I'm not worried about the oil spill. Obama is in charge and giving it his undivided attention. What could go wrong?
Posted on 06/01/2010 12:04:43 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
The 1991 spill into the Persian Gulf, which began on January 21, was purposely caused by the Iraqis in order to delay or prevent a threatened US-led invasion of Kuwait, including possible landings by US Marines.
On February 23, American forces, including the 1st Marine Division, 2nd Marine Division, the 1st Light Armored Infantry, overran Iraqi defenses quickly, but expressed shock at the extent of the environmental disaster surrounding them.
The US lost 148 service members in combat, 458 were wounded in the First Gulf War which lasted from August 2, 1990, to February 28, 1991, when America and its allies forced Iraq to end its occupation of Kuwait.
The Iraqi occupiers had opened valves at Kuwait's Sea Island oil terminal and dumped oil from several tankers into the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi army set fire to nearly 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, 6 million barrels of oil went up in smoke daily.
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein blamed American air strikes on two Iraqi oil tankers for causing the Persian Gulf oil slick. Subsequent American airstrikes on January 26 targeting Kuwaiti oil pipelines failed to halt the flow, which only stopped when the Iraqis were ejected from Kuwait at the end of February.
The scale of the catastrophe on sea and land, and in the atmosphere staggers the imagination. An estimated 462 million gallons of oil from an estimated 10 percent of the world's oil reserves poured into the northwest corner of the Persian Gulf for slightly more than a month.
According to the New York Times, the Gulf of Mexico spill oil slick covers between 2,500 and 9,100 square miles. Between 18 and 40 million gallons have already flowed into the sea, and experts cannot agree on how much oil is gushing from the damaged Deepwater Horizon well each day.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Shortly after the April 22 sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, Nick Pozzi, who was an engineer with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East and Houston friend and attorney Jon King (with whom Pozzi recently launched a business called Wow Environmental Solutions), traveled to Houma, La., headquarters for BP's response center, to offer up the lessons he'd learned working in the Persian Gulf.
By employing a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water's surface, Pozzi's team was not only able to clean up the spill, but also salvage 85 percent of the oil.
"We took [the oil] out of the water so it would save the environment off the Arabian Gulf, and then we put it into tanks until we could figure out how to clean it," he told AOL News.
Ever since, he says, the pair's been stonewalled.
When he called the manager at BP in charge of the cleanup effort, Pozzi says he was told "don't bother me."
"He said, 'Follow procedures,' " Pozzi recalls. "He said, 'I'm taking names and I'm going to sue you.' "
Next, Pozzi and King phoned the president of BP and left a message with his secretary. An hour later, though, they received a call from "from a young lady in BP headquarters" who asked how she might assist them. They told her about their plan -- but have received no further contact.
Then, early this week, the duo say they spoke with Capt. Ed Stanton, the Coast Guard commander overseeing a length of the affected coastline. Stanton asked for a written proposal. That's the last Pozzi and King heard from him.
800 million gallons of oil poured into the Persian Gulf [ kept under wraps for close to 2 decades-exposed], which would make it more than 70 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.
Meantime, Saudia Arabia is sitting on the world's largest fleet of supertankers. Pozzi suggests that the U.S. government tell the Saudis: " 'Hey, we helped you out, can you help us out? Lend us some supertankers.' For a little payback for helping them out during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
Moreover, he says, "there are many, many, many other countries that have oil tankers" that, for a price, could be deployed off Louisiana.
Oil & The Government: So..... what's really going here?
18 and 40 million gallons so far vs. 800 million Persian Gulf oil spill. That's why the careful use of "biggest oil spill for the US" carefully worded by Gibbs. Gibbs did go on to say today, "We need a comphrehensive enery bill and need to invest into a clean energy economy..."
Incidentally, Daily Finance's Bruce Kennedy reported tourism was up 10.7% in Gulf State Resorts according to May 22,'10 hotel data compared to "no oil spill" last year.
This might help to visualize the quantity of oil released released...648,000 gallons in an Olympic pool...
I'm not worried about the oil spill. Obama is in charge and giving it his undivided attention. What could go wrong?
The Secret, 700-Million-Gallon Oil Fix That Worked — and Might Save the Gulf
Back on May 13, 2010 by Mark Warren
“Pozzi thinks, owing to cost considerations, or because there’s no clear chain of authority by which to get valuable ideas in the right hands. But with BP’s latest four-pronged plan remaining unproven, and estimates of company liability already reaching the tens of billions of dollars (and counting), supertankers start to look like a bargain.”
