Friday, May 28, 2010

Crude Awakening

"I don't believe at any time we have misled anybody on this"- 
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles


Wow! Some official statement, considering the timeline of facts. 


• The Deepwater Horizon explodes, killing 11 workers. 
• The platform starts to list, but an official announcement is made, it will not sink. 
• The oil rig sinks, but an official announcement is made there is no oil leaking. 
• Oil leaks gushes, but BO is quick to officially announce a low volume of oil. 
• BP tries some different tactics to stop the gush, all are announced to have never been done at this depth before, and none are working. 
• 30 days later, BP CEO, Tony Hayward ($2009 salary $4,563.451 all benefits combined), stands on an oil soaked beach saying things are going well, and BP is making it's best effort. Reporter Katie Couric asks "did you LOOK at the beach???"
• BP now tries the top kill technique. Problem is with many major leaks, it appears the mud they are pumping down is being flushed right out the pipes, rather than pushing back the oil to be able to shut it down. 
• The top kill procedure is high risk, it could blow out the well & make it gush even more. 
• Crews will continue to drill two relief wells, considered the only surefire way to stop the gush. 


I don't know about you.... but the words BP & Surefire make me think of this:




So in review everything they told employees would/could not happen did happen. 
They told the government they could handle an accident if it happened at this depth, and obviously they can't. 
They said it won't sink, and it's not leaking. 


Considering the fact everything they have claimed to date has been untrue....
They have said they will compensate everyone who has a verifiable claim for losses due to the spill. 
Frankly, the notion that the relief wells are a surefire remedy, but they will take till August to complete, basically tripling the amount of oil already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. 
I'm not buying the "surefire" label either. They could just as easily have some kind of issue, or blowout in that operation as well. 


I'm not holding my breath on any promise or claim that BP is making these days. 
I'll believe it when I see it. 
The other thing is no amount of money is going to fix this issue for the environmental aspect of this catastrophe. You can't undue harm done to so many of the endangered species, on so many levels. 


What could possibly be a silver lining about this disaster?
Maybe now the Drill Baby Drill crowd will STFU, and understand what the environmentalists have been arguing about offshore oil drilling all along. 


Our government has been lax & literally in bed w big oil for far too long. 


Too bad it's taking such total destruction for them to wake up & smell the crude to get it. 
But maybe now they will?


"The burst well is spewing oil at a rate of at least 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt told reporters Thursday, meaning 260,000 to 540,000 barrels had leaked as of 10 days ago -- larger than the 250,000 barrels spilled when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989."
~CNN Reports


This is a crime scene, and BP is the culprit. 


The Top kill seems to not be working as well as they thought, so they did the junk shot. 
Will we now see golf balls & trash flowing out of the broken pipe?


Hell, even BP publicly admits it is an environmental catastrophe. That's better than BP standing on an oil soaked beach saying things are just fine. 



4 comments:

nonnie9999 said...

i hope the next hearing in congress begins with one of the congresscritters or senators saying to any and all bp reps why should we believe anything you say today, now that we know that you've been lying all along?

D.K. Raed said...

Graphic inside my head: whenever big oil guys are speaking, I don't hear their words ... all I see is the oil gushing out of that pipe a mile under the ocean ... their pie-hole is the busted pipe, the spewing oil are their words ...

Mauigirl said...

Horrible, horrible horrible. If it takes till August to fix this it will be unimaginably horrible. And if that doesn't work, who knows. I am sick, just sick. I don't even know where to start. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it and can't get back to sleep.

Fran said...

nonnie~ so far they have entirely demonstrated we can't believe anything they say.

DK~ I just read someone refer to it as "geyser cam"- looks like just oil coming out now- but it looks to be coming out in a heavier volume?
(not the heavy mud they were pumping, which is now questionable if the heavy mud is a mixture of toxic chemicals??), they did a junk shot as well, which indicates the mud alone is not getting it.
I suspect the top kill is a failure.
But how about some disclosure on if the mud actually adds more toxins to this disaster?

The people need to know- because as a nation we need to decide if our hunger for oil is worth taking this kind of risk.
A lot of us are already convinced it is not worth the risk, but now that the worst case scenario has occurred, maybe some of the Drill baby drill crowd will have changed their minds?

Maui~ I have that same feeling. Money can;t fix this problem. They had so many rare, endangered & threatened species there- some unique to just the Gulf waters. There is never a "good time" for an oil spill to happen, but this is happening right during nesting & migration season- so the hatchlings are at risk as well.
They just took the Brown Pelican off the endangered species list in Louisiana in November 2009. 316 have died since the spill & 207 sea turtles.
Damn.

But maybe now people will get it that there are too many perils in the offshore drilling & real change will come of it?