You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 127. Number 126 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.
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.
The BOP and pressure drawings are viewable here. The CAD drawings come highly recommended by the techies among us. h/t Claudius Bombarnac.
Breaking News and new links:
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
cosmic debris put together a comprehensive list of links on oil health and safety info:
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.
Images giving a rough idea of what's in place now and status of the kill wells
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
45683/45684 - Skandi_ROV2
47175/21144 - Enterprise_ROV_1
21145/21327 - Enterprise_ROV_2
37235/37270 - Q4000_ROV1
35523/35624 - Q4000_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):
The best multi-view feed Be patient as load time may take a bit.
Markey's multi-view page
Lusty's multi-feed page (originally created by papicek)
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
- Sea creatures flee spill, gather near shore
- BP agrees to set aside about $20 billion for spill claims
- Efforts to repel Gulf oil spill are described as chaotic
- BP warns that its new oil collection plan has safety risks
- Oil spill coats Louisiana's Barataria Bay
- Obama names final five to oil spill panel commission
- Air tests from the Louisiana coast reveal human health threats from the oil disaster
- GeoPlatform - Gulf Response: Mapping the Response to BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
- BP may lose US oil leases, contracts as Gulf spill punishment
- Florida closes 23 miles of coastline to fishing
- International Bird Rescue Research Center: Info on bird survival rates
- Kent Wells' technical update, June 10, 2010
- Summarized tally of affected wildlife
- BP plans to suspend shareholder dividend amid oil spill
- Huge federal Gulf recovery act planned
- dov12348's oil toxicity links
- National Science Foundation rapid response research grants for Gulf oil spill research
- Rolling Stone: The spill, the scandal, and the president
- First oil reaches Florida inland waterways
- Another Gulf Oil Spill: Well near Deepwater Horizon has leaked since at least April 30
- White House endorses unlimited liability cap for oil spillers
- Lab tests confirm underwater layers of oil
- 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.
- Visualize the spill
- Nola.com
- dov12348's Ocean currents, wind currents, and hurricane links
- World newspapers oil section
- The Oil Drum
- Oil & Gas Journal
- Offshore Magazine
- Petroleum News
- Your Oil and Gas News
- World Oil
- Administration response to spill.
- Donate to SkyTruth here. SkyTruth helps environmental NGOs use remote sensing (pictures taken from space) and digital mapping to improve their scientific credibility, conservation decision making, communications and public outreach.
- 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.
- Timeline of the Event from April 20th being maintained by blogroots.
- Department of Energy BP Deepwater Horizon Spill site updates.
- Bit Tooth Energy blog (technical discussions) by the famed Heading Out, well known key poster on The Oil Drum blog site.
- 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
- U.S. begins criminal investigation into oil spil
- NOAA Spill tracking site
- ERMA: Environmental Response Management Application
- BP has a good diagram of the cutting process that partially succeeded
- Documents show BP chose a less-expensive, less-reliable method for completing well in Gulf oil spill
- Norway freezes drilling in new deepwater blocks
- Worker on rig saw it coming
- BP doesn't want photos of dead animals
- Map of things on the sea floor there.
- Calculator for distance from BOP.
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I wrote this over two days and don't have much time tonight to hang around... the muse is upon me in meatspace - performing the equivalent of beating me about the head with a rolling pin to finish this chapter of my thesis. But, yesterday's announcement about "Lucy's" great-grandfather being found took me back to 1998, my senior year in high school, and International Science Fair.
My high school was a powerhouse. We were a little public school (my graduating class was the largest in its history, with 175) twenty miles north of Gulfport and twenty south of Hattiesburg. We were fairly agricultural, and with a half-dozen pulp mills, we had extractive industries down pat, but the community's biggest employer was Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, which used to be a residential agricultural high school. Nothing much ever went on in Perkinston, Mississippi, unless the Bulldogs were playing. We didn't even get a red light until I was a freshman in college. I could even tell you the date, because I got the first ticket for running it.
Our rivals from the counties to the south (Jackson, Harrison, and Hancock) never let us forget just how podunk we were. We might be dominated on the football field (often), the basketball court (less often) or the baseball field (rarely), but when it came to two things: band and science - we were unstoppable.
All the science prowess was due to two teachers. Mike Cain and Mary Webb. Mike, whose father wanted a son so badly he named his daughter Michael, was our chemistry teacher and Mary taught biology. In the early 1970s, after they'd gotten their degrees and moved back to small-town Mississippi, they mandated that from sixth grade on, every student would do a science project. So, in the sixth grade, knowing that I'd have to do projects for the next six years, my Dad had a backboard built for me. It was six feet tall, and when placed on its two-foot table, it towered over me. After a few years of piddling around in Middle School, I landed on a topic worthy of the 8-foot custom made monstrosity my Dad had found - determining if dental amalgam would produce bacterial resistance in E. coli. For the next four years, I spent untold hours in microbiology labs at the college, up the road at Southern Miss, at our local hospital, and during the last two - at Biloxi Regional Hospital. My hard work paid off when I developed a process to combine finely ground dental amalgam (think table salt) with agar in any proportion. This meant that a graduated strip of antibiotic could be tested on fully-impregnated agar - thereby allowing me to determine, over a zillion hours and four years of high school - at what rate dental amalgam caused E. coli to become resistant to commonly-used antibiotics. The judges loved it. My junior year, after breaking hearts in local, district, and state fairs, I was selected as an alternate to the International Science Fair in Louisville. My senior year I was selected as a designated attendee at state and was therefore guaranteed a spot at the competition in Fort Worth.
