BP has finally succeeded in placing a concrete cap over the leak to enable some, but not all of the spilling oil to be collected by surface ships. The leak will only be stopped in a couple of months if the drilling of the relief wells is successful.

The Deepwater Horizon incident is becoming a major political topic, the search for scapegoats is well underway and an executive order has been issued establishing National Commission to investigate the spill. The oil industry has a bad record of spillage and environmental damage across the board with companies like Occidental polluting the Amazon for decades.

Only recently many of the large oil companies were successful in lobbying against tighter safety regulations in the USA which would have added to their cost of doing business. The industry in general is about profit over safety and environment and the industry in general should pay. I'm sure BP will be made the scapegoat for the whole industry but they're all guilty in my opinion.

Yes they are all guilty. They have polluted the one of America's largest fishery habitats Link.

32 % of all Federal Waters are closed!

This is unacceptable, any where, any time. Fishing where I live is a way of life for many, and this will crush what little economy growth our region has (well what was left after the recession hit).

The real finger pointing should be at Me and my fellow Americans. WE let this happen. We approved of offshore drilling, thinking spills could never happen here. We were wrong and now we are paying the price, but it is not just us.
What will happen the the nations in the Carribean and beyond. Who's to say the spill will not spread to the Atlantic? In the end, fingerpointing will not solve anything. Actions need and must be taken, here in the US and globally to place limits on such destruction of irreplaceable habitats and food?

What use is a (hypothetical) endless supply of oil, if you starve the oceans and yourself in the process?

Linky

There is no such thing as an endless supply of oil - Conservative projections say that we will have used up the worlds oil reserves in 25 years, those said to be radicals say it is more like 10 years. So all this damage to our world is really for nothing. As far as BP being held responsible, sure the finger will be pointed at them, the media will chew at their ankles for a month or two, probably investigations will result in some hearings where BP will be told to pay a billion dollars for cleanup and environmental damages. They will claim it was circumstances beyond their control, and that where unpredictable that led to the explosion that started this whole mess. In the end BP will probably make some small payment and continue business as usual, while we, the citizens of the US, and the rest of the world continue to pay for their FU.

Just look at the Exxon Valdez incident - They were found guilty of the captain being intoxicated, ship safety below required standards for the ship to legally be at sea, and not being equipped with required containment gear. They in the end were hit with the largest judgment ever against any company - however they only actually paid something like $100,000. The rest of the judgment is still outstanding. 2 years ago they went on record as having the highest profits ever recorded by any company anywhere in the history of the planet over 4 BILLION in profits. in the same year they received and undisclosed amount of government subsidies, claiming that they could not afford to offer gasoline to the American public at affordable rates without government intervention to offset the cost per barrel of oil. The government (Bush) responded with cash and giving them access to our strategic oil reserves. The strategic oil reserves were set up after WWII so that in case of another world war we would have at least enough oil for our military to function for 2 years to be able to defend our country. We gave it away to a company that made the highest ever profits, and still has not paid for their judgment to Alaska or to the American people that paid for their cleanup.

I only say all this because I fully expect that BP will be handled the same way. I am not any kind of activist, or anti-government conspiracy theorist, I'm just pi$$ed of that my government allows this cr@p to keep happening and the company's responsible are never really held accountable.

If a purse thief steals an old lady's purse with 12 dollars in it and he knocks her down in the process he could get 15 years in prison - but steal our natural waterways, fishing grounds, wildlife, personal incomes, the list goes on and on, and what happens to the people responsible for that - nothing. So why would they ever stop. every night these executives go home to their multimillion dollar homes without even a thought that the choices they made that let this disaster become what it is will cause them to lose any of their freedoms or beautiful homes. In fact if the public heat becomes too much for them they may have to go on a long vacation somewhere out of the public eye until everything settles down. Good thing they didn't knock some old over stealing $12 dollars from her.

