It may be the most disturbing site yet: the first heavy sludge now oozing into the marshes of Louisiana as the slick continues to grow in size out in the gulf.
CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports it’s an ominous sight. The oil is thick and black and stretches about a quarter mile down a beach. It goes beyond the booms into the sensitive marsh lands which are home to migratory birds.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal flew over it Tuesday.
“This wasn’t just sheen, we were seeing heavy oil out there,” Jindal said. “This wasn’t just tar balls. It shows you how quick the oil showed up.”
When CBS News tried to reach the beach, covered in oil, a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest. Coast Guard officials said they are looking into the incident.
Also on Tuesday, nearly two dozen tar balls were found off Key West, Fla., the U.S. Coast Guard said, but the agency stopped short of saying whether they came from the massive oil spill.
Love that they are going to arrest anyone who provides coverage of the disaster. Loved this, too:
Coast Guard Lt. Anna K. Dixon said no one at the station in Key West was qualified to determine where the tar balls originated. They have been sent to a lab for analysis.
Why don’t you take a wild fucking guess?
*** Update ***
And the reason you don’t take wild guesses is because the tar balls weren’t from the spill.
Chuck Butcher
Latest news I heard was the tar balls had another source.
jwb
Actually, the tar balls tested negative, at least that’s what the Coast Guard says.
Zuzu's Petals
They didn’t have to guess. They took tests:
Keith
The part about the tar balls not being from the spill kinda confuses me a bit. Yeah, it’s not from the spill, but shouldn’t people be concerned that balls of tar are washing up on the beaches nonetheless?
neill
as long as the media are kept away, the environmental impact will be negligible, god dammit!
Zuzu's Petals
@Keith:
There’s all kinds of natural seepage at any time. Don’t know if it applies here though.
Joseph Nobles
Patience. The Deepwater Horizon oil just hit the Loop Current. It will be in Key West soon enough.
Zuzu's Petals
@Keith:
Sorry, couldn’t edit my last on my iPad, but there’s also this:
Litlebritdifrnt
Rush Limbaugh says there is no oil spill, in fact the panic about the oil spill is akin to the fraud of global warming. Must be true cause Rush said so today.
Taterstick
The tarballs could have come from multiple sources. For example, bunker oil from ships, previous leaks from other wells, etc. Happens all the time.
On the other hand, chasing away reporters and threatening to arrest them will get some Coastie assigned to patrolling the waters off of Bumfuck, Alaska.
Midnight Marauder
You’re fucking right they’re looking into the incident. This shit is completely unacceptable. Why in the hell is the Coast Guard doing BP’s dirty work? There is no way that shit should be acceptable.
And in a related bit of good news, someone is finally going to bat to try and force BP to release the video feed they have of the oil spill:
Martin
There’s no way the tar balls made it to Key West, unless they arrived in the pocket of a tourist. The loop current simply doesn’t move that fast.
There have been plenty of previous leaks out there to have supplied those tar balls, which I think makes a bigger point than had they come from the Horizon.
Mark S.
This was in the sidebar of the article:
Huh? I know corporations run our government but I’ve never seen it stated so baldly.
J sub D
This could not be true.
Take a guess where that came from.
JCT
Hey!
When is Haley Barbour going to shoot that “Come vacation on the Gulf Coast ” commercial? You know the one when he frolics on the shore in his Speedo surrounded by happy children?
Don’t mind all the dead and dying sea life children, just bury them in your sandcastles…
Keith
@Zuzu’s Petals:
They’ve been showing up at Dauphin Island (Alabama) as well. I dunno if they traced the source of those, but it’s a shame if DI gets hit. It’s got some major litter in the form of rusted WWII tank parts IIRC, but beautiful white sand and salt marshes all over the place.
Citizen_X
Watch the video; see for yourself the coastie telling the CBS people, “This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours.”
Fine then: tell BP to get the fucking BP Navy out there to enforce their “rules.” You guys work for us.
Fergus Wooster
Fuck me. Great.
