Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

NewOrleans IndyMedia / Houston IndyMedia /

If Americans want to visualize victory over the oil spill invasion that threatens our beloved Gulf of Mexico, then we should call for a federalized war of skimmers and booms.

We should not be timid about it. We should visualize a series of booms in concentric rings that contain the spill, with skimmers at work within each ring, sucking up the oil. Industry websites claim that extracted oil can then be mixed with chemicals and reused for fuel.

The effort might also be helped by supertankers “that come in empty, with the huge valves and huge pumps that they have to suck the oil off the surface of the sea so it stops drifting into the wetlands”, says former president of Shell Oil John Hofmeister in a recent interview with the BBC.

As part of this winnable war, dispersants must be stopped.

Our winning hope for this war is nicely exemplified by the Coast Guard Cutter Walnut, which just left Hawaii for her 6,000-mile journey to the Gulf.

“The Walnut is 225-feet long, has a crew of about 50 people, and boasts state-of-the-art communications equipment and oil skimming capabilities,” reports Minna Sugimoto for Hawaii News Now. “Designed after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the Walnut comes equipped with a boom and pump oil collection system.”

“The skimmer sucks the oil in and pumps it into a bladder,” says Jeffrey Randall, U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer. “That bladder is then filled up, transferred to another vessel that takes it away.”

“Coast Guard officials say the crew goes through annual spill response training, but this will be the first time it’ll actually put oil in the equipment,” Sugimoto reports.

As early as April 29 the Los Angeles Times was reporting the Navy’s mobilization of booms and skimmers and the “opening (of) two of its bases in Mississippi and Florida as staging areas.” WLOX- Biloxi reporter Steve Phillips filed an eyewitness account of the activity from the Gulfport Seabee base.

 Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy is commander of the US Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA) which includes the Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV). Within these commands we find initial offerings of equipment, expertise, and training that will be required to defend the Gulf of Mexico against the oil spill invasion.

“A team of NAVSEA professionals are working around the clock to protect the sensitive coast lined with oil booms and perform open-ocean skimming at the source,” says Vice Adm. McCoy at a web page posted by the Naval News Service (NNS).

“NAVSEA’s Chief Engineer for Underwater Salvage (Capt. Patrick Keenan) has been an integral member of BP’s Engineering Command Cell that has assembled the best and brightest minds from around the world to try to stop the leak,” said Vice Adm. McCoy.

“With a single phone call from the U.S. Coast Guard, 66,000 feet of open ocean boom and nine self-contained skimming systems, and the professionals to install and operate them, were dispatched (representing the initial shipment). That’s your Navy — a 24-hour Navy, incredibly ready and trained to respond to a wide variety of national taskings,” boasts Vice Adm. McCoy.

While the Coast Guard and Navy probably do not have enough booms and skimmers on hand to supply the war for the salvation of the Gulf Coast, they do appear to have sufficient knowledge to gather and organize the inventories and people needed. Surely there are enough booms and skimmers in the world that can be air-transported quickly and organized effectively.

Meanwhile, activists and biologists are converging on a consensus that toxic dispersants must be stopped.

“The use of dispersants is a crime on top of a crime, sanctioned by a federal agency, Lisa Jackson, and the EPA,” writes Elizabeth Cook at New Orleans IndyMedia.“It is the rape of the Gulf of Mexico, its sea creatures, and the people who depend on this ecosystem for a living.“

“Diluting the evidence, this (dispersant) solution was designed only for public relations, even as it made the situation much worse,” argues Linh Dinh at CounterPunch. “Imagine Agent Orange in the water. Thousands of people are already sick, with millions more to come.”

With enough booms to contain the spill, and enough skimmers to extract the oil from the water, there would appear to be no need to add the risk of toxic dispersants to the already toxic spill.

When on Sunday’s “State of the Nation” program, CNN’s Candy Crowley asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen to describe the military response to the Gulf oil spill, the answer she got was a textbook case of incoherence.

Within the space of 141 words the Chair of the Joint Chiefs zig-zagged between “a support role” that simply responded to BP requests on the one hand to “doing everything we can. . . with every capability that we have” on the other. His confusing ambivalence was perhaps best expressed in the sentence: “And as best I’ve been able to understand, the technical lead for this in our country really is the industry.”

While it may be true that the deep-water attempt to stop the oil spill belongs primarily to industry engineers (although, along with Dr. John, we may protest why this has to be the case) there is ample evidence that the military is perfectly qualified to take command of pollution control.

Remember Dunkirk or the Berlin Airlift? There are times in military history when impossible missions have been accomplished through mobilized determination. We should not give up hope that the war to the save the Gulf of Mexico can go down in history as one of those remarkable efforts.

<pEditor’s Note: thanks to Elizabeth Cook of New Orleans IndyMedia for help with research and issue development.

In a perfect world the health insurance industry would be liquidated overnight, replaced by a universal care fund, aka single payer. But until last week, the reason for abolition wasn’t so clearly phrased by the insurance industry itself. Now they say it plain: “You can’t make us cover Tiny Tim.”

If the insurance industry wants to boast that it can cut Tiny Tim out of its future, then it should expect the righteous judgment that falls upon the head of each and every Scroogelike creature–a lonesome and cold gravestone. Nor should we forget to pick their corporate pockets thoroughly as we ready their legacies for the burial that their recent history so richly deserves.

For a day or two anyway, Washington danced enthusiastically with the profiteering managers of our health care economy. And from a distance it looked like a partnership that had half a chance. Then the creeps started whispering little things in Washington’s ear.

But situations like this are what elbows are made for, and it would be interesting to see who would vote against a little old law of one sentence only. “Any insurance company who refuses to cover a child will forfeit all of its assets immediately to the US Treasury.”

