Heya DKos Boomers! Happily, I don't have to write a diary every day. I've really no talent for it and just trying to come up with something not-awful takes a lot of effort. I don't have to write a diary every day because there are a dozen or so other Kossacks who do have that talent and keep us up-to-date. I'm not going to list them for fear of leaving someone out. You know who they are.
Regarding my language, I really don't normally write or speak that roughly, unless I'm out in the patch actually working. I'm going to clean it up on DKos. That stuff was useful in my first booming diary as a means of helping us all express our outrage. Now, we're all just about shot-through with outrage, so I'll clean it up. I might forget every now and then, especially when talking about BP's management and our Coast Guard's Commandant. Please cut me some slack on that.
Follow me after the bump to find out why everything has changed and how we're being lied to by BP, The Media and Our Government. We've proof of that now.
Fuck. Where was I?
Oh yeah. I call your attention to a recent diary by a superb diarist, YucatanMan:
Vast Undersea Pollution - BP's (invisible) Disaster
Boomers, this changes everything! I'm not talking about it validating the many, huge estimates of the real size of the leak/spill, even though it does. I'm not talking about any concern about the toxicity of the dispersants being used, though that is alarming also. YucatanMan's diary exposes the true scope of this disaster and how dispersants are magnifying the damage manyfold. We were first warned of this horrifying situation back on May 11th by my fellow fishperson, FishOutofWater:
Is Dispersed Oil in the Loop Current Heading for Florida?
I told FishOutofWater at the time that the last image shown in that diary was the scariest, most important pic yet. So we have two diaries, days apart. One finds huge blobs way way deep. The other, since we see them in a satellite image, suspended near the surface (but where they can't be seen from a helecopter or boat). What's going on? I was about to write that we can't be sure, but that's not true now. We goddamn well CAN be sure!
Removing all doubt regarding the shrimp
That's an external link so open it in a new window or, hell, here's the meat of it:
The Terrebonne closure, which affects both recreational and commercial fishing, was instituted after a report of oil-covered shrimp was verified.
According to a news release from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Capt. Lyle Dehart of the shrimping vessel Rocking Angel caught oily shrimp around midnight on Friday in Bayou Severin, near Sister Lake. Shrimpers on the boat reported that their fingers stuck together when they touched the shrimp.
Officials from Wildlife and Fisheries boarded the boat on Saturday morning, noting that there was oil on the deck and the shrimp had black on their legs and heads.
Now. What's interesting about that, besides it being really bad news, is that shrimp don't swim on the surface. Shrimp don't give a shit about oil "sheen". What's also interesting is the area where they netted those oily shrimp.
These shrimp were netted in that CLOSED area to the West of the Delta. Just closed today, I might add. Now, compare that to this spill-tracking chart:
That black line is supposed to represent an "area of uncertainty". They just caught a literal boatload of very oily shrimp there! Are we really uncertain anymore? Quit feeding us bullshit! Tracking this leak/spill on the surface has become useless! It's BAD reporting! It's BAD journalism! It's BAD science! After the information contained in these two pivotal diaries by YucatanMan and FishOutofWater, and a boatload of very oily shrimp from an area with little or no surface oil, tracking surface oil is now about as credible as (fucking) Creationism! Here's another external link, so open it in new window or come right back here after viewing it.
Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Animation
That thing has been useless since they started doing it. Notice how the extent of the "spill" shrinks and grows from day to day, seemingly jumping hundreds of miles over night! Boomers, that's impossible. It defies logic. It is fully, scientifically, provably and obviously bullshit.
THEY'RE. TRACKING. ONLY. WHAT. THEY. CAN. SEE. ON. THE. SURFACE!