When Jindal is having to acknowledge the scale of the disaster, you know we’re fucked. (Barbour will live in his fantasy-world until he’s nostril-deep in tar. Then a couple gurgling spasms, and release.)
How sick is it that the only upside has been that the initial spill is in the GOM Dead Zone? As it moves into the LA wetlands, even that dubious consolation is rendered moot.
Anybody got a new planet we can start colonizing?
Tom
Along the same lines, they aren’t allowing teams to get a more accurate look at how big the
leaksgeysers are.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
sbjules
I live in Santa Barbara & we had a “blow out” in 1969 on a Union Oil platform in the Santa Barbara Channel. There are still 20 oil producing platforms there. Just no new ones. In any event, there is always a boat called the Mr. Clean in the channel ready to clean up any spills. I have not heard of anything like that in the gulf. Did they truly think it would never happen?
There used to be asphaltum mines onshore in the Santa Barbara area. Although they were “mined out” there is a lot of tar on the beach.
salacious crumb
After Jindal is done touring the oil spill and bitching about its effect on working class people, then he will go back to sucking his corporate overlords dick.
Derek
Itmakes me furious!
@JCT:
More like, “Build some sand mausoleums, kids.”
Zuzu's Petals
The Coast Guard responds:
Derek
@Tom:
Yeah, I’m sure BP would love for people to not actually know how much fucking oil they end up spilling into the Gulf. Motherfuckers.
sloan
I bet BP will replace those Coast Guard guys with some Blackwater goons and try to intimidate people who get too close to the truth.
bago
Can you believe those scientists want to spend money on something called oil volcano monitoring?
sloan
@Zuzu’s Petals:
So now we have media “embeds” on government media tours right here in America.
Awesome!
srv
I think Tina Fey should be making some new Elvis beach parties. Thune can be Elvis and Sarah can play the love interest. I suggest:
BP Clambake
Paradise, Gulf Style
Spills! Spills! Spills!
Black Aruba
Flaming Horizons
Fergus Wooster
@sloan:
This. If they can, they will. Hopefully the public outrage will be sufficient to make Interior / the Administration smack that down.
Although I’m trying to manage my expectations at this point. I’m afraid John had it months ago – we’d best all start learning to grow food.
Midnight Marauder
@Tom:
This…this cannot be real.
Accurate measurements of how much oil is spilling from the well “might even detract” from the cleanup effort? How…? What…? I mean…?
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get my mind to stop reeling from the audacity and disdain it takes to make a comment like that.
scav
__
clearly, knowing the scope and / or scale of the problem you’re dealing with has simply nothing to do with how you attack it. No wonder they’re attempting to cure a decapitation with a band-aid.
And, just so I know who’s who when they knock down doors, if Apple’s enforcement arm is the California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team and BP has the Coasties, anybody know who’s got the Marines? GS?
scav
@sloan:
Blackwater guarding oil spills? Does just what it says on the label that.
Keith G
And why didn’t the dumb ass, chicken shit reporter smell the story of a life time and just say, “Alright boys, you’re gonna have to arrest me.”?
Zuzu's Petals
@sloan:
I dunno, they described journalists as being “embedded” with government responders in post-Katrina New Orleans. Seems like an easy enough way to distinguish media traveling and working with govt or military (which the USCG is) units from media observing from the outside.
Just my opinion.
Big City Mary
Appropo to that, I am driving home this evening from Central Long Island across Manhattan into New Jersey from an assignment. As I am nervously inching along the Long Island Expressway going West (thanking my lucky stars I was not going East) I was thinking “how did we get here with these ugly, nasty roads full of delapitating asphalt as far as the eye can see that we can no longer afford to repair, and air pollution and sitting in these dangerous deadly tons of steel” and the answer is and I know it, the oil companies and the car companies. But I doubt even they had guessed in the 1940s and 50s, that their strategic marketing goal to eliminate mass transit and get everyone behind the wheel of an automobile or on a gas powered bus, would release such hell.
As I was driving on Monday moning to the assignment the radio was announcing all the cut backs to the Long Island Railroad that were going into effect that day due to the budget problems which is happening with all mass transit in the NorthEast.