Sorry for going on - this whole situation just really Pi$$es me off. As Americans we claim to hold ourselves to a higher moral than most of the world, how embarrassing that we don't actually act like it. I Feel like I should personally apoligize to the world for things that my country and the Big companies within it are doing to our planet even though it is beyond my personal control to prevent it.

Well sorry for venting on everyone here - just really frusterating to watch these events unfold and the damage being done.

Thanks for the link Dev but that topic wasn't presented as a debate.

We could debate that!

And before anyone says it, I already know

I have a few questions.
1. Why doesn't somebody turn off the pump?
2. If its under pressure why doesn't somebody close the valve?
3. If there is no valve why not?

note: My plumber showed me the two valves to my house's water supply. He could give bp technical advice at an attractive hourly rate.

Im gonna take the analogy of your house to explain. If something in your house blows up, and tears the part of the pipe before the first valve....what do you think will happen?

" tears the part of the pipe before the first valve..."

note to BP engineers: Put the valve at the bottom, not the top.

Actually they did install a remote controlled valve called a blowout preventer. It failed because:

"The chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon testified Wednesday that he was at a planning meeting 11 hours before the rig exploded at which the BP company man overruled drillers from rig owner Transocean and insisted on displacing protective drilling mud from the riser that connected the rig to the oil well."

"The implication was that the Transocean employees expected they might have to take emergency action because of BP's push to remove the drilling mud."

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/in...t_prevente.html

this shit is pretty messed up... i live in the caribbean. aint no one talkin about us..... as if it cant reach here... the caribbean sea and the gulf share their waters. all it needs is a shift in the current and that oil can reach the islands...
and wat about us....we dont hav the resources to deal with oil on our shores n the impact it would hav on the islands.

we will b seein effects of this oil spill for years to come......lets remember alot of the oil we are not seein it.....no idea where it is goin...wat it is doin..... and the unpredictability of it is wats so bad.

bp will jus b there....might spend sum money.....jus to preserve their image. but they will not really "pay" for wat has happened (n i dont jus mean monetary)

The problem is that there is no pump... The oil reservoir is pressurized within the earth from being trapped in there in the first place, and since it has a lighter density than water its just gonna keep bubbling up. Imagine filling a balloon full of cooking oil and putting it in a water barrel... then put a 21" wide hole in that balloon.

I forsee some danger in this dispersant business, too, as it could then affect the bouyancy of the oil and cause it to pollute the whole dang water column. Not to mention that whatever it takes to break up crude has to be pretty nasty in its own right... the trick to cleaning oil off your tools is to wipe em down with gasoline, isn't it?

Why even allow offshore drilling there anyway? I doubt we (Americans) see any kickback from this drilling. If I'm correct in my assumption, and I could be mistaken, the oil drilled from the Gulf is sent to the global market for sale, where Americans can buy there own oil off the market. I believe that was how it was explained to me, but it is late and I've had a few so i could be talking out of my

I'm not an expert or chemical engineer so I'll take this on advisement but dispersants and solvents are two different things entirely. I don't think they're using solvents like gasoline and xylene. Dispersants are like a soap, they cause the oil to break up into very small particles which hopefully get digested quickly by bacteria. The problem with dispersants is that the oil can remain suspended deep in the water and it can also recombine back into a slick at a later date.

ok straight to it ...the point is BP F&*K'd UP

Are you talking about their clean-up efforts, their proceedures or their share price?

^^^ YES!

Some very interesting reports coming out about the investigation hearings into this whole fiasco. Apparently some of the workers to survive the incident and who testified against BP are now being discredited as reliable witnesses by the BP lawyers because they are biased against BP, so their testimony isn't reliable. Amazing the what bull you can spin in a courtroom with good lawyers - and so it begins.

