You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 225. Number 224 is here.
Please DO NOT Rec this diary, rather REC THE MOTHERSHIP instead. She needs your love to stay afloat.
Please be kind to kossacks with bandwidth issues. Please do not post images or videos. Again, many thanks for this.
PLEASE visit Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier's Diaries to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!
For a description of the mothership/ROV liveblogging process, check out this thread.
Must read: Lax Oversight Seen in Failure of Oil Rig's Last Line of Defense. Watch video and interactive graphic page, too. Best overview of how the BOP works, and doesn't work, and the management interference that caused the accident.
Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill Reference Material - from Whitis is the best source for everything.. The quantitative data diary has also been moved there.
Jeff Masters of Weather Underground posted his take on the effects of a hurricane passing through the Gulf and making landfall.
Please DO NOT Rec this diary, Rec the Mothership here.
BP put up a video explaining the LMRP procedure and the future plans.
Go to the Deepwater Horizon Data Summary for a wealth of actual data from the Department of Energy.
This is what BP DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE. The following images are guaranteed to make you SICK AT HEART.
These images are not for the faint of heart - DO NOT VIEW THEM LIGHTLY.
Really, I mean it. Hold somebody's hand. Grab a tissue.
A brief reference guide to nicknames you may see in the ROV diaries:
- Gertrude, aka Gerty: the oil volcano
- Lizzy: the diamond saw cutter
- Clampy: the cute ROV
- Crunchy: 30 ft shear. bit the pipe, now a movie star
- Wanda: the dispersant sprayer
- laundry basket: yellow thing that brings things up and down
- Thingy: those things, you know, those things
- Shiny Thing: those really neat things
- Ms. Blanche Flo, aka Blanche, aka Flo: the manifold thingy
Thanks to dov12348 for publishing a diary on Oil Terminology.
Here is a tutorial on the sources of pressure on the well
H/t to Pluto for finding this:
The official casing configuration under the wellhead.
The initial approach above will be followed by open hole and drill pipe magnetic ranging. After they get within 5 feet of the blown out well's lower casing they will ream, case and cement the relief well prior to reaming through the blown well's casing. (Photos from The Oil Drum)
Audio, a slide presentation, and a transcript from Kent Wells' 6-28 briefing is available.
The video feeds we are watching:
==== ROV Feeds =====
44287/44668 - OceanInterventionROV1
44838/45135 - OceanInterventionROV2
46566/54013 - Viking_Poseidon_ROV1
55030/56646 - Viking_Poseidon_ROV2
31499/31500 - Boa_Deep_C_ROV_1
22458/23729 - Boa_Deep_C_ROV_2
45685/49182 - Skandi_ROV1 (herc14)
45683/45684 - Skandi_ROV2 (herc6)
47175/21144 - Enterprise_ROV_1
21145/21327 - Enterprise_ROV_2
37235/37270 - Q4000_ROV1
35523/35624 - Q4000_ROV2
41434/41436 - Oly_ROV1 (Olympic Challenger's ROV1)
40788/40789 - Oly_ROV2 (Olympic Challenger's ROV2)
24951/24975 - Inspire_ROV1 (Discovery Inspiration's ROV1)
30948/35246 - Hos_ROV1 (HOS Adventure ROV1)
35461/36301 - Hos_ROV2 (HOS Adventure ROV2)
Possibly outdated or redundant links (from The Oil Drum):
46245 - BP "Official" #1 (primary)
46260 - BP "Official" #2 (secondary)
46661 - BP mystery feed #1
46663 - BP mystery feed #2
Restricted to web browser based viewing:
CNN Video Streams Note: multi-view is sometimes unavailable.
PBS (fewer security issues than some others)
BP videos Links to all available live feeds from BP.
WKRG - Mobile/Pensacola (Contains link for an iPhone app at the bottom.)
ABC 7 Chicago Live Video Multiple ROV Camera Views (h/t to temptxan for the great find).
Multiple stream feeds (hard on browser/bandwidth):
Bobo's lightweight ROV Multi-feed: A great low impact multi-view page
The best multi-view feed Be patient as load time may take a bit.
Markey's multi-view page
Lusty/papicek/sullivanst multi-feed page (originally created by papicek, small improvement by Lusty, and huge improvement by sullivanst)
Vote For America's awesome clickable multi-view Courtesy of one of our very own Kossacks.
A multi-view Contains feeds from BP, C-SPAN-2, WKRG, and PBS
High-def video feeds
See this thread for more info on using video feeds and on linking to video feeds.
Again, to keep bandwidth down please do not post images or videos.