And they need to stop that because it amounts to lying. We know this as a fact now. We're not conspiracy nuts. They are WRONG. We are RIGHT. Just because it's going to take everyone else months to figure this out doesn't mean we here at Daily Kos can't proclaim it now. STOP IT WITH THE GOD DAMNED DISPERSANTS! Shrimp and fish and most other marine critters don't get oily from surface oil. And the things that do, like dolphins and birds and whales, are still going to get oily because there's still surface oil. Lots of it! We can skim it on the surface. We can boom it on the surface. You can literally herd it on the surface. You're no longer successfully hiding anything from us, BP, EPA, Coast Guard, Obama. We figured it out. So stop it. Stop it right now. Because from this day forward, we're holding you responsible. All of you.
And as for toxicity, what the dispersants DO is bad. I don't care if they're made from rainbows and clover. Let's look at all the claims they make for dispersants.
1. It breaks the oil up so that microorganisms can render it harmless.
Okay. There's microorganisms in sewage treatment plants that render human shit harmless. Doesn't mean I want a bunch of those microorganisms in my swimming pool. I don't want those microorganisms in my food! I don't want them where I fish for Sea Trout or Redfish! This spill isn't going to kill all life in the Gulf of Mexico. Just the good stuff. Just the stuff that can't eat oil. How's that for a lack of biolological diversity? I'm sorry, but fuck!
From Remembering Jello in the comments, a very relevant (and true) observation regarding using microorganisms to clean up oil, In situ:
They shit ammonia
NH4->NO2->NO3- note increasing 0s
All stages pulling O2. Basically ya get an ammonia spike which kills animals, followed by a nitrite spike which kills phytoplankton, followed by a nitrate spike which causes massive algeal blooms which suck all the O2 out of the water and kill what's left.
Picture a hog farm lagoon- same cycle.
2. It sinks the oil to the deep ocean bottom, where it degrades.
No it doesn't. It forms huge, Kansas-sized plumes of oily blobs that drift around in all the depth-layers of the Gulf of Mexico. They're tracking it now. You can quit pretending it's on the bottom. We know you're lying. The plumes that are on the bottom... AREN'T GOING TO STAY ON THE BOTTOM! Even once it's degraded to nearly pure tar, some of it is still going to come floating up. Until then, it's not so much globs of tar as globs of Oil-Jello. It's going to sink and rise and sink and rise. Over and over and over. Like a Lava Lamp, except seventeen billiony trillion times bigger.
Sarah Palin: "Wow -- beneath the sea it looks just like a darned big lava lamp now!"
(ht to dov12348 in the comments)
Often, on its way to the surface or on its way back to the bottom, it's going to get caught in the loop current or wash up on shore. And it's going to wash up on shore, Oil-Jello, a lot of it, all over the Northern Gulf of Mexico, for decades. You Boomers know Fishgrease likes him some Proper Boom! Problem: you can't boom this stuff. Not with good booming. Not with bad booming. They're starting to see it now. They're calling it tar balls, which it is not and won't be for years and years. Who knows what depth it'll be at when it comes to shore? You know that white sugar-sand beach you love? Kiss it goodbye and all the tourism it brings with it. That is over. We Dkos Boomers know that already. It'll take everyone else up to six months to decide it's true. Maybe longer, but not much. If any of you want to become a multi-millionare (I'm serious about this) then just develop some sort of fabric or metal fence with a mesh that will catch these blobs but let current and such through. That and a way to position it 200 yeards off beaches will make you One Rich Boomer. People will literally throw money at you to put it on their beach before you put it on the other guy's beach.
One more thing, Boomers. I love you guys. But these spill diaries are getting huge with comments. Comments thanking me and telling me how wonderful I am make it so people can't scan for real information. I'm not wonderful. I'm sitting here in my boxers and I need a bath and a shave. I'm actually pretty gross. And I THANK YOU! YOU are the people that will make a difference. God bless you.
And Also-Also... I answer all questions. If I don't answer them, some other leak/spill DKos person will, and I enourage that. Might take me a while, but I will answer your questions before the diary is a day-dead. Don't ask about nuking or otherwise exploding the wellhead though. I won't answer about that besides to say it is so stupid it doesn't deserve an answer.
LINK! jamess has a fresh diary up showing just what we're risking here.
Life on the Edge -- Videos of Gulf of Mexico Coral Reefs