The Gulf Current is part of the North Atlantic Gyre wiki. The Gyre current flows in a clock wise direction into the Southern Caribbean up along the coast of Mexico to the Gulf Coast of the US and then is forced to detour back south around Florida before turning Northagain to go as far up the Coast as Greenland then turns East and South to Europe and then North Africa where it then turns west across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Its like stirring a cup of coffee everything is pulled to the middle where it clumps up and is slowly pulled back out to the outside, usually down to the bottom and back out. So eventually enough oil could poison the entire North Atlantic. Of particular concern to the people of the Caribbean are the 2 places the current is forced to make a sharp turn where Florida juts out into the center of the Gyre. Study a river current where it makes a bend, always carving the outside bank away and forming eddys, the water wants to go strait. In open water it forms a counter clock wise swirl that comes back to the current. This affect will push surface oil out of the current like a spray all the way around this back spin and out into the center of the Caribbean where it will be pulled back toward the center of the Gyre. Both Turns in the current South of Florida will send oil directly down the Chain of Islands from Cuba out past Puerto Rico and smaller currents caused by the Islands will disperse it. This will be floating on the surface and should start washing up on the beaches in clumps like it is in Florida.

Now consider the soluble toxins leaching out of this crude, that mess will be unseen and disperse into the ocean like a drop of food coloring into a glass of water. Now we just have to sit back for many years to come and see if enough of these soluble toxins were released to poison every fishery in the North Atlantic and possibly beyond.

This is why I have always been opposed to off shore drilling. Its not a matter of if an accident will happen, we have been proven right that its just a matter of when and how bad and I felt that was not acceptable. I also share the same view of Nuclear Power and a Hydrogen Based System .

The technology exists today to make ethanol from algae so there is no competition between fuel and food. If we were to harness solar and tidal power we could balance out to where biomass ethanol can round it out. ethanol can run in any modern vehicle by simply adjusting the Fuel/Air ratio, can be stored and delivered by the existing infrastructure down to the current pump nozzles. Ethanol is not toxic, you can drink it, so if a spill did happen it might harm wildlife in the immediate area it could never poison the entire North Atlantic the way an offshore rig here or off the Coast of the U.K. could.

Want the real kick in the ass, guess what gas algae uses to produce energy, that's right Carbon-dioxide, yep the worst part of burning petroleum that is causing global warming.

Why does the public believe this isn't true, greed, campaign contributions and lobbying by those who have a vested interest in petroleum. Did you really think they would give up their cash cow with out a fight. They don't care about the environment because they only care about them selves and what they can get. What do they care if the ice caps melt 50 years from now, they won't be here. All the rest of us are either sheep or helplessly stuck in their system.

Its this endless kinda crap that makes me understand why some one would climb a clock tower with a deer rifle

I ran across this neat little tool to help you visualize the scale of the Deep Horizon Oil Spill.

that is so sad that all of that ocean is closed off to us because of what has happened and the sad thing is it is only going to get worse the longer we are here because of greed

Well this is just freaking lovely. While checking the containment cap yesterday a sub bumped into a vent and knocked it off and the spill has resumed worse than before.

There have been 2 more deaths among clean up workers, neither "seems" to be work related.

Also of note a Federal Judge has lifted the moratorium on deep water drilling that the White House issued after the accident but Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he will issue a new one and the White House will appeal on the older one. Seems the White House is ready to fight this all the way.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37841204/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf

My opinion, it's horrible it happened but at least it happened on a Liberal's shift.

The 2008 financial statements of the judge that binned the ban on further oil drilling in the Gulf, show that he's got investments in the oil business himself, so that part of the story might take a legal twist anyway. (source: Yahoo News)

Also, have a look at this video: there's an oily sheen on rain puddles near the Gulf (allegedly). That recent cartoon about a tornado soaking up the oil and turning into a massive fireball might not be that far fetched, perhaps

I'm wondering if the oil in the rain is caused by the controlled burning that's been used in areas to try and prevent wetland and beach damage. The thick smoke produced may have a high unburned oil content.

I'm skeptical about that oil slicked puddle. Louisiana is very low ground some places are actually below sea level. So lots of places there would be collecting points for the whole basin and would have to evaporate. That could be accumulated oil maybe even some still from Katrina. Not to mention all the cars and campers around it, any one of them with a bad oil or fuel leak could be responsible.