“The suck-and-salvage technique was developed in desperation across the Arabian Gulf following a spill of mammoth proportions — 700 million gallons — that has until now gone unreported, as Saudi Arabia is a closed society, and its oil company, Saudi Aramco, remains owned by the House of Saud. But in 1993 and into ‘94, with four leaking tankers and two gushing wells, the royal family had an environmental disaster nearly sixty-five times the size of Exxon Valdez on its hands, and it desperately needed a solution. “
“Pozzi, an American engineer then in charge of Saudi Aramco’s east-west pipeline in the technical support and maintenance services division, was part of a team given cart blanche to control the blowout. Pozzi had dealt with numerous spills over the years without using chemicals, and had tried dumping flour into the oil, then scooping the resulting tar balls from the surface. “You ever cooked with flour? Absorbent, right?” Pozzi says. Next, he’d dumped straw into the spills; also highly absorbent, but then you’ve got a lot of straw to clean up. This spill was going to require a much larger, more sustained solution. And fast. “
“That’s when Pozzi and his team came up with the idea of having empty ships park near the Saudi spill and pull the oil off the water. This part of the operation went on for six months, with the mop-up operations lasting for several years more. Pozzi says that 85 percent of the spilled oil was recovered, and it is precisely this strategy that he wants to see deployed in the Gulf of Mexico”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-supertankers-051310#ixzz0pd9dwo9o
Power grab. Chicago Climate Exchange. Obvious workable solutions ignored. Governor Jindal stonewalled on permit request to save wetlands. Got to have a crisis to sway public opinion. Communists on the march…
When oil enters the ocean it quickly begins to change and disperse. Though oil is toxic, it becomes less so with time. Winds and waves help spread and disperse the oil. Some oil will evaporate. Some will form into tar balls and sink to the bottom where they may remain for a long time, slowly releasing hydrocarbons into the water. Bacteria in the water attack and digest the oil. If people act quickly after the spill, they can scoop up some of the oil and stop it from causing worse damage to the environment.
Effects on the Food Chain: Each tier of the marine food chain can be affected by an oil spill. Oil floating on the water may contaminate plankton (very small, swimming or floating plants and animals).
The Persian Gulf War: Although the war in the Middle East in the early months of 1991 was brief, it left behind a damaged environment. Huge quantities of oil (2.5 to 4 million barrels) were dumped into the Persian Gulf. It was the largest oil spill in history.Because this oil spill happened during a time of war, clean-up actions were delayed. Efforts were made to protect a few delicate areas. If action could have been taken earlier, less oil would have gotten into the water. Booms and skimmers were set up and used to protect some areas. People from all over the world went to the area to help with the cleanup.
The Exxon Valdez:This was the first large spill in an enclosed, cold body of water. These conditions made clean-up very difficult. The oil slick spread quickly. Chemical dispersants could not be used because the seas were too calm for them to be effective.
The Monongahela River Spill: About a million gallons of oil accidentally spilled into the Monongahela River in Western Pennsylvania when an above-ground oil storage tank collapsed January 2, 1988. In a matter of seconds, a 30 foot wave of heavy oil surged over containment barriers and spilled into the river, threatening the water supplies of more than a million people living downriver. Swift action was necessary to safeguard these water supplies.
http://www.awma.org/enviro_edu/fact_sheets/oil_spills1.html>
May 13--James Cameron, the film director behind ‘Titanic’ and ‘Avatar’, has offered BP the use of a number of his privately owned submarines for help in the oil giant’s efforts to stem the flow of oil in the Gulf of Mexico
May 21st- BP agreed to test Kevin Costner’s avialable vacuum cleaners machines,”said BP spokesman Mark Proegler said. “Of course, they need to meet regulations with respect to discharge.”
With oil washing up on a portion of southeastern Louisiana’s swampy edges, (talk radio) word of Costner’s devices and their potential capabilities has triggered intense lobbying over where they should be stationed first.
High on the list of prospective sites is Plaquemines Parish. “Some people want the machines placed out on the blue ocean where the oil is surfacing. Others want them placed along the coastline.”
Read more: http://www.sunherald.com/2010/05/21/2200926/kevin-costner-could-hold-key-to.html#ixzz0pdEHf3oi
One oily hand oils the other.
So oil rolls in. International politics could play a role.
The Bush excuse is wearing real thin..and those that spout rhetoric on all networks "fair and balanced" look like desperate fools!
Bad People et. al. benefit from that silly incompetence.
Result they blunder about at will.
What they need to do is not plug it from the top, the pressures at 5000 ft under water make that tedious and near impossible for mortal man to do. What is needed is to implode the rupture from below... A few hundred pounds of Semtex shoved down the pipe to a few hundred feet below would accomplish this nicely... By imploding the opening from beneath, it would keep any further oil from leaking out...
It's no problem, they have many tried and true ways of sealing and recovering the oil just as it is, or was, before they cut the riser off.
They have wonderful flexclamp technology they could have used to attach risers to the already flowing damaged riser.
Many of the petroleum engineers Bad People laid off can and have explained same on Oil Drum, Youtube and elsewhere.
There's another agenda at work.
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