana officials and residents say there is no plan in sight to
protect them.
Many environmental experts have said that an oil cleanup might
cause more harm to the coastline than just leaving it there, so the
only viable option is to keep the oil away.
A caller from St. Tammany Parish broke into tears Monday on a
talk show on radio WWL. "All they're trying to do is destroy the
wetlands so they can get the mineral rights to all of whatever is
under" the wetlands, the woman said.
The Obama administration questioned BP's competence on Sunday,
when Salazar told reporters he was "not completely" confident BP knows
what it's doing.
For local residents, BP's violation of the Sunday night deadline
to stop using the toxic dispersant felt like a slap in the face.
"Are they just going to continue spraying this stuff until
someone sends them to jail?" Plaquemines Parish President Billy
Nungesser asked on WWL radio Monday night.
Nungesser said he and other coastal parish presidents are fed up
with BP and the federal government. Nungesser said he intends to take
matters into his own hands, whether the Corps of Engineers issues his
parish the emergency permit he applied for on May 13 or not, and
whether BP decides help keep oil out of the wetlands or not.
"We are giving the Corps 24 hours" to issue the emergency
permits, Nungesser said on WWL. "We are giving them the opportunity to
do the right thing. But even without their permit, we will protect our
parish."
After 24 hours, permit or not, Nungesser said Plaquemines Parish
will begin dredging and building emergency berms, as a last line of
defense against oil intrusion into Plaquemines Parish marshes.
"If we don't do it, our marsh will be destroyed," Nungesser said.
The wetlands are prime breeding habitat for dozens or hundreds of
species of wildlife, including fish, crustaceans and birds.
"We're heavily invested in doing the very best job that we can,"
BP spokesman Mark Salt said on WWL radio Monday.
Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said Monday that BP
will spend $500 million in the next 10 years to study the effects of
the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, including the environmental effects
of the dispersant.
As it became clear Monday that BP had not followed orders to stop
using Corexit, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said that BP does not
have to stop using it completely, but asked BP to limit its use of the
dispersant and to find a less toxic replacement.
Richard Dennison, a senior scientist with the Environmental
Defense Fund wrote on the group's website Monday that Corexit 9527 and
Corexit 9500, the two forms BP is using, are "among the least
effective of the 18 dispersants that EPA has approved under the
National Oil and Hazardous Pollution Contingency Plan."
Dennison wrote that the dispersants "appear to be among the more
toxic based on limited short-term toxicity tests conducted on fish and
shrimp."
BP has been using Corexit during the oil spill catastrophe in far
greater quantities than ever before in U.S. history.
Jackson said other chemicals the EPA wanted BP to consider appear
to be less toxic and more effective than Corexit.
"My concern is they appear to be going out of their way to find
problems with these other chemicals," Jackson said.
Propublica reported last week that Corexit was used after the
Exxon Valdez disaster and was later linked with health problems,
including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney, and blood
disorders. One of the two Corexit products that BP is suing in the
Gulf also contains a compound that is associated with headaches,
vomiting and reproductive problems, according to the Propublica
report.
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