Posted on 06/24/2010 10:00:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Earlier this week Reuters reported on a massive amount of methane discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler said methane gas levels in some areas are “astonishingly high.” Kessler recently returned from a 10-day research expedition near the BP oil gusher. Kessler’s team measured both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP’s destroyed wellhead. “There is an incredible amount of methane in there,” Kessler told reporters. He said the level may be as much as one million times the normal level.
In late May BP said methane makes up about 40 percent of the leaking crude by mass. In addition to methane, large mounts of toxic hydrogen sulfide, benzene and methylene chloride are leaking into the Gulf according to the EPA and others.
Lindsay Williams, a former Alaskan pipeline chaplain with high-level oil industry connections, told the Alex Jones Show on June 10 that deadly gases are indeed escaping from the breached wellhead.
Investigative journalist Wayne Madson, writing for Oil Price, states that his sources inside the federal government, FEMA, and the US Army Corps of Engineers are dealing with a prospective “dead zone” created by the escaping methane within a 200 mile radius from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
In addition, Madsen reports, Corexit 9500, the oil dispersant used by BP, is viewed by FEMA sources as mixing with evaporated water from the Gulf. This deadly mixture is then absorbed by rain clouds and produces toxic precipitation that threatens to continue killing marine and land animals, plant life, and humans within a 200-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site in the Gulf.
The “dead zone” created by a combination of methane gas and Corexit toxic rain, Madsen continues, will ultimately result in the evacuation and long-term abandonment of cities and towns within the 200-mile radius of the oil gusher.
“Plans are being put in place for the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Hammond, Houma, Belle Chase, Chalmette, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pensacola, Hattiesburg, Mobile, Bay Minette, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Crestview, and Pascagoula,” Madsen writes.
On June 13, SoCal Martial Law Alerts (SCMLA) predicted that Gulf states would be evacuated. “Greg Evensen, a retired Kansas Highway Patrolman, estimates that 30-40 million people would need to be evacuated away from the Gulf’s coastline (i.e. at least 200 miles inland),” SCMLA reported.
In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, the federal government (through FEMA and other agencies) would most likely seek first to control and manage the transportation system and then operate relocation centers to manage evacuees. Toward this end, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already declared the airspace over the oil spill site to be a no-fly zone until further notice. Various sources have indicated that local police, highway patrol, National Guard, US military and foreign troops may be involved in an operation to evacuate the Gulf Coast. In fact, the Governor of Louisiana has already requested evacuation assistance (i.e. National Guard) for his state from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Madsen’s trusted sources now lend credence to the SCMLA report.
DK Matai reports that by some geologists’ estimates, the methane now escaping into the Gulf may have been part of a massive bubble trapped for thousands of years under the sea floor. “More than a year ago, geologists expressed alarm in regard to BP and Transocean putting their exploratory rig directly over this massive underground reservoir of methane. Warnings were raised before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that the area of seabed chosen might be unstable and inherently dangerous,” writes Matai.
Matai and others fear the methane — under intense pressure (experts estimate the pressure to be between 30,000 and 70,000 pounds per square inch) — may form a bubble that would then rupture the seabed and erupt with an explosion.
“The bubble is likely to explode upwards propelled by more than 50,000 psi of pressure, bursting through the cracks and fissures of the sea floor, fracturing and rupturing miles of ocean bottom with a single extreme explosion,” Matai explains. “If the toxic gas bubble explodes, it might simultaneously set off a tsunami traveling at a high speed of hundreds of miles per hour. Florida might be most exposed to the fury of a tsunami wave. The entire Gulf coastline would be vulnerable, if the tsunami is manifest. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and southern region of Georgia might experience the effects of the tsunami according to some sources. ”It is not certain the federal government is concerned about the prospect of a tsunami. However, if Madsen’s sources are correct, they are concerned about the release of deadly hydrogen sulfide, benzene, methylene chloride, and the prospect of toxic rain.
A mass evacuation of the Gulf states would be impossible without a declaration of martial law. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the government all but declared martial law in New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast — it was deemed a “state of emergency,” not officially martial law — and this gave rise to the largest military mobilization since the so-called Civil War. Combat-equipped troops and private contractors went house-to-house to enforce the complete removal of the civilian population in New Orleans and also confiscate guns and leave residents defenseless.
