You are in the current BP disaster ROV number 338; number 337 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 Pam LaPier's diary 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 reads:
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.
We have a new 40 page 12mb report on the Macondo well that is an excellent reference on the well design.
Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill Reference Material - from Whitis is the best source for everything.. The quantitative data diary has also been moved there.
The motherlode of technical data was removed but I located the 19 mb 48 page BP Accident Investigation Overview and the 12 mb 147 page Confidential TransOcean Assurance Analysis of the BOP with detailed control diagrams starting at page 56.
Jeff Masters of Weather Underground posted his take on the effects of a hurricane passing through the Gulf and making landfall.
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.
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
Thanks to dov12348 for publishing a diary on Oil Terminology.
Technical Info
Here is a tutorial on the sources of well pressure.
H/T to Pluto for finding this:
Here is a much better well casing configuration diagram (PDF).
Technical look at the BP Spill Investigation (PDF)
The initial approach above will be followed by open hole and drill pipe magnetic ranging. After they get within 5 feet of the blown out well's lower casing they will ream, case and cement the relief well prior to reaming through the blown well's casing. (Photos from The Oil Drum)
Audio, a slide presentation, and a transcript from Kent Wells' 6-28 briefing is available.
A video primer on ROV Watching, from GW Regular sometv.
Video feeds we are watching
Tomtech created a set of playlists for VLC player to solve the title problem.
==== ROV Feeds =====
44287/44668 - Ocean Intervention's ROV 1
44838/45135 - Ocean Intervention's ROV 2
46566/54013 - Viking Poseidon's ROV 1
55030/56646 - Viking Poseidon's ROV 2
21233/31218 - Boa Sub C's ROV 1
31219/33627 - Boa Sub C's ROV 2
45685/49182 - Skandi Neptune's ROV 1 (Hercules 14)
45683/45684 - Skandi Neptune's ROV 2 (Hercules 6)
47175/21144 - Discoverer Enterprise's ROV 1
21145/21327 - Discoverer Enterprise ROV 2
37235/37270 - Q4000's ROV 1
35523/35624 - Q4000's ROV 2
41434/41436 - Olympic Challenger's ROV 1
40788/40789 - Olympic Challenger's ROV 2
24951/24975 - Discoverer Inspiration's ROV 1
30948/35246 - HOS Achiever's ROV 1
35461/36301 - HOS Achiever's ROV 2
==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)==
Restore the Gulf.gov has put up a government sponsored multi-feed.
Bobo's lightweight ROV Multi-feed: A great low impact multi-view page
The best multi-view feed Be patient as load time may take a bit.
Markey's multi-view page
Lusty/papicek/sullivanst multi-feed page (originally created by papicek, small improvement by Lusty, and huge improvement by sullivanst)
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
ACTION
- X Prize Competition for oil spill fix announced
- Requiring a Relief Well: Let's Write a Bill! A diary series by Garret
- National Science Foundation rapid response research grants for Gulf oil spill research
- ERMA: Environmental Response Management Application
BACKGROUND
- Google Crisis Response page for Gulf Oil Spill
- Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
- BP has a good diagram of the cutting process that partially succeeded
- VIDEO - CBS 60 Minutes Report on the Deepwater Horizon Blowout
CLEANUP INFORMATION
- BP Hides Use of Mostly Black Prison Labor for Oil Gusher Cleanup
By Kossak Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
DATA
- Sketch Map of Subsea Operations - from Another Kevin
- GeoPlatform - Gulf Response: Mapping the Response to BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
- Kent Wells' technical update, June 10, 2010
- dov12348's oil toxicity links
- dov12348's Ocean currents, wind currents, and hurricane links
- Visualize the spill
- SkyTruth
- 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.
- Department of Energy BP Deepwater Horizon Spill site updates.
- 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
- Map of things on the sea floor there. -- outdated, based on unreliable data
- Calculator for distance from BOP. -- not reliable
- NOAA Spill tracking site
HEALTH AND SAFETY
- 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Crisis Wiki
- NIH National Library of Medicine Crude oil spills and Health
- ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH): ToxFAQs™
- CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response: 2010 Gulf of Mexico
Includes fact sheets and health and safety information for Gulf Coast Residents, Response Workers, and Health Professionals
- Reducing Occupational Exposures while Working with Dispersants During the Gulf Oil Spill Response
- EPA Response to BP Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
Includes Air Monitoring Data Reports, Daily Average Particulate Matter, Air Sampling Data Files, Real-time Air Monitoring (including TAGA data), and Downloadable data set of hourly air monitoring
- Hester's Special Guest Mothership on Human Health Issues and the BP Disaster
LEGISLATION/FEDERAL RESPONSE
- Administration response to spill.