Richard Leakey was our MC at the award ceremony, Bill Nye spoke at the opening ceremonies, and Edward O. Wilson gave the keynote at a special event for students from the Southeast. I fell madly in love with Bill Nye, was in awe of Leakey and his odd gait and big voice. With Wilson, I must tell you, I soon realized the deepest case of hero worship imaginable. When I found out his story - childhood on the Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi coasts, I was even more taken. Just a few years before, Dr. Wilson, one of the most recognized entomologists in the world, had published a biography of sorts, and he spoke at length of growing up in a very religious and anti-science community but finding a talent with bugs that his parents helped foster until it landed him where he is today - professor emeritus at Harvard, with two Pulitzer prizes and a Crafoord Prize - the ecologists' equivalent of the Nobel.
While still in Fort Worth, I found a bookstore that carried Naturalist, and I re-read the book about once a year, usually in the winter. I give it my highest recommendation to all of you - and to tempt you, here's one of my favorite passages, where Dr. Wilson tells of a summer spent in Florida while his parents tried to salvage their marriage.
Quoted from Edward O. Wilson, "Naturalist". (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), 6-9.
The place, Paradise Beach, which I have revisited in recent years, is a small settlement on the east shore of Florida's Perdido Bay, not far from Pensacola and in sight of Alabama across the water.
...
Paradise Beach was paradise truly named for a little boy. Each morning after breakfast I left the small shorefront house to wander alone in search of treasures along the strand. I waded in and out of the dependably warm surf and scrounged for anything I could find in the drift. Sometimes I just sat on a rise to scan the open water. Back in time for lunch, out again, back for dinner, out once again, and finally, off to bed to relive my continuing adventure briefly before falling asleep.
...
I have no remembrance of the names of the family I stayed with...[.] It was the animals of that place that cast a lasting spell. I was seven years old, and every species, large and small, was a wonder to be examined, thought about, and, if possible, captured and examined again.
There were needlefish, foot-long green torpedoes with slender beaks, cruising the water just below the surface. Nervous in temperament, they kept you in sight and never let you come close enough to reach out and a hand and catch them. I wondered where they went at night, but never found out. Blue crabs with skin-piercing claws scuttled close to shore at dusk. Easily caught in long-handled nets, they were boiled and cracked open and eaten straight or added to gumbo, the spicy seafood stew of the Gulf coast. Sea trout and other fish worked deeper water out to the nearby eelgrass flats and perhaps beyond; if you had a boat you could cast for them with bait and spinners. Stingrays, carrying threatening lances of bone flat along their muscular tails, buried themselves in the bottom sand of hip-deep water in the daytime and moved close to the surf as darkness fell.
...
How I longed to discover animals each larger than the last, until finally I caught a glimpse of some true giant! I knew there were large animals out there in deep water. Occasionally a school of bottlenose porpoises passed offshore less than a stone's throw from where I stood. In pairs, trios, and quartets they cut the surface with their backs and dorsal fins, arced down and out of sight, and broke the water ten or twenty yards farther on. Their repetitions werwe so rhythmic that I could pick the spot where they would appear next. On calm days, I sometimes scanned the glassy surface of Perdido Bay for hours at a tie in hope of spotting something huge and monstrous as it rose to the surface. I wanted at least to see a shark, to watch the fabled dorsal fin thrust proud out of the water, knowing it would look a lot like a porpoise at a distance but would surface and sound at regular intervals. I also hoped for more than sharks, what exactly I could not say: something to enchant the rest of my life.
As Dr. Wilson chatted with us that abysmally hot day in 1998, he was unfailingly cordial and professional with each participant. With a half-century dividing us in age, though, there wasn't much more than science and geography uniting us; even today, I remember the conversation feeling awkward. Someone there asked, though, about Wilson's rationale in studying ants (the authoritative text on the study of ants is among his extensive list of publications) and he told us about how he'd lost sight in his right eye: a pinfish's needle stabbed him through the pupil that summer when he was seven and full of discovery. And as he told us of his love for the Gulf south and his nostalgia for the region even from his offices and laboratories in Cambridge, we were united by a shared reverence for the beauty, richness, and diversity of this oft-maligned region. Dr. Wilson hasn't spoken publicly about the ongoing disaster in the Gulf, though I understand he did mention its possible effects on biodiversity in the region at a talk on his "Encyclopedia of Life" in London last week. As we get a better idea of the biological ramifications of the Macando gusher, I hope you'll keep an eye out for statements from Wilson or the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. If they're able, they will allay some of our fears. In the meantime, enjoy the EoL and research some of the species placed in greater danger by this disaster.
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Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 126 - David Kroning II
BP's Gulf of Mexico Disaster ROV #125 - gchaucer2
BP's Gulf of Mexico Disaster ROV #124- Tomtech
BP's Gulf of Mexico Disaster ROV #123 - Yasuragi
BP's Gulf of Mexico Disaster ROV #122 - Solstice Edition - Darryl House
BP Gulf of Mexico Disaster Father's Day on the Gulf Edition Continued #121 - Pam LaPier
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 120 - khowell
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV #119- peraspera
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 118 - Cosmic Debris
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 117 - Yasuragi
BP's Gulf of Mexico Disaster Sperm Whale Edition ROV #116 - Pam LaPier
...
For a more complete list of Liveblog diaries, see the current mothership.
Bandwidth Warning: NO IMAGES and NO VIDEOS. Readers who are on DIALUP will thank you!