But it is where we are. So I am thinking how do we say enough. And I am thinking a massive driving protest in which those of us with cars, most of us, just stop on the road where ever we are at the same time on the same day, and just stay there for a while. Have a picnic, take some pictures, chat a while, share some tunes. We could very easily shut down interstate commerse in the whole country.
I know, I know – alot if issues to resolve like clear paths to burning homes and hospitals, but there has to be a way.
auntieeminaz
@Joseph Nobles: How soon before it hits Rush Limbaugh’s estate?
Fred X. Quimby
— Louisiana Misgoverner Bobby Jindal
kommrade reproductive vigor
If people just stop paying attention the spill when it bothers them it will get bored and go away.
MobiusKlein
There was a crime scene in Union Square, SF today.
For some reason, the police threatened to arrest me when I went to look. I had a video camera, so I was part of the media!
First Amendement, baby, let me in!
(end sarcasm)
TooManyJens
This honestly isn’t meant as a shot at Glenzilla, but the first thing I thought when I saw this post was, “Cole’s updates are so much more awesome than Greenwald’s.”
Derek
gothamist.com/2010/05/19/kevin_costner_waterworld_will_save.php
Crisis averted, Kevin Costner is going to fix the Gulf.
jayjaybear
@JCT: [Haley Barbour frolicing in Speedos]
You completely put me off my dinner. Thanks.
Oh, and what are the odds of Jindal having treated this like a disaster if it had happened prior to Jan 20, 2009?
Violet
@auntieeminaz:
Well Rush lives on the Atlantic coast of Florida, not the Gulf coast, so it’ll be a little while at least.
Ed Marshall
Ummm, the loop current, leads to the gulf stream which means that oil is going to wind up in Africa and Northern Europe eventually. It’s not the American people’s ocean.
Toni
Midnight Marauder
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get my mind to stop reeling from the audacity and disdain it takes to make a comment like that.
(sorry first comment not sure of all the tags)
anyway,
try this one on for size:
I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest. It is impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment as we go forward. We’re going to do that with some of the science institutions in the U.S. But everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest.
Tony Hayward, CEO, BP
Perhaps he doesn’t know the definition of modest.
assclown
South of I-10
I posted this earlier in the open thread, but I am posting it again. It still fucking breaks my heart. There are plenty more and these are from Jindal’s little boat ride today.
kay
@Zuzu’s Petals:
How (why) do you know so much about offshore drilling?
It’s not a veiled attack. I’ve been reading your comments throughout, (not all of them, but many) and you know a lot about this whole subject, and this specific disaster.
Is it something you were interested in prior to the current situation? Environmental, industry. or a combo of both?
sparky
accurate post headline, though.
yeah all kinds of icky things normally wash up down here. you do not want to know what gets picked up off the beaches. trust me.
ps: i have no connection with the folks who put out the linked blog, but this post of theirs is an eloquent assessment of how we got here.
lawguy
@Zuzu’s Petals: And a nice easy way to “direct” the flow and amount of information.
Given the government’s response to this is there any reason to believe that they believe it is in their best interests to have a lot of coverage. Look at Katrina.
God I never thought I’d think, let alone say something like that.
Rick Taylor
This is weird.
__
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
I’ve posted on several threads that my son is a merchant marine, and actually worked on the Deepwater Horizon for nearly five years. He knew nine of the men who died (all the Transocean employees).
I guess I’d say both of us therefore have a personal interest in knowing the industry is well-regulated and performs in the most environmentally safe way possible. At the same time, it’s important that decisions are based on accurate information.
Tom Hilton
[/litella]
DougL
Nobody in the MSM ever bothers to cover all the beaches where tarballs aren’t washing up on shore and marshes that aren’t covered in oil. *frowny face*
Zuzu's Petals
PS to Kay:
I actual know very little about the technical side of offshore drilling etc. But I’ve been following the discussions at the professional boards like gCaptain and The Oildrum. Both are excellent sources of information, and often more accurate and timely than the media reporting.