- Kossak Square Knot's diary on the limits of governmental authority
PERTINENT BLOGS and collections of Oil Spill-specific JOURNALISM
- The Daily Hurricane: Blog run by Bob Cavnar
- Nola.com Oil Spill News
- Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS) Oil Spill News
- Mobile (AL) Press-Register Oil Spill News
- St. Petersburg Times (FL) Oil Spill News
- World newspapers oil section
- The Oil Drum
- Oil & Gas Journal
- Offshore Magazine
- Petroleum News
- Your Oil and Gas News
- World Oil
- Bit Tooth Energy blog (technical discussions) by the famed Heading Out, well known key poster on The Oil Drum blog site.
WILDLIFE
- Help Cornell Lab of Ornithology collect bird information on the Gulf
- Center for Biological Diversity list of Gulf species threatened by the spill
- International Bird Rescue Research Center: Info on bird survival rates
- Summarized tally of affected wildlife
- 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.
- BP doesn't want photos of dead animals
- Washington Post: People Come Together to Save Coast's Oil-Covered Wildlife (h/t Humphrey)
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Although I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I haven’t lived there for seven years. We moved to Kentucky in 2003, were married soon after, and have been here ever since. In the late summer of 2005, I finally found a full-time job and was just getting settled in when I had the chance to be home for five days for my college roommate’s wedding in Gulfport. We did all the things we used to do – we bought sandwiches and jugs of McAlister’s tea and sat on the boardwalk, talking about music, old friends, old flames, and old times. We kicked ourselves for not playing anymore – she played flute, I oboe, and our last year of college we were co-captains of the sideline percussion ensemble. We played a four-handed version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata that we arranged ourselves, for two marimbas and bowed vibraphone. We were inseparable.
When she needed a Matron of Honor, as much as I disdain the connotations of “matron", as I am decidedly un-matronly – I was there. Our parties were fabulous, and our time together was even more dear than I could have imagined. One month later, the coast we knew was gone. Obliterated. And I couldn’t be there to help.
The whole week before the storm, I tried to talk Mom and Dad into coming up. They’d been on the coast for Camille and said they’d be fine, and no amount of my prodding could convince them otherwise. On the 29th, I went to work, and it was a regular, crazy Monday. We’d had torrential rains for two or three days before, and getting on post was crazy – my car was searched for the first time. I talked with the family a few times that morning, and texted my sister almost frantically throughout the day. The last thing we said to each other was around 2 or 3 PM. She said, “Hey, I can hear trees falling everywhere.”
That was it.
As I’ve described before, my family has always gone north to Hattiesburg the day after a storm passed, for air conditioning and functional plumbing and food that wasn’t pulled from the freezer and grilled outside in the pine-scented air. I fully expected Mom and Dad to do the same after Katrina, and when I got a call from Dad that they were at the Sams’ in Hattiesburg, I thought everything was okay. They had gas in the car, but the roads had been bad enough getting out to the highway that they’d had to drive for hours on back roads and were perilously low on petrol. The mall was closed – the storm was far worse, farther inland, than they had realized. There was no power in the ‘burg. Sam’s was turning away customers who asked to use the facilities, as was Wal Mart. They were doing business, but not allowing anyone to use the bathrooms. Mom went to the car to wait, and got out when Dad came back with packages. In one of those moments where you realize what you’ve done almost in the same millisecond it happens, they both shut their keys in the car at the same time.
Dad called again. He sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “We’ve locked our keys in the car, we don’t have enough gas to get home, your Mom needs to use the bathroom, and I’m not sure what we’re going to do. But I love you, and we’re all okay.” And he was gone. The batteries on the cell towers were dying one by one.
Three days later, I talked to my Mom. Three whole days. The longest three days of my life. I went to work, but I was a zombie. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, with vivid and horrible dreams of what my imagination allowed to befall them. A student of ours, who’d grown up in LaFourche Parish, and lived around the corner from me, brought me three white roses, one for each of them. I watched the flowers wilt and ate myself alive with worry. Our classes were cancelled – when the storm came through, it dumped so much rain that we had extensive flooding - and I no longer had work to distract me. We went into town to see what the news could tell us. At the local K-Mart, I sat on the floor in front of a bank of TVs and sobbed. A journalist in a helicopter was flying low and slow over the beaches from Ocean Springs to Pass Christian. It looked like the Somme. There was nothing recognizable for miles. The manager came and asked if I was okay, and Thomas just nodded toward the TV and said, "that's her home." The manager brought me a box of Kleenex, and stood back as I pointed to places on the screen and whispered the names of businesses I'd supported, restaurants I'd worked in, and homes I'd visited. After an hour, we went home and continued the vigil, jumping each time the phone rang.
About 10AM on Thursday, I got a call from an unknown number. The connection was bad, but I thought I could pick my Dad's voice out of the static. The call dropped, then my phone rang again. It was Dad. They were safe, at home, with a half-dozen trees on the house, but whole and safe and healthy. A man was parked in a truck on the side of the road, with a handmade sign that said "free phone calls," and Dad made one to me, to let me know they were safe, and one to my Mom's brother, in Mobile, asking them to come with gas to take them to Alabama. That man could've sold Nextel service to the entire Gulf South.