Oh, and “God bless us all, every one!”–gm

Below are the links and clips that first appeared in the announcements section of the Texas Civil Rights Review before we read an analysis at The Oil Drum which is altogether logical and depressing. We are at a death watch now, praying for a miracle.–gm

Link to critcal: TCRR Critical Calendar

Our timeline of events for the first seven weeks with notes, press clips, and commentary. Our chief interest in the facts pertained to calculation of an oil containment and recovery “deficit” derived from subtracting official figures of millions of gallons of “oily water” recovered from official estimates of oil gushing up.

But already by week eight the deficit figures calculated during week seven have become obsolete. As Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reports, we should be considering the number that a NOAA group wrote on a white board shortly after the fatal blowout: 60,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. Since this is the moral equivalent of war, we should take the higher limit as the challenge before us.

100,000 barrels per day is 4.2 million gallons per day, which means that oil containment and recovery capacities are missing at least 90 percent of the threat. By day 48 we calculated an average “oily water” recovery rate of about 400,000 gallons, but we do not know how to gauge the percent of oil to water, which could be as low (or lower than) 10 percent.–gm (updated June 13).

Official Date of Blowout: Apr. 20, 2010

Forecast for June 16, 2010

deepwaterhorizon.noaa.gov

See Also

New Orleans IndyMedia

UGA GulfBlog

Plume Detectives: “Think of it as gas-saturated oil that has been shot out of a deep sea cannon under intense pressure – it’s like putting olive oil in a spray can, pressurizing it and pushing the spray button. What comes out when you push that button? A mist of olive oil. This well is leaking a mist of oil that is settling out in the deep sea.”

Louisiana Bucket Brigade Crisis Map Reports

Grassroots Reports from Gulf Coast Community.

Misdirection Exposed: Dylan Ratigan Clip

Are we seeing the whole truth?

Gulf Tribunal

“We urge all readers to research the activities of Halliburton and BP in the months leading up to DeepWater Horizon’s explosion on April 20, and then sinking on April 22, which happens to be Earth Day.”

Gulf Restoration Network

See Latest Footage BP Doesn’t Want You to See: The amount of oil we encountered (on June 4 flyover) is staggering. The lack of response vessels working to contain this oil is bitterly disappointing. At the “source” we counted at most a dozen boats with boom working to contain the oil. However, the source is the only place we found these boats and none of them appeared to be skimmer vessels. Other than the “source” itself, we spotted no other containment efforts until we flew along the Louisiana coast from East Bay to Grand Isle.

Defend New Orleans

---

In an effort to provide regular news updates and accurate information about Louisiana seafood to journalists and the general public, the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board has launched a new website, www.louisianaseafoodnews.com.

---

Gov

USCG National Strike Force / Gulf Strike Team / Official DeepWater Horizon Response Website / US Navy SUPSALV / MMS

Com

Abanaki Oil Skimmers / CINC / ITOPF / Desmi Ro-Clean / Koseq / Lamor-Slickbar / RecoveredEnergy

---

Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com

More Video Resources

Long Road to Restoration: PBS interview with RALPH PORTIER, Professor of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University (expert on microbial approaches to oil cleanup); and AARON VILES, Gulf Restoration Network (“this is going to be a years and decades problem”).

---

The Oil Drum: A Busted Well Bore — All the Way Down?

What does this mean? It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad, same dynamics.

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

Not so Fast: A Cracked Well Bore Would Already Have Done More Damage

if there was a crack, in the same way as with the BOP, then over time that would have been eaten away as oil, gas and mud flowed through it. Once a flow starts it will rapidly eat out a larger passage, as the above has demonstrated. Once that passage was created then oil flow through it to the surface would make it impossible to see what was going on around the well (look at the cloud above the BOP). In fact there are very clear pictures from under the BOP. This would seem to show that there is no oil leaking there at present.

Early Warning: Dylan Ratigan Clip

Are
we seeing the whole truth?

By Greg Moses

When the President stood at the beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana on Friday May 28 did it look like a major invasion was coming? Was the readiness of the President’s forces in full array?

By Tuesday, June 1, the front-line sea battle between the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama will stretch about 270 miles. The invasion has been in the making for about forty days, and the President of the United States declares that he has been briefed on its progress daily.

If the President had just spent forty days preparing for a sea invasion that was projected to hit between Boston and Washington, DC what would you expect to see along that shoreline behind the President’s back? 300 men with rakes?

Elizabeth Cook, writing for New Orleans IndyMedia, calls this a constitutional crisis, and so it is. Even the level-headed David Gergen recognizes that the oil spill on the Gulf Coast raises the most fundamental question of social contract. The preamble to the Constitution declares that it shall provide for “the common defense.” So where is the common defense of the Gulf Coast?

It is time for the Commander in Chief to tell the whole truth about the oil spill invasion. It is time for him to show us a map of the NOAA oil spill forecast and tell us exactly who is doing what and where.

Common sense suggests that two hundred miles of floating booms should have been deployed to stop the oil at the surface and that massive resources in skimming technologies should have been applied. Where is the boom line? Where are the skimmers? We deserve a detailed action map linked to the White House website. We deserve to see a timeline of what has been ordered when.

Military history instructs us that new wars demand innovations of tactics and materiel. What are the innovations of this war? What new equipment is being deployed?

Communities across the United States participate in networks of civil defense and national guard. There are at least 15 million people unemployed. The Gulf Coast is full of people who would drop everything if they were needed to lend a hand. Who will be mobilized? What can be done with civilian boats and volunteers?

The President has promised “cleanup.” Okay. There will come a time for that. Meanwhile we want to know this week what is being done to turn back and contain that oil spill–using everything at the President’s command.