Rick Taylor
@Rick Taylor:
Ooops, that was already heavily covered above in comments. Never mind!
Zuzu's Petals
@lawguy:
I suppose that could be argued. What do you suggest, that they not allow media to be on the boats and airplanes?
kay
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Thanks. I wondered. I’ve enjoyed reading your comments, in any event. I didn’t know one thing about any of it.
Linda Featheringill
@Litlebritdifrnt:
This looks like a tactical mistake on Rush’s part. Too many people can look at it and see it for themselves.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
Thanks for the kind words.
There seems to be so much to worry about when he’s offshore…the helicopter ride, the weather, etc. You just never want to think he’s in danger because someone isn’t doing their job.
(They actually outran Katrina in that rig. Disconnected, turned on the thrusters, and got going…at a full five knots per hour. The eye passed right over where they’d been drilling.)
Martin
@Big City Mary: Unless you’re in a truck, never, ever take the LIE.
These roads are often dilapidated not because we lack the money but because those elements of our infrastructure are critical and shutting them down for repair/rebuilding is nigh impossible.
The LIE is the only major road that accepts truck travel for the 7 million people that live there. Shut it down for repairs, even partially, and it would be a MAJOR issue. The island has few other options – there’s limited port capacity and limited air transport capacity. Only relatively recently (last 20 years) has rail freight been restored, and that’s limited in scope because the passenger traffic is so high.
So the costs of fixing the LIE aren’t just the direct cost, but also the secondary cost of replacing the functionality of the LIE while it’s being repaired, which is no small feat. That’s one of the biggest problems with US infrastructure – lack of redundancy and flexibility.
sukabi
@Zuzu’s Petals: maybe they should try looking at BP’s other rig out there the Atlantis.
kay
@Zuzu’s Petals:
I spend a lot of time on the Great Lakes, mostly Michigan and Erie, because my husband is a fanatic about them, and I’ve grown to love them, but I’ve never spent any time on any coast.
I have been genuinely scared two or three times when there’s weather, way out on Michigan with him, in one or another of his series of too-small boats. I can’t imagine what being out in Katrina was like. It’s wild when the rain starts washing over in sheets.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
Yes, fortunately they were out of the way when Katrina passed over their well. Just barely.
He was on another rig when Mitch came through. He phoned me from the bridge to say the last helicopter had turned back and he was going to have to ride it out. I faxed him Psalm 91…am sure there was no embarrassment there, heh.
Turned out he was evacuated, but he said the helicopter ride back was the really scary part.
I’ve seen Lake Michigan twice, from the Chicago shore…and wow, that is like looking at an ocean. Who can blame you for being freaked in one of those storms.
kay
@Zuzu’s Petals:
It’s a beautiful thing, that lake. I can be out there a hundred times and never get over all that fresh water.
Older
@Midnight Marauder: He didn’t say “clean-up effort”, he said “response effort”.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
I bet.
I love the ocean, but I have a special feeling about rivers. Not necessarily being on them, just watching ’em.
Egypt Steve
If we had a real news media, they would have taken the bust. Back in ’68, John Chancellor was arrested on the floor of the Rethuglican national convention. As he was led off by security guards, he gave the greatest sign-off in the history of American broadcast news: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”
There was a newsman.
bago
There is only so much physical space very close to the well. You can either fill it up with monitoring equipment, or you can fill it up with repair equipment. I think it’s in everybody’s interest to have it be repair equipment.
sloan
@Zuzu’s Petals: I think the whole embed thing just rubs me the wrong way. I guess the rationale for Iraq and Katrina was that it would be too dangerous for a reporter to go in without protection – not that it ever stopped journalists before.
This time around I’m not sure why a government escort would be required to protect a journalist from observing an ecological disaster caused by a private company on public land.
Zuzu's Petals
@sloan:
I don’t see where it’s required. They say there is nothing to prohibit media from going in on their own unless there is a safety problem or it would interfere with the response activities.
Allowing them to accompany responders on their boats or planes may consolidate resources or may be the only safe (or least risky or invasive) way to get them into some areas…I don’t know enough to say. In any case, that would be the media organization’s choice.