When they finally got settled in Mobile, Mom called and told me the whole thing. They freaked out in the parking lot of Sams, then as they were standing there trying to decide which window to break in my Mom's Mazda, one of her former students walked up. He helped them jimmy into the car, and gave them 10 gallons of gas to get home. He wouldn't take a dime for the gas, though Dad, I was told at his funeral, tried mightily to shove a folded $20 in his pocket. They got home, stopping at one of the shelters on HWY 49 so Mom could use the bathroom. The next day, they surveyed the damage: A half-dozen trees on the house, the roof mostly gone, with one large pine down the middle of my sister's car, and one on my Dad's car. It looked like winter: deciduous trees were stripped of their foliage, the 8 acres of blueberry trees were completely bare, and every pine in the yard was topped or blown over entirely. Green pine needles stuck out at right angles from the storage shed and house. The house I grew up in, 10 miles south, had a tree whose root ball was 9 feet tall lying on top of it. The tree had pushed the house, a 1900s log cabin, precariously forward on its pilings. Three other houses (my Dad dabbled in rentals) were going to need several thousands of dollars in repair before they were habitable again.
They were alive, though. I cried, I threw up, and I cried some more. Mobile wasn't in good shape, either, and Dad told me later that he (a pianist) and my Uncle, a violinist, were heavily armed when they took a generator to a relative's gas station to pump gas. They stayed two weeks in Mobile, until the power came on. Mom went back to the house a couple of times - Lance and Charlie, the cats, had disappeared. Helicopters circled constantly, no one had water, and the heat had returned.
Friends of ours, more than I can count offhand, lost everything. Their homes and lives were reduced to slabs and the clothes on their backs. I was lucky. We were lucky. Sometimes, though, I wake up in a cold sweat, nauseous, and I don't know where they are, or if they're alive, all over again. I relive those three days in the blink of an eye. And today, as we approach the fifth anniversary, I am reliving that anxious, sick, worried time. Thomas usually plans something this time of year to distract me, and this year is no different. With friends coming into town, and two baseball games, I won't have much time to dream about white roses and wind and rain.
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Previous liveblog ROV diaries:
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #337 - Perpetual fishin' - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #336 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - KHowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #334 - More Waiting... - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #333 - Waiting... - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Yasuragi
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #332 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #330 - Cantankerous ram - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #329 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - greenbird
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #328 - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - khowell
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #327 - Endless Fishin' - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - peraspera
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #326 - The Dead Zone Edition - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Pam LaPier
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #325 - More fishin' - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Tomtech
Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #324 - More fishin' - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - peraspera
Information on our community can be found in Phil S 33's diary here. That diary having timed out, bigjacbigjacbigjac next took up the cause and posted a new bio diary here. The latest bio diary was posted by Ursoklevar on 7-25 and includes the bios from the previous diaries in alphabetical order by user name.
If you'd like, feel free to join in by sharing a little about yourself there.
in the dark time we held vigil,
we held vigil against the night,
we raged against the storm,
we moved with the force of nature
to right a great wrong,
to howl like the wind,
to hold the line,
to renew an ancient vow,
a sacred purpose,
to recall to life the human spirit,
to safeguard that which is most holy to us,
to forge and reforge,
this, above all, to be true,
to awaken our greater nature,
to commune from the deepest regions of our soul,
to heal this realm, to heal our people,
to guard all life, to guard life,
for this generation,
and all to come,
this is why we hold vigil ~ ~ ArthurPoet ~
| We Are Here |
| We are here. |
| We are watching. |
| Years from now, |
| if anyone asks, |
| we will tell them: |
| We were there. |
| |
| Maybe it will not matter. |
| Maybe nothing matters. |
| But if we throw up our hands now, |
| maybe someday, |
| years from now, |
| we will ask ourselves, |
| why did we not at least keep watch, |
| why did we not? |
| |
| Maybe someday, some of us |
| will talk with someone younger, |
| and tell of the time we watched. |
| Maybe that someone younger |
| will try harder next time, |
| will do more next time, |
| remembering |
| the time we watched. |
| |
| -- bigjacbigjacbigjac |
We're all stunned and horrified by this disaster. Huddling with good people to calculate the damage and monitor progress, have a laugh when we can, share the sorrow we feel, and learn a lot in the process... That's what I'm really here for.
This is how I best cope. And if it turns out to be a useful thing to others, then that's great.
Kimberley
This is where you want to be for discussion, worrying, tearing up, and caring for each other. It's also where you're welcome to be angry and scream and curse and cry and rant at the criminal negligence and greed that have brought us all together. Most importantly, though, it's where we can learn from those kossaks among us (I'll not name names for abject fear of leaving one of you out, but you know who you are.) who bring the light of knowledge - sometimes with heat, sometimes without it - and teach us about what's happening beneath our Gulf of Mexico. On a personal note, I'll ask you to please be kind to each other in our little boats. There's enough hurt going on outside without bringing it here. - khowell
Bandwidth Warning: NO IMAGES and NO VIDEOS. Readers who are on DIALUP will thank you!
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