Moreover, FEMA imposed iron-grip censorship of the media. On September 7, 2005, MSNBC’s Brian Williams reported that the city had “reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement.” Williams and his crew were ordered to stop taking photographs by gun-toting National Guard troops. Williams said he experienced “the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.”
Indeed, if Florida and the Gulf states are evacuated as predicted — and again, Madsen’s sources are usually impeccable — a large part of the country will be separated from the United States and placed under martial law.
Nails it. They want yet another issue to panic about. This sounds as ridiculous as a low budget Hollywood thriller.
I would like to know how many idle sitting deep water drilling rigs are in the GOM that can be put on station withing a week or two to start a massive drilling effort to reduce the pressure.
I keep seeing a plan to use every resource our country has to urgently pump off as much crude oil as fast as possible regardless of OPEC, store in in any safe manner possible.
Speaking of OPEC I bet they have some interesting thoughts lately.
“Perspective:
Water in the Gulf: 660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons.
Oil in the Gulf: 126,000,000 gallons.
That comes out to about 5,000,000,000 gallons of water for each gallon of oil.
Or about 70,000 gallons of water per drop of oil.”
Makes it sound so nice and innocent. In other words, the oil is so diluted it isn`t doing any harm. Maybe the damage we`re seeing on tv is just a figment of our imaginations. Or it`s fake. Here`s more scare-mongering.
“Extreme exposure (a CO level of 400 ppm and higher) will result in unconsciousness, brain damage and death.”
http://www.carbon-monoxide-poisoning.com/article1-co-levels.html
Who they trying to kid. 400 ppm sounds pretty damn diluted, so it should`nt do any harm. sarc/
*ping*
Bookmark
Nalco is the company, do some research on it....
Ring a bell?
There are currently two drilling rigs drilling relief wells, a rig tied up with the recovery effort and a platform burning off oil and gas recovered from the choke line on the BOP. That's four major vessels in the immediate vicinity of the wellhead, not counting the support vessels, crew and supply boats. It's a pretty crowded patch of water now when you consider maneuverability of larger vesssels, add in a storm and there isn't much room for error.
Speaking of OPEC I bet they have some interesting thoughts lately.
Well, Hugo stole H&P's rigs ("nationalized" them)....
So what I like to do is, whenever I see one posted, grab one item that is patently false, and use that to show that we can't really trust these sources.
For this post, I'll grab THIS line:
Toward this end, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already declared the airspace over the oil spill site to be a no-fly zone until further notice.
Now, the second part is a fact; what we are focusing on here is the start of the sentence "Toward this end". What end was that? THIS END: In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, the federal government (through FEMA and other agencies) would most likely seek first to control and manage the transportation system and then operate relocation centers to manage evacuees.
This is what we call a "surface reasonable" statement. If you don't think about it, it sounds like a good logical argument. They need to control transportation, and they've already declared a no-fly-zone.
Except that there is no evacuation routes, and really no normal commercial traffic, that would be flying through the no-fly-zone that has been imposed. And if you think about it for a minute, the no-fly-zone makes perfect sense without any appeal to a conspiracy to shut down transportation. Since there is an oil spill, people want to fly out and see it. A lot of gawkers and onlookers, probably charter flights would be going non-stop. These would all run the risk of interfering with operations, and endangering the crews.
So they shut down flights over the spill operations.
The next sentence is the kicker: Various sources have indicated that local police, highway patrol, National Guard, US military and foreign troops may be involved in an operation to evacuate the Gulf Coast.
I sure hope so. Remember Katrina? And Rita? Yes, we have hurricanes, and when hurricanes come at your coast, you want an evacuation plan. We've been working on these for years, and they involve local police, highway patrol, NG, US military, and the coast guard.
About the only thing odd about that sentence was "foreign troops". And that is most certainly false. We have hundreds of thousands of our own troops, we'd have no need for foreign troops.
Except that it is quite possible that we are doing some coordination with Mexico, because a hurricane could hit along the boarder. And maybe we do training with some other central American countries because they might have reason to evacuate as well. But foreign troops to evacuate people from U.S. cities to other U.S. cities? Come on.