It maybe possible for the solvents in petroleum that gasoline is made from to evaporate and condense in clouds and fall with the rain or possible in the rain drops. That would make a slick on puddles.

The tornado of fire is a scary thought that could happen, a water spout coming ashore saturated with crude oil hits a power transformer right on the water front and boom a fire inside of a 300 mph vortex.

Badog that is very possible as well.

Honestly the best thing BP can do at this moment is build a gallows in front of their corporate office and take turns in the noose. There needs to be a tighter control of who is responsible and how to proceed with the situation not sit on their fat asses and delve into ideas that will never be implemented, and then drag their heels to slow the government investigation.

Exactly. I saw on the news that that BP mananger (can't recall his name) said the he was 'ready to get back to his life' or something. Yeah sure. he can go back to his life, but we down here in south Louisiana will never really have our lives back. And on top of that, it's hurricane season, and we've already had one named storm in the Gulf, Alex. If Louisiana gets hit full on with a Hurricane, we are screwed. It is really hurting our wetlands. There was this one little bayou back behind my uncle's. You can smell the oil that has gotten into it. There's not alot of oil, but you can smell it. No more has washed in, thankGod, but I'm terrified that the little paridise behind my great uncle's home will be ruined. We are hurting bad down here on the Gulf, and I think that Obama needs to do something. He was never all that popular for me, but he is slipping fast.

dynamitesgurl

The problem with capping this thing is the depth. The pressure at 5000' is 151.5x what it is at sea level. Very few subs on the planet can work that deep. The ones that can had to be retrofitted to do the work which means they had to have time to attach new gear to do the job. This is an nearly impossible task so its a bit premature to blame the president for lack of effort. Its easy to blame him because he is in office but the real blame for this should be directed toward the people who let them drill that deep knowing if there was an accident we couldn't fix it.

While the Obama Administration is trying to deal with this they are being blocked by Republicans playing party politics. The administration is still fighting to stop all deep water drilling until they can at least make sure this can't happen on an other rig but are being blocked by the oil industry who is using conservative (Republican) judges to overturn their orders. So if I were you and the rest of the Golf States folks I would say take a good look at who did this to you, the same people that handled Katrina so well.

Perhaps it is a 'good' thing that the well hasn't been capped yet -- the media attention will drop off rapidly once there are no more visual scars. In my opinion, that's one of the reasons why BP used that highly toxic dispersant: animals struggling in thick oil have a bigger visual impact than dead animals hidden under the surface.

Are there any cautions or reassurances about possible drinking water pollution going out in that area?

Boom. Fact is, it's BP's fault for not making the pipe good enough to not break and then sh*t out a load of oil everywhere. What do you want Obama to do. Swim down and put a band aid on it? Not gonna happen. (Sits and waits for the inevitable "it's all the British people's fault" comments)

MY OPINION

Shit happens, but only when you let it.

The Bush administration should never have lifted the regulations and let BP bypass safety regulations.

Fact is, the Bush administration and their little firiend, BP, ufkced up. But the blame game is pointless, endless, and only masks the real problem. BP is still using harmful disperants that in all practicality only cause problems to last longer and to be more wide-spread. They use the dispersants to make the spill "look" like less oil is leaking out.

We as the people need to demand that these administrations raise the safety regulations, and companies like BP must be willing to spend the extra 500k$ on better safety precautions (blowout preventer in this case) to help this planet live a little bit longer, especialy because their anual profits are in the billions.

The British people aren't who I suggest blaming Dav. BP, should never have been given permission to drill at such depths, the Republicans fought long and hard to change the regulations that prohibited it.
We have our own Government to thank for this.
So now that we have let it we are pretty well screwed as dynamitesgurl pointed out its hurricane season, the storm surge from even a cat 1 will push a lot of oil up into the wet lands( the whole place is a swamp) and now we have contaminated fresh water.