Links, courtesy of several Kossacks
ACTION
- X Prize Competition for oil spill fix announced
- Requiring a Relief Well: Let's Write a Bill! A diary series by Garret
- National Science Foundation rapid response research grants for Gulf oil spill research
- ERMA: Environmental Response Management Application
BACKGROUND
- Google Crisis Response page for Gulf Oil Spill
- Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
- BP has a good diagram of the cutting process that partially succeeded
DATA
- Sketch Map of Subsea Operations - from Another Kevin
- GeoPlatform - Gulf Response: Mapping the Response to BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
- Kent Wells' technical update, June 10, 2010
- dov12348's oil toxicity links
- dov12348's Ocean currents, wind currents, and hurricane links
- Visualize the spill
- SkyTruth
- Images of the Oilpacalypse, from Tomtech.
- Visit the Oil Spill Crisis Map to see where oil, mousse, tar balls, and eau de crude have been reported on the Gulf coast.
- The BP Deepwater Horizon Unified Command official website. Wherein you can read latest post warning of employment scams associated with the event and much more from the folks handling this.
- Timeline of response here.
- Department of Energy BP Deepwater Horizon Spill site updates.
- Department of Interior BP Deepwater Horizon Response site provides updates, reports, data, links to pictures, etc.
- Rigzone for specific disaster news and news about the offshore industry, in general.
- Courtesy of profgoose here is a list of links from The Oil Drum links on newer developments, etc
- Maritime ship tracking -- courtesy of johnsonwax
- Map of things on the sea floor there. -- outdated, based on unreliable data
- Calculator for distance from BOP. -- not reliable
- NOAA Spill tracking site
HEALTH AND SAFETY
- 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Crisis Wiki
- NIH National Library of Medicine Crude oil spills and Health
- ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH): ToxFAQs™
- CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response: 2010 Gulf of Mexico
Includes fact sheets and health and safety information for Gulf Coast Residents, Response Workers, and Health Professionals
- Reducing Occupational Exposures while Working with Dispersants During the Gulf Oil Spill Response
- EPA Response to BP Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Includes Air Monitoring Data Reports, Daily Average Particulate Matter, Air Sampling Data Files, Real-time Air Monitoring (including TAGA data), and Downloadable data set of hourly air monitoring
- Hester's Special Guest Mothership on Human Health Issues and the BP Disaster
LEGISLATION/FEDERAL RESPONSE
- Administration response to spill.
PERTINENT BLOGS and collections of Oil Spill-specific JOURNALISM
- The Daily Hurricane: Blog run by Bob Cavnar
- Nola.com Oil Spill News
- Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS) Oil Spill News
- Mobile (AL) Press-Register Oil Spill News
- St. Petersburg Times (FL) Oil Spill News
- World newspapers oil section
- The Oil Drum
- Oil & Gas Journal
- Offshore Magazine
- Petroleum News
- Your Oil and Gas News
- World Oil
- Bit Tooth Energy blog (technical discussions) by the famed Heading Out, well known key poster on The Oil Drum blog site.
WILDLIFE
- Help Cornell Lab of Ornithology collect bird information on the Gulf
- Center for Biological Diversity list of Gulf species threatened by the spill
- International Bird Rescue Research Center: Info on bird survival rates
- Summarized tally of affected wildlife
- US Fish & Wildlife Service Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Response h/t to CindyMax Left side of page has "Daily Wildlife Collection Reports" that details wildlife found oiled, alive, deceased, and/or released.
- BP doesn't want photos of dead animals
- Washington Post: People Come Together to Save Coast's Oil-Covered Wildlife (h/t Humphrey)
Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #224 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - bubbanomics
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #223 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Lorinda Pike
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #222 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #221 - New Rules - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #220 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #219 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #218 - Darryl House
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #217 - The Test's Time is UP - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #216 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #215 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #214 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Darryl House
Previous motherships and ROV's from this extensive live blog effort may be found here.
---------------
As I wandered through downtown Chicago today, I targeted Burnham, Root, and Van Der Rhoe structures. I'm no architect, but I've always had a healthy appreciation for those who can see buildings in their heads, down to the last lintel and post. The spill, even 16 hours away, is never far from my mind, though. A handful of people with whom I spoke during stops at bookshops and for lunch remarked on my fleur de lis necklace, asking, as they always do, if I'm a native New Orleanian. I always reply in the negative, but as usual, explaining I'm from Mississippi often as not gets a pitying look.
I ducked into the Barnes and Noble bookshop affiliated with DePaul University to pick up a city map, realizing that even my usually-good head for directions would be well-served by some sort of guide. As I sat at the bar area, drinking my juice, eating granola, and listening to the chatter going on around me, a student sat down. He asked if the seat was taken before climbing in, and with a nod toward the open map, asked if I was a student or a tourist. "Both," I replied. He is a student in the school of law there and we chatted about Chicago's history. He, I think, was pleased that a non-native would know more than the "Devil In the White City" chapter of Chicago history, which was a flattering moment for yours truly, of course.