PS, I assume it was the same with Katrina, as when reporters accompanied Natl Guard units in New Orleans. There were plenty and plenty of news orgs reporting on their own.
Elie
@Chuck Butcher:
Tar balls in Florida had another source. These are for real I think
Zuzu's Petals
@Elie:
The piece was about tar balls in Key West.
celticdragonchick
@salacious crumb:
I’m waiting for another statement from him on how we are wasting federal tax dollars studying volcanoes…
It would be amusing to put him up close and personal to a pyroclastic flow in progress and get his opinion on that!
scav
@bago: you talk as though it is either / or situation. plus the fact that monitoring is an integral part of the solution. do one really just stop monitoring vitals during an operation on a human?
Elie
@bago:
Is it really that either/or?
I tell you what: similar scenario on humans in surgery:
You are having vascular surgery on your whatever, and that damned medium sized artery just started going and pulled back under a bunch of tissue. Pretty quickly, the whole op site is filled with blood and the surgeon had better find it pretty damned quick. You know who is hanging right there and is responsible for measuring or at least estimating that blood loss pretty damned quick? The anesthesiologist. (they always say it cost nothing to be put to sleep — its making sure you WAKE UP!) Heh
Anyway, that anesthesiologist has MOST of the equipment to make sure you ass wakes up and he had better damned well be pretty close to a correct estimate of what he has to do to make up that lost blood volume and electrolytes, clotting factors, etc, Dig? The surgeon RELIES on the Anesthesiologist to do what he/she has to do so that they can both get the patient through this emergency alive.
BP has been less than forthright about their plight and therefore, how can we know that they have the equivalent of the Anesthesiologist on site to help figure out just how aggressive they have to be and on what time frame using what means?
If what has been suggested, that this is a leak of multiple proportions of magnitude HIGHER than what they say, it seems to me that the whole world needs to know that and to bring whatever resources to bear to get on top of it. Maybe if that is true, we need to stop dicking around with their sucking tube solution and get onto something way more aggressive.
But we cant do that if we keep favoring the BP view of reality (which already has caused this whole fucked up situation to begin with, wouldnt you say?)
This is not a salon discussion. If BP is wrong and their solution insufficient, the Gulf is dead. There isnt enough money in anyone’s bank account for that and in a real creepy way, maybe they already have figured that and figured that they cant be made fully accountable to that scale of catastrophe.
But I say this: It is absolutely necessary for the government to stick a big, aggressive and rectum brusing foot up BPs ass right now and make sure that these folks are being straight up. To do that, they will need data. For all the bitching about the equipment that they need to fix this, BP didnt have the right equipment or the right equipment functioning to prevent all this, so it seams that its up to them to figure out how to get our necessary monitoring equipment to fit next to whatever they need.
YEAH, I am angry and I don’t give a f—- about what BP needs. They NEED to shut up, put their heads down and keep trying to fix this and stop worrying about managing what we, the people, the government do to make sure their lying, incompetent asses do what they need to do.
Zuzu's Petals
@lawguy:
PS, speaking of “controlling the flow of information,” you may be interested to know that Adm. Landry, the head of the response team, held a teleconference with several bloggers, including one from ThinkProgress, on Monday. Video and transcript links here:
The Oildrum
Elie
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Yes, as in Key West, Florida…
did I misunderstand your comment?
Zuzu's Petals
@Elie:
Uhm, I possibly misunderstood you. Sorry if so.
The article (and Chuck’s comment) was about the Key West tar balls. That’s what I thought you were talking about when you said “these are for real” I thought you meant the ones in the article.
Are there others you’re thinking of?
TenguPhule
When he’s begging for his life with a gun cocked to his head, I’m going to have to go with “The answer is no to that.” and pull the trigger.
Zuzu's Petals
Pictures of Jindal’s tour of the marsh here:
First signs of thick oil found in Plaquemines marshes.
Just heartwrenching.