I wasn't suggesting that it was the British people that were to blame. I was saying it was BP's fault for not making the pipe good enough to not break and then aiming a sarcastic comment towards people who might have though that BP was still owned by the British. We sold that sh*tter on long ago lol

so thier solution is to solve the problem by drilling more...
just when hurricane season is starting up...
no one sees a problem with this?

making more holes in a balloon would make it pop wouldn't it?

The concept is to relieve some of the pressure pushing the oil out. By drilling two new wells the can greatly reduce the force with which the oil is literally squirting out of the ground.

On another point during our previous administration, I wont mention any names but his initials are B U S H, most oversights regarding industry were striped down so far that it was literally impossible for them to perform their intended functions. The FDA is now run by former members of the drug company's that still hold interests in the same company's they are supposed to police. Same with the department of agriculture, EPA, all the way down the line. Here in Michigan there are 2 inspectors for the whole state for the Bureau of Automotive Regulations. You name it and it was stripped of personnel. Hell look what happened to our financial institutions after government regulations were lifted. Not defending of pointing fingers at Obama, Just pointing out that he inherited this mess from his predecessor, and it will take years to put things right again, in fact we may not even see it until Obama has left office.

Back on point, I like the gallows idea, but you can't make nylon rope without oil, so you can see the predicament that would cause. I suppose we could try the electric chair, but Louisiana power comes mostly from natural gas power plants. Maybe a firing squad, oh yea you need oil to harden the gun barrels. How about we drown them like they used to do to witches, oh yea the coast line is closed due to an oil spill. We could gas em, but how would we protect ourselves against it, you need oil to make the gas masks that we would have to wear so we didn't gas ourselves as well.

Any ideas on how we could deal with BP that doesn't involve their product?

We can only hope that Fossil Fuels finally run out someday: Problem solved, don't you think. Reminds me of a campaign they ran some years ago:



Click to view attachment

Well here's My 50 pence worth....
Exxon valdez
I understand the uproar about this accident but lets not forget that exactly what it was an" accident",No OIL company in the world wants to lose Billions and billions of $,£'s worth of Oil..But to say its all the fault of the British is a little gauling to say the least...whats That saying....."Those in Glass houses should`nt throw stones.."


Natural catastrophic events cause more environmental problems every day ie. underwater Earthquakes/volcanic activity, and such..if one of those where to be found to be that actual cause, who would we have to blame then?
I`m By no means defending BP for their Part in this.. I`m just a little peeved to see that America is Blaming it ALL on the UK/British firms and companies, when It was the American government that allowed them to search and drill for Oil there in the first place..I would assume at that time Huge amounts of Money changed hands to secure the contract for drilling and further expeditions in simmilar environmentaly sensitive areas...


Quick Edit..to add:-
List of Oil spills I think I actually see only One Union Flag(Actually St George Cross Flag) in that little lot..Torry canyon..Scilly isles March 18, 1967..
Just My opinion and No I`m not having a Dig at our American Members ..Just pointing out, We are Not all that bad...

Understand we are not blaming UK/British companies in any way. BP isn't and hasn't been a British company in years, and the owner of the rig was an American investment company. We did this to ourselves. I haven't heard anyone blaming the UK or the British.

I feel I may have gone and shot my mouth off with that last comment I made, but still they claim that "They are a multinational company and its up to them to fix this" and you cant help but ask who this "company" is and what in the hell they are trying to do to remedy the situation and why the rig (which was leased to BP from an American company) was exempted from being considered a danger if a cataclysmic event occurred. On that note why was it when several workers expressed great concern for the pressure building in the drilling pipe operations where not halted to considered the consequences of further drilling, or the blow off stack engaged?

actually according to law, the federal government is responsible for logistics of the cleanup and the actual work. by law BP is responsible for the cost only, however they are doing much more than just pay for it. In fact if you ask me as bad as this is I think BP is doing about all they can and then some. IT would seem that our governments ineptness does nothing but slow down the process Oh and we should quit the stupid blame game, work together and get this taken care of. i forget when it was written into the books, but it was years ago, and the currnet administration was clueless about it. Just another example of our governments ineptness. it seems they rather like to investigate, but not actually work together to solve the problem.