Frankly, I would expect an increased focus on evacuations because of the spill. A category 5 hurricane, which already would cause evacuations on the coast, might well require further inland evacuation because it would be powerful enough to pick up oil and drag it onshore, which could make some areas hazardous that otherwise would just be very wet.
There are other real problems with the article, like the "50,000 lbs/sqinch" methane bubble somehow produced from a well that had no more than about 13-15,000 pounds/in2 max pressure (as calculated by the fact that the drilling mud was containing the well).
However, for peace of mind, we should probably have one of those huge fire bombs on call from the military, and if we do have a huge methane gas bubble come to the surface, we could bomb it and set it on fire while it is dozens of miles out to sea, before it can cause any trouble. Not that I expect there to be one, but it's not like we don't have a few bombs sitting around waiting to go.
There is no place on the floor of the ocean where a million gallons of oil would be coming up that we wouldn't all know about. It's "convenient" that these stories are always from "experts" who had to sign "confidentiality agreements", and that there is no proof because of some big conspiracy.
If there was a huge leak, they'd have dispersant ops on the leak. Further, they'd be expecting the relief well to fix them, and moreso, there'd be no reason for the government and BP and those involved to all hide this existance, while showing live shots of millions of gallons of oil coming out of the main well.
When evaluating a conspiracy, one qood question is "why would someone take the trouble?" BP is out billions of dollars and has pledged to pay for damage from every drop of oil. What possible reason would they have to hide that oil was coming up somewhere else. Worse for the conspiracy, a lot of people are upset that BP isn't sealing this well or trying to with the cap. Revealing these purported leaks would pretty much end that, as people would understand the uselessness of sealing the main well top if oil was just coming out elsewhere.
It also would do the government no good to hide this information. Everybody already expects a major ecological disaster from this oil, it's not like knowing that more oil is leaking would hurt people more, or make people think less of the effort, or panic more people.
My guess is that if you added up all the oil people claim are leaking from all the holes, and did your calculations based on the drill hole into the formation being about 10 inches max in diameter, you would discover that the pressure needed to get that much oil INTO the pipe would be in the millions of pounds per square inch (no, I haven't done the calculations, so I am speculating).
"All of the ingredients contained in Nalco’s dispersants are safe and found in common household products, such as food, hand and body lotion, packaging, cosmetics, and household cleaners. Corexit is approved for use by the EPA because it falls well within the agency’s range of allowable toxicity levels. Corexit products biodegrade rapidly, do not bioaccumulate, are not human carcinogens, do not degrade into endocrine disruptors, and are not reproductive toxins. Common household soaps are more toxic to marine life than Corexit."
As to the claim that Corexit evaporates: "FACT: COREXIT dispersants are made to disperse oil into the water column and not to evaporate. They biodegrade into the water and are not released back into the atmosphere. In fact, Admiral Thad Allen noted at a June 11 press conference that the primary surface use of Corexit is to protect worker safety."
CAS #
Name
Common Day-to-Day Use Examples
1338-43-8
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate
Skin cream, body shampoo, emulsifier in juice
9005-65-6
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs.
Baby bath, mouth wash, face lotion, emulsifier in food
9005-70-3
Sorbitan, tri-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs
Body/Face lotion, tanning lotions
577-11-7
* Butanedioic acid, 2-sulfo-, 1,4-bis(2-ethylhexyl) ester, sodium salt (1:1)
Wetting agent in cosmetic products, gelatin, beverages
29911-28-2
Propanol, 1-(2-butoxy-1-methylethoxy)
Household cleaning products
64742-47-8
Distillates (petroleum), hydrotreated light
Air freshener, cleaner
111-76-2
** Ethanol, 2-butoxy
Cleaners
Further, the site notes that the last listed ingredient is not in the version they are using in the gulf now, but may have been in existing stockpiles that were tapped at the beginning of the process.
While i'm not saying I'd like to be sprayed with those chemicals directly, they hardly seem the stuff of a 200-mile-radius circule of toxic, deadly poison gas.
sorry I have no idea.
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