When he noticed the fleur de lis, he asked if I was from Louisville. (Fleurs de lis decorate many of that city's street signs and sidewalks.) I said no, and as he asked, I reluctantly said I was from Mississippi. We chatted, of course, about the gusher, and what it means to home. He seemed sympathetic but not overly ... understanding of the situation, and as I tried to explain the loss of a generations-old seafood industry and nearly incomprehensible damage to the ecosystem that supports an entire culture to someone who lives inland, I gestured to the buildings around me.
"What," I asked, "if the historical buildings that make Chicago unique were to disappear, replaced by two-dimensional, colorless renderings of them and huge expanses of concrete? And what if at the same time, the financial businesses that run Chicago today were shut down - indefinitely - and the men and women who live there could only find occasional work, provided by the company that shut them down? Finally, what if you, as a native Chicagoan, could only watch the destruction of the city you love, the streets on which your memories are built, and the decades-old buildings that color your dreams?"
He sobered a bit as that image sunk in. "You can lose what makes a place a place," I said, recalling a NYT piece that ran after the storm. "Eventually, the character of a place changes, always. That's why we can 'never go home again'. But if in the span of five years, Chicago changed so much that the streets you knew like the back of your hand a decade before were completely foreign, it's like being told you can't go home again and finding out that the locks are changed and home is gone. If there's a mass exodus of money and jobs and people from the coast, that's a very real possibility in the next few years."
We moved on to lighter things, and his girlfriend walked up. She joined us and we chatted about things I should see while in town. Almost reflexively, he asked where he should take his girlfriend to show her the best of my coast. I told them of my favorite places: walking along East Beach in Ocean Springs as the sun rises; taking the Glenn Swetman tour; visiting Beauvoir, not for the politics of traitors, but for the live oaks and lawns and secret, quiet places hidden from the noise of Highway 90. I told them of salt marshes and floundering and skipping flat rocks on the glassy Sound. I'd occasionally have to revise directions as we made notes, to reflect Katrina's re-shuffling of the landmarks in my mind's eye. And when he asked about food, I told him of the institutions - our best restaurants: Mahoney's, the White Cap, Vrazel's, and Huck's Cove, but with the caveat that they're likely not serving local food after ages of promoting nothing but.
We exchanged emails and parted ways. I don't know if he'll take his girlfriend to Biloxi and stay at the Hard Rock, or not, but I hope he will always remember that the character of our coast is something greater than the sum of its parts. Live oaks and old homes and salt air are all well and good - but there's also that rich patina of time that magically persists, even when a storm comes along, and even more remarkably in the wake of this most recent disaster.
---------------
in the dark time we held vigil,
we held vigil against the night,
we raged against the storm,
we moved with the force of nature
to right a great wrong,
to howl like the wind,
to hold the line,
to renew an ancient vow,
a sacred purpose,
to recall to life the human spirit,
to safeguard that which is most holy to us,
to forge and reforge,
this, above all, to be true,
to awaken our greater nature,
to commune from the deepest regions of our soul,
to heal this realm, to heal our people,
to guard all life, to guard life,
for this generation,
and all to come,
this is why we hold vigil ~
~ ArthurPoet ~
| We Are Here |
| We are here. |
| We are watching. |
| Years from now, |
| if anyone asks, |
| we will tell them: |
| We were there. |
| |
| Maybe it will not matter. |
| Maybe nothing matters. |
| But if we throw up our hands now, |
| maybe someday, |
| years from now, |
| we will ask ourselves, |
| why did we not at least keep watch, |
| why did we not? |
| |
| Maybe someday, some of us |
| will talk with someone younger, |
| and tell of the time we watched. |
| Maybe that someone younger |
| will try harder next time, |
| will do more next time, |
| remembering |
| the time we watched. |
| |
| -- bigjacbigjacbigjac |
We're all stunned and horrified by this disaster. Huddling with good people to calculate the damage and monitor progress, have a laugh when we can, share the sorrow we feel, and learn a lot in the process... That's what I'm really here for.
This is how I best cope. And if it turns out to be a useful thing to others, then that's great.
Kimberley
This is where you want to be for discussion, worrying, tearing up, and caring for each other. It's also where you're welcome to be angry and scream and curse and cry and rant at the criminal negligence and greed that have brought us all together. Most importantly, though, it's where we can learn from those kossaks among us (I'll not name names for abject fear of leaving one of you out, but you know who you are.) who bring the light of knowledge - sometimes with heat, sometimes without it - and teach us about what's happening beneath our Gulf of Mexico. On a personal note, I'll ask you to please be kind to each other in our little boats. There's enough hurt going on outside without bringing it here. - khowell
Bandwidth Warning: NO IMAGES and NO VIDEOS. Readers who are on DIALUP will thank you!