Oh Jeez
Every five days for one hundred days we had an Exxon Valdez spewing into the gulf.
I'm sticking with my estimate of 65,000 barrels a day giving 6.5 million versus the official 5 million barrels flooded into the gulf.
Say 273,000,000 gallons of crude oil.
Plus
1,500,000 million [oops back to work] gallons of Corexit dispersant.
They think I am going to swallow the story that it has all dispersed, and we can now go back to watching whatever mindless piece of celebrity misadventure there is to take our minds off reality?
Sure I'm a ___ing believer!
Hey presto no oil plumes
Hell Yes I'm a ___ing believer!
Hey presto hardly anything dead at all
Slap me silly I'm a __ing believer!
Nothing to see here now move a long
Holly shit I'm a __ing Believer!
Drill Baby Drill
Bring it on, I'm a ___ing believer!
"The vast majority of the oil has now been contained, it's been skimmed, Mother Nature has done its part, it's evaporated," Carol Browner NOAA
Heck of a job Browner!
Best NOAA estimates say:
It says that 5% of the oil was burned, 3% skimmed and 8% removed by chemical dispersant. About 17% was removed after BP was finally able to attach a pipeline to the wellhead a mile below the surface of the sea and pump it on to ships.
That means 67% was cleaned up by good old mother nature by dilution and evaporation!
That means its gone..right?
Oh jeez.
OK, so what fine does BP now get, since its miraculously gone, and you know the oil plumes that everybody measured and tracked never existed?
First we had
NOAA's testing backs up reports from scientists at a number of universities who had suggested that plumes of oil were suspended beneath the surface of the Gulf.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
Now we are being sold
US government scientists yesterday raised questions about claims of vast plumes of oil hovering beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico as they issued a report saying that 75% of the worst spill in American history has been cleaned up or naturally dispersed.
The report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests that the remaining oil is now so diluted that it is no longer a big threat.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
I think I'm beginning to smell a rat.
oh
Scientists at the NOAA are preparing a report on the long-term effect of dispersant which is likely to figure in negotiations between BP and Washington over compensation payments for cleaning up the environment.
But hell I'm a ___ing believer.
Estimating the long term effects of an initially banned dispersant, five minutes after the event with no previous data to draw upon.
Godammit I'm a __ing believer.
So its gone what a relief.
I'm a ___ing believer.
Heh, remember the initial safety reports issued by the MMS?
Are you a __ing believer too?
.
.
Oh and if you do:
According to a study out Feb. 15 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Geological Survey and Alaskan agencies found that oil levels in the sands around the sound are much the same as they were when tests were done five years ago. The study says oil has seeped down 4 to 10 inches.
The oil is a continuing, "far-ranging" problem for fish and wildlife, says Kim Trust, science director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, an Alaska-federal partnership that works to repair the environmental damage. A 2006 council report found that two species — Pacific herring and pigeon guillemots — are not recovering. Populations of clams and mussels are still affected by the lingering oil, as are sea otters and birds such as harlequin ducks and black oystercatchers.
and
The supertanker Amoco Cadiz wrecked on the coast of northern Brittany in April 1978. The resulting spill of 223 000 t of crude oil polluted some 360 km of rocky or sandy shores, salt marshes and estuaries. An immediate mortality impact was observed. Populations of bivalves, periwinkles, limpets, peracarid crustaceans, heart urchins and sea birds were the most severely affected. Populations of polychaete worms, large crustaceans and coastal fishes were less affected. Three to six generations (5-10 years for bivalves but up to 60 years for birds) may be necessary before populations retrieve their stable age distribution. Delayed effects on mortality, growth and recruitment were still observed up to 3 years after the spill. Estuarine flat fishes and mullets had reduced growth, fecundity and recruitment; they were affected by fin rot disease. Populations of clams and nematodes in the meiofauna declined one year after the spill. Weathered oil is still present in low-energy areas. Species with short life cycles tend to replace long-lived species. A fauna of cirratulid and capitellid polychaete worms now prevails in sandy to muddy areas. For several clam populations, recruitment remains unstable. Three years after the spill it is still premature to decide how long it will take before populations and ecosystems reach their former or new equilibria.
.
Oh and thanks to BentLiberal
If you still are not a ___ing believer
Try this tripe for size
It turns out that the playful sea mammals, like other creatures, suffered much less damage than was forecast. A grand total of three dead dolphins covered in oil have been recovered by wildlife rescue teams. The spill has so far killed less than one per cent of the number of birds claimed by the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.
Expect this to be the wisdom of the day.
I'm still a __ing believer.
_______________________________________________
general replies
To those saying corexit is safe
The Obama administration is facing internal dissent from its scientists for approving the use of huge quantities of chemical dispersants to tackle the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Guardian has learned.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has come under attack in Congress and from independent scientists for allowing BP to spray almost 2m gallons of the dispersant Corexit on to the slick and, even more controversially, into the leak site 5,000ft below the sea. Now it emerges that EPA's own experts have been raising similar concerns within the agency.
To those saying my flow rate is too high
BP has claimed repeatedly there is no way of measuring the scale of the leak and an early estimate of 5,000 barrels a day turned out to be way too low. Scientists subsequently estimated the leak at up to 40,000 barrels of a day partly based on live webcast of the oil head, released reluctantly by BP after pressure from US politicians such as Republican Senator Ed Markey. But experts later revised this estimate upwards up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day.
As for over-emphasizing the risks
Marine biologists will admit that not a great deal is known about the effects of oil on organisms in deep water.
"We know almost nothing about the ecology in the deep ocean," says Prof Overton.
It may offer only a crumb of comfort, but the 2010 spill will one day provide that knowledge.
As for my early morning errors in numbers of millions my apologies, I was a factor of 10 too low.