You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 113. Number 112 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.
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 (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Possibly outdated or redundant links (from The Oil Drum):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
Lusty's multi-feed 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
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
- 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.
- 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
- 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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Mea Culpa
Hester has been a diligent ROV participant, and twice now I have missed call outs for ROVs. Before my little vignette, I'd like to post something considerably more grave - and important - from Hester's comment. Please share mojo with Hester for bringing this to our attention - and join the discussion of this painful chapter to the Gulf disaster in the thread below.
Hester, please accept my apologies. After this morning, I'm thinking I should be the one to step away from the liveblog.
One young sperm whale was dead in GOM.
Over the last weeks, the carcasses of oily pelicans, turtles and other animals have washed to shore in the Gulf of Mexico. Now the first dead whale has been found — a juvenile sperm whale floating 77 miles from the leaking oil well.
They are doing tests on it's skin to determine if it died as a consequence of this perpetual raping of mother earth.
But what I found so horribly poignant and heartbreaking was this:
Hal Whitehead, a biologist who studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said sperm whales are highly social animals that live in matriarchal groups like elephants. They communicate through noises that sound like clicks, which researchers refer to as a dialect. They have also shown behaviors that resemble mourning. In one case, Dr. Whitehead said, when a young sperm whale died, its mother carried its carcass around in her mouth.
Pitiful isn't it?
Here's the link. It's an interesting read
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When we moved to Kentucky, we had cable in our first apartment. As has been well established here, I am a foodie of epic proportions. I love to cook, and I love to eat. Since we're both historians, we found ourselves watching a lot of The History Channel, (a.k.a. - "The Hitler Channel," or "Nazis-R-Us") the Discovery Network, and, of course, the Food Network. I became addicted to Alton Brown, and even though we were newlyweds, I assured Mr. khowell that should Alton come knocking on my door, I'd have to say goodbye with love. When Bourdain came on, my list of food-related crushes only grew.
As a dedicated Food Network junkie, I was initially a huge Emeril Lagasse fan. I've cooked in a chain restaurant that was started by the legendary Al Copeland; its home office is in New Orleans. I've eaten lavish meals at the big fine-dining establishments in the Big Easy: Antoine's, Arnaud's, Court of the Two Sisters, Dooky Chase's, Delmonico's, NOLA, Emeril's, Commander's (while Jamie Shannon was there, rest his soul) and Galatoire's. I know my Oysters Rockefeller from my Oysters Bienville, and my tasso from my prosciutto. I can order like a local at Mothers', the Bluebird Cafe, Central Grocery, and Mulate's. I know what it means to order a poboy "dressed," and until I moved to Kentucky, I kept a roll of Scotch tape in the car for rendering a daiquiri from the Daiquiri Barn in Bougalousa, LA, legal as we rode back toward Wiggins on Highway 26. (Tape on the straw = closed container.)
For someone who loves New Orleans cuisine as much as I do, being an Emeril fan was easy: this Yankee from Fall River talked a good talk and sold our culture like nobody I'd ever seen. He made our food look even more delicious when he slid a plate to the four-top on stage left. I was charmed by his joire de vivre, the fact that he had music - with talented percussionists - on stage, and the bags of Zapps (if there is a Goddess, she craves these potato chips when she's PMS-ing, I assure you) that he handed to kids.
But then my honeymoon with Emeril Lagasse came to a screeching halt. I remember what I made for dinner that night: Italian Wedding Soup, with teensy veal meatballs and lots of grated Parmesan on top. T and I finished our dinner and kicked back to watch the late show of Emeril Live. In his opening segment, he ran through the crowd and did the wee monologue at the beginning, saying he was going to do a smoked fish dish, blah, blah, blah. It was the second one on the menu. When he started it, he said that he'd created the dish for the menu at NOLA and decided he'd name it "Biloxi Bacon."
I don't remember what I did, but T says that I was off the couch and screaming at the TV, then muttering in the corner in righteous indignation while rummaging through files for a project I was reviewing for a friend. Biloxi bacon, my friends, is not some smoked fish dish that Mr. Lagasse crafted for his patrons. It's the nickname for the common mullet, a fish so ubiquitous to Coast waters that a plate of fried mullet on the breakfast table was more common than a plate of bacon. Within a month, we had gone back to Mississippi to get married, and the day before our wedding I was in the archives at Southern, looking for an article I knew I'd seen in my one of friend Charlie Sullivan's works on Coast history. When I found it, I sent copies to every one of Mr. Lagasse's restaurants, to his in-law's home in Pascagoula, and to his home offices in New York. No way was this fake New Orleanian going to ignore the history of the Biloxi Bacon. No way.
So, on that note, here's your culinary history for the day:
(I must say before sharing the story below, that I am in no way a Confederate sympathizer. I loathe the damned secesh, and I doubly loathe the modern-day "patriots" who wrap themselves in the flag of traitors.)
"Know Your Coast" - 16 August 1956 - Biloxi (Mississippi) Herald
Visitors frequently hear our extremely edible and year round available Coast mullet referred to as "Biloxi Bacon".
This affectionate nickname goes clear back to the War Between the States which the Yankees call the Civil War... back to that period of privation when the Federal blockade had the Coast cut off from supplies so effectively that its citizens would have starved had it not been for the seafood the gunboats could not keep from coming into our bayous, bays, and shorewaters.
It seems that when a Federal Navy landing party from nearby Ship Island forced the surrender of Biloxi, whose fighting men were with the Confederate armies in Virginia and other theatres of war, a Biloxi small boy overheard a Boston Lieutenant remark that "The best way to end this war is to starve the Rebels into submission."
This made the lad so mad he walked right up to the Yankee officer and shouted in his face: "Mister, you'll never starve us as long as we have the mullet!"
Now the boy really knew what he was talking about... because the truth of the matter was that while the Federal troops on Ship Island were compelled to subsist on hard tack and salt pork, the conquered and blockaded Coast citizens could always take their cast nets just off shore and provide their families with delicious suppers of those small but tasty silver mullet. And so it has always been. Through wars and depressions the mullet has been the ever-reliable, always pan-fryable Biloxi Bacon."
(c) 1956, Ray M. Thompson, copy from the Ray M. Thompson Papers, William David McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, folder M-85
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Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 112 - khowell
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 111 - yawnimawke
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 110 - politik
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 109 - cosmic debris
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 108 -Yasuragi
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 107 - Wee Mama
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 106 - rubyr
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 105 - khowell
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 104 - gchaucer2
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 103 - Garrett
BP Oilpocalypse Liveblog ROV 102 - conchita
...
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!