You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 73. Number 72 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.
You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 73. Number 72 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.
Paste this text into the Body box for the ROV diary:
BP put up a video explaining the LMRP procedure and the future plans.
Breaking News:
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.
Please DO NOT Rec this diary, Rec the Mothership here.
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:
Here is an excellent image of what is supposed to exist under the wellhead. Take the comments from Halliburton with a grain of salt since this is part of their "blame those two" PR campaign.
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 (BP player shows wrong feed)
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
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
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
- 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 decisionmaking, 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.
- BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Quantitative Data - from whitis
- 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
---------------------------------
Alma Alves and her neighbor Cora Croslen, of New Orleans and Baltimore, respectively 1911, Biloxi, Mississippi.
(I don't embed the picture for fear of frustrating those of you on dialup. Please do take a second to look at little Alma Alves, who worked at Barataria Canning Company in 1911.
Her eyes almost scowl at Lewis Hine, don't they? Hine's famous photographs of child laborers in coal mines and textile mills and canneries pricked the conscience of many who came to support laws opposing child labor. Hine took a handful of plates showing the Alves family. One of them I can't find digitally, but in my Xeroxed copy-of-a-copy accompanying an interview from the Lewis Hine project at USM-Gulf Park, it shows all of them gathered on the front porch of a shanty much like this one, for the neighborhood in which they lived was a company town owned by Barataria. The canneries in Biloxi were some of the most egregious offenders of modern sensibilities, mainly because they had an almost incomprehensible richness of natural resources - oyster and crab, particularly.
Whatever may be written of the Gulf Coast region - its fruits and flowers, its vegetables and nuts - is incomplete without a mention of its great oyster beds. They supply two-thirds of the world's demand for oysters, are perhaps more responsible than any other one thing - climate not excepted - for the lack of agricultural development on the part of the natives. With a small boat and a pair of oyster tongs no one in the region of the Mississippi Coast need fear starvation. It is this luscious bivalve primarily to which much of this condition must be hid - for it furnishes not only ready food but ready money at notice, inasmuch is everyone eats oysters on this coast, summer and winter alike, and the leisure classes prefer buying their supplies to manipulating the oyster long on their own account.
snip
The oyster beds skirt the Mississippi and Louisiana coast and are hundreds of miles in area, thus being utilized by the canneries of both states and producing a heavy revenue for each. Between 300 and 400 schooners and small barges haunt the oyster grounds daily during the season, and flights of these little ships constantly wing their way to and from the beds.
At the oyster wharves an interesting scene is enacted when the ships come in and null up alongside the little "oyster railroads" with their miniature trains of cars. With automatic hoists the oysters are lifted to the wharf and emptied into the cars. When filled, each train runs into the factory where a picturesque line of Bohemians, men, women and children, awaits them and falls to opening the shells as soon as they are steamed. The dexterity with which they learn to extract the bivalve is fascinating. As their tin cups are filled, they are paid in cash. Shuckers make from 60 cents to $1.25 per day and besides this wage, receive free houses, fuel and water from their employers.
Labor is an ever-present problem with the oyster canners - most of it comes from Baltimore, but the briefness of the season and lack of all-year-round employment deters many from making the long journey to the coast. In order to obviate this condition, the canners have tried canning various products - cane syrup, figs, vegetables - but none has been sufficiently successful up to date.
snip
The five canning factories at Biloxi which is the most centralized point in this great industry, employ 2,000 to 3,000 men, women and children for eight months in the year, putting up sea products, fruits and vegetables. The raw oyster shipping industry is a business in itself, employing 200 to 300 men from September to May, who earn from $2.00 to $3.00 a day.
Lopez & Dukate, at Biloxi, have the largest of the coast canneries; in fact, the largest in the world. The city of Biloxi owes its growth and progress largely to this firm. Its public buildings, new street railway system, as fine a trolley line as one can find in the North, theatre, bank, almost everything of consequence, are chiefly due to these gentlemen. The Mississippi Sound oyster is sold under thirty-five different labels from this one factory, part of these being private labels that have purchased them.
The Barataria Canning Co. is one of the largest industries on the Gulf Coast, and its product is sent over the world - oysters, shrimp, figs and vegetables. Several hundred hands are employed in the factory, and on the boats. Thirty-five oyster ships are operated by this company. The capacity of this factory in oyster canning is 2,000 barrels a day. From North & South: Devoted to Health, Happiness and Honesty, published in 1904
Alma grew up, still in a company shanty near Division Street in Biloxi, still working for Barataria, and married Voorhis Olier, a "Frenchman" (which in local parlance is a antiquated term for an Acadian or "Cajun") in 1926. Alma Croslen Olier would raise six children in a house on Myrtle Street in Biloxi, and her son Joseph and his wife still live in Hurley, MS, where they moved after they lost their home on The Point to Katrina. (Point Cadet was the area of Biloxi where many generations of seafood workers lived - at the turn of the 20th century, they were Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Italians, and Acadians, like Voorhis Olier. At the turn of the 21st century, they were Vietnamese. It's hard to tell today that the little sliver of land between Back Bay and the Gulf ever hosted so many people from around the world. In 1992, when "the boats" (legalized gaming) came, the Point became a hotbed of casino development, stripping much of The Point of its character.
Alma's son Joseph was named for her older brother, who in 1917 learned with his family the value of fighting the moneyed interests who ran Mississippi's seafood industry. Joseph, then 14, nearly lost his leg in an accident. Oysters were loaded into large, wheeled carts, which were rolled down the long wharf into a steamer. They were steamed there, emptied inside, then the carts' wheels were re-greased and pushed back out to the ships. Young Joseph's job was to re-grease the wheels of the carts after they'd been steamed. On his first day on the job, he was not apprised of the dangers of the several holes in the wharf, nor of the constantly-moving cable beneath it that served to operate the derrick unloading the boats. He slipped, and his leg was pulled into the hole. His injuries aren't well-described in the court proceedings, but his family described them as "permanent". In their first suit against the cannery, they won. The owners appealed, and Joseph Alves won that appeal with a resounding opinion from the court in favor of preserving the safety of employees engaged in their day-to-day duties.
The Alves' weren't well off by any stretch of the term. They were working poor, living first in a company town, then in the projects. When Joseph, the second of seven children, was injured in his line of work, his mother, who spoke little English, and his father, who couldn't read or write, "but could do figures in his head before you could find paper," knew the company was wrong. Even without Joseph's wages, the family managed to try to right the wrong - and $5000 later, they had exacted their small toll on the company that nearly took Joseph's leg, probably shortened his life, and definitely made it more painful.
BP is in a different class of offenders. Instead of placing our children in a situation reminiscent of indentured servitude, BP is destroying our wetlands, our beaches. They're running roughshod over laws and rules of common decency. They will pay, not just for the eleven who died, not just for the animals and the out-of-work shrimpers, and the injured economy. On the day when BP pays, may I live to see it, I'm going to raise a glass to Joseph Alves, who lived a shortened and painful life because those around him allowed a corporation to steal his childhood. For to watch BP pay will be your victory, and mine, and in some small way, it will be his, as well.
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Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 72 - quinn
Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 71 - Alkalinesky
Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 70 - yawnimawke
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 69 - JasperJohns
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 68 - Tomtech
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 67 - peraspera
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 66 - JasperJohns
BOP Oilpocalypse ROV Diary #65 - Digitalmuse
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 64: The Clean Up and Lasting Effects - hester
BP Liveblog ROV 63 - heart of a quince
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 62 - whitis
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 61 - Lusty
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 60 - Tomtech
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 59 - Pam LaPier
...
For a more complete list of Liveblog diaries, see the current mothership.