Robert Sneddon
@Elie:
You are describing an operating theatre with half a dozen skilled people standing around a brightly-lit table where the patient is directly accessible to the hands and eyes of said skilled people in real time.
The well-head BP is trying to shut off in the Gulf is five thousand feet, a mile below the surface in total darkness surrounded by turbulent muck, gas bubbles and oil obscuring the view. The site is only accessible by robot and manned submersibles which move slowly and carefully to avoid hitting each other or running into the wellhead gear and damaging it even further. They have a couple of cameras already on site; trying to get more monitoring gear safely into place takes time and resources they would rather expend in trying to shut the damned leak off, or at least slow it down.
If you want to compare the wellhead site with a hospital surgery imagine you’re operating on a patient in total darkness in a room filled with thick turbulent smoke. You have a couple of small flashlights to illuminate the scene and you can’t get closer than twenty feet to the operating table with your hands. You have a pair of binoculars to see what you’re doing and some lazy-tongs to reach the open wound to try and stitch it up. At the same time a bunch of folks outside the operating theatre are banging on the door and screaming that you’re doing it all wrong and they want you to stop what you’re doing so they can come in and look.
As an aside, forget the garbage reporting by “experts” about the leak being 10 times the BP estimate and more. No single well, and certainly not an exploratory well anywhere on the planet can produce 50,000 barrels a day even when it is running properly. That kind of output is close to 0.1% of the entire planetary production of oil (about 80 million barrels per day). There was an End Times loon who got his rantings into the press a few days back who claimed the oil leak was that high and it was going to destroy the world and nobody fact checked him before the claims went viral.
Tata
@Robert Sneddon:
What elegant disdain – and yet it is an illuminating argument for why deep sea drilling shouldn’t happen in the first place.
brantl
@Robert Sneddon: He wasn’t a loon.
Robert Sneddon
@brantl:
He was talking about End Times prophecy, about all the oil in the reservoir leaking out and the dome collapsing causing a giant volcanic eruption. He was a loon (probably still is).
hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/05/13/1953208/Gulf-Gusher-Worst-Case-Scenario?art_pos=1
The drill hole into the reservoir is about 6 inches in diameter although the valve gear on the seabed is much larger for various reasons. There’s no way to get much more oil than the leak estimates BP have already issued out of an oil reservoir via a drill hole of that size. A field in production has multiple drill holes feeding the collection system to increase the rate of flow. This was a exploratory drilling operation, not meant for production in the short term.
Zuzu's Petals
@Tata:
I’ll take “elegant disdain” based in fact over viral rants based in ignorance any day. Just my opinion.
(Not saying Elie’s comment was an ignorant rant…just describing much of what’s out there right now.)
Zuzu's Petals
@Robert Sneddon:
To be fair, Adm. Landry is willing to consider that figure as well. Not as a current estimate, but as a worst-case possibility:
teachergirl
@Midnight Marauder:
You got that right. If one dime of taxpayer money is used to clean up this fucking mess, there will be some serious ramifications. The federal government should be directing this show, spending BP & Haliburton’s money to clean it up first, then those two dirtbag companies should pay back the fishermen, tourist industry, and the good people of the Gulf coast for their property damage and GDP losses. The pics are nauseating to see, and the real picture is surely disasterous.
Robert Sneddon
@Zuzu’s Petals:
The best production from a single well ever is/was in the Saudi Gawahr (sp?) field, producing about 100,000 barrels per day up a 12″ diameter bore. That’s with the best oil geology known to man exhausting into atmospheric pressure (15psi) from a shallow low-density dome, with multiple drill-holes leading off the main bore.
What you’ve got in the Gulf is a 5″ or 6″ pipe with a lot of gear on top of it interrupting the flow of a single bore drilled not very deep into a not-very-good bit of oil geology. It’s exhausting into water a mile deep facing a backpressure of 2000 psi or so. There is no way in God’s earth that that single exploratory hole could emit 50,000 bpd without explosive fracturing, steam/CO2 injection and heavy-duty pumps delivering the oil to the surface.
Zuzu's Petals
@Robert Sneddon:
I understand. You notice she said “if